Last week, the Trump Administration released the National Security Strategy that was dated from the month before.

In an effort to highlight how the Administration — no doubt led by Stephen Miller and his fascist allies — claims to have adopted a utilitarian foreign policy stemming from things called principles and based on wildly imaginary assessment of America’s current strengths, this post will lay out what is in it. (Note, the titles are links.)

Follow-ups will say more.

Pages 2-3: My fellow Americans

This is a letter from Trump bragging about what he claims his accomplishments since Biden left are. They include:

• Restoring borders (this does not explicitly talk about immigration)
• Kicking qualified trans service members and other “DEI” hires out of the military
• Making NATO allies pay 5% in defense costs
• Getting Congress to pay $1 trillion for a Golden Dome that won’t work
• Launching a trade war that has devastated soybean farmers, bankrupted many small businesses, and allowed China to acquire leverage by withholding rare earth products
• Attacking Iran’s nuclear facility and claiming the attack did more damage than it did (this makes no mention of the inconclusive attack on the Houthis or the murderboat strikes)
• Forcing Americans to prefer oil and gas over strategically smarter renewable energy
• Ending eight wars (he claims)

Among the things this letter does not mention is destroying USAID and America’s soft power, and obviously it treats some of the grave damage Trump has done with his trade war and attacks on science and universities as strengths.

Page 4: Contents

Pages 5-6: Ends over Values

Two pages describing that the US has been doing everything wrong since the Cold War, chasing “platitudes” (also known as values) rather than desired ends.

Pages 7-8: What Should the US Want

These two pages describe a bunch of things it claims the US should, normatively, want.

Just half of these are things Trump has actually pursued (and even there, some of Trump’s policies have gone beyond what Trump says is ideal):

• ¶3 Secure borders and controlled immigration
• ¶5 A lethal military in which everyone is proud of their mission
• ¶6 A Golden Dome
• ¶10 A reinvigorated American culture (code for white nationalism)

More than half of these are things Trump has affirmatively destroyed:

• ¶1 Continued survival of US sovereignty
• ¶2 Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage
• ¶4 “A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat”
• ¶7 The most dynamic economy
• ¶8 A robust industrial base
• ¶9 Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)

Page 9: What do “we” want from the rest of the world?

• A Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
• Halt damage an unnamed China has done while keeping stability in Indo-Pacific and keeping shipping lanes free and supply chains secure
• Impose Stephen Miller’s idea of civilizational identity on Europe
• “[P]revent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down”
• “[E]nsure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward”

Note, this section parallels the discussion of regions, below, with the exception of laying out how the US will remain the standard-setter in the world by being an asshole and adopting crank conspiracies.

Pages 10-11: What are America’s means to get these ends?

This includes a list of things the US did have when Trump took over (I’ve italicized those which he has squandered, though there are others he is squandering):

• A still nimble political system that can course correct;
• The world’s single largest and most innovative economy, which both generates wealth we can invest in strategic interests and provides leverage over countries that want access to our markets;
• The world’s leading financial system and capital markets, including the dollar’s global reserve currency status;
• The world’s most advanced, most innovative, and most profitable technology sector, which undergirds our economy, provides a qualitative edge to our military, and strengthens our global influence;
• The world’s most powerful and capable military;
• A broad network of alliances, with treaty allies and partners in the world’s most strategically important regions;
• An enviable geography with abundant natural resources, no competing powers physically dominant in our Hemisphere, borders at no risk of military invasion, and other great powers separated by vast oceans;
• Unmatched “soft power” and cultural influence; and
• The courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people.

It also includes a list of things that Trump thinks are good, which I’ve restated to reflect reality:

• “Instilling a culture of competence:” They’ve gotten rid of brown people and women who made them insecure
• “Unleashing our enormous energy production capacity:” They’ve forced America to stop competing in renewable energy
• “Reindustrializing our economy:” They’ve gutted the economy with tariffs
• “Returning economic freedom to our citizens:” They’ve exploded the deficit with tax cuts to oligarchs huge tax cuts while cutting the health care that drives the economy
• “Investing in emerging technologies and basic science:” They’ve destroyed America’s higher educational advantage and replaced it with state socialism

The strategy

Pages 12-15: Principles [sic]

This starts with a page of shite about Trump’s greatness. Then includes the following bullets:

• Focused Definition of the National Interest (Trump will ignore key parts of the world)
• Peace Through Strength (white nationalism)
• Predisposition to Non-Intervention (with excuses permitted for invasions of choice)
• Primacy of Nations (a nice way of saying they’ll gut international organizations)
• Sovereignty and Respect (in which the NSS protects projecting “free speech” demands into other sovereign nations)
• Balance of Power (China and Russia can extend their power so long as they allow America to do the same)
• Pro-American Work (claims utterly inconsistent with Trump’s catering to oligarchs)
• Fairness (code for making NATO, Japan, and South Korea pay more)
• Competence and Merit (White men should not have to compete with brown people and women, and especially should not have to compete with H1B holders)

Pages 15-19: Priorities

• The Era of Mass Migration Is Over: “Border security is the primary element of national security”
• Protection of Core Rights and Liberties: This is defined as “the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common govern,” but apparently does not include due process or similar rights for Europeans or the Anglosphere
• Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting: “The United States will stand ready to help— potentially through more favorable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement—those counties that willingly take more responsibility for security in their neighborhoods and align their export controls with ours.”
• Realignment Through Peace: The President will intervene everywhere and claim to have fostered peace
• Economic Security
  • Balanced Trade
  • Securing Access to Critical Supply Chains and Material
  • Reindustrialization
  • Reviving our Defense Industrial Base: We need to build drones in the US cheaply
  • Energy Dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear, explicitly)
  • Preserving and Growing America’s Financial Sector Dominance

Page 19: The Regions

A half page excusing largely ignoring key swaths of the world, as when you dedicate just a half page to Africa or mention Russia only in a section discussing Europe not as a place but a greatness to be imposed from outside.

Pages 19-23: Western Hemisphere: The Donroe Doctrine

• Enlist: Treat a swath of countries as agents insofar as they can help stop the movement of people and drugs
• Expand: Eight paragraphs on combatting “foreign influence” not named as Chinese, and three paragraphs imagining this can be driven by corporate investment

Pages 23-29: Asia: Win the Economic Future, Prevent Military Confrontation

• Leading from a position of strength: Asia has gotten strong through manufacturing and we will combat that with false platitudes
• Economics: the Ultimate Stakes: A claim that Trump’s disastrous trade policy will bring results the opposite of what have happened
• Deterring Military Threats: A lot of talk about deterrence, some in passive voice

Pages 29-31: Promoting European Greatness

These are the two pages attracting the most attention, and I will return to it. Note that Europe is not described as a place, like the other regions are. The only mentions of Russia (ten) are in this section, and Russia is defined as not-Europe (and therefore not addressed as a region at all).

Pages 31-33: The Middle East: Shift Burdens, Build Peace

This section claims the Middle East is no longer as important because it is not longer the dominant energy producer, and then explains that major conflicts (including radicalism) are no big deal anymore.

Half of page 33: Africa

Africa will not get aid. It will get investment and Trump claims of peace deals.

 

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted Dan Richman his request for a Temporary Restraining Order, preventing the government from snooping in his stuff, one that goes through Friday. And while I agree with Gerstein and Cheney (and Bower and Parloff) that it could have the effect of thwarting another indictment of Jim Comey — indeed, it may undercut an attempt to stonewall Richman — I find KK’s order interesting for other reasons.

Partly, it’s the way she’s demanding signs of life from DOJ.

Judge KK attempts to forestall a stonewall

As a reminder, Judge Cameron Currie threw out the indictment against Jim Comey on November 24, the Monday of Thanksgiving week. Two days later, the day before Thanksgiving, Richman cited that dismissal and the expired Statute of Limitations in his bid to get his data back. As far as I know, no one noticed it until Anna Bower pointed to it on Tuesday.

Notably, Richman attached the warrants used to obtain his records as sealed exhibits.

The same day Bower noted it (the day it was assigned), December 2, Judge KK issued an order, half of which dealt with Richman’s sealing request, which she provisionally granted. But she also told him that if he wants to keep the government out of his data, he needs to get a Temporary Restraining Order. Her order emphasized that that request must submit some sign of life from DOJ.

Finally, Petitioner Richman’s 1 Motion requests that this Court “issue a temporary restraining order enjoining the [G]overnment from using or relying on in any way” the materials at issue in his 1 Motion while this matter is pending. Consistent with Local Rule of Civil Procedure 65.1, it is ORDERED that Petitioner Richman shall file his application for a temporary restraining order by separate motion, accompanied by a certificate of counsel that either (1) states the Government has received actual notice of the application and “copies of all pleadings and papers filed in the action to date or to be presented to the Court” in connection with the application; or (2) identifies “the efforts made by the applicant to give such notice and furnish such copies.”

A Certificate of Service Richman filed later that day explains part of the reason KK made that order: For some reason, the motion was not docketed. So, Richman attorney Mark Hansen explained that he formally served Jocelyn Ballantine and DC USAO on December 1.

This Corrected Certificate of Service corrects the service date listed for the public redacted Motion for Return of Property and accompanying attachments, see ECF No. 1 at 3, and the sealed version of that Motion with accompanying attachments, see ECF No. 2, from November 26, 2025, to December 1, 2025. Although Petitioner filed those papers on November 26, 2025 and intended to serve them on that date, the filings were not docketed at that time. I promptly caused the filings to be served on counsel for respondent upon receiving notification from the Clerk’s Office, on December 1, 2025, that the filings had been accepted for submission and docketed.

But to comply with the other part of her order, Richman’s attorneys also included the emails they exchanged with Ballantine. And among the things those emails showed is that after agreeing to attorney Nick Lewin’s midafternoon December 3 request to respond by close of day on December 4,

Based on the government’s use of such property in connection with the Comey case (as described in Judge Fitzpatrick’s November 17, 2025 opinion), we are concerned that, absent a TRO, the government may continue to use the property in a manner that violates Professor Richman’s rights – particularly in light of recent news reports that the DOJ may seek a new indictment of Mr. Comey. However, if the government has no such intention and will agree to refrain from searching, using, or relying in any way upon Professor Richman’s property pending resolution of the Rule 41(g) motion, that would address our concerns and obviate the need for a TRO.

Please let us know the government’s position by COB tomorrow.

[snip]

Nick,

Thanks for your email. I will reach out to the appropriate people at DOJ with your request and will respond to you tomorrow by COB.

Jocelyn

Ballantine had not responded by 9PM on December 4.

Hi Jocelyn,

Did you get an answer? Please let us know.

Ballantine had a good excuse: she was busy prosecuting accused pipe bomber Brian Cole. Nevertheless, when she did respond at 9:12PM Thursday night, she said that her leadership — Jeanine Pirro — had already engaged with DOJ leadership (Bondi spent part of Thursday with Pirro bragging about the pipe bomber arrest), but she would not have an answer until “early next week.”

Thank you so much for the prompt. I met with my leadership today, and they have engaged Department of Justice leadership. I have also shared your pleadings and request with the prosecutors who handled the Comey prosecution out of EDVA.

I do not have an answer for you this evening, but I expect to have one early next week.

That’s what led Richman to file his motion for a TRO, maybe around 10PM Friday night. Judge KK responded just under a day later.

Her order specifically ruled that DOJ knows about Richman’s request.

Third, the Court finds that the Government has received actual notice of Petitioner Richman’s [9] Motion, ensuring that the Government is positioned to act promptly to seek any appropriate relief from this Order. Specifically, counsel for the Government may move to dissolve or modify this Order immediately upon entering an appearance, and the Court will resolve any such motion “as promptly as justice requires.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 65(b). Under the circumstances, the Court will allow and consider such a motion at any time upon contemporaneous notice to counsel for Petitioner Richman. See id. (providing that such a motion may be filed “[o]n 2 days’ notice to the party who obtained the order” or “on shorter notice set by the court”).

And barring the government requesting a different schedule, Judge KK’s order set up the following schedule:

• Richman should “promptly” serve Judge KK’s order and everything filed in the docket to Pam Bondi (KK identifies Bondi by title specifically).
• By noon on Monday, “the Attorney General of the United States or her designee” must confirm “the United States,” so everyone!, is in compliance with KK’s order not to “access … share, disseminate, or disclose” Richman’s data “to any person.”
• By Tuesday at 9AM, DOJ must respond to both of Richman’s requests.
• He must reply by 5PM that day.
• The order will expire at 11:59PM on Friday night if Judge KK has not issued an order first.

If DOJ follows Judge KK’s order, then it will have the effect of:

1. Slightly accelerating the response deadline for DOJ, which may have been due sometime on Tuesday anyway, while dramatically accelerating Richman’s reply, which is now due that same day.
2. Flip the default status of Richman’s data, restricting DOJ from accessing it before Judge KK issues an order rather that allowing them to access it until any such order is in place.

In other words, the government can’t stall Richman’s effort in a bid to use the data in the interim. If DOJ follows the order, then it would prevent DOJ from using the data to get a new indictment before such time as Ballantine responds, “early next week.” Unless DOJ got an indictment on Friday with hopes of a big show arrest tomorrow morning, then KK would have thwarted any effort to stonewall Richman’s assertion of his rights.

If DOJ blows off the order, it’ll make it even easier for Comey to argue any indictment is malicious (unless, of course, he has to argue that to Aileen Cannon).

Did Judge KK smell a rat?

That’s the logistics of the order. The other parts of it are more interesting.

First, KK’s analysis on the TRO is cursory: just one paragraph stating that the government probably has violated Richman’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching his data without a warrant.

The Court concludes that Petitioner Richman is likely to succeed on the merits of his claim that the Government has violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures by retaining a complete copy of all files on his personal computer (an “image” of the computer) and searching that image without a warrant. See United States v. Comey, No. 1:25-CR272-MSN-WEF, 2025 WL 3202693, at *4–7 (E.D. Va. Nov. 17, 2025). The Court further concludes that Petitioner Richman is also likely to succeed in showing that, because of those violations, he is entitled to the return of the image under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g).

That’s on the third page of the four-page memo.

Before she gets there (and in addition to formally finding that DOJ has notice of Richman’s request), she focuses on the way DOJ is playing dumb. She notes she has spoken to unnamed people from DC USAO, who were helpful on administrative matters, thank you very much.

First, although the Court has been in communication with attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, 1 the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has not yet entered an appearance to make representations on behalf of the Government, and counsel for the Government has not yet been identified. See Pet’r’s Ex. A, Dkt. No. 9-2.

1 These attorneys have helpfully facilitated communication on administrative matters. The Court appreciates counsel’s prompt assistance on these matters.

But no one, including Jocelyn Ballantine, wants to put their name on this docket.

And that’s a problem, Judge KK notes, because until someone files notice of appearance, there’s no formal way to start figuring out who has the data.

Second, the Government has not yet indicated who has custody of the material at issue, and neither the Petitioner nor the Court can determine the identity of the custodian until the Government appears in this case. Given that the custody and control of this material is the central issue in this matter, uncertainty about its whereabouts weighs in favor of acting promptly to preserve the status quo.

Maybe it’s something those helpful DC USAO personnel told her. Maybe it’s the way Ballantine deftly shared Richman’s motion with the Loaner AUSAs at EDVA, but not the DOJ leadership with whom Pirro had consulted by late day Thursday.

It’s like Colleen Kollar-Kotelly suspects DOJ is hiding the ball, and that’s why she ordered Richman to go right to the top with his request, to ensure Pam Bondi can’t pretend she’s ignorant of his request.

The perma-sealed Bill Barr dockets

There’s something else sketchy going on here.

As I noted, Richman attached the warrants used to seize his stuff. They’re still sealed and Judge KK has provisionally permitted them to remain that way.

But why are they still sealed?

Back on November 5, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick ordered the Loaner AUSAs to get them unsealed or, if not, then to file a motion justifying the seal in DC.

ORDERED that the Government shall, on or before November 10, 2025, move in the issuing district to unseal the four 2019 and 2020 search warrants referenced in the Government’s Reply to Defendant’s Response to the Government’s Motion for Implementation of Filter Protocol (ECF 132), together with all attendant documents, or, in the alternative, file a motion in the issuing district setting forth good cause as to why the subject search warrants and all attendant documents should remain under seal, in whole or in part;

In that same order, he ordered that there’d be a discussion about unsealing all the references to the warrants in the Comey docket on November 21, which was before Judge Currie dismissed the indictment on November 24. The government was also going to have to defend keeping the filing explaining the notice given to Comey — and submitted as an exhibit to his first response to the effort to get a taint team — sealed that same day.

ORDERED that, if necessary, the Court shall hold a hearing on the pending motions to seal (ECFs 56, 72, 109, and 133) on November 21, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. in Courtroom 500, and the materials subject to those motions shall remain UNDER SEAL until further order of the Court; and it is further ORDERED that, to the extent the Government seeks to seal Exhibit A to Defendant’s Response to the Government’s Motion for Expedited Ruling (ECF No. 55-1), the Government shall file a supporting brief in accordance with Local Criminal Rule 49 on or before November 12, 2025; Defendant may file a response on or before November 19, 2025; and, if necessary, the Court shall hold a hearing on the Government’s sealing request on November 21, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. in Courtroom 500;

Best as I can tell, that never happened. For example, there are no gaps in the Comey docket hiding a sealed discussion about these sealed warrants.

And that’s interesting because when Fitzpatrick asked about all this back on November 5 — this is the hearing that led to the order to unseal the warrants — Rebekah Donaleski revealed that they asked Loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons about the warrants twice at that point, but had gotten no response.

Before we begin, what I’d like to do is — before we address the underlying issues, the government’s motion for a filter protocol, the defendant’s position, we have four outstanding sealing motions, and I do think those sealing motions will touch, at least in some way, on this motion; if not, motions that you-all are going to argue in the future. So what I’d like to do is see if we can nail down what the parties’ positions are and see if we can kind of resolve some of those sealing issues now, if possible.

As I understand it, there are four sealing motions that are outstanding. The defense has filed three; the government has filed one. All these sealing motions deal with either warrants that were issued in a sister district or one document that the government has provided to the defense in discovery.

MS. DONALESKI: Thank you, Your Honor. With respect to the one document provided in discovery, that’s our position, we have no objection. With respect to the underlying warrants which we attached to our motions, my understanding from Mr. Lemons is that he has moved to unseal those. We don’t know where — he hasn’t moved to unseal them — when. We’ve asked him twice for that information, and he hasn’t provided it. The defense’s view is that we should be entitled to proposed reasonable redactions for PII of those warrant affidavits and warrant materials. We have asked for an opportunity to do that and have not heard from the government. So our position is, the information in our motions, in the motion papers themselves, we have no objection to that being under seal — to that being publicly filed; but with respect to the warrants, which my understanding is those remain under seal by the District of D.C. court, we would ask that we be permitted an opportunity to propose redactions with the government.

[snip]

But with respect to the information that we’ve described in our motion papers, specifically referring to the offenses at issue in the Artic Haze warrants, the dates that the warrants authorize to search, the defense believes that those should be discussed publicly and those can be discussed publicly.

THE COURT: What about the affidavits in support of the warrants?

MS. DONALESKI: Those remain under seal. I don’t expect that we’ll need to get into what is in those affidavits in this hearing today, but if the government or the Court feels differently, we’d welcome that discussion.

And when Fitzpatrick asked Lemons about the warrants, the Loaner AUSA got a bit squirmy. Lemons had asked the AUSA to unseal the warrants. He had not filed a motion to unseal them, as if someone — maybe the AUSA in question, who may be Jocelyn Ballantine — advised him that was not a good idea.

THE COURT: Mr. Lemons, what’s the status of that?

MR. LEMONS: Thank you, Your Honor. Your Honor, we have made a request to the issuing district as to those search warrants, for them to be unsealed. My understanding, last speaking with an AUSA in that district, is that motion has not been filed at this time. They are preparing to provide notice to other potentially interested parties, per their practice and the rules they have to abide by in that district. So we requested it, and our understanding is at this time that the warrants all remain completely under seal. That is the only reason why the government designated these search warrants as protected material and filed them under seal and understands why the defense filed them under seal. If it was in my power and ability here today, those search warrants would be totally unsealed. [my emphasis]

“Preparing to provide notice to other potentially interested parties”? Who else would need notice? Richman and Comey were the ones suspected of leaking!

It has been a month but these dockets remain sealed.

One possible explanation for that is that the Loaner AUSAs (or perhaps Ballantine) filed a motion in DC on November 10 that is under seal, one that should not be sealed for Judge KK. So perhaps everyone is trying to hide the fact that after being ordered by Fitzpatrick not to access this data, Kash Patel just dealt it to someone else (possibly Jason Reding Quiñones). That might explain why Judge KK ordered the government they can only contest her order after giving “contemporaneous notice to counsel for Petitioner Richman:” because (hypothetically), having been ordered by MJ Fitzpatrick to stay out of Richman’s data, they instead dove deeper into it without telling him.

Or maybe the squirminess is about hiding how the underlying warrants were managed … by Jocelyn Ballantine.

Revealing those warrants, after all, should not thwart the effort to keep snuffling about Richman’s data, except insofar as it would raise questions not directly addressed in Judge KK’s order. Just as one example, even though Richman in his initial motion and TRO request relied heavily on Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s opinion effectively describing rampant Fourth Amendment violations, he does not mention that when the FBI seized his iCloud account in 2020, they took content through August 13, 2019, more than two years after the date of the warrant (basically, through the date of the Comey Memo IG Report release).

According to an April 29, 2020 letter from Mr. Richman’s then-attorney to the government–produced to the Court ex parte by the defense–the Department of Justice informed Mr. Richman that the data it obtained from his iCloud account extended to August 13, 2019, well outside the scope of the warrant and well past the date on which Mr. Richman was retained as Mr. Comey’s attorney. ECF 181-6 at 20. The same letter further states that the Department of Justice informed Mr. Richman that it had seized data from Mr. Richman’s hard drive that extended to June 10, 2017–again well into the period during which Mr. Richman represented Mr. Comey–despite the warrant (19-sw-182) imposing a temporal limit of April 30, 2017. Id.

Did Ballantine — in whom Pirro has invested the trust to limit the blowback of the pipe bomb prosecution — allow the FBI to obtain data outside the scope of a warrant? Are there secret John Durham warrants someone is hiding?

It’s not clear who all this squirminess is designed to protect. But I feel like, whether or not Judge KK’s order halts DOJ efforts to dive into this unlawfully collected data, it may lead to some interesting disclosures about why everyone is so squirmy.

Update: Right wing propagandist (and daughter of a former whack job FBI agent) Mary Margaret Olohan gives the game away. One of her DOJ sources says this won’t be a setback … which sort of confirms that DOJ intends to continue to violate Richman’s Fourth Amendment.

Things could get a bit awkward with two of Trump’s terrorists in the days ahead. Trump has done such a great job of memory-holing his insurrection, and yet it won’t entirely go away.

Start with Taylor Taranto. I’ve written about the mentally ill Navy veteran who trespassed on January 6 — just one of thousands of Trumpsters who invaded the Capitol — but then took up with the DC Jail crowd in the aftermath, growing increasingly unstable until when, after Trump posted Barack Obama’s address on Truth Social, Taranto started stalking Obama, as prosecutors described in a footnote of a motion to gag Trump this way:

[T]he defendant’s public targeting of perceived adversaries has resulted in threats, harassment, or intimidation. The public record is replete with other examples. See, e.g., United States v. Taranto, No. 1:23-cr-229, ECF No. 27 at 4-6 (D.D.C. Sep. 12, 2023) (affirming detention order for Taranto and explaining that, after “‘former President Trump posted what he claimed was the address of Former President Barack Obama’ on Truth Social,” Taranto— who had previously entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021—reposted the address, along with a separate post stating, “‘See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s’” [sic], and then proceeded, heavily armed, to the area the defendant had identified as President Obama’s address, while livestreaming himself talking about “getting a ‘shot’ and an ‘angle,’” adding, “‘See, First Amendment, just say First Amendment, free speech’”) (quoting Taranto, ECF No. 20).

Like everyone else, Taranto was pardoned for his Jan6 trespass and his gun-related crimes were downgraded along with the rest of America’s defense against gun crimes. Trump appointee Carl Nichols sentenced him to time served on October 30, but not before Jeanine Pirro’s office tried to hide the sentencing memo (and prosecutors) who described Taranto’s role in Trump’s insurrection and Trump’s role in inciting Taranto’s stalking.

So he was free to go home to Seattle and attempt to rebuild his life from the chaos that Trump made of it.

Only he didn’t.

In recent days he has been back stalking DC, and specifically Jamie Raskin. The very same prosecutors who attempted to bury Trump’s role in inspiring Taranto’s crimes were stuck asking he be jailed again.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolf said Taranto’s return to D.C., his erratic behavior and renewed livestreaming raised serious alarms that he was “on the path” to the same conduct that led to criminal charges against him two years earlier and urged that he be returned to jail.

Wolf described acute mental health concerns, a series of alleged violations of Taranto’s supervised release conditions, and alarming social media posts, including one from the parking lot of the Pentagon. The prosecutor discussed other details of Taranto’s case during a closed court session.

Trump appointee Carl Nichols tried to give Taranto one more chance to go back to Washington and get some help. But he continues to lurk around DC, figuring he still has time before he has to report to Probation in Washington on Wednesday.

The man needs help, and jail is not going to get him what he needs, but until he leaves DC, he remains a real concern.

He’s a reminder of what Trump does to people, driving around DC broadcasting as he goes.

According to the standards DOJ has used with ICE protestors, Trump should have been charged right along with Taranto.

Then there’s the possibility that efforts to prosecute alleged pipe bomber Brian Cole will backfire, at least on those — Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino — who crowed about the arrest on Thursday.

Since he was arrested there have been a series of leaks, starting with Ryan Reilly (who literally wrote the book on the January 6 investigation, with all that suggests about his possible sources) followed by Evan Perez (one of the best-sourced journalists at FBI), told the FBI he believed Donald Trump’s bullshit.

The man charged with planting two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican party headquarters on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Brian Cole Jr., 30, is cooperating with the FBI, NBC News has reported, citing a separate person familiar with the matter. Cole appeared in court Friday, one day after he was charged with leaving pipe bombs outside the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee in the hours before Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Trump has falsely claimed the 2020 election was “rigged.”

Cole confessed to planting the devices outside the parties’ headquarters in the hours before the Capitol attack, three people familiar with the matter told NBC News. A federal prosecutor said in court on Friday that the suspect spoke with the government for more than four hours, but did not reveal the contents of those discussions.

Pirro has been out trying to disclaim the obvious: that Cole is one of Trump’s terrorists, not the insider threat that people like Dan Bongino and Ed Martin have been claiming since the attack.

Anna Bower tracked Martin’s effort to stoke conspiracy theories about the pipe bomber, including this screen cap.

Kash Patel who has fired people for claiming that Jan6ers were a terrible threat to the country, said that when you do what Cole did, “you attack the very being of our way of life”  — and he did so after Pam Bondi hailed his hard work to make the case.

And then Bongino went on Sean Hannity and confessed he was making shit up before.

Hannity, during his interview with his former colleague, gave Bongino an opportunity to criticize prior iterations of the Justice Department and FBI for failing to arrest anyone in the case, and praise his own colleagues for getting the job done. But then he asked Bongino about the FBI deputy director’s own role in promoting conspiracy theories about the bomber during Bongino’s past career as a right-wing commentator.

“You know, I don’t know if you remember this — this is before you became the deputy FBI director,” Hannity said. “You put a post on X right after this happened and you said there’s a massive cover-up because the person that planted those pipe bombs, they don’t want you to know who it is because it’s either a connected anti-Trump insider or an inside job. You said that, you know, long before you were even thought of as deputy FBI director.”

Bongino’s response was astounding. He looked down, as if embarrassed, and replied: “Yeah, that’s why I said to you this investigation’s just begun.” But after hemming and hawing about the confidence he and FBI Director Kash Patel have that they arrested the right person, he got real.

“Listen, I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” he explained. “That’s clear. And one day, I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

And when you peruse the possible explanations about why FBI didn’t find Cole before this week (I suspect it’s because FBI had far less evidence against Cole when they arrested him on Thursday than against virtually every other Jan6er; they just got fucking lucky that they got the right guy), they all feed left wing concerns.

Did Steve D’Antuono take steps to distract from Cole back in 2021, as some right wingers are now suggesting? If so, he did that between the time he took insufficient steps to prevent the attack and those times in 2022 when he attempted to kill any investigation of Trump.

Did Chris Wray intentionally stall this investigation? Then what does that say about the rest of the January 6 investigation?

And what if Cole says he qualifies for one or both of the pardons Trump already gave to people, like him, who responded to Trump’s false claims by attacking the Capitol. After all Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of sedition and adjudged a terrorist at sentencing, was gone from the Capitol a whole day before Cole allegedly placed those bombs, and Tarrio got a full pardon. What is Pardon Attorney Ed Martin going to say to conclude that Cole is somehow different from the hundreds of others, including a good many who brought incendiary devices, who have been running free since January?

It’s still possible Jocelyn Ballantine will manage to bury Cole’s pro-Trump leanings — or at least avoid implicating anyone who worked with Cole to plant the bombs in the precisely perfect place to create a distraction on January 6. Ballantine has played such a role before, and emails that Dan Richman submitted in his bid to get his data back before the FBI can violate his Fourth Amendment rights again suggest she was part of the process that led to that violation in the first place.

But until then, the lesson Dan Bongino just learned could be devastating. When you follow the facts, even the most rabid Trump supporter may discover that Trump’s terrorists are the ones threatening America.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

Update: Here are the photos of James Joyce’s Martello Tower I mentioned.

Looking towards the sea from the strand.

A tie Joyce gave Samuel Beckett, which is exhibited in the Martello Tower.

Me, pretending to be Buck Mulligan, spying the ship named the Samuel Beckett.

 

The third and last chapter of The Ethics Of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir applies the ideas in the first two chapters to the question how one should respond to oppression and tyranny. She focuses on the responses to the Nazis and to the oppression of the proletariat by the capitalists.

The Aesthetic Attitude

Many Frenchmen also sought relief in this thought in 1940 and the years which followed. “Let’s try to take the point of view of history,” they said upon learning that the Germans had entered Paris. And during the whole occupation certain intellectuals sought to keep “aloof from the fray” and to consider impartially contingent facts which did not concern them. Pp. 75-6.

De Beauvoir calls this the aesthetic attitude, and says it is merely flight from reality. In the real world, we are all in this together. What happens to others is our concern. Our freedom exists only in the presence and freedom of others. The aesthetic attitude is an effort to hide from the reality of our own freedom. These people aren’t free: they are locked in a tiny bubble of like-minded cowards (my word, not de Beauvoir’s), people afraid of the existential truth of human existence in the moment of crisis.

She says that the responsibility of the intellectual, the artist, and the critic is to create awareness of existential freedom as a common goal for all humanity, and to encourage everyone to accept the demands of that freedom in the face of tyranny.

How can we do that today? It seems to me that the people carrying whistles and filming the thugs attacking my neighbors in Chicago demonstrate their freedom and challenge to the rest of us to exercise our freedom as best we can. [As a former lawyer I remind everyone that if the goons arrest you while you’re demonstrating your freedom, STFU.]

Freedom And Liberation

The next two sections take up the ethics of dealing with oppression and tyranny. She says we must resist both, with violence if necessary. De Beauvoir follows Kant’s assertion that we are not to treat other people as means to our ends, or as objects, as we would a lump of coal, but as ends in themselves, autonomous creatures acting from their own freedom.

De Beauvoir conflates the ideas of tyranny and oppression, but there’s a useful distinction. The capitalist system is oppressive, in the Marxian sense. The capitalists extract most of the wealth created by systems of production. They claim that this is the natural order of things, and that nothing can be done to correct it. I tell that story in this post.

The oligarchs tell their story everywhere, and vilify every competing story as socialist or communist while never taking it on seriously. This is a standard tactic of the dominant class, as we saw reading Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, as here.

Outside the workplace, the proles are free to pursue their own projects. De Beauvoir is contemptuous of many of those projects, seeing them as tools of further oppression:

… the trick of “enlightened” capitalism is to make [the worker] forget about his concern with genuine justification, offering him, when he leaves the factory where a mechanical job absorbs his transcendence, diversions in which this transcendence ends by petering out: there you have the politics of the American employing class which catches the worker in the trap of sports, “gadgets,” autos, and frigidaires. Pp. 87-88.

Tyranny is better seen as the domination of a social order by one person who treats all others as ends, fit only to fulfill the desires of the tyrant. Tyrants can limit the freedom of every individual in all aspects of their lives at all times, whether or not they choose to do so.

The difference between these two is reflected in the means used to resist. Oppression operates largely by mystification. People are acculturated to the capitalist system from birth, and have no means to construct an alternate view or attract a significant number of people even to question it. Thus this post. But this kind of change only occurs when enough people are ready to move into a different form of economic organization, Violence won’t make anyone change their minds about capitalism.

Tyranny either dies when the tyrant’s line dies out, as with Soviet Russia, or it is resisted with violence, as with Hitler and Mussolini. Treating the tyrants and their minions as objects is necessary if we are to remove their ability to restrict the freedom of ourselves and others. And it is fully justified.

The desirable thing would be to re-educate [them]; it would be necessary to expose the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint. P. 98.

The Future

De Beauvoir says that the struggle for freedom is never-ending. In part this is the necessary result of her notion of freedom as generating new ways to be human, opening new futures for all. But also it results from the fact that we are merely human, and thus operate under many different forces. Many people will not accept their freedom, some will not accept new freedoms, others will accept it partially, as with the Adventurer, and still others will use it for their own private ends. Some will use it to oppress or tyrannize others. Some will not be willing to see themselves as oppressors in the Capitalist System or otherwise. The future is open, but only if we make it so.

Conclusion

One problem with reading texts like this one is the nagging feeling of elitism they generate. Throughout this book, de Beauvoir is judgmental. The descriptions of her categories is a good example, as is her snide comment on Frigidaires above. In the end, she seems to say that most people will never achieve her notion of freedom, but that it is the goal of people like her to show everyone their freedom and let them choose. Should we characterize that as elitism? If so, is that bad, or just annoying to people unwilling to cope with her level of abstraction?

In the end, I don’t see answers to the question I raised at the outset: what should we do to defeat rising fascism. We see signposts for a bad future in Arendt and Polyani but we don’t see off-ramps. We get ideas about how people think in other readings. We see responses and justifications for those responses in de Beauvoir. It’s disappointing that the best minds of that era have no answers for their future readers. But there we are. People who want their freedom will find a way. Maybe it starts with whistles.

 

The arrest affidavit for Brian Cole, the 30 year old guy charged as the pipe bomber today, is here.

The evidence consists of:

Phone records placing him on Capitol Hill at the time the FBI believes the bombs to have been placed.

The seven transactions between the COLE CELLPHONE and Provider’s towers occurred at approximately 7:39 p.m., 7:44 p.m., 7:59 p.m., 8:14 p.m., 8:23 p.m., and 8:24 p.m. Two transactions took place at 7:39 p.m. During this time period, the COLE CELLPHONE had transactions with five different sectors on Provider’s cell towers.

a. At approximately 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 59323, which faces southeast (approximately 120˚) from its location at 103 G Street, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector A”). Also at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 126187, which faces east1 (approximately 90˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector B”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:39:32 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked westbound on D Street, Southeast and then turned southbound on South Capitol Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage areas of Sector A and B.

b. At approximately 7:44:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Sector B of Provider tower 126187. Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:44:36 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked east on Ivy Street, Southeast. This location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector B.

c. At approximately 7:59:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 147990 which faces south (approximately 180˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector C”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:59:38 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked southbound on New Jersey Avenue, Southeast then turned eastbound on E Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage area of Sector C.

d. At approximately 8:14:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Provider tower 45111 which faces west (approximately 255˚) from its location at 101 Independence Avenue, Southeast in Washington, D.C. (“Sector D”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 8:14:15 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs exited Rumsey Court and walked westbound through an alley between the Capitol Hill Club and the RNC then walked northbound onto First Street, Southeast. This location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector D.

e. At approximately 8:23:59 p.m. and 8:24:06 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Provider tower 144340, which faces west (approximately 295˚) from its location at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Southeast in Washington, D.C. (“Sector E”). Video surveillance footage last captures the individual who placed the pipe bombs at 8:18 p.m. walking eastbound on Rumsey Court in the direction of tower 144340, which is approximately 1/2 mile east of the individual’s last recorded location. The last recorded location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector E.

A license plate reader showing his car arriving at Capitol Hill that evening.

On January 5, 2021, at approximately 7:10 p.m., COLE’s Nissan Sentra was observed driving past a License Plate Reader at the South Capitol Street exit from Interstate 395 South, which is less than one-half mile from the location where the individual who placed the devices was first observed on foot near North Carolina and New Jersey Avenues, Southeast at 7:34 p.m. Approximately 5 minutes later, at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE began to interact with Provider towers in the area.

Purchases of components consistent with the construction of the pipebombs, including paying cash for a battery connector consistent with the pipe bombs in 2019.

Both pipe bombs were manufactured using a nine-volt (9V) battery connector with attached red and black wires. The nine-volt battery connectors used in the pipe bombs had identifying information on the black and red insulated wires that were consistent with those distributed in North America by a known company and its predecessors (the “Nine Volt Distributor”). COLE purchased five of the Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors from Micro Center in northern Virginia on or about November 12 and December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction. Fewer than 8,000 of Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors were distributed in the United States between December 2017 and January 5, 2021. [my emphasis]

A purchase made across the street from the alley way on December 14.

Approximately three weeks before the pipe bombs were placed, on or about December 14, 2020, COLE made a purchase at a restaurant located near First and D Streets, Southeast. The restaurant is located across the street from the entrance to Rumsey Court on D Street, Southeast.

There’s nothing that ties those weird sneakers to Cole at all. [Corrected]

Certainly, he’s a candidate, and should have been IDed as such in 2021. But the affidavit lacks the kind of thing we saw all the time in real January 6 affidavits: Personal communications. Signs of planning in the period after Trump announced the rally. While there are a bunch of components purchased in November 2020, after the election, there’s not a single data point in the affidavit between when Trump announced the rally on December 19 and when Cole was on Capitol Hill on January 5, 2021.

Surely, FBI has already obtained warrants for all that and it is at least consistent with someone who had been playing with bomb-making for two years before placing these bombs.

But they’re not telling what’s in them.

You get the feeling they might not tell the story Kash Patel and Pam Bondi want to tell. What if finding the pipe bomber gets them fired, just like responding competently to COVID got Anthony Fauci fired and targeted?

DOJ has assigned Jocelyn Ballantine to this case. You may recall that she made false claims in support of efforts to throw out the Mike Flynn case in 2020.

Update: Per Ryan Reilly, Cole (who wouldn’t have been assigned an attorney yet) told the FBI that he believed in 2020 election fraud claims.

DOD IG has released the unclassified version of the report confirming what was clear months ago: Whiskey Pete Hegseth has no business leading DOD.

He was wildly uncooperative with the investigation, refusing to be interviewed, refusing to let DOD inspect his phone, refusing to turn over other threads.

But Whiskey Pete may not look quite as stupid as JD Vance.

You see, Whiskey Pete turned over the Signal chat that was left on his phone after all the autodeleting these scofflaws had been doing. Most of the thread was gone. But there was a single text that post-dated Jeffrey Goldberg’s departure from the list, something the Deputy General Counsel used to suggest the Atlantic thread might not be reliable (a claim DOD IG refused to put in the body of the report because, some people still refuse bullshit).

After Jeff Goldberg left the group, JD Vance said, “This chat’s kind of dead. Anything going on?”

One after another participant on the thread changed their ID, perhaps in hopes … I don’t know what they fuck they were thinking.

These are dumb people.

No one more so, though, than JD.

Unless DOJ disguised him, the hack of John Bolton described in his indictment didn’t show up in the Iranian hack-and-leak indictment. It should have. After listing the 2022 attempt to assassinate Bolton (where he is described as “a former US National Security Advisor,” the indictment lists a slew of people that Iran IRGC attempted to hack (starting in 2020) and (starting in 2021) nine people it succeeded in hacking before it hacked Roger Stone and four other Trump flunkies.

Bolton should have, could have, been included along with those nine people.

As the (nifty color-coded) timeline below makes clear, Bolton told the FBI about the hack of him, on July 6, 2021, just as the Iranian hackers were setting up infrastructure to hack a set of people that include those, like Bolton, who played a role in the Qasem Soleimani assassination and Trump’s hardline first term approach with Iran.

To be sure, there are potentially good reasons why Bolton is not in there. There’s a sealed notice of related case in the Bolton docket (at docket entry 6), which could reflect charges against the people who hacked him, charges that might have been filed shortly after he alerted the FBI about the hack. Prosecutors could have left Bolton out to obscure that he told the FBI about the hack (and that therefore the FBI had been working backwards from that ever since, which is consistent with the timeline). Prosecutors could have left Bolton out because the criminal investigation into him remained open.

All plausible reasons to leave him out.

But when you put the hack and assassination targeting of Bolton on the same timeline as the hack-and-leak targeting first fellow Iran hawks and then the Trump campaign, as well as the second alleged assassination attempt by Asif Merchant, all presumed to be IRGC, it raises further questions.

First, one reason I was interested in Merchant’s disclosure yesterday that he was under surveillance from the moment he arrived in the US in April 2024 is because it suggests US spies were already well aware of the efforts to retaliate for the Soleimani killing. Indeed, the timeline explains how the FBI was magically able to get CHSes in both the Shahram Poursafi and the Asif Merchant attempt to hire hit squads to target Bolton and others: the FBI identified those people via those intercepts and flipped them early on in the plot.

It does raise questions about whether the FBI also knew of the hack-and-leak targeting Bolton in advance. The FBI would have been tracking the IRGC closely after their 2020 effort to attack Democrats under the guise of the Proud Boys (an earlier plot that makes the targeting of Proud Boy ally Roger Stone more interesting).

There is some separation between these two plots. While Poursafi eventually had access to non-public intelligence targeting Bolton, he didn’t even know Bolton’s home address at first, which he would have known if he had the emails stolen from Bolton available to him. But the hack-and-leak indictment, at least, lists as one of the goals of the hacking campaign, “to advance the IRGC’s malign activities, including ongoing efforts to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani,” and the first hack included, of someone at State who led the Abraham Accords, implies that’s how they used, “travel, lodging and other information” from someone who was “a senior U.S. Department of State official at the time of Qasem Soleimani’s death and therefore of interest to the IRGC.” Near the tail end of the Poursafi complaint, so just weeks before the hack of that victim, Poursafi turned to another target.

But that’s the other reason this timeline is of such interest. The progression with Bolton went Hack > Extortion > Assassination Attempt. Bolton could simply have cooperated with the IRGC, but instead he went to the FBI (which has now led to his prosecution).

Trump, however did not.

It was over two months between the time hackers got into Roger Stone’s Hotmail account in May 2024 and the time the hack became public. In July, when they first became aware of the hack, the campaign affirmatively decided not to report it to the FBI.

Trump’s mistrust of federal agencies has complicated the investigation into Iran’s cyberattack on his campaign. When a technology firm first discovered the breach, campaign aides huddled to discuss what they should do. After hours of discussions in July, they decided they trusted the software experts to handle the matter and did not call the FBI. Co-campaign manager Susie Wiles, whose email account was targeted, was among those who questioned whether they could trust the Justice Department. The fears centered on giving federal officials access to campaign email servers and whether they would leak information out publicly.

As I noted at the time, Trump made that decision after relentlessly (and falsely) accusing the FBI of failing to get the server from the DNC hack. The decision was understandable (once you account for Trump’s venality and paranoia), because according to the initial reports, the hackers claim to have gotten information on Trump’s legal cases, not just his campaign.

The sender would not speak on the telephone with a Post reporter but indicated they had access to additional information, including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases.

And one reason that’s interesting is because — as Reuters disclosed only this summer — the lawyer targeted in the attack was Lindsey Halligan, who had no public role on the campaign but who did represent Trump on the stolen documents case.

In online chats with Reuters on Sunday and Monday, the hackers, who go by the pseudonym Robert, said they had roughly 100 gigabytes of emails from the accounts of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan, Trump adviser Roger Stone and porn star-turned-Trump antagonist Stormy Daniels.

Which brings me back to Merchant, to the delay in turning over his own conversations until October 28.

Two public things might explain that delay (there are no doubt a bunch of secret things that could too): The conviction of Ryan Routh, who did have Iranian ties, though no Iranian role in his assassination attempt was publicly disclosed, and the indictment of Bolton, which disclosed that Bolton alerted the FBI to this hack back in 2021, just months before the FBI would preempt an assassination effort targeting Bolton as well.

The FBI took far greater efforts to rein in any publication of the materials stolen from Trump’s people than they ever have on another leak save WikiLeaks’ biggest document dumps. I can’t help but wonder whether there’s more about the Trump hack we weren’t told.

Timeline

December 19, 2018: Hackers establish account using Israeli politician’s name.

April 15, 2019: IRGC designated as FTO.

January 3, 2020: Trump kills Qasem Soleimani.

April 11, 2020: Hackers get an account in the name of a SCOTUS spouse.

October 22, 2020: Treasury sanctions IRGC for tampering in 2020 election.

June 16, 2021: Bolton and DOJ enter settlement on book.

July 6, 2021: Bolton representative tells FBI Iran has hacked Bolton.

July 7, 2021: Hackers register fake domain mailerdaemon.online.

July 25, 2021: Hacker threatens to release Bolton materials.

I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email (some of which have been attached), especially after the recent acquittal. 

This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side!

Contact me before it’s too late…

July 28, 2021: Bolton representative tells FBI about threat.

July 29, 2021: Bolton rep tells FBI he would delete account.

August 5, 2021: Iran threatens Bolton again.

OK John … As you want (apparently), we’ll disseminate the expurgated sections of your book by reference to your leaked email…

October 22, 2021: Shahram Poursafi asks Individual A to photograph Bolton. Individual A suggests CHS.

November 9, 2021: Hackers register fake domain mailer-daemon.live. CHS contacts Poursafi; Poursafi asks if he could hire someone to “eliminate someone.”

November 14: Poursafi tells CHS he doesn’t need pictures anymore. After searching for it online, Poursafi provides Bolton’s DC office address with name of scheduling assistant.

November 18: Poursafi note with Bolton’s name, website, social media handle, and former title.

November 19: CHS asks for home address and asks how to do it.

November 21: Poursafi ups the payment to $300,000.

November 23: CHS tells Poursafi he traveled from Texas to DC; Poursafi still did not have home address, but that Bolton walked or was driven to work.

December 7, 2021: Poursafi says because of a recent failed operation, Iran did not approve payment.

December 10, 2021: Poursafi told the CHS that Bolton didn’t go outside often.

December 12, 2021: Hackers register tinyurl.ink.

December 14, 2021: Hackers create persona based on DC think tank employee and phish State employee (Victim 1). 

December 16, 2021: Poursafi asked CHS to refer to Bolton by name “Benham.”

December 20, 2021: With Bolton’s consent, CHS sent pictures of Bolton leaving his office.

December 22, 2021: Poursafi sends picture of cash he claims is for CHS.

January 3, 2022: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi says Trump and other high ranking Trump officials need to face trial for Soleimani killing. Poursafi tells CHS the murder was not timed to coincide with anniversary of Soleimani death. Poursafi says he has a source who says Bolton is at home.

January 5, 2022: CHS tells Poursafi he would do the job on January 16 or 17.

January 7, 2022: IRGC head Esmail Ghani promises revenge.

January 10, 2022: CHS asks if Ghani’s speech was a reference to this job.

January 15, 2022: CHS claims to have three vans. Poursafi warns not to talk operational details on phone, instructs CHS to crush phone and/or change Poursafi contact to “Mark” in it.

January 18, 2022: CHS sent Poursafi public information stating that Bolton might be traveling; Poursafi said that Bolton was not. “The information does not appear to have been publicly available. POURSAFI did not specify whether his source was a person conducting surveillance, a cyber intrusion, or another type of source.”

January 20, 2022: Poursafi told CHS Bolton did not have a body guard, had not yet left town.

January 28, 2022: Poursafi instructs CHS to get surveillance cameras for Bolton’s home and office.

January 29, 2022: Poursafi instructs CHS to restore social media account.

February 1, 2022: Poursafi told CHS the area around Bolton’s home was clear.

April 13, 2022: Poursafi pushes CHS to do a second job.

April 28, 2022: Poursafi told CHS to finish the second job in six days.

April 30, 2022: Hackers create another persona, persona 3.

May 9, 2022: Jalili accesses persona 3 account, other hackers arrive in office, send test message to book author.

May 31, 2022: Hackers register mailer-daemon.me.

June 18, 2022: Hackers create persona 4, phish victim 1.

August 2, 2022: Hackers create spoof of think tank, with two more personas.

August 5, 2022: Shahram Poursafi complaint.

August 6, 2022: Hackers start stealing from victim 1, including his passport.

Early August 2022: Hackers create persona based on DC journalist/think tanker (victim 4).

August 23, 2022: Victim 4 responds to phish.

August 29, 2022 through October 5, 2022: Hackers hack former Homeland Security Advisor (Victim 5).

October 4, 2022: Hackers pose as assistant to Victim 1 to contact peace organization employee (Victim 2), using stolen passport and get Victim 2 to buy business class ticket for Victim 1.

October 26, 2022: Hackers used Victim 1 passport to query about UAE conference.

November 23, 2022: Hackers create persona based on UAE embassy employee in DC, then use account to invite Victim 1, a former senior CIA person (Victim 6), a former US Ambassador to Israel (Victim 7), and a former Deputy CIA Director (Victim 8) as well as other targeted persons to a party at UAE embassy.

December 20, 2022 to January 23, 2022: Hackers compromise Victim 6’s personal email.

January 16, 2023: Hackers create encrypted app account in the name of DC think tank employee and phish Iranian Human Rights worker (Victim 9).

April 2024: Hackers try to phish Victim 5.

April 13, 2024: Merchant arrives in Houston.

April 22, 2024: Merchant pitches CHS on business.

May 23, 2024: Hackers attempt to log into Roger Stone’s account.

May 24 ,2024: Hackers use recovery code to access Stone’s account.

June 3-4, 2024: Merchant presents plan.

June 10, 2024: Merchant and CHS meet fake hitmen.

June 12, 2024: Hackers access Stone’s account and access campaign official (Victim 11).

June 13, 2024: Merchant establishes code.

June 15, 2024: Hackers use Stone’s account to attempt to phish Victim 13 (Susie Wiles?).

June 18, 2024: Merchant arranges payment with US-based associate.

June 20, 2024: Hackers hack a second Stone account.

June 21, 2024: Via WhatsApp Merchant’s cousin arranges payment.

June 27, 2024: Hackers send Trump debate prep to two people on Biden’s campaign; neither responded.

July 3, 2024: Hackers send Trump info to another Biden associate; that person did not respond.

July 12, 2024: Merchant arrest.

July 20, 2024: Hackers use 2FA hack to access Trump lawyer [Lindsey Halligan?], Victim 12.

July 22, 2024: Hackers started pitching content to journalists, including by pitching one journalist on things campaign official said to Susie Wiles about that journalist’s reporting.

August 9, 2024: Microsoft report on Iran hack.

August 10, 2024: Politico reports hack; WaPo follows.

August 13, 2024: Hackers ousted from Victim 11 account and Victim 12 account.

August 14, 2024: Google report on Iran hack.

August 31, 2024: Hackers pitch more journalists (including me).

September 24, 2024: Iran hack-and-leak indictment.

October 2, 2024: FISA notice in Merchant prosecution.

December 20, 2024: Initial CIPA request in Merchant prosecution.

July 1, 2025: Hackers attempt to sell Susie Wiles, Lindsey Halligan, Stone, and Stormy Daniel emails.

July 11, 2025: CIPA filing in Merchant prosecution.

August 11, 2025: CIPA meeting in Merchant prosecution.

September 23, 2025: Ryan Routh guilty verdict.

October 18, 2025: Bolton indicted.

October 28, 2025: Delayed discovery provided in Merchant prosecution.

November 12, 2025: Ex parte communication in Merchant prosecution.

 

---

Purple: Shahram Poursafi complaint

Blue: Iran hack-and-leak indictment

Pink: Asif Merchant complaint

Green: Bolton prosecution

 

Asif Merchant wants EDNY to provide all the spying the FBI did targeting him — or at least the spying that they say matches the calls he made while they were surveilling him.

As you’ll recall, Merchant is the Pakistani guy that EDNY arrested in July 2024 for allegedly soliciting someone to kill political targets, possibly including Donald Trump. Since then, Merchant has been sitting in prison, under communication restrictions, awaiting trial, which is currently scheduled for February 23, 2026. On October 2, 2024, DOJ informed Merchant they used FISA to find him. Just over a year ago, on December 20, 2024, DOJ kicked off the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) process. It filed a CIPA Section 4 motion (where the government asks to withhold certain materials that aren’t relevant or helpful to the defense) on July 11, and met with Judge Eric Komitee about it on August 11, after which point Komitee ordered the government to provide the materials they had discussed with the Court Information Security Officer.

In a letter asking the judge to intervene in a discovery dispute, Merchant’s lawyers reveal that the initial story DOJ told — that the guy Merchant asked to help him find a hit squad simply went to the FBI which is where the FBI first learned of the plot — is inaccurate. In fact, Merchant was under FISA surveillance even before he arrived in the United States in April 2024 and he was closely surveilled the entire time he was in the US.

Discovery has revealed that Asif was under investigation before he arrived in the United States, and he was under surveillance from the moment he arrived in this country. In addition, Asif was the subject of electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”). (See Notice of Intent to Use ForeignIntelligence Surveillance Act, Docket Entry No. 20). As a result, the government is in possession of his communications which it obtained through this electronic surveillance. In addition, Asif was also under surveillance by teams of agents. The government produced reports from these surveillance teams, which indicate that Asif was constantly speaking on his phone. In addition, Asif was also under surveillance by teams of agents. The government produced reports from these surveillance teams, which indicate that Asif was constantly speaking on his phone. The government also set-up a hidden camera in a hotel room where he stayed for a number of days, which also indicates that Asif made a number of calls on his cellphone (though the calls can be difficult to hear). Both the surveillance reports and the hidden camera cover only a portion of the time between Asif’s entry into the United States and his arrest. 

On November 8, 2024, the government produced five recordings of Asif’s intercepted telephone calls. On October 28, 2025,1 Defendant received sixty-four additional audio-recordings of Asif’s telephone calls from the government. These sixty-nine recordings, however, do not match up with the phone calls noted in the surveillance reports. Moreover, given the frequency with which Asif used his phone while under surveillance and while his phone was subject to monitoring (as can be observed on the surveillance videos produced by the government, for example), the government is likely in possession of many additional recordings that have not been produced. In addition to the sixty-four recordings, the October 21, 2025, production included a number of FBI reports that were redacted.

1 The government’s cover-letter is dated October 21, 2025. (See Docket Entry No.60).

Among the many concerns Merchant’s lawyers raised was why they didn’t get this discovery until October 28 (with a letter dated October 21).

During the November 25, 2025, meet and confer, the Defense (1) expressed concerns about the timing of the October 28, 2025, production and asked why the government had not produced the recordings at an earlier date, since they appear to have been in the government’s possession throughout the pendency of this case;

But his attorneys are also asking for all the intercepts of Merchant, particularly those that match with the surveillance of him.

Both the surveillance reports and the camera recording indicate that he used his cellphone constantly. The recordings produced by the government, however, do not match the communications which occurred during the surveillance. In other words, many more recordings of Asif should exist that correspond to telephone calls noted in the reports or indicated by the footage. Second, the additional recordings are material. Asif is accused of coordinating anti-American activity and assassinations on behalf of a foreign government over the course of the approximately three months he was in the United States. The content of the recordings is relevant to show his actual activity during that time period, and the government’s refusal to produce the recordings implies that these communications do not constitute evidence of the alleged plot. On the other hand, the additional recordings would show him engaging in activity and discussing matters unrelated to the allegations in this case.

Probably, these problems simply reflect a delayed CIPA decision that they had to share the intercepts and incompetence, possibly arising from the competence drain under Trump.

But the revelation that the FBI was watching Merchant when he arrive in April 2024 is interesting for a slew of reasons, which I’ll return to.

Where Murder Dances With Law

A while back, maybe a decade and change ago during the Obama administration, I was drinking with some nerdy friends in a San Francisco hackerspace. We got to talking about National Security law, hacktivism, and terrorism. I had been Wired’s correspondent on Anonymous, and probably understood The hacktivist collective better than anyone. They had recently tore through the net, hacking companies and governments like they were wet paper towels. I was explaining to my fellow nerds that Anonymous was very similar to Al-Qaeda. Though in form only, not in content.

There was no crossover between the shit-talking data “liberators” I had embedded with in 2011/12 and the religious extremist terrorist group founded by Osama bin Laden. They had no members in common, (that I ever knew of) and the ethos of the two groups were so far apart as to not just be in opposition, but to be mutually unintelligible.

A lawyer friend also drinking with us explained that US law struggled to categorize these kinds of leaderless collectives. Al-Qaeda has leaders, but they’re more the winners of a local popularity contest than they are formally appointed, ordained, coronated, or what not.

The answer legislators came up to deal with these groups with was a bit of legalistic nailing jello to a wall. Much like Anonymous, if you wanted to go start your own Al-Qaeda cell, you just did it. It was entirely possible that as an Al-Qaeda terrorist, you would talk your friends into doing some terrorism with you. Then presumably go and blow something up, possibly yourself, possibly random innocent victims, or both.

Anons also would pick a target, usually a perceived terrible company or government, and try to hack the hell out of it. They’d bring down servers, steal secret data and dump it on the net for anyone to see, jam the websites of badly behaved companies, and so forth.

By being essentially more internet/media brand than traditional organization, both Al-Qaeda and Anonymous were particularly hard to prosecute as a group, or even legislate against. They were collectives architected by speech acts, mostly on the internet. Law enforcement could and did go after both groups, but to do so they had to find someone breaking a law and pursue them for that one single act of law breaking.

Unlike the Mob or a criminal gang, there was no illicit organization to target, there was just “the memes.” When you caught one Anon, you caught exactly one Anon. Even in the case of the notorious Anonymous operation run by the FBI, they only managed to arrest one person. (That was a shit show, mainly put together to make Shawn Henry’s exit from the FBI and move over to Crowdstrike as lucrative as possible, as far as I could tell.)

Lawmakers eventually found a way around the strange status of groups like Al-Qaeda, but it was pretty terrible lawmaking. To make a very long set of laws and recent history very short, the provision basically amounted to this: if you called yourself Al-Qaeda, you were Al-Qaeda. That meant you could be killed, on sight, without due process, because you were Al-Qaeda. That name meant that you were an enemy of the state.

I found this situation so absurd that I started the Radical Queer Wing of Al-Qaeda. I was curious how I could be (theoretically) the most murderable non-combatant possible, both by my own government and a terrorist organization. We (mostly me) were a pretty tame branch of Al-Qaeda.  All our bombs were glitter bombs, and we touted ourselves as the most fabulous of the Al-Qaedas. Straight people were not allowed to join our Al-Qaeda, but they could hang, if they were cool.

The lawyer friend (who declined our offer to join the Radical Queer Wing of Al-Qaeda, as he was straight and also definitely not going to do that) confirmed that, yes, maybe, even probably, I could be killed on sight, without due process, under the existing law. He pressed me to make sure I understood that no one was going to do that, it would simply never happen or even come up. This was all a hypothetical. “But they could,” I replied, “And that’s the important part!” The weirdly violent ridiculousness of the situation was the point.

We all continued drinking. Later, I had a few Radical Queer Wing of Al-Qaeda brunches at my co-living space in San Francisco, before getting bored and running off to find new ways to get in fights with, and make fun of, my government.

A 21st Century of Rot

George Bush’s 2001 PATRIOT act had so many horrific provisions to fight and make fun of, and even as some parts were repealed, others persisted into future administrations, and still others became not just part of law, but also part of culture. The War on Terror normalized killing the bad guys, because they were bad. Because we were told they were bad. Americans mostly learned not to question their badness, or the slow and sneaky erosion of our rights to the presumption of innocence.

Obama not only kept the PATRIOT Act provisions in place, he expanded them, including the open killing of children. Obama loved murder by drone. Famously, he killed a 16-year-old American citizen, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, a few days after he’d already killed the kid’s father. Killing people with drones in the Obama era became common enough that it didn’t really make the news after a while. Obama seemed to have loved a good techno-assassination.

He held “Terror Tuesdays” every week where he’d work with staff to pick a new person to kill. Presumably, what Trump calls “bad hombres,” but are, one way or another, still people. They were people we were once required to provide with due process, to be presumed innocent if arrested, be they citizens of the United States or not, because that’s who we were supposed to be. But now we call it war, and then murder some guys because they’re in boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Well before Trump, we had left the principles of the Fifth Amendment (due process) dying in a ditch. He’s gone on to attack free speech. Trump shat on the right to assemble (using AI), denied literally thousands the right to trial before forced deportation. He even tried to strike out birthright citizenship with a stroke of his sharpie. His government has engaged in unreasonable searches and seizures. Trump has tried to confiscate the rights of both the people and the States. Trump did not merely come to weaken Bill of Rights, he came to destroy it altogether. In this task, he has faced barely any resistance, in part because the last few presidents loosened the bolts on the system for him.

No one should be surprised at this point that Whiskey Pete Hegseth kills people with impunity. He’s tacked on “terrorist” to a narco- prefix to make the whole thing look vaguely legal, as if that one magical word abrogates all human rights. But “Narco-terrorist” is just a term he made up to justify what remains murder. That is what is going on in the Caribbean. It’s the logical conclusion of what I was trying to parody all those years ago with my Al-Qaeda glitter bombs — laws that allow for extrajudicial killing, based on the slippery idea that anything we don’t like is terrorism, can only arrive at the place we are now. It’s not quite within legal regimes, but colored by laws that seem to contradict the Constitution in both meaning and plain language.

But here we are, and here is where we have to come back from.

Pete Hegseth’s campaign of terror against poor fishermen in the Caribbean may have taken us out of the rule of law more than any other single act, but Bush and Obama prepared the ground for Trump. This situation would be recognizable to the Founding Fathers as the kind of thing that we rebelled against those centuries ago.

Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda never really had the power to destroy America, anymore than gays or communists did. But he invited us to destroy ourselves. Standing on the shoulders of the last few administrations, Trump has taken up bin Laden’s dream of making America into a pseudo-religious hellscape of gerontocratic corruption and vice, just with more fake Jesus and less fake Muhammad.

It’s Not Too Late for US

We don’t have to settle for this. We can save America. Somewhere beneath the layers of corporate corruption, bigotry, and jingoism, we still have values. We are often good neighbors. Americans have some of the highest rates of volunteerism in the world — we don’t just sit at home, we work the problems around us, and we go work abroad. We donate, but we also get off our butts and help people. To defeat that, the ghouls running our government have tried to convince us that no one else matters. Right now, we have to remember who we are and take care of each other. We have to protect ourselves and our communities against the avaricious.

This administration tried to make us selfish. But they are failing. According to polling by YouGov and the Economist, Trump has 38% approval, and falling. The message that we should work together to make our world a better place was key to Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in New York, and it’s key to how we rally Americans against this venal administration. But it does mean we have to look past our own troubles and begin to engage in community together.

Trump voters voted on prices more than anything else. They didn’t see the larger picture, but it’s coming into focus now.

Donald Trump’s grand bet is that our selfishness will keep us weak and atomized, but we can prove him wrong. When we reach out and take care of each other, when we organize, rally, and commit, we build the community we need to defeat this rising darkness.

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A previous version of this piece described Obama as targeting Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, which was incorrect He was killed in a targeted attack, but he was not the target himself. I regret the error.