Donald Trump’s lawyer just filed a clown motion to depose Rupert Murdoch in his WSJ lawsuit immediately (the court already approved Dow Jones’ uncontested request to extend the response date to September 22).

As justification, Trump’s lawyer argues, in part, that Rupert is old and might kick off before things slowly get around to discovery in a year’s time or so, if they even get that far.

Murdoch’s age and health warrant conducting his deposition on an expedited basis. Murdoch recently turned 94 years old and has suffered, but thankfully overcome, multiple health issues throughout his life. Moreover, upon information and belief, Murdoch resides in New York, New York, which is well over 100 miles from this District. Thus, it is presumable, both because of his age and health and/or his distance from this Court, that Murdoch will be unavailable for trial. See Supra Glass, 2024 WL 1558712, at *3 (granting motion for deposition de bene esse and finding that witnesses were unavailable for trial under 32(a)(4)(B)).

Among the things Trump is subpoenaing is any digital communication about the July 17 article reporting that a letter from Donald Trump was included in a 2003 birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein. Another is phone records about whom he spoke with on it.

7. Any text messages, iMessages, WhatsApp messages, Slack messages, Signal messages, WeChat messages, or any other form of digital communication on any mobile device related to the Article that You have sent or received.

8. Documents sufficient to show a log of the calls You made and received, on any landline or mobile phone number, from July 10, 2025 through July 25, 2025 related to the Article.

But the only proof that Trump presents that he did speak with Murdoch is an unvalidated screen cap of Trump’s Truth Social post posted after the fact to that effect (when Hunter Biden tried to submit such things in a court filing, DOJ successfully rejected it).

Worse still, the post falsely claims that WSJ “printed” “the supposed letter.”

That’s not even what the lawsuit alleges, which claims that WSJ stated that Trump authored, drew, and signed the letter in question.

17. Therein, Defendants falsely and maliciously stated that President Trump supposedly authored, drew, and signed a letter wishing Epstein a happy fiftieth birthday.

While the WSJ did say that Trump’s signature appeared where pubic hair might go, it specifically said that it did not know how the letter was produced.

It described that Ghislaine Maxwell collected letters from friends, including Trump.

She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump.

Maxwell collected letters from Trump and dozens of Epstein’s other associates for a 2003 birthday album, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

It described that the letter bore his name, and that his signature appeared.

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

And it specifically said it did not know how the letter was prepared — disavowing knowledge of whether Trump “authored, drew, [or] signed” the letter himself.

It isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared.

Trump provides no proof the emails or calls he describes actually occurred. He doesn’t provide his own phone records (or even, proof that he’s the one who posted the Truth Social post, something that took Jack Smith quite a bit of work regarding Trump’s January 6 tweets).

And curiously, Trump wants to know to whom Rupert was talking about all this starting on July 10, five days before the alleged phone call to Rupert (and wants to know to whom Rupert spoke for a full week after Trump filed the lawsuit, going through the second story on the Epstein book).

It’s a stunt. Among other things, it reveals that Trump doesn’t think Rupert plotted all this on Truth Social!

Update: Judge Darrin Gayles has given Rupert until August 4 to respond to the request.

Yesterday, Trump invited Ursula Von der Leyen for a lecture on windmills and a big announcement of a trade deal.

In theory and as laid out, Trump used threats of 30% tariffs to get the EU to capitulate to his demands, accepting 15% tariffs on goods exported to the United States rather than the 10% he was proposing weeks ago, before the Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein made him feel weak.

“The golf was beautiful,” Trump told reporters. “Even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world. And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills at the end of the 18th. I say, isn’t that a shame?”

Trump said the EU will agree to purchase $750 billion of energy. It will also agree to invest $600 billion more than planned in the U.S.

Von der Leyen said the 15 percent tariff rate would be a ceiling, with the same rate applying to cars, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. The tariff treatment for alcoholic drinks has still to be worked out.

Europe would replace Russian gas with purchases of energy from the U.S. with purchases of $250 billion per year for the rest of Trump’s term, she added. [my emphasis]

While no one seems to be addressing this, the EU reportedly did not budge on EU regulations on tech, one of the things Trump had been pushing for.

US consumers will be taxed on EU goods — with some carveouts. But EU consumers won’t be taxed on US goods (which are already cheaper because Trump is destroying the dollar).

In theory, this creates the same perverse incentive structure as the Japanese deal did, in which Japanese companies pay a lower tariff, 15%, on cars than US producers pay for inputs, 50%. In theory, the Japanese deal could lead Toyota and Honda to move jobs out of the United States. The EU doesn’t have that kind of brand impact in the US, however, meaning Volkswagen is badly hit by the tariffs but not in a strong enough position to simply revert production to Germany (or some place cheaper in the EU).

The tariffs will impose some of the biggest costs on Ireland, since it exports a lot of pharmaceuticals to the US (and that production may be one of the easier things to return to US production). Meanwhile, goods exported from Northern Ireland face a 5% lower tariff.

Meanwhile, France’s Prime Minister is already condemning the deal.

France called a framework trade deal between the United States and European Union a “dark day” for Europe, saying the bloc had caved in to U.S. President Donald Trump with an unbalanced deal that slaps a headline 15% tariff on EU goods while sparing U.S. imports from any immediate European retaliation.

The criticism from Prime Minister Francois Bayrou followed months of French calls for EU negotiators to take a tougher stance against Trump by threatening reciprocal measures — a position that contrasted with the more conciliatory approaches of Germany and Italy.

“It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, brought together to affirm their common values and to defend their common interests, resigns itself to submission,” Bayrou wrote on X of what he called the “von der Leyen-Trump deal”.

I can’t help but think that this deal is just a holding pattern. After all, Trump plans to discuss with Keir Starmer today the deal he made with the UK back and May and was signed back in June. Every other deal he has “made” has led immediately to a dispute about what the countries really agreed to. Deals don’t actually get finalized for months after the deal. And Van der Leyen is kidding herself if you think Trump will be locked in to anything.

Meanwhile, as noted above, there’s no deal yet on how much Trump will tax French wines and other fancy European booze.

That’s notable given that Trump’s appeal of lower court rulings that his tariffs are unlawful, in part, because they’re so arbitrary and capricious will be Thursday at 10AM. And the lead plaintiff in that case is a wine importer, still looking for clarity on how much they’ll pay to import wines from, among other places, Austria, Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Germany, Croatia, and Hungary, over a 100 days after suing.

Plaintiff V.O.S. Selections, Inc. is a 39-year-old New York-based business, founded by Victor Owen Schwartz, that specializes in the importation and distribution of small-production wines, spirits, and sakes from six continents. V.O.S. Selections has made and makes significant direct purchases of wines, spirits, and sakes from Austria, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Morocco, Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, and South Africa. The products it imports are not reasonably available from a producer in the United States.

If the Circuit Court of Appeals upholds (or preferably, improves) the lower court ruling, then this whole process will be thrown back into chaos until SCOTUS tells us whether their expansive view of the presidency extends to roiling international trade agreements every time he gets grumpy about a sex trafficking scandal.

On July 11, 2017, I noted that we had proof that Trump’s claims he had been wiretapped were false. That’s because, if the Intelligence Community had found an exchange like the one Don Jr released that day — in which someone working for Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov offered Don Jr, “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” and he responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” then the confidence level for the Intelligence Community Assessment that Russia had affirmatively tried to help Donald Trump get elected would have been high, even for the NSA (which said it only had moderate confidence).

And yet we’re still arguing over whether that judgement was fair eight years later.

The HPSCI report released the other day — which is dated September 18, 2020, but which right wing HPSCI Chair Rick Crawford misleadingly released alongside a statement pretending it was done in January 2017, and which the architect of the case for the Iraq War, Fred Fleitz, says was done in 2018 —  seems to have been a response to a more rigorous SSCI Report released weeks earlier that confirmed Putin did want Trump to win. (Indeed, Fleitz offers a garbage explanation to claim this HPSCI Report is more credible than the SSCI one.)

The HPSCI report manages to challenge the SSCI conclusion by revisiting a different question: Not, did Russia take actions to help Trump win the election that created a grave counterintelligence threat (the SSCI report included, but went far beyond, the evidence released in the Mueller Report) but, did the IC claim that Putin did want Trump to win, made in a rushed report published in the first days of 2017, have enough evidence behind it at the time?

The report accuses John Brennan of having made up his mind to that question, yes, Putin aspired to help Trump, and thereby influenced the result. Fair enough (though as I read it I wondered whether Brennan knew of the advance notice of the email leak that George Papadopoulos got, and so had a source of confidence not reflected in the report; and the nature of the claim in the HPSCI report differs from the nature of the claim in a report John Ratcliffe released last week). But the HPSCI report does the exact same thing, delivering up the result that Donald Trump wanted, and it did so, in part, by intentionally remaining dumb to many, but not all, of the things that had been learned since.

Just as one example, the report asserts,

[T]he available intelligence showed: No Putin orders directing or suggesting operations intended to elect Trump (by contrast, Intelligence on Russian operations on German elections specifically mentioned Putin’s goal of defeating Chancellor Merkel).

This refers to this ICA judgment predicting that Germany would be the next country in whose elections Russia would interfere. Only, that judgement turned out to be wrong; Russia conducted the same kind of hack-and-leak campaign targeting Emmanuel Macron in May 2017 (with the help of pro-Trump influencers), so while that might be a good argument in January 2017, it fails after May 2017, to say nothing of September 2020.

More importantly, it only references the intelligence available through December 29, 2016, so wouldn’t include the damning email to Don Jr disclosed in July 2017. Because the ICA didn’t include ongoing FBI investigations, it wouldn’t include Papadopoulos’ brags about Russian interference that the FBI knew about, but didn’t, couldn’t, include in the report. It wouldn’t include the intercepts between Mike Flynn and Sergei Kislyak discovered in that very period as the IC sought to explain why Putin decided not to retaliate against US sanctions.

The HPSCI report concluded there was not enough intelligence to back a high confidence conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump win by focusing only on the time before FBI started looking in earnest.

In any case, as I’ll show, in several places, the report breaks the conceit that they’re evaluating only the information available to the IC on December 29, 2016.

The HPSCI Report, then, is not so much a useful piece of analysis, but a time machine, an attempt, weeks before the 2020 election, to set the clock back for candidate Donald Trump to the time before it became clear he really did benefit from help from Russia.

And it doesn’t even do that very well.

The report structure

As laid out below, the report doesn’t hide that its sole goal is to erase the judgment that Putin wanted to elect Trump. Its first finding is that everything else in the ICA is sound, followed by seven poorly-organized findings ostensibly explaining why the assessment that Putin aspired to help Trump was unsound.

• Finding 1: The bulk of the ICA judgements were sound.
• Finding 2: Significant tradecraft failures cast doubt on the ICA judgments of Putin’s intentions, claiming that only on the judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump, the ICA tradecraft failed.
• Finding 3: The ICA failed to acknowledge that key judgements were based on raw intelligence that did not meet tradecraft standards: This claims that of 15 sources behind the judgment, 12 were unremarkable, but three “contained flawed information and these became foundational” to the claim Putin aspired to help Trump win.
  • One was a fragment, claiming that Putin “counted on” a Trump win, that John Brennan overruled professionals to include.
  • A second was a substandard (Ukrainian) report from an unknown subsource about a February 2016 Russian plan recommending engagement with Trump.
  • A third was a another substandard source from an unknown source. It claimed that Russia preferred Republicans over Democrats because they didn’t care about human rights.
• Finding 4: The ICA excluded significant intelligence that contradicted its judgment. This section discusses Russia explaining why there were downsides to both candidates.
• Finding 5: The ICA disregarded Russian behavior that undermined its judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win. This section, which notes that Moscow was receiving reports on US polling but doesn’t mention (!!!) that some came from Trump’s campaign manager, argues that since the election got close in its final weeks, you would have expected Putin to dump all the other derogatory intelligence he had on Hillary. That argument provides an opportunity to parrot the SVR documents discussed here. It also looked at what it claimed were Russian leaks (really, just one) that it said made Trump look bad. Finally, it ludicrously suggested that the disparate hacking of Hillary is just attributed to her being an easier target.
• Finding 6: The ICA misrepresented documents on Putin’s intention. This pertains significantly to advice Putin got (it may also rely on the SVR documents). A 10-page attack on the dossier is put in here for contrived reasons, which I’ll return to in another post.
• Finding 7: The ICA failed to consider alternate explanations. This section significantly revisits the SVR documents.
• Finding 8: The ICA was unnecessarily rushed.

Some of this is quite reasonable. For example, Finding 4 notes that Russia was going to be unhappy with either candidate; I think Trump opponents often forget that Putin didn’t want a strong Trump, he wanted a Trump whose narcissism would create more problems than Hillary.

In Finding 8, sure this report was rushed. It had to be.

Some of the criticism of Brennan — if accurate, but as noted the complaint here is different from the complaint in more recent reports — seems fair.

The flawed reports (Finding 4)

In several other areas, the analysis only survives by relying on that time machine effect.

The report claims that of 15 pieces of intelligence to back the Putin finding, three were not just substandard, but were pushed through by Brennan.

The first I address here. Brennan pushed to include a report that Putin approved the DNC leak because he was “counting on” a Trump victory. The CIA, years later, stands by the quality of the source and the fact that the interpretation in the ICA, “was most consistent with the raw intelligence.”

The second of these three reports is far more interesting. It describes a report from Kyiv (the Republicans spell it Kiev) laying out a plan, starting in February 2016, to place someone pro-Russian on Trump’s campaign team. The analysis of this lead focuses on questionable sourcing and potential Ukrainian bias.

But the time machine effect of this report frees Republicans from accounting for the fact that Trump, starting in February 2016, in fact did place a pro-Kremlin official on his “election team,” Paul Manafort, and Manafort sought to monetize his role there by getting pro-Russian Ukrainians and a Russian oligarch to pay him.

And Konstantin Kilimnik, in Ukraine, seemed to know of that plan before Manafort was installed. This report may have looked problematic for inclusion in December 2016 (though by that point Manafort’s cover-up of his Russian ties was public). But it looked prescient by 2020.

The third report is similar. HPSCI’s response begins a long focus of the report attempting to debunk the underlying intelligence — a claim that Russia perceived Republicans to be less supportive of human rights — with a bunch of whataboutism. How dare you call the party of torture less supportive of human rights, the right wingers wail. Did you know that Reagan said, “tear down this wall”? All the while ignoring that Trump ran on an affirmatively pro-torture platform.

“They’re both poison” (Finding 5, 7)

In other words, a central pillar of the report is to complain that intelligence analysts didn’t consider alternative explanations for the intelligence they were looking at.

This was about the stage of reading this report where I could get not get the scene from Princess Bride where Vizzini attempts to outsmart the Dread Pirate Roberts out of my head.

That’s true because some of the arguments — and they go on for pages and pages — sound just as stupid as Vizzini does. Republicans tie themselves in knots trying to come up with alternative explanations. Republicans refuse to consider that the SVR hacks, which I wrote about here, were meant for intelligence collection but the foot-stomping GRU ones were not. They treat all the SVR reports — including the ones that, FBI had decided years before 2020 were objectively false or the one that Ratcliffe released days before this report warning it “may reflect exaggeration or fabrication” — as true and damning. They obsess about the derogatory claims about Hillary’s health and mental fitness without even considering the report Hillary released in real time after her pneumonia scare. They actually believe a claim that European leaders doubted Hillary could lead. These reports obviously play on right wing biases, and sure enough HPSCI’s Republicans cling to those Russian spy claims in the report, just as they have since Tulsi emphasized them. In a report that wails mightily (and correctly in at least one case, cited the parallel CIA report) about leaving out contrary information, HPSCI simply leaves out the Jim Comey allegation in one of the SVR reports, which if true, would explain why Putin wouldn’t have to (and didn’t) dump damning intel close to the election: Because Putin believed that “Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections,” something that turned out to be true. In other words, they cherry pick which Russian spy products they choose to parrot, one of the sins they accuse the ICA team of, but they do so with years of hindsight that made clear how foolish that was.

This report has an entire section on how Putin would have tracked polling and so knew he could get Trump over the line if he dumped opposition late in the campaign (which, of course, he did), without blushing about one source for that polling: Manafort’s regular provision of it via Kilimnik, something that became public between the ICA release in 2017 and this HPSCI report in September 2020.

Their claims get more ridiculous from there. Even in the face of the non-stop flood of Hillary emails released in 2016, right wingers cling to the single report from Colin Powell calling Trump “a national disgrace” as proof Putin doesn’t love Trump.

I mean, it’s pretty funny to me. But then ultimately it gets back to what Wesley, the Dread Pirate Roberts, said when Buttercup concluded that Wesley had put the poison in his own cup. He didn’t. He put poison in both glasses.

All the ICA did — and it’s worth reading how the “aspired to” section includes a lot of explanation as to why Putin would prefer Trump to which right wingers didn’t and don’t object, such as Trump’s willingness to partner with Russia on terrorism or make deals — all the ICA did was say that Putin wanted Trump to win. And right wingers have gone to all lengths, up to and including parroting Russian spies in the White House, to degrade the strength of that claim as it was made from high to moderate confidence years after it became clear the judgment was correct.

Ultimately the effort was intended and bound to drive more polarization. Which point the right wingers make but — oh my goodness look how they do it?!?! They point to the IRA’s activities after the election that claimed to oppose Trump’s election.

But they source that to the Robert Mueller IRA indictment, dated February 16, 2018, over a year after the ICA was completed.

By February 2018, there was abundant public evidence that Putin preferred Trump, including that letter to Don Jr as well as the guilty pleas of George Papadopoulos and Mike Flynn. By 2020, the date of this report, court filings were public describing Manafort’s lies that, Amy Berman Jackson judged, he told to cover up what happened at an August 2, 2016 meeting with alleged Russian spy where they discussed how Trump planned to win, how Manafort would get paid by pro-Russian Ukrainians and debt relief from Oleg Deripaska, and a plan to carve up Ukraine. But only here, only amid their desperate attempt to find proof that Vladimir Putin does too hate Donald Trump, do they confess they’ve read any of the charging documents from Mueller.

That is, the time machine was fake, just an attempt to make all the evidence laid out in the SSCI report go away.

As I’ll show, what HPSCI did with the dossier was even worse — so much worse I had to break it out as its own post. There, they don’t even try to maintain the illusion they were dumb to everything they learned since the ICA.

But as to their main report, claiming to assess the treatment of the intelligence in 2017 — a feigned ignorance that is central to their rebuttal of one of three “substandard” intelligence reports — they can’t even maintain that ploy as they attempt to whatabout proof that Putin wanted to help Trump win.

In the wake of a WSJ report that Democrats have fallen to a historic approval low, the usual suspects — in this case, David Atkins — have taken to Bluesky to blame everything on Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Again.

Atkins demanded that Democratic leaders talk about Trump conspiring with his personal attorneys to cover things up.

People keep asking “what do you expect Democrats to do???”

I expect Schumer and Jeffries to hold a press conference and say: “Donald Trump is conspiring with his personal attorneys he corruptly installed at DOJ to cover up his close friendship and possible horrific crimes with Jeff Epstein.”

Let me stipulate that the messaging that Schumer and Jeffries do do is often feckless, though in this case, Schumer released a statement on both Xitter and Bluesky on Thursday first arguing that sending Donald Trump’s personal lawyer to meet with Ghislaine “stinks of high corruption,” which led a few articles. That followed around ten other social media posts, including his prediction on Wednesday that, “Maybe Speaker Johnson declared the Epstein Recess to give Trump time to prepare papers for the pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell. Disgraceful” (making Schumer a prominent early adopter of the theory that Trump will pardon the sex trafficker) and a post (again posted to both Xitter and Bluesky) elevating video of Markwayne Mullin admitting Republicans were trying to give Trump cover. And while Jeffries was more focused on redistricting and messaging on the Big Ugly last week, Epstein was a repeated focus in his press conferences (it was the initial focus of Katherine Clark’s comments), and he was mocking Trump on this even before it bubbled into a scandal.

Atkins’ complaints that Dems aren’t messaging on Epstein comes in the wake of three significant earned media wins by Democrats on Epstein in recent weeks:

• After Dick Durbin released a whistleblower’s description of the 1,000 people Pam Bondi pulled off their day jobs to review Epstein files, Allison Gill responded by releasing damning details of the search, followed days later by NYT. The details of this search will continue to feed the controversy (as well as FOIAs to get the spreadsheet of prominent names discovered in the search, so it can be compared to the list of names Todd Blanche asked Maxwell about in their cozy tête-à-tête). Update: Durbin sent a letter (with Sheldon Whitehouse) to Todd Blanche for information about the meeting, which NYT reported on.
• After Ron Wyden sent letters in March and June demanding that Todd Bessent and Pam Bondi release FinCEN files on Epstein and Leon Black, NYT did a story on the financial aspects. When Republicans accused Wyden of sitting on this during the Biden Administration, he sent another letter disproving that and mapping out what steps they should take. In a great story on Wyden’s efforts, Greg Sargent noted the value of such letters: “such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability.”
• And then there was Ro Khanna’s tactic that shut down the House by leading Mike Johnson to give up on a rule governing last week’s work, which led to follow-on efforts in committees and the Senate. This — which required working with Tom Massie (something lefties religiously disavow) — was a parliamentary score, with series of stories in the Hill beat press to follow.

Almost none of that appears in Atkins’ response to my question why he was ignoring other members. He said he had mentioned a Whitehouse interview, but he ignored the long thread from Whitehouse more directly addressing the corruption, as well as a Podcast with Jamie Raskin where they dedicate the last 5 minutes of to it.

The real tell to Atkins’ willful ignorance (or outright deceit) about what Dems have done is his claim, “I have highlighted [Dems who are pushing this]. But they get lost in the fray when leadership isnt backing them up,” [my emphasis] a day after RTing this story from Axios.

The social media card for the story, which uses Jeffries’ picture above two quotes, misleadingly suggests the Minority Leader said, “This whole thing is just such bullsh**t” … “I don’t think this issue is big outside the Beltway.” Which seems to be as far as Atkins got.

The entire story is premised on those quoted centrists opposing Jeffries’ encouragement to focus on it, and links an earlier story describing Jeffries’ affirmative focus on it.

Why it matters: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-N.Y.) leadership team has encouraged its members to maintain the drumbeat on Epstein,

The column goes on to list just some of what Dems are doing — with the encouragement of the Minority Leader (the earlier post describes that Ro Khanna worked closely with Jeffries in jamming the Rules Committee).

The other side: Other Democrats argued that going after Republicans on policy and slamming them on Epstein aren’t mutually exclusive. “I think all these issues are linked together,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) told Axios.

• “Trump is willing to lie and betray his own people, and he’s willing to take away your health care to give it to his rich friends. … I think it’s all part of one story,” said Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
• Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a former CPC chair, said similarly: “I’m talking about Medicaid, I’m talking about tax breaks to billionaires — and I’m talking about Epstein, because he fits right in there.”

State of play: Jeffries has surprised some of his members by bear-hugging rank-and-file efforts to force the release of the Epstein files despite his usual reluctance to engage on salacious issues.

• His messaging arm, the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, sent out several emails to members’ offices last week on how to message on Epstein, as Politico first reported.
• “We’ve encouraged members to lean into this, to talk to their constituents about it,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), a DPCC co-chair. “It’s an opportunity to speak with people who might usually disagree with you.”

Atkins’ entire whine — based off a premise he would have known was outright bullshit if he had only clicked through to a ragebait story he RTed — was rewarding for Atkins; 17 people RTed it as if it were true, with one person even whining about Garland along the way. But the whole thing was either an affirmative misrepresentation or a confession that Atkins knows fuckall about what Dems have done and simply didn’t bother to check before whining about it.

I won’t lay out all that Dems have done — there are actually multiple stories out that I’m sure even Atkins could read if he bothered to click through on ragebait. It should be enough to say that Dems, with Massie, deprived Republicans of the tools of their majority for a week and have been mocking them relentlessly ever since. That Johnson ran away will continue to feed this story.

But one example is illustrative. Ruben Gallego — often attacked for his centrism and coddling of cryptograft — got into an extended spat with Trump mouthpiece Markwayne Mullin in the Senate last week (the appearance Schumer elevated), after Gallego tried to pass a resolution to release the files. Following that, Gallego appeared on Jim Acosta’s Substack show, where he described how this all reeks of a cover-up (and accused Republicans of revictimizing the victims and exploiting the vulnerabilities of their base). He played on populist concerns about rich people, and mocked Republicans for fleeing like they did when the Brits invaded DC. A centrist Dem delivered up precisely the kind of message Atkins claimed no one is delivering, and he did it two days before Atkins whined about it.

I’m not sure Atkins has an excuse for making a false claim belied by an Axios story he had RTed a day earlier. At some point, a pundit has to be responsible for clicking through to the stories they’re disseminating.

But — again stipulating that Jeffries and Schumer’s messaging is often feckless — I think there’s something else driving much lefty belief that Dems are not messaging, on top of pundits like Atkins making false claims belied by ragebait they’ve disseminated without reading.

In the last several years, fascist-supporting oligarchs have given people good reason to stop consuming a wide variety of media. After Elon Musk bought Twitter — the algorithm of which already disproportionately rewarded right wingers — he invited Nazis to overrun it. In a bid to cultivate Trump’s favor, Jeff Bezos has willfully gutted the WaPo and shut down anti-Trump opinion on the platform. NYT continues to frame most stories in ways that pitch Trump as the hero, with many outright framed to Dem- or trans-bash. Substack, where people like Paul Krugman and Terry Moran and Jim Acosta have fled after having been hounded out of traditional media, also platforms Nazis. Google has allowed AI to enshittify its search function, making it far more difficult to find breaking news.

One by one, lefties have abandoned those platforms, often in a failed attempt to force the oligarchs who own them to reverse course. The decision to abandon those platforms are, for most people, self-evidently ethical decisions.

But the consequences of those ethical decisions are that even if Dems do something great, you will be blind — blinded by ethical choices you yourself made.

Your blindspots might entail the following:

• You will see (and far too often, help to disseminate) the latest outrage Trump posts to his Truth Social account, as well as the uncontested disinformation in it. Those posts will often silence the moral criticism of Trump, as happened with Rosie O’Donnell.
• You will view Trump speeches and press sprays, as well as oversight hearings in which Democrats have been forcing real news that often is not getting picked up, through the lens of Aaron Rupar or Acyn, who make it easy but bring their own narrow lens. You might see clips from the traditional media. Not all of those clips will be easy to disseminate yourself without rewarding Xitter.
• You will see the stories about shitty framing or Dem- (or trans-) punching at NYT, but will miss better routine news stories, and even, sometimes, important breaking reporting.
• To the extent to which it still exists, you will not see the general access political reporting at WaPo.
• You will not see Capitol Hill beat reporting that is publicized almost entirely on Xitter, including reports admiringly explaining why chasing Mike Johnson away early took some tactical smarts, unless you subscribe to them.
• Because there’s not a viral algorithm at Bluesky, you may only see the content from electeds crafted for that platform if you follow them directly and even then only if you happen to be online when they post it; you will not see what they post — very often self-consciously crafted to be more confrontational — on Xitter.
• You will see rage-bait stories from Axios and Politico designed to drive depression among Dems and often, as Atkins did, you’ll disseminate it without clicking through to see what it really says.
• You won’t see what right wingers are saying on Fox or NewsMax or Breitbart, not even when they’re bitching about firey speeches Hakeem Jeffries made that didn’t filter into Bluesky.
• You may entirely miss what is going on on TikTok, which is where a great deal of messaging is happening (so will I, as I learned when I looked for the Rosie O’Donnell post that had been widely covered in right wing media before Trump threatened to strip her citizenship over it).
• You will have to work harder to find news stories that have been broadly reported.

In short, at least in part due to perfectly ethical decisions from people who used to have a radically different media diet before certain changes accompanying rising fascism, even activist Dems will be largely blind to a great deal of what Dems are doing.

I absolutely support that ethical decision (and after two weeks of doing a great deal of — sometimes very effective, IMO — messaging about Epstein and Tulsi’s disinformation campaign designed to bury it at the Nazi bar, such choices may be crucial for your mental health).

But it is not remotely ethical to make comments about what Dems are or are not doing if you have not checked your blindspots.

More importantly, we will not survive if you respond to the effects of oligarch takeover with passivity, demanding you get fed things as easily as you used to get. That is what they are counting on: that their efforts to make it harder to find important news will lead you to give up and assume it doesn’t exist.

I may be biased, but I’m also allegedly an expert on this, because it was the topic of my dissertation. Finding and disseminating oppositional news is an absolutely critical part of opposing authoritarianism; it can take work and risk your security. But it becomes a fundamental part of citizenship.

The oligarch-led assault on the press started long before Trump started implementing fascism but has accelerated during precisely the period when Democrats have demanded to have Dem messaging land in their lap. There are many things Dem electeds absolutely have to do better (though having spent far too much time on Xitter in the last week, it’s clear there’s a purpose to tailor messaging on both platforms, which I do too). I agree that neither Schumer nor Jeffries is great at this messaging (but am also acutely aware of how much time they’re spending off-camera trying to ensure Dems have a chance in 2026).

But Dems have done almost everything right on Epstein, down to forcing Denny Hastert’s successor to abdicate his power for a week to help Trump cover up his sex trafficking scandal. Yet whining pundits are winning clout on Bluesky by misrepresenting rather than learning from that fact.

Posts in this series
The Anti-Democracy Project Of John Roberts
The Allies Of The Billionaires

In the first two posts in this series I described the constant onslaught led by the filthy rich against our democracy, and identified groups of people who supported those attacks. In this post, I offer two thoughts about going forward.

We cannot go back

The guidepost of the Biden Administration and the Congressional Democrats was a return to normalcy. They were convinced that Trump was a blemish on the brilliance of the US, a blemish that would come off with some scouring; that it was a nightmare from which voters had awakened. They believed that the US could resume its position as Leader of the Free World, the greatest economy ever, the center of innovation and progress and a beacon of freedom.

They restored an economy devastated by the Covid shutdown and the millions it killed and damaged. They were fairly successful in restoring the faith of our allies in our stability and worthiness to lead.

They were wiped out in the 2022 mid-terms. Harris promised to continue the restoration project. The voters rejected her. The Democratic Party dream of restoring normalcy is dead.

1. We cannot go back because that is not what the majority of us want. Whatever Trump voters want, it isn’t restoration. Non-voters wouldn’t go to the polls to vote for restoration or to vote against Trumpian chaos and destruction. Harris voters were willing to accept restoration, but even among them a large number, perhaps a majority, wanted much more.

2. We cannot go back because Trump has wrecked the institutions and norms we need for restoration. He has gutted agencies devoted to accumulation of soft power around the world, especially USAID. In the process he is potentially responsible for millions of premature deaths.  How do we recover from that?

He attacked our basic research institutions. He made it scary for foreign students to study and do research here. He handed our national health efforts to an ignorant buffoon. He turned the Department of Justice into a stable of third-rate lawyers loyal to himself. We aren’t going to recover from that for a long time.

3. We cannot go back because John Roberts and the Fasces won’t let us. They have wrecked the legal structure of the Administrative State, which sought to replace arbitrary decisions by the President with informed decision-making by independent boards for technical and scientific matters. They have blunted legislative power on purely political grounds. They have formed a protective barrier around the Presidency, so that Trump is effectively beyond the rule of law.

In the process, they have surrendered the the judicial power. Trump is free to do as he sees fit, throwing his tariff tantrums, his prosecutions, his lawsuits, his ICE thugs, and the US military around like a toddler angry at his toys. John Roberts and the Fash Five won’t let District Courts enforce the laws Trump is violating, meaning that the judicial branch is irrelevant.

When our young people think on this, why would they trust the government? How do we persuade them to follow the rules?

4. We cannot go back because no sane national leader would take us seriously. The period of US domination in world affairs is done. There is no going back.

5. We cannot go back because Trump has empowered the stinking worst of us to bully and torment us. They and their vile ideas sit like dead things in the dark poised to spread their deadly poisons.

6. We cannot go back because the filthy rich, the Theists, the Neoliberals, and the Grifters don’t like it and they will figure out how to hold on to as much of their power as they can. Too many weaklings sit in positions of authority, unwilling to protect the democracy that gave them their positions. They are easy prey for the anti-democracy ghouls.

But suppose a Democrat gets elected president, and Democrats take the House and Senate. It’s possible that she would try to rule like Trump, using the powers he asserts and those given him by John Roberts and the Reactionaries. That’s not far-fetched. See this at The Atlantic. Or maybe Roberts and the Revanchists will apply their double-standard to Democratic presidents, leaving the precedents for the next right-wing wannabe dictator.

Where should we go?

I don’t know.

But I do know we need to think about it starting immediately. The Democratic Party has run as the “We aren’t them” party for so long it’s in their DNA. Nothing changes unless we force change.

One possible starting place for a future is Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. They make a great program, and as the pic on the front page shows, they come with Norman Rockwell images. FDR articulated these ideas in his 1941 State of the Union Address, and expanded on them in his 1944 address:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

These principles are the precise opposite of the program of Trump and the filthy rich.

Changing the future

If we don’t organize and act together, the forces that put us here will try to restore the social structures that benefit them and no one else.  And as Hannah Arendt tells us, participation in the political sphere is one part of what it means to be a full human being. Certainly she participated, as this PBS documentary shows.

There are plenty of people willing to organize against Trump. We also need people to help us see and organize for a better future.

From the second I saw Trump say, Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?, I knew this scandal would roll out differently. At that point, I understood it only as a matter of attention — and I was right.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official told POLITICO the president is frustrated with his staff’s inability to tamp down conspiracy theories they once spread and by the wall of media coverage that started when Attorney General Pam Bondi released information from the Epstein case that was already in the public domain.

“He feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention,” the senior White House official said.

Donald Trump survives (and thrives) via two super powers: his ability to command and redirect attention, and his exploitation of polarization to defy actual truth once he has that attention. And, in asking that question, Ae you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein, he expressed that he believed those super powers were failing.

At the time I only understood that his ability to command and redirect attention was failing, but given what has transpired since we can hypothesize about what brought him to this point.

Epstein is different than past scandals because it is so close to a motivating conspiracy of his base, QAnon. A third of his mob is motivated by an equally strong cult belief, and he relies on that mob to control political opinion and wield credible threats against defectors. Meanwhile, his base is suffering from what I’ll call “Justice deprivation,” (which I’ll return to — I’m sure there’s a better term), meaning they believe in him because he continues to stoke their belief he’ll deliver “Justice.” But they’re getting impatient. The John Durham investigation didn’t quench their thirst for vengeance against the Deep State, and now Pam Bondi has been caught stalling on delivering justice to the pedophiles.

And, Ghislaine Maxwell has a credible threat. This doesn’t mean she has proof Trump raped 15-year olds, though we can’t rule it out. Given how things are proceeding, I doubt we’ll ever learn what it is. What matters is the threat was and is serious enough he recognizes he must neutralize it.

But that credible threat meant that two parallel developments — Maxwell’s attempt to cut her 20-year prison sentence and the bumbling efforts from Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino to resolve the Epstein thirst they had stoked — collided in the week before John Sauer had to move forward on defending the prosecution against Maxwell’s appeal. Probably, Bondi’s frantic review of the case files in March was an assessment, as Maxwell was preparing her appeal, of how badly those two risks collided, and (as we’ll see) a creation of a list of names to target.

For a brief moment, the left — which has squandered any effort to be able to command attention, in part because most prefer to yell at Chuck Schumer — managed to piggyback on the right wing mob to be able to command attention and even, in Congress, political risks.

In those weeks, we’ve seen Sauer take an action (the response to her cert petition at SCOTUS) that Maxwell viewed as a threat to her ability to get out of prison. Then, her attorney David Markus publicly conveyed that he believed Donald Trump was reneging on a deal (publicly, that was a reference to the appeal, but this is a world of easy double entendres). Then the initial WSJ story — I can’t prove that it came from Maxwell but everything that happened since is consistent with that and this discussion assumes that’s true — demonstrated to Trump how Maxwell’s threat might play out against the backdrop of his mob’s dissatisfaction with Bondi’s dodge on the Epstein files, which convinced Trump to take steps to address the Maxwell threat, all the while against the backdrop of the second (Iran was the first) defections from his base, as they accused Trump of covering up.

It’s fairly clear the plan was to fire Maurene Comey, freeing up Trump to sell out the victims, create a delay and diversion with the grand jury head fakes, so as to shift Maxwell’s focus on Trump onto everyone else. Markus revealed that she was asked about 100 people in her two-day “proffer,” and the plan is to feed the base with scandals about those 100 people, some of whom will be the most prominent Democrats. That will provide Trump the space and excuse to get Maxwell out of prison.

Meanwhile, the Tulsi Gabbard conspiracy theories met with tremendous success at redirecting the focus, at least of the top trolls, from Epstein to transparently bullshit claims about The Black President. Kate Starbird shows that the Epstein focus tailed off by the end of day on Friday July 18, after Tulsi aired her conspiracy theories.

But those conspiracy theories are already creating their own problems. The John Durham investigation already proved there’s no legal there there. And Tulsi recklessly (but effectively) upped the ante, promising even better results than Trump ever promised Durham would provide. Treason, she said.

Trump is still struggling. Perhaps, most lethally for him, he’s not hiding that he’s trying to command and redirect attention — he has said as much three times now. Spectacle fails when you reveal its strings, and Trump, himself, is disclosing them.

He literally reeled off a list of things he wants journalists to cover other than his own Epstein problems.

What are you hoping Todd Blanche gets out of his meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well I don’t know about the meeting — I know it’s taking place. And he’s a fantastic man. He’s a great attorney, and people should really focus on how well the country’s doing, or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup, or they should focus on the fact that Larry Summers, from Harvard, that Bill Clinton, who you know very well, and lots of other friends — really close friends of Jeffrey Summers [sic] — should be spoken about, because, you know — Jeffrey Epstein — should be spoken about. And they should speak about them because they don’t talk about them, they talk about me, I have nothing to do with the guy.

[pre-planned exchange about the homeless in which Trump asserts authority to take over DC]

Have you heard about Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell? Have you considered clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney. But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers, you ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys, they’re all over the place. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

Do you maintain you did not write a letter?

I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Now somebody could have written a letter, used my name, but that’s happened a lot. All you have to do is take a look at the dossier, the fake dossier. Everything’s fake with that administration. Everything’s fake with the Democrats. Take a look at what they just found about the dossier. Everything is fake. They’re a bunch of sick people.

[turns back to talk about homeless people]

[Another conversation endorsing genocide of Palestinians]

Would you consider a pardon or a commutation for Ghislaine Maxwell?

It’s something I haven’t thought about.

If [inaudible] recommended it?

I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.

But you wouldn’t rule it out.

But Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, is doing a good job of shifting the attention. After the first proffer, the WSJ magically came to focus on all those other people, some of the very same people Trump would name the next day (again, Markus revealed that Blanche brought in a list of about a hundred names, surely culled from what they saw in the case files; Maxwell is not being asked what happened, she’s being asked what kind of dirt she has on a pre-selected group of people).  And NewsMax and some key influencers are beginning to sell his narrative that Maxwell is the victim. Markus is a formidable lawyer in any context, but he happens to be South Florida’s formidable lawyer, and he knows these players and how they work.

And while Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi are nowhere near as formidable as Markus (indeed, Markus handed Blanche his ass on a cheap plastic plate), they do have the power and the shamelessness to do what needs to get done — the betrayal of victims, the clemency for a monster. Blanche already guaranteed that everything Trump will do going forward, including pardoning a sex trafficker to neutralize the threat she poses to him, will be rubber stamped by a SCOTUS already happy to sanction Trump’s crimes. We can’t probe his motives, even if they’re transparently deprave, SCOTUS already dictated.

That means only political pressure can thwart or impose a cost for Trump’s plan on rewarding a sex trafficker to redirect her weapons.

• One question is what Maurene Comey does. She has been silent (and, as far as I know, has not been a source for any story). But there are a number of steps she might take that would either clarify how important her own firing was in making this happen or fuel the response.
• I think Trump has also assumed the victims won’t find a way to speak up. That may well be true — after all everyone else is terrified and they have far less power than all the people cowering from Trump — but it may not be. There are a lot of journalists who have fought to tell their stories, and those stories are powerful.
• Epstein’s executors are clear they’ll accept subpoenas. And at least for the moment, Democrats have succeeded in forcing Republicans to vote for subpoenas.
• I’d love to do a campaign asking every Republican to go on the record about whether they would impeach Trump for a Ghislaine Maxwell pardon — but the moment for that may have passed.
• One reason Deputy Attorneys General don’t meet with sex traffickers is because it makes them a witness. And while I think Blanche may one day claim he is protected by dual privileges — those of a top law enforcement officer and those of the President’s consigliere — that’ll be a legally dodgy claim. He has done plenty, already, to warrant a subpoena for testimony about why he has broken every law enforcement protocol to meet with a sex trafficker.
• The three judges involved in the grand jury unseal requests seem to smell something is up; Richard Berman, in particular, is acutely aware of how badly the victims have and are being treated. (Note the docket in that case has shifted to non-public filing, which likely means victims have started filing their response to the unsealing request.)
• Bondi created 1,000 witnesses to what is in the Epstein files, and put everything on a SharePoint server, meaning it may be vulnerable to hacking under the zero day just released, and was vulnerable to Elon’s DOGE boys.
• NewsMax, which employs Alex Acosta and is front-running the pardon Ghislaine campaign, could be pressured for coddling pedophiles. And for the moment at least, the twin powerhouses of the Trump bubble, are taking different approaches (silence versus complicity) to helping Trump kill this story.
• And until the far right totally gets on board, it is still possible to keep this swamping the news.

All of which is to say there are other sources of attention and power. Trump has a plan forward and a shit-ton of tools (and an exceedingly competent partner in Markus), but cannot be sure he’ll be able to reclaim that attention.

Still, a number of other things are going on, as Trump’s accelerating sprint to consolidate power.

Again, he is disclosing his strings. You don’t shift attention by telling people to avert their gaze, you entice them elsewhere. First Trump started yelling at his influencers for covering Epstein (most of them complied with his orders, but not all), and then he started giving people a list of things to cover instead: Trump’s claimed successes, his Potemkin trade deals, or the Obama conspiracy theory, or Larry Summers and Bill Clinton. You gotta pick, grandpa. You pick your focus and lead the way, you don’t give a multiple choice test!

The diversion — Tulsi’s conspiracy theory — may create its own problems. NYT reports that Tulsi did that without giving Pam Bondi a heads up (in the same way Bondi staged the first Epstein influencer event).

Ms. Bondi was given little warning the director of national intelligence was about to demand she investigate one of Mr. Trump’s most longstanding grievances: claims without evidence that the Obama administration overstated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election in order to undermine him.

Ms. Bondi, fresh off a nasty fight with a top F.B.I. official over who was responsible for the political mess around the Epstein case, felt blindsided and annoyed, according to several people familiar with her thinking. They said that in reality, however, Ms. Gabbard was acting as little more than a proxy for a president demanding action on his vengeance agenda.

Ms. Bondi’s staff scrambled for a solution that would satisfy Mr. Trump while not committing the department to a tit-for-tat Obama investigation with unpredictable legal and political consequences.

Ms. Gabbard, standing at the White House briefing room lectern on Wednesday, made a series of provocative claims and pointedly said the onus was now on the Justice Department.

Several hours later, Ms. Bondi’s deputies posted an ambiguous, four-paragraph statement on the department’s website that announced the formation of what they described as a “strike force” to look into the Gabbard accusations.

In several posts, Ben Wittes has unpacked the series of non-announcements that Bondi has made.

So if the two conspired as government officials—as the Fox News article suggests—to do something nefarious to cook intelligence to get Trump, the statute of limitations for that offense, assuming such conduct even maps onto any known criminal offense, would have lapsed long ago. Ditto the statutes governing false statements and perjury. In other words, it’s completely unclear what the Justice Department—so eager to announce the investigation—might actually be investigating.

I can think of only two possible answers to this question.

Third, the first possibility is that some of the investigations of these matters dragged on for years, and some interviews might have taken place late enough that statutes of limitations have not yet run. For example, Comey gave one congressional testimony as late as September 2020, which would leave a few months yet before the statute of limitations on that. Brennan was interviewed by the John Durham investigation in August of the same year. So it’s theoretically possible that the investigation is limited to supposedly false statements made in the context of interviews made within the past five years.

Fourth, the second possibility—maybe more likely—is that the investigation is premised on a fanciful theory that the supposed “conspiracy” continued past the two men’s service in government. If you posit some conspiracy, after all, the statute of limitations runs five years past the end of the conspiracy, not five years after any of the specific acts that make up the conspiracy.

With respect to any supposed conspiracy involving Brennan and Comey to cook the intelligence on Russia to get Trump, we are operating in the land of fantasy. And when exactly does a conspiracy to commit a fantastical act end? In other words, if one predicates an investigation based on nonsense, it is possible to nonsense one’s way back quite a few years using a theory of conspiracy to nonsense.

Fifth, I actually doubt that either of these things is what is really happening here. What I think is happening is what one might call a ghost investigation.

I’d add another several points about evidence:

• First, DOJ and FBI already conducted assessments about some of this evidence, both as they assessed it in counterintelligence reviews and as part of the John Durham investigation. As I’ve shown, Tulsi’s claims include an SVR document that HPSCI not only selectively cited, but which they had to know had been deemed “objectively false;” revisiting that decision would require, among other things, conceding that Jim Comey intentionally threw the election to Donald Trump in 2016. The Durham investigation showed that to try to make an investigation of these files, you have to fabricate things that aren’t even in the underlying Russian spy reports.
• Now, think of the witnesses. DOJ can’t pursue this for the same reason it would have been nearly impossible to reopen the Russian investigation; because a credible witness (in that case, Bill Barr) had weighed in definitively. Tulsi’s recent claims conflict with things Kash Patel, Marco Rubio, and John Ratcliffe have had to say, after reviewing the same evidence. As I’ll show, the HPSCI Report right wingers are frothing over actually added an egregious error years after Kash sort of got the same assertion correct.
• And that would also mean that the FBI and CIA Director would be natural, irreplaceable witnesses. Want to create a shitshow? Invite John Brennan to call Kash Patel as a hostile defense witness to both what happened in 2017 and what has happened more recently.

Will Sommer has been tracking what he calls “hype-debt” among Trump’s rubes.

But as I dove into the MAGA internet to get a sense of whether this distraction was working as intended, I was surprised to discover that not everyone was buying it. Yes, it’s only been a few days. But my sense is that Trump is racking up a sort of hype-debt within the party, as he tries to refocus his base away from one disappointment by setting them up for an even bigger one when Obama fails to face a military tribunal.

Take Liz Wheeler, a conservative pundit who received one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s fateful Epstein binders back in February, and has since become one of the most vocal critics of Trump’s attempt to shut down questions about Epstein. On Monday, demonstrating why she was trusted to participate in the binder photo-op in the first place, she gushed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had published “new evidence” of a scheme by senior members of the Obama administration to undermine Trump’s first term. (That was, coincidentally, a day after the infamous Wall Street Journal story on Trump writing a note to Epstein). Gabbard’s moves against Obama, she wrote, marked “the first glimmer of what I would call real justice.”

But even Wheeler couldn’t miss the contradiction here. If Obama and his aides committed treason, why don’t they actually get, y’know, arrested? Can a Trump Justice Department that can’t manage to release the Epstein documents without stepping on a series of rakes really pull off the criminal prosecution of an entire past presidential administration?

Wheeler said the only way to fulfill Trump’s new commitment to his supporters would be actual prosecutions.

Though he was also one of the first to catch NewsMax prepping the way for Maxwell’s clemency.

Meanwhile, Republicans are the only ones who buy this. In Gallup’s latest, Trump has started closing in on his all-time lows — his support immediately after leading an assault on the Capitol — among support from Independents. And that’s as the effects of his tariffs builds.

It seems likely that Trump’s defense attorney will pull of some kind of non-Trump Epstein distraction. What’s not yet clear is how much backlash that will elicit. Or whether Trump will reclaim his ability to grab attention.

I know, right? Todd Blanche’s unsealing request in SDNY is also designed to fail.

But I want to look at how the denial went down in SDFL. Not only did Judge Robin Rosenberg make sure to get DOJ to reaffirm it knew it was asking her to do something it could not do, but she made a point of saying that the request to unseal two grand jury dockets — one from 2007, the year of the Jeffrey Epstein plea deal — is not related to the SDNY dockets, because DOJ is not conducting any investigation in those SDNY dockets.

The original request acknowledges this won’t work

Blanche’s original request to unseal — he names two grand juries, one (05-02) before the Alex Acosta plea deal and one (07-103) the same year — differs from the SDNY ones in several ways.

First, SDFL’s US Attorney, Hayden O’Byrne, signed and filed the court filings. Blanche adds language to say that DOJ would work with SDFL to make redactions of victim-related information if the grand jury transcripts were released.

Second, Blanche acknowledges that he’s requesting transcripts “associated with grand jury investigations,” as opposed to indictments.

Third, Blanche includes a paragraph noting that under 11th Circuit precedent, SDFL can’t release grand jury transcripts.

The Department of Justice recognizes that this Court is bound by Pitch v. United States [citation omitted] (district courts lack inherent, supervisory power to authorize the disclosure of grand jury records outside of exceptions enumerated in Rule 6(a)(3)). Nevertheless, the Department raises this argument due to the significance of the matter and to preserve it for any potential appeal.

Pitch is a 2020 decision in which the 11th Circuit rejected a historian’s effort to unseal grand jury transcripts about the investigation into a 1946 lynching, during a period when J. Edgar Hoover was reluctant to bring cases on lynching.

Judge Rosenberg asks how Blanche thinks this could work

In response, Judge Robin Rosenberg (an Obama appointee) instructs DOJ to clarify a few things. First, she asks whether DOJ thinks this request falls under any of the exceptions under Pitch, that 11th Circuit precedent.

The rule of secrecy is subject to exceptions, but in this Circuit, there are only five–that is, there are five, limited exceptions under which a district court may authorize the disclosure of grand jury materials. [citation omitted]

It is unclear from the Petition whether the government is arguing that any of the five exceptions applies to its request.

[snip]

In supplemental briefing, the Government shall clarify whether (1) it concedes that this Court must deny the Petition under binding Eleventh Circuit precedent, but that it nonetheless seeks an order from this Court so that it may file an appeal; or (2) it argues that an exception applies that would permit this Court to grant the Government’s Petition, together with legal argument in support of same.

She then asks whether there’s any reason to believe that a grand juries from 2005 and 2007 arose out of the one in SDNY, which is the only way she could transfer it.

Because the Florida Proceedings appear to have been initiated many years prior to the New York Proceedings, any argument that the Florida Proceedings nonetheless arose out of the New York Proceedings must be accompanied with an explanation and with legal argument in support of the same.

[snip]

Alternatively, if, under applicable law, there is no legal basis to transfer the Petition, the Government should clearly state the same.

Basically, Rosenberg was just forcing the government to concede that they were asking her to do something she could not.

SDFL attempts to claim Rosenberg has the authority

The response from SDFL (it’s not clear who is behind this response; O’Byrne signed it with an electronic signature) answers Rosenberg’s questions in reverse. First, SDFL claims that Rosenberg should transfer the case, because the petition arises out of those much later indictments.

This Petition to Disclose (filed July 18, 2025) arises out of two highly publicized judicial proceedings in the Southern District of New York: the indictment and criminal prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein [citation omitted], and the subsequent federal criminal indictment, trial, and conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell in the Southern District of New York [citation omitted]. Indeed, the relief sought in this petition is ancillary to the relief sought in those cases.

Then, SDFL answers Rosenberg’s first question — conceding she has no authority to release the grand jury materials, but then citing irrelevant precedent claiming she could anyway.

Consistent with its petition, the government recognizes the Eleventh Circuit precedent holds that no exception outside those expressly enumerated under Criminal Rule 6(e)(3) authorizes a court to publicly disclosure grand jury materials. [citation to Pitch omitted] The government also recognizes that, in this circuit, only an en banc decision or the Supreme Court may overrule that decision.

That said, decisions from other circuits support public disclosure of grand jury materials under “special circumstances,” including when a matter possess historical interest by the public.

Rosenberg notes that the New York proceeding is irrelevant

After reviewing the posture of the case, Rosenberg responds in the same order she posed the question. She notes that the exceptions SDFL cited are not among those under which she would have the authority under Eleventh Circuit precedent to release the transcripts.

The Government’s Petition to unseal the grand jury transcripts is not based on any of the exceptions in Rule 6. Instead, the Government makes two arguments outside Rule 6. First, the Government argues that disclosure is proper because “many of the rationales supporting grand jury secrecy under Rule 6(e) no longer apply to this investigation because of Jeffrey Epstein’s death.” Supp. Br. at 5. It further argues that “the public’s strong interest in th[e] historical investigation into Jeffrey Epstein constitutes a special circumstance justifying public disclosure.”

[snip]

Contrary to the Government’s stated basis and the Second and Seventh Circuits,1 the Eleventh Circuit has directly held that a district court “do[es] not possess … the power to order the release of grand jury records not covered by Rule 6(e)(3)(E).

[snip]

The government does not assert that disclosure is appropriate under any exception in Rule 6(e)(3)(E).

[snip]

The Government concedes as much in its Petition.

1. A district court is bound by the decisions of its intermediate appellate court. That is, this court, the Southern District of Florida, is bound by the decisions of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

I assume Rosenberg provided that elementary language about precedent for readers who don’t know how this works, but I can’t help but hear some scolding at DOJ for trying to confuse the issue.

She then denies the request to transfer the case, in significant part because Blanche is not asking to transfer the grand jury proceedings to support an ongoing investigation in SDNY.

The Government’s request for transfer does not arise out of a judicial proceeding; the Government does not seek the disclosure of evidence for itself. Indeed, the Government provided the evidence sought to be unsealed with the Petition. Consistent with the fact that the Government does not need the evidence, it has not filed the Petition for the purpose of prosecution4 the New York Federal Proceedings — the trial-level proceedings concluded years ago. Similarly, the Government has not filed the Petition because unsealing the evidence is necessary for the proper litigation of the New York Federal Proceedings.

[snip]

Further, the text of the Petition sources the need for the Petition in the Government’s recent public memorandum summarizing its investigation into Mr. Epstein. Pet. at 1 (“[T]he Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a memorandum describing an internal [sic exhaustive] review undertaken of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein.”) Because that memorandum resulted in great public interest, the Government filed the instant Petition. Id. {[T]here has been extensive public interest in the basis for the Memorandum’s conclusions.”) As such, the request to unseal arises from the Government’s internal investigation, from its public statements about that investigation, and from great public interest in the investigation, but it does not arise from the New York Federal Proceedings themselves. The Government has not filed the Petition in response to a pleading, objecting, strategy or ruling in the New York Federal Proceedings, and it does not state that it will use the unsealed evidence in furtherance of any case-related objective. The trial proceedings have concluded.

And with that, she denied the request and ordered that this case “should be directly assigned to the undersigned,” just in case anyone else in the District tried to poach the case, I guess.

At one level, I think by forcing the secondary briefing, Rosenberg forced DOJ to concede that they knew they were making a request she had to reject. She’s not going to take the fall for this.

More interesting, though, is that second grand jury, the one from the same year that Epstein signed a plea deal eliminating any possibility of further charges for him or his co-conspirators (including Ghislaine Maxwell) in SDFL. Todd Blanche is claiming that it pertains to Jeffrey Epstein personally. I’m not sure whether it does or not.

Update: Per the Office of Professional Responsibility summary of the Alex Acosta investigation, there was a 60-count indictment in SDFL in May 2007. It’s possible the prosecutor needed to get a second grand jury after the first expired. Or it could be something else.

In May 2007, the AUSA submitted to her supervisors a draft 60-count indictment outlining charges against Epstein. She also provided a lengthy memorandum summarizing the evidence she had assembled in support of the charges and addressing the legal issues related to the proposed charges.

Update: I failed to note that Seamus Hughes found this docket.

It’s funny, reading the two rehashes of the 2017 ICA that John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard released in the last weeks.

There are parallels and common judgments between them (probably in part because the CIA one was limited to “CIA materials provided to congressional oversight investigations”). Both say the confidence level for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election was too high. Both say John Brennan big-footed the process in a problematic way. Both complain about the short timeline. Both complain that “the highest classified version of the ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials;” neither acknowledge that that was neither anticipated nor, presumably, the fault of Obama appointees, who were long-gone by the time Trump’s appointees disseminated it that broadly (and in fact other documents Tulsi released suggest that ICA drafters intentionally planned a less-classified version to be disseminated at that level, to avoid the problem Trump’s appointees complain about). Both complain about how the Steele dossier was added as an appendix, though (as I’ll show in a follow-up) they’re inconsistent about how they claim it was.

But there are differences. the document from Ratcliffe — who released the first of the SRV documents contemporaneously with the HPSCI report that obsessed about them — doesn’t appear to mention them at all.

The two reports treat three pieces of intelligence on which the “aspired” judgment was based differently (the CIA one may not treat one of the HPSCI complaints at all). As I’ll note in my main post on the HPSCI report, CIA treats one document that HPSCI considers problematic as reliable but compartmented in a way that made inclusion problematic.

Perhaps the most interesting detail you get from reading both in tandem pertains to one phrase in a document about which “a senior CIA operations officer observed, ‘We don’t know what was meant by that’ and ‘five people read it five ways,'” basically, about whether that phrase hade been read the correct way. As of a few weeks ago, in Ratcliffe’s report, the CIA was still trying to protect this intelligence, but not Tulsi. She declassified most of four pages of discussion about the phrase, with information about the access — the source was well-established, had authoritative access to something but second-hand access to this information, but for some reason the CIA was not able to clarify what the source meant by the phrase. The HPSCI Report complains that the ICA didn’t note that this person had an “anti-Trump bias” (emphasis original).

And Tulsi declassified what the intelligence said (even though she hadn’t in the less classified version of the ICA she had released a day earlier).

Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails in July] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.

The HPSCI memo goes on to complain that Brennan included this. It invents a number of other readings this could have meant, besides that Putin wanted to help Trump win. Maybe Putin expected Trump to win, in July 2016 when no one else did? Maybe Putin counted on a Trump win at the RNC? They even tried to undermine the intelligence by claiming that all the things Putin did to tamper in the election could have served the other goals he also had.

None of the confirmed activities — leaks, public statements, social media messaging, and traditional propaganda — corroborate the ICA interpretation of the fragment, because these activities were all consistent with Putin’s objectives to undermine faith in US democracy, without regard for candidate Trump’s fate.

Putin approved the DNC leak because he was counting on Trump to win, the fragment said, and HPSCI Republicans want to believe that maybe Putin just wanted to undermine faith in democracy.

Well, anyway, as I said, Ratcliffe didn’t declassify any of that. He did send analysts back to review the underlying intelligence, and here’s what they said.

The DA Review examined the underlying raw intelligence and confirmed that the clause was accurately represented in the serialized report, and that the ICA authors’ interpretation of its meaning was most consistent with the raw intelligence.

And Ratcliffe also backs the quality of the source behind this claim.

The DA Review does not dispute the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report that the ICA authors relied on to drive the “aspired” judgment.

So between them, Tulsi and Ratcliffe provided us something genuinely new. According to a reliable but ambiguous intelligence fragment, CIA got intelligence that said Putin approved the DNC leak  “because he was counting on” Trump’s victory.

Update: I’ve fixed the quotation mark in the title: just the “counting on” is a direct quote.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

One of the more effective messages about activism I’ve seen this year is this post by Robert Reich:

Robert Reich @[email protected]

Jun 26, 2025, 10:03 PM

(If the embedded video doesn’t appear for you, click on the link at the date.)

It might seem childish but the message is that simple: we are incredibly strong together.

Community members express distress over their frustration with the current White House and Congress. Some ask what will change and when; others ask what they can do to effect change.

Take action, but know that you are stronger when you act with others. Organize others or work with others already organized.

~ ~ ~

What organizations, you might ask. Here’s a few to get you started:

Indivisible.org

This link is home to Indivisible Project, a registered 501(c)(4), and Indivisible Action, a Hybrid Political Action Committee.

Indivisible is currently working on communications focused on the Epstein files. Check their page for more specifics about activities in which you can participate: https://indivisible.org/epsteinfiles

Women’s March Network

Women’s rights are people’s rights; this organization focuses on organizing and training feminists to defend women, fight fascism, and free the people. It’s the heir to the 2017 Women’s March that first protested against Trump’s first term.

Sister organization Women’s March – a 501c(4) organization – has ongoing Free America study sessions. See https://www.womensmarch.com/initiatives/free-america-study-sessions

Check their list of events for one near you.

MoveOn.org

Yes, MoveOn is still actively pursuing progressive issues through MoveOn.org Civic Action, a 501(c)(4), and MoveOn.org Political Action, a federal political action committee.

In fact they’ve organized a march for this weekend on July 26. Find details in their Events list: https://www.mobilize.us/moveon/

Organizations near you

These aren’t the only groups organizing and mobilizing. There are more near you.

— Your county Democratic Party organization is working on both organizing responses against fascism, but preparing for the next election. That next election could be a special election depending on where you live, and those races could really use your help. With enough special election wins for House seats, the GOP could lose control of the House.

Some states like mine are currently preparing for a Senate race. Primary candidates are emerging; throw support behind one now, and/or help the local and state party prepare for the mid-term election. We need every Democratic senate seat and then some if Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is to be stopped.

And of course the local Democratic Party is working on state and local races. These are extremely important as backstops to lawlessness at federal level. Who’s going to run in 2026? What can you do to help them now?

— Other state-wide progressive organizations are also working to organize and mobilize. Don’t just read their emails, find out what they’re working on and what they need to achieve discrete goals. What are those progressive  organizations in your state? Share their contact information in comments below.

— Follow the work of those who are organizing language against fascism, because our message is stronger when we are on the same page, singing from the same choir book.

Subscribe to Jason Sattler’s (a.k.a. LOLGOP) at The Farce.

See also Gil Durán and Dr. George Lakoff’s work at the FrameLab.

(Both of the above are hosted on Ghost, thank goodness.)

~ ~ ~

What I try to tell young people is that if you come together with a mission, and its grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.

— John Lewis

Let’s make the impossible possible. Let’s fight fascism together, and build a better future in the process.

This is an open thread. Bring all your comments unrelated to Trump’s Epstein scandal here.

I joked the other day that it’s as if Trump offered his cabinet members a free condo for whomever best distracted from his Epstein problem.

Tulsi Gabbard is, thus far, winning the contest for the sheer shamelessness of her ridiculous claims.

She has manufactured claims of sedition out of her conflation — whether deliberate or insanely ignorant — of voting machines and the DNC server, built on top of President Obama’s perfectly reasonable request to document all the ways Russia tampered in the 2016 election. Then, she released a different report — a 2020 GOP HPSCI report complaining about Intelligence Community tradecraft in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. The HPSCI Report not only exhibits all the tradecraft failure it complains about, but it conflicts in some ways with her original propaganda.

In a presser at the White House yesterday (skip ahead to 12:30), Tulsi went one better, presenting the contents of the HPSCI report without context, focusing closely on a section that cites a cherrypicked selection of Russian intelligence reports purportedly (but not certainly) based off documents stolen from Democrats, the State Department, and a think tank.

Tulsi stood at the podium of the White House press room and delivered Russian intelligence, with an occasional “allegedly” thrown in, without explaining clearly that’s what she was doing.

In so doing, the Director of National Intelligence effectively teamed up with Russian spies, parroting analysis those Russian spies did on documents stolen from Hillary and people associated with her, without masking Hillary’s identity as required by intelligence protocol. This is precisely the kind of (then unsubstantiated) abuse that first animated right wing grievance back in 2017, outrage over the possible politicized unmasking of political adversaries, carried out by the head of intelligence from the White House podium.

They have become the monsters they warned about.

The SVR documents

Let me explain the documents. By 2016, there were actually two parallel Russian hacking campaigns targeting Hillary (and others). One, starting in 2016 and conducted by Russia’s military intelligence (GRU, often referred to as APT 28), obtained and caused the dissemination of documents during the election — the hack-and-leak campaign that Trump exploited to win the election. But starting years before that, Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR, often referred to as APT 29) targeted a number of traditional spying targets, including the White House, DOD, and State, some think tanks viewed as adversarial to Russia, and the DNC.

Here’s a report on APT 29’s hacking campaigns published in September 2015, which I wrote about here. Here’s a more recent history that includes those earlier hacks. I’ve been told that the interactions between APT 29 and APT 28 hackers inside Democratic servers was visible, but reluctant. APT 29 had and still has the more skillful hackers.

Unlike GRU, SVR did not use most of the files it stole in a hack-and-leak campaign. Russian spies analyzed the documents and wrote reports on them, like normal spying. But then someone — some other spying service, probably — spied on their spying efforts. And that entity shared what they found, including both the things SVR stole and the reports that Russian spies wrote about those stolen files, with the US Intelligence Community. And starting at least by 2018, right wingers have been obsessed with those stolen files and Russian intelligence reports, using them to feed one after another investigation into Democrats.

This gets a bit confusing, because we’re seeing the results of that obsession out of order. We first saw a right wing campaign based off them when John Ratcliffe, then the Director of National Intelligence, released a report about one particular analytical report, then released background documents; both were used as part of the effort to undermine the Mike Flynn prosecution in advance of the 2020 election. That particular report — allegedly claiming that in July 2016, Hillary endorsed a plan to focus on Trump’s ties to Russia to distract from the Clinton email investigation — served as the animating force for the Durham investigation, though Durham had to fabricate new details in the intelligence to do so. For years, Chuck Grassley has been frothing to release a classified appendix of the 2018 DOJ IG Report on the Clinton email investigation that pertained to the SVR documents, which Pam Bondi released the other day. Yesterday’s propaganda presser was based on the release of a 2020 critique of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of the 2016 hack (there were earlier versions in which Kash Patel was involved), written by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI).

We’re surely not done. There’s a classified annex to the Durham report in which he tries to justify treating Russian intelligence product as true. And yesterday, Grassley and House Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford asked to get more of the SVR files, this time focused on Barack Obama.

So, these documents were addressed at length by Michael Horowitz (it’s not yet clear how prominently they figure in earlier HPSCI work), then packaged up as part of Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, then further fluffed up by Durham in his failed prosecution effort and, on top of these recent releases, will no doubt feed the frothers indefinitely. But this order matters, because right wingers kept forgetting what they learned in earlier iterations of this obsession.

 The 2018 classified annex

The DOJ IG classified annex considers FBI’s treatment of two kinds of files from that SVR collection: first, report(s) claiming that Loretta Lynch was trying to cover up the Clinton investigation and Jim Comey was trying to exacerbate it (Comey only appears in one), and, also, a set of files that might have raw State Department documents stolen by Russia that could be used to investigate Hillary.

The reports became important to Horowitz’ discussion of the Clinton email investigation because Jim Comey claimed in June 8, 2017 congressional testimony that one reason why he decided to make the prosecutorial decision on the Clinton investigation is because he worried that the two reports on Lynch might leak.

The raw intelligence became a focus because early on, alleged Trump adversary Peter Strzok sought to review the raw collection, a request that ultimately fell through the cracks, which Grassley uses to claim the investigation was not diligent enough.

A several page section of the report describing the collection — eight thumb drives, along with a set of data provided via other means — makes clear that, on top of normal concerns about allowing the FBI to review stolen US person data, the hesitation to access the data arose from the large number of privileged files, from the White House, from State, and from Congress, in there.

• Thumb drives 1-5: These thumb drives included files stolen from US victims, including the Executive Office of the President, the State Department, and the House of Representatives, probably including a number of unknown US victims. The FBI did analyze these files, which helped them to identify where the Obama ones came from, that the Russians had obtained “advance intelligence about a planned FBI arrest of a Russian citizen,” and network maps of classified US government systems. Two drives, drives 3 and 4, “focused primarily on State Department communications,” as did much of the content of the other thumb drives. The FBI never comprehensively reviewed these files because of concerns about Executive and Congressional privileges tied to the victims. The FBI has queried them, three times:
  • In early 2016, FBI queried the drives using some approved keywords, apparently to understand Russia’s targets.
  • FBI later conducted a second set of limited queries, without reading the actual content. It did, however, create a “word cloud” of what was in the US victim data, which FBI treated as an index.
  • In August 2017, FBI OGC permitted an analyst working with Mueller to query the word cloud index on Clinton and clintonemail.com.
• Thumb drives 6 and 7: These drives appear to include Russia’s reports about their hacks; victim data was included as attachments. The FBI permitted analysts to review non-victim data for foreign intelligence and evidentiary purposes, but not any content from the Executive Office of the President, State, or Congress.
• Thumb drive 8: This data was never uploaded until 2018 and by the time of this report (also 2018) had never been reviewed. It was believed to include data redundant to what was on drives 1-5, including privileged material.
• Post-8 data: This data appears to have come to the FBI via a medium other than a thumb drive. Their source filtered out certain kinds of victim data before passing it on. It also was unlikely to have the privileged sources of information — from EoP, State, and the House of Representatives — that presented concerns about the data on thumb drives 1-5. The FBI was permitted to review this data under the same rules as applied to Thumb drives 6 and 7 — that is, they could review the non-victim information.

Staring in August 2016, Andy McCabe started asking to access all eight drives. While the Obama White House told the FBI in October 2016 that their request for access was overly broad, they never got around to negotiating that access because the FBI was too busy working on the Russian investigation and exploiting Anthony Weiner’s laptop. White House Counsel Neil Eggleston circled back on this issue in his last day on the job, January 19, 2017.

Ironically, the most aggressive attempt to access these files up to the IG Report came from an analyst on the Mueller team — no doubt someone who has subsequently been fired. The IG Report describes that this person likely exceeded search protocols prohibiting searches on victim information, including on Clinton and clintonemail. Now, however, Trump will undoubtedly use Tulsi’s propaganda campaign as an excuse to read emails stolen from Barack Obama, waiving any privilege concerns (indeed, that should be understood as one goal of the task force Bondi set up yesterday, to collude with Russian spies to spy on President Obama).

For the purposes of understanding how Tulsi colluded with Russian spies yesterday, the most important detail from the classified annex is that the FBI didn’t treat the two Loretta Lynch reports as credible — the report describes that FBI considered them “objectively false.”

[W]itnesses told us that the reports were not credible on their face for various reasons, including that they contained information that the FBI knew to be “objectively false.”

One reason they likely believed that is because one of the two Lynch reports said that Comey was deliberately trying to stall the investigation.

Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections; in order to effectively undermine the chances for the [Democratic Party] to win the presidential elections. [brackets original]

It also revealed that the FBI never found the underlying stolen documents on which the reports were purportedly based — at one point, the DOJ IG Report notes that it wasn’t clear “if such communications in fact existed.”

The FBI didn’t believe these documents were credible.

But if you do believe the reports are credible — if you treat the reports as “true” — then it is not just “true” that Jim Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, but Russia believed that Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans win the election.

HPSCI’s Jim Comey problem

The HPSCI report includes these SVR files, years after the FBI determined at least two of them were not credible, as “true” statements of Putin’s belief. I’ll write up the entire report separately; parts of it are quite rigorous and interesting, while the section on the Steele dossier was riddled with errors and this part — the part that relies on these SVR reports — was sort of an exercise in desperation to find as many reasons to discredit the claim that Putin tried to help Trump get elected as possible. This section is the mirror image of what the report alleges John Brennan was engaged in with the 2017 ICA Report, intelligence analysis that came to a conclusion and then found intelligence to back that conclusion. They include the SVR reports to argue that if Putin really wanted Trump to win, he would have released all these reports.

In a page and a half, the HPSCI report cites one after another of these reports.

• In September 2016, Russian spies claimed that President Obama found Hillary’s health to be “extraordinary alarming.”
• Russian spies claimed it had communications showing Hillary was suffering from “psycho-social problems” and even (Tulsi parroted there in the White House) “was placed on a regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’.”
• Russian spies claimed Hillary had Type 2 Diabetes and deep vein thrombosis.
• The claim — which John Ratcliffe noted could “reflect exaggeration or fabrication” in his report in 2020 — that Hillary had a plan to link Trump and Putin to distract from the Clinton email investigation.
• Russian spies claimed Hillary traded financial funding for electoral support with religious organizations in post-Soviet countries.
• US allies in London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome doubted her ability to perform the functions of President.
• European government experts assessed that Trump’s only chance of winning was allegations about the Clinton Foundation.

The HPSCI Report includes in three bullets the allegations laid out in the two reports described in the IG Report, split up across two pages, as if they represent three reports.

[snip]

Not only do they ignore that the FBI viewed at least some of these reports as “not credible,” nor address the question of whether these reflected real intercepts at all.

But they don’t mention that the first of those two reports (probably the January 2016 one) also claimed that Jim Comey was going to stall the investigation to help Trump win.

If you believe the reports were “true,” then you believe that Jim Comey had a plan to help Trump win — much like what he did do — and that Putin shared that same belief.

It was bad enough that a bunch of right wing Congressmen desperate to create a propaganda document to help Trump get elected in 2020 exhibited such shoddy tradecraft.

But yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence stood at a White House podium and repeated one after another Russian intelligence report about which multiple entities have raised serious questions as to its accuracy.

In the guise of complaining about politicized spies exercising inadequate due diligence, Tulsi Gabbard just parroted these Russian intelligence reports — reports that either rely on intercepts of an American citizen or just make shit up — uncritically.

This was Russian spy product, delivered from the White House, from the head of US intelligence.