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Donald Trump has a plan to occupy America’s great majority-minority cities, and by doing so, neutralize his opposition.

The occupation of Washington DC is but his second experiment in that process. He’s not hiding the ambition or the scope of the project.

Many poor, unhoused, and brown people will suffer in the course of this experiment, and if the larger project works, the United States is in for a very dark period.

I don’t make light of any of that. Nevertheless, it is the case that the effort will only succeed if the optics he is chasing leads his MAGAts and enough Trump supporters to join in the erotic thrill of seeing such violence imposed on brown people.

It’s like a military parade. If it makes you look weak, if it doesn’t provide racists the vicarious thrill of domination, it actually undercuts your bid for fascism.

And thus far at least, Trump’s invasion of DC may not only fall short of that required spectacle, but it may well backfire.

Start with the presence at Union Station or other low-crime areas frequented by tourists.

Sure, the very presence of Humvees in DC’s public space could become normalized. It could also become banal, just like Trump’s parade where historical tanks moved at a snails pace with little fanfare. This reminds me of a house I used to cycle by in West Michigan, with big tanks on top of a hill and probably a bunch of military flags to boot. Or of the tanks in front of a VFW club in small abandoned town in the plains where all the kids have moved away. It all looks like an affirmation of lost power.

Then consider how videos of law enforcement crackdowns on brown people — the kind of thing that go on everyday, but also the kind of thing that will now be seen when it might not otherwise have been — will resonate.

Here, a guy filmed cops (mostly, if not all MPD cops), and almost a dozen of them — mostly white — mobbed and tackled him. In the process, they kept bumping into each other. They looked like scrambling impotent figures (the language that comes to mind risks eliminationist language; you watch the video and find your own description). And of course, this arrest appears blatantly illegal, and the visibility of it makes it more likely this guy will have good legal representation to make that case.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to Sean Dunn — the white guy who threw a sandwich at some Federal cops after calling them fascists.

There are a number of people in DC who are rightfully furious that this white dude who did something stupid is the hero of the resistance, and they have a good point. But I think we’re stuck with him now, and that has the potential to backfire on Trump in fairly epic fashion.

Trump and Pam Bondi and Jeanine Pirro are all adopting the same approach with this guy all Trump’s legal flunkies have since the beginning of the term: in revenge for the prosecutions of Trump’s violent mob on January 6, they try to apply what their fevered little imaginations claim to be equal treatment to people who resist Trump’s crackdown. And so, after charging Dunn in DC Superior Court (and firing him from his DOJ job working on transnational crime), DOJ decided to charge him with 18 USC 111(a)(1) in Federal Court, the same charge used against hundreds of MAGAts who assaulted cops during the insurrection. They’ve made all sorts of inappropriate out-of-court statements about Dunn, including this dumb meme and this video, sent out by the White House, showing how they sent 20 people to arrest him in his comfortable safe home.

I get why they’re doing it. This is meant to be revenge for the self-imagined humiliation that all the MAGAts feel about being subject to rule of law, from Jeffrey Clark in his tighty whities to Peter Navarro to thousands of MAGAts.

But, first of all, it doesn’t look tough. Like the MPD officers swarming impotently because a guy was filming them, this looks pathetic, a bunch of men so fearful of a cushy condo building that they have to wear body armor. Like Will Chamberlain, who confessed to be terrified by seeing some brown kids do a wheelie, they risk becoming the butt of mockery.

And they’re making this pathetic show of force in a case where they risk defying the best loved adage about grand juries: that a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

Indeed, in his coverage of how Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey expressed skepticism of these charges yesterday when releasing Dunn on his own recognizance, Jordan Fischer also revealed yesterday that prosecutors have already gotten no-billed twice by a grand jury in a different case.

This arrest has already become the butt of stupid jokes about sandwich names. And stupid jokes create a shared community of humor — in this case, in mocking this show of force and, with it, the larger occupation.

They’re doing it with a white guy, who in his khaki shorts and pasty skin could well be a Republican. Where’s the erotic thrill of seeing this guy tackled?

And they’re doing it with a guy represented by Sabrina Shroff. Longtime readers will remember that Shroff helped Josh Schulte hang a jury in his first trial, a truly tremendous feat. Complex national security cases have been her forté for years. It also happens, though, that Shroff represented a handful of January 6 clients, including, for a time, David Dempsey, who was charged with the same assault charge, albeit with the enhancement for using a pole, a crutch, and pepper spray — as opposed to a hoagie — to attack cops. Even if Shroff hadn’t been involved in the January 6 cases, and so have firsthand knowledge of the charging standards in those cases, she would make an unbelievable stink about the political influence here. Even in an average case, Shroff has the propensity to flip things back on prosecutors, and Pam Bondi has handed her one after another tool to do that. But this is a case where the misconduct is so manifest it’ll be like slapping mayo on a bun.

Does Bondi have any competent advisors? You don’t give Shroff this kind of open face, you just don’t.

That’s the other thing about this occupation. In LA, invaders were largely claiming to kidnap undocumented aliens. To the extent they succeeded (and in far too many cases, they guessed wrong), they then faced a very permissive detention regime. But when Kristi Noem’s goons arrested US citizens in LA who would have to be charged criminally, they routinely faceplanted. Bill Essayli, Trump’s US Attorney in Los Angeles, also got no-billed once he charged those cases.

Here’s there’s far less of a pretext that this is about immigration enforcement, and so Trump’s minions will have to meet the higher standards, and more skeptical judges, of the criminal justice system. It’s not just Sabrina Shroff who will make lunch meat of such cases. Every case has the potential to embarrass Bondi and Pirro.

Finally, because this is in DC, with a far denser media presence, it will be a lot harder to shift this, as well as faceplants and flying footlongs, to the back burner. Indeed, it risks making the double standard here obvious.

As right wingers promise to crack down on violence, it raises questions about Cory Mills’ special treatment.

As Federal forces invent flimsy excuses to do traffic stops, it raises questions why Markwayne Mullin’s confession that he violates DC law on wearing seatbelts does not get him a citation (to say nothing of how a dumbass like him got elected).

As Federal officers tell Black people sitting on private porches that they can’t drink in public, it recalls the rumors that Pirro, like her colleague Whiskey Pete, drinks on the job.

And if and when something big happens — something these FBI and DEA guys are actually paid to be preventing — it’ll make the excess and the theater more of a problem.

All this could change. Trump’s mob would love to incite some kind of backlash to give them the opportunity to ratchet up the oppression, as they did in Los Angeles. But even then, it still made Stephen Miller’s dragnet far less popular.

And thus far, all they’ve done is create a shared community of people mocking the impotence of it all. And that’s a dangerous spread for an aspiring dictator.

Update: DC has sued (there’ll be a hearing before Judge Ana Reyes shortly) and asked for a restraining order. In a declaration, Police Chief Pamela Smith described that muddling the chain of command as Pam Bondi has will create a very dangerous situation.

If effectuated, the Bondi Order would upend the command structure of MPD, endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike. In my nearly three decades in law enforcement, I have never seen a single government action that would cause a greater threat to law and order than this dangerous directive.

Update: Corrected which Magistrate Judge was skeptical of this case.

I was the fake news yesterday.

I taunted Kash Patel that he had yet to declassify the Crossfire Hurricane binder Trump purportedly declassified on January 19, 2021. But then I learned that Trump had declassified it.

Sort of.

Trump ordered it released in April, whereupon John Solomon posted it. And after Judicial Watch mentioned it in their FOIA lawsuit, FBI released a copy here. Which I’ve made available here.

I say sort of because, if you compare the released files with the two-part release to Judicial Watch as part of their 2022 FOIA (one, two), there are still a few of the things that were pending for DOJ release that have not been released. Plus, neither re-release includes two Carter Page FISA applications that have been substantially released.

That said, the famed Crossfire Hurricane binder is, as I wrote up in this post, one Dumbass Binder. It is really not all that interesting. It actually doesn’t tell the story of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, not even as completely as Jeffrey Jensen did in his efforts to unravel the Mike Flynn prosecution (but then, that effort involved a great deal of deception and cherry pick).

Almost half of the released pages consist of the Confidential Human Source management files of Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper. Those describe how much the men were paid and when they met with their handlers, including on topics totally unrelated to Crossfire Hurricane. That is, they’re very useful for Russian spies to reconstruct past disclosures. They’re very useful for making anyone who might inform on Trump or Russian sources think twice before cooperating with the FBI.

They’re useless for telling us what really happened with the investigation.

The release of the binder is yet another item in a very long list, seemingly done as part of Trump’s grievance that he needed Russian help to get elected, that has instead served to damage US intelligence, particularly Russian experts, a process I argued was built into Russia’s 2016 operation from the start:

Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.

Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election has led him to do the following:

• Fire many of FBI’s top Russian experts at the FBI.
• Retaliate against experts.
• Expose recent CIA recruits.
• Appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe as top spies, all of them Useful Idioms for Russia.
• Fire more of FBI’s top Russian experts at FBI.
• Elimination or down-grading of programs used to reign in Russia, including FARA, FCPA, Foreign Influence Task Force, and KleptoCapture.
• Assign an incompetent idiot, Steve Witkoff, to carry out negotiations with Russia.
• Refocus of organizations fighting hacking and foreign election interference.
• Fire two top officials on the National Intelligence Council.
• Fire six professionals at National Security Counsel, followed by Alex Wong and eventually Mike Waltz — a number of whom were more hawkish on Russia.
• Reassignment of many experts on the National Security Counsel.
• Fire NSA Director Timothy Haugh and NSA General Counsel April Doss.

And more recent disclosures — notably the HPSCI Report that served as a time machine to make Trump’s contacts with Russia go away — will make it far less likely that allies (like the Dutch) will share intelligence.

You could attribute all this to Trump’s grievances about the Deep State. At some point, though, that excuse begins to ring hollow.

But the effect of it is that Trump will walk into a meeting with Vladimir Putin today having rid himself of almost any competent advisors on Russia. He has, since he started clinging to the grievance Russia built into their 2016 election operation, aggressively eliminated all the people he would need to negotiate with Russia competently.

When Trump met with Putin in 2018, he was still advised by Fiona Hill, a genuine expert.

Hill was asked about her experiences at the summit in Helsinki, when Trump caused huge controversy by meeting Putin alone then appearing deferential in public, saying he took the Russian president at his word that he did not interfere in the US election in 2016 – a conclusion not supported by US intelligence and law enforcement.

Hill has previously said she was so appalled that she considered faking a sudden illness to stop the press conference.

“I also thought about pulling the fire alarm, but I didn’t know what Finnish was for ‘fire alarm’,” Hill said, to laughter.

More seriously, Hill said, the Putin press conference “was one of the most humiliating episodes of all time.

[snip]

“The issue was really the press conference itself. We knew that it was going to be difficult. I’d actually recommended against a press conference. My word didn’t have much coinage in that environment but one of the reasons was because Trump admires Putin so much, he never wants to be humiliated. And it was all about a personal sense of humiliation.

“The instance in which he was asked the question about whether he felt that the Russians interfered in the election, he wanted to push back very quickly against it. He wanted to diminish any kind of idea of that because if … he wanted to get the message across that nobody had interfered on his behalf.”

He got his ass handed to him. It was an utter humiliation for Trump and for the United States.

But this time, having soiled himself in Helsinki, Trump will go into a solo meeting with Putin having been advised by sycophants at best, including those who proudly spout Russian Useful Idioms.

Tulsi Gabbard should be helping the President prepare to capitulate to Vladimir Putin.

She’s doing so, tellingly, by continuing to push propaganda — this time, the email via which NSA Director Mike Rogers registered his moderate rather than high confidence in intelligence showing that Putin wanted Trump to win — that she hopes will distract from the fact that the Russian investigation ratcheted up in 2017 because Trump’s National Security Adviser secretly undermined sanctions with Russia.

Indeed, the same day Rogers wrote that email was the day Flynn made his first call to Sergey Kislyak about undermining President Obama’s position on Israel, a call the transcript for which has not been released, but the follow-up to which records Kislyak describing Putin’s awareness of the calls: “your previous, uh, uh, telephone call, I reported to Moscow and it was considered at the highest level in Russia.”

More interesting is a cache of documents released to the Federalist, regarding the various investigations into leaks about Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016 and 2017, with the Adam Schiff documents plopped in there starting at 143, after the Genetic Christmas file.

The cache, in general, shows why FBI had difficulty finding the leakers on all the cases except James Wolfe (which I’ll return to), the SSCI staffer who had been dating Ali Watkins: the intelligence behind these stories was often shared with at least 60 and sometimes close to 300 people.

It also shows how aggressively Trump’s DOJ investigated these stories. Of particular note, after Durham investigated Jim Baker and others for a leak, his results were used to reconsider the other Trump-related investigations — the process that was first disclosed in 2021. Details of the subpoenas served on HPSCI (covered extensively in this DOJ IG Report), including both Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, are redacted. And the inclusion of the “whistleblowers” documents in this cache show how DOJ discredited his claims: after interviewing Michael Bahar, they realized the timeline they had been given misrepresented Bahar’s normal activities (which included contact with the press long preceding the conspiracy theories about Adam Schiff). In other words, the cache as a whole debunks the claims people are making about Schiff, rather than confirm them.

You won’t hear that from the frothers.

Several of the case files confirm the veracity of stories for which NYT or WaPo got Pulitzers. Trump is suing the Pulitzer Foundation for awarding those prizes, and these documents will help the newspapers defend the lawsuits.

Both the investigation into the Flynn story and the Carter Page one sputtered out after those records were declassified — in both cases, declassifications in which Kash Patel was centrally involved. To repeat: These investigations were largely halted because Kash declassified the information involved.

That makes the entire manufactured mob around this more interesting. Regarding the HPSCI “whistleblower” (whom Schiff has said was terminated for cause): at the time of the alleged leaks nothing went on in HPSCI without Kash’s involvement or awareness. Yet after making an enormous stink about being targeted in a lawsuit in 2023, Kash has released nothing about all that — not even the explicit concerns that Rod Rosenstein raised about Kash in January 2018, separate from these investigations.

Then again, there are a bunch other documents that Kash could release, such as the Crossfire Hurricane binder that he claimed was declassified on January 19, 2021, or the grand jury testimony that he obtained immunity to give. Kash could vindicate his past claims. Thus far, he has not.

Arctic Haze

Opened August 1, 2017

Closed September 9, 2021

Investigated source for details of the SVR documents as raised by Jim Comey in testimony about Clinton Foundation. The investigation focused closely on Daniel Richman, the Comey friend who got copies of his memos memorializing Trump conversations. In 2021, Comey shared his phone to show there was no evidence implicating him. Only at that late date did the FBI chase down possible other sources — but only the ones who might have a motive to protect Comey.

Echos Fate

First reported on January 24, 2017

Opened May 12, 2017

Closed December 9, 2020

Investigated source for David Ignatius story exposing Mike Flynn’s calls with Russia. It came to incorporate one redacted entity, as well as EDMO (where Jeffrey Jensen was doing propaganda for Bill Barr). The investigation determined that over 167 people had access to this information.

Foggy Falls

Opened May 10, 2017

Closed May 6, 2020

Investigated leak of Carter Page FISA application. The opening memo describes who in Congress got read only briefs of the application. Starting in 2018, after HPSCI released dueling memos on the application, FBI started asking whether they could prosecute at all.

Riding Hood

Opened October 18, 2017

Closed July 17, 2019

This is the Ali Watkins-based tip (from June) that led into the James Wolfe investigation. It is presented out of order in the cache.

Genetic Christmas

Story dated December 14, 2016

Crime report July 25, 2017

Opened October 23, 2017

Closed April 16, 2020

Investigated sources for NBC reporting that Putin was personally involved in election operation. Over 60 people had access either to the documentation or briefing.

Sirens Lure

Opened August 14, 2017

Closed May 11, 2021

Investigated sources for reports on Jared Kushner’s targeting in Russian investigation. There were 192 people in the subject pool.

Tropic Vortex

Referred by Dana Boente March 22, 2017

Opened January 31, 2019

Closed February 25, 2020

This was initially based on an October 2016 NYT story (which may actually be this story on an entirely different topic, a scan DOJ asked Yahoo to do, using a FISA warrant, for a terrorism-related selector). But it came to incorporate this story on Jim Comey’s effort to push back on Trump’s false “tapp” claim (only the NYT, which includes Mike Schmidt, is named, though ABC had the story too). The initial investigation was referred to John Durham because one subject of the investigation was a former senior FBI official. Durham submitted his report in January 2019, and DOJ decided to reconsider all the other investigations based on what Durham had discovered.

If I hadn’t already concluded that the coverage of Trump’s sell-out to Putin on Ukraine adopts the wrong framework, I’d be pissed that Lawrence Freedman stole my intended title, “Baked Alaska,” for this column. Freedman’s is the best analysis of Trump’s “deal” using a traditional diplomatic framework. Freedman argues that Trump has accepted this deal out of wishful thinking.

Donald Trump continues to pursue a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine despite the accumulating evidence that there is no deal to be had. He has acknowledged, after many fruitless phone calls, that Putin has been stringing him along, even accusing him of peddling ‘bullshit’. In an interview with the BBC, he acknowledged

‘We’ll have a great conversation. I’ll say: “That’s good, I’ll think we’re close to getting it done,” and then he’ll knock down a building in Kyiv.’

He observed of Putin that ‘I’m disappointed in him, but I’m not done with him.’

And so like Charlie Brown, shocked each time Lucy pulls the ball away as he is about to kick it, Trump allows wishful thinking to triumph over experience. He clings to the belief that a direct conversation with the Russian leader is the key to unlocking the whole process. As he insisted two months ago, ’Look, nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together.’

Freedman links to but doesn’t dwell on the implications of this BILD report: as the clock was ticking down on Trump’s imaginary deadline for Putin to stop fighting, Trump offered up sanctions relief and territorial concessions, but Putin refused.

“Vladimir Putin still wants full control over the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. He only offered a partial ceasefire – a refusal to attack energy facilities and large cities in the rear. But not a comprehensive ceasefire,” a BILD source stated.

The publication emphasizes that the US, on the contrary, proposed freezing the war along the current front line in exchange for a broad lifting of sanctions and new economic agreements with Russia. According to BILD, the Kremlin was unwilling to accept this proposal.

Even after offering Russia most of what it needs to keep fighting and getting rejected, Trump claimed he might still get concessions out of Putin.

And while that does confirm Freedman’s conclusion — that Trump will be embarrassed — I think imposing a diplomatic lens on this negotiation is as ridiculous, at this point, as it would be to impose an economic lens on Trump’s tariff deals. These deals are not about outcomes — improving the economy or saving Ukrainians’ (much less Palestinians’) lives.

They’re about about Trump’s need to feel powerful, his need to coerce tribute. And he’s willing to destroy America in that pursuit.

Coverage since Freedman’s column has begun to inch closer to that, such as this tidbit in ¶6 of a WSJ article describing that a Trump Tower deal for Trump is back on the table.

Alexander Yakovenko, a former ambassador who headed Russia’s foreign-service academy until last year, wrote in an op-ed for the state RIA news agency that “settling the war in Ukraine, which has been lost by the West a long time ago, has become a secondary issue in relations between the United States and Russia—nothing more than an obstacle to normalization that we must overcome together.”

Ever since the summit was announced, Russian media has been replete with stories about special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Dmitriev sharing fried dumplings at a restaurant in the Russian capital, and about the site of a future Moscow hotel, described as a possible Trump Tower Moscow, that the two men visited last week.

A decade ago, this impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal was going to be worth $300 million. Since then, of course, Trump has turned Trump Tower deals — in Oman, Dubai, Hanoi, Jeddah — into an expanding currency. Back in office now with a pliant Attorney General and immunity for official acts, every deal Trump makes has a side hustle: “free” flying bribery palaces that will cost taxpayers $1 billion, golden shares to destroy a healthy union, 15% to deal critical technology to China. And that’s before you consider the crypto, including the two separate hundred million dollar investments from Chinese linked businessmen, one of whom got a fraud case dismissed. (Er … perhaps the Nvidia approval, to say nothing of the neverending delays in slapping tariffs on China, are not so separate.) His $4.5 billion crypto profit since returning to office may depend on another corrupt pardon.

You cannot assess Trump’s tariff deals in terms of the economic logic because there is none. They are destroying entire US industries by giving foreign companies a competitive advantage.

Similarly, you cannot assess Trump’s upcoming capitulation to Putin in diplomatic terms, because there is none.

This is about Trump.

And I don’t think you can assess how Friday will go without reviewing where we are.

Vladimir Putin helped Trump get elected in 2016 because, according to a piece of intelligence released by Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, he was “counting on” a Trump win. During the election, Russia floated that impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. Shortly thereafter, the Agalarovs dangled dirt on Hillary for sanctions relief from Don Jr. And then, just over nine years ago, they had a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager (he had come from a meeting with Trump and Rudy Giuliani) where they discussed how Manafort planned to win the swing states, how to get Manafort paid millions …

And a plan to carve up Ukraine.

A plan not all that different from this plan to carve up Ukraine. Trump seemed all in and even was discussing business deals with the same guy that his latest flunkie, Steve Witkoff, is shopping Trump Tower sites with now.

Trump was gung ho to deliver that deal until his National Security Adviser, on a phone that Russians undoubtedly knew was tapped, assured Sergey Kislyak that “boss is aware” of Flynn’s own efforts to undercut sanctions punishing Russia for helping Trump get elected. And that resulted in a criminal investigation that disrupted those plans.

Trump has complained for nine years that Democrats ruined his presidential term because of that investigation, but really, it was his National Security Adviser’s shitty OpSec, even worse than Mike Waltz’ all these years later.

And as a result, Trump and the Russians have spent nine years trying to bury that past in false stories. In one of the first meetings between Trump and Putin, they crafted a cover story for the Aras Agalarov dangle together, outside the hearing of an American translator. At their Helsinki meeting, Trump famously sided with Putin’s spies over his own.

My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server but I have, I have confidence in both parties.

[snip]

I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer.

He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Ok? Thank you.

Putin joked that, “I’d like to add something to this. After all, I was an intelligence officer myself and I do know how dossiers are made up.” It was about that time when right wingers averted their gaze from Oleg Deripaska’s likely role in the dossier, which enabled Trump to keep claiming that the dossier — which appears to be the result of Russians fucking Hillary over for her poor choice in a subcontractor her team barely interacted with — was the source of his woes and not his own actions.

Around that same time, we now know, Trump started chasing more Russian disinformation, the attempt to frame Hillary that Russian spies invented the day after the investigation into the Russian hack was publicly announced. Trump started adopting that Russian disinformation as the founding myth of his MAGAt tribe. That’s what Bill Barr used, successfully, to bury the damning results of the Mueller investigation. And Trump’s hunt for disinformation is what elicited his attempt to corrupt the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in 2019. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it, ” Trump started his extortion attempt, before turning, less than 30 words later, to his claim that Ukraine, not the FBI, had the server Russia hacked: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” And Trump kept chasing that disinformation, pushing Rudy to team up with Andrii Derkach and others in search of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

At this point, every single claim on which Trump builds his own legitimacy, according to the terms he himself measures it, is built on Russian disinformation. And that means every single claim is built on degrading rule of law in the United States. Every single claim is built on ever deeper swamps of corruption.

And after he won again — with some overt Russian disinformation and who knows what kind of help from bomb threats originating in Russia — Russia made clear they plan to collect. One of Putin’s closest allies, Nikolay Patrushev stated, truthfully, that Trump had relied on certain forces to get elected, to claim legitimacy.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

“He will be obligated to fulfill them.”

The mistake, in analyzing the Alaska meeting is not just about Ukraine.

It’s about the United States.

It’s not just that Putin can bide his time in Ukraine.

It’s that the longer he holds out, the greater his true objective — turning Trump into his puppet and the United States into a dying kleptocracy that is child’s play to manipulate — comes into grasp.

Putin may still be fighting in Ukraine. But he has achieved far more than he probably hoped for in the US. He has all but defeated every nuisance the Main Enemy once stood for: rule of law, free trade, freedom of speech, science, human rights, reason.

It’s not just that Trump is welcoming a dictator on US soil. It’s that the dictator is coming to reclaim what Russia owns.

Update: This paywalled Telegraph piece says Trump is discussing cooperation on mineral resources in both Eastern Ukraine and Alaska, with an end to sanctions on parts and planes.

Update: OFAC has just cleared a sanction license for the meeting, meaning sanctioned people — like Oleg Deripaska — could attend.

It’s my opinion that Solicitor General John Sauer succeeds because of the political pressure he brings to bear on Justices.

That was my immediate impression upon listening to the hearing in Trump v. US. Sauer was arguing a clearly unconstitutional stance, adopting arguments (in a case where Trump nearly got his Vice President killed) that the President could order SEAL Team 6 to kill his adversaries, and (having not reviewed the actual evidence) the right wing judges accepted his premise that this prosecution truly represented a case of meanie Democrats treating Trump badly under the law.

And based on that, the right wing justices wrote an opinion that gave themselves a preemptive veto over whether a former President could be prosecuted, effectively preventing meanie Democrats from upholding the law.

That’s what I think happened with SCOTUS’ abuse of the emergency docket to both overturn nationwide stays and to rubber stamp unconstitutional deportion practices. With their first ruling on April 7 in JGG, SCOTUS sent a mild rebuke to Stephen Miller’s bid to deport wide swaths of Venezuelans to a concentration camp under the Alien Enemies Act based on their tattoos: the ACLU couldn’t get a nationwide injunction against the practice under the Administrative Procedures Act, but each detainee could get a habeas review. Based on that precedent, the Trump Administration got their biggest slapdown of the term in AARP, where Justices intervened on Easter Saturday to make the government turn around buses rushing to deport more men under the Alien Enemies Act. In between the two, SCOTUS ruled that the government should describe what steps it had taken to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia after deporting him illegally.

None of these were good rulings, holding that Miller’s dragnet was wildly illegal. Rather, they were mild rebukes to Miller and tactical rebukes to courts. But then Sauer was confirmed on April 3 (before these rulings but after they were appealed) and Miller and Trump’s propaganda campaign wailing about nationwide injunctions and judicial coups ratcheted up. And against a background of SCOTUS rubber stamping any and all termination orders — with the single exception of the Fed Chair — SCOTUS engaged in exceedingly outrageous action in DVD, serially overriding a District Court’s effort to, one, enforce his orders and, two, prevent the government from deporting men to regimes like South Sudan pending a constitutional review. All this was done with tactical orders building off SCOTUS’ fondness for allowing the President to fire whoever he wants (except the Fed Chair), which itself was used as precedent to allow Trump to override due process for deportees until the courts could consider the legal niceties of it all.

Steve Vladeck is, of course, the source to read on the law of Emergency Docket. The law sucks. But I argue that the law sucks because SCOTUS is not responding to the law. They’re responding to Miller’s shrieks, John Sauer’s neat packaging up of those shrieks, and how both mirror in the Fox News bubble most if not all of these right wing Justices pickle in.

Which is what Trump is planning on in VOS Selections, the tariff case in which both right and left are trying to overturn Trump’s arbitrary illegal trade war. As I keep noting, this case is unique among all challenges to Trump’s unlawful power grabs, because conservative legal luminaries and NGOs like CATO, AEI, and the Chamber of Commerce have joined Democratic states in opposing the power grab. If SCOTUS will ever start reining Trump it, it is likely to be this case.

Back on May 28, the Court of International Trade ruled for the plaintiffs (along with small businesses like wine importer VOS Selections, a bunch of Democratic states), finding that IEEPA, the emergency authority Trump had invoked to impose or threaten tariffs, didn’t give him that authority.

After the hearing but before the court issued its ruling, DOJ submitted a bunch of declarations from Trump’s top officials (which because of the timing were never tested) claiming that if they lost the stick of IEEPA, it would lead other countries to stop negotiating on trade deals. Then, after the ruling, DOJ asked for a stay, relying on the argument in those declarations. The motion for a stay said that the plaintiffs — again, the lead plaintiff is a wine importer — would not be harmed by the period of uncertainty as this got litigated because if plaintiffs won, the government would simply pay them back.

For any plaintiff who is an importer, even if a stay is entered and we do not prevail on appeal, plaintiffs will assuredly receive payment on their refund with interest. “[T]here is virtually no risk” to any importer that they “would not be made whole” should they prevail on appeal. See Sunpreme Inc. v. United States, 2017 WL 65421, at *5 (Ct. Int’l Trade Jan. 5, 2017). The most “harm” that could incur would be a delay in collecting on deposits. This harm is, by definition, not irreparable. See Hughes Network Sys., Inc. v. InterDigital Commc’ns Corp., 17 F.3d 691, 694 (4th Cir. 1994). Plaintiffs will not lose their entitlement to refund, plus interest, if the judgment is stayed, and they are guaranteed payment by defendants should the Court’s decision be upheld.

Immediately after the CIT order, DOJ asked the Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay, playing really hard on how without a stay Trump wouldn’t have a stick with which to negotiate his trade war.

As members of the President’s Cabinet have attested, the CIT’s order would irreparably harm the economic and national security of the United States. The Secretary of Commerce explained that the injunction “would undermine the United States-United Kingdom trade deal that was negotiated in reliance on the President’s emergency tariff authority,” plus the recent “China trade agreement,” and “would jeopardize the dozens of similar arrangements with foreign-trading partners that” are being negotiated. A76. “Each of these negotiations,” the declaration explained, “is premised on the credible threat of enforcement of the IEEPA tariffs,” and the injunction could compromise that threat, so that “foreign counterparts will have reduced incentives to reach meaningful agreements[].” Id. That could “leave the American people exposed to predatory economic practices by foreign actors[] and threaten national security.”

Again, the government assured the court that plaintiffs — and everyone else who had paid illegal tariffs — would get paid back: “the government will issue refunds to plaintiffs, including any postjudgment interest that accrues.”

The small business importers responded by describing all the reconstitution of markets that would happen during the appeal, but also describing the problem with permitting the President to continue to use illegal leverage during a period of a stay.

The President has legitimate means of conducting foreign policy; imposing illegal tariffs is not one of them. The President cannot act illegally as a matter of policy convenience, be ordered to stop, and then plead prior reliance on his illegal acts. If Defendants’ arguments were adopted, an injunction barring virtually any illegal action could be stayed by virtue of claiming that the illegality might create useful leverage: If the President illegally detained innocent people without due process, he could argue for a stay of an injunction against that action on the ground that detention could be useful leverage against the innocent detainees or their families, and thereby advance some claimed U.S. foreign policy or national security interests.

On June 10, the Circuit Court of Appeals granted that stay without engaging in the relative harm to either side, instead pointing to Wilcox, one of two SCOTUS shadow docket rulings about the President’s authority to fire people which has since undermined stays generally.

Days before the hearing, Trump rushed out a bunch of things called trade “deals,” which were not written down and about which both sides continue to argue. That includes a “deal” with the EU, Pakistan, and Korea. And on July 31, having not made the 90 deals supposedly leveraged with the stay, Trump simply set new tariffs, Liberation Day Two Point Oh.

On July 31 (the same day as those new tariffs), the full Circuit Court of Appeals heard the appeal. I actually think the judges were far more split than others did (those judges more favorable to the government spoke up later in the hearing), but it was really hard for me to judge given that most judges on the Circuit participated. This is like a mini-Supreme Court ruling before the big one. Still, the conventional wisdom is, I think, that the Circuit will rule against Trump.

Even before that, though, Trump started working the refs.

Even before the hearing, he claimed that America was dead a year ago but was getting rich off tariffs.

A week after the hearing, boasting that the tariffs-not-deals would go into effect that night, Trump said only a “radical left” court could stop him.

Days later he lied about how much money tariffs were bringing in (here’s the reality), and claimed that if a “radical left court” ruled against him, it — not the tariffs — would cause a Great Depression.

Yesterday, he lied that “consumers aren’t even paying these tariffs” (they’re paying about a fifth of them), then lashed out at a Goldman economist who said that would soon change.

Then John Sauer got into the batshittery.

Monday, about the same number of days after the Circuit Court hearing as it was when DOJ submitted the declarations demanding leverage to negotiate deals they ultimately never negotiated, this letter was submitted under Sauer’s name (but not on DOJ stationery). It cited the July 27 EU deal, announced before the Circuit Court hearing, as well as others announced still earlier than that, as an additional authority (which is normally a new Court ruling that might impact a pending one). Most of it derives directly from Trump’s Truth Social bullshit (marked in brackets below), including the President’s claims that America was a shithole country a year ago and that if a court overturns the tariffs, it (and not the underlying illegal actions) will cause a Great Depression. But it presents these in such a way that neither DOJ’s lawyers nor Trump himself can be held accountable to the court for the obvious lies.

[The President believes that our country would not be able to pay back the trillions of dollars that other countries have already committed to pay, which could lead to financial ruin.] Other tariff authorities that the President could potentially use are short-term, not nearly as powerful, and would render America captive to the abuses that it has endured from far more aggressive countries.

There is no substitute for the tariffs and deals that President Trump has made. [One year ago, the United States was a dead country, and now, because of the trillions of dollars being paid by countries that have so badly abused us, America is a strong, financially viable, and respected country again.] If the United States were forced to pay back the trillions of dollars committed to us, America could go from strength to failure the moment such an incorrect decision took effect.

These deals for trillions of dollars have been reached, and other countries have committed to pay massive sums of money. [If the United States were forced to unwind these historic agreements, the President believes that a forced dissolution of the agreements could lead to a 1929-style result. In such a scenario, people would be forced from their homes, millions of jobs would be eliminated, hard-working Americans would lose their savings, and even Social Security and Medicare could be threatened. In short, the economic consequences would be ruinous, instead of unprecedented success.]

Just about the only claim from anyone but Trump is that, “There is no substitute for the tariffs and deals that President Trump has mad,” which was made in the underlying declarations (and so is not a new authority either).

This is Presidential social media tantrum, presented as legal authority.

The small business plaintiffs responded by noting that the government already said this, therefore it doesn’t count as a new authority, reiterating the harm of any stay, and debunking the claim — the only one that comes from DOJ lawyers — that there is “no substitute” for illegal tariffs, such as going to Congress.

If the Court is inclined to consider the substance of the letter, there is no basis for its declaration that there is “no substitute” for “the tariffs and deals that President Trump has made.” Even without IEEPA, the President can obtain ex ante authority to enter into trade agreements, see 19 U.S.C. § 4202(a), or submit agreements for congressional approval, including via fast-track procedures, as prior presidents have done, see 19 U.S.C. § 4501 (implementing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement).

Scott Bessent gave up the game the other day with Larry Kudlow (around 13:00). When Kudlow, who predictably allowed Bessent to spin a bunch of other bullshit unchallenged, suggested that if the Circuit Court rules against the government, then Trump has other ways of putting together the magical pony economic plan that Bessent had laid out in the interview.

Kudlow: If the tariff court wins on appeal, you’ve got other ways to put this trade and tariff policy together?

Bessent: Larry, good framing here would be if the tariff court rules against us, we will immediately — it will immediately be enjoined, so the tariffs will likely continue. Then it will go to the Supreme Court in October, then we would expect a ruling in January. But I tell you, Larry, the amount of money that’s coming in here, I think the more deals we’ve done, the more money coming in, it gets harder and harder for SCOTUS to rule against us.

As noted, this question — are there other legal ways to do this? — is the only one in Sauer’s letter that doesn’t derive directly from a Trump Truth Social post.

Bessent dodged the question and instead said that if the tariffs are ruled illegal, then they will just draw things out — just like Sauer did with Trump’s criminal case — until the cost of overturning the tariffs would be too big an ask for SCOTUS.

That is, they’re not even claiming any of this is legal.

They’re just boasting that if they can claim the US is paying its bills through inflated claims of tariff revenues, then the Roberts Court won’t dare uphold the law, for fear of being held accountable for the financial ruin Trump is rushing us towards.

And, as batshit as that Sauer letter is, they might well be right.

Update: I’ve annotated the letter.

The FBI released documents to John Solomon to run a hit piece on Adam Schiff that amounts to a confession that Kash Patel and John Solomon’s sources and methods were illegal.

At issue are some 302s from HPSCI whistleblower claiming that Adam Schiff tried to research and leak information about the Russian investigation.

Water.

Wet.

I mean, I don’t doubt that Schiff (and Eric Swalwell) did leak information from HPSCI, in the same way that I have no doubt that people close to Devin Nunes likewise leaked information.

There’s a very long history of members of Congress doing that, about all topics. It’s a safety valve for Executive abuse of classification authority.

I also know, for a fact, that the primary whistleblower, who describes that he was not part of Nunes’ team investigating Russia, gets key details about Schiff’s treatment of classified information and contact with the press in this precise period wrong. I also know that his imagined description of sources behind stories was badly flawed in at least one respect, in such a way that might have distracted the FBI from a far more ominous channel of classified information.

Keep in mind, too, that these 302s reflect a cherry pick of 302s from the investigation into leaks about Trump — an investigation that Kash himself has squealed mightily about (and was investigated in). Kash personally was considered a far bigger leaking concern into 2018 than Schiff’s staffers, even after this testimony, by Rod Rosenstein. And the flood of leaks to John Solomon (via whatever source) was institutionalized up to the end of Trump’s first term.

Indeed, after Kash claimed that Trump had declassified everything he took home with him in 2021, he had to invoke the Fifth Amendment when testifying about the claim before a grand jury.

Finally, they complain that ultimately — sometime after 2019 — DOJ decided that Speech and Debate prevented any charges here is pretty funny. That’s because the very same Speech and Debate protection prevented DOJ from accessing, much less prosecuting, most of the information implicating Scott Perry in Trump’s insurrection.

I had been wondering what the Sydney Sweeney thing was … in truth, this old lady was wondering who Sydney Sweeney is, mostly for the reason Rob Flaherty addresses in this column. In recent days, the right wing had used some dumb dogwhistle to distract from the thing — Russia Russia Russia — they had used to distract from Trump’s Epstein scandal.

Whatever it was, whoever she is, I knew, it was another demonstration of how well the right can distract and focus attention.

You might be wondering why anybody cares about this. But here’s the thing: The fact that this moment became a thing at all — that a stupid pun could metastasize into a full-blown political moment — says something real about the media ecosystem we’re all trapped in. And it says even more about why Democrats keep losing the culture war, and with it, the narrative war that inevitably shapes who wins elections.

The Sweeney thing is an example of how memes can arise from some randos and filter up to elected politicians, including Trump and JD Vance, and once they do, dominate the online ecosystem.

On the left, we start with a set of messages we’d like for people to believe. We then test (like, wow, do we test) messages for their persuasive impact. We use paid media to get those messages in front of people, at which point we meet public perception for the first time, and fight against it. We treat politics as the slicing and dicing of issues, not the formation of perceptions.

The right understands that virality is as much of a barometer for success as whether an argument is seen as persuasive. Conservatives use the internet as a testing ground for what has heat, and they work it up the ladder. Organic media wags the dog. Campaigns simply add kerosene to what people are already telling them they find resonant. In a world where voters don’t trust institutions, messaging that feels native to their own conversations will be significantly more effective than what’s being pushed to them in ads.

This isn’t to say that campaigns don’t matter, or that ads don’t work (in fact, another lesson from 2024 ought to be that they do). But they’re the last mile. If all you’ve got are ads after years of withering cultural definition, you’re going to be playing from behind. Our space is just optimized for return on campaign investment, not shaping the narrative terrain on which they’re fought. Republicans have an always-on machine that shows — not tells — people a story about cultural values. And that’s where real political resonance comes from.

Caroline Orr Bueno had a great piece on the danger posed because of the left’s inability to do this — in significant part because the right has stacked the algorithmic deck against them.

[T]he left typically uses this tactic reactively — responding to narratives that the right has already established. Trump’s ecosystem uses it proactively, often launching narratives from scratch to get ahead of potential negative stories coming down the pipeline.

This is what LOLGOP and I have tried to address in our Cat Turd Deficit videos.

The left, giddy with the brief (but very real) success of their recent focus on Epstein (which piggybacked on that right wing ecosystem and required cooperation with Thomas Massie), often thinks of this solely in terms of attention, and as a result does little more than claim one after another thing is a distraction of the thing.

But it’s not. It’s more than that. It’s the ability to test and reinforce on the fly.

Yesterday was an example of the stakes. There were several Epstein developments:

• A judge called out Todd Blanche’s obvious diversion in his request for grand jury materials
• After Sheldon Whitehouse focused some attention on the Ghislaine Maxwell transfer to comfier digs by sending a letter, Allison Gill published actual details of it, including that the sex predator may have the same privilege to leave the facility to “work” that Jeffrey Epstein had
• Ghislaine’s former cellmate revealed that Ghislaine had tried to pitch the Biden Administration on dirt she had on Trump, but they ignored her

All that was drowned out by Trump’s announcement he will invade DC because a boy named Big Balls was assaulted by unarmed teenagers. That happened, by chance or perhaps not (because Trump is really more tactical on these legal assaults than people credit), on the first day of the California trial over Trump’s invasion of Los Angeles. Indeed, during the trial, the two DOD witnesses admitted they had absolutely no advance notice of the DC deployment or Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s public comments on it, and DOJ desperately tried to keep the comments Hegseth made at the presser out of evidence, even though he is a named defendant. (Politico has a good report on the trial and the split screen it created with the DC announcement, including how a major general was accused of disloyalty for objecting to a stunt in MacArthur Park.)

A lot of Dems responded by claiming that the invasion of DC was an intentional distraction from Epstein. That gets things entirely reversed: the invasion of a second blue city is another step in a mostly pre-planned map for fascism, and Trump’s brief inability to redirect his online mob’s focus on Epstein merely created a speed bump in that march of fascism, one Sydney Sweeney seems to have corrected.

I don’t mind if people claim that the invasion of DC is the distraction, because the Epstein thing still has salience, but let’s at least aspire to do that effectively!

I spent much of the day on Xitter, watching and trying to contest what Flaherty and Orr Bueno describe. Over the course of several hours, the right tried several different messaging strategies.

• Responding to journalists and Democrats’ factual observation that crime in DC is actually falling quickly by pointing to the suspension of an officer last month over claims about whether MPD was bringing crime rates down by misclassifying crimes. Given how the police union — which initiated the complaint that led to the suspension — loudly backed Trump’s invasion, I don’t rule out the fight over stats being a set-up in anticipation of this invasion. In any case, this dispute ignored that Eagle Ed Martin had claimed credit for lowering crime in DC by 25% in April.
• Having women talk about their fear of walking in DC and others talk about how they’ve moved out of it.
• Accusing Democrats of being pro crime, repeating Stephen Miller’s fascist othering language, and then, ultimately, repeating Trump’s racist dogwhistle that DC and Democrats are filthy. This is eliminationist language and must be contested.

I tried a bunch of things to respond (I make no claims about whether I had any success). Even before the announcement, I did this post on how Eagle Ed, now in charge of weaponizing DOJ, had not signed a domestic violence arrest warrant MPD drew up for Cory Mills, allowing Mills to allegedly threaten a second woman with revenge porn. When elected Republicans, including Jim Jordan, spoke out in favor of the DC invasion, I RTed them, noting that then they of course would demand that Pam Bondi arrest Mills in one of the first things she does.

During the presser, I posted one after another image from the January 6 assault cases, covering just a fraction of the ones on this list. After the presser and my bleg, someone put Trump’s comments from the presser, talking about how people disrespect cops, to video from January 6.

Both of these things made me realize that the January 6 archive has degraded in searches; until I remembered my own post of the assault arrests, I was struggling to find spectacular images of Trump’s criminals. But once I had this video, I used it as a rebuttal to all the people who claimed Democrats support crime. It must have had some effect, because one of the main far right January 6 propagandists — who made her grift on January 6 — complained that Dems will never stop talking about it.

I also tried to respond to Chuck Grassley’s (and that of Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, generally) enthusiastic boosting for this invasion by pointing out that many of their states are more dangerous than DC.

This is a problematic response, I now recognize. All it serves to do is highlight how majority minority cities around the country have been neglected. Indeed, Marsha Blackburn will likely run for Governor by demonizing one of Tennessee’s great cities, Memphis. Plus, Missouri already did invade St. Louis in an effort to reverse criminal justice reforms.

Through all of this, almost no one (including me) mentioned that Congress had cut funding for DC, creating the problems Trump claims to want to fix.

But ultimately (just before bedtime my time, which is totally not a healthy use of my time), it came down to those claims of filth.

A man just moved the woman who “stole” his spa girls and turned one into a sex slave into comfier prison digs to prevent her from revealing the dirt she has on him, and we’re losing the battle over who is filth.

It is my belief that this failure of messaging — the left’s inability to remain laser-focused on not just Trump’s crimes, but the impact of them — is the real reason Trump got reelected in spite of the fact that he’s a thuggish criminal (though the fact that most lefties wanted to spread conspiracy theories about Merrick Garland instead of focusing on Trump’s crimes didn’t help). I mean, some of the voices who were most focused on Trump’s crimes — Dan Goldman and. Ryan Goodman — confessed during the transition not only that they didn’t know what had been made public before the election, much less hammer Trump on those public details, but were misinforming people about key details.

People got bored and that created a vacuum Trump exploited.

Voters didn’t factor Trump’s history of sex crimes, fraud, and fascism into their vote because Trump’s opponents failed to prosecute the issue in the public sphere on a daily basis even as Trump spun a tale of grievance that actually attracted younger voters. And unless we fix this — unless we find a message that a President who pardoned cop assailants, freed terrorists, and may soon free the sex predator who “stole” his girls is filth — we will not defeat this fascist onslaught.

Update: Fixed the description of the dispute over crime classification in DC.

Judge Paul Engelmayer has rejected Todd Blanche’s bid to unseal Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury materials — but not for the reason I expected (Maxwell’s still-pending appeal).

Instead, he’s rejecting the request because Blanche was lying when he insinuated there’d be anything of substantial public interest. As Engelmayer laid out, anyone who followed the trial would be familiar with everything in the transcripts and exhibits.

A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new. The materials do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor. They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes.

Engelmayer did consider unsealing the material for another reason: to expose the government’s attempt at diversion. But he decided that the government has already conceded that point.

The one colorable argument under that doctrine for unsealing in this case, in fact, is that doing so would expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal. A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at “transparency” but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such. And there is precedent—In re Biaggi, the fountainhead of the Second Circuit’s “special circumstances” doctrine—permitting a court to order the release of grand jury testimony to correct a movant’s misleading public characterization of it.

[snip]

This Court gave careful consideration to unsealing the Maxwell grand jury materials on a similar rationale. But with the Government having now conceded that the information it proposes to release is redundant of the public record—that this information was “made publicly available at [Maxwell’s] trial or has otherwise been publicly reported”—the public interest in testing the Government’s bona fides does not require the extraordinary step of unsealing grand jury records. Dkt. 800 at 3. Without any need to review the grand jury materials, the public can evaluate for itself the Government’s asserted bases for making this motion. [my emphasis]

He goes onto call out Blanche’s haste, sloppiness, and ignorance about the proceeding, and his inattention to the concerns of the victims.

Second, any argument that the Government’s motion to unseal merits substantial deference is weakened by a host of irregularities with respect to that motion. That motion was not made, nor has it been joined in, by any member of the Government’s trial team—the DOJ lawyers presumably most familiar with the Maxwell case and the broader Epstein-Maxwell investigation. The motion was filed by the DAG alone, without any signatory from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this District. And it was made under circumstances suggestive of haste rather than reflective deliberation. The motion was three-and-a-half pages in length; there were no supporting materials filed, under seal or otherwise; the motion did not disclose (or reflect awareness of) the summary-witness nature of the Maxwell grand jury testimony; and the motion was made without advance notice to Epstein’s and Maxwell’s victims, a fact which, as reviewed below, has alarmed numerous victims. Only after the Court inquired on that point was notice to victims given. See Dkt. 789; Dkt. 796 at 9. Finally, the Government’s highlighting of the grand jury transcripts did not suggest close familiarity with the Maxwell trial record, because a number of details that it identified as non-public in fact had been testified to during the trial. See note 16, supra.

This was a stunt. Now exposed as a stunt.

Donald Trump, who was charged for obstructing the certification of Joe Biden’s vote on January 6, 2021 and who pardoned 1,500 of his fellow Jan6ers — hundreds of whom assaulted cops — on his first day on the job, will hold a press conference today to announce he will put criminals in DC in jail where they belong. “The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong. It’s all going to happen very fast.”

Trump also promises to evict the unhoused — people like Taylor Taranto, who was living out of his van when he took the address for Barack Obama that Trump posted on Truth Social and started stalking Obama’s Kalorama neighborhood. Trump pardoned Taranto’s January 6 trespassing charges, but not the weapons charges tied to Obama.

Trump must, then, be promising to oust Cory Mills.

Back in February, police responded to a call at Congressman Mills’ home and found (one of) Mills’ girlfriends with “visible injuries.”

The first police report, provided to News4 by a source and confirmed by a second source familiar with the investigation, said: “(Her significant other for over a year) grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door.” The report says she showed the officer “bruises on her arm which appeared fresh.”

The first report goes on to note that during a phone call between the significant other and alleged victim, she “let officers hear Subject 1 [now identified by MPD as Mills] instruct her to lie about the origin of her bruises … Eventually, Subject 1 made contact with police and admitted that the situation escalated from verbal to physical, but it was severe enough to create bruising.”

When police arrived, the woman was in the lobby of the Salamander hotel next door. The report says an officer was “able to immediately identify [the alleged victim] out of all other patrons in the lobby by her demeanor: physically shaking and scared.”

According to the report, the responding police officer told the subject he would be placed under arrest. But then the woman approached police and recanted the details, including where the bruises came from. News4 reached out to the responding officer but has not heard back.

After the girlfriend, Sarah Raviani, backed off the allegations, the US Attorney’s Office — then led by Eagle Ed Martin– refused to sign an arrest warrant.

A spokesperson for MPD said Monday the department sent the U.S. Attorney’s office a warrant for Mills’ arrest, but that warrant was never signed.

When asked about it, Eagle Ed — who was made head of DOJ’s weaponization after Republicans refused to confirm him as US Attorney, has espoused a “name” and “shame” approach for Trump’s political enemies who cannot be charged — declined to comment, stating, “it is improper to discuss cases before criminal charges are filed.”

Cory Mills denies the assault allegations in DC.

The assault allegations in DC led another of his then-girlfriends, Lindsey Langston, to break up with Mills. In a complaint filed in Florida, she alleges that Mills has threatened to release revenge porn against her.

Mills continued to harass Langston for months, she reported to police last month, despite repeated requests to be left alone. As part of a police report she made on July 14, 2025, she provided local and state investigators with timestamped digital evidence to support her allegations, which she also shared with Drop Site.

“The threats from Cory intensified over time,” she told Drop Site. “From emotional manipulation, to physical violence against whoever I date in the future, to threats of having me stripped of the Miss United States crown… something I worked extremely hard for and a dream that was placed in my heart long before I even knew who Cory Mills was.”

The evidence covers months of interactions and includes text messages in which Mills—who says he separated from his wife in 2022—warned Langston he posed a threat to anyone she wanted to date in the future (“Strap up, cowboy,” he said in one text) and threatened to release private images shared in the context of their relationship. Langston submitted the evidence to back up an incident report she filed with the Columbia County sheriff’s office last month.

“Since February 20th of 2025 Cory has contacted Lindsey numerous times on numerous different accounts threatening to release nude images and videos of her, to include recorded videos of her and Cory engaging in sexual acts,” the police report says.

Drop Site sent a detailed comment request to Mills, who said the accusations were untrue. Before he replied to Drop Site, Mills called Langston from Raviani’s number, then sent several text messages asking her to take back her allegations, saying, “Only you can stop this,” and “I understand you [sic] mom is going through a lot of mental health issues.”

Trump mostly is making today’s announcement because Ed “Big Balls” Coristine was assaulted recently after some teenagers attempted to steal his girlfriend’s car.

DC’s Metropolitan Police did arrest two of Big Balls’ alleged assailants.

But if Trump wants to pretend to care about crime in DC — the kind of crime he has personally stoked — then surely he’ll at least oust Cory Mills?