Pam Bondi’s Slop

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I’ve been struggling all morning (in truth, for the last several days) to describe the kaleidoscope of ways Trump is destroying rule of law.

It perhaps is best conveyed by a contrast between all the shit going on in Minnesota and what happened in Chicago yesterday.

Pam Bondi personally went to Minnesota to secure arrests of people who protested the Southern Baptist Church whose minister, David Easterwood, also runs the local ICE department. When the FBI went to arrest one of them, Nekima Levy Armstrong, they arrested the wrong Black woman at first. Then the White House posted a meme of her, slopped up to make it look like she was crying, and falsely accusing her of rioting.

The AI slop will make it far easier for Levy to argue this is vindictive.

DOJ had tried to charge Don Lemon, but a Magistrate Judge refused to charge someone who was legitimately covering a protest. And now Lemon, who is represented by the omnipresent Abbe Lowell, is taunting Bondi.

The Magistrate also refused to approve FACE charges against those already arrested.

The arrest of the wrong Black woman was not the only case of mistaken identity in Trump’s invasion of Minnesota this week. It turns out that the out-of-state ICE goon who shot Venezuelan Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis thought he was chasing one guy, Joffre Barrera, who is 5’2″ and 128 pounds, but was instead chasing Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, who is 5’7″ and 172 pounds.

Both have short brown hair.

Sosa-Celis and Aljorna might have a decent argument that they had no way of being sure the ICE goon they’re accused of assaulting was actually ICE. According to the arrest affidavit, the ICE goon who shot Sosa-Celis was not wearing anything that identified him as Police — his badge and gun were on a tactical belt. His buddy, who was wearing a tactical vest identifying him as police, was not yet present when the assault and shooting happened. And they were driving an unmarked vehicle. Except both defendants talked to the cops without an attorney and confessed to knowing the goons were ICE.

Meanwhile, the backlash surrounding the snatching and use as bait of five year old Liam Conejo Ramos has gotten so bad that Stephen Miller is openly defensive.

The problem for Miller is that, at least according to the attorney for Ramos’ family, they are in the US legally, seeking asylum.

Marc Prokosch, the family’s attorney, said they came to the U.S. in 2024 from Ecuador, had an active asylum case and the preschooler should never have been detained. He said the family was properly following immigration rules and [his father, Adrian] Conejo Arias had no criminal history.

The Ramoses are not the only ones. The local Fox affiliate describes that there have been more habeas petitions filed this year than the entirety of last year.

Immigration attorneys say they are filing habeas corpus petitions to secure the release of detainees at a “dizzying pace.”

The petitions are constitutionally protected challenges to the government’s arrest of an individual. However, the Trump Administration previously suggested suspending those rights.

In the context of immigration enforcement operations, the petitions ask federal judges to either release individuals from custody or grant them a bond hearing in immigration court.

By the numbers: According to case data reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators, 312 immigrant detainees had sought habeas relief through Jan. 21.

The number of petitions filed in the district court of Minnesota in the first three weeks of the year has already surpassed the 260 filed in the entirety of 2025.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Public Radio tracked down the people on one of DHS’ “worst of the worst” lists — the people DHS falsely claimed to have snatched during this invasion. Most had been released into ICE custody before the recent invasion.

[M]ost of the people on the list had been immediately transferred to ICE custody at the end of time served in Minnesota prisons.

All of those transfers happened before ICE began its surge of operations in Minnesota on Dec. 1, 2025, with some even happening years before.

[snip]

[F]ive of those individuals were transferred from prison custody to ICE custody between August and late November. Three others were handed over to ICE custody by DOC during previous presidential administrations.

And one person was offered to be released to ICE custody more than a decade ago and ICE declined, according to the DOC.

[snip]

[O]ne was put on probation for 30 years and was never in DOC custody, and two were only ever in the custody of county jails and never in DOC custody.

One person on the list was convicted of crimes in Ohio, where it is unclear if they had an ICE detainer, which is a request to hold a prisoner for another agency. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction did not respond for a request for information on the matter.

Click through for the list, including the guy released to ICE in 2012 — and share this widely.

Relatedly, Bulwark and a local ABC affiliate reports that the guy DHS claimed they were looking for when they snatched a senior Hmong-American in his underwear was already in prison.

Sometimes, the “worst of the worst” — the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s catchphrase for undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records — are exactly where one would expect: prison.

That was the case for Lue Moua, a 52-year-old Laotian man who DHS officials say they were looking for when they instead arrested an elderly U.S. citizen last weekend.

The images of ChongLy Thao’s arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in St. Paul sparked outrage in Minnesota and across the internet.

Several videos show Thao, a U.S. citizen, led out of his home in freezing weather, wearing nothing but his boxers, sandals and a blanket draped around him. Thao’s family alleges the agents did not present a warrant, nor did they ask Thao for identification. He was released shortly afterward.

In a statement explaining Thao’s detention, ICE officials say they were looking for two undocumented Laotian men with criminal records, Moua and Kongmeng Vang, who they say lived with Thao. They also said Thao matched the description of those men.

Family members said they had no knowledge of either and that Thao lived with his son, daughter-in-law and his young grandson.

So where are these men?

Moua, who has felony convictions dating back to 1992 of fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping, and violating a parental custody order, has been incarcerated at Minnesota Corrections Facility-Faribault since Sept. 4, 2024. His expected release date is Jan. 7, 2027.

It’s all bullshit, all the way down.

Contrast that effort to criminalize dissent in Minnesota and claim five year old boys are scary criminals with the most spectacular faceplant yet in Trump’s attempt to gin up criminal cases to justify Stephen Miller’s dragnet, the acquittal of Juan Espinoza Martinez, who was accused of attempting to pay for a hit on Greg Bovino. Jon Seidel describes how the case collapsed after DOJ conceded they could not prove that Martinez had ties to the Latin Kings.

The original criminal complaint cited a “source of information,” now known to be 44-year-old Adrian Jimenez, who called Espinoza Martinez a “ranking member of the Latin Kings.” A Homeland Security press release also called Espinoza Martinez a “Latin Kings gang member.”

But earlier this month, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Yonan and Assistant U.S. Attorney Minje Shin acknowledged they would not try to prove Espinoza Martinez’s gang membership at trial.

That prompted Lefkow to bar gang evidence from the case. She wrote in an order that, “without evidence showing that [Espinoza Martinez] is a member of the Latin Kings or that the Latin Kings instructed [Espinoza Martinez] to send the alleged murder-for-hire information, the prejudicial nature of such testimony outweighs any probative value.”

In an emergency hearing hours after that ruling last week, Yonan told [Judge Joan] Lefkow that “nearly every piece of evidence in this case touches, in some fashion, on the Latin Kings.”

But the trial still kicked off. The feds called only three witnesses Wednesday, who testified over the course of nearly three hours, combined. Then, in closing arguments Thursday, Yonan told jurors that Espinoza Martinez was “angry” about immigration enforcement last fall in Little Village, where he lived.

“He was fixated, and obsessed, with Gregory Bovino,” Yonan told the jury.

Prosecutors told jurors about a message Espinoza Martinez sent over Snapchat to Jimenez in early October. It followed a picture of Bovino and read, “2k on info cuando lo agarren,” “10k if u take him down,” and “LK … on him.”

Jimenez testified that he understood that to mean “$2,000 when they grab him … $10,000 if you kill him … Latin Kings are on him.”

Martinez’ brother explained one piece of evidence DOJ attempted to use against him: a gun that the brother (who has a concealed carry permit) was seeking for himself. And his attorneys emphasized that there was no evidence of an actual hit.

[Dena] Singer told the jury, “the government has failed to prove their case. You know it.”

No money exchanged hands, she said. No weapons were purchased. Social media, she said, “is riddled with things that aren’t true. … with people sending and sharing things.” There was no evidence that Espinoza Martinez intended for the murder to happen, or that he took a “substantial step,” she said.

Ultimately, live coverage of the trial made it sound like Martinez was passing on the chatter from his neighborhood, not plotting a hit himself (and it probably helped frame the case that the informant was seeking immigration protection himself).

As Seidel notes, this marks the 15th case, of 31, that have collapsed in Chicago since the invasion (I tracked the collapse of all the cases from just one day, September 27, here).

Espinoza Martinez is one of 31 known defendants charged in Chicago’s federal court with non-immigration crimes tied to the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign last fall. With Thursday’s acquittal of Espinoza Martinez, 15 of them have now been cleared.

DOJ has pointed to this case, over and over, to claim there’s a real threat against Stephen Miller’s goons, including in their failed bid to get SCOTUS to bless Miller’s deployment of the National Guard to invade Chicago.

An alleged leader of the Latin Kings gang in Chicago is being prosecuted for placing a bounty of $10,000 on the murder of a Border Patrol Chief. Hott Decl. ¶¶ 24; Parra Decl. ¶ 17. These activities substantially interfere with DHS’s ability to enforce federal immigration laws in the Chicago area. See, e.g., Hott Decl. ¶¶ 43-47, 63. And it was clearly erroneous for the district court to discredit or minimize the unrebutted sworn testimony that those acts of violence and threats of violence in fact occurred.

There may well be; the actual Latin Kings may well be seeking to target Bovino (one of the people arrested for ransacking an FBI vehicle in Minnesota is more credibly claimed to be a Latin King). But if they are, then FBI wouldn’t learn of it because they are doing showboat arrests, not investigations.

Which is one of the many points in this compilation of quotes about how Kash Patel is destroying the FBI. Many of these anecdotes have been told anonymously in past reporting, but they are more powerful laid out like this; set aside some time to read this in full. FBI is not chasing complex crime anymore; they’re creating photo ops that please Donald Trump.

Patel directed the F.B.I., which has no immigration-enforcement authority, to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement in conducting raids and making arrests. Field offices began assigning F.B.I. agents and analysts to work immigration shifts, pulling them away from other priorities like counterterrorism, public corruption and white-collar crime.

John Sullivan, former section chief in the intelligence division: We’d been told that when Trump watched footage or saw a picture of a raid, he got mad that he didn’t see F.B.I. raid jackets.

ICE was saying they wanted their teams to commingle with our teams. Tactically, you don’t commingle units that haven’t trained together. My bosses said, If we work on immigration, we use our teams and our case info. They put together a list of people already in F.B.I. files we had concerns about, so we’re not just targeting people over their citizenship status.

They also had to juggle Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who wanted to ride in our tactical vehicle to do her TV stuff. That makes all the operators uneasy, and it makes them less safe.

And that makes it harder for FBI to do the complex investigations only they can do.

Midwest case agent: I was a grunt agent. I enjoyed trying to take apart large criminal organizations piece by piece.

They relabeled task forces from drugs to immigration and pushed us toward focusing on deportation versus convictions for actual drug offenses.

Unfortunately, what used to be our focus, long-term investigations, are now short-term hits. You hit the guy carrying the bag, not the guy who made the call, because that’s how you drive up the arrest and prosecution numbers. But the guy carrying the bag, you can’t flip anymore, because he’s getting deported.

Because F.B.I. agents are posting up with Homeland Security, citizens think we’re part of ICE, which disrupts other investigations. It used to be that you could sit in front of a house, watching another house, and a lot of the time, people were OK with that. They might help you. Now they’re scared.

All this was unrolling against the background of Jack Smith’s testimony. While there were moments of interest — Smith forcefully explained why Stan Woodward’s attack on Jay Bratt was bullshit, for example — mostly I feel the same way Phil Bump does. Everyone was just performing for the cameras.

There wasn’t much use to the hearing. There’s no actual question to adjudicate. No serious and unbiased observer questions Smith’s objectivity or credibility and no serious observer questions that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, triggering the riot that overwhelmed the building on Jan. 6, 2021. In effect, then, the existence of the hearing necessarily served to reinforce the falsehood that there was a debate in the first place.

Smith summarized the importance of recognizing reality in his opening remarks.

“The rule of law is not self-executing,” he said. That is, the bounds of the law are real only to the extent that they are respected. Smith, better than most, understands what it looks like when that respect evaporates.

The product of the hearing wasn’t a studious consideration of the validity of his work since, as stipulated above, there was nothing serious to mull over. Instead, the primary output of the hearing was probably a tidy stream of social-media-friendly video snippets. Members of the House (nearly all of whom will soon face primaries or reelection) saw an opportunity to make news and most of them tried.

What this means, in effect, is that the hearing not only didn’t resolve any tension between reality and surreality, it simply dug each side in a little deeper.

Perhaps the most effective moment in the hearing was Jared Moskowitz’ soliloquy, which combined a reminder of all the times the very same Republicans who performed Donald Trump’s assault on Smith’s investigation expressed terror during January 6 itself.

The AI slop the White House released yesterday really embodies what Pam Bondi’s DOJ has become.

Bullshit all the way down.

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DHS Assaulting Protesters Because Goons Believe They Are “Vicious, Horrible People”

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215 days before Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good dead after Good’s wife, Becca, engaged in First Amendment protected taunting of Ross, HSI Special Agent Ryan Ribner rushed through a gate at at a Los Angeles garment factory and — along with ICE Officer Carey Crook — assaulted SEIU CA President David Huerta, targeting Huerta rather than several other people who were more directly blocking a van, the purported crime in question.

Huerta argued in a motion to dismiss on First Amendment grounds submitted last week, days before Good’s killing,  that Ribner and Crook did not arrest Huerta for obstructing a Federal officer, which is what got charged after DOJ abandoned a claim that Huerta had conspired to impede officers, much less the assault that they contemplated charging initially, but because Huerta had engaged in that First Amendment protected taunting.

It may well be that Ribner lied when he claimed he didn’t learn Huerta was a powerful union leader until after he assaulted him. Months later, the undercover officer working the crowd, Jeremy Crossen, admitted people in the crowd referred to Huerta as a union “member,” though that didn’t appear in either the texts that got shared with Huerta in discovery — which described the institutional affiliation of others — or a countersurveillance report he wrote weeks after the assault, where he included the research he had done after the fact for everyone but the state president of one of the most powerful unions in the country, the guy who got assaulted.

But if Huerta wasn’t targeted because he’s a powerful Democrat (in Ribner’s report there’s a weird claim that the agent guarding Huerta in the hospital only “feigned” interest when Mayor Karen Bass showed up to Huerta’s hospital room), then the record shows little else beyond speech.

According to videos turned over in discovery, Ribner started predicting Huerta would go to jail based solely off taunting, mostly about their masks.

Mr. Huerta asked them, “How are you keeping us safe?” Agent Ribner’s response was: “You are gonna go to jail. You are not impeding us. You are not impeding us. You’re going to jail, [unintelligible from 0:00:09–00:11] and you’re going to jail.” Id. at 0:00:01–00:12. Mr. Huerta then repeatedly asked him, “What are you doing?” and told him, “I can’t hear you through your fuckin’ mask,” and pointed at Agent Ribner. Id. at 0:00:14–00:17. Agent Ribner can be heard replying: “You’re gonna go to jail, you’re going to jail.” Id. at 0:00:17. For the next few minutes, Mr. Huerta continued to protest in front of the gate, including conversing with Agent Ribner, Officer Crook, and other officers, including, according to agents’ after-the-fact reports, “aggressively”4 asking the officers to identify themselves, stating “What are you going to do… Where’s your fucking badge number… What’s your fucking name?” Ex. B at 9. He also allegedly stated: “You’re not police! You’re not fucking police! You’re not keeping me safe!”

Indeed, Ribner’s own report describes himself predicting that Huerta and others would obstruct them, so he instructed his colleagues to be prepared to make arrests.

Later, HUERTA approached the gate and began yelling and about wanting to see agents’ faces. At times HUERTA was putting his arms through the fence as he yelled, and on at least one occasion he pointed as well. HUERTA stated, “Your boss” [believed to be referring to President Trump] wants things “made in America”. HUERTA went on and said that the things were manufactured inside of Ambiance. HUERTA appeared to be aggressive and angry by his voice, demeanor, and facial features. At some point HUERTA walked up to the gate and asked either about the purpose or legit impact of agents’ duties. SSA Ribner asked HUERTA the purpose of what he was doing [regarding being belligerent with law enforcement]. HUERTA made a comment that he lived in the community and /or cared about the community. SSA Ribner advised HUERTA that “we” [agents] also live in the community. SSA Ribner made the comment to HUERTA in the hopes of obtaining HUERTA’s compliance by advising HUERTA that law enforcement agents are just like him and care about the community and are also part of the demographic of the southern California area.

[snip]

STRONG, and LENEHAN would highly likely block or impede law enforcement vehicles, cause damage to USG property, or commit a battery against agents as they attempt to depart. SSA Ribner informed the DEA agents that if anyone in the crowd impedes, blocks, or physically batters an agent that arrests would be made. [my emphasis]

“He pointed as well”!!! And from that (and perhaps in his view that Huerta was Hispanic? — though several other people present looked more obviously Hispanic), Ribner concluded Huerta was aggressive.

Even though a vehicle had already entered the gate Ribner stood behind without major obstruction, Ribner predicted that a white detainee van that pulled up shortly after the conflict with Huerta occurred, while the gate was still closed, would incite some response. Huerta was on the public sidewalk in front of the gate, though several other people were more directly in front of the van’s path. But when the gate did open, at which point Huerta was to the side of the van, Crook and Ribner rushed Huerta and pushed him down.

That’s when Ribner conducted a brutal arrest, even applying pepper spray to his hand and smothering Huerta’s face with it, because — he claimed after Huerta sought hospital treatment for a head injury — Ribner did not want Huerta to hit his head on the curb he was driving it into.

SSA Ribner decided to deploy a chemical agent (pepper spray) on HUERTA due to HUERTA actively resisting arrest, the angered crowd, and HUERTA’s safety as his head was near a cement curb and SSA Ribner didn’t want him suffering an injury. Due to the concern of over spraying the chemical agent with others nearby (SDDO C and the crowd) or spraying HUERTA directly in the eyes, SSA Ribner decided to spray a small amount of the chemical agent in his hand and place his hand near the upper nose area of HUERTA’s face. HUERTA began to make noises and say that he couldn’t breathe.

Huerta’s head got slammed, and Huerta sought immediate hospital care. In his arrest report — again, written after he learned Huerta had a head injury — Ribner describes feeling no lump on Huerta’s head but said he did so to help Huerta to clean the pepper spray that Ribner’s post hoc reports claim he specifically avoided getting in his eyes out of Huerta’s eyes.

Agent’s Note: During the arrest encounter SSA Ribner never personally observed HUERTA strike his head on the ground. Additionally, when SSA Ribner was decontaminating HUERTA, he placed his hands on the back of HUERTA’s head to help move his head back to place water in his eyes and face area. SSA Ribner never felt any bumps or cuts on the back of HUERTA’s head. Additionally, SSA Ribner didn’t observe any physical bumps or cuts on HUERTA’s head.

As so often has happened after DHS assaults and hurts someone, that night make-believe US Attorney Bill Essayli accused Huerta of assault.

And sometime later, Ribner was in a meeting with Todd Blanche, and Essayli promised Blanche this would go to trial in September or October.

GS Ribner stated he spoke with United States Attorney Bill Essayli about this case and others, such as the Deputy Attorney General (DAG) and Special Agent in Charge Eddie Wang. During the briefing, USA Essayli told the DAG that “this case is going to trial in September or October

It did not go to trial in September or October. Instead, as AUSAs learned more about what happened, they gave up the felony charge.

As you can tell from Ribner’s attempt to build in deniability for the head injury, Ribner obviously tried to reverse-engineer his actions, to provide some excuse for the assault.

As I noted at the time, when Ribner wrote the arrest affidavit back in June, he absurdly claimed that Huerta intimidated him because he banged on the gate.

“Banged on a gate” and “pointed as well”!?!?! No wonder they asked to detain Huerta pretrial.

Ribner’s initial arrest report (the same report where he denied knowledge of a head injury, which he wrote almost two weeks after the arrest) is full of things — including some alleged assaults by protesters, but also including exchanges like the local San Diegans who, days before the Huerta assault, shouted “shame” until ICE abandoned their effort to raid a local restaurant — that Ribner cited to explain why he implanted an undercover agent at the scene to seek out a vast conspiracy Ribner was sure existed.

Mostly, though, I suspect it was the shame.

Huerta was lucky. Because he’s an American citizen, he couldn’t be shunted off to a GEO prison and refused access to his attorneys, which is what make-believe US Attorney Essayli did to prevent Carlitos Ricardo Parias from unpacking the problems with the claims of assault against him. Because — unlike Renee Good — Huerta survived, DOJ had to try to invent a criminal case out of Ribner’s own actions.

But, it appears that by August, after several delays in attempting to indict Huerta, the whole charade started falling apart. Ribner’s report (which, on top of the obvious retconning of his actions, did not match the documented timeline in a few other areas) and the absence of any crime was bad enough. But the witness stories didn’t match, even though there’s good reason to believe they were coordinated after the fact. In addition to claiming he noticed Huerta arrive in real time rather than after Ribner called him out, Crossen described Huerta push back, something not captured in video (and which Crossen may not have been able to see from where he stood). Carey Crook (the guy who first pushed Huerta), falsely claimed Huerta had splayed himself across the van in an X, and similarly invented a claim that Ribner had sprayed Huerta, rather than smother his face in pepper spray. The driver of the van, Brian Gonzales, didn’t remember seeing Huerta in a first interview, but in a follow-up the day before he would start a new permanent job at CBP, he did, though he disputed Crook’s claim that Huerta had splayed across the van grill.

Crossen explained that his video didn’t capture Huerta in front of the van because he started filming just after that. He said he did all this on his personal phone because his government phone wasn’t working that day (in addition to the motion to dismiss, Huerta is also demanding the Cellebrite metadata for the texts extracted from the personal phones both Ribner and Crossen used that day). He admitted that Ribner gave instructions on how to write up his countersurveillance report, but didn’t tell him what to say.

Ribner’s was the last interview from this period when DOJ was stalling the case, a week before a new case opening date possibly focused on Ribner. When asked to describe his actions, as problems with the arrest must have become evident, Ribner explained simply that the peaceful protesters were “vicious, horrible people.”

GS Ribner stated HUERTA and other protesters are “vicious, horrible people”.[In reference to a still photo of video 2774 at 0:03], GS Ribner identified HUERTA. He recalled telling HUERTA, “You better not block the cars”. He stated that HUERTA was not in the way of vehicles or personnel at this point.

Stephen Miller has told all Trump supporters, especially those who work at DHS, that people who support immigration are vicious, horrible people. And he gave them rules of engagement that invited assaults like this, assaults they simply bury in often-failed attempts to criminalize the victim.

It’s surprising it took seven months before someone Stephen Miller has defined as a vicious horrible person got killed.

Timeline

June 6: Arrest

9:00 AM: HSI task force officer (and Inglewood cop) Jeremy Crossen arrives under cover

9:20: Agents start executing search

9:57: Crossen interacts with Asian woman

10:26: Crossen interacts w/Hispanic protestor, claims he is monitoring the police

10:33: Crossen texts Ribner

11:07: Crossen sees pick-up without plates whose Hispanic driver films

11:19: Crossen describes a Hispanic woman with a neck gaiter; his report provides background on a Kids of Immigrants sweatshirt she wears; start time of alleged criminal conduct

11:25: A sedan enters the gate; after an agent instructs those filming it to step away, they do; Crossen texts Ribner,

 

11:31: A Hispanic woman whom Crossen IDs by name shows up, makes phone calls

11:36: Crossen describes a white woman by name, describes that she masked as the crowd grew

11:37: Crossen describes the Hispanic leader of ACCE Action, Council Member Jose Delgado, show up, make calls

11:49: Crossen claims he sees Huerta walk up

11:51: A white woman from Tenants Union starts yelling obscenities

11:53: Ribner instructs Crossen to focus on Huerta

11:54: Huerta and others sit in front of the gate

12:01 PM: Ribner leaves the property and assaults Huerta [note his report timeline goes haywire in here]

12:00-12:09: Crossen texts Ribner

12:15: Crossen claims van arrives (his description describe others who were in front of the van, then says Huerta also was)

12:15: Ribner calls 911 (claiming this is about pepper spray)

12:18: Crossen describes a scrimmage line

12:20-12:40: Discussions about Huerta’s attempt to call his attorney

12:30: LAFD responds; Huerta asks to be brought to the hospital; Crossen describes LAFD arrival this way:

At approximately 12:28 p.m., TFO Crossen observed a Los Angeles City Fire truck with activated emergency lights and loud audible siren, attempting to gain entry to the business, still being blocked by protestors, to render aid for HUERTA, inside the business, who had been exposed to OC Spray, during his arrest.

12:40: Ribner reports arrest to CACD US Attorney office

12:42: Ribner tells Crossen his personal phone is out of battery, asks him to use his government one

12:47: Ribner admits he used pepper spray

1:05: Ribner speaks to USAO again

1:30: Huerta taken to hospital w/agent in car

2:45: Ribner asks Crossen for pictures of Huerta

Unmarked time: Mayor Bass shows up to hospital room; they ask her to leave (and she does)

9:12: Crossen sends last clip from videos to Ribner (the discovery turned over provides nowhere near the “4 hours” or “100 videos” that Crossen told Ribner, five hours earlier, that he had taken (though the defense did not include all the texts in their exhibit)

9:36: Ribner obtains warrant for Huerta’s phone

10:30: Huerta attorney turns over the phone

June 8: Huerta charged with felony conspiracy

June 9: Case opened

June 17: Date created for one photo provided in discovery

June 19: Initial incident report; Ribner would later (in his September 10 interview) admit he wrote the report from memory and simply did not “recall that he told HUERTA, ‘You are not impeding’. He does not know why he did not include that statement in his report and agrees that his statement could sound exculpatory.”

June 23: Countersurveillance report from Crossen

July 2: Second set of discovery

July 17: Third set of discovery

July 28: Fourth set of discovery (including agent texts)

August 20: USAO interviews Brian Gonzalez, who drove the van allegedly blocked

August 27: USAO interviews Carey Crook; he told AUSAs that, contrary to Ribner’s claim, Huerta did not assault him

August 27: USAO interviews Crossen

September 9: USAO reinterviews Gonzalez; he says he does not remember Huerta straddling the van, as Crooks claimed

September 10: USAO interviews Ribner

September 11: Gonzalez starts at a new job at CBP

September 17: Later case opening date, possibly focusing on the lying agents

October 17: Huerta charged with misdemeanor

November 5: Huerta’s attorneys ask AUSA to identify the obstructive conduct

December 19: AUSA finally provides vague description of conduct

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“The Truth Is for Chumps:” Prepare for the Hunger Games

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As you read the 100 page report about what a shitshow the FBI is under Kash Patel, keep the following in mind.

First, this report is an attack on Kash from the right, complaining among other things, that he hasn’t eradicated “Trump Derangement Syndrome” from the FBI and that Fox doesn’t play in FBI break rooms, while applauding him for eliminating DEI.

It was shared first with Miranda Devine, whose skillset is hit jobs, not government analysis.

It was shared as a Sribd.

It was sent to Chuck Grassley and Jim Jordan, but not their counterparts Dick Durbin and Jamie Raskin.

Yes, the report’s most damning anecdote describes that Kash delayed a presser in theTyler Robinson case until he could get a ladies’ sized jacket with the particular SWAG he wanted. Yes, it describes multiple sources quoting Dan Bongino saying, “the truth is for chumps.”

There’s even the very serious and persistent concern that the FBI has neglected its counterintelligence and counterterrorism mission (the report doesn’t mention rampant public corruption).

Perhaps the most telling detail, though, is there’s no mention of Andrew Bailey, ostensibly co-Deputy with Dan Bongino.

You see, in just two weeks, Bailey will be eligible to run the FBI or even DOJ without undergoing confirmation. And so you should expect that sometime after that, someone will be replaced.

Kash has long been the leading candidate to be replaced. But there’s likely to be a bit of a Hunger Games competition in the weeks ahead as various contestants attempt to keep their high flying planes.

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Who Needs Intelligence Sharing?

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On January 27th, an AP story appeared on the news website Military.com with the headline “Intelligence Sharing by the US and Its Allies Has Saved Lives. Trump Could Test Those Ties.” On the surface, it reads like one of those analysis pieces that come out when the White House changes from one party to the next, with the added twist of knowing what the first Trump administration was like.

The Associated Press spoke with 18 current and former senior European and U.S. officials who worked in NATO, defense, diplomacy or intelligence. Many raised questions and concerns about Trump’s past relationship with America’s spies and their ability to share information at a time of heightened terror threats and signs of greater cooperation between U.S. adversaries.

The importance of trust

The U.S. and its allies routinely share top-secret information, be it about potential terror threats, Chinese cyberattacks or Russian troop movements. America’s closest intelligence partners are New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain, and it often shares with other nations or sometimes even adversaries when lives are at stake.

[snip]

Cooperation particularly between the U.S. and the U.K. is “strong and robust enough to withstand some turbulence at the political level,” said Lord Peter Ricketts, former U.K. national security adviser and current chair of the European Affairs Committee of the upper chamber of the British Parliament.

However, any strong intelligence relationship is underpinned by trust, and what if “trust isn’t there?” Ricketts said.

Ricketts’ question is no longer a hypothetical. This is the reality faced by intelligence services who in the past have been friendly with the US intelligence community. The AP put out their story on January 27th, and that seems like years ago. Today this reads like a warning.

The takeover of USAID that has played out this past week is *not* just a battle over who runs offices in DC. The bulk of USAID’s staff work overseas, alongside their local partners. When phone calls from these overseas missions back to DC go unanswered, and when US staffers abroad are told to stand down, all those local partners are going to get very, very nervous, and not just because their paychecks stop. They’re going to talk to others in their government, trying to find out what it going on. At the same time, they will be providing input (either directly or indirectly) to their own country’s intelligence service, as their spooks add it to whatever they are learning from elsewhere. In the US, folks worry about those who are losing their jobs; overseas, these fights will result in people dying, like those who don’t get the clean water, medical care, or disease prevention measures like malaria nets. Those other countries are watching with horror the stories of Musk’s minions breaking into sensitive databases, over the objections of trusted career people, and wonder what of their own information is now in the hands of a privateer, and if the same this is (or will be) going on at the CIA, DIA, and other US intelligence agencies.

I guarantee you that all these other countries are watching the battle over USAID much more carefully than folks in the US.

Or look at the targeting of General Mark Milley, widely respected by his counterparts among our allies and within their intelligence services. OK, Biden pardoned him to protect him, but Trump withdrew his security clearance, and also his personal security detail. On January 29th, newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched a process to investigate Milley, seeking to strip him of at least one star, cut his retirement pay, and punish him further. Given what the US attorney for DC is doing by going after DOJ attorneys for investigating the rather noticeable break-in of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, it’s not hard to imagine that Hegseth’s henchmen will be rather thorough in their work and ruthlessly push aside anyone who gets in their way.

Now imagine you are a member of a foreign intelligence service — perhaps the head, or perhaps a mid-level staffer whose specialty is the US. You see the USAID invasion. You see the public decapitation of the FBI. You see the targeting of career DOJ officials. You see Hegseth paint a target on the back of Milley (and others, like John Bolton and John Brennan). You see all this, much of it in the bright light of public reporting. You hear more from your contacts, who paint more detailed pictures of these purges and fights. You see all this, and you ask yourself two questions, over and over again.

1) Are the things we shared with the US intelligence community in the past safe from being revealed in public, and thus causing us harm?
2) Can we trust the US intelligence community with information we might share with them in the future?

Given what we’ve seen over the last week, the answers to these questions are becoming more and more clear: 1) no and 2) no.

I haven’t talked to those “18 current and former senior European and U.S. officials who worked in NATO, defense, diplomacy or intelligence” to whom the AP spoke. The AP headline was hypothetical – “Trump could test those ties” – but now on February 3rd, it’s real. Trump has been f’ing around with those intelligence service ties, and he’s about to find out what happens.

The short answer is becoming clear, as Trump’s vision of America First becomes America Alone.

 

 

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You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law

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The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.

Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.

Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.

With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.

And it won’t work.

Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden

Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.

Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted.

But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.

While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media.92 The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards93—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.

Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.

Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.

More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.

Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.

That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.

There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole

Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.

Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.

Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.

Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.

Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.

There are legal privileges to protect

One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking openly of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.

To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.

Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.

“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”

Plus, the opinion via which Scott Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.

The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.

If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.

It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law

There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.

Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.

Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.

Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.

Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.

Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.

Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.

Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.

51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.

John Bolton would beg to differ with you.

Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.

Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.

But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.

What this moment requires is not a magical pony, some gimmick that will protect the strongest targets while ceding moral high ground, but a return to the work of actually defending rule of law day to day, especially those who are easy to isolate or demonize. This moment also requires actual journalism. I shouldn’t be the only one who cares about Hunter Biden’s due process rights more than his ickiness.

And yes, I realize that means that people will continue to get hurt, just as they’ve been getting hurt going back to 2017. Trust me, like many other people, I’m doing my own risk mitigation for the days ahead.

Pardoning the highest profile likely current targets of Trump capitulates to Trump’s narrative that there is no rule of law, there’s just one party against another. Instead defending the conduct of the people Trump targets takes a lot more work, a lot more courage. But without that work, Trump has won the fight.

Mark Milley’s defense of the Constitution

For most of the targets in question, the story you’d tell would be precisely the one Trump wants you to tell. If you pardon Cheney and Schiff because they investigated Trump, for example, you condone his narrative that that’s a crime.

It’s not.

If you pardon Fauci because he made difficult health insurance according to the best — albeit imperfect — science, you condone the pack of cranks Trump plans to install in every health-related agency.

But Mark Milley is different.

He’s different because the reason why Republicans would target him is that he upheld the Constitution, rather than Trump.

He’s different because he did something crucial — reaching out to his counterparts overseas to deescalate threats of nuclear catastrophe. Republicans want to spin that vital work as treason.

He’s different because a prosecution of Milley will be used as an excuse to deprofessionalize the military officer corps.

And he’s different because Trump might try to target Milley via military justice or might seek penalties not on the table for his other targets.

I don’t know if Milley wants that protection or if, like Schiff, he would prefer to defend his own actions. That’s his business.

The point though is nothing Biden can do will eliminate the risk that Trump will keep doing what he has been doing for eight years. Someone or someones will be that target, and imagining we can make that risk go away, it’ll only lead people to look away again instead of giving the attention the focus that it has lacked.

If we don’t find the solution to that problem, if we seek instead a quick fix, then it’ll get continually harder to defend rule of law as Trump stacks the courts and guts the guardrails at DOJ.

You can’t pardon your way out of Trump’s attack on rule of law. It’s going to take much harder work than that.

Update: Ian Millhiser makes the same argument about the inefficacy of pardons, noting as well that pardons can’t prevent lawsuits or state retribution.

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NYT Keeps Downplaying Trump’s Past Retribution Tour

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Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan keep teaming up to write the same story over and over: A second Trump term is going to be bad … really bad.

Just some of these stories, in reverse order from Tuesday’s latest installment, are:

There are several aspects to these stories: a bid to eliminate civil service protections, a personalization of power, and the elevation of people who proved willing to abuse power in his first term: Russel Vought (who helped obstruct the Ukraine investigation), Stephen Miller, and Johnny McEntee (who even before January 6 was making a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act a litmus test for hiring at DOD), and Jeffrey Clark.

The series, thus far, skirts the language of authoritarianism and fascism.

At the core of the stories is that Trump is going to use a second term for retribution, to which the June 15 article is dedicated.

When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”

These stories admit that Trump did some of this in his first term. But they describe a process of retribution by the guy who got elected — with abundant assistance from Maggie Haberman — on a platform of “Lock her up!,” who breached the norm of judicial independence 24 days into office when he asked Jim Comey to “let this” Mike Flynn “thing go,” as something that took a while to “ramp up.”

In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

Yet even though Savage did some important reporting on some of this (reporting that was counterbalanced by Maggie’s central role in helping Trump obstruct criminal investigations), these pieces always vastly understate how much politicization Trump pulled off in his first term, and never describe how that politicization continues at the hands of people like Jim Jordan.

In the spring of 2018, Mr. Trump told his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and James B. Comey Jr., the former head of the F.B.I. Mr. McGahn rebuffed him, saying the president had no authority to order an investigation, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

Later in 2018, Mr. Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into officials involved in the Russia investigation. The following year, Attorney General William P. Barr indeed assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, John Durham, to investigate the investigators — styling it as an administrative review because there was no factual predicate to open a formal criminal investigation.

Mr. Trump also said in 2018 and 2019 that John F. Kerry, the Obama-era secretary of state, should be prosecuted for illegally interfering with American diplomacy by seeking to preserve a nuclear accord with Iran. Geoffrey S. Berman, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan whom Mr. Trump fired in 2020, later wrote in his memoir that the Trump Justice Department pressured him to find a way to charge Mr. Kerry, but he closed the investigation after about a year without bringing any charges.

And as the 2020 election neared, Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham to file charges against high-level former officials even though the prosecutor had not found a factual basis to justify any. In his own memoir, Mr. Barr wrote that the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” eroded their relationship even before Mr. Barr refused Mr. Trump’s baseless demand that he say the 2020 election had been corrupt.

Where Mr. Trump’s first-term efforts were scattered and haphazard, key allies — including Jeffrey B. Clark, a former Justice Department official who helped Mr. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election — have been developing a blueprint to make the department in any second Trump term more systematically subject to direct White House control.

This effort was in no way haphazard!!! Most FBI personnel involved in the Russian investigation, from Jim Comey down to line analysts, had their careers systematically ruined, with Peter Strzok (who, the actual record of the Russian investigation shows, repeatedly took steps to protect Trump and Mike Flynn, even if he disliked Trump) offered up as an example of what will happen to people who don’t meekly just accept their punishment or, better yet, retreat to the private sector. The exceptions were the cyber guys who completely bolloxed the Alfa Bank investigation and people like Bill Barnett, who misrepresented the steps he himself took to provide “proof” of corruption on the Mueller investigation. That precedent has been sustained as right wingers take out other FBI agents deemed insufficiently loyal, like Tim Thibault, who personally opened an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016 but who was targeted last year because in 2020 he didn’t mainline disinformation about Hunter Biden.

Yes, Bill Barr ordered Geoffrey Berman to investigate John Kerry. But he also set up a complex, systematic structure to halt  any investigation into Rudy Giuliani so the President’s lawyer could get dirt from Russian spies, feed it to Scott Brady, who would then push that information into the investigations of Hunter Biden and others. When Berman and Jessie Liu refused to break (after a good deal of bending to Barr’s will), he fired them both.

Barr didn’t just pressure John Durham to prosecute high-level people: He skipped, hand-in-hand, with Durham as they used Russian intelligence to fabricate an attack on Hillary Clinton, the organizing logic of an investigation that swept up private sector people and who had the temerity to research Donald Trump or — worse!! — to help Hillary recover from a hack-and-leak. The effort even took out academic researchers who were simply trying to keep the US safe from Russian hacking. Trump did get DOJ to investigate Hillary, with investigations lasting the entirety of his presidency, and that investigation included precisely the kind of fabricated evidence and coached testimony that NYT imagines is a hypothetical left for Trump’s second term.

To the extent these stories talk about Trump’s pardons, they do so prospectively. There’s no discussion of how the pardons of Mike Flynn and Roger Stone rival any of the most corrupt in US history, but were necessary to prevent DOJ from developing proof that Trump conspired with Russia.

These articles don’t describe how Congress has served as a wing of this politicization, from the leaks to Mike Flynn in 2018 about how to undermine his own investigation to sham hearings — like the one with George Papadopoulos unencumbered by the documents that would have provide evidence of “collusion,” in which he spewed out conspiracy theories that Bill Barr and John Durham quickly got on a plane to chase. These articles don’t describe how the current unrelenting attempt to manufacture an impeachment out of the detritus of Hunter Biden’s life could not have happened if Bill Barr hadn’t made very systematic attempts to enable Trump’s retribution tour in 2020.

And these articles don’t describe the violent threats that have become routine for anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. The threats Trump deployed against Lisa Page and Marie Yovanovitch — “she’s going to go through some things” — exist on an unrelenting continuum as the threats against Ruby Freeman and Lesley Wolf and Fani Willis and Don Bacon’s wife.

Yes, it’s important to warn about what Trump plans to do with a second term. But calling Trump’s past retribution “haphazard” is a journalistic cop-out, a way to avoid admitting that we don’t yet fully understand how systematic Trump’s past retribution was or — worse — don’t want to come to grips with our own central role in it.

For a warning to be effective, we have to show the human costs of all the past retribution — the thousands of Jan6ers who had their lives ruined, the significant degradation in US national security, the fear, especially the fear among Republicans — costs that no one, no matter how loyal, will ultimately escape.

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How Many Podunk Local DAs Ought to Arrogate Themselves Federal Election Police?

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For anybody that has read me here, or followed me on Twitter, you know I have maintained from the start that Fani Willis, and her “investigation” is a complete joke.

Have also maintained the Trump conspiracy actions in Arizona were as bad as Georgia, if not worse.

Apparently the national media has caught on to what informed Arizonans have known from the start.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey was hit up by Trump (so was the then Secretary of State).

So, why is the ladder climbing Fani Willis the only local DA trying to enforce federal election law, much less her completely bogus RICO posit?

There are now people in Arizona clamoring for this horse manure. Thanks to Fani Willis and her self serving showboating garbage.

Fulton County, where Fani Willis is the local DA, has approximately 1.1 million county residents. Maricopa County, where all significant acts in AZ occurred, has nearly 5 million.

So, should every pissant local county prosecutor arrogate upon themselves to control and charge federal election crimes?

No. Nor should local AGs. Leave this to the Feds.

Things are getting just absurd.

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On Judge Aileen M. Cannon

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The New York Times is out with a long, interesting, piece on SDFL Judge Aileen M. Cannon by Schmidt and Savage. I won’t call it a hit piece, but it is extremely negatively framed, and in some regards disingenuously so. For a news article, there is no way not to view it as a position piece.

“Aileen M. Cannon, the Federal District Court judge assigned to preside over former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, has scant experience running criminal trials, calling into question her readiness to handle what is likely to be an extraordinarily complex and high-profile courtroom clash.

Judge Cannon, 42, has been on the bench since November 2020, when Mr. Trump gave her a lifetime appointment shortly after he lost re-election. She had not previously served as any kind of judge, and because about 98 percent of federal criminal cases are resolved with plea deals, she has had only a limited opportunity to learn how to preside over a trial.”

That is the opening salvo. Okay, Cannon is a newish federal judge. So what? You take your federal judges as you get them, not as you want them. Criminal trials are not the only trials federal judges do, they also do civil trials. And complicated criminal hearings, including evidentiary ones, pre-trial that most often lead to pleas. The NYT did not delve into that, to any extent it may exist. The fact Cannon has only four criminal jury trials is not shocking in the least. Importuning that she is incompetent because of that is lame.

In Arizona state courts, I have Rule 10 right to notice a change of judge as a right within 10 days of arraignment or assignment of judicial officer.

There is no such availability in federal court. You get what you get. TV lawyer gadabouts like Norm Eisen are shouting that Cannon MUST recuse, and if not Smith must affirmatively move for her disqualification. Based on a ruling in a short civil matter involving Trump previously. Granted her action in that matter was dubious, to be overly kind. But even the hideous 11th Circuit slapped that down, and she complied with the edict. This is a non-starter, and Smith would be an idiot to attempt it. Attempt that and lose, and you almost certainly would, now you really have a problem.

Would Cannon self recuse? There is no evidence of that to date. My friend Scott Greenfield thinks she should for the sake of her career, while acknowledging there is little to no chance of forcing her off like windbags like Eisen clamor for.

I, which rarely happens, disagree with Scott. It would torpedo her career and be a tacit admission she is a right wing nut job incapable of presiding over any partisan issues. That would not be a good look, does not look like a career enhancer in a jurisdiction like SDFL to me.

Back to the NYT article. It reports:

“But the chances appeared low. Under the Southern District of Florida’s practices, a computer in the clerk’s office assigns new cases randomly among judges who sit in the division where the matter arose or a neighboring one — even if the matter relates to a previous case. Nevertheless, Judge Cannon got it.

That is completely contrary to the facts as I understand them. As I have related in comments previously, anybody who took the job seriously enough to check with the clerk’s office, and current status of the SDFL bench could have seen this coming. Not just as a freak chance, but arguably a likelihood. Smith chose to put his eggs in that basket, and did so.

Another portion of the report literally made me roll out of bed and laugh:

“At the same time, they said, she is demonstrably inexperienced and can bristle when her actions are questioned or unexpected issues arise. The lawyers declined to speak publicly because they did not want to be identified criticizing a judge who has a lifetime appointment and before whom they will likely appear again.”

Seriously?? That describes pretty much EVERY federal judge I have been in front of, irrespective of how long they have been on the bench. This is completely silly land.

Here is another one:

“The Trump case is likely to raise myriad complexities that would be challenging for any judge — let alone one who will be essentially learning on the job.

There are expected to be fights, for example, over how classified information can be used as evidence under the Classified Information Procedures Act, a national security law that Judge Cannon has apparently never dealt with before.”

Seriously? There are a LOT of very experienced federal District judges that have never had to meaningfully deal with CIPA at trial. And most of the ones that have are in DC or EDVA. Again Smith chose this locus, he, and we, will have to live with it. So too should the NYT instead of posting up a somewhat dubious and negative filled report.

The Times report goes on to belittle Cannon’s background and qualification to even serve. But Cannon is nowhere near as bad as many of Trump’s appointments. She is a graduate of Duke and then the University of Michigan Law School. She worked for years at Gibson Dunn and as an AUSA. She is fully qualified, even if you think she should not have been nominated. And the NYT citing “ABA” ratings as still being relevant in any regard seems quaint, at best.

Read the NYT article. I am sure it will inflame your passions. But this is federal court, and the law, where not your passions control things. Am I warm and fuzzy about Judge Aileen M. Cannon? No, not whatsoever, but that is irrelevant. Here is where the issue is, for better or worse. Unless Cannon self recuses, that is where it shall remain.

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Jack Smith Knows his Justice Robert Jackson

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Justice Robert H. Jackson, lead US prosecutor at Nuremberg

Much is being made, rightly, of the current historical moment: a former US president has been indicted in federal court. Trump and his supporters are trying to position this investigation and indictment as political revenge. Sadly for them, Special Counsel Jack Smith appears to understand the best lessons to come out of the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leadership after World War II.

The US legal delegation at Nuremberg was led by US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. In his opening statement at the first trial, he acknowledged that the victors in the war were in charge of the trial.

Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the first World War, we learned the futility of the latter course.

But how does a prosecution by the victors avoid being accused of running a kangaroo court? Again, from Justice Jackson:

We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers, and these defendants had their share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.

[UPDATE: I just found video of Jackson’s opening remarks. The “Unfortunately . . .” quote above is at the 10:15 mark, and “We will not ask you . . .” quote is at 12:55.]

As I read the indictment in the matter of the United States v. Donald J. Trump, Jackson’s words kept echoing in my head.

Books and records . . .

Vanity and photographs . . .

“You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices . . .”

What Marcy labeled (properly!) as “Hillary’s Revenge” is a collection of Trump’s own words, and Trump can be seen and heard saying them in numerous video clips all over the internet. The same is true of “Brennan’s Revenge”.

It should be no surprise to anyone that the Trump indictment echoes Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg. Before he was named as the Special Counsel in this matter, Jack Smith had spent several years working at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. From his wiki:

From 2008 to 2010, Smith worked as Investigation Coordinator for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.[11][10] In that position, he oversaw cases against government officials and militia members accused of war crimes and genocide.[3][9] 

[snip]

On May 7, 2018, Smith was named to a four-year term as chief prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, investigating war crimes committed in the Kosovo War,[8][9][13] including the case of Salih Mustafa.[16] He took up the post on September 11, 2018, and was appointed to a second term on May 8, 2022.[8]

You don’t hold positions like these without studying the Nuremberg Trials and learning their lessons.

In Jackson’s opening speech to the Nuremberg Tribunal, at the end of his introductory remarks and before he pivots into the specific discussion of the case at hand, he offered these words to the Tribunal:

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.

“Men of station and rank . . .”

“men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools . . .”

“reach the planners and designers, inciters and leaders . . .”

Marcy called the Trump indictment a “tactical nuke” and she explored how it ramps up pressure on Walt Nauta to come clean. But more than that, I see it as Jack Smith channeling his inner Justice Jackson.

Yes, this is the DOJ of a political victor charging a political loser with serious crimes, but Smith learned from Jackson how that can be done with integrity. Yes, this is the first time a former US president has been charged with serious crimes, but Smith learned from Jackson that this must be done when circumstances warrant, or the nation and the world will pay a price for failing to seek justice.

Jack Smith knows his Justice Robert Jackson. Now he’s begun teaching Team Trump what’s he learned, and something tells me they aren’t going to like it at all.

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Where Is The Proud Boys Verdict?

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Friday has come and gone without a jury verdict in the Proud Boys case in front of Tim Kelly in DC District Court.

Couple of days ago, somebody asked me when I expected a verdict. That is fools’ play, but I said probably Friday because juries want to get on with their lives, and not come back, yet again, the next week.

Apparently I got that all wrong. Go figure.

So why did the PB jury blow past an obvious chance to be done? I do not know that either, but there is a fair chance it is not about ultimate guilt or innocence, but about multiple defendants and the complexity of the seditious conspiracy charge so many people (even here) have long clamored for.

Sometimes you get what you asked for, and that may be the case here. Counts, charges and jury instructions matter. I hope that is not the holdup here, but very much fear it could be. And that is what happens when you do not keep things narrow and strong.

We shall see.

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