Banging on a Gate: Pam Bondi Found a Cyber Investigator Who Doesn’t Check Phone Logs!

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Less than three weeks ago, Pam Bondi’s DOJ got admonished by a Magistrate Judge for charging first, investigating latter.

When dismissing Ras Baraka’s charges on May 21, Magistrate Judge André Espinosa scolded the AUSA present — and by proxy, DOJ — for arresting Newark’s Mayor before doing basic investigation.

The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office. An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.

It’s precisely that commitment to rigorous 19 investigation and thoughtful prosecution that has 20 characterized the distinguished history of your Office, Mr. Demanovich, particularly over the last two decades. The bench and the bar have witnessed in that period, the diligence and care demonstrated by prior U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, whose leadership has consistently upheld the highest standards of prosecutorial ethics and professionalism. Their legacy is one of careful deliberate action where charges were brought only after exhaustive evidence gathering and a thorough consideration of all facts That bedrock principle, consistently honored by your predecessors, is the foundation upon which the credibility and effectiveness of your Office rests.

So let this incident serve as an inflection point and a reminder to uphold your solemn oath to the people of this District and to your client, Justice itself, and ensure that every charge brought is the product of rigorous investigation and earned confidence in its merit mirroring the exemplary conduct that has long defined your Office.

The apparent rush in this case culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges suggests failure to adequately investigate to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power Your Office must operate with higher standard than that.

But just 18 days later, Pam Bondi’s DOJ charged another prominent Democrat — this time, SEIU CA President David Huerta — via complaint, without first doing basic investigation. The complaint, which was released before Huerta’s initial appearance yesterday, charges Huerta with one count of conspiring to impede an officer, a felony (h/t to Meghann Cuniff for releasing the complaint).

The incident occurred outside of this fast fashion factory, where officers were conducting a search.

As Bondi’s DOJ did with Ras Baraka (the charges that were dismissed) and LaMonica McIver (she has a hearing tomorrow), ICE team members physically grappled with their target, and then arrested them for the interaction. In this case, agents picked up Heurta and knocked him over, knocking his head into a curb and wrenching what he said was a bad shoulder in the process of cuffing him. He went to the hospital for treatment during his weekend detention.

There are two elements that have to be proven to convict Huerta of this felony: first, that the defendant used force, intimidation, or threats to induce a US official to stop doing his job. When this same charge was used against January 6 militias, prosecutors relied on actual assaults of cops, threats to spray them, military formation and kit, and threats to assassinate members of Congress. All of it threatened physical violence and even death.

The closest such threat to these guys was someone — no tie to Huerta is alleged — who told officers to shoot themselves.

As a crowd gathered outside of the vehicular gate, individuals in the crowd began screaming expletives at law enforcement officers through the gate in an attempt to intimidate them. For example, one individual yelled “I want you to kill yourself! Go home and drink a lot of vodka and shoot yourself with your own god damn revolver!”

As to Huerta specifically, the affiant of this complaint claimed that Huerta’s banging on the gate to the facility was an “attempt to intimidate us,” and pointed to Huerta’s repeated taunts about his mask and claimed that this was necessarily an attempt to dox and intimidate the officers “in the future.”

I told HUERTA that if he continued to block the gate, he would be arrested. HUERTA replied “I can’t hear you through your fucking mask.” Others in the crowd repeatedly asked me and other law enforcement officers to take our masks off and attempted to film our faces and badges in an apparent attempt to intimidate us. Based on my training and experience, I know that protestors often do this so that they can publish identifying information about law enforcement officers online.1 That way, others can harass or threaten the law enforcement officers in the future.

The affiant’s name is redacted in several places in the affidavit, but not in the section where he introduces his background. He doxed himself, while citing the imagined threat of doxing as the intimidation necessary to sustain these charges.

But it’s the conspiracy part of this that is particularly nutty. Prosecutors need to show that Huerta entered into an agreement with at least one other person to intimidate an ICE team to stop them from doing their job.

As a threshold matter, the complaint presents no evidence that Huerta or anyone else knew what the law enforcement officers were doing — executing a judicial search warrant rather than conducting a raid based on an administrative warrant. That may matter to proving intent.

More importantly, the affiant just points to person after person and says, well maybe that indicates a conspiracy.

A woman provided details of the law enforcement presence into her phone. Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Protestors who arrived at the site — video-taped by an undercover officer!! — were communicating with each other. Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Huerta was “apparently typing text into his digital device while present at the protest.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Huerta lives nine miles away from the garment factory, so had to have learned of ICE activity from someone “coordinating a protest at this location.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Someone — no tie to Huerta is alleged, and there’s no indication he was arrested — attempted to padlock the gate. Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Huerta said, “What are you going to do, you can’t arrest us all,” which the affiant presents as proof that “he and the others had planned in advance of arrival to disrupt the operation.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Nowhere does the affiant even allege that Huerta and the others entered into a conspiracy to intimidate the beleaguered ICE officers standing behind a 7-foot steel fence, which protestors didn’t try to breach when it opened, remaining all the time on a public sidewalk. Rather, he alleges a conspiracy to disrupt what the protesters might have thought was an ICE raid, meaning any attempt to provide proof of a conspiracy to impede officers by intimidating or threatening them is almost nonexistent. And he repeatedly calls this a protest, even while describing Huerta using the language of protests and pickets.

One of the nuttiest parts of this is that the affiant — the guy who cited the threat of doxing as proof of intimidation and then doxed himself — is a senior HSI Agent pulled off his normal duty conducting cyber financial investigations, the kind of thing that normally targets international crypto-facilitated crimes.

I am a Supervisory Special Agent (“SSA”) with the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”). I currently supervise the Cyber Financial investigations group at the HSI Los Angeles office.

The bread and butter of cyber investigations are digital tracks: cell phone, social media, and financial records.

The FBI collected reams and reams of such things before charging the aforementioned 18 USC 372 conspiracies against Jan6 militias. There were Signal and Telegram chats, Parler posts, saved communications from walkie-talkie chats during the riot, reported conversations from a number of cooperating witnesses, on top of the actual assaults of cops and weapons and direct threats.

And this guy, whose forté is to collect such things … hasn’t. He refers to Huerta’s digital device twice, but doesn’t say whether he tried to exploit it. He refers to social media posts (even while assuming the woman who first reported from the scene was using a videoconference app rather than just posting to TikTok or something), but he doesn’t cite a single post. He doesn’t even have phone records — available via subpoena even on a weekend — to identify with whom, if any, of the other protestors Huerta was really communicating.

Ryan Ribner, who wouldn’t have gotten where he was in his day job without highly developed skills at collecting and analyzing digital tracks, hasn’t (claimed to have) done any of that.

Another instance of charge first, investigate later.

There are several indications that may be the point.

First, there’s that undercover officer, who was filming the entire time but apparently didn’t produce a single video that could substantiate a conspiracy. This protest was miniscule. Why was there an undercover officer present at all? Did it have everything to do with Huerta’s presence (the undercover, as described, seemed focused on Huerta)?

Our trusty cyber expert also suggests that the van entering the gate of the facility — the predicate for making Huerta move and therefore the predicate to tackling him, injuring him, and then arresting him — may not, after all, be the only entrance. He describes that “as far as I was aware,” it was.

As far as I was aware, this gate was the only location through which vehicles could enter or exit the premises.

I wonder whether his awareness has changed over the weekend.

As this goes forward, it’s likely that our intrepid cyber investigator will actually subpoena some phone records, do the kind of thing he has been doing for over a decade. It’s likely he will then try to substantiate a conspiracy for which he has presented no more than speculation. Given his conflation of what he himself calls a protest and the intimidation and physical force contemplated in 18 USC 372, given the calls — including from Trump — to substantiate some organized background behind the larger protests in a city of 10 million, he may well imagine a conspiracy in SEIU’s organized protests.

Protests are what unions do, and SEIU is an enormously important union with close ties to the Democratic party. Will official and private communications among SEIU personnel planning protests look like plans for protests? Yes, of course. And DOJ will claim that banging on a gate is so intimidating to a bunch of armed law enforcement officers standing behind it that those plans for protests amount to a felony.

Pam Bondi’s DOJ first assaulted and injured, then charged, a very important labor leader with a conspiracy charge the evidence for which they didn’t even bother to look for.

Yet.

And that seems to be the point.

Update: The crack staff in Los Angeles’ US Attorney’s Office finally docketed the case. They asked for Huerta to be detained (which, I guess, is how they got a judge to impose a $50K bond)!

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How Can Pete Hegseth Invade California without a Babysitter?

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Back when Whiskey Pete Hegseth had trusted advisors by his side, he launched an ill-considered escalation against the Houthis based on Stephen Miller’s vibes about Trump’s views. He shared probably-classified details, in advance, about the attack on Signal. According to WSJ, he “drew resources from efforts in Asia to deter China and pushed back maintenance schedules for carriers.” And, after several months and two F/A-18s later, he packed up, having achieved nothing, and went home.

Since then, he fired those trusted advisors. According to the Guardian, the process that led to their firing appears to have been driven by rumor spread by a guy taking them out.

The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.

The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.

But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation.

[snip]

In particular, one Trump adviser recently told Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell – or any of the fired aides – had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.

[snip]

Still, the Trump advisers who reeled from the claim also eventually told Hegseth they were concerned by the optics of Parlatore, who had been close to the former chief of staff Kasper, running an investigation that targeted Kasper’s perceived enemies in the office.

Curiously, Guardian’s Hugo Lowell neglects to mention that Tim Parlatore was a Trump defense attorney — indeed, he vouched that Trump wasn’t hoarding any more classified documents — until he blabbed his mouth one day.

So that was then: Hegseth took action. Bungled that action. Fired the competent people around him.

This is now: Donald Trump just gave Whiskey Pete open-ended authority to attack US cities, in the name of protecting ICE deployments.

I hereby call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations. Further, I direct and delegate actions as necessary for the Secretary of Defense to coordinate with the Governors of the States and the National Guard Bureau in identifying and ordering into Federal service the appropriate members and units of the National Guard under this authority. The members and units of the National Guard called into Federal service shall be at least 2,000 National Guard personnel and the duration of duty shall be for 60 days or at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense. In addition, the Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.

After usurping control of the California National Guard, Hegseth is also prepping a Marine deployment, just in case.

Oh, and he’s also engaged in a whole bunch of dick-wagging on Xitter, on his personal account (he hasn’t posted on his official account since Friday, making me wonder whether he lost the password or the password holder to that account).

Again, he’s doing all that without the kind of trusted advisors he had when he bolloxed the Yemen attack.

In fact, NBC describes that as he is directing an attack on a US city, the White House is attempting, but failing, to find him some babysitters.

The White House is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a series of missteps that have shaken confidence in his leadership, but it has so far found no suitable takers, according to four current and former administration officials and a Republican congressional aide.

Top Defense Department jobs, including the defense secretary’s chief of staff, are normally considered prestigious and typically attract multiple qualified candidates. But at least three people have already turned down potential roles under Hegseth, according to a former U.S. official, the defense official and a person familiar with the matter.

[snip]

Vance and Wiles have been searching for candidates who could support Hegseth ever since, according to three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official. So far, though, the administration has not had much luck identifying people who are either willing to work for Hegseth or who fit the bill politically. And the White House has rejected some people Hegseth wants to hire, while Hegseth has rejected some of the White House’s candidates.

He is failing to do the day job — like completing a budget (though Kash Patel also failed to get his budget done on time) — of the Secretary of Defense and is primarily supported by an aide the White House doesn’t trust.

Hegseth now leans heavily on a former military aide, Ricky Buria, who retired from the military in April hoping he could serve as Hegseth’s chief of staff, a civilian position. But White House and Pentagon officials view Buria as a political novice who had reportedly been critical of Trump and Vance in private. (A Defense Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from Buria.)

As a result, White House officials rejected Hegseth’s plan to hire Buria as his chief of staff, one of the defense officials and an administration official said. Despite that, Buria was seen with Hegseth during his recent trip to Asia in a workout video posted on social media.

[snip]

The infighting helped delay plans for “Golden Dome,” Trump’s signature missile defense program to defend the U.S. homeland, officials said. It has also contributed to the lack of a Pentagon budget, which raised frustrations among Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom supported Hegseth in his tight confirmation battle.

We’re getting closer and closer to the moment when the White House will have to admit what we all told it, back in January: Whiskey Pete is manifestly unfit for his job. He has neither the temperament nor the experience to do this job.

And at the moment, he doesn’t even have the aides — the White House, after several months of trying, can’t find him those aides — that, he said during his confirmation hearing, would help compensate for his lack of relevant experience.

And that’s the guy that Trump just put in charge of usurping California’s National Guard and — possibly — leading a Marine invasion of Los Angeles?

Update: Oh it gets worse!!

The guy behind the claim that NSA intercepts showed Hegseth’s reliable aides were the leakers was someone Elon implanted via DOGE at DOD. And no one cared that Forbes caught him doctoring his resume.

The adviser, Justin Fulcher, suggested to Hegseth’s then chief of staff Joe Kasper and Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, that he knew of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified the leakers.

Fulcher offered to share the supposed evidence as long as he could help run the investigation, three of the people said. But when he sat down with agents over a week later, it became clear he had no evidence of a wiretap, and the Pentagon had been duped.

The problem was that before investigators debunked the claims by Fulcher, who was previously found to have embellished his resume, the damage was done: Trump advisers had been told by Parlatore about “smoking gun” evidence incriminating three aides, and Hegseth had already fired them.

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No, Trump Voters Did Not Vote for This

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A disavowal of Stephen Miller’s immigration crackdown by Ileana Garcia, one of the founders of Latinas for Trump, has generated a lot of attention and some outrage.

Many lefties are criticizing Garcia for perceived denial about who and what she voted for, or for being a dumbass for pretending they didn’t enable this. It’s absolutely true that anyone who voted for Trump voted for the way he deployed bigotry, twice, to win. Garcia owns that.

But she didn’t vote for the specific crackdown that is currently going on. And the distinction matters.

The pushback against Garcia’s comment was largely a response to Miami Herald’s headline. “‘Inhumane:’ Latinas for Trump founder condemns White House immigration crackdown,” or a few paragraphs taken out of context.

Her full statement — as well as that of Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, to which she was responding — is more nuanced than that. Both are complaining about the practice of arresting people as they attend court hearings or routine check-ins as part of adjudication of legal claims. Here’s Garcia’s comment.

[W]hat we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings—in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims.

Salazar explained the point at more length.

Arrests in immigration courts, including people with I-220A and pending asylum cases, the termination of the CHNV program, which has left thousands exposed to deportation, and other similar measures, all jeopardize our duty to due process that every democracy must guarantee.

I remain clear in my position: anyone with a pending asylum case, status-adjustment petition, or similar claim deserves to go through the legal process.

That is, both women (and I presume Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez, with whom Salazar says she’ll be meeting with Kristi Noem after several weeks of seeking a meeting) are primarily complaining that, to ratchet up arrests, ICE is arresting people as they arrive for scheduled meetings that are part of their due process to remain in the US.

This is the tactic that lefties have condemned when it happened to people like Mohsen Mahdawi or Carolina or Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda or Carol Hui or VML’s mother, every one of them the subject of local or national attention.

You can argue that these Cuban-Americans are mostly pushing to protect their own communities; Salazar specifically mentioned the parole covering Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants, which Trump recently revoked with SCOTUS approval. You’d be right! Four South Florida politicians are fighting to protect their constituents.

You can argue Garcia should have seen this coming when Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller falsely accused Haitian migrants of eating house pets. You’d be right! Of course, that comment targeted Haitians in Ohio, not Cubans in South Florida. Salazar even specifically excluded Haitians from those migrants fleeing the “most brutal regimes in our hemisphere.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s promise to deport millions was premised on deporting immigrants with no legal basis to be in the US, not those who are abiding by a legal process to stay (of which Florida must have a disproportionate number).

No person voted for that because that’s not what Trump ran on (though Miller and JD did call the Haitians illegal, which should have been the tip-off).

And even if Garcia and Salazar were making a more general comment — that Stephen Miller’s focus on longterm migrants, rather than just criminal aliens (both women use somewhat ambiguous language here, with Garcia using the term “criminal aliens” and Salazar referring to “criminal[s] here illegally”) — they’d have some basis for their argument.

I contemplated reposting this entire post, from Day 8 of Trump 2.0, to address this issue. But the record shows that:

  • During a key part of the campaign, Trump, Miller, and Republican members of Congress claimed there were hundreds of thousands of aliens known to have committed a crime wandering the streets; it was based on a misrepresentation of DHS’s tracker of aliens anywhere in the US, the vast majority of whom are in prison either awaiting trial or serving a sentence. Those were the people Trump promised to deport; he just lied about how many of them there were.
  • Miller built another part of his campaign on a lie about Tren de Aragua, and when the Intelligence Community debunked that lie both before and after he relied on it in an attempt to bypass due process, he lied some more. Those were the Venezuelan criminals Miller made up who would be covered by the CHNV parole cited by Salazar.
  • Within a week of inauguration, as experts began to predict the inevitable outcome of Miller’s ICE quotas (then half of what he has since ratcheted them up to) — that ICE would focus on easy targets who were not known criminals rather than hunting down the far rarer criminal alien Miller lied about during the campaign — Miller started redefining the term “criminal alien” to encompass the easier, peaceful targets his quotas would inevitably target. CATO (currently one of Miller’s favorite targets) reported that this focus on numbers rather than criminals would have the effect of drawing law enforcement away from the most dangerous people.

Those are the people — long-term US residents not known to have violated any law — whom Miller has redefined into the criminal aliens about which he lied during the campaign.

You can absolutely hold politicians like Garcia and Salazar responsible for helping to elect Trump, for enabling his grotesque assault on migrants who don’t happen to be Cuban.

But it is nevertheless the case that Miller got Trump elected promising to round up a bunch of people he portrayed as violent criminals, and has since redefined the term “criminal alien” to justify going after people in the US even if they are pursuing a legal claim of asylum.

Garcia and Salazar let themselves buy into a lie, but it was a lie. A series of lies. All designed to move the goalposts to encompass people that South Florida politicians rightly treat as part of their community.

And even if you think Garcia and Salazar let themselves buy into the bigotry, for the moment, who cares? You’ve got powerful Republicans calling out Trump’s lies, with Garcia targeting Stephen Miller and his quotas by name.

One of the most important things that we could achieve, in the short term, to discredit Trump’s ICE crackdown (and with it, Trump’s military invasion of Los Angeles) is to point out that Trump didn’t run on deporting people who were pursuing legal status in the US, and he strongly implied that his promise of mass deportations was a promise to deport actual criminals (about the numbers of which Trump and Miller lied), not long-term US residents who had put down roots. One of the most important things we need the public to understand is that the events in Los Angeles were incited by Miller’s impossible quotas for arrests, 3,000 a day, quotas that from the start were guaranteed to shift ICE’s focus away from dangerous people and onto mothers working at the local waffle restaurant. Even if the only thing such pushback achieves is to end the practice of arresting people when they show up for scheduled check-ins, it would do a lot to keep families together, it eliminate one of the most egregious practices.

Prominent Republicans want to — correctly — blame Stephen Miller for the chaos that has erupted.

Don’t get in their way! At this point, any pushback on Miller’s gulag, any focus on him and his lies, is welcome.

We will not make it through this unless we exploit every single break that Republicans make with Trump. We will not make it through this unless we convince a significant number of Trump voters to push back or better yet disavow their vote.

Only if we do make it through this do we have time for recriminations against the people who allowed themselves to believe a lie.

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Stone Cold Liar: Trump Incited Riot after Threatening to Cancel Funding for CA

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Gavin Newsom is doing a fair amount of press as he monitors the response to the protests and conflict in Los Angeles. In a number of those interviews, including this MSNBC one, Newsom accused Trump of lying when he claimed the two discussed deploying the National Guard on Friday.

Gavin Newsom: We talked for almost twenty minutes. And he barely — this issue never came up. I kept trying to talk about LA, he wanted to talk about all these other issues. We had a very decent conversation.

Jacob Soboroff: When was this?

Newsom: This was late Friday night. About 1:30 plus, his time.

Soboroff: After the protests had started?

Newsom: After the protests. And he never once brought up the National Guard. He’s a Stone Cold Liar. He said he did. Stone Cold Liar. Never did. It was a very civil conversation. I’ve always wanted to approach engagement with the President of the United States in a respectful and responsible way. But there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.

Soboroff: Did you mention to him in that phone call on Friday night the types of raids that were happening in your state on Friday. There were reports that and video of enforcement operations in ways that they haven’t traditionally. ICE officers [went] to Home Depots around Los Angeles and picking off day laborers. Did you bring that up with him?

Newsom: The conversation started with the frame of what’s happening in LA, he immediately pivoted to other things and other interests.

He went on to correct Soboroff’s comment that this was about immigration. After putting it in context with all of Trump’s other attacks on the Constitution, Newsom described, “It is a serious moment under the guise of immigration. but it’s much deeper than that.”

Newsom is giving these interviews in advance of suing Trump to end the National Guard deployment (by the time he sues, some Marines that Pete Hegseth is readying may already be deployed). We may learn more specifics about the time and content of the conversation the two men had on Friday night via that lawsuit.

But as he describes it, Newsom spoke to Trump — in an attempt to talk about LA — in the wake of reports, relying on White House sources, that Trump was threatening to cut funding from CA.

The Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding for California, an effort that could begin as soon as Friday, according to multiple sources.

Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California. Sources said the administration is specifically considering a full termination of federal grant funding for the University of California and California State University systems.

“No taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement Friday afternoon, criticizing California for its energy, immigration and other policies. “No final decisions, however, on any potential future action by the Administration have been made, and any discussion suggesting otherwise should be considered pure speculation.”

Newsom spoke to Trump late on Friday, wanting to talk about LA. Trump kept pivoting to “other things and other interests.”

And out of that, Newsom stated, “there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.”

Obviously, Newsom is right: As I noted the other day, Stephen Miller loves the racism, but immigration is also one tool of his authoritarianism. The defunding makes clear that the pretext of antisemitism is another.

But this assault on California is an expansion of a pattern.

Trump asked law firms to work for him. Some capitulated, and they’re increasingly paying a price. Others refused and, thus far at least, have survived.

Trump asked Ivy League universities to work for him. Columbia capitulated, and they’re paying a price. Harvard refused and, thus far at least, has survived.

Trump is now seeking to bring California to heel using some of the same tools used with law firms and universities.

California’s governor refused.

And then Trump sent in the Armed Forces.

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The Big Ugly: Stephen Miller Uses His War on Home Depot to Invade California

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Yesterday, Trump used the opportunity of a protest against brutal ICE action staged out of Paramount, CA (close to a Home Depot location) to federalize 2,000 California National Guard for force protection — a step towards, but still short of, invoking the Insurrection Act (see Steve Vladeck for a description of what Trump, legally, did; update: and an even more detailed description from Lawfare). Pete Hegseth has also floated sending the Marines to an American city, a suggestion Gavin Newsom called, “deranged.”

It’s all a transparent confrontation used to invade a blue city.

All this comes comes as the hours longshormen at LA ports work have dropped in half due to Trump’s trade war, and some of the workplaces ICE targeted were in the garment district, where actual manufacturing still occurs. In addition, Trump has promised to start cutting Federal grants to California, which led Gavin Newsom to point out that CA is a net donor to Federal taxes.

This was a natural escalation stemming directly from Stephen Miller’s shrill tantrums demanding that ICE focus more on law-abiding undocumented people rather than the criminal aliens he lied about during the election. The escalation comes in the wake of Elon Musk’s meltdown, which might otherwise make passage of Trump’s reconciliation bill funding a massive expansion of Miller’s gulag. It comes as a few libertarians — Tom Massie called for “Realistic border funding” and “No bloat for military industrial complex” in his pitch for a new “skinny” bill — focus on the huge funding for the gulag.

This inital use of federal troops in a blue city should be understood as an effort to build pressure to help pass the bill. It should also be used as an example of the danger of passing the bill — the kind of authoritarianism that Miller intends to wield if the bill does pass.

As Washington Examiner was the first to report (a testament to the kind of people who were pissed about this tantrum), two weeks ago Miller called senior ICE officials to a meeting in DC to berate them that they’re not meeting his impossible quotas for arrests, 3,000 people a day. During the meltdown he had at the meeting, Miller specifically ordered ICE to start staging arrests at Home Depot and 7-Eleven. Miller specifically berated ICE officials because they were focusing on the criminal aliens around which Miller built Trump’s re-election campaign.

ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.

ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.

One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.

“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.

The protests started in response to two things: Raids on work places and also the detention of a growing number of people without food in the basement of a federal building — the latter of which Representative Jimmy Gomez was protesting most of the day. At an early tiny peaceful protest, ICE assaulted and then arrested SEIU California President, David Huerta, injuring him badly enough to require hospital treatment, during their assault. He remains in custody. The assault-and-arrest bears similarities to the staged confrontation at Delaney Hall and ICE’s invasion of Jerry Nadler’s office in recent weeks.

Huerta’s treatment drew condemnation from Democratic leaders across the country, including LA Mayor Karen Bass.

Multiple Trump authoritarians, including Miller, responded to Bass’ condemnation of the violence ICE was wielding by insisting that “Federal law is supreme and federal law will be enforced.”

From there, the protests against ICE grew, many of them mocking ICE. But ICE and LA Sheriffs (the LAPD deployed, but said it saw no violence) escalated. Nevertheless, protests remain localized (around the ICE facility and at the Federal building).

Numerous Administration keyboard warriors, including Miller, are tying the protest in Los Angeles to his Big Ugly bill, using the very same eliminationist language Trump’s used to kick off an assault on the Capitol.

The through-line here is crystal clear.

Ratchet up raids on peaceful people to hit impossible quotas (ICE came close, but did not meet, Miller’s 3,000 arrest quota on two days last week).

Use protests against that draconian invasion to arrest Democratic leaders and invade a blue city.

Point to the chaos created by Miller’s draconian ICE raids to demand passage of the Big Ugly bill, which will codify and expand precisely that kind of draconian ICE raid.

Create chaos, and then use that chaos to try to codify authoritarian power.

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The Kilmar Abrego Garcia Indictment

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As you’ve heard, the government has done what they claimed they could not do: bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia (KAG) back to the US. They did so to prosecute him on trafficking charges.

I’m going to deal with the indictment against KAG in two separate posts.

In this post, I’ll take the indictment — and only the indictment — on its face to describe how DOJ charged KAG with trafficking charges that span far further than anything for which they have direct evidence.

In a second post, I’ll show how the government has at least three sets of incompatible documents. Not even the indictment and the detention memo are consistent. That’s going to cause problems — potentially very major ones — down the road.

The indictment charges KAG with two crimes, both violations of transporting aliens (18 USC 1324). Count One charges KAG with conspiring with six other people to transport aliens into the United States. Count Two charges KAG, individually, with transporting aliens within the United States. Both charges build out a set of allegations around the November 30, 2022 traffic stop outside of Cookville, Tennessee (which is why this was charged in Nashville) where KAG was driving a van of nine Hispanic men, none of whom had ID, on an expired license.

Effectively the entire indictment tells a story to wrap around that traffic stop, claiming the traffic stop is proof he’s an MS-13 member who was running guns, sometimes drugs, endangering children, and abusing women.

As alleged, there are five Salvadorans involved in the trafficking conspiracy, just three of whom (CC1, CC2, and CC3) allegedly interacted directly with KAG. There’s also a Guatemalan (CC6), who allegedly got migrants into the US that KAG and CC1 and CC2 would allegedly transport within the US for cash payments.

As background to this indictment, let me reup the eight things you need to know about conspiracy law that Elizabeth de la Vega wrote that I always rely on.

CONSPIRACY LAW – EIGHT THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

One: Co-conspirators don’t have to explicitly agree to conspire & there doesn’t need to be a written agreement; in fact, they almost never explicitly agree to conspire & it would be nuts to have a written agreement!

Two: Conspiracies can have more than one object- i.e. conspiracy to defraud U.S. and to obstruct justice. The object is the goal. Members could have completely different reasons (motives) for wanting to achieve that goal.

Three: All co-conspirators have to agree on at least one object of the conspiracy.

Four: Co-conspirators can use multiple means to carry out the conspiracy, i.e., releasing stolen emails, collaborating on fraudulent social media ops, laundering campaign contributions.

Five: Co-conspirators don’t have to know precisely what the others are doing, and, in large conspiracies, they rarely do.

Six: Once someone is found to have knowingly joined a conspiracy, he/she is responsible for all acts of other co-conspirators.

Seven: Statements of any co-conspirator made to further the conspiracy may be introduced into evidence against any other co-conspirator.

Eight: Overt Acts taken in furtherance of a conspiracy need not be illegal. A POTUS’ public statement that “Russia is a hoax,” e.g., might not be illegal (or even make any sense), but it could be an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Conspiracy law allows prosecutors to hold one cog in a larger crime responsible for the actions taken by everyone else with whom he entered into a conspiracy — and the agreement can be implicit (see Rule One). Once prosecutors show that a person has entered into a conspiracy — here, to transport migrants first into the US and then around the US — then he is on the hook for everything else his conspirators do. Conspiracy law allows prosecutors to rely on communications from some members of a conspiracy without requiring them to take the stand to validate those communications.

Two more points. First, it is totally normal for DOJ to refer to co-conspirators anonymously as they do here. In addition, it is not at all unusual for DOJ to throw a great deal of energy — such as (hypothetically) a cooperating agreement with CC1 and possibly even favorable treatment of CC6 to substantiate a case against a lesser member of a conspiracy if they want. That’s likely what happened here.

With that as background, here’s what the conspiracy looks like:

CC1 allegedly recruited KAG into this trafficking conspiracy way back in 2016 (the government claims, with no evidence presented, that it has continued up to present day, but that may simply mean others continued to transport migrants until a recent arrest). Sometime in the past, CC1 was arrested for trafficking, did his sentence, got deported, then returned to the US. When he was in prison, the indictment alleges, he recruited CC2 to take his place.

It seems likely that CC1 and CC2 will be the government’s star witnesses against KAG; there is an exceeding likelihood that they provided that testimony to avoid being sent to CECOT.

CC1 and CC2 generally attest to certain details about how the smuggling worked — they picked up migrants in Houston, usually in batches of 6-10, transported them in a van using varied routes, took away their cell phones, used the cover story of transporting men for construction jobs, and got paid in cash. Those details happen to match the known details of the van in which KAG was stopped in 2022. Both appear to claim they also transported weapons, but that is not charged (if they were transporting weapons but KAG was not, it would provide DOJ additional leverage to flip them).

They apparently had communication with CC6, because (the indictment alleges) that KAG was abusing women which was bad for business so CC6 told CC1 and CC2 to get him to stop (apparently DOJ believes that migrants coming to the US are repeat customers). In addition, CC1 used CC6 to transfer funds, for a fee (that doesn’t make sense either, because if CC1 was worried about customer service for CC6, why would he pay him to transfer funds?).

There are allegations that go through CC3, CC4, and CC5 that money changed hands. That doesn’t seem well fleshed out, but it provides cause to introduce a bunch of Western Union records that may not tie to the cash found in KAG’s pocket when he was stopped in 2022. The government also claims they’ve got evidence of cell phone and social media communication; in the indictment, they don’t quote a single communication involving KAG directly. That’s part of the beauty of a conspiracy charge, if you’re a prosecutor: You can rely on the communications of other co-conspirators to prove elements of the crime (indeed, if Trump had gone to trial for January 6, evidence against him would have relied heavily on communications of Rudy and others).

It’s tough to assess the case based on what they show in the indictment (and without the cooperation deals under which CC1 and CC2 presumably testified). But it’s notable that the testimony of CC1 and CC2 differs as to one key respect: about whether they got paid.

18. KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA and CC-1 regularly required the undocumented aliens they transported to pay KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA and CC-1 in cash for facilitating their transport throughout the United States. The MS-13 members and associates transported by CC-2 refused to pay for CC-2 for his transportation services, but the MS-13 members and associates KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA  transported generally treated KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA with respect and also paid him for his transportation services.

CC1 says he got paid, along with KAG. CC2 says he did not, but attests that the alleged MS-13 gang members transported by KAG showed him respect and paid him.

Central to whether they can prove this case or not, they’ll have to prove that 9 gang members paid cash in advance — the $1,400 found on KAG’s person at the 2022 traffic stop — to be transported around the country but did not do anything to steal that money back. If everything was in cash, then the government has no records of KAG getting paid, just Western Union transfers that do not allege his involvement.

Conspiracy law is a powerful tool. But much of this case depends on the credibility of CC1.

Update: Added language about this treatment of co-conspirators fitting the norm for DOJ.

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Lefty Pundits Continue to Drown Out Democratic Actions with their Complaints about Democratic Inaction

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On Tuesday, a small immigration reporting outlet, Migrant Insider, asked Hakeem Jeffries whether the masked ICE officials who had accosted LaMonica McIver and a Jerry Nadler staffer had been identified. Jeffries replied that every single one of them — no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes — would be identified, noting that the US was not the Soviet Union. Jeffries explained that “our first priorities” are making sure that the person on the front line is able to move on, but he also claimed that efforts to deal with the broader policy implications “are underway.”

Of the biggest outlets that picked up the comment, just MeidasTouch, which said “this is exactly kind of the fight that we need to be seeing from our representatives,” served to magnify Jeffries’ comment; their Instagram post got over 43,000 likes. Most of the others — Breitbart, CPAC, Sean Hannity, the Washington Examiner — tried to pitch this as a threat to ICE. Jeffries said something fiery, but while the right wing used it to claim Democrats were attacking cops, left wing pundits either didn’t notice or ignored it.

One probable reason left wing pundits didn’t mention Jeffries’ comment on Tuesday is they were still seething over a comment he made two days earlier — a comment they didn’t have to work to find. Jeffries told Dana Bash that Democrats would respond to Trump’s attacks on members of Congress — Bash mentioned both the charges against LaMonica McIver and the handcuffing of a Jerry Nadler staffer — but “we will make that decision in a time, place, and manner of our choosing.”

The comment from Jeffries has been used all week as an example of the feckless Dems, of their fecklessness on immigration issues, especially.

But Jeffries was right that Democrats have been responding to these issues, to the extent they can in the minority. Since Jeffries made that comment, at least the following has happened:

  • On Monday, Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan did an unannounced visit to a Wisconsin detention center of the sort that turned into the McIver altercation in New Jersey; nothing happened and so it got little notice
  • On Tuesday, Jerry Nadler and Jamie Raskin sent a sternly-worded letter to Jim Jordan demanding 1) He condemn the abuse of separation of powers presented by the ICE detention and 2) he call Kristi Noem for a hearing before the House Judiciary to answer for her “agency’s irresponsible and dangerous actions”
  • On Tuesday (as noted) Jeffries promised to identify the ICE agents involved in such heavy-handed tactics
  • On Tuesday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka sued Alina Habba for malicious prosecution and defamation
  • Jerry Nadler released a second video of the altercation with ICE agents (who were actually unmasked); it shows that one ICE agent pushed the Nadler staffer before handcuffing her, debunking DHS claims
  • As we speak, Jimmy Gomez is reporting on an atrocious detention situation in Los Angeles (he has demanded to go in)

And all that’s before other victories on detention, such as the release of Carol Hui and the return of an improperly deported man or the order to release details of the Administration’s deal with Nayib Bukele, legal cases that have attracted lefty attention, with or without involvement of members of Congress.

A number of these things — the detention center visit and the sternly-worded letter — are the kind of routine oversight that rarely attracts attention (though I’ve repeatedly been told that members of Congress are not making such detention center visits, so it’s important to mention that they are). I’ve noted that Jeffries’ promise to identify the ICE officers was largely ignored by much of the left — but not the right.

The Baraka lawsuit got a great deal of mainstream attention, but very little attention from pundits. Until this Baraka appearance on Democracy Now today, I’ve seen little focus on its significance.

That’s probably true, in part, because there’s a decent likelihood it gets dismissed based on prosecutorial immunity grounds; there are other lawsuits that are, legally, far more urgent and significant for legal commentators to cover.

But if it is not dismissed then it may turn into a political firestorm. Baraka cited a number of things that may get him beyond the normally very high bar of prosecutorial immunity: he cited Alina Habba’s comments before being confirmed as US Attorney, promising to abuse her authority, he cited Habba’s use of her private Twitter account to make knowingly false claims about his arrest, the false claims both Habba and DHS made about the circumstances of the arrest, and Magistrate Judge André Espinosa’s rebuke of DOJ for its conduct in the case gets past an attempt to dismiss it. If the lawsuit survives, it could be a very powerful political tool to fight back against Trump’s politicization of law enforcement.

But even as a messaging document, the lawsuit is important. It makes clear that Special Agent in Charge Ricky Patel — whom Baraka alleges instructed other agents to “take him down” while they were pushing and shoving the group —  had no basis to arrest Baraka and also disputes claims made in the LaMonica McIver arrest affidavit. Details from the lawsuit — such as that Habba commented publicly even before Baraka was transported from Delaney Hall, or that they fingerprinted Baraka twice, once upon his arrest and once on his initial appearance — make it clear what a political hit job this was. If, as polls show is likely, Baraka doesn’t win New Jersey’s gubernatorial primary, he’ll be able to add the affect of the arrest on his electoral chances to the injury Habba caused to him. Those are all enough to make a stink out of.

All the more so given the obvious comparison with Eric Adams. Pam Bondi’s DOJ dismissed a case against Adams so it would not affect his primary chances, also citing his need to carry out his mayoral duties. But they arrested Baraka while he was carrying out his mayoral duties, trying to ensure the safety of a facility in his city, and did so weeks before a primary. Those are fundamentally inconsistent actions.

If this survives an initial motion to dismiss, then Baraka will have the ability to get discovery (including a comparison of his case with Adams’) and demand depositions.

And all of that makes a criminal case against Congresswoman McIver (which has yet to be indicted by a grand jury) far less viable. Unless and until DOJ gets the Baraka lawsuit dismissed, they will have competing threads of discovery out there, even further weakening an already weak case against McIver.

That should have made it a central messaging vehicle. The same is true of Jerry Nadler’s release of a video that shows DHS lied about the circumstances of the handcuffing of his staffer. With attention, it could create a firestorm by itself. I’ve seen no coverage from the pundit class. No pundit class, no firestorm.

It’s not so much the Democrats are doing nothing. It’s that the people who are best situated to make a stink about what has happened — to publicize Baraka’s competing claims about what happened at Delaney Hall, to generate outrage over how the Nadler video debunks DHS, and yes, even to use that sternly-worded letter to shame Jim Jordan for abdicating the independence of Article I power — are instead spending entire days claiming that nothing is happening except a comment they watched out of context.

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ProPublica Explains How DOGE’s AI Cut Support for Veterans Care

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Even among ProPublica’s exceptional work exposing DOGE’s failures, this is notable.

ProPublica used the opportunity of the disgruntled departure of an engineer named Sahil Lavingia from DOGE as an opportunity to unpack a specific task he took on, and botched. It provides valuable insight to the source of errors as Elon unleashed a bunch of coders on federal bureaucracy without the context to understand what they were doing.

Lavingia joined DOGE — after previously attempting to get a job with DOGE’s nonpartisan predecessor, US Digital Services — with a genuine wish to improve the way government works. He was assigned to review VA contracts to decide which could be “munched” — canceled. He claims that after his AI review of the contracts, people with some actual knowledge of the VA services should have reviewed the contracts he flagged to prevent obvious errors. It appears that didn’t happen, and as happened so often elsewhere, pretty critical contracts were cut.

Lavingia’s ouster and his willingness to speak up provides a glimpse of what has led to such stupid decisions from DOGE.

Back in March, after asking Elon at the sole all-hands DOGE meeting he ever attended if he could open source his code, he published it to GitHub. Months later he did an interview with FastCompany, which led to his firing.

Since his firing, in addition to telling multiple media outlets that there really wasn’t the kind of waste he’d expected, he walked ProPublica through the specifics of a task he was assigned, reviewing VA contracts for DEI and waste, which has led to key contracts getting canceled.

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.

We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.

[snip]

Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

But the really great thing ProPublica did was to have experts, including Waldo Jaquith, who used to do IT at Treasury, review Lavingia’s code to explain how it went wrong.

You should read both stories, but here’s where things went wrong.

First, rather than simply consulting USA Spending to learn what contracts were doing and how much they were spending, Lavingia instead used AI to review the contracts themselves, which often had outdated information.

This portion of the prompt instructs the AI to extract the contract number and other key details of a contract, such as the “total contract value.”

This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value.

When he did that, though, Lavingia only asked AI to review the first 10,000 characters of the contracts, which isn’t where some of the most important information (not to mention information on whether a contract included a DEI component) would be found.

Analyze the following contract text and extract the basic information below. If you can’t find specific information, write “Not found”.

CONTRACT TEXT:
{text[:10000]} # Using first 10000 chars to stay within token limits

The models were only shown the first 10,000 characters from each document, or approximately 2,500 words. Experts were confused by this, noting that OpenAI models support inputs over 50 times that size. Lavingia said that he had to use an older AI model that the VA had already signed a contract for.

He did that, he explained, because the VA only had dated AI that could only handle 10,000 characters.

Then the script prompted to assess whether contracts provided “direct patient care,” defined first by including “medical procedures,” then excluding “psychosocial support” of the sort that keeps Veterans alive, measuring how many layers removed from actual care a contract was, then finally running it through a list of things like audits (including “Nuclear physics and radiation safety audits for medical equipment” !!) that could not be “munched,” or canceled.

These two lines — which experts say were poorly defined — carried the most weight in the DOGE analysis. The response from the AI frequently cited these reasons as the justification for munchability. Nearly every justification included a form of the phrase “direct patient care,” and in a third of cases the model flagged contracts because it stated the services could be handled in-house.

But the exclusion of audits didn’t work.

The article provided one example of the kind of obvious (literal) patient support that got targeted for cancelation: the maintenance contracts for ceiling lifts used to reposition patients during their care.

The emphasis on “direct patient care” is reflected in how often the AI cited it in its recommendations, even when the model did not have any information about a contract. In one instance where it labeled every field “not found,” it still decided the contract was munchable. It gave this reason:

Without evidence that it involves essential medical procedures or direct clinical support, and assuming the contract is for administrative or related support services, it meets the criteria for being classified as munchable.

In reality, this contract was for the preventative maintenance of important safety devices known as ceiling lifts at VA medical centers, including three sites in Maryland. The contract itself stated:

Ceiling Lifts are used by employees to reposition patients during their care. They are critical safety devices for employees and patients, and must be maintained and inspected appropriately.

Back in February, Doug Collins bragged about the work DOGE was doing reviewing contracts.

 

This was, he said, the work DOGE was supposed to be doing.

I guess Doug Collins believed his job running the VA involved eliminating critical care based on shoddy code.

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The Tax Elon Solution and Other Actual Reporting Not Included in the Frenzy

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Politico’s Dasha Burns reports something that isn’t making headlines elsewhere: the fun of the Trump-Musk fight may be short-lived.

White House aides are trying to broker a peace.

White House aides, after working to persuade the president to temper his public criticism of Musk to avoid escalation, scheduled a call Friday with the billionaire CEO of Tesla to broker a peace.

“Oh it’s okay,” Trump told POLITICO in a brief telephone call when asked about the very public breakup with his onetime megabacker. “It’s going very well, never done better.” Trump went on to tout his favorability ratings saying, “The numbers are through the roof, the highest polls I’ve ever had and I have to go.”

Update, 1:30 ET: One after another access journalist has spoken to Trump and are now reporting that Trump thinks Elon has a problem. One after another access journalist has left unanswered — if Elon is nuts, why did Trump let him run unfettered through government for four months and what will Trump do to make sure Elon didn’t damage the government?

Aside from that actual news report, much of the rest of the reporting is no better — and often worse — than what we can do from the comfort of our own EU perch.

The same Politico lists seven right wingers who could get caught between the two narcissists. But only JD Vance — whose endorsement of Trump in the wake of Elon’s seeming endorsement of impeaching Trump was rather mild — is really stuck between the Silicon billionaires and Trump.

I’m really not worried, for example, about the Millers (though agree Stephen is the most likely peace broker, since he had a big role in recruiting Elon in the first place). And while David Sacks was one of Elon’s entrees into the Trump world, Trump’s increasing addiction to cryptocorruption guarantees Sacks some protection inside the White House.

Meanwhile, NYT has an inane post about eight ways Trump and Musk might damage each other. It doesn’t seem to realize that Musk could not just use Xitter as an irritant (which is what it reports), but could also rejigger Xitter to undercut the way it favors right wing discourse and disinformation generally. NYT simply doesn’t understand how important Xitter is to the far right project, not even with Charlie Kirk’s slavering tribute to it amid the worst of the blowup, not even with the way Elon destroyed Xitter’s gateway function to real journalism, in the process damaging outlets like NYT.

Worse still, NYT doesn’t seem to understand the ways Trump has used the presidency to pay off his election debt to Elon; it even calls DOGE a “pet project.”

Wield the power of the presidency against him. Mr. Trump has a tremendous array of powers at his disposal, with the ability to sign executive orders punishing political adversaries and to direct agencies like the Justice Department to initiate investigations. He could end some of Mr. Musk’s pet projects, such as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as well as his embrace of white South Africans, a priority of Mr. Musk’s.

As I noted, Elizabeth Warren made a list of 130 ways Elon exploited his access to Trump, many of them involving short-circuiting regulation of his businesses (this is an entirely different set of benefits to Elon than I included in this post).

34. Musk has direct business interests before over 70% of agencies and departments targeted by DOGE.

35. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was a top target. Musk called for “delet[ing]” the agency and DOGE attempted to fire up to 90% of CFPB staff, who would regulate X Money.

36. President Trump fired the CFPB Director and the new head of CFPB forbade the agency from doing work — after CFPB had received over 300 consumer complaints about Tesla.

37. X also deleted CFPB’s official account on the social media platform, limiting the public communications of an agency that regulates Musk companies.

38. X deleted the account of Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. after he posted about President Trump’s allegedly illegal firings of Democratic CPSC commissioners.

39. The Trump Administration fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) commissioners after EEOC investigated Tesla for alleged racial harassment and retaliation at the company’s Fremont Facility.

40. The Trump Administration plans to cut potentially thousands of EPA employees, after the EPA found that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act, investigated Tesla’s actions at its Austin Facility, and investigated an xAI facility in Tennessee for air pollution.

41. The Trump Administration began requiring any EPA spending greater than $50,000 to obtain DOGE approval, potentially allowing Musk to slow down environmental enforcement actions, like past investigations into Tesla and SpaceX for hazardous waste dumping and other alleged activity.

42. The Trump Administration attempted to fire hundreds of FAA employees, including some who directly contribute to air safety, after the FAA required SpaceX to abide by environmental requirements.

And NYT’s treatment of DOGE as a “pet project” ignores one of the real risks exacerbated by this blowup. Elon’s DOGE boys remain burrowed into government agencies, rewarded for their lack of experience and ties to criminal hackers with GS-14 and GS-15 salaries.

Although Elon Musk has said that he is largely exiting his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at least three of his early operatives and key lieutenants throughout his government takeover have recently become full-time government employees.

Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Ethan Shaotran’s employment designations at the General Services Administration (GSA) have been officially converted to full-time from the restricted special government employee classification that limited their time in government to a period of 130 days, according to documentation viewed by WIRED.

Coristine, who has gone by “Big Balls” online and previously worked for a telecommunications firm known for hiring former blackhat hackers, was converted to full time on May 31, along with Farritor. Shaotran became full time on April 10.

[snip]

Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran, according to documentation viewed by WIRED, each maintain their “senior adviser” titles. Coristine and Farritor are drawing some of the largest salaries possible for government employees through the “General Schedule” employee rankings. They have a salary grade of GS-15, one of the highest grades, and Shaotran is one step below at GS-14. When they were special government employees, Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran did not appear to be drawing salaries at all through GSA, WIRED reported in March.

These boys have access to our data! We still haven’t learned who was exfiltrating data from NLRB — as reported by whistleblower Dan Berulis — or why entities using a Russian address seemed to know the new login accounts created by DOGE boys.

18. I started tracking what appeared to be sensitive data leaving the secured location it is meant to be stored. I initially saw gigabytes exiting the NxGen case management system “nucleus,” within the NLRB system, and I later witnessed a similar large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself. From what I could see the data that was being exfiltrated added up to around 10 gigabytes– in the case that the data was almost all text files it would be the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard-copy documents. It is unclear which files were copied and removed, and I’ve tried multiple routes to prove this was not an exfiltration event but none have yielded fruit and some have been stopped outright. I also don’t know if the data was only 10gb in total or whether or not they were consolidated and compressed prior. This opens up the possibility that even more data was exfiltrated. Regardless, that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.

[snip]

21. On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.

Whether the fight between Elon and Trump is real and ongoing or whether it’ll be patched up, the blowup should lead people from both parties to demand that these DOGE boys be removed from government systems and agencies and a thorough audit of their work be done systemwide. Yes, Elon’s meltdown is cause to revisit his security clearances (with a consequent review of the SpaceX relationship), but the national security and privacy risk posed by Elon’s infiltration of government is actually far broader than that.

Finally, I’m not seeing any outlets point out that making one small change to the Big Ugly bill at the center of this dispute — the huge tax cuts for people like Elon — would not only limit the damage it does to the deficit (Elon’s claimed complaint with it) but also call Elon’s bluff (since he very much wants to eat his tax cut too).

Let’s tax Elon. That’ll make this blowup go someplace productive!!

The narcissistic explosions of last night really aren’t just fun and games, as they’re largely being treated by the press.

They’re a visible reminder of the problem with access, the problem with wealth inequality, the problem with campaign finance failures,  the problem with Trump’s unbound corruption.

To pay off a campaign debt, Donald Trump let an unstable man — allegedly abusing drugs — with no understanding of government bureaucracy unleash a tribe of DOGE boys throughout government for four months, countering the will of Congress based on his whims and conspiracy theories. And now that man has threatened vengeance on Trump.

This may get papered over because Trump needs to paper it over.

But it’s high time the political press caught up to Wired and ProPublica in unpacking the grave risk of all this.

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