There have been a few stories in the wake of last week’s effective town halls about Trump’s efforts to reach out to increasingly uncomfortable Republicans.

First, HuffPo got a number of Republicans to express concern about Trump’s latest trade war with its closest trading partners. While “Most Republicans in Congress, however, either said Trump’s tariffs were a good idea or offered only muted criticism,” Chuck Grassley and House Ag Committee Chair Glenn Thompson expressed confidence farmers would be protected somehow.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) suggested he would be seeking an exemption for his state, which is a leading producer of corn, soybeans and pork in the United States. Farmers in Iowa and other states rely heavily on Canadian potash, a key fertilizer ingredient, for their crops.

“Potash coming from Canada would be 25% higher,” Grassley said. “I assume I’m going to hear from farmers to contact the secretary of commerce to try to get a waiver.”

[snip]

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), chair of the House Agriculture Committee, said he believed Canada and Mexico had already stepped up border security. Canada had announced a $1 billion border security plan that included new helicopters, while Mexico said it would deploy 10,000 national guardsmen.

“I’m not sure what additional, like — the 25% tariffs of Canada — they’ve really stepped up. So has Mexico, actually, on the border. But I’m not a part of those negotiations, so I don’t know exactly what the president is trying to extract additionally,” Thompson told HuffPost.

The farm sector exports a lot of produce and is uniquely vulnerable in a trade war. When Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term, and the Chinese government retaliated with tariffs on U.S. exports in kind, the Trump administration bailed out agriculture producers with nearly $30 billion worth of direct payments.

Thompson said if there’s another protracted trade war, the government would once again help out farmers.

“I’m hoping that we won’t find ourselves in a situation of sustained retaliatory tariffs on our farmers. If we are, we’ll be prepared to deal with that.” he said.

Aside from one lawsuit seeking to force the government to restore access to climate information, I know of no lawsuits representing the many farmers whom Trump’s freeze on Inflation Reduction Act spending has harmed, though many risk bankruptcy because approved spending has not been reimbursed. These comments suggest that farmers imagine they’ll be made whole via other means, political favors.

There’ve already been signs that Trump has placated Republicans whose own constituents were targeted by his rash cuts. For example, it didn’t take long for elimination of Indian Heath Services that would have disproportionately hit Alaska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota to be reversed. By offering cuts and waivers, Trump uses preferential treatment for Republicans to sustain support for actions that harm the entire country.

Yesterday, Trump took a similar approach with DOGE, sending Elon Musk to meet with Republican Senators and House members (but not Democrats) to placate them on DOGE cuts. The reports from the Senate meeting reveal how meek key, purportedly powerful, Senators were in the meeting with Musk, begging that he adopt a more considered approach.

“Every day’s another surprise,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said of the daily bombshells from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“It would be better to allow Cabinet secretaries to carefully review their departments and then make surgical, strategic decisions on what programs and people should be cut and then come back to Congress for approval,” she said.

Collins argued a methodical approach to reforming government would be better than what she called Musk’s “sledgehammer approach.”

A second GOP senator said colleagues raised concerns about Musk’s leadership of DOGE and shared stories about how funding freezes and firings have impacted constituents.

“They were presenting some of the compelling stories and some of them shared about terminations at VA hospitals and how it impacted constituents and how there was no answer” from Musk’s team, the senator said.

“Another question was, ‘Who do we bring it to when we have these issues?’” the source added.

One of the Republican senators digging for answers is Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chair Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who told The Hill he’s trying to find out whether the firing of 2,400 probationary VA employees would impact services for veterans.

“We’re asking that question,” he said. “We want to know [what] positions [are affected]. We’ve been reassured that it doesn’t affect direct care, but we’re looking for more information.

[snip]

“If I get confirmed as the head of an agency, a Cabinet-level position, [and] I’ve got somebody else that is pretending — or that is acting as my boss, that’s a real problem,” [Thom Tillis] added. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to have all those employees thinking that you’re looking out for the agencies and their best interests.”

Tillis said that if Trump’s Cabinet officials “want to be viewed as the heads of these agencies,” they need to balance Musk’s recommendations to cut staff with their missions to provide services and advance U.S. interests.

“They need to say, ‘This is all good stuff, but now it has to go into the context of everything else I’m doing to run this agency, not just efficiencies.’ Because you’ve still got to keep the lights on, you’ve still got to provide acceptable service levels for the people that you’re tasked with serving,” he said.

Other reports describe suggestions, started by Rand Paul, to codify all DOGE’s cuts in a recission package.

“I love what Elon is doing. I love the cutting of the waste. I love finding all the crazy crap that we’re spending overseas. But to make it real, to make it go beyond the moment of the day, it needs to come back,” the Kentucky Republican said.

Musk huddled behind closed doors with House Republicans on Wednesday evening and spelled out DOGE’s efforts to uncover wasteful spending, an initiative that many Republicans applauded.

But others emerged with a more skeptical view.

“When you have a very small group with a broad set of powers, able to inflict dramatic change on institutions without a lot of knowledge, that means the process of cleaning up afterwards is going to be extensive,” said Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma.

Senate Republicans said Musk, a top adviser to Trump, was “elated” by Paul’s suggestion that the White House request congressional approval to rescind spending through a legislative process that would circumvent the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster.

“He was, like, so happy,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee.

“What we’ve got to do as Republicans is capture their work product, put it in a bill and vote on it. So, the White House, I’m urging them to come up with a rescission package,” the South Carolina Republican added.

None of this is surprising: That Trump is placating Republicans with doubts about his destructive attack on the US with direct outreach. Indeed, we’ve seen hints that it has been going on this entire time.

For now, it’s simply confirmation that even the most powerful Republicans, like Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, are asking for no more than this, meekly suggesting that maybe Cabinet Members should be allowed to act like Cabinet Members. And also confirmation that more members of Congress are willing to share, under their own name.

Thus far, Trump is making a sustained attack on the United States and Republican Members of Congress are still easily bought off with tailored exemptions rather than policies that serve the common good. That may change, but thus far, Article I remains solidly and easily co-opted.

Update: I should have included this story, which focuses more in House members, including this wisdom from House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole:

“With all due respect to Mr. Musk, he doesn’t have a vote up here. … [Give] courtesy to the members. They’re the ones that have to go home and defend these decisions, not you. So why don’t you give them a heads-up,” Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma) said Tuesday before the meeting. “You are certainly complicating the lives of individual members, and you might be making some mistakes and hurting some innocent individuals in the process.”

[snip]

Cole, who as chair of the House Appropriations Committee is responsible for funding the government, said that while he believes DOGE has “uncovered some amazing things,” he has observed that some staffers “clearly don’t know what [they’re] talking about” based on some fiscal decisions he has seen them make.

After a delay of a week, SCOTUS has finally issued an order denying the government’s attempt to turn its own contempt into an appeal of a Temporary Restraining Order.

The language denying the stay (which could have been released last week) is circumspect.

On February 13, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a temporary restraining order enjoining the Government from enforcing directives pausing disbursements of foreign development assistance funds. The present application does not challenge the Government’s obligation to follow that order. On February 25, the District Court ordered the Government to issue payments for a portion of the paused disbursements—those owed for work already completed before the issuance of the District Court’s temporary restraining order—by 11:59 p.m. on February 26. Several hours before that deadline, the Government filed this application to vacate the District Court’s February 25 order and requested an immediate administrative stay. THE CHIEF JUSTICE entered an administrative stay shortly before the 11:59 p.m. deadline and subsequently referred the application to the Court. The application is denied. Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed, and in light of the ongoing preliminary injunction proceedings, the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines. The order heretofore entered by THE CHIEF JUSTICE is vacated

But not Sammy Alito’s dissent, joined by Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Gorsuch.

He accepts the government’s misrepresentation of the posture of the case, not to mention the government’s conceit that the injury to the government — an inability to recover uncontested past due claims — is greater than shutting down companies forever (which may happen regardless). He even misrepresents that these are contractors and grant recipients providing services ordered by Congress, not some children who won an award.

Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic “No,” but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.

In capsule form, this is what happened. Respondents are a group of American businesses and nonprofits that receive foreign-assistance funds from the State Department and the U. S. Agency for International Development. They brought suit and claimed that the current administration’s temporary pause of foreign-assistance payments is unlawful. On February 13, 2025, the District Court issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) requiring the Government to halt its funding pause. It based that decision on a finding that respondents are likely to succeed in showing that the Government violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). After issuing the TRO, the District Judge grew frustrated with the pace at which funds were being disbursed, and on February 25, he issued a second order requiring the Government to pay out approximately $2 billion. The judge brushed aside the Government’s argument that sovereign immunity barred this enforcement order, and he took two steps that, unless corrected, would prevent any higher court from reviewing and possibly stopping the payments. First, he labeled the order as a non-appealable TRO, and second, he demanded that the money be paid within 36 hours.

The word “contempt” does not show up in Sammy’s opinion at all.

I mean, sure, there is plenty of contempt, directed at Amir Ali (perhaps not coincidentally the first Muslim and Arab American DC District Judge). But no discussion about the government having contemptuously blown off a court order.

Probably, John Roberts at least would be sympathetic with giving USAID the two weeks they claimed to need to make payments that would have been made in hours before the DOGE boys started breaking things. But he’s not yet ready to create a new precedent sanctioning government contempt.

Update: I did a little annotation of Sammy A’s key deceit, treating plaintiffs as recipients of “foreign assistance payments” rather than contractors who provided a service to the government.

Index to posts in this series

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’. M. Servan, Le Soldat Citoyen, 1780, quoted in Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pp. 102-103 Kindle Edition.

 

 

[The attitudes of Trump voters and non-voters] are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads. Me.

The series was motivated by the idea that the books I’ve read over the years and the writing and thinking I’ve done here might give me some insight into Trump voters. Not the racists, the Christian Nationalists, the misogynysts, the homophobes, the Nazis, the nihilists and the other freaks, their motivation is obvious. It’s the regular folk who think they’re decent people I want to understand.

I had a tentative idea, an image of Trump voters trooping to the polls like so many soldiers. That led me to think about the nature of individuality, because soldiers surrender large parts of their nature to achieve what they think is a higher good.

I suppose others might see Harris voters the same way. That’s what the Repub operatives say. But it’s stupid. There is no information bubble telling regular Democrats what to think. The Democratic Party isn’t capable of telling anyone how to think about the world around us and the problems we face.

Democratic voters have to work out a view of reality based on a range of sources, from Billionaire Media to blogs to social media, teachers, friends, family, books etc. There are strategies for that, but very few, if any, just take the word of a tiny group of professionals, especially Democratic politicians, for anything.

Trump voters are immersed in the world view created and maintained by creepy billionaire right-wing donors, ratfuckers, enablers in the business and legal communities, grifters and loons. We see it all the time. We listen to our parents who have crossed the line into Foxworld. We hear it from cousins convinced the MMR vaccine is dangerous. We see it in stories like that of Ryleigh Cooper.

All of these filthy rich actors and their enablers are trying to kill our political community. They use words to veil intentions and their deeds are brutal. See The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, p. 200, Kindle Edition. They’re succeeding at destroying, but they have no replacement and people are suffering. Ask Ryleigh Cooper and her family.

I don’t think there’s a single explanation for why people voted for Trump. That was a foolish idea. No matter the “reason” they give, it’s incomprehensible to me that anyone would vote for this deeply repulsive creep.

Conclusion to series

Immanuel Kant wrote a four-page essay titled Answer To The Question: What Is Enlightenment? In 1784. Here’s a readable free translation by Ted Humphrey, made available by the New York City Public Library. Here are the opening paragraphs.

1. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.

2. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance …nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.

It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.

The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult.

Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts. Fn omitted; my formatting.

Side notes: Guidance probably means something more like instruction or direction. The word go-cart is probably better translated as something like pony-cart. I left the misogyny in, but should I have deleted it?

Kant’s guardians are a big part of the problem, just as Servan, Kant, Arendt, Bourdieu, Foucault, and many others have said. But there’s nothing to prevent any of the ridden from thinking for themselves. Nothing, says Kant, nothing but laziness and cowardice. It’s too much trouble. I might get it wrong. I don’t want to get cross-ways with my neighbor.

I’m not saying everyone has to spend hours and weeks and years studying things. But. Billions of people have taken the Covid vaccines. The incidence of death is nearly zero. The incidence of serious complications isn’t much greater. But lots of people listen to loons on social media. They don’t perform a single-step thought process to see that it’s safer to take the vaccine than risk illness and death from the disease. I think that’s what Kant means when he tells us to use our own understanding.

The billionaires and their cronies who created this bubble of non-thought, are the guardians Kant is talking about. They are riding their herd just as he said. and it’s tough to tell one individual in a herd from another.

Enough. I am a child of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave this series with this aphorism from David Hume, an Enlightenment philosopher. Here’s a link for context.

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

A bunch of legal and governmental ethics experts, as well as Norm Eisen’s Democracy Defenders Fund, have filed an amicus motion that could (though is unlikely) to affect Judge Dale Ho’s forthcoming consideration of whether to dismiss the case against Eric Adams.

The motion asks Judge Ho to ask Paul Clement, in the latter’s role as an amicus, to consider whether Emil Bove violated professional ethics in trying to dismiss this case.

Amici submit that the inquiry should include whether Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove violated the Rules of Professional Responsibility and applicable Department of Justice guidelines in his conduct of this matter.

[snip]

First, to direct Mr. Clement to conduct a factual inquiry into whether Mr. Bove violated any of the Rules of Professional Conduct or Department of Justice prosecutorial policies or standards; and

Second, to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether, in fact, Mr. Bove violated any of the Rules of Professional Conduct or Department of Justice prosecutorial policies or standards.6

6 Pursuant to Canon 3(B)(6) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, this Court has the discretion to impose a remedy – beyond denial of the Motion to Dismiss – if it determines that Mr. Bove violated any of the Rules of Professional Conduct. The Canon provides that “[a] judge should take appropriate action upon receipt of reliable information indicating the likelihood that . . . a lawyer violated applicable rules of professional conduct.” (Emphasis added.)

They include a list of rules that Bove might have violated.

RPC 5.1(b)(2). This Rule requires that Mr. Bove, as a supervising lawyer in the Department of Justice, ensures that the lawyers he supervises comply with the Rules of Professional Conduct, including Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, and lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, whom Mr. Bove directed to sign the Motion;

RPC 1.11(f)(3). This Rule prohibits a lawyer who is a public official from accepting an offer of anything of value in exchange for influencing official action. If, in fact, Mr. Bove accepted an offer from Mayor Adams as a quid pro quo in the form of cooperating in the enforcement of the Administration’s immigration policies, he may have violated this ethical duty;

RPC 3.3(a)(1). This Rule prohibits Mr. Bove from knowingly making a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal. If the reasons given by Mr. Bove in support of his Motion and his statement that there was no quid pro quo are false, he may have violated this ethical duty; and

RPC 8.4(d). This Rule prohibits a lawyer from engaging in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice. If Mr. Bove’s justifications for the Motion are pretextual and an abuse of his prosecutorial power, granting the Motion may be prejudicial to the administration of justice.

The most compelling theory substantiating abuse was the way Bove serially threatened attorneys with investigation and firing if they did not sign onto his motion to dismiss the case, along with the investigations he initiated against those who refused.

If either or both of the lawyers who signed the Motion were pressured into doing so, as has been reported, this would irrevocably taint the Motion. By signing the Motion, under Rule 3.3(a)(1), Mr. Bove represented to this Court that the Motion did not contain a false statement of fact or law. There is a substantial basis here to inquire whether Mr. Bove made representations knowing at the time that they were false. The Court should not be placed in the position of granting a Motion lacking in honesty and integrity.

[snip]

When the prosecutors on the team prosecuting Mayor Adams expressed concerns about the legal and ethical propriety of the dismissal, Mr. Bove responded with a campaign of retaliation — placing them on administrative leave and initiating investigations. Bove Letter at 1. These actions are inconsistent with Mr. Bove’s duty to seek justice.5

[snip]

Punishment of career prosecutors for adhering to their oaths and ethical obligations, if proven, would certainly constitute conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.

The amicus also notes that, particularly in the face of Bove’s claim that DOJ attempted to interfere in an election by indicting Mayor Adams nine months before the Democratic primary, his efforts to dismiss the indictment months before the primary may have been intended to influence an election.

By arguing to the Court that the prosecution should be dismissed because it is interfering with Mayor Adams’s ability to run for re-election, Mr. Bove has raised the specter that dismissal is being sought with the purpose of affecting the upcoming June 24 primary election—now just a few months away—in which Mayor Adams is a candidate. Hearing Transcript at 26. It is also apparent that dismissal would give Mayor Adams an electoral advantage he otherwise would not have. In sharp contrast, Ms. Sassoon has explained that the decision to bring the indictment in September 2024 was made nine months before the June 2025 Democratic Mayoral Primary and more than a year before the November 2025 Mayoral Election and “complied in every respect with longstanding Department policy regarding election year sensitivities and the applicable Justice Manual provisions.” Sassoon Letter at 4

Now, I’m skeptical that this request will lead to a fulsome evidentiary hearing about Bove’s conduct.

But by putting all this on the record, including the threats to prosecutors, it might provide Ho a tool to do something else he laid the basis to do.

The lawyers included the transcript of the hearing with their motion. And there’s a part of it that was far more subtle than what made into reports of the hearing.

Virtually every report of the hearing described that the question of whether Ho should rely on amici came up. Most focused on Bove’s attack on Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, and his request that Ho ignore that amicus.

I do object to consideration of the second amicus at Dkt. 128 purported to be filed on behalf of a series of former U.S. Attorneys. And, again, acknowledging the Court has broad discretion about if, how, and when to invite amicus participation, a brief authored by Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, who are both central to the investigation at the New York District Attorney’s Office of President Trump, it just comes from a place of such bias and lack of impartiality, that that’s not a friend of the Court’s submission. That’s a group of people claiming that — I think the words in the brief are there should be — I think the word “roving” might have even been used, a roving factual inquiry into the situation.

That’s just partisan noise. That’s not an amicus brief actually trying to help your Honor with the issues that are before you. So I submit that the Court should not accept the amicus at Dkt. 128.

But before that — the first time Judge Ho raised the amicus briefs — he did so after questioning Alex Spiro about the letter he sent to Bove on February 3, which Spiro himself docketed. After Spiro gave a representation of why he wrote that letter, Judge Ho turned to Bove and asked him about the February 10 letter he sent Danielle Sassoon, which was before him because it was attached to the Pomerantz amicus.

This first discussion was not about whether Bove opposed the amicus itself. It was, like the preceding discussion about why Spiro wrote the February 3 letter, whether the February 10 memo he sent Sassoon was authentic.

Mr. Bove, I believe this is a memorandum dated February 10, 2025, regarding the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the case, and that is titled “Dismissal Without Prejudice of Prosecution of Mayor Adams.” Is that right?

MR. BOVE: Yes, Judge.

THE COURT: And you’re familiar with this memo?

MR. BOVE: Yes.

THE COURT: Are you the author of the memo?

MR. BOVE: Yeah. Those are my initials.

THE COURT: Okay. And this is authentic? It was submitted in connection with an amicus brief. I want to confirm that.

MR. BOVE: This is the memorandum I sent to Ms. Sassoon on that date. I do have a procedural objection to the amicus brief we’re talking about, but I want to be responsive first to the Court’s question.

THE COURT: Okay. I mean, I haven’t made any kind of ruling on the amicus brief.

MR. BOVE: I would like to be heard on that point.

THE COURT: I do want to address your views about whether or not the Court should consider certain things, including the amicus brief. But this memo, Mr. Bove, did this represent the official views of the Justice Department as of this date?

MR. BOVE: I mean, this is the authentic document that I sent to Danielle Sassoon.

THE COURT: Okay. And when I consider the government’s motion to dismiss, is it appropriate for me to consider what’s in this memo?

MR. BOVE: No.

THE COURT: Okay. Explain that to me.

MR. BOVE: The record here is the motion that I made. The only question — basically, if you start with the Rinaldi footnote 15, the Supreme Court case, you look at the more recent Second Circuit cases, Blaszczak, HSBC, the only two questions are is there some concern about harassment. Your Honor has addressed that conclusively today.

And then, second, is there a question about whether the motion is so clearly contrary to the public interest that the Court should not grant it.

[snip]

Considering documents outside the record I don’t think is part of that discretion. Even if your Honor considers this, it’s entirely consistent with everything that I’ve said. [my emphasis]

Later, Judge Ho got Spiro to back off his opposition to amici generally (Spiro had raised concerns that, “Any person that comes before the Court could have political motivations”) to state that he did not take a position on the non-Pomerantz memo.

THE COURT: Just so I understand it, what I heard from the government, and, Mr. Bove, correct me if I’m wrong, is that you object to the brief, the second of the two amicus briefs that was filed, the former U.S. Attorneys one, but not to the common cause one. Whereas, Mr. Spiro, you object to both?

MR. SPIRO: We take no position on whether the pending letter motion is part of the record. If it ends there.

THE COURT: I’m sorry. Do you object to the Court considering — granting either of the motions? I shouldn’t put it in terms of the Court. Do you object to either of the motions for amicus submissions? I just want to make sure my record is clear so I understand what I’m doing when I’m ruling.

MR. SPIRO: I don’t take a position on the first letter motion.

THE COURT: Okay. Thank you.

MR. SPIRO: I don’t take a position on it. Any further involvement, I rest on the record I just made.

You’ll recall that two of the questions Ho asked Paul Clement to address were whether he should consider other materials beyond the Rule(48) motion itself.

2) Whether, and to what extent, a court may consider materials other than the Rule 48(a) motion itself;

3) Under what circumstances, if any, additional procedural steps and/or further inquiry would be appropriate before resolving a Rule 48(a) motion;

Now, it’s unclear whether Ho will consider the amicus itself; it is dated Friday (Ho’s deadline for additional amici) but not docketed until yesterday, so he could ignore it on that basis alone. But it does provide a theory by which these letters come in based on Bove’s own conduct.

But he may not need it.

He was clearly focused on something else: Alex Spiro’s letter from February 3, seemingly mapping immigration assistance that Adams would provide if the case were dismissed, and Bove’s letter to Sassoon claiming (among other things) that the investigation by that point was an example of weaponization.

Of note, Judge Ho did not say anything when Bove claimed that his judgement that the case was politicized overrode Ho’s own opinion from January that it wasn’t.

The first is just a straightforward exercise of prosecutorial discretion guided by President Trump’s Executive Order 14147 relating to weaponization of the criminal justice process as well as guidance issued by the Attorney General on the day she was sworn in, February 5, 2025.

And basically what is set forth here is my conclusion that this case, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, should not proceed because it reflects, at minimum, appearances of impropriety that give cause for concern about abuse of the criminal justice process. And I believe it actually goes further than that and it is an abuse of the criminal justice process.

That matter, which, again, in an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, is, I think, as your Honor alluded to earlier, virtually unreviewable in this courtroom, especially where guided by an Executive Order and direct guidance from the Attorney General.

This claim is legally noxious, because it suggests that Bove can override an opinion from Judge Ho (though Bove never acknowledged that Ho had made that ruling). But Ho didn’t point out that Bove’s opinion basically attempted to overrule Ho’s own earlier opinion.

He did, however, react a bit when Spiro used the leaked Sassoon letter to reiterate his earlier argument about leaks.

MR. SPIRO: Well, I don’t want to digress. We didn’t have a hearing about it. But the reality is, the letter that leaked, the letter that I think we can both agree, sir, the letter that leaked with the back and forth between the Department of Justice did have prejudicial and false information about the mayor in it. There was a letter that leaked, that we can I hope both agree, couldn’t have been leaked, since it was internal to the Department of Justice, from any third outside party or bogeyman.

THE COURT: I’m sorry. You’re not referring to stuff that was the subject of motions practice earlier?

MR. SPIRO: No, I’m talking about now.

THE COURT: Okay.

MR. SPIRO: Yes, your Honor.

THE COURT: I got confused. I apologize. Go ahead.

MR. SPIRO: Not at all. But I’m just saying, I think the Court has to think about that. And the Court can keep thinking about, and the Court can always revisit its beliefs. Earlier in the case when I said things like, doesn’t this seem a little off, and doesn’t this seem a little politically motivated, and doesn’t it seem there are a lot of leaks going on. The Court can look at the cavalier nature with which the prosecutors put things in those letters that went back and forth when the Department of Justice was discussing this matter.

It remains the case that the most likely outcome of this is that Judge Ho dismisses the case against Adams with prejudice, depriving DOJ of any leverage over the Mayor.

But unnoticed by most of the coverage, Ho laid the foundation to rely on exchanges that happened before everything blew up on February 12.

Update: Relatedly, Jamie Raskin and Jasmine Crockett sent Pam Bondi a request for information on the Adams case. Their key hook is the possibility that Bove might have destroyed the notes of the January 31 meeting he confiscated.

All handwritten or electronic notes taken during the January 31, 2025, meeting between Department prosecutors and Mayor Adams’ legal team. If any notes have been destroyed, please provide the names of individuals who destroyed the notes, as well as the dates, manner, and reasons for such destruction.

The request is imperfect in some ways. For example, it doesn’t include Bill Burck and Eric Trump or Trump Organization in the list of conversations; Burck has an apparent conflict by representing both Trump Org and Adams. Similarly, it doesn’t ask for communications from Chad Mizelle, who was clearly in this loop as well.

But it is the kind of thing that–if there were real scrutiny of Bove’s ethical problems–could become a problem with DOJ.

Update: Fixed the first sentence, I hope.

If you bought this bronze January 6th commemorative medal from the US Mint, its value just went up.

While everyone was watching as Trump and Vance were taunting Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, other things were happening.

From last Friday at the rather niche publication Numismatic News:

The U.S. Mint has removed the bronze medal commemorating law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, from its website. The removal appears to have been done without prior notice or explanation, leaving collectors and observers speculating about the reason behind the decision.

The medal was originally created as part of a congressional initiative to honor the U.S. Capitol Police, the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police, and other first responders who helped secure the Capitol during the events of January 6. Congress authorized gold medals to be awarded for their service, with bronze replicas made available to the public for purchase through the U.S. Mint.

[snip]

While the medal has been available for purchase for some time, its product page on the U.S. Mint’s website now returns an error message indicating it has been removed.

NBC News adds a few more details:

Former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who was injured by the mob on Jan. 6, told NBC News that he tried to purchase a number of the replica medals this week, planning to hand them out as gifts, and was surprised to see they were no longer available.

Gonell said the erasure of the medals fits in a broader pattern, pointing to the failure of Congress to place a memorial for law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol up in the building before Trump’s second inauguration last month.

Justice Department webpages that listed the cases and featured summaries of the work of the federal prosecutors who brought Jan. 6 cases were also removed from the web after Trump took office.

“Not only do Republican members of Congress refuse to put up the plaque, but they are even erasing and removing the ability to purchase the coin for the Congressional Gold Medal,” Gonell said.

Before the listing was erased from the Mint’s website, a description noted that the medal was struck under the authority of Public Law 117-32, an act passed in August 2021 to honor the “sacrifice of heroes including Capitol Police Officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, Metropolitan Police Department Officer Jeffrey Smith, and those who sustained injuries, and the courage of Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman.”

Tonight, Donald Trump will enter the US Capitol to address a joint session of Congress, entering the House chamber through the same door that Ashli Babbitt tried to climb through before being shot by US Capitol Police on January 6th.

George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, and Ray Bradbury did the same with Fahrenheit 451; Trump is using them both as instruction manuals. Trump and his minions are going after the FBI agents who played a part in the January 6th investigation, and also the DOJ lawyers who prosecuted the hundreds of the January 6th insurrectionists, declaring them to be workers of injustice. Trump has pardoned those hundreds – some who had pleaded guilty and others who were found guilty by a judge and/or jury – and declared them to be innocent victims of a political plot against him. Trump launched primary challenges against members of Congress who voted to impeach him, and threatens to do the same to any who stand in his way today. Up is down, declares the leader, and woe to any who dare to disagree.

And in this context, reports emerged last Friday that the US Mint has joined the effort to “disappear” the January 6th insurrection. We don’t know whether they were ordered to stop selling these medals by the White House or whether they decided this on their own as a way of trying to keep their heads down during the Trump/Musk purge of the government. Either way, the result is the same: the history of January 6th is being slowly erased.

The wording on those January 6, 2021 commemorative medals is simple and direct: “Honoring the service and sacrifice of those who protected the US Capitol.” The US Mint may have stopped selling the medals, and Trump may have pardoned those who stormed the Capitol, but the service and sacrifice which the medals recognize cannot be erased.

It can be forgotten, though – and nothing would please Trump more than that.

There’s been an underlying tension throughout the five week DOGE effort to suffocate USAID (and with it, millions of people around the world).

After Trump halted foreign assistance, Republicans spoke up, often quietly; but John Cornyn did so publicly in a hearing, Jerry Moran did so as well (in part to support Kansas Ag markets), and Bill Cassidy did so on Xitter, demanding that lifesaving programs that Republicans have long supported be restarted.

Over and over again, Rubio and others insisted that they had reversed course and restarted life-saving programs.

But both in court filings and anonymous leaks, people who have previously implemented USAID’s work (virtually all have been put on leave or ousted) disputed that the programs had been restarted.

That led to this intemperate comment from Rubio, in which he claimed that if humanitarian programs had not been restarted, it was because their organizations themselves were incompetent.

“Right now, there is no USAID humanitarian assistance happening,” a current USAID official in the humanitarian division said. “There are waivers put in place by Secretary Rubio for emergency food assistance and a number of other sectors, but they are a fraud and a sham and intended to give the illusion of continuity, which is untrue.”

The official also slammed the waiver as unclear and largely unactionable because staff has been furloughed, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seized control of the agency.

“There is no staff left anymore to actually process waiver requests or to move money or to make awards or to do anything,” that official added. “We’ve ceased to exist.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday pushed back on nongovernmental organizations saying aid programs remained paused despite the waiver.

“I issued a blanket waiver that said if this is lifesaving programs, OK — if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” he said. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.

“And I would say if some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization, or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” Rubio added.

Since then, USAID has twice silenced people continuing to debunk Rubio’s claim to have restored humanitarian care.

On February 13, USAID released a memo purporting to correct a “false narrative,” “clarifying that Global Health (GH) programming under the lifesaving humanitarian waiver has continued uninterrupted and was never paused” — effectively an order to adhere to the lie that Marco Rubio’s order had actually restored care.

Then, on Friday, USAID retaliated against the truth once again.

After the Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health, Nicholas Enrich, issued a memo describing that such aide has never been restored, he was placed on paid leave.

The memo itself presents a detailed timeline of the various ways that aide was stalled and identifies a large number of specific documents where he memorialized each step of the process (the NYT, in its story on Enrich’s suspension, describes obtaining “a series of memos,” and I assume about five other outlets did too; it detailed and released a different memo cataloging likely impacts).

It details specific ways DOGE interfered with the release of lifesaving funds by restricting access to the financial systems needed to process waivers.

From the start, the Programs Group alerted Agency leadership that the lack of access to funds for implementing partners was a critical impediment to the ability to implement the waiver, as access to USAID financial systems (GLAAS and Phoenix) had been completely turned off by DOGE, per Bob Kingman and Daniel Gaush from Department of State ICASS Service Center, preventing the flow of any funds to implementing partners who were approved to implement LHA activities.

It describes how Christian nationalist Pete Marocco personally intervened to ensure that the Ebola relief Elon Musk claimed had been restored could not be restored if doing so involved the World Health Organization.

On February 18th, A-AA Enrich shared an action memo with Mark Lloyd recommending the utilization of an existing agreement with the WHO to utilize previously obligated funds to access a critical stockpile of PPE and lab supplies to support the Uganda Ebola outbreak response. While the activities would normally be covered in the regular process for the lifesaving humanitarian assistance waiver, this memo was drafted for approval from State/F Director Pete Marocco, given that the implementing partner of the agreement is WHO, the subject of a separate Executive Order. Mark Lloyd cleared the memo on Feb. 19th and it was sent forward for COS Borkert clearance and DFA Pete Marocco signature. COS Borkert specified that DFA Marocco would not sign the memo and would not agree to utilizing the agreement with WHO to access the PPE stockpile, and instead ordered A-AA Enrich to “pick up the PPE and deliver it to the necessary people and organizations in the region to respond to ongoing infectious disease outbreaks” without utilizing the agreement with WHO. DFA Marocco immediately responded to Borkert’s email, threatening to the jobs of GH staff if an alternate plan was not carried out immediately, directing political appointees Borkert, Lloyd and Meisburger to “take all necessary personnel actions in the event this is not completed in the next 12 hours.”

It continues the explanation of what happened with Ebola: six days later, political appointees specifically deprioritized getting Ebola funding (and that for other “neglected tropical diseases”) restarted.

On February 24, in an effort to move forward approvals and payments, the GH leadership team (A-AA Enrich and DAA Coles) walked through each waiver request with political leadership (Mark Lloyd and Tim Meisburger) in an effort to move forward approvals and payments. Political leadership provided guidance instructing GH to narrow the focus of its requests and to deprioritize activities related to neglected tropical diseases, Mpox, polio, Ebola, and any monitoring and surveillance activities, as those would not be approved.

Then, when State shut down virtually all foreign aide last week, they shut down (inadvertently, they claimed later) Ebola programs along with everything else.

Additionally, on February 26th, over 5,000 USAID awards were terminated globally; GH was not notified of this action before it happened. The terminated awards included almost all of the awards that were needed to implement lifesaving activities. A-AA Enrich informed COS Borkert, SBO Jackson, and AtAs Lloyd and Meisburger immediately of the grave impacts on lifesaving activities related to malaria, tuberculosis, and ebola. In an email following the February 26th terminations, DCOS Borkert indicated that the awards that were terminated should not have been, and had been terminated in error: “Please hold on these life saving programs and let us review in the morning. There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind. We need to identify what those are.” [my emphasis]

The memo even details the genesis of the earlier, February 13 memo:

On February 13th, A-AA Enrich and Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator (SDAA) Julie Wallace were told by DCOS Borkert that there had been a false narrative spread in the media that GH had been told to pause on approving activities under the LHA waiver. A-AA Enrich stated that the Agency FO had in fact told GH to pause on further approvals, and reminded him of the previous day’s email. DCOS Borkert as well as other senior advisors, including AtA Tim Meisburger and Senior FO Advisor Laken Rapier shouted at A-AA Enrich that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to immediately draft another Info Memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause.”

On February 13th, GH circulated the memo from AtA Mark Lloyd “performing the duties of Assistant Administrator, Global Health” which among other things, reiterated GH’s approach to approval of waivers per the earlier February 4th memo.

While agency leadership previously told GH to only include requests for 30 days (articulated in the February 4th memo), GH was subsequently asked to shift to the original 90 days as articulated in the original waiver language. This was updated in the February 13th memo. [my emphasis]

As a whole, it provides this summary of who is responsible for preventing lifesaving programs from being sustained: political leadership and DOGE.

USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation. These actions include the refusal to pay for assistance activities conducted or goods and services rendered, the blockage and restriction of access to USAID’s payment systems followed by the creation of new and ineffective processes for payments, the ever-changing guidance as to what qualifies as “lifesaving” and whose approval is needed in making that decision, and most recently, the sweeping terminations of the most critical implementing mechanisms necessary for providing lifesaving services. These actions individually and in combination have resulted in the U.S. Government’s failure to implement critical lifesaving activities. This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale. This memo serves to document the LHA waiver process and challenges encountered by the Bureau for Global Health to date, excluding PEPFAR.

In other words, Nicholas Enrich documented everything that had happened in spite of Rubio’s public order, and he was ousted.

While it’s not surprising, it’s not entirely clear whether there’s a specific reason he was ousted. That is, it’s not clear to me which facts people like Pete Marocco are trying to suppress:

• The specific actions taken by DOGE to thwart Rubio’s order.
• Marocco’s own specific complicity with decisions that will lead to the deaths of millions.
• The sheer amount of advance warning that political leadership got
• Rubio’s possible lack of involvement in things that Marocco has told courts he was personally involved in, which I wrote up here

But I can’t help but notice that Rubio responded to demands from Republican Senators that life-saving programs be restarted. And State has spent a good deal of time since then trying to hide the ways that people at USAID and State — people like Marocco and DOGE — directly undermined all efforts to do what Rubio assured Republican Senators was being done.

Are they trying to hide that people reporting to Rubio have directly undermined his order, the real insubordination that Marocco has blamed on USAID staffers? Or are they trying to hide that Rubio’s order was always a lie?

Whichever it is, Senators who were placated by Rubio’s past public claims are now on notice. They were lying to you. And while they were lying to you, food and medicine was spoiling and people were dying.

In a piece describing how, after Trump attempted to publicly humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talks on normalizing relations with Russia (negotiated by Kirill Dmitriev, of Mueller Report fame) will accelerate…

There is also renewed optimism in Moscow that, with President Zelensky at odds with President Trump and his team, difficult negotiations to end the war in Ukraine will now take a back seat to a raft of potentially lucrative US-Russia economic deals already being tabled behind closed doors.

[snip]

Already the Kremlin’s key economic envoy to the talks, Kirill Dmitriev, has told CNN that cooperation with the US could “include energy” deals of some kind, but no details have been announced.

Separately, the Financial Times is reporting that there have been efforts to involve US investors in the restarting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, which Germany halted at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dmitriev has called for the Trump administration and Russia to start “building a better future for humanity,” and to “focus on investment, economic growth, AI breakthroughs,” and long-term joint scientific projects like “Mars exploration,” even posting a highly produced computer graphic, on Elon Musk’s X social media platform, showing an imagined joint US-Russia-Saudi mission to Mars, on board what appears to be a Space X rocket.

CNN described literal “bewilder[ment]” about why Trump would sell out America’s allies.

[W]hy the US president would choose the Kremlin over America’s traditional partners remains the subject of intense speculation.

Much of it, like the frequent suggestion that Trump is somehow a Kremlin agent, or beholden to Putin, is without evidence.

Perhaps the right-wing US ideological fantasy that Russia is a natural US ally in a future confrontation with China, and can be broken away from its most important backer, is motivating Washington’s dramatic geopolitical shift.

But for many bewildered observers, both explanations for Trump’s extraordinary pivot to the Kremlin seem equally misplaced. [my emphasis]

CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Russia helped Trump win in 2016, after which Dmitriev reached out and discussed a bunch of investments — investments which would require ending sanctions — as a way to improve relations. CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Russia attempted to help Trump win in 2020 at least by sending disinformation framing Joe Biden and his kid via Russian agent Andrii Derkach to Trump’s personal lawyer. CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Derkach made similar efforts in 2024, and a bunch of Russian malign influence efforts (possibly including bomb threats that forced the evacuation of Democratic precincts) similarly aimed to help Trump and others who would “oppose aid to Ukraine.”

CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that a key Putin advisor, Nikolay Patrushev, said this in November:

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

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

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

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

As people puzzle through this bewilderment, as people puzzle through why Trump appointed people who undermined the Russian investigation to lead the FBI, the boilerplate about what Robert Mueller discovered about Russia’s 2016 efforts to help Trump remains wildly inadequate, as in this recent version in a story on Don Bongino’s propaganda about the investigation.

Mueller’s inquiry found repeated contacts between Russia-linked entities and Trump campaign advisers, but didn’t establish a conspiracy between the two.

Mueller didn’t establish a conspiracy between Trump and Russia. But such boilerplate always leaves out that his key aides lied about the true nature of those contacts, which is a big reason why we wouldn’t know if there had been one.

In the Mueller investigation, Trump’s campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, National Security Adviser, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all adjudged to have lied about the true nature of Trump’s ties to Russia from the first campaign.

Let’s unpack that even further.

• Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, confessed to lying to hide the direct contact he had during the campaign with Dmitry Peskov’s office in pursuit of an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal, a deal that would have required lifting sanctions to complete. Cohen confessed to lying to cover up his conversations with Trump about that impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. His confession meant that when Trump disclaimed pursuing business deals with Russia — in the same July 27, 2016 press conference where he asked Russia to hack Hillary some more and said he might bless Russia’s seizure of Crimea — Trump lied to cover up that dangle for an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal.
• Trump’s foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos (who was overtly involved in Derkach’s efforts last year), confessed to lying about the timing and circumstances of learning that Russia had thousands of Hillary’s emails and planned to release them to hurt her campaign. He lied about the other Russians that Joseph Mifsud introduced to Papadopoulos. After he pled guilty, Papadopoulos remembered and then unremembered telling his boss on the campaign, Sam Clovis, about the emails. He also claimed to forget what his own notes describing a proposed meeting in September 2016 with Putin’s team pertained to (notes that also mentioned Egypt and involved Walid Phares, whom investigators suspected of having a role in any $10 million payment Egypt made to Trump).
• A jury found Trump’s rat-fucker, Roger Stone, guilty of lying to cover up the nature and source of his advance notice of the Russian hack-and-leak campaign. Over the course of the investigation, the FBI found evidence Stone knew of several of the Russian personas before they went public. There’s good reason to believe that Stone got advance knowledge, in mid-August 2016, of the substance of select emails from the later John Podesta leak. When prosecutors indicted Stone, they were very keen to obtain a notebook containing notes he took of all his conversations with Trump during the 2016 campaign. Stone stayed out of jail by repeatedly claiming prosecutors offered leniency to get knowledge of those contacts.
• Don Jr. refused to testify before a grand jury, an appearance that presumably would have included questions about his understanding of the June 9 meeting at which Aras Agalarov offered dirt on Hillary in exchange for sanctions relief.
• Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, reneged on his plea agreement, in part, by lying about his August 2, 2016 meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, at which three topics were discussed: The campaign’s strategy to win swing states, how Manafort could get paid millions, and a plan to carve up Ukraine. In 2021, Treasury stated as fact that Kilimnik. was a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who had “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during 2016. The report went on to explain that, “Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” a narrative Trump keeps pushing.
• Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, confessed, twice, to lying about his efforts to undercut Barack Obama’s policy, including efforts to sanction Russia in response to the 2016 attack. There’s a good deal of evidence — including Flynn’s assurances to Sergey Kislyak that the “Boss is aware” — that Trump was involved in those efforts.

All of the people who lied to cover up the true nature of Trump’s Russian contacts in 2016, save Michael Cohen, were pardoned.

So was one other person — someone else who probably lied about the nature of Trump’s Russian contacts in 2017.

In the section describing his declination decisions, Mueller explained that there were three other people who probably lied, but whom he wasn’t charging.

We also considered three other individuals interviewed–[redacted]–but do not address them here because they are involved in aspects of ongoing investigations or active prosecutions to which their statements to this Office may be relevant.

The report itself and the 302s of Steve Bannon’s testimony, which evolved over the course of four interviews to more closely approximate the evidence, suggests Bannon could be one of those three (after all, Bannon, Trump’s other campaign manager, was a key witness at the Stone trial).

Not least because the report describes a pretty big discrepancy between Bannon’s testimony and Erik Prince’s regarding conversations the latter had with Kirill Dmitriev, now starring in negotiations about Russia. And both men played dumb about where the texts they exchanged in that period disappeared to.

Prince said that he met Bannon at Bannon’s home after returning to the United States in mid-January and briefed him about several topics, including his meeting with Dmitriev.1086 Prince told the Office that he explained to Bannon that Dmitriev was the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund and was interested in improving relations between the United States and Russia.1087 Prince had on his cellphone a screenshot of Dmitriev’s Wikipedia page dated January 16, 2017, and Prince told the Office that he likely showed that image to Bannon.1088 Prince also believed he provided Bannon with Dmitriev’s contact information.1089 According to Prince, Bannon instructed Prince not to follow up with Dmitriev, and Prince had the impression that the issue was not a priority for Bannon.1090 Prince related that Bannon did not appear angry, just relatively uninterested.1091

Bannon, by contrast, told the Office that he never discussed with Prince anything regarding Dmitriev, RDIF, or any meetings with Russian individuals or people associated with Putin.1092 Bannon also stated that had Prince mentioned such a meeting, Bannon would have remembered it, and Bannon would have objected to such a meeting having taken place.1093

The conflicting accounts provided by Bannon and Prince could not be independently clarified by reviewing their communications, because neither one was able to produce any of the messages they exchanged in the time period surrounding the Seychelles meeting. Prince’s phone contained no text messages prior to March 2017, though provider records indicate that he and Bannon exchanged dozens of messages.1094 Prince denied deleting any messages but claimed he did not know why there were no messages on his device before March 2017.1095 Bannon’s devices similarly contained no messages in the relevant time period, and Bannon also stated he did not know why messages did not appear on his device.1096 Bannon told the Office that, during both the months before and after the Seychelles meeting, he regularly used his personal Blackberry and personal email for work-related communications (including those with Prince), and he took no steps to preserve these work communications.1097

The lies Trump’s top aides told to hide aspects of the 2016 Russian effort — his campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, National Security Adviser, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker — along with gaps left by both Jr and Bannon’s testimony (note, Bannon’s testimony  also conflicts with Mike Flynn’s regarding whether he was privy to Flynn’s effort to undermine sanctions) trace out clear outlines of a quid pro quo: a serial agreement to reward Russia by acceding to carve up Ukraine and an agreement to lift sanctions, in exchange for help getting elected.

And here we are, eight years later, utterly bewildered why Trump might be in such a rush to deliver up Ukraine to Russia and lift sanctions to pursue business deals, precisely the quo outlined by the lies told years ago.

Really? How is anyone bewildered about this?

On November 11, one of Putin’s closest allies complained about how, “election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions.” Patrushev warned that, this time, Trump will “be obliged to fulfill” his “corresponding obligations.”

And what we are seeing in real time, in plain sight, protected by an Attorney General who has promised to investigate neither the campaign assistance nor the bribery, is Trump picking up precisely where things left off in 2017.

Starting with the very same offers Dmitriev was offering eight years ago.

Lawyers are very good at making up reasons why their clients are right, regardless of the nature of the dispute. And they’re very good at explaining why applicable laws and cases do or don’t apply, whichever serves the client’s interests. In this post I look at the ethical requirement related to purely legal arguments.

Rules

All lawyers are bound by the ethical obligations set by the state in which they are licensed. Generally these are a version of the ABA Model Rules Of Professional Conduct.  Here’s the text of Rule 3.1:

A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law. A lawyer for the defendant in a criminal proceeding, or the respondent in a proceeding that could result in incarceration, may nevertheless so defend the proceeding as to require that every element of the case be established.

In civil cases lawyers are bound by FRCP 11, which requires the signature of an attorney to every paper filed in court. Here’s the relevant part:

(b) Representations to the Court. By presenting to the court a pleading, written motion, or other paper—whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating it—an attorney or unrepresented party certifies that to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances:

(1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation;

(2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;

(3) the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; ….

Government lawyers have greater ethical obligations in both criminal and civil cases. Here’s the first part of Comment 7 to Rule 8.4:

[7] Lawyers holding public office assume legal responsibilities going beyond those of other citizens. A lawyer’s abuse of public office can suggest an inability to fulfill the professional role of lawyers. ,..

As you can see, a violation of FRCP 11 is almost certainly a violation of Rule 3.1. Every state has a disciplinary authority empowered to enforce the rules of conduct. Lawyers have a duty to report known violations of the rules to the relevant authority. Rule 8.3.

Example: Birthright Citizenship

There are two cases on birthright citizenship, one in Massachusetts, discussed here and one in Seattle, discussed here. These cases are based solely on the Constitution; there are no disputed facts. This post focuses on the latter

Here’s an exchange between Judge Coughenour and Brett Shumate, a lawyer for the DoJ in the Seattle case:

“In your opinion is this executive order constitutional?” he asked.

Said Shumate, “It absolutely is.”

“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” Coughenour said. “It just boggles my mind.”

I would have said “the position of the government is that the EO is constitutional.” If pushed, I would repeat whatever is in the brief. This was the tactic used by Antoinette Bacon and Edward Sullivan in their motion to dismiss the Eric Adams prosecution, and from my experience, it’s common for government lawyers to do things like this. But Shumate is all in on this Trump EO.

Shumate’s brief includes a number of procedural arguments about standing and similar matters which I won’t discuss.

Discussion of the merits begins on page 11. The first argument is about the term “jurisdiction” used in the 14th Amendment. The District Courts in both cases reject this argument based on Wong Kim Ark and the ordinary meaning of jurisdiction. Any person in the US is subject to the jurisdiction of the US, regardless of how or why they’re here with exceptions for diplomats. For example, if you go to Paris, don’t take weed even if it’s legal in your state. It isn’t legal in France, and if the gendarmes catch you you’ll learn about jurisdiction.

The leading case is Wong Ark Kim v. US, (1898) Wong was the son of Chinese citizens. They were living in the US when he was born, but went back to China without him 17 years later. He went to visit them and returned without incident. On his second visit he was barred from entry and filed this habeas corpus petition. The decision is long and complex, delving into the history of citizenship by birth and citing cases I doubt were in my law school library. It seems to me that the central holding is this:

But the opening words, ‘All persons born,’ are general, not to say universal, restricted only by place and jurisdiction, and not by color or race, as was clearly recognized in all the opinions delivered in the Slaughter House Cases, above cited.

Unfortunately the question presented to the Court included statements about the domicile and residence of Wong’s parents, and the final statement of the holding repeats that language. That gives Shumate a foothold to argue that domicile of the parents is relevant and should be read into the language of the 14th Amendment. There is a small group of lawyers making that argument; it’s like watching the formulation of an argument by a committee of pre-law students.

The nearly unanimous consensus is that Shumate is completely wrong. Here’s a recent example.

Application of Rules

Both Rule 3.1 and FRCP 11 prohibit lawyers from raising frivolous legal issues. Both allow for “good faith” arguments for reversal of existing case law. Public officials like Shumate are held to a higher standard. There is no definition of “frivolous”.

In this case, Shumate has two good faith arguments. First is his argument that the question raised and the holding in Wong Kim Ark reference the domicile of the parents, so the case doesn’t control cases where there is no domicile. This creates two further problems. First, the decision isn’t at all clear on the meaning of domicile. Second, the term domicile is not used in the 14th Amendment. Generally when a law is plain on its face there is no need to look further. Still, it’s not frivolous.

The second plausible argument is that there’s a dissent in Wong Kim Ark on behalf of two members of the Court. That is grounds for Shumate to argue for a reversal of the case. I didn’t read that dissent, so I have no opinion about it.  Its mere existence is enough to protect Shumate.

There are two other considerations. This is a motion for a TRO, not a fully briefed and considered set of pleadings. More latitude should be allowed in such circumstances. Also this is the president’s position, and in the past that has carried some weight, giving cover to the DoJ lawyers. I think the second should be disregarded in Trump’s case.

For these reasons, I don’t think a claim of ethical violations would succeed at this point. I do think that continuing to push the domicile argument, which seems extremely weak, especially on appeal, might raise concerns.

The lesson

I can’t think of a better case for sanctions purely based solely on a frivolous legal theory. The language of the 14th Amendment is clear and unambiguous. The leading precedent has stood for 125 years, through times of far worse xenophobia than ours, but Congress has not acted in any way to affect the decision. It has not been controversial until very recently, and there is no meaningful academic support for change.

That tells me that bringing a disciplinary case under Rule 3.1 or a demand for sanctions under FRCP 11 on a purely legal question is not likely to succeed. The ability and willingness of today’s lawyers to create arguments out of nothing, and the willingness of the Trump Protection Squad (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett) to discard precedent on ridiculous grounds, should be protection.

I will say, however, that a lawyer who refused on ethical grounds to work on this case would be fully justified. Of course, they’d be fired.

Yesterday, arguably for (at least) the second time, Trump declared fealty to Vladimir Putin.

As I contemplated the awful but in no way surprising developments (here’s a good podcast, featuring Marc Polymeropoulos, Doug Lute, and Rosa Brooks), I thought about the various ways Trump is sabotaging the United States, based on apparently different motivations.

But we only assume those motivations are different because we (or much of the legacy press, anyway) accept the claimed motivation Trump offers. When you look at all of them together, you simply can’t rule out they’re all part of the same effort to capitulate to Putin.

Project 2025

There’s a consensus that Trump is following the plan mapped out in Project 2025. This Politico report, from early February, laid out how Executive Orders Trump had signed implemented plans to attack diversity and LGBTQ protections, attack migrants, and protect disinformation. It focuses on fossil fuel plans that have mostly defunded renewable energy without raising fossil fuel exploitation (in part because it was already so high under Biden).

Even if that were the only thing going on or if that were really what was going on, it would raise real questions about foreign influence. Last year, Casey Michel mapped out how Viktor Orbán used the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead for his influence peddling in the US (which I discussed in this post on Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025).

While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.

Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.

Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*

The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told The New Republic that their arrangements with the Danube Institute is “restricted to carrying out educational research and analysis, as well as related events—none of which involved any financial commitment from either party” and that “at no point did Heritage receive funds from or pass funds to the Danube Institute, the Hungarian government, or the prime minister’s office.”

The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.

Christopher Rufo, the propagandist behind the demonization of trans people, has ties to the Danube Institute.

So even if this was just about implementing Project 2025, that would best be described as replacing American democracy with Orbanist authoritarianism — adopting the model from a key Putin puppet.

DOGE infiltration and destruction of US government

There have been a slew of stories about how DOGE provided cover for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller to implement Project 2025. Wired, for example, described how Stephen and his wife Katie, who is formally on the DOGE team, serve as gatekeepers to Elon and use Elon to carry out their dirty work.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller has, along with Project 2025 coauthor and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, became one of Musk’s closest allies in the administration, The New York Times reported earlier this month. WIRED has learned that the relationship is far closer, and more complicated, than has been previously known publicly.

In many ways, Musk’s targeting of federal agencies is perfectly in sync with the aims of Miller, who has championed DOGE’s work internally and even helped in making a lot of it possible. (In public, Miller has equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”) Still, sources tell WIRED that Trumpworld is more comfortable with Musk taking the heat for the recent federal cuts rather than the less famous—and, in their view, far less telegenic—Miller.

Yet through their actions so far, the Millers and Musk have developed a MAGA version of the Pet Shop Boys adage from the song “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”: You’ve got the brawn / I’ve got the brains. Stephen Miller’s knowledge of the federal apparatus, Katie Miller’s contacts on Capitol Hill, and the couple’s good standing among Trump loyalists, coupled with Musk’s relentless ambition and effectively infinite resources, made the scale of the DOGE government takeover possible. Musk is not the independent actor he’s often portrayed as and taken to be, in other words, but is rather carrying out actions essentially in concert with the man to whom the president has delegated much of the day-to-day work of governance.

“Stephen is kind of the prime minister,” one of three Republicans close to Trump and familiar with the situation tells WIRED. Another Republican familiar with the dynamic also used the term “PM” to describe Miller, short for prime minister. The implication is that Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.

But DOGE is going beyond the scope of Project 2025, and in ways that directly harm the United States.

Take the Project 2025 recommendations on USAID, the first target of DOGE. DOGE adopted the general theme of the Project 2025 chapter — that USAID had been used to implement a lot of radical plans. But the virtual elimination of USAID implemented last week goes well beyond Project 2025’s recommended reversal to 2019’s budget of $39.3 billion.

Project 2025 hailed Trump’s use of USAID to push for religious protection for Christians which — as I showed —  got shut down early along with everything else.

It promoted international religious freedom as a pillar of the agency’s work and built up an unprecedented genocide-response infrastructure.

It specifically called for greater reliance on local NGOs — and pointed to PEPFAR as a model.

Streamlining Procurement and Localizing the Partner Base. USAID is a grantmaking and contracting agency that disburses billions of dollars of federal funding in developing countries through implementing partners, such as U.N. agencies, international NGOs, for-profit companies, and local nongovernmental entities. In rare instances, such as in Jordan and Ukraine, the agency provides direct budget support to finance the operations of host-country governments. USAID far more often counts on expensive and ine!ective large contracts and grants to carry out its programs. It justifies these practices based on speed and a lower administrative burden on its institutional capacity.

[snip]

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has shown that localization at scale is possible within a short time span. Over the four years of the Trump Administration, the multibillion-dollar program increased the amount of funding disbursed to local entities from about 25 percent to nearly 70 percent with positive overall results. This model should be replicated across all of USAID.

But as declarations in various lawsuits repeat over and over, these local partners are not getting paid, and it’s destroying the credibility of the US (and rule of law).

11. Currently my mission has more than $30 million in unpaid invoices for 2 months of implementing partners’ work, with half of those past Prompt Payment Act due date (30 days) and incurring interest every day. If one were to extrapolate the numbers across all of the missions and USAID/Washington, given that annual USAID appropriation is $40 billion, the total dollar amount of unpaid invoices would certainly surpass $1billion at the most conservative estimate.

[snip]

13. Arbitrary withholding of due payments to U.S. and non-U.S. based partners does grave damage to the reputation and reliability of the U.S. government both domestically and internationally. USAID is a USG Agency which signed the contracts and grants in line with the Code of Federal Regulations and other statutes; USG refusal to pay for the past performed work and non-compliance with the TRO can shatter Americans’ certainty in the rule of law.

Rather than empowering local partners and capabilities, the quick decimation has devastated them — and left Americans still located overseas exposed to backlash.

USAID is just the most substantiated example of the sheer waste DOGE is creating. We’re seeing similarly stupid decisions in the firings of critical personnel (some of whom get hired back), but also the elimination of long-term maintenance or safety programs that will cost far more when those protections are gone.

Project 2025 envisioned stripping civil service protections and politicizing the bureaucracy. But with DOGE cuts, it’s not clear the bureaucracy can be rebuilt, even assuming the Heritage hires knew what they were doing. Meanwhile, the method of those cuts is more likely to elicit a backlash from judges, potentially even from the Supreme Court justices whom right wingers were counting on to bless all this.

And all that’s before you contemplate the possibility that Elon’s DOGE boys are doing something else with the data they’re accessing, or — intentionally or not — setting up backdoors via which adversaries can do so themselves.

Assume you were a true believer in Project 2025 (and not far greater authoritarianism). DOGE puts all that at risk, because by breaking so much so early, it is eliciting backlash and collapse of the economy.

The installation of useful idiots

It’s not just Elon who is making a mess. So are the other unqualified useful idiots Trump has installed — people like Pete Hegseth (who has fired three senior women officers after assuring Joni Ernst he wouldn’t target women) and Tulsi Gabbard (who parroted the same Russian propaganda she partly disavowed to get confirmed yesterday) and RFK Jr (who reneged on his promise not to cut off vaccine programs) and Kash Patel (who reneged on his promise to appoint a career FBI Agent as his Deputy).

These people are doing precisely the affirmative damage to the US that Democrats warned they would do — most obviously in RFK’s initial dismissal of the measles outbreak spreading from Texas to other states. And they’re doing it after years of parroting Russian propaganda.

The personalization of DOJ

We expected DOJ to be politicized in a second Trump term. I was even cynical enough to imagine that he would pardon all the January 6ers. The denialism about both Russia and January 6 were baked right into Project 2025.

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false,5 collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.6
• Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign—while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.

[snip]

• The FBI engaged in a domestic influence operation to pressure social media companies to report more “foreign influence” than the FBI was actually seeing and stop the dissemination of and censor true information directly related to the 2020 presidential election.11

But the personalization of DOJ, along with Pam Bondi’s orders to stop chasing foreign influence operations, does something more.

It effectively makes foreign bribery — as well as the kind of kickbacks we saw in advance of Trump’s inauguration — legal.

As I noted here, the SEC, for example, has paused its suit against Justin Sun. As Judd Legum describes, this follows the Chinese-linked businessman’s multi-million “investment” in Trump’s crypto currency.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.

[snip]

Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump — 75% of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”

Once you’ve installed lawyers who publicly represent they are Trump’s lawyers, once you’ve ensured that no one friendly to Trump will be prosecuted for bribery, then Ukraine was bound to lose any negotiation with Russia. Russia has been dangling bribes in front of Trump for years and now they’ll be free to deliver in plain sight.

And Trump has never placed his own self interest behind the interests of the United States.

The capitulation to Russia

Keep all that in mind as you consider Trump’s abject capitulation yesterday.

Keep in mind that even before yesterday’s ambush of Zelenskyy, Pete Hegseth ordered Cyber Command to stand down any targeting of Russia.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization’s outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The order does not apply to the National Security Agency, which Haugh also leads, or its signals intelligence work targeting Russia, the sources said.

CISA, too, has taken its focus off of Russia, something that risk grave damage to private companies as well as the government.

Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cybersecurity that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. Franz also did not mention the Russia-based LockBit ransomware group, which the US has previously said is the most prolific ransomware group in the world and has been called out in UN forums in the past. The treasury last year said LockBit operates on a ransomeware-as-service model, in which the group licenses its ransomware software to criminals in exchange for a portion of the paid ransoms.

In contrast to Franz’s statement, representatives for US allies in the European Union and the UK focused their remarks on the threat posed by Moscow, with the UK pointing out that Russia was using offensive and malicious cyber-attacks against Ukraine alongside its illegal invasion.

“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB [the Russian security agency] into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They hate the US and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The US policy change has also been established behind closed doors.

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

The person said work that was being done on something “Russia-related” was in effect “nixed”.

And, again, this happened before the ambush yesterday.

Eight years ago, as Mueller’s prosecutors started to focus on Roger Stone’s possible implication in a hacking conspiracy with Russia, Trump declared that he was going to partner with Putin; Russia and the US would jointly guard things like elections.

Now, Trump has chosen to unilaterally disarm.

Yesterday, Roger Sollenberger unpacked the Gitub of one of Elon’s boys, Jordan Wick.

In addition to his AI start-up, AccelerateX (which Wired wrote about), Wick has been fiddling with:

• Tracking government employees by union status
• Downloading Xitter DMs
• Identifying open source data on submarine cables, ports, and mineral deposits

Sure, the utility of some of that — tracking union status — maps right onto the Project 2025 plans DOGE is purportedly implementing, even if that, plus the DM download, raise grave concerns about privacy.

But the submarine cables too?

Even as Donald Trump has made his fealty to Putin clear, even as his Director of National Intelligence parrots Russian disinformation (protected now by the FBI), Elon Musk has been vacuuming up all the data of all the government. And every claim that he’s been modernizing networks or searching for fraud have fallen apart.

At this point, we simply cannot rule out deliberate wholesale sabotage.

Update: Thought I’d repost what I wrote in December in response to Kimberly Strassel complaining about Trump’s useful idiot picks.

But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.

Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.

Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.

But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.

This was an odd podcast, because Nicole and I went back and opened live to talk about Trump’s ambush of Zelenskyy.

I’ll say more in coming days. One thing I think is super important is that the SEC is moving to settle with Justin Sun, the Chinese-linked businessman who dumped $30 million into Trump’s crypto scam during the election. Once you do that, you’ve made bribery legal (which Pam Bondi and Chad Mizelle have been rushing to do in any case). Once Russia has the luxury of bribing Trump, Ukraine was never going to win this “negotiation.” The rest is just show, with America’s sovereignty and world peace to pay for it all.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)