The FBI Director just endorsed the ignorant ravings of a long-discredited propagandist, Sean Davis, attempting to debunk the NYT’s factual reporting that the letters on which the entire conspiracy the frothy right has been chasing for years “were probably manufactured.”

Kash needs Davis to be right, because if he’s not, it exposes Kash as someone too stupid to understand he has been chasing Russian disinformation for years. Kash needs Davis to be right, because Kash just declassified this annex thinking it would help his boss distract from the Epstein scandal that him himself stoked, when in fact it shows that Russian spies have been laughing their ass off at everyone involved for nine years (which I’ll come back to).

The truth is, Kash has been chasing documents as self-evidently problematic as the Steele dossier all that time.

He has proven an easy mark.

So while Sean Davis is never worth anyone’s time, I want to unpack the propaganda the FBI Director is clinging to, even as Russian spies laugh their ass off at him.

Start at the end. Davis claims “everyone on earth knows.”

6) Everyone on earth knows the Clinton campaign launched a scheme to falsely claim that Trump colluded with Russia. This new claim that somehow it was a fabrication that the Clinton campaign ran an op to falsely tie Trump to Russia is beyond insane. It’s sociopathic.

But poor Davis can’t even parrot Russian intelligence accurately. All the intelligence report in question claimed is that Clinton,

approved a plan … to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.

As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of “Putin’s support for Trump” to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.

Even the Russian spies, in their effort to gin up polarization in the US, didn’t claim Hillary would need to fabricate anything. As I’ve shown, the claim she would fabricate anything was itself a fabrication by John Durham, largely sustained by ignoring all the things in plain view — like Trump’s request for Russia to hack Hillary, his ties to Russian oligarchs, and the use of his properties to launder money.

Anyway, once you’re arguing that “everyone knows” something, or that it is “sociopathic” to actually examine the evidence, you’ve confessed you’re just adhering to this as an object of faith.

Now go back to the start of Davis’ rant.

That’s not what it shows at all. The New York Times is straight up lying.

1) The Durham annex never states at all that the specific intelligence was “fabricated.” It says the opposite, that his office was never able to “determine definitively whether the purported Clinton campaign plan [intelligence]…was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety.”

Davis creates a straw man, claiming that the NYT said the emails were fabricated. In fact the only people in the NYT story in question who used the word “fabricate” were the Trump flunkies who have chased this: John Ratcliffe, who acknowledged the possibility they might be in 2020, at a time when Kash worked for Ratcliffe.

Ahead of the 2020 election, Mr. Ratcliffe, as director of national intelligence in Mr. Trump’s first term, had declassified and released the crux of the July 27 email, even though he acknowledged doubts about its credibility. Officials did “not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication,” he said.

And Kash, five years later, as he rolled out an annex he probably doesn’t understand.

And Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, who has a long history of pushing false claims about the Russia investigation, declared on social media that the annex revealed “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”

But what Davis quotes there is from the end of this section, in which Durham effectively says, “after chasing this for four years, neither we nor the CIA were able to determine whether this was true, but since Brennan briefed the President on it, the FBI should have more seriously considered whether Hillary was trying to frame Trump.” More importantly, at that point Durham was talking about a plan in general, including Julianne Smith’s plan to get people to condemn Trump for attacking NATO. Davis puts the word “intelligence” in Durham’s mouth, claiming Durham is talking about something other than he was.

Importantly, this passage addresses not just the “Clinton plan” (including that letter about NATO) but whatever is under that redaction as well, and it comes at the tail end of analysis of earlier SVR documents that — among other things — also claim that Jim Comey was going to throw the election for Republicans.

Even this section relies heavily on the CIA, no doubt a 2017 review (which like the long redaction here) remains significantly redacted, long before Durham chased down authentic emails showing the actual content on which the SVR report was based was written by someone else, about something else.

As I’ll show, Durham lies throughout his annex about what the FBI actually knew. He has to. If his premise — that the FBI should have been more skeptical about the dossier and the Alfa Bank allegations — is false, then his entire four year witch hunt was futile.

But Davis ignores the bit of the report the NYT cites — specifically addressing the emails on which the SVR report was based — that says Durham’s best assessment is that the emails were “composites.”

“The office’s best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others,” it says.

Durham may not have been able to definitely determine how the report was put together, which is different than the specific emails in question, which is what the NYT addresses. But his best judgment is that the emails were “composites.” His claim there was a Clinton plan relies on other things, like that NATO letter. Davis is not even addressing what the NYT is, the emails themselves.

Next, Davis confesses he can’t read page numbers.

2) At the time the intel which Ben Smith says was “fake” was received, John Brennan took it so seriously that he briefed Obama about it, took notes about it, and stashed the notes away in his safe.

What Davis is talking about are the notes from John Brennan showing that Brennan briefed President Obama on the SVR intelligence right away, which John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel released in an effort to help Trump win the 2020 election.

But Davis is once again conflating two things. Brennan took the SVR intelligence seriously, which is different than Brennan taking the allegations in this report seriously. This particular note spanned the fifth and sixth pages of his notes. Probably, the things Brennan took more seriously were on earlier pages of his notes.

In any case, this response was based off an intelligence report written no more than a day earlier. It was not the result of concerted analysis (and it’s not clear whether Brennan had seen the SVR email from the day earlier where Russian spies spoke about ginning up a scandal themselves, which itself was genuinely alarming but which Kash continues to ignore).

Next, Davis looks at what Comey said about the earlier reports, dating to January and March 2016, which alleged both that Loretta Lynch was trying to undermine the investigation but also that he himself was trying to extend it to help Trump win.

3) James Comey specifically went under oath and cited the Clinton plan intelligence as one of the major reasons he chose to unilaterally usurp the authority of Loretta Lynch and to declare that the U.S. government would not charge Hillary Clinton for her use of an illegal private email server.

4) Comey told Congress that he believed the Clinton plan intelligence was “genuine.” “So far as I knew at the time, and still think,” Comey testified on December 7, 2018, “the material itself was genuine[.]”

Once again, Davis is conflating different things. Worse still, he is truncating what Comey said about the earlier reports. He said they were genuine (that is, authentically from SVR), but that he couldn’t vouch for their accuracy.

Mr. Comey. I know generally, and I have to tread carefully here, because I think the underlying material is still classified. So there was material — this is what I’ve said publicly, and so I’ll say it again, there was material that was classified that if unclassified, released, would open the Attorney General up to the accusation — whether it was true or not — the accusation that she had not been acting fairly and impartially in overseeing the investigation.

So far as I knew at the time, and still think, the material itself was genuine, which is a separate question, though, from whether it was what it said was accurate.

Finally, Davis points to still more reactions to the earlier emails (and reactions to Lynch’s reaction to them).

5) FBI general counsel James Baker said he was “greatly concerned” about the intel and specifically Lynch’s reaction when confronted with it. Durham’s report said Baker “did not dismiss the credibility” of the intel reports. Andrew McCabe likewise said he was struck by Lynch’s “odd” reaction to the allegations.

Understand, Davis’ proof that the NYT is wrong consists of repeatedly conflating one thing (a Clinton plan, including to send a letter about NATO) or another (those January and March 2016 reports) for what NYT wrote about, the emails themselves, even while twice misquoting people.

• Bullet 1: Davis misquotes both the NYT and Durham and conflates a Clinton plan for emails from which SVR invented a claim of one
• Bullet 2: Davis conflates the entirety of the SVR intelligence for this one report
• Bullet 3 and 4: Davis conflates January and March 2016 reports for a July 2016 one, and truncates a Jim Comey quote
• Bullet 5: Davis again conflates those earlier reports for the later one
• Bullet 6: Davis clings to faith rather than facts

Crazier still, Davis invests everything in both those January and March 2016 reports to be true.

If they are, it means Jim Comey deliberately threw the 2016 election by extending the Clinton email investigation, and Donald Trump didn’t get elected fair and square.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

The most important passage of the classified annex of the Durham Report is this one — though you won’t hear it from the frothy mob, in significant part because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are hiding what these documents are. Durham describes that it is “dated the following day” just after discussing an email dated July 25, so July 26.

Go ahead and read it once. But before I explain why it is so important, first let me illustrate how Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are obscuring the provenance of these documents.

As I explained here, these documents were stolen from Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) by another country’s intelligence service (understood to be the Dutch). The documents themselves generally consist of two different kinds of documents:

• Emails and other raw intelligence that SVR stole from victims, including US think tanks, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President
• Discussions among SVR — mostly intelligence analysis — about the files they stole

Sometimes the victim files the Russians stole would be attached to the reports, sometimes they would be incorporated into the reports. Sometimes the Russians would translate the English-language documents they stole, other times they would not. So the game of telephone that most of these documents entail looks like this:

• SVR steals documents
• SVR translates documents
• SVR analyzes documents
• Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
• Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
• CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits
• CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
• CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

But that’s not all. For the key documents in this collection, they report the speech of one or another Hillary Clinton associate, which means the game of telephone looks like this:

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Julianne Smith talk with Think Tank guys (primarily Open Society’s Leonard Benardo, but also OSF’s Jeffrey Goldstein, as well as unidentified people at Atlantic Council and Carnegie Endowment)
• Think tank guys write what they learned from DWS or Julianne Smith
• SVR steals documents from Think Tank guys
• SVR translates documents from English to Russian
• SVR analyzes documents
• Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
• Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
• CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits to English
• CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
• CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

Best as I can tell, that path is the one involved in the documents Durham claims are the most important in his appendix, the ones that claim to report what Smith said about a Hillary Clinton plan to smear Donald Trump.

Here’s what FBI lawyer Tricia Anderson wrote about the problems with this game of telephone in a memo:

• The reports likely reflected multiple levels of hearsay given that they were based on purported communications between Wasserman Schultz and potential donors, not any underlying communications between Lynch and Clinton campaign staff;
• Wasserman Schultz’ communications may have contained exaggerations designed to reassure potential donors who were concerned by news about the FBI investigation;
• The [Russians] who drafted the reports may have injected opinion, editorialization, or exaggeration into the reports; and
• Translation errors may have contributed to the potential for unreliability

Durham provided just a summary of this assessment, but a fair one (in part because he’s more focused on later documents that don’t involve DWS but do involve all those levels of reported speech).

Here’s how the purported smoking gun was introduced (note, if Durham provided the date, it is redacted, but it reports something that happened on July 26, so it can be no later than then but could be July 27).

There was additional analysis about the provenance following the text.

There are a number of things conveyed in these redactions:

• The classification marks
• That CIA received these documents
• The dates the Dutch passed them on
• Presumably (though given Durham’s practice elsewhere in his report, not definitely) the date of the underlying memo
• A description of the people at SVR they were obtained from
• The import of all the other think tanks
• The nature of the incorporated messages purported to be from Benardo

I don’t contest some of those redactions. But the amount of redaction, and lack of context elsewhere, obscure what the purported smoking gun is: a draft SVR report that in some way incorporates language attributed to Leonard Benardo. We have no clue whether it is dated July 26, 27, or 28 (by which date CIA had a copy). The section that most frothers are quoting (just like the section of other SVR reports released in recent weeks) is not an email itself, it is a Russian discussion about purported emails.

Durham follows the actual SVR report with the text attributed to Benardo; the description of how this text is incorporated in the document is redacted.

He follows it with another similar (raw) email attributed to Benardo (which should make evident whom Benardo sent the email to, or at what time, but Durham didn’t share that).

John Durham does not mention, at all, that the language of those first two purported Benardo emails — the ones with a date of July 25 — in no way supports the claim made in the SVR Report, that on,

26 July 2016, Clinton approved of a plan of her policy advisor, Julianna Smith … to smear Donald Trump. by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican nominee.

As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of “Putin’s support for Trump” to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.

He does note in a footnote that the SVR report got Julianne’s first name wrong, Juliana. He simply asserts that the “Julie” referred to in the purported Benardo emails is Julianne; he doesn’t note that in the purported follow-up Benardo email the name used is “Julia,” not the kind of thing a colleague would normally do. Durham interviewed Benardo, who specifically said he didn’t know who “Julie” (or “Julia”) was.

The only corroboration at all that the language in the Benardo email was real, was evidence it was not: an email sent by someone else, a Carnegie Endowment cyber guy named Tim Maurer, discussing this article on attribution from Thomas Rid. Durham says less about the Rid article than another cited in this correspondence, which is telling, because Rid discussed the Democrats’ decision, back in June, to go public with the hack.

This was big. Democratic political operatives suspected that not one but two teams of Putin’s spies were trying to help Trump and harm Clinton. The Trump campaign, after all, was getting friendly with Russia. The Democrats decided to go public.

Rid also discussed the Guccifer persona at length, which is important for reasons I’ll explain in a follow-up.

As noted, ultimately Durham concludes that the emails themselves — documents that are supposed to be raw collection — are instead “composites,” including from a totally different guy, Maurer.

The Office’s best assessment is that the July 25th and July 27th emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others. Indeed, as discussed above, language from Tim Maurer’s email of July 25th is identical to language contained in Benardo’s purported email of the same date.

Durham is hedging wildly here. I think the NYT overstates when it says, “Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.” That would be the conclusion sane normal people would draw, that if emails purporting to be from Benardo were actually cut-and-pasted language from Maurer, but Durham doesn’t make that conclusion (perhaps because he continued to chase this conspiracy theory for another two years after he interviewed all these people, indicting two more men only to discover his theories about them, too, were made up). Indeed, in an almost entirely redacted (and therefore useless) passage, Durham claims that in what must be July 2017, the CIA still maintained that the report and at least some of the purported emails were not fabrications. He also cites interviews he did with people who thought the Benardo emails were authentic.

But yeah, if the emails themselves are “composites,” it means they’re made up, not even attributing the author correctly. In fact, if they’re composites, we have no reason to believe the emails dated July 25 weren’t in fact “composited” on July 26 or 27.

Now’s a good time to mention that Durham is obscuring the sequence of the documents here (not least by withholding the metadata of the real email he obtains, but also thanks to the redactions from Grassley and Tulsi). The sequence looks something like this, but we can’t be sure:

• July 25: Thomas Rid story
• July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack.
• July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
• July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
• July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
• Unknown date: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
• July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported Benardo email, in what Durham describes as English but is … probably not written by a native English speaker
• July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO

Narratively, Durham puts the draft report, incorporating a July 25 email attributed to Benardo, then citing another July 25 email attributed to Benardo, and describing Hillary approving a plan on July 26, before the email between two Russian spooks, which by description is dated July 26. But I’ve been staring at it for an hour (and reviewing Durham’s unclassified report and now realizing he never provides the date there, either) and for the life of me, I’m not sure if we know whether the two spooks email precedes the draft intelligence report or not (note, too, that it starts, “Great!” by responding to something, suggesting there’s an even earlier one Durham suppressed). If my read that it is dated July 26 is correct, it would have been written on the same day as the purported approval by Hillary, of a plan to smear Donald Trump. But the only email attributed to Benardo reflecting Hillary’s approval is written July 27, meaning it’s more likely it was written on July 27.

So we don’t know. I am still searching but I believe Durham never revealed the date of that memo. But based on what we can see, SVR didn’t “have” an email reflecting Hillary approving this plan until July 27, the day after (at least by Durham’s description) two Russian spooks discussed telling stories about the Deep State.

If that’s right, Russian spooks were discussing “making” such a report before they “found” an email in stilted English that Durham couldn’t match describing Hillary approving this plan.

Based on interviews (italicized here) that appear only in this annex, John Durham first started chasing this conspiracy theory no later than September 2019 (the day after meeting with Nate Batty, the politicized FBI Agent who killed the Alfa Bank investigation). After interviews done by July 2021, Durham should have come to the conclusion he states here: that the purported emails were “compiled” from emails of entirely different people. And yet all the while, the IC was in possession of documents showing one Russian spook suggesting that another one, “do something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State.”

Durham tried to bury all that, that he created precisely the chaos the Russian spooks were trying to manufacture, in this classified annex and — if you believe Kash Patel — burn the proof.

The Russians told you what they were up to.

And yet you fell for it anyway.

Update: Fixed spelling of Benardo’s last name.

The Epstein distraction files continue, with a purported whistleblower report (which Tulsi Gabbard now seems to claim was the entire source of her past discredited propaganda) and the Classified Annex to the Durham Appendix.

I’ll return to the substance of the Durham Appendix.

The Tl;dr is that Durham made false claims in the appendix contradicted in the unclassified version, and ignored totally basic details about the 2016 election as well as evidence in his own possession to sustain his Clinton Conspiracy Theory, which I addressed at length here.

But the short version of the story is that in addition to the two SVR documents involving Loretta Lynch I described here, Durham reviewed two more SVR documents. So in sum total, this scandal is about:

• A January 2016 intelligence memo purporting to describe what Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said about the Clinton email investigation and also stating that Jim Comey intended to keep the scandal running “to jeopardize the chance of the DP to win the presidential race.”
• A March 2016 intelligence memo claiming that the Hillary’s political director, Amanda Renteria, regularly receives updates from Loretta Lynch and that Hillary was reviewing Trump’s ties with Russian oligarchs (including Aras Agalarov), “with support from special services.”
• A July 2016 “draft memo” relaying that the Soros Foundation had evidence that on July 26, Hillary approved a plan from her policy advisor, Juliane Smith, “to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.” This was, in part, an effort to get the White House to be more confrontational with Russia. (There’s a reference to “PC” that Durham takes to be “Political Convention” and not “Principals Committee”). It claimed (remember, this purports to be what Smith said) that the FBI lacked irrefutable evidence of Russia’s involvement in the scandal. The July 2016 memo then says that the campaign Hillary purportedly approved on July 26 was launched in June 2016, and also claimed that Hillary lacked direct evidence (which they of course did have). The appendix cites five more somethings of emails (the report redacts the description) purportedly from Leonard Bernardo, dated July 25 to July 27, that say “the FBI will put more oil into the fire,” most of which are in Russian.

Durham obtained records from many of the think tanks involved and he “was unable to locate in the records from the Think Tanks any exact versions of the Bernardo emails obtained” from their source. Instead, he found some real emails, “contain language and references with the exact same verbiage to the materials.” One was a discussion about Thomas Rid’s analysis of the DNC hack. Another was an email Smith actually sent soliciting bipartisan experts to condemn Trump’s attacks on NATO. As noted in my earlier post, Durham focused on Smith’s efforts to get a public statement about the actual hack released, which had no tie to Trump (as also noted, Durham omits a great deal of context to make that look damning).

None of the people involved in the purported emails said they sent them. None of Hillary’s staffers said there was a plan. Durham ultimately concludes that the emails on which he predicated a five year investigation were merely “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking.” The rest of his opinion is stupid for the reasons I laid out in my earlier post, but will return to.

From that, the right wing is treating the things in the Russian intelligence reports as true. And treating the desire to make political hay of an election year hack as a criminal conspiracy.

Curiously, though, none of them are treating as true that Jim Comey would draw out the investigation into Hillary until the end of the election to help Trump win, even though that is what happened.

And none of them are accusing Jim Jordan (or anyone else) of trying to make political hay about the Iran hack of Donald Trump last year — the exact equivalent of the worst insinuations about what Smith did.

Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray requesting an unclassified briefing on the Iranian hack of President Trump’s campaign. According to reporting, Iran emailed the illegally obtained information to at least three advisers on the Democratic presidential campaign and emailed stolen information, including at least three major media outlets—Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The Committee is requesting the briefing to address questions including:

• What material did Iran obtain from President Trump’s campaign?
• To whom at the Biden for President or the Harris for President campaigns did the hackers send information and materials?
• On what date did the FBI learn there had been a hack and exfiltration of nonpublic information from President Trump’s campaign?
• On what date(s) did Iran provide the stolen documents to the Biden for President campaign or the Harris for President campaign?
• On what date did the FBI first inform President Trump’s campaign it had been hacked?
• Did the FBI use any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorities to surveil President Trump’s campaign?

Excerpts of the letter to Director Wray: 

“On September 18, 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that in ‘late June and early July,’ the Islamic Republic of Iran attempted to interfere with the upcoming presidential election by ‘sen[ding] unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with the Biden-Harris campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign . . . .’  Since then, Iran has continued ‘to send stolen, non-public material’ from President Trump’s campaign to the media.  Iran’s actions raise serious concerns about foreign election interference targeting President Trump’s campaign to support President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’s campaigns. We write to request information about this serious matter.

Look, if you really believe that these documents represent the transparent truth, then you believe that Jim Comey threw the election to Donald Trump and Jim Jordan must go to prison.

But if you’re ignoring those bits (as well as John Durham’s silence that the DOJ IG report quoted FBI as saying some of the SVR memos were “objectively false”), then you’re simply chasing conspiracy theories to drown out the Epstein scandal.

Pick. Either send Jim Jordan to prison or shut your yap.

As I described in this post, just hours before a Circuit Court hearing in which Trump will try to defend his use of IEEPA to arbitrarily impose tariffs, he declared the possibility that Jair Bolsonaro will be held accountable for his coup a threat to American democracy.

I should have looked closer at the products that Trump is excluding from the tariffs. They include orange juice.

That’s interesting because less than two weeks ago, Johanna Beverage Company sued Trump for his tariff threat against Brazil.

4. Operating since 1995 and 2007, respectively, Johanna Foods and Johanna Beverage are the leading private label and co-pack juice supplier and producer, supplying juice products for numerous retailers and brands, including Aldi, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Wegman’s, Safeway and Albertsons.

5. Plaintiffs supply nearly 75% of all private label not from concentrate orange juice customers in the United States, as well as two of the largest branded orange juice producers, making our operations a cornerstone of the national orange juice supply chain. Ex. 1, at ¶12.

[snip]

31. The President’s imposition of a 50% (or more) tariff on Brazilian orange juice will cause significant and direct financial harm to Plaintiffs and to American consumers.

32. Brazil is the world’s leading producer of orange juice and is the second largest supplier of orange juice to the United States.

33. Currently, more than half of the orange juice sold in the United States comes from Brazil, with eighty percent of NFCOJ imported from Brazil.

The entire complaint is an interesting lesson in the orange juice market, including how extreme weather has devastated much of the American orange crop in Florida.

As a result, America has become dependent on imports for the orange juice they drink.

Trump excluded orange juice from yesterday’s tariffs, but not coffee, a bigger export and probably an even more crucial breakfast ingredient.

Which is a bit of a tell.

The orange juice exclusion wasn’t about preventing immediate pain among American consumers.

It was about mooting this lawsuit.

I’ve already complained that the press simply refuses to explain that these tariffs have already been ruled illegal, and significant swaths of the right wing legal establishment are pushing to sustain that decision through the appeals process. (Then again, journalists refuse to describe tariffs as unlawful taxes on American consumers, either.)

But tracking the legal challenges to Trump’s unlawful power grab is actually a critical step in understanding how Trump hopes to sustain them even though they are illegal.

There’s a coping mechanism I often see that involves stating we will get justice against the perpetrators of fascism once we “win.” It goes something like, “when we win we’ll hold all of these ICE goons accountable.”

I get the urge: you’re feeling outraged and helpless right now and one way to feel better — one way to affirm justice — is to imagine a more just time in the future. I get the import of accountability.

I say it’s a coping mechanism for several reasons. Making the statement is an act of obscuring how difficult or, in this case, almost impossible delivering justice to these particular people are. Those ICE goons? Most of what they’re doing is currently legal or at least covered by qualified immunity. To the extent we ever held torturers accountable, they were low-level schlubs and not the architects who successfully hid behind legal advice. So if you want to hold the ICE goons accountable, you’re going to have to figure out how to do something far bigger than just winning an election.

And making the statement often serves as a substitute for doing the work — any work — to actually win.

If the ICE goons make you feel helpless — which after all is the intent — why not search out one of the efforts to resist, like the ones Michelle Goldberg described here?

[I]f Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.

[snip]

With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.

When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.

As Goldberg notes, that way to stop feeling helpless about your neighbor being kidnapped can also build the kind of network that we need in order to win, a network that not coincidentally is not conceived in terms of political party.

There’s another version of this that involves writing entire columns akin to the comment about the ICE goons: What will Democrats do, will they do it, if we win?

With little consideration of how we win or what a win is.

Two examples from yesterday demonstrate the type — but also point to where the discussion could be, and why.

After reviewing two of the horrible events of the last day — the frivolous attack on James Boasberg and the confirmation of Emil Bove — JV Last inexplicably pitches an entire post that assumes Dems are feckless but also imagines what we should do if those feckless Dems manage to win in spite of their fecklessness.

I have some questions for Democrats, and for you, that I hope you’ll discuss in the comments. I want a real conversation about wisdom because it’s possible that I’m a few degrees too hot on this stuff.

• Should the next Democratic president fire FBI Director Kash Patel, even if there is no immediate pretext? Why or why not?
• Should a Democratic Congress attempt to remove Bove from the bench since he apparently perjured himself during his confirmation hearing?
• Should a Democratic president pressure universities to adopt policies friendly to liberalism and punish universities that caved to the Trump administration, in order to establish that collaboration comes with a cost?
• Should a future Democratic administration pursue all available modes of accountability for federal agents who broke the law under the Trump administration by—just as a for-instance—filing false charges against innocent civilians?

Or should Democrats who gain power in the future decide that it’s better to focus on kitchen-table issues. To work with Republicans to pass bipartisan legislation that impacts Real People’s Lives.

Offering advice for a potential 2026 candidate, and so imagining how not to be feckless as a candidate, Dan Froomkin adopts a more optimistic stance, offering a 10-point plan of what to do if Dems do win.

Someone I know who is thinking about working for a primary campaign in the fall asked me the other day what I would want to see in a 2026 congressional candidate.

And from my perspective covering the resistance, my answer was clear: I want to see some fight.

My view is that if Democrats want to harness the energy of the resistance in the 2026 elections, they need to start talking now about how to stymie Trump as much as possible in the short term and how to undo the damage he has wrought in the long term.

I’m honestly not so clear myself on the short term. As long as Trump is president, given his veto power, it seems to me it will be impossible to pursue a positive legislative agenda even if Democrats win both chambers. And if Trump is willing to hold the country hostage, which he is, Democrats might even have to make some concessions simply to keep the government functioning at all. Does anyone have any thoughts about the best course? Please share them with me.

I do know that a Democratic House majority starting in 2027 could aggressively use subpoena power to fully investigate the many abuses committed by this administration, setting the stage for reforms to come. Every candidate ought to make that a solemn vow.

As for the long term, candidates should enthusiastically address the need to restore sanity and good government to the country after Trump is gone.

I’d like to see people campaign on something along the lines of a 10-point plan. And my first draft is something like this:

1. Restore the rule of law. This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.
2. Stop mass deportations. That includes defunding ICE, closing concentration camps, restoring temporary protected status, respecting asylum claims, ending to the harassment of people on visas, and welcoming more international students.
3. Revive the civil service. That means hiring back tens of thousands of workers who were driven out, undoing organizational changes, reestablishing the tradition of a nonpartisan bureaucracy.

I read these, and then I read the Texas gerrymander plans that aim to turn Democrats into a permanent minority, and wonder, what the fuck are we doing here, people?

You need to find a way to ensure there will be some kind of real representation left, you need to find some way to ensure martial law like Trump tested in Los Angeles doesn’t disrupt elections, you need to figure out what the fuck DOJ is doing by demanding election rolls from every state before you can even think about what we do if Democrats win in 2026.

Even the question of retaliating against the Texas gerrymander — which would involve rolling back efforts that have made states more democratic — for short term survival is not an easy one (as Semafor lays out).

Beyond the difficult political problems, gerrymandering is at the core of partisan and racial polarization that is Trump’s magic sauce. This is a fight not just about whether Republicans can insulate themselves from accountability for the wildly unpopular policies they’ve rubber stamped in service of their liege Donald Trump. It’s a fight over whether Americans can find common ground with their neighbors.

Without that — without finding some way to break through the polarization that Republicans use to demonize Democrats and people of color and in so doing blinding their followers to the pain they’re imposing on them, the followers — you will not defeat fascism.

Which is why I think Last and Froomkin aren’t thinking big enough, and in the process aren’t really addressing the problem.

Fire Kash? No brainer. But the problem isn’t Kash, per se. It’s that in the zero sum game of polarization, right wingers are wielding “justice” as a political tool, all the while duping their rubes into believing Democrats did that, because they tried to hold a privileged white billionaire accountable for his actions. Jim Comey did stupid things because he was afraid right wing FBI agents would leak and make him — make FBI — look bad. Chris Wray refused to defend what happened before he arrived, making it easy to spin conspiracy theories about how Donald Trump was the one unfairly treated during an 2016 election in which FBI may have decisively hurt Hillary. At least Kash’s rabid partisanship has the potential of backfiring — certainly it has so far on Epstein — because he’ll never be able to deliver on the promise of children’s books.

Ending mass deportations, restoring civil service? Of course. But why conceive of that as a simple reversal, a restoration of the protections that right wingers easily hijacked? What would it take to provide real job security for the weather forecasters and cancer researchers if we ever get to bring them back? And should we purge FBI and ICE of all those leakers and goons first, or is there a review of Trump’s abuses provides a way to fix past problems? What does “restoring rule of law” mean when right wingers have embraced a mafia state? How do you restore faith in rule of law from both right and left, especially when the norms that provide the necessary foundation are gone?

There are a list of things that need to happen to address this: Dramatically curtail the Presidential pardon. Establish a way — a replacement for the failed experiment with Special Counsels — to hold the political accountable that is insulated from partisan chain of command. Eliminate the abuse of informants. We have barely begun to conceive of how much Trump has thrown out all rules prohibiting domestic spying, which provides an opportunity to rethink how to protect privacy in the age of dragnets (and how to safely disaggregate the data Trump is accumulating on one place). Why not take Trump’s debasement of FBI and supercharge of ICE as an impetus to rethink Federal law enforcement entirely and take all of it out of DHS, where it has far fewer rules? And yes, you’d have to do something about SCOTUS, but why stop at expanding SCOTUS instead of reconceiving of it, finding away to make it something other than the zero sum fight it has been for three decades?

Trump has destroyed the justice system — Trump has stolen rule of law from ordinary people, whether they’re Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, victims of his fraudster buddies he let off scot free, or American taxpayers whose shared national interest he has converted for political gain. He has replaced it with a spoils system that rewards loyalty. That makes the task of restoring it far harder, but it also provides an opportunity to show the cost of Trump’s corruption, and to pitch this as a fight against corruption, not Trump per se.

I’m not saying you’d be able to do this immediately with a House majority in 2026 or the White House in 2028. You wouldn’t, unless Trump precipitated a collapse so major that America is rebuilding as it struggles to feed its people, not at all an impossibility. But the reason Joe Biden, a man who enacted historic legislation with the thinnest of margins, failed is because the rising flood of fascism wiped all that away within weeks, even though Biden anticipated some of the means (like the attack on civil servants) Trump used to do that.

There are really better ways to fight fascism than focusing on what magical ponies we’ll ride if we “win.” But if you’re going to do that, consider what would need to happen to actually reverse the tide.

Update: As if on cue, The American Prospect has a thoughtful piece on what kind of reforms we could impose in the wake of Trump that might fix things. It focuses closely on the post-Watergate reforms.

A post-Trump legislative agenda could begin by reinforcing the post-Watergate laws and reaffirming the public purposes that motivated them. Congress could strengthen the enforcement provisions of the Impoundment Control Act. In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling about the president’s power to remove executive branch officials, Congress could put inspectors general out of the president’s reach and under its own protection as part of the Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency (although Trump has tried to control congressional agencies too).

Congress could also enact a new National Emergencies Act that would limit the ability of presidents to declare forever emergencies. In 1983, the Supreme Court struck down the provisions in the 1976 act that enabled a single chamber of Congress to withhold consent for an emergency’s continuance. Under the Court’s decision, Congress now must have a two-thirds majority in each house to overcome a presidential veto and end an emergency. As Josh Chafetz of Georgetown Law School suggested recently in an unpublished paper, a new Emergencies Act could—like the original 1976 act—terminate all existing emergencies and end lurking emergency powers in statutes that Congress no longer thinks necessary. Most important, it could establish new sunset provisions. Emergencies would end within a short period (perhaps 60 days) and be nonrenewable unless approved under expedited procedures by a joint resolution of Congress. Those provisions, as Chafetz argues, would afford presidents short-term powers in genuine emergencies but ensure that Congress retains the power to make lasting policy.

Remember what I wrote on July 10, when Trump write a letter to Lula da Silva warning him of a 50% tariff?

I described that Trump was trying to impose the tariff on Brazil — largely because Brazil is prosecuting Trump’s coup counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro — without first declaring the emergency required under IEEPA, the legal authority on which he claimed he was relying.

As a reminder, the trade war Trump launched on April 2 purports to address an emergency created by trade deficits in goods (not services).

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (19 U.S.C. 2483), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

[snip]

That claim seems to have been forgotten in discussion of the 50% tariff Trump just threatened to place on Brazil.

Trump barely focused on his claimed emergency in his letter — posted to Truth Social — to Lula da Silva. Rather, he mentioned:

• The purported Witch Hunt against Jair Bolsonaro — the prosecution for Bolsonaro’s attempted coup — “that should end IMMEDIATELY!”
• Efforts to regulate social media in Brazil (largely with the goal of investigating and cracking down on insurrection), which Trump called “hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to U.S. Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from the Brazilian Social Media market”

All that was in addition to (and before) the boilerplate language on goods included in the letter.

Mind you, that boilerplate would be nonsense in any case, because the US enjoys a trade surplus with Brazil. There could be no trade deficit emergency with Brazil because the US doesn’t have one.

Which is one of the points Lula noted in response (ironically, on Xitter). The US says the US has a trade surplus with Brazil.

In light of the public statement made by U.S. President Donald Trump on social media on the afternoon of Wednesday (9), it is important to highlight the following:

[snip]

The claim regarding a U.S. trade deficit in its commercial relationship with Brazil is inaccurate. Statistics from the U.S. government itself show a surplus of $410 billion in the trade of goods and services with Brazil over the past 15 years.

Therefore, any unilateral tariff increases will be addressed in accordance with Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law.

Sovereignty, respect and the unwavering defense of the interests of the Brazilian people are the values that guide our relationship with the world.

Which leaves solely the complaints pertaining to coup accountability: that Brazil fined Xitter when it refused to comply with legal and investigative demands, as well as the requirement that it have a local representative (through whom Brazil would enforce the law), as well as the complaint that Brazil is holding Bolsonaro accountable for the same crime that Trump himself committed.

Well, Trump finally declared that Brazil’s prosecution of its coup conspirator threatens Trump — er, the United States.

As President of the United States, my highest duty is protecting the national security, foreign policy, and economy of this country. Recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. Members of the Government of Brazil have taken actions that interfere with the economy of the United States, infringe the free expression rights of United States persons, violate human rights, and undermine the interest the United States has in protecting its citizens and companies. Members of the Government of Brazil are also politically persecuting a former President of Brazil, which is contributing to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law in Brazil, to politically motivated intimidation in that country, and to human rights abuses.

As President of the United States, my highest duty is protecting the national security, foreign policy, and economy of this country. Recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. Members of the Government of Brazil have taken actions that interfere with the economy of the United States, infringe the free expression rights of United States persons, violate human rights, and undermine the interest the United States has in protecting its citizens and companies. Members of the Government of Brazil are also politically persecuting a former President of Brazil, which is contributing to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law in Brazil, to politically motivated intimidation in that country, and to human rights abuses.

These judicial actions, taken under the pretext of combatting “disinformation,” “fake news,” or “anti-democratic” or “hateful” content, endanger the economy of the United States by tyrannically and arbitrarily coercing United States companies to censor political speech, turn over sensitive United States user data, or change their content moderation policies on pain of extraordinary fines, criminal prosecution, asset freezes, or complete exclusion from the Brazilian market. These actions also chill and limit expression in the United States, violate human rights, and undermine the interest that the United States has in protecting its citizens and companies at home and abroad. [my emphasis]

Trump has been gunning for treating moderation requirements as a trade barrier for a while — it was and is one of the stumbling blocks to pretending that Trump actually entered an agreement with the EU.

But even ignoring everything else that’s wrong with this, declaring it illegal to subpoena Xitter in Brazil is the kind of thing that makes even a good faith attack on content moderation look silly. (The US does have an MLAT with Brazil.)

Ah well, at least he discovered that the US has a trade surplus with Brazil.

More importantly, is the timing.

Tomorrow is the hearing appealing Trump’s tariffs before the Circuit Court of Appeals, in which this Brazil gambit was sure to be an example of how absurd Trump’s claims are.

They’re still absurd.

But now they shift the absurd claim in such a way that might reframe tomorrow’s discussion.

Meanwhile, outlets in Brazil are reporting that Bolsonaro’s son — whom Trump is harboring in the US — is soliciting a coup in Brazil.

Much of the traditional press (though not Chris Hayes) has missed the significance of Trump’s confession yesterday that Virginia Giuffre — recruited from Trump’s spa when she was 16 or 17 — was one of the girls that he says Jeffrey Epstein “stole.”

Reporter 1: I’m just curious. Were some of the workers that were taken from you — were some of them young women?

Trump: Were some of them?

Reporter 1: Were some of them young women?

Trump: Well, I don’t wanna say, but everyone knows the people that were taken. It was, the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story’s been pretty well out there. And the answer is, yes, they were.

[inaudible]

Trump: In the spa. People that work in the spa. I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa. Hired. By him. In other words, gone. And um, other people would come and complain. This guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether they were spa or not spa. I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine and then not too long after that he did it again and I said Out of here.

Reporter 2: Mr. President, did one of those stolen persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?

Trump: Uh, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.

Many, for example are forgetting what Trump said the day before: Epstein “stole” one of Trump’s girls, Trump told him to stop, and Epstein did it again.

What caused the breach with him? Very easy to explain. But I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it. But for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk. Because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, don’t ever do that again. He stole people that worked for me. I said, don’t ever do that again. He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out. And that was it.

To tell Epstein to stop doing something, Trump would have had to have known he was doing something.

And the “it” is made much more clear by what “the Mar-a-Lago” told Page Six in 2007, even before Epstein had signed the sweetheart non-prosecution agreement.

Meanwhile, the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach last night confirmed a Web site report that Epstein has been banned there. “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” a source told us. “Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.” Epstein denies he is banned from Mar-a-Lago and says, in fact, he was recently invited to an event there.

Before the full extent of Epstein’s abuse was public, someone at Mar-a-Lago wanted to make it clear that when Epstein did “procure girls … he tried to get her to do things.”

This member’s daughter who was “about 18,” was at least the second girl Trump learned about.

The first (or who knows? maybe she wasn’t the first!) was Giuffre.

The second (at least) was the member’s daughter.

Having now confirmed that Giuffre was among the “girls” Epstein would try to “procure” from Trump’s spa, it makes both Trump’s public acknowledgement to New York Magazine (two years after Ghislaine Maxwell “stole” Giuffre) that Epstein liked his so-called women “on the younger side” and the smutty letter sent a few months later reflected knowledge that Epstein was fucking girls.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is. 

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. 

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it. 

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that? 

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you. 

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Not just any girls, but his girls. Trump’s girls, from his spa.

And Trump is so furious that Ghislaine Maxwell stole girls from his spa that he’s saying the same thing about a pardon for her that he said about pardons for Paul Manafort and Roger Stone before he rewarded for their lies about him, that he won’t rule it out.

By all appearances, Trump will pardon the woman who stole his girls. That’s how furious he is that she groomed at least two of his girls and tried — successfully in Giuffre’s case — to turn her into a sex slave.

Meanwhile, now that Trump has placated much of the press, the cover-up continues apace. In a letter David Markus sent to James Comer (but not Oversight Ranking Member Robert Garcia — Markus was leaving nothing to chance) he said that Ghislaine would only testify to the House Oversight Committee if she:

• Got formal immunity
• Got the questions in advance
• After she tests her luck with SCOTUS (in which case she won’t need to spill secrets to get out of prison)
• If she gets clemency for the things she’ll say

In other words, she’ll only testify if that’s the only way she can leverage what she knows.

Comer immediately declined, meaning Trump faces no risk that Ghislaine’s silence will disrupt the cover-up.

Meanwhile, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Jay Clayton (but not even the AUSA who filed an appearance) have confessed that they are engaged in a headfake. Their response to Richard Berman and Paul Engelmeyer  falsely claims that the interest in these transcripts arose from the memo Pam Bondi released and not the inflammatory comments and promises Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino made.

Attention given to the Epstein and Maxwell cases has recently intensified in the wake of the July 6, 2025 Memorandum announcing the conclusions of the Government’s review into the investigation

They minimize the concerns about victim testimony because just two people testified.

Here, there was one witness—an FBI agent—during the Epstein grand jury proceedings. There were two witnesses—the same FBI agent from the Epstein grand jury proceedings and a detective with the NYPD who was a Task Force Officer with the FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force—during the Maxwell grand jury proceedings.

Both witnesses are still alive; the FBI agent continues to be an agent with the FBI, and the Detective continues to be a Detective with the NYPD as well as a Task Force Officer.

Consistent with applicable rules concerning the admissibility of hearsay testimony, the grand jury witnesses described statements of others, including statements of and concerning victims, many of whom are still alive.

They admit they’ll redact the names of the third parties who enabled Epstein (which they wouldn’t necessarily have to do if they released the files in their custody).

[T]he grand jury transcripts contain victim-related and other personal identifying information related to third parties who neither have been charged or alleged to be involved in the crimes with which Epstein and Maxwell were charged, to which the Government is sensitive, and which is why the Government proposes redacting the transcripts before releasing them.

But they are providing notice to those people.

 In addition, the Government is in the process of providing notice to any other individuals identified in the transcripts.

They appear to suggest that they’re not providing all the grand jury transcripts to the judges — just the underlying material.

The Court directed the Government to submit: (1) indices of Epstein and Maxwell grand jury materials, including a brief summary, the number of pages, and dates; (2) a complete set of the Epstein and Maxwell grand jury transcripts; (3) a complete proposed redacted set of the Epstein and Maxwell grand jury transcripts; and (4) a description of any other Epstein and Maxwell grand jury materials, including, but not limited to, exhibits. (Epstein Dkt. 63 at 3; Maxwell Dkt. 789 at 3). As to the final category, the Government provides a description of all of the underlying materials presented to the grand jury as well as copies of, and proposed redactions to, certain materials presented to the grand jury. [my emphasis]

They definitely don’t answer a question both judges asked: whether DOJ had asked the victims before filing this response.

The Court also directed the Government to state whether, “before filing the instant motion, counsel for the Government reviewed the Maxwell grand jury transcripts and whether the Government provided notice to the victims of the motion to unseal,”

[snip]

In addition, the Government has now provided notice to all but one of the victims who are referenced in the grand jury transcripts at issue in this motion. The Government has attempted to contact the remaining victim, but such efforts have been unsuccessful. In addition, the Government is in the process of providing notice to any other individuals identified in the transcripts.

Having not done that (and not yet spoken to one of the victims), they ask for a chance to respond to the victims’ comments about this ploy — which they should have asked about before they started it — after they file sealed responses.

[T]he Government also respectfully requests leave to file a supplemental submission once the Government and the Court have received any filings from the victims or others referenced in the transcripts.

The only thing this exercise is “transparency” has done so far is to share grand jury information with people implicated, but not charged, in Epstein’s actions.

Note, one person specifically implicated in Epstein’s crimes is Prince Andrew. To the extent he was investigated and possibly even charged under seal — which is the most obvious explanation for why he wouldn’t travel — the DOJ letter would create the appearance of a clean bill of health. But it could be buried in a different grand jury and we’d never even know.

Update: This is a very good CNN piece, including a long focus on how hard this is on the victims.

Ten years ago today, I published this article, in which I predicted that Republicans would all fall in line behind Trump.

[S]o long as the base continues to eat up Trump’s schtick –the Republicans are going to be stuck with him, because they have few means of controlling him and even fewer to limit any damage he might do if provoked.

[snip]

If all proceeds as things appear to be proceeding — although, yes, it is far too early to say for certain that it will — Republicans will ultimately be applauding the prospect of President Trump. complete with the possibility he’ll appoint Dennis Rodman (drawing on his diplomatic trip to North Korea) as Ambassador to China. If and when Trump becomes the only viable opponent for Hillary Clinton, Republicans will be forced to accept their fate and hope for the best.

And with it, they may well recognize that their ideological celebration of the rich and of demagoguery have delivered them precisely the candidate they’ve asked for.

It’s a dizzying read for me, not least because I recognize a number of things (including the Russian plot to help Trump, but even more the resurgent authoritarianism of the right) had already kicked off, little visible until Trump caused a light to focus on them.

That said, what was already visible — not least, Trump’s demonization of immigrants as a means to grab attention and encourage the worst instincts among white Americans — carry through to this day.

In recent days Trump’s ability to grab and control attention has come under strain, in part because the very forces he unleashed refuse to be placated by bullshit.

But after Donald Trump largely confessed that he knew of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking but did nothing more than demand that Epstein stop recruiting at Mar-a-Lago, the press has largely ignored the import of that and moved on.

As a WaPo story quoting the White House declaring victory on Trump’s Epstein scandal notes today, Trump has managed to do this before.

“People forget,” the White House official said. “We’ve gone through these things for the last eight years.”

It’s been ten years, not eight.

After a 50-49 vote confirming him (Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted against, with all Democrats), Emil Bove will be installed in New Jersey’s Third Circuit seat. He will remain there until retirement, death, impeachment, or criminal prosecution — or, quite possibly, promotion to SCOTUS — removes him.

It pains me to catalog the ways in which Bove’s confirmation serves and advances Trump’s criminal protection racket. But we need to understand how Trump plans to destroy rule of law and Bove’s central role in it.

Reward for keeping Trump out of prison

Bove left SDNY at a point when his career stalled. He had faced problems because of his bullying and supervised the worst Brady violation in recent memory. After briefly representing Guo Wengui’s co-conspirator (and facing a conflict review because he had supervised the investigation against her), he joined up with Todd Blanche on Trump’s defense team.

There’s little indication he did anything of note on the defense team. John Sauer masterminded the successful ploy for immunity and Aileen Cannon needed little help in finding an excuse to throw out the stolen documents case.

But he did enough to reassure Trump that he would be Trump’s fixer, and so he ran DOJ until Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche were confirmed, and remained in a key role after that.

Reward for the abuse and misconduct Bove risked

During his short tenure at DOJ, Bove did at least three things that have merited ethical review and/or could justify criminal review:

• He engaged in what Judge Dale Ho suggested was a quid pro quo, dismissing the case against Eric Adams in exchange for pliant cooperation from NYC’s Mayor
• He repeatedly ordered lawyers to act in contravention of their oath and ethical obligations and fired those who did not comply
• He gave the order to unload over two hundred men into a concentration camp based on an Alien Enemies Act declaration that Trump should have known was riddled with false claims; the men credibly claim they were tortured and raped there

All of these are the subject of some kind of review (in the form of bar complaints and the contempt proceeding before Boasberg). But even if those reviews find Bove engaged in misconduct, without the political pressure that failed here, he’ll be largely immune from consequences.

Continued debasement of the Senate

Republicans confirmed Bove because of loyalty to Trump. In doing so, they blew off:

• A letter signed by over 900 former DOJ lawyers
• A letter signed by 80 former judges, including Michael Luttig
• Three whistleblower complaints, two focused on the immigration defiance and a third focused on his role in the Eric Adams quid pro quo (Whistleblower Aid revealed the complaint submitted to DOJ IG got “lost” until yesterday)

There’s surely a range of rationalizations Senators adopted to explain why they did it. A terror of Trump’s wrath, a disinterest in their own constitutional obligations, a belief in laughably thin claims that the objections to Bove — all rooted in rule of law, from astonishingly large bipartisan judges and lawyers who adhere to rule of law — were partisan attacks.

Every time Trump gets the Senate to confirm someone who is facially unqualified — starting with Pete Hegseth, moving on to RFK Jr, then to install his defense attorneys at Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, and Solicitor General, onto the conspiracy theorists at FBI, and now to Bove — he expands their tolerance to do more of the same.

He has domesticated the Senate, like dumb slobbery puppies who keep rolling in their own shit.

Eviction of real lawyers

I’m not sure I have a good count of all the principled lawyers that Emil Bove left in his wake. They include:

• Lawyers who prosecuted Trump’s mob
• Lawyers who prosecuted Trump for stealing classified documents
• The entire Eric Adams prosecution team
• People at Public Integrity who refused to sign off on Bove’s corrupt quid pro quo
• Denise Cheung, who refused to hold payments based on James O’Keefe conspiracy theories
• Erez Reuveni

Which is to say, before he left DOJ, Bove removed around career 50 lawyers who believed in upholding the law, even against the powerful.

Unexplained DC Circuit complicity in Bove’s impunity

For the entirety of the time Bove’s confirmation was pending, two Trump appointed judges, Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao, sat on Boasberg’s contempt ruling, stalling any discovery to learn more about Bove (and others’) misconduct on the Alien Enemies Act case.

It’s bad enough that they stalled on this. How they decided to do so concerns me even more. Were they taking instructions from someone?

Punishment of real judges

In curious timing, yesterday Pam Bondi filed a misconduct complaint against James Boasberg in the DC Circuit.

The conspiracy theory behind the complaint has been bubbling around for a few weeks: Someone leaked details of a Judicial Conference meeting days before Judge Boasberg imposed a stay on Trump’s Alien Enemies Act deportations to propagandist Margot Cleveland.

Steve Vladeck explains more about the complaint and argues this is intended to throw red meat to Trump’s base and cow other judges. But it may also be designed to give Katsas and Rao a pretext to do something other than let the contempt case move forward. That is, this may be an effort to shut down further inquiry in how Trump’s DOJ knowingly sent 200 men, many innocent, to a concentration camp as part of a quid pro quo to help Nayib Bukele bury his own ties to MS-13.

A captive judge at Bedminster

Bove is from Pennsylvania, not New Jersey. By appointing Bove to the NJ seat (a Delaware seat was also open), Trump ensures that his own defense attorney will be available (though arguably conflicted) for any problems that arise for him in his summer home, Bedminster, which also happens to be where some of the still-missing stolen documents disappeared to.

We had a window to reverse Trump’s mafia state before he packed the courts. With Bove’s confirmation, that window begins to close.