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Where We Go from Here

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At the beginning of 2026, I did a post piggybacking on what had succeed against Trump last year, laying out ways to use Trump’s own conspiracism and grievance against him. That post linked an assessment of our success in five ways fighting fascism, and also explained why I think we need to fight Trump using his own tools against him.

This page repeats the same categories from that post, and fleshes out developments that accord with my original framework.

Treat Epstein as the base layer

Remember that Marc Caputo column — it was published on December 23 — stating that the Epstein releases could last a whole ‘nother week? On the day that would mark that week, December 30, Devlin Barrett published a story saying that, “The document review” of what is now believed to be 5.2 million documents “is expected to take until at least Jan. 20, according to a person familiar with the matter.” Even if they could finish it by January 20 (they won’t), that’ll just be the first go-around. DOJ has not done what they need to do to document the redactions, so there’ll be demands from Congress for them to do that (with obvious areas — including DOJ names and some deliberative documents specifically included in the law, where they’re in violation), they’ll need to repeat the entire process over again, Congress will begin to bring more legal pressure, and all the while survivors will be pointing out things they missed.

A week, Marc Caputo reported, as if that were credible!

This will go on for some time. This will go on for a very long time.

Still, while the Epstein scandal has been absolutely instrumental in loosing Trump’s grip on things, people are naive in thinking that will be enough. “My friends will get hurt,” Trump predicted, but what does it really mean for Trump’s power that Les Wexner has been implicated in the Epstein scandal as a co-conspirator? What is the use of creating right wing cognitive dissonance about Les Wexner, when Wexner is not the oligarch currently helping Trump destroy the country?

In my opinion, the Epstein scandal is a tool. It undercuts Trump’s ability to grab and redirect attention. It can create moments of cognitive dissonance, as it did for MTG. It is a way to turn Trump’s conspiracism and populism against him and may make other related narrative lines more salient. And if there’s a surprise disclosure — perhaps about Melania’s origin story — all the better. But as you keep the focus on Epstein, remember that there needs to be a direction beyond Epstein as well, a direction which incorporates the oligarchs who are still key players in Trump’s network of power.

Focus on the Broligarchs and AI

The Broligarchs who’ve been a key part of Trump’s power are one way to do that (and that’s before we’ve really gotten into Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel’s ties to Epstein).

Tesla Takedown was one of the most successful campaigns of 2025. At a time when Tesla faced cheaper competitors worldwide, the protests incurred a cost on Musk for his DOGE depredations.

Elon was installed in the White House in significant part by fellow South African “alien invader” David Sacks, who is even more conspiratorial and even more pro-Russian than Musk. Sacks was installed in the White House as a Special Government Employee (who, Elizabeth Warren suggests, has overstayed his welcome) to force a bunch of policy decisions that suck for America but ensure that Broligarchs won’t pay any consequences for their rash business deals. When one or both of crypto and AI crash (this is a really good story on how and why AI will burst), he’ll be there to ensure the government bails them out, as he did after playing a role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

And even as Trump sheds support based on his mockery of affordability, even as MTG split with Trump over that and his support for crypto, Sacks is trying to brand Democrats as being more populist than even Zohran Mamdani is.

Fine. You want Democrats to be the party attending to the needs of working people? You’ve just made the GOP the party of “alien invader” billionaires who got tax cuts as millions lost their health care.

This happened even as AI has become a political liability. It has happened as local groups successfully stave off new data centers. It has happened as more instances of AI-inflamed suicide, murder, and porn — including porn exploiting children — appear. And it happens before the aforementioned crash.

Sacks and the other Broligarchs are going to do something for which they’ll try to dodge accountability. Now is the time to make sure his name comes up as people look for culprits.

January 12, 2026: Trump seeks to quell data center rebellion (WaPo)

January 12, 2026: America’s Biggest Power Grid Operator Has an AI Problem—Too Many Data Centers (WaPo)

Emphasize Trump’s loser stench

Another thing that will lead people to defect is to realize that Trump is a loser. He has done things — like the takeover of the Kennedy Center — that makes it easy to demonstrate he’s a loser in tangible fashion. Better still, every time Trump attaches his name to something, it provides an opportunity to hijack that brand, as comedian Toby Morton auspiciously managed to do by anticipating Trump’s most venal instincts and buying the domain.

The same is true of his businesses. Trump and his entire family is getting rich off the presidency 2.0. But his businesses are built as cons, sometimes Ponzi schemes. The idea is to leverage the loyalty of MAGAts to get them to invest in something, run up its value, only to collapse, leaving the most vulnerable screwed. In the past, at least, the cult effect was such that even MAGAts bilked by Trump associates, as with Steve Bannon’s Build the Wall graft, were reluctant to turn on the fraudsters; that may change. But at the very least, the volatile nature of Trump’s frauds makes it easy to show that as a businessman, he’s a loser.

Visualize Trump’s corruption

While there has been good reporting on Trump’s corruption — see, for example, NYT’s nifty visualization from New Year’s Eve — there has not been a systematic effort to take on his corruption.

Nevertheless, possibly because of the Epstein scandal, a majority of the country does think Trump is corrupt.

That may actually not be in a bad place to be as we move into 2026. That’s because Democrats can make Republican inaction in the face of Trump’s corruption a campaign issue (and then, if it leads to a Democratic sweep in midterms, the electoral buy-in will be in place to do a lot of oversight and defunding of Trump’s corruption).

Trump’s pardons are similar. There’s actually a solid stream of reporting on how corrupt they are, without yet any political direction to it. Democrats running against Republican incumbents — especially in the Senate — should state as presumed that it is the job of Senators to respond to the kind of naked corruption Trump is engaged in.

Where activists can magnify the good reporting on both Trump’s corruption and his pardons is to focus on the victims. This is actually showing up in the reporting on both topics. WaPo focused on the victims of Trevor Milton who might have gotten restitution had Trump not pardoned him. LAT similarly focused on the victims fucked over by Trump’s pardon of David Gentile.

Rosenberg, a retired wholesale produce distributor living in Nevada, has supported Trump since he entered politics, but the president’s decision in November to commute the sentence of former private equity executive David Gentile has left him angry and confused.

“I just feel I’ve been betrayed,” Rosenberg, 68, said. “I don’t know why he would do this, unless there was some sort of gain somewhere, or some favor being called in. I am very disappointed. I kind of put him above this kind of thing.”

Trump’s decision to release Gentile from prison less than two weeks into his seven-year sentence has drawn scrutiny from securities attorneys and a U.S. senator — all of whom say the White House’s explanation for the act of clemency is not adding up. It’s also drawn the ire of his victims.

“I think it is disgusting,” said CarolAnn Tutera, 70, who invested more than $400,000 with Gentile’s company, GPB Capital. Gentile, she added, “basically pulled a Bernie Madoff and swindled people out of their money, and then he gets to go home to his wife and kids.”

This superb Bloomberg story on the extent to which the Juan Orlando Hernández pardon unraveled years of work starts with a murder arranged by the network.

Five minutes later, González was circling a roundabout when a gray van braked in front of him. At the same time, a green SUV crowded his rear bumper. A motorcycle carrying two men emerged on his left. A man on the back of the bike fired six shots through the driver-side window. González’s head slumped toward his shoulder, and he tilted forward, held upright by the seatbelt. He died instantly.

More than a dozen men streamed out of the two vehicles that had sandwiched his Nissan. They scrambled to collect the spent shell casings on the ground, then scattered other casings across the pavement—decoys to complicate ballistics tracing. They jumped back into their vehicles, circled the roundabout and took the same road Julián had just driven down.

When they approached the Slaughterhouse, the gates opened to let them in, then closed behind them.

Every one of these pardons has a victim — and that’s before you get into the people newly victimized by people who’ve been pardoned by Trump, which NYT covered in November and others are tracking as well.

A New Jersey fraudster who was pardoned by President Trump in 2021 was sentenced to 37 years in prison this month for running a $44 million Ponzi scheme, one of a growing number of people granted clemency by Mr. Trump only to be charged with new crimes.

The man, Eliyahu Weinstein, was pardoned by Mr. Trump in 2021 and was re-indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey three years later. He was accused of swindling investors who thought their money was being used to buy surgical masks, baby formula and first-aid kits bound for Ukraine, and a jury convicted him in April of several crimes, including conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud.

[snip]
Some of those pardoned for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol have quickly drawn new attention from law enforcement. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said in June that at least 10 of the more than 1,500 who were pardoned had been rearrested and charged, and the number has only grown since then.

Earlier this month, a man who was pardoned after having participated in the Jan. 6 attack was charged with sex crimes against two children. Another man whose original sentence Mr. Trump commuted in 2021 was recently sentenced to 27 months in prison after convictions on physical and sexual assault, among other crimes.

These stories provide an important way to explain the costs of Trump’s corruption.

Brand Trump as the criminal he is

And while we’re talking about telling these stories: We must never ever cede the ground of crime to Stephen Miller’s attempt to brand immigrants as criminals.

Trump — a felon who freed hundreds of cop assailants on his first day on the job — has an entire infrastructure devoted to trying to spin brown people as criminal. Every time that infrastructure goes into action, including with the effort to brand Somalis in Minnesota as inherently fraudulent when Trump himself is a serial fraudster, we need to repeat, relentlessly, that Trump is a serial criminal who coddles other criminals.

This is something Gavin Newsom just started doing, with an entire website devoted to cataloging Trump’s crime and that of his pardon recipients.

Do not let a conversation about crime go by without focusing on how much of it Trump does.

Crime, in Trump’s era, is a rich white man’s thing. And while it will take a lot of work to adjust a lot of racist priors, until people start seeing Trump as a criminal it will be far too easy for them to make excuses for him.

Hold Stephen Miller accountable for his failures

I focused on Stephen Miller — and the import of making his failures clear — last week.

The import of shifting how we speak of Miller’s considerable power is clear. That’s true because he frankly has done huge damage, even to Trump’s goals, and well more so to average Americans. He’s someone that people, including Republicans, can scapegoat for Trump’s failures (and they’ll be right). And if we don’t make sure that happens, then he’ll scapegoat brown people.

Again, are Somali day care workers or billionaires systematically defrauding average people the problem? One easy to way to drown out Miller’s case that it’s the former is to make it clear how much he personally has harmed average Americans.

Visualize how Stephen Miller took money for cancer research and veterans care to pay for a goon army snatching grandmothers

On January 12, AOC explained this shift better than anyone has.

Relatedly, particularly as the huge injection of funding Republicans approved last year starts landing at DHS, it will become increasingly necessary to tie the goon squads in the streets to the loss of benefits elsewhere.

We need to make it clear that this is a direct trade. 50,000 ICE goons in, 300,000 other government employees out, including people who cure cancer, help learning disabled kids get through school, protect our National Parks, ensure your Social Security comes on time, and care for veterans.

Christopher Ingraham did a handy graphic to show the trade-off.

Stephen Miller’s dragnet is unpopular in the abstract and wildly unpopular in the lived sense, even — if meekly — among local Republican leaders.

But it still retains support of a big chunk of the population, probably because Trump officials routinely blame their own failures to address American problems on migrants, when as often as not, Trump’s response to immigration is the source of the problem.

America can’t have nice things, like cures for cancer and welcoming public schools, because Republicans in Congress took the money used to pay for those things and gave it to Stephen Miller to use to invade America’s neighborhoods.

Discredit Key Spokespeople

Right wingers like Jonah Goldberg and David French have expressed alarm by an old promo for a 60 Minutes piece (the piece itself was from October) that an influencer reposted yesterday, describing dozens of times when the government lied in court filings.

Judges have caught Trump’s DOJ in several major lies since then. In Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis wrote a 233-page opinion documenting the many lies DHS has told about their Chicago invasion.

And in December, judges in both Kilmar Abrego’s case caught the government obfuscating. In the criminal case, on December 30, Judge Waverly Crenshaw unsealed a December 3 opinion describing how Nashville’s US Attorney lied about how centrally involved Todd Blanche’s office was in demanding Abrego face trial.

The central question after Abrego established a prima facie case of vindictiveness is what information in the government’s control sheds light on its new decision to prosecute Abrego, after removing him from the United States without criminal charges. These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with Singh and others. (Doc. No. 178-1). Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences. For example, Singh contacted McGuire on April 27, 2025, to discuss Abrego’s case. (See Doc. No. 229 at Abrego-Garcia000001). On April 30, 2025, Singh asked McGuire what the potential charges against Abrego would be, whether the charging document would reference Abrego’s alleged MS-13 affiliation, and asked for a phone call before any charges were filed. (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000007–000008). In a separate email on April 30, 2025, Singh made clear that Abrego’s criminal prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s office (Blanche). (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000037). He then told McGuire to “sketch out a draft complaint for the 1324 charge [making it unlawful to bring in and harbor certain aliens].” (Id.). On May 15th, McGuire emailed his staff that “DAG (Blanche) and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000060).

And as I’ve already noted, Judge Paula Xinis cataloged the many deliberately ignorant declarations DOJ filed about whether DHS had deportation plans for Abrego when she ruled that he must be released.

Respondents showcased Cantú’s ignorance about the content of his Declaration pertaining to Costa Rica. As the pointed questions of Respondents’ counsel made clear, Cantú’s lack of knowledge was planned and purposeful.

Counsel: So paragraph 4, final sentence [of the Cantú Declaration], do you see where it says the word—the words “certain understandings”?

Cantú: I found it. Yes, I do. I see it.

Counsel: What are the certain understandings referenced in the last sentence?

Cantú: I don’t know . . .

Counsel: What are the “contingencies” referenced in the last sentence?

Cantú: I do not know . . .

Counsel: What are the “interim developments” referenced in paragraph 5?

Cantú: I don’t know.

ECF No. 107 at 26:8–27:12 (counsel for Respondents, Jonathan Guynn (“Guynn”), questioning Cantú). See also id. at 53:8–9 (Guynn, at sidebar with Court, stating “I’ll just say I told you this was exactly what was going to happen,” regarding the witness’ ignorance on Costa Rica as a viable country of removal).

Ultimately, Respondents’ calculated effort to take Costa Rica “off the table” backfired. Within 24 hours, Costa Rica, through Minister Zamora Cordero, communicated to multiple news sources that its offer to grant Abrego Garcia residence and refugee status is, and always has been, firm, unwavering, and unconditional.

It’s a problem that, after huge scoldings like these, right wing critics of Trump don’t understand how much Trump’s people lie — not least because the Supreme Court still credits the most outlandish claims Trump makes, even after they’ve been thoroughly debunked by lower court judges.

Many of these lies are coming from the same people: Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche’s office, DHS spox Tricia McLaughlin, and Greg Bovino.

It is remarkable that so many of these people have been caught lying to courts (or publicly, about people before courts). But it needs to become common knowledge for everyone, so every time Tricia says something, they start from the assumption she’s lying, because she almost always is.

There comes a time when the credibility of systematic liars not named Trump collapse entirely such that every utterance they make discredits the claims they try to sell. Tricia McLaughlin, at least, is close those levels of propaganda, and Stephen Miller is not far behind.

Use Trump’s claimed opposition to antisemitism against him

Within days of his inauguration last year, Trump signed an EO — adding to one he signed in 2019 — claiming to oppose antisemitism. There has been some discussion about the bad faith of this EO and a DOJ lawyer implementing it, Michael Velchik, once wrote a paper from Hitler’s perspective. While it is explicitly targeted at universities (and has been a key tool to attempt to takeover universities), it nevertheless claimed to oppose antisemitism everywhere.

It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.

This is the kind of statement of principle that can form the basis of political pressure — particularly as the MAGAt movement splinters around the overt antisemitism of people like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owen, and as political opportunists like Ted Cruz attempt to exploit that splinter.

We’re going to have to fight this battle in any case. As part of the revocation of everything Eric Adams did after he was indicted for bribery yesterday, Zohran Mamdani revoked an EO that gave Israel preferential treatment, which Israel is using to stoke division; yet Mamdani preserved the office Adams opened to combat antisemitism.

We need to call out the dripping antisemitism of Trump’s team, from top (at least JD Vance, who refuses to disavow Fuentes) to bottom.

There are two key Trump aides who should be targeted. Most notably, Paul Ingrassia, who had to withdraw his nomination to be Special Counsel after Politico exposed texts in which he confessed to a Nazi streak been installed at GSA instead. In addition, Kingsley Wilson became DOD spokesperson in spite of Neo-Nazi comments. NPR has done good work unpacking these ties.

Reclaim disinformation research

Republicans plan on exporting fascism via US tech platforms.

That’s not new. I’ve been talking about Elon’s plans to use Xitter as a machine for fascism for some time.

But since then, Trump’s minions worked it into the National Security Strategy.

And, in the wake of the EU’s sanctions against Elon Musk for — basically — lying about why I have a blue check, Marco Rubio stripped the visas of five people, including US Green Card holder Imran Ahmed, a long time adversary of Elon’s.

But there are several developments that suggest it is time to renew efforts to defend disinformation research, not least the White House’s absurd effort to attack real journalism, what is sure to be a snowballing failure on Bari Weiss’ part to make propaganda popular, and the meltdown the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, had over the holidays about right wing “misinformation” targeting Pam Bondi.

The right wingers are doing what they themselves established is unlawful. And that presents both political and legal opportunities to demonize their propaganda.

Which in turn cycles back to the increasing problem of AI propaganda, including Grok’s flagrant willingness to nudify children in recent days.

Some people write short resolutions. I guess I write 4,000-word To Do lists. Join me in my efforts!

Where We Go from Here

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Back before everyone checked out for the holidays, I did an inventory of the progress we’ve made in four ways to fight fascism (in comments ApacheTrout reminded I should have the courts in there too).

  1. The Erica Chenoweth rule, which says that if you can get 3.5% of a population in the streets, it often leads to regime change.
  2. Beginning to peel off four people in the Senate or eight or nine people in the House.
  3. Rescuing Republicans from a predictable catastrophe like Democrats did in 2008 and 2020.
  4. Waiting until 2026, winning at least one house of Congress, and beginning to rein in Trump that way.

I wrote it intending to kick off the new year with a post of things we can do, or do better. Here we are!

But first, let me explain where I’m coming from. Much of what follows builds on my belief that we’ve been fighting Donald Trump wrong.

Polarization is his superpower. It’s how he has gotten out of every single one of his political jams in the past: by turning his own scandal into a polarizing pivot, thereby turning his own failures and crimes into a matter of tribalism. Once he has done that, he invents some new bullshit story (usually stoking grievance), and getting right wingers to believe it because of that polarization.

This is why I’m such an asshole about the way people serve as data mules for Trump’s tweets: because those damn things are little polarization machines, which always serve to make him the center of attention around which society is re-polarized.

The way to combat someone whose superpower is polarization is not to exacerbate that polarization. It is to use his own tools — grievance and conspiracism — against him.

Back in May, before the Epstein files had created a full-blown crisis for the Trump Administration, Phil Bump and Mike Rothschild wrote about how conspiracism can undermine someone with power (which I added to here).

Think of how important conspiracism and grievance were to (at least per the Robert Draper profile) Marjorie Taylor Greene’s turn against Trump:

  • Realizing Trump never returns loyalty
  • Discovering Trump was the villain of the Epstein scandal in which she had an unshakeable belief
  • Opposing Gaza (probably for horrible Jewish space laser reasons) and crypto currency (for justifiable reasons inflamed by conspiratorial thinking)
  • Seeing Trump mock affordability
  • After all that (but while she still had her courage), being targeted by Trump mobs
  • Packaging that in a morality tale, Christianity, whence she derived moral value

Simplifying and ignoring her potential political ambitions, Trump became the thing everyone suspected was being hidden in the Epstein files, and that led to cognitive dissonance that led MTG to revisit a lot of her other differences with Trump.

So some of my logic, below, is simply to focus on the things that are likely to get Trump supporters or sympathizers to feel betrayed by him including by holding people close to him accountable for shitty things we are pretty sure are going to occur. It includes:

  • Treat Epstein as the base layer
  • Focus on the Broligarchs and AI
  • Emphasize Trump’s loser stench
  • Visualize Trump’s corruption
  • Brand Trump as the criminal he is
  • Hold Stephen Miller accountable for his failures
  • Visualize how Stephen Miller took money for cancer research and veterans care to pay for a goon army snatching grandmothers
  • Discredit Key Spokespeople
  • Use Trump’s claimed opposition to antisemitism against him
  • Reclaim disinformation research

One more point about this. This post is not a To Do list for the DNC (though some people on Bluesky will undoubtedly treat it as such). It’s a To Do list for myself, most of all, but one that others can borrow if they find it useful. Many of these things are attentional activities that are about repetition and focus as much as congressional oversight or electoral politics.

These are meant to be stories we can tell, regardless of what someone in Congress or some candidate in Iowa does.

Treat Epstein as the base layer

Remember that Marc Caputo column — it was published on December 23 — stating that the Epstein releases could last a whole ‘nother week? On the day that would mark that week, December 30, Devlin Barrett published a story saying that, “The document review” of what is now believed to be 5.2 million documents “is expected to take until at least Jan. 20, according to a person familiar with the matter.” Even if they could finish it by January 20 (they won’t), that’ll just be the first go-around. DOJ has not done what they need to do to document the redactions, so there’ll be demands from Congress for them to do that (with obvious areas — including DOJ names and some deliberative documents specifically included in the law, where they’re in violation), they’ll need to repeat the entire process over again, Congress will begin to bring more legal pressure, and all the while survivors will be pointing out things they missed.

A week, Marc Caputo reported, as if that were credible!

This will go on for some time. This will go on for a very long time.

Still, while the Epstein scandal has been absolutely instrumental in loosing Trump’s grip on things, people are naive in thinking that will be enough. “My friends will get hurt,” Trump predicted, but what does it really mean for Trump’s power that Les Wexner has been implicated in the Epstein scandal as a co-conspirator? What is the use of creating right wing cognitive dissonance about Les Wexner, when Wexner is not the oligarch currently helping Trump destroy the country?

In my opinion, the Epstein scandal is a tool. It undercuts Trump’s ability to grab and redirect attention. It can create moments of cognitive dissonance, as it did for MTG. It is a way to turn Trump’s conspiracism and populism against him and may make other related narrative lines more salient. And if there’s a surprise disclosure — perhaps about Melania’s origin story — all the better. But as you keep the focus on Epstein, remember that there needs to be a direction beyond Epstein as well, a direction which incorporates the oligarchs who are still key players in Trump’s network of power.

Focus on the Broligarchs and AI

The Broligarchs who’ve been a key part of Trump’s power are one way to do that (and that’s before we’ve really gotten into Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel’s ties to Epstein).

Tesla Takedown was one of the most successful campaigns of 2025. At a time when Tesla faced cheaper competitors worldwide, the protests incurred a cost on Musk for his DOGE depredations.

Elon was installed in the White House in significant part by fellow South African “alien invader” David Sacks, who is even more conspiratorial and even more pro-Russian than Musk. Sacks was installed in the White House as a Special Government Employee (who, Elizabeth Warren suggests, has overstayed his welcome) to force a bunch of policy decisions that suck for America but ensure that Broligarchs won’t pay any consequences for their rash business deals. When one or both of crypto and AI crash (this is a really good story on how and why AI will burst), he’ll be there to ensure the government bails them out, as he did after playing a role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

And even as Trump sheds support based on his mockery of affordability, even as MTG split with Trump over that and his support for crypto, Sacks is trying to brand Democrats as being more populist than even Zohran Mamdani is.

Fine. You want Democrats to be the party attending to the needs of working people? You’ve just made the GOP the party of “alien invader” billionaires who got tax cuts as millions lost their health care.

This happened even as AI has become a political liability. It has happened as local groups successfully stave off new data centers. It has happened as more instances of AI-inflamed suicide, murder, and porn — including porn exploiting children — appear. And it happens before the aforementioned crash.

Sacks and the other Broligarchs are going to do something for which they’ll try to dodge accountability. Now is the time to make sure his name comes up as people look for culprits.

Emphasize Trump’s loser stench

Another thing that will lead people to defect is to realize that Trump is a loser. He has done things — like the takeover of the Kennedy Center — that makes it easy to demonstrate he’s a loser in tangible fashion. Better still, every time Trump attaches his name to something, it provides an opportunity to hijack that brand, as comedian Toby Morton auspiciously managed to do by anticipating Trump’s most venal instincts and buying the domain.

The same is true of his businesses. Trump and his entire family is getting rich off the presidency 2.0. But his businesses are built as cons, sometimes Ponzi schemes. The idea is to leverage the loyalty of MAGAts to get them to invest in something, run up its value, only to collapse, leaving the most vulnerable screwed. In the past, at least, the cult effect was such that even MAGAts bilked by Trump associates, as with Steve Bannon’s Build the Wall graft, were reluctant to turn on the fraudsters; that may change. But at the very least, the volatile nature of Trump’s frauds makes it easy to show that as a businessman, he’s a loser.

Visualize Trump’s corruption

While there has been good reporting on Trump’s corruption — see, for example, NYT’s nifty visualization from New Year’s Eve — there has not been a systematic effort to take on his corruption.

Nevertheless, possibly because of the Epstein scandal, a majority of the country does think Trump is corrupt.

That may actually not be in a bad place to be as we move into 2026. That’s because Democrats can make Republican inaction in the face of Trump’s corruption a campaign issue (and then, if it leads to a Democratic sweep in midterms, the electoral buy-in will be in place to do a lot of oversight and defunding of Trump’s corruption).

Trump’s pardons are similar. There’s actually a solid stream of reporting on how corrupt they are, without yet any political direction to it. Democrats running against Republican incumbents — especially in the Senate — should state as presumed that it is the job of Senators to respond to the kind of naked corruption Trump is engaged in.

Where activists can magnify the good reporting on both Trump’s corruption and his pardons is to focus on the victims. This is actually showing up in the reporting on both topics. WaPo focused on the victims of Trevor Milton who might have gotten restitution had Trump not pardoned him. LAT similarly focused on the victims fucked over by Trump’s pardon of David Gentile.

Rosenberg, a retired wholesale produce distributor living in Nevada, has supported Trump since he entered politics, but the president’s decision in November to commute the sentence of former private equity executive David Gentile has left him angry and confused.

“I just feel I’ve been betrayed,” Rosenberg, 68, said. “I don’t know why he would do this, unless there was some sort of gain somewhere, or some favor being called in. I am very disappointed. I kind of put him above this kind of thing.”

Trump’s decision to release Gentile from prison less than two weeks into his seven-year sentence has drawn scrutiny from securities attorneys and a U.S. senator — all of whom say the White House’s explanation for the act of clemency is not adding up. It’s also drawn the ire of his victims.

“I think it is disgusting,” said CarolAnn Tutera, 70, who invested more than $400,000 with Gentile’s company, GPB Capital. Gentile, she added, “basically pulled a Bernie Madoff and swindled people out of their money, and then he gets to go home to his wife and kids.”

This superb Bloomberg story on the extent to which the Juan Orlando Hernández pardon unraveled years of work starts with a murder arranged by the network.

Five minutes later, González was circling a roundabout when a gray van braked in front of him. At the same time, a green SUV crowded his rear bumper. A motorcycle carrying two men emerged on his left. A man on the back of the bike fired six shots through the driver-side window. González’s head slumped toward his shoulder, and he tilted forward, held upright by the seatbelt. He died instantly.

More than a dozen men streamed out of the two vehicles that had sandwiched his Nissan. They scrambled to collect the spent shell casings on the ground, then scattered other casings across the pavement—decoys to complicate ballistics tracing. They jumped back into their vehicles, circled the roundabout and took the same road Julián had just driven down.

When they approached the Slaughterhouse, the gates opened to let them in, then closed behind them.

Every one of these pardons has a victim — and that’s before you get into the people newly victimized by people who’ve been pardoned by Trump, which NYT covered in November and others are tracking as well.

A New Jersey fraudster who was pardoned by President Trump in 2021 was sentenced to 37 years in prison this month for running a $44 million Ponzi scheme, one of a growing number of people granted clemency by Mr. Trump only to be charged with new crimes.

The man, Eliyahu Weinstein, was pardoned by Mr. Trump in 2021 and was re-indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey three years later. He was accused of swindling investors who thought their money was being used to buy surgical masks, baby formula and first-aid kits bound for Ukraine, and a jury convicted him in April of several crimes, including conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud.

[snip]
Some of those pardoned for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol have quickly drawn new attention from law enforcement. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said in June that at least 10 of the more than 1,500 who were pardoned had been rearrested and charged, and the number has only grown since then.

Earlier this month, a man who was pardoned after having participated in the Jan. 6 attack was charged with sex crimes against two children. Another man whose original sentence Mr. Trump commuted in 2021 was recently sentenced to 27 months in prison after convictions on physical and sexual assault, among other crimes.

These stories provide an important way to explain the costs of Trump’s corruption.

Brand Trump as the criminal he is

And while we’re talking about telling these stories: We must never ever cede the ground of crime to Stephen Miller’s attempt to brand immigrants as criminals.

Trump — a felon who freed hundreds of cop assailants on his first day on the job — has an entire infrastructure devoted to trying to spin brown people as criminal. Every time that infrastructure goes into action, including with the effort to brand Somalis in Minnesota as inherently fraudulent when Trump himself is a serial fraudster, we need to repeat, relentlessly, that Trump is a serial criminal who coddles other criminals.

This is something Gavin Newsom just started doing, with an entire website devoted to cataloging Trump’s crime and that of his pardon recipients.

Do not let a conversation about crime go by without focusing on how much of it Trump does.

Crime, in Trump’s era, is a rich white man’s thing. And while it will take a lot of work to adjust a lot of racist priors, until people start seeing Trump as a criminal it will be far too easy for them to make excuses for him.

Hold Stephen Miller accountable for his failures

I focused on Stephen Miller — and the import of making his failures clear — last week.

The import of shifting how we speak of Miller’s considerable power is clear. That’s true because he frankly has done huge damage, even to Trump’s goals, and well more so to average Americans. He’s someone that people, including Republicans, can scapegoat for Trump’s failures (and they’ll be right). And if we don’t make sure that happens, then he’ll scapegoat brown people.

Again, are Somali day care workers or billionaires systematically defrauding average people the problem? One easy to way to drown out Miller’s case that it’s the former is to make it clear how much he personally has harmed average Americans.

Visualize how Stephen Miller took money for cancer research and veterans care to pay for a goon army snatching grandmothers

Relatedly, particularly as the huge injection of funding Republicans approved last year starts landing at DHS, it will become increasingly necessary to tie the goon squads in the streets to the loss of benefits elsewhere.

We need to make it clear that this is a direct trade. 50,000 ICE goons in, 300,000 other government employees out, including people who cure cancer, help learning disabled kids get through school, protect our National Parks, ensure your Social Security comes on time, and care for veterans.

Christopher Ingraham did a handy graphic to show the trade-off.

Stephen Miller’s dragnet is unpopular in the abstract and wildly unpopular in the lived sense, even — if meekly — among local Republican leaders.

But it still retains support of a big chunk of the population, probably because Trump officials routinely blame their own failures to address American problems on migrants, when as often as not, Trump’s response to immigration is the source of the problem.

America can’t have nice things, like cures for cancer and welcoming public schools, because Republicans in Congress took the money used to pay for those things and gave it to Stephen Miller to use to invade America’s neighborhoods.

Discredit Key Spokespeople

Right wingers like Jonah Goldberg and David French have expressed alarm by an old promo for a 60 Minutes piece (the piece itself was from October) that an influencer reposted yesterday, describing dozens of times when the government lied in court filings.

Judges have caught Trump’s DOJ in several major lies since then. In Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis wrote a 233-page opinion documenting the many lies DHS has told about their Chicago invasion.

And in December, judges in both Kilmar Abrego’s case caught the government obfuscating. In the criminal case, on December 30, Judge Waverly Crenshaw unsealed a December 3 opinion describing how Nashville’s US Attorney lied about how centrally involved Todd Blanche’s office was in demanding Abrego face trial.

The central question after Abrego established a prima facie case of vindictiveness is what information in the government’s control sheds light on its new decision to prosecute Abrego, after removing him from the United States without criminal charges. These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with Singh and others. (Doc. No. 178-1). Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences. For example, Singh contacted McGuire on April 27, 2025, to discuss Abrego’s case. (See Doc. No. 229 at Abrego-Garcia000001). On April 30, 2025, Singh asked McGuire what the potential charges against Abrego would be, whether the charging document would reference Abrego’s alleged MS-13 affiliation, and asked for a phone call before any charges were filed. (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000007–000008). In a separate email on April 30, 2025, Singh made clear that Abrego’s criminal prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s office (Blanche). (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000037). He then told McGuire to “sketch out a draft complaint for the 1324 charge [making it unlawful to bring in and harbor certain aliens].” (Id.). On May 15th, McGuire emailed his staff that “DAG (Blanche) and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000060).

And as I’ve already noted, Judge Paula Xinis cataloged the many deliberately ignorant declarations DOJ filed about whether DHS had deportation plans for Abrego when she ruled that he must be released.

Respondents showcased Cantú’s ignorance about the content of his Declaration pertaining to Costa Rica. As the pointed questions of Respondents’ counsel made clear, Cantú’s lack of knowledge was planned and purposeful.

Counsel: So paragraph 4, final sentence [of the Cantú Declaration], do you see where it says the word—the words “certain understandings”?

Cantú: I found it. Yes, I do. I see it.

Counsel: What are the certain understandings referenced in the last sentence?

Cantú: I don’t know . . .

Counsel: What are the “contingencies” referenced in the last sentence?

Cantú: I do not know . . .

Counsel: What are the “interim developments” referenced in paragraph 5?

Cantú: I don’t know.

ECF No. 107 at 26:8–27:12 (counsel for Respondents, Jonathan Guynn (“Guynn”), questioning Cantú). See also id. at 53:8–9 (Guynn, at sidebar with Court, stating “I’ll just say I told you this was exactly what was going to happen,” regarding the witness’ ignorance on Costa Rica as a viable country of removal).

Ultimately, Respondents’ calculated effort to take Costa Rica “off the table” backfired. Within 24 hours, Costa Rica, through Minister Zamora Cordero, communicated to multiple news sources that its offer to grant Abrego Garcia residence and refugee status is, and always has been, firm, unwavering, and unconditional.

It’s a problem that, after huge scoldings like these, right wing critics of Trump don’t understand how much Trump’s people lie — not least because the Supreme Court still credits the most outlandish claims Trump makes, even after they’ve been thoroughly debunked by lower court judges.

Many of these lies are coming from the same people: Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche’s office, DHS spox Tricia McLaughlin, and Greg Bovino.

It is remarkable that so many of these people have been caught lying to courts (or publicly, about people before courts). But it needs to become common knowledge for everyone, so every time Tricia says something, they start from the assumption she’s lying, because she almost always is.

There comes a time when the credibility of systematic liars not named Trump collapse entirely such that every utterance they make discredits the claims they try to sell. Tricia McLaughlin, at least, is close those levels of propaganda, and Stephen Miller is not far behind.

Use Trump’s claimed opposition to antisemitism against him

Within days of his inauguration last year, Trump signed an EO — adding to one he signed in 2019 — claiming to oppose antisemitism. There has been some discussion about the bad faith of this EO and a DOJ lawyer implementing it, Michael Velchik, once wrote a paper from Hitler’s perspective. While it is explicitly targeted at universities (and has been a key tool to attempt to takeover universities), it nevertheless claimed to oppose antisemitism everywhere.

It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.

This is the kind of statement of principle that can form the basis of political pressure — particularly as the MAGAt movement splinters around the overt antisemitism of people like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owen, and as political opportunists like Ted Cruz attempt to exploit that splinter.

We’re going to have to fight this battle in any case. As part of the revocation of everything Eric Adams did after he was indicted for bribery yesterday, Zohran Mamdani revoked an EO that gave Israel preferential treatment, which Israel is using to stoke division; yet Mamdani preserved the office Adams opened to combat antisemitism.

We need to call out the dripping antisemitism of Trump’s team, from top (at least JD Vance, who refuses to disavow Fuentes) to bottom.

There are two key Trump aides who should be targeted. Most notably, Paul Ingrassia, who had to withdraw his nomination to be Special Counsel after Politico exposed texts in which he confessed to a Nazi streak been installed at GSA instead. In addition, Kingsley Wilson became DOD spokesperson in spite of Neo-Nazi comments. NPR has done good work unpacking these ties.

Reclaim disinformation research

Republicans plan on exporting fascism via US tech platforms.

That’s not new. I’ve been talking about Elon’s plans to use Xitter as a machine for fascism for some time.

But since then, Trump’s minions worked it into the National Security Strategy.

And, in the wake of the EU’s sanctions against Elon Musk for — basically — lying about why I have a blue check, Marco Rubio stripped the visas of five people, including US Green Card holder Imran Ahmed, a long time adversary of Elon’s.

But there are several developments that suggest it is time to renew efforts to defend disinformation research, not least the White House’s absurd effort to attack real journalism, what is sure to be a snowballing failure on Bari Weiss’ part to make propaganda popular, and the meltdown the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, had over the holidays about right wing “misinformation” targeting Pam Bondi.

The right wingers are doing what they themselves established is unlawful. And that presents both political and legal opportunities to demonize their propaganda.

Which in turn cycles back to the increasing problem of AI propaganda, including Grok’s flagrant willingness to nudify children in recent days.

Some people write short resolutions. I guess I write 4,000-word To Do lists. Join me in my efforts!

Kristi Noem’s Non-Stop Slander Invites Congress to Ask Melania about Her Close Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

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Kristi Noem loves to slander Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

DHS has long wanted to claim — but failed to substantiate — that Abrego is a member of MS-13.

For example, the whistleblower complaint from Erez Reuveni describes how DHS wanted to make such claims about Abrego, but had no evidence. When he failed to make such an argument in court, his boss Drew Ensign called to complain, explaining that the White House had wanted DOJ to make such a claim.

Ensign asked Mr. Reuveni why he did not argue that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a member of a terrorist organization or that being a member of such organization meant Mr. Abrego Garcia’s protection from removal to El Salvador was nullified. Mr. Reuveni told Ensign he did not make those arguments because: 1 ) those were not arguments in the government’s briefs, which Ensign had reviewed; 2) there was no evidence in the record to support the arguments; and 3) the laws governing withholding of removal do not support a theory that declaring someone a member of a terrorist organization retroactively nullifies a grant ofwithholding relief. Ensign had little reaction but called again a few minutes later asking similar questions and informing Mr. Reuveni that these inquiries were prompted by the White House. Mr. Reuveni again repeated the same concerns he had on the first call.

Todd Blanche fired Reuveni after he refused to sign on a brief claiming that Abrego was a terrorist, a claim not made to the District Court.

And when DOJ attempted to convince two judges that Abrego was a dangerous terrorist, they failed. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes laid out that the evidence presented to her of MS-13 membership largely amounted to the feeling of a cooperating witness whose family has ties to a competing gang, but their key cooperating witness said he knew of no evidence Kilmar was a MS-13 member.

The government’s evidence that Abrego is a member of MS-13 consists of general statements, all double hearsay, from two cooperating witnesses: the second male cooperator and N.V. Those statements are, however, directly inconsistent with statements by the first cooperator. In interviews, the second male cooperator, whose general unreliability the Court addressed above, stated broadly to Special Agent Joseph that Abrego was “familial” with purported gang members. Other than this vague statement, there is no evidence of when these interactions occurred or in what context (other than as general greetings), how the second male cooperator determined those other unidentified individuals to be known gang members, or precisely how some perceived interaction between Abrego and other unidentified individuals substantiates gang membership.

Cooperating witness N.V. stated to Special Agent Joseph that she “believed” Abrego to be a member of MS-13. N.V. is a 20-year-old female individual who gave interview statements, but not sworn testimony, of her interactions with Abrego from more than five years earlier, when she was 14 or 15 years old. She has been previously compensated for providing information to law enforcement but is not receiving compensation in this case. NV’s family is also affiliated with the 18th Street or 18 Barrio gang. Other than N.V.’s general belief about Abrego’s gang membership, no other testimony was offered of when, in what context, how, or why N.V. came to arrive at that belief.

Contrary to the statements of the second cooperator and NV, the first male cooperator told Special Agent Joseph that, in ten years of acquaintance with Abrego, there were no signs or markings, including tattoos, indicating that Abrego is an MS-13 member. This statement specifically repudiates any outward indicia that Abrego belongs to MS-13, in stark contrast to the non-specific second cooperator’s and N.V.’s feelings that Abrego may belong to MS-13. Given these conflicting statements, the government’s evidence of Abrego’s alleged gang membership is simply insufficient.

[snip]

25 Given the volume of resources committed to the government’s investigation of Abrego since April 2025, according to Special Agent Joseph, the Court supposes that if timely, more specific, concrete evidence exists of Abrego’s alleged MS-13 gang membership or a consistent pattern of intentional conduct designed to threaten or intimidate specific individuals, the government would have offered that evidence at the detention hearing.

When asked to review Holmes’ decision, District Judge Waverly Crenshaw agreed, finding that the government’s claims “border on fanciful.”

Based on the record before it, for the Court to find that Abrego is member of or in affiliation with MS13, it would have to make so many inferences from the Government’s proffered evidence in its favor that such conclusion would border on fanciful.

But Noem and her flunkies keep publicly claiming that Abrego is an MS-13 member.

Abrego has requested on four different occasions (one, two, three) for the judge in his criminal case to gag the government from making such inflammatory claims, most recently last Thursday. Each time, Judge Crenshaw has ordered parts of the government to comply — first the lawyers subject to local rules, and then anyone before the court — but he noted that it was not clear whether DHS is before him.

ORDER as to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia: Before the Court are Abrego’s Motion to Ensure Compliance with Local Criminal Rule 2.01 94 and Supplemental Motion regarding the same 98 . To the extent the Motions 94, 98 seek clarification that Local Rule 2.01 applies both to the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, it is not clear on the record before the Court whether that is true of the latter. Nevertheless, for those before this Court, compliance with Local Criminal Rules 2.01(a)(1) and (a)(4) is not discretionary for all attorneys and their firms or agencies. To ensure that Abrego receives a fair trial, all counsel are subject to Local Criminal Rules 2.01(a)(1) and (a)(4) and Tennessee Rule of Professional Conduct 3.8(f). All counsel and those working with counsel shall ensure that any proper public communications include that the Indictment only contains allegations. Our Constitution requires that Abrego is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury.

Noem, of course, doesn’t care.

Perhaps as a deliberate incitement Sunday, she went on Face the Nation, and repeated the same unsubstantiated claims that Holmes and Crenshaw both judged they had no evidence to prove, including that Abrego, “was a known human smuggler, an MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors.”

CBS cut that claim, and now Noem, Trump’s top propagandists, and Trump’s right wing mob is trying to liken it to CBS’ editing of the Kamala Harris interview.

In other words, even as Abrego asks the court to make DHS adhere to long-standing policies of public statements regarding pretrial defendants, Noem is deliberately stoking slander.

She’s doing so, presumably, comfortable in the knowledge that DOJ would substitute the government for Noem if Abrego sued. That is, she’s hiding behind the immunity of government employ to stoke a false propaganda campaign against a guy she trafficked to a concentration camp based on false claims.

I can’t help but note that Noem is gleefully engaged in slander in the wake of Melania Trump’s efforts to bully multiple entities — first Daily Beast, and then James Carville — into withdrawing reports about Jeffrey Epstein’s claims that he had role in introducing Melania to her spouse (or that they first fucked on his plane). Melania attempted to do the same with Hunter Biden, but he refused (and in the process, Hunter noted that NYT had published Epstein’s claim he introduced them before he died, with no retraction).

But while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting. Mrs. Trump has said that her future husband simply asked for her phone number at a party at the Kit Kat Club during Fashion Week in 1998.

Thus far, Melania has not made good on her threat to sue Hunter into oblivion.

Melania also got a British publisher to withdraw a more incendiary claim in online versions of a new book on Prince Andrew.

As Congress returns today, Epstein will remain a key focus, with a politicized inquiry unfolding under James Comer in House Oversight and a more aggressive effort pushed by Ro Khanna and Tom Massie, who have a discharge petition queued up for a vote. Both efforts have real cause to ask why Trump moved sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison camp close to Bryan, TX schools (including Texas A&M) to shut her up, and whether it has anything to do with Melania’s litigious interest in tamping down any questions about her ties to Epstein.

Those same members of Congress might take a lesson from Noem (or, for that matter, the members of Congress who made false claims about Hunter Biden).

The entire Trump Administration treats government employ as a platform for incendiary slander.

As Trump faces renewed scrutiny of his efforts to cover-up his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, that could get awkward for Melania.

I am assuredly not saying that Ro Khanna should deliberately lie about Melania, as Noem is deliberately lying about Abrego. But I am saying that one basis for Trump’s sensitivities about Epstein (the other being the fact that Epstein and Maxwell “stole” his spa girls, forcing one — Virginia Giuffre — into sex slavery) appears to be Melania’s ties to the sex trafficker. And Congress does have the interest and authority into probing those ties.

Update: Corrected inaccurate description of Abrego as a “pretrial detainee.” He has been released under Bail Reform, but then was detained anew by ICE.

Update: Fixed Judge Crenshaw’s first name.

Two Maryland Men and a Michigan Woman: A Topology Trump’s Witch Hunts

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Back on Friday, before Women’s World Cup Rugby distracted me for a long weekend, I started this post with the claim, “As of this moment, both Kilmar Abrego and John Bolton are free men.”

That claim, of course, has been overtaken by events.

Friday started with a search of Bolton’s Maryland home, reportedly in a renewed investigation into the mishandling of classified information that went into his book (see Ben Wittes’ first hand account here). In an interview taped (and partially released that day), JD Vance revealed not only that he was part of the investigative decisions targeting Bolton, but effectively admitted this was a fishing expedition, basically a search of the Trump critic’s home to find out if they could target him with a crime.

VICE PRES. JD VANCE:

We’re in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton. I will say we’re going to let that investigation proceed. What I can tell you is that, unlike the Biden DOJ and the Biden FBI, our law enforcement agencies are going to be driven by law and not by politics. And so if we think that Ambassador Bolton has committed a crime, of course, eventually prosecutions will come. But as you know, Kristen, this is all part of gathering evidence, trying to understand something that we’re worried about. And, of course, I’ll let the FBI comment on the next stage of the investigation.

KRISTEN WELKER:

What’s at the root of this? Is this about classified documents?

VICE PRES. JD VANCE:

Well, again, I’ll let the FBI speak to that. Classified documents are certainly part of it. But I think that there’s a broad concern about, about Ambassador Bolton. They’re going to look into it. And like I said, if there’s no crime here, we’re not going to prosecute it. If there is a crime here, of course, Ambassador Bolton will get his day in court. That’s how it should be. But again, our focus here is on did he break the law? Did he commit crimes against the American people? If so, then he deserves to be prosecuted.

This was heavy handed dick-wagging, the White House making it clear they were personally directing searches of Trump’s defectors.

Meanwhile, Abrego was free on Friday when I started this post. He was released from pre-trial detention in Tennessee, only to be detained at an ICE check-in on Monday. Judge Paula Xinis has ordered the government not to deport him — to Uganda — until she can review the evidence of retaliation for his decision to contest first his illegal deportation and then the Tennessee charges against him. He has formally requested to be deported to Costa Rica.

Abrego’s very good attorney, Sean Hecker, described how much courage it took Abrego to fight this fight:

One of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, Sean Hecker, said after the detention that the threat of deportation came even as Costa Rica was willing to take him in as a refugee. “The government’s campaign of retribution continues because Mr. Abrego refuses to be coerced into pleading guilty to a case that should never have been brought,” he said.

After the Bolton search, a number of people claimed it represented some new low in Trump’s efforts to demonize his opposition. Such claims always depended on misrepresenting the Durham investigation and ignoring the way Bill Barr’s DOJ framed Joe Biden. But after the confirmation that Durham chased Russian disinformation for two more years after concluding the underlying pretext for his investigation was fabricated, such assertions border on pathology.

That said, the Kilmar Abrego treatment is new; in the first Trump term, after all, DOJ would simply reverse wrongful deportations. So, too, is Trump’s claimed firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook after Bill Pulte snooped in her mortgage records and conjured up a mortgage fraud referral. This is an Administration pushing the means by which it attempts to criminalize its opponents — but that overreach may (and in Abrego’s case, arguably already has) backfire.

I want to write a series of posts on how and what he is doing.

In this post, I will lay out a kind of topology of what he is doing — and how various executive authorities overlap in them. These attempts are efforts to push the bounds of criminal prosecution, sometimes by forgoing the actual prosecution, sometimes by fabricating evidence.

In a second post, I will discuss the players. It matters that Todd Blanche has been named in two separate vindictive prosecution filings, particularly given the ruling that Alina Habba was not properly acting as US Attorney during the period when DOJ claimed not to have body cameras for two of the key witnesses in the LaMonica McIver prosecution. It matters that Kash Patel, who harbored a grudge against Bolton going back years and included him in his enemies list, gleefully tweeted as the search of Bolton’s home began. It even matters that Pulte appears to be trawling the financial records of Trump’s enemies, even while Trump’s other policies harm the housing industry.

In a third post, I’ll consider outcomes. Trump is doing this for more than just his desire to attack his enemies. But it’s not clear whether, particularly after purging the Department of Justice of competent prosecutors, he can achieve his objectives. As I’ve noted in the past, Trump is trying to satisfy a mob of rabid conspiracy theorists. While I believe the Hunter Biden prosecution raised real concerns, in general, the criminal justice system still adheres to basic laws of gravity. And those rules may thwart Trump’s effort to redefine “justice.”

In a fourth post, I’ll review John Roberts’ opinion in Trump v. US. The opinion did more than immunize Trump’s own crimes; it created conflicts that will soon land before SCOTUS.

Immigration

It is my belief that, on top of being a raging white nationalist, Stephen Miller identified immigration law as an area where the expansiveness of Presidential authority provides ready tools for fascism. After all, Miller plotted for years to use the Alien Enemies Act as a way to send hundreds of men to a concentration camp with no due process, an effort that was thwarted (for now, at least) by the Continuing Resolution that kept government open over the weekend of March 14, Chief Judge James Boasberg’s willingness to work while on vacation, and key disclosures about the lies on which the effort was based.

From that expansive authority, DOJ has explicitly tried to criminalize support for migrants. Last week, for example, Acting Los Angeles US Attorney Bill Essayli crowed that he convinced a grand jury to indict Adrian Andrew Martinez, the kid whom CBP assaulted after he called out their detention of an old guy in his Walmart parking lot. While his indictment (from nearly a week ago) is not yet docketed, the complaint against him claims Martinez was blocking the CBP vehicles. Before charging Martinez, DOJ attempted to subpoena his contacts with media, as if the media will be implicated in this conspiracy.

The charge against Martinez — conspiracy to impede a federal officer — is the same DOJ has used against David Huerta, the President of CA’s SEIU, who also was assaulted at a protest. That case keeps getting continued, which could reflect that it is one of the cases that prosecutors are having a hard time getting a grand jury to indict, or could indicate that politicized prosecutors are using the initial charge to rifle through SEIU coffers to try to substantiate something larger.

There are four other cases where Trump’s DOJ has attempted to criminalize Democrats with a crime for countering DHS’s dragnet.

I suspect that Brad Lander, who was violently detained days before the NYC Mayoral Primary, would have been charged if not for Emil Bove’s prior statements about how even prosecuting Eric Adams was election interference.

Trump’s other key targets — Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and Newark Congresswoman LaMonica McIver — all did have official purpose to do what Trump is trying to criminalize. But on top of that official purpose, as all three cases moved to discovery, the accused caught the government in apparent false claims. Dugan, for example, claims that DOJ falsely accused her of sending the undocumented man before her down a stairwell (the more damning alleged facts in the case against Judge Shelly Joseph, whom Trump charged in his first term).

2 On this small detail, Judge Dugan follows the government on one of its forays outside the scope of the indictment. It is undisputed—and indisputable, given the video evidence—that E.F.R. entered the public hallway about 15 feet to the right of the usual courtroom door, where two agents watched him emerge. So Judge Dugan never “optimized” the man’s avoidance of federal agents. Contra Dkt. 46 at 28. On the government’s own witness statements, she certainly never directed E.F.R. “to access a stairwell.” Dkt. 46 at 21. To the contrary, she pointed him to the public hallway. None of this is dispositive now, one way or the other, especially because the magistrate judge found these acts part of a judge’s job, Dkt. 43 at 30, and the government does not dispute that finding. But it begs the question why the government overstates or misstates its evidence.

In the Baraka and McIver case, the sworn affidavit of Ricky Patel in the Baraka case does not match the alleged facts in the McIver indictment — and that’s before you get into the missing Body Cam footage in McIver’s case.

Which is to say that Trump’s DOJ is having to make shit up in their quest to criminalize oversight for immigration enforcement.

Revenge

The criminal case against Ksenia Petrova — the Harvard researcher first detained, then arrested, for bringing frog samples into the country — is unclear. Speedy Trial should have expired on that case.

With Abrego, of course, is it much more clear.  Rather than move Abrego back to the US and initiate a deportation procedure to a third country, they instead immunized and freed people who’ve committed the crime they’re alleging against Abrego. Two judges reviewed the evidence and both found it so flimsy that it didn’t merit detention. Then, after he accused the government of classic vindictive prosecution — the filing of charges because he availed himself of his rights under the Constitution, they tried to coerce him to plead guilty in order to win deportation to Costa Rica instead of Uganda.

That’s why the stakes on Abrego’s case are so high. He is challenging the government’s bid to ratchet up legal jeopardy when anyone fights for their rights. While so many others lay low in hopes they’ll avoid further targeting, Abrego — perhaps out of necessity — has pushed to vindicate rule of law.

Data dives

Meanwhile the head of Fannie and Freddie, Bill Pulte, appears to be trawling through mortgage records to find dodgy paperwork to refer to Trump’s Director of Weaponization, Eagle Ed Martin. Thus far, Pulte has referred Tish James, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, and two more unnamed people.

As Abbe Lowell noted in a latter to Martin regarding his stalking of Attorney General James, somehow Pulte missed that Ken Paxton has one more “primary residence” than Pulte claims that his Dem targets do.

This conclusion is supported by your other appointed title, Special Attorney. Whileprofessing to be acting to address “mortgage fraud,” Attorney General Bondi and you have statedthat your targets are Ms. James (Democratic Attorney General of New York) and Adam Schiff(Democratic Senator of California). Notably, absent from your mandate is Kenneth Paxton(Republican Attorney General of Texas). Given that the same news reports raising questions aboutMs. James and Mr. Schiff have reported that, somehow, Mr. Paxton has three different properties that he claims to be his “primary residence,”3 it seems to indicate your title ought really be,“Special Assistant for Mortgage Fraud [Alleged Against Democrats Adverse to President Trump].”

3 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Senate hopeful, claimed 3 homes as his primary residence,Associated Press (July 24, 2025), https://apnews.com/article/paxton-mortgages-trump-primary-residence-homestead-deduction-bd259b6bd122afcaf4f11eac5a3a152e.

One thing that’s missing from all of this, however, is that Ed Martin is the one receiving these referrals, not a competent prosecutor (note, too, that the metadata of an earlier letter Martin sent Lowell showed that Jared Wise, an FBI agent who incited January 6 rioters to kill cops, was the author of the letter).

These are men who stated their job was to name and shame, not prosecute.

Ed Martin described himself at a press conference as the “captain” of the group that is investigating prosecutors who launched past investigations into Trump and his allies.

“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” Martin said. “And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed. And that’s a fact. That’s the way things work. And so that’s, that’s how I believe the job operates.”

[snip]

“I will say that the prosecutor’s role, and at this moment in our history, is to make clear what the truth is and to get that out,” Martin said. “It can’t be that the system is stifling the truth from coming out because of some procedure.”
Martin said he would have a “more public-facing” role as director of the Weaponization Working Group.

“When I was asked to switch over here, I was told, you know, this job, you need to be out more and talk about what’s going on. So I think we’ll be a little bit more outward facing in terms of talking about what’s happening,” Martin said.

Trump has now claimed to have fired Cook — in spite of a recent Supreme Court ruling that explicitly said the President can only fire Governors for cause, even though Pulte chose to share the referral with someone who brags that he is not conducting himself according to DOJ guidelines.

The extralegal nature of this is of particular concern. In a matter of ten days, a partisan official offered up a Black woman to target, and Trump responded by firing her without the due process he was afforded.

And I expect that Pulte is just the tip of what will soon become an iceberg. Trump has done completely unprecedented consolidation of government-held data (indeed, there’s a new allegation that DOGE is mishandling Social Security data). So we should expect more such attempts to criminalize Trump’s adversaries as his minions data mine more data.

Counter-investigation

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to find a way to claim those who investigated him are themselves criminals.

To be sure, he has already gutted DOJ and FBI of experience by purging those who worked on Trump’s cases (which by purging the really talented prosecutors, might make it harder to succeed with other edge cases DOJ is pursuing).

But Eagle Ed Martin claims to be search for a way to prosecute Tish James. There are hints that DOJ is trying to pursue people like Liz Cheney.

And rather than concerning himself with Trump’s coddling of Russian and China, Tom Cotton referred Jack Smith to Office of Special Counsel for investigation. According to a NYT report, OSC has not contacted Smith or his team at all (suggesting that under Trade Rep Jamieson Greer, the office is not working according to normal protocol). This may be just another attempt to document dive — beyond what Trump himself attempted — to try to invent conflicts where none exists.

Conspiracy theories

Then there’s the at least third attempt to do what John Durham spent four years attempting to do, but failed — to find some way to claim that the counterintelligence and criminal investigation of Trump in 2016 was itself criminal.

The latest incarnation stems from Tulsi Gabbard’s adoption of an obvious conspiracy theory, one based on provably false claims about the shift in the intelligence review in 2016, the content of the Intelligence Community Assessment, and John Clapper’s view of the Steele dossier briefing to Trump.

Trump is attempting, with shoddier prosecutors, what Durham went to lengths he himself said were criminal himself.

Old news

And then finally there’s the old news — the attempt to mine from prosecution declinations — of Jim Comey under Bill Barr in 2020 and of John Bolton under Merrick Garland sometime in the last four years. Both these investigations attempt to criminalize the men for the same thing Trump was himself charged with: mishandling classified information. They aspire to do so with declination decisions from past prosecutors.

Security clearance

The second area in which Trump is exploiting expansive Executive authority is in security clearances. He started his term by stripping security clearance from any of the 51 spooks who truthfully said that the Hunter Biden hard drive packaged as a laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation. A move to strip the security clearance of anyone in the Big Law firms he targeted is the one aspect of those Executive Orders that might survive on appeal (Trump has appealed all those decisions, on delayed basis). There were select cases of targeting — perhaps most importantly, Mark Zaid, since Zaid is one of the defense attorneys with most experience adjudicating clearance issues. And then in recent weeks, Tulsi started stripping the clearance of top spies based on her conspiracy theories.

The expansiveness of Presidential power on this issue will matter in criminal cases insofar as it prevents someone like John Bolton from enjoining the witch hunt into him.

Previous posts

May 27: The Law, Conspiracism, and Gravity

June 12: Pam Bondi’s Four Political Prosecutions

August 16: LaMonica McIver Prepares to Hoist Todd Blanche with His Own Petard

Dockets

Hannah Dugan docket

Ras Baraka criminal docket

Ras Baraka civil docket

LaMonica McIver docket

David Huerta docket

First Kilmar Abrego civil docket (MD)

Second Kilmar Abrego civil docket (MD)

Kilmar Abrego criminal docket (MDTN)

Ksenia Petrova criminal docket