Charlie Kirk and the President’s failson are very impressed with President Trump’s order that Pam Bondi seek to release grand jury transcripts.
Trump gave the order in response to a WSJ report describing a birthday letter, signed by Trump, included in a book that Ghislaine Maxwell made for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.
It isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared. Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.
“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.
WSJ describes that this book was examined by Epstein and Maxwell investigators.
Pages from the leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—are among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It’s unclear if any of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review.
But while there are titillating allusions in the letter, such as the reference to a new secret every day, there’s is not any conceivable reason why this letter would be presented as evidence against either Epstein or Maxwell. It does not overtly describe trafficking minor women at all.
The order that Bondi unseal grand jury materials will do nothing but impress people like Kirk and Don Jr, designed to create a likely unsuccessful drawn out legal fight in which, even if the transcripts were released, would not include this book.
SQUIRREL! Trump yelled, when cornered.
And it worked not just for Charlie Kirk, but also for NYT’s Glenn Thrush, a politics reporter who survived a Me Too scandal repurposed to cover DOJ. It took him 11¶¶ before he explained that a judge was unlikely to release any transcripts, and another paragraph before he explained that the vast bulk of the evidence is in FBI custody.
Mr. Trump’s stated desire to address the “ridiculous” publicity around the case may not be enough to convince the judge to release the transcripts. Grand jury transcripts are, under federal guidelines, kept secret to protect crime victims and witnesses. They are typically released only under narrowly defined circumstances.
Even if the transcripts are made public, which might involve months of legal wrangling, the evidence represents a fraction of material collected in the investigation. Over the past several months, dozens of F.B.I. agents and prosecutors with the Justice Department’s national security division were diverted from other assignments to review thousands of documents and a vast trove of video evidence, including footage from video cameras in the prison. [my emphasis]
If the grand jury evidence is a subset of the larger FBI stash, Glenn, then Bondi could release the letter herself, on her own authority, today. At least tell your readers that, Glenn, even if you don’t make the entire story, “Cornered by WSJ story, Donald Trump attempts a limited hangout.”
Thrush quotes Goldman making a point that there’s more in FBI custody, but doesn’t explain the import of it–that Bondi could release whatever copy of this letter the FBI has immediately.
Donald Trump is sufficiently concerned about this that he’s attempting to distract dim-witted people.
Including, apparently, NYT reporters.
Update: On Xitter, Thrush claimed this, in the third paragraph, alerted readers that Trump was affirmatively chasing data that would not have the letter.
The president cited “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein” for his directive, which falls far short of demands from some congressional Republicans to make public all investigative files collected by the department and the F.B.I., not just testimony presented in federal court.
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I’ve often said that, this time, Donald Trump has chosen poorly of which people to make political martyrs.
Less than eight hours after proclaiming that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was just some “new SCAM” perpetrated by Democrats, about four days after he first attempted to float the wildly illogical claim that the Epstein “Files [were] written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” DOJ fired Jim Comey’s daughter, Maurene.
According to the NYT, the letter terminating Ms. Comey cited Article II authority.
Ms. Comey was informed of her firing in a letter that cited Article II of the Constitution, which describes the powers of the president, according to two of the people.
In recent weeks, Pam Bondi’s DOJ has pursued an accelerating purge of prosecutors, public affairs professionals, and ethics advisors protected by civil service protections, also citing Article II authority. But somehow Ms. Comey’s firing took place after Trump started to lose his shit over his inability to squelch his own supporters’ mania about the Epstein scandal.
After Donald Trump started to go nuts about Epstein, Ms. Comey was fired on Trump’s own personal authority. It’s certainly possible this SCOTUS would uphold his authority to do so, if sued. But he’d have to spend a lot of time arguing about his own personal discretion in the decision to fire her.
He did this. Donald Trump did this.
And all the while, her role as a prosecutor in the Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Diddy cases would be at the forefront.
Even ignoring the insanely stupid timing of Ms. Comey’s termination, creating at least the appearance of a connection between Trump’s failing attempts to squelch conspiracy theories and her firing, there are two other details that Pam Bondi cannot have thought through.
First, the indictment of Epstein and the prosecution of Maxwell depended — as did the reporting from Julie Brown (which Miami Herald has now posted together) it built on — on developing the trust of the victims. Here’s how Geoffrey Berman described it in his book.
Over the next weeks and months, a team of FBI agents, NYPD detectives, and our prosecutors scrambled to make that happen. This meant that they identified victims, interviewed them, and went about the sensitive task of getting them to agree to testify in open court against their tormentor. Without the voices of these young women—girls when Epstein raped them—there was not a case. That our team accomplished these tasks without word leaking to Epstein or his lawyers that he was under investigation is a testament to their intelligence and deftness.
[snip]
I made a plea to the victims: Our job is not over, there is justice to be done, and we need your help. Epstein could not have done what he did without the assistance of others. We ask for your cooperation in our ongoing investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators. The response was overwhelming. We conducted interviews that afternoon and in the days that followed. Over time, many other victims agreed to be interviewed. After the initial shock of Epstein’s death, I could feel the team refocusing and reenergizing.
One big break was the cooperation of a victim, one of Epstein’s first, whom Maxwell and Epstein had recruited at a summer arts camp back when she was just fourteen years old. She is now an actress and married with children. She told us that Epstein and Maxwell approached her at the camp when she was fourteen. They took what seemed to her, at first, to be a genuine interest in her life and aspirations. Epstein paid for her voice lessons and some other arts instruction.
She had told no one about the abuse that followed, and specifically not her mother, who had naively believed that Epstein’s interest was benign—that he was a kind, wealthy man helping her daughter reach her dreams. It was difficult for her to come forward. She had never wanted her mother to feel guilty. (Her name, thankfully, has not been publicly revealed. Judge Alison Nathan, who was assigned the Maxwell case, allowed the victims to remain anonymous if they so chose.)
What she told us, and would later testify to, was that Maxwell was walking her pet Yorkie when she approached her at the camp. Epstein soon joined them and began asking questions. “He seemed very interested to know what I thought about the camp, what my favorite classes were,” she said.
They stayed in touch, and at one point he took her to Victoria’s Secret and bought her white cotton panties. Soon after, when she was alone with Epstein at his Palm Beach residence, he pulled his pants down, got on top of her, and masturbated. As she later testified at trial, “I was frozen and in fear. I had never seen a penis before. I was terrified and felt gross and like I felt ashamed.” What followed were group sessions involving Epstein, Maxwell, and other women, which began with “Ghislaine or Jeffrey” summoning everyone to follow them to Jeffrey’s bedroom or massage room. We continued to build the case and search for other victims.
The SDNY team, including Ms. Comey, spent a lot of time assuring victims that their willingness to testify might bring them some kind of justice.
I don’t know how the victims will respond to the news that Ms. Comey was fired before Maxwell’s appeals were exhausted (to say nothing of the Diddy sentencing, currently scheduled for October 3). But these victims put trust into Maurene Comey. Maurene Comey was one of the few people who convinced them she would take on very powerful people in search of justice for them.
And Pam Bondi fired her, on Donald Trump’s personal authority.
There’s one more detail. According to Berman, not long before he killed himself, Epstein proffered cooperation with SDNY, in another bid to get a sweetheart plea deal.
[Reid Weingarten] said that he had just come from meeting with Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and that his client was not happy. (Good! I remember thinking.) “I think my client might want to have an interesting conversation with your office,” he said.
I had expected an overture. With Epstein facing forty-five years in prison—a life sentence for a man his age—it made sense for him to want a deal. But my openness to one was quite limited. He’d already been given the deal of the century in South Florida, buying him more than a decade of undeserved freedom.
Prosecutors, though, never foreclose the conversation. At minimum, you may get new leads, more victims to talk to, additional perpetrators. “The Southern District is always interested in having interesting conversations,”
I said. I told my team to expect a call. A few days later, Weingarten reached out. He said that his client would come in for a proffer—an agreement between a defendant and a prosecutor’s office in which the defendant agrees to share information with the understanding that his statements won’t be used against him at trial.
But Epstein had one condition: he wanted assurances that the SDNY did not see him as a rapist. That was the end of that. He was a rapist, and we were not about to give him some other, more polite-sounding label.
Ms. Comey would be one of the people privy to that proffered testimony.
That doesn’t mean she’ll go release it, or even start naming the rapists who victimized the girls Epstein trafficked. Unlike Bondi and her top aides, Ms. Comey will presumably honor her ethical duty.
But having fired Ms. Comey, one of a few people who earned the trust of sex trafficking victims that she would go after the powerful to seek justice for them, and having claimed to do so on the President’s own authority, Pam Bondi has chosen to fire precisely the person who championed justice for sex trafficking victims … and she did so in Donald Trump’s name.
Update: I should say one more thing. It’s possible Bondi (“Blondi,” as Laura Loomer has dubbed her) did this in response to pressure from Loomer. As I noted here, Trump seems loathe to confront Loomer directly, and Bondi is trying hard to shrug off the pressure of Loomer.
But Loomer, for all her hubris, really is pretty dumb about politics outside of her bubble, to say nothing of the law. For example, she’s calling for a Special Counsel to be appointed on Epstein, but under Trump’s FL Get out of Jail Free Card, that would likely require Senate confirmation. So it would be especially rich if Bondi did something this stupid in response to pressure from Loomer.
Update: Politico reports that Ms. Comey sent a letter to colleagues warning against fear.
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain. Do not let that happen,” she wrote. “Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought. Instead of fear, let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place. A fire of righteous indignation at abuses of power. Of commitment to seek justice for victims. Of dedication to truth above all else.”
[snip]
In her parting message, Comey wrote that during her nearly 10 years at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, her goal was “making sure people with access, money, and power were not treated differently than anyone else; and making sure this office remained separate from politics and focused only on the facts and the law.”
“Fear,” she wrote, “was never really conceivable.”
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The bubbling Jeffrey Epstein scandal is about two things: the underlying scandal and any ties Trump has to it, and the way it has disrupted Trump’s normal super power ability to command and direct attention.
His attack on Rosie O’Donnell yesterday shows that his ability to direct the attention of the left remains undiminished and makes clear why this power is so important to Trump.
Trump’s attack on the comedian, just hours before his latest inept intervention in the Epstein matter, came in the wake of a number of stories — the NYT story describing that key National Weather Service positions were vacant when the flood hit, the CNN report on a three day delay that Kristi Noem caused in the search and rescue, reports on Kerr County’s refusal to accept a Dem-funded early warning system that Rayne wrote up here, the NYT story describing how Noem cut off funding to a call center while it was fielding calls from survivors — holding Trump’s Administration or Republicans accountable for exacerbating the impact of the flood.
When Trump tweeted that Rosie O’Donnell “is a Threat to Humanity” and claimed to be considering stripping her citizenship (she lives in Dublin but as far as I know does not yet have Irish citizenship), that post circulated wildly among journalists and the left, sometimes with commentary about how grave a threat it was that Trump would even make such threats (which he has no legal power to carry out).
But the people who gaped at his unfiltered tweet did not explain, much less link, the background.
What a horror story in Texas — the flash floods in Texas. The Guadalupe River. 51 missing. 51 dead, more missing. Children … at a camp. And you know when the President guts all the warning systems and the, uh, weathering [sic] forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re going to start to see on a daily basis, because he’s put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law. As Republicans cheered. As Republicans cheered. People will die as a result and they’ve started already. Shame on him. Shame on every GOP sycophant who’s listening and following the disastrous decisions of this mentally incapacitated POTUS.
Rosie O’Donnell made a powerful moral critique of Trump, and as that critique was bearing out, he responded to it by asserting to have power over her, power he doesn’t have. And rather than focusing on or even mentioning that moral critique — or even continuing to focus on the many ways the Trump Administration did exacerbate the flood — those who disseminated his tweet gaped in horror at his spectacular display of power, without identifying it as an attempt to avoid being held accountable.
Whether or not the US can restore democracy depends heavily on the success that Trump’s critics have in tying his failures to disasters like Kerr County. It depends on their ability to remain laser-focused on holding him accountable for the disasters his actions predictably cause. And Trump squelched the words of one prescient critic with a tweet. He did so with the willful cooperation of data mules on the left.
Trump’s ability to command and direct attention — his ability to rupture context and redirect attention to his own claims of authority — is his super power. It is how he has attained and remained in government; it is how he has beat back scandals that would have doomed others.
And that super power has been failing him as his DOJ and FBI reversed course on past fevered promises to disclose everything about the Epstein scandal.
That’s what, I have tried to argue, has always been missing from reporting on this exchange: how badly Trump flubbed a role, suppressing coverage by bullying a journalist, that is second nature to him.
Pam Bondi sets out to answer two questions from a journalist about Epstein. She’s actually good at this performed competence and had Trump just let her answer he might have avoided all the backlash. But Trump interrupts. He stumbles over delivery of the name, Jeffrey Epstein, as if he is trying to perform disgust, but it sounds hollow. He asks a question — “are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein” — that feigns ignorance of both the importance of the Epstein scandal to his base, to say nothing about how much his chosen aides, Bondi, Dan Bongino, and Kash Patel, have themselves never shut up about Epstein. Trump almost regains his footing when he complains that the journalist isn’t focused on Texas or “this” (huh? what is “this”?); Trump almost regains his footing by bullying a journalist, an easy trope for him. But then he tries to perform disgust again — “this creep” — and like the earlier mention of his friend, Epstein’s name, “creep” sounds forced, a badly delivered performance. Trump tries a familiar stance again — “I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein” — but this was a question about a release Bondi’s own DOJ orchestrated. He ends with feigned outrage, accusing the journalist of “desecration.” The whole performance lacked energy, exacerbated by the slurring Trump exhibited throughout the event.
What is a normal ploy from him — attacking journalists to bully them out of covering things — simply failed. The great Realty TV Show Star flubbed his part, as devastating as if his voice squeaked when declaring “You’re fired,” back in the day.
Both in content and performance, his bid to shut down this line of questioning made him look vulnerable, not strong. It raised questions rather than silencing them.
With each development since — the clash between Dan Bongino and Bondi over who would take the fall first revealed in reports of Bongino’s pouty refusal to go to work on Friday, the persistent backlash from some of the loudest voices among his Twitter mob, leading up to Trump’s lengthy tweet yesterday — Trump’s command of attention has slipped.
While folks finally recognized that something is failing in Trump’s normal ability to command attention, this time, by gaping at the length of this tweet, if you look closer, the tweet was even more delightfully ill-conceived.
Both right wingers and journalists have, I think correctly, conceived the purpose as an attempt to alleviate pressure on Pam Bondi.
What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!
[snip]
LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!
But even there, Trump starts pathetically, by claiming that “my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?'” are leading the attack on Bondi. This attack, on “Blondi,” is being led by Laura Loomer, and suggesting that she’s following Trump’s “boys” on this betrays a reluctance to go after Loomer directly.
The defense of Kash Patel (right wingers correctly noticed that Bongino gets no mention) is secondary.
Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.
For the first time ever, Trump claimed that the Epstein files were made up by Democrats — all Democrats, serially.
Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.
To be fair, this is not an entirely new ploy. Last year, Trump explained his hesitation to release the Epstein files based on a claim that “it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”
I guess I would. I think that, less so, because, you know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.
Even then, he was preparing a defense that if something in there implicated him, it was phony, fake, fraudulent.
Still, the claim that Democrats — Obama, Hillary, John Brennan, and Jim Comey (who is not a Democrat, or at least wasn’t when this all happened) — created the Epstein files would normally be a reasonable ploy, given the disinformation he has long used to sustain loyalty. He attempted to tie the Epstein files to things he has trained his rubes to believe were hoaxes — the legal adjudications that Trump’s top aides lied to cover up his ties to Russia and false claims about what 51 spooks said about the Hunter Biden laptop — as well as an actual hoax (the Steele dossier) that he has blamed on Democrats rather than the Russians who larded it with allegations that closely match real things only the Russians knew.
These things — Russia Russia Russia — are a foundational element of his tweets (and one of the things data mules disseminate without debunking, thereby reinforcing as unquestioned). This was an attempt to add one more element, as he added the spook letter and Hunter Biden laptop after Russia Russia Russia was already established as his foundational disinformation.
So this might have been a reasonable attempt to discredit the Epstein files, the things he anticipated claiming were “phony” last year. Except you don’t attempt this after years of treating it as credible.
Worse still, you don’t do that and then immediately ask the question that MAGAts have long used to reassure themselves that Trump wasn’t in the Epstein files.
Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?
Why didn’t they, indeed?
Again, even Benny has seen the problem with this, and he is painfully stupid!
The reason Trump’s claims that the Russian investigation and the spook letter and the Steele dossier are hoaxes have succeeded is because they were made public, often with the involvement of Democrats. But if Democrats — even Hillary, whose spouse flew on his plane! — larded the Epstein files with things damaging Trump, right wingers’ biases dictate that the left would have released it.
Before Trump’s claims that these were fabricated, the logic made sense to right wingers: Democrats didn’t release the files because there’s nothing about Trump in them. But if the left allegedly fabricated them along with the Russian investigation and the spook letter, which Trump has falsely claimed were fabricated in an attempt to hurt Trump, then they would have released them.
Furthermore, he would order Kash to include the Epstein files among the witch hunts on which he wants FBI to focus. Instead, he’s arguing that Kash doesn’t have time to investigate this alleged hoax targeting him because he is too busy investigating other fabricated claims of a hoax, his desperate attempt to find some way to sustain the claim that he’s not a loser beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.
The entire post collapses in on itself. Even Benny sees this!
Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.
Crazier still, when he first attempted this complaint, he used a phrase that is bound to fuel conspiracists.
“selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?! Did you really say that? About a guy whose circumstances of death are a key part of this conspiracy theory? Hell, the most unhinged Epstein conspiracists (including a good number of Trump supporters) question whether he did die. And you just wrote down that Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?!
Trump’s supporters are in a cult. But many of them are also in the QAnon cult. And for those for whom the QAnon cult came first or remains predominant, telling them that “nobody cares about” Jeffrey Epstein ruptures the unity between Trump and them, because he is attacking one of their foundational beliefs. It’s like telling devout Christians that Jesus never walked the Earth. You have just assailed a foundational belief of those who believe — as proven by Epstein — that pedophiles control the powerful. So long as Trump flirted with QAnon conspiracies, he and his rubes shared that foundational belief; yesterday, he assailed it.
(Both Phil Bump and Mike Rothschild addressed what happens when you betray the trust of conspiracists back when Bongino first affirmed that Epstein killed himself; their descriptions really anticipated what we’re seeing this week.)
There certainly are questions about what aspects of Trump’s sustained fondness for Epstein remain in files that once might have been on Pam Bondi’s desk before they weren’t and never had been, according to Bondi. It’s certainly likely that something in them explains the failure of Trump’s super power here, his inability to deliver his long-practiced lines, first of bullying a journalist, then claiming Dems implicated him in a hoax.
But the reason why his super power is failing doesn’t matter so long as it does continue to fail, especially given that Epstein conspiracies were always non-falsifiable and Trump’s conflicting stories make them all the more so. Unless something drastically changes, every attempt Trump makes to squelch this focus will only exacerbate the growing cognitive dissonance his rubes have. And the underlying Epstein scandal is so spectacular — so unquestionably a case of injustice to the victims — that even feckless Dems have the means of keeping it at the forefront.
Trump survives based on that super power, on his ability (as he succeeded in doing with the Rosie O’Donnell tweet) to dodge accountability by distracting away from it.
If that super power starts to fail, though, so will his ability to avoid accountability.
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I was and still intend to write a post arguing that all of the coverage of this comment from Trump is wrong. As I rant on Nicole Sandler’s show today, what we saw in these few moments was Trump, whose super power is in being able to command attention, not only failing that, but flubbing his lines when he tried to reassert his command over attention focused on Jeffrey Epstein.
The conspiracy theorists who put Trump in office will not let him take ahold of this conspiracy.
What we see in this exchange is — more than at any time in the last ten years, I argue — Trump’s super power of commanding where people focus their attention failing him.
So I want to write about how everyone is getting this wrong.
But first, I want to talk about how Trump’s Deep State can’t even Deep State competently.
Trump’s attempt to tamp this down, predictably, had the opposite effect, both because infighting over who fucked up the incompetent attempt to tamp it down, and the conspiracy theories that have arisen in the void.
Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is at the pivot of both worlds, and she’s playing her part to perfection. She started things today by revealing that Dan Bongino — who actually doesn’t like how hard he has to work at FBI anyway — complaining about how the memo that attempted but failed to tamp all this down happened.
That led Todd Blanche, fresh off his efforts to make the Erez Reuveni disclosures worse, to weigh in, claiming there was no dispute about how to release the Epstein memo.
Meanwhile, Marc Caputo — who has close ties with Susie Wiles from way back — debunks Blanche’s claim of harmony, describing that Wiles and Taylor Budowich witnessed anything but.
The intrigue: MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a Bondi critic, first reported Friday on X that Bongino left work and that he and Patel were “furious” with the way Bondi had handled the case.
Some Trump advisers have criticized Bondi, but Trump “loves Pam and thinks she’s great,” a senior White House official said.
Those witnessing the Wednesday clash between Bondi and Bongino in the White House were Patel, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.
The more important part of Caputo’s report, though, is that insiders blame Bongino for the “missing minute,” which provided the nutters reason to doubt the entire effort to tamp all this down.
Zoom in: At the center of the argument: a surveillance video from outside Epstein’s cell that the administration released, saying it was proof no one had entered the room before he killed himself.
The 10-hour video had what has widely been called a “missing minute,” fueling conspiracy theories in MAGA’s online world about a cover-up involving Epstein’s death.
The “missing minute,” authorities say, stemmed from an old surveillance recording system that goes down each day at midnight to reset and record anew. It takes a minute for that process to occur, which effectively means that 60 seconds of every day aren’t recorded.
Bongino — who had pushed Epstein conspiracy theories as a MAGA-friendly podcast host before President Trump appointed him to help lead the FBI — had found the video and touted it publicly and privately as proof that Epstein hadn’t been murdered.
That conclusion — shared by FBI Director Kash Patel, another conspiracy theorist-turned-insider — angered many in Trump’s MAGA base, criticism that increased after Axios first reported the release of the video and a related memo.
After the video’s “missing minute” was discovered, Bongino was blamed internally for the oversight, according to three sources.
Only, complaints about the video are only going to get worse. Wired describes that the metadata shows the video has been altered.
The “raw” file shows clear signs of having been processed using an Adobe product, most likely Premiere, based on metadata that specifically references file extensions used by the video editing software. According to experts, Adobe software, including Premiere and Photoshop, leaves traces in exported files, often embedding metadata that logs which assets were used and what actions were taken during editing. In this case, the metadata indicates the file was saved at least four times over a 23-minute span on May 23, 2025, by a Windows user account called “MJCOLE~1.” The metadata does not show whether the footage was modified before each time it was saved.
The embedded data suggest the video is not a continuous, unaltered export from a surveillance system, but a composite assembled from at least two separate MP4 files. The metadata includes references to Premiere project files and two specific source clips—2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4 and 2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4. These entries appear under a metadata section labeled “Ingredients,” part of Adobe’s internal schema for tracking source material used in edited exports. The metadata does not make clear where in the video the two clips were spliced together.
Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on digital forensics and misinformation, reviewed the metadata at WIRED’s request. Farid is a recognized expert in the analysis of digital images and the detection of manipulated media, including deepfakes. He has testified in numerous court cases involving digital evidence.
Farid says the metadata raises immediate concerns about chain of custody—the documented handling of digital evidence from collection to presentation in a courtroom. Just like physical evidence, he explains, digital evidence must be handled in a way that preserves its integrity; metadata, while not always precise, can provide important clues about whether that integrity has been compromised.
“If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I’d say no. Go back to the source. Do it right,” Farid says. “Do a direct export from the original system—no monkey business.”
Farid points to another anomaly: The video’s aspect ratio shifts noticeably at several points. “Why am I suddenly seeing a different aspect ratio?” he asks.
It is abundantly likely that all of this is easily explained. I noted in my first post that the missing minute probably comes from MCC’s ancient surveillance equipment. And it sounds like someone packaged this up for Bongino.
Of course, none of that is going to matter if and when people confirm that the video doesn’t even show Epstein’s cell, as multiple people claim.
Every single wrinkle will only serve to feed the conspiracy theorists whose attention Trump cannot manage to command.
Here’s the thing, though. I think Bondi probably did shut down these investigations because they are inconvenient to Trump. Maybe it stems from nothing more than Trump’s demand to command attention; maybe it has to do with the known connections between Trump and the abuser looking damning no matter how close or far Trump is to the rape.
But because the Deputy Director of the FBI, an agency with thousands of people with expertise on this kind of thing, couldn’t manage to find someone who could hold his hand and explain basic things like chain of custody, they have all made it far, far worse.
Trump’s Deep State can’t even Deep State competently.
Update: The date of the saved video (May 23) was between the date when Bongino and Kash told Bartiromo that Epstein killed himself and the date when Bongino told Fox the FBI was going to release the video but first was, “taking time to clean up and enhance the video.”
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There was a remarkable moment in Trump’s cabinet meeting. A journalist asked, first, if it was true that Jeffrey Epstein had worked for a foreign intelligence service. Then he asked why there was a minute missing in the video released to show no one entered in cell.
Trump blew up.
Trump: Are you still talking about Jeffrey EPstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things that, people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is UNbelieveable. You want to waste the time [points to Bondi] you feel like answering?
Bondi: I don’t mind answering.
Trump: I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy, with what happened in Texas. It just seems like … a desecration.
I can think of no moment in his ten year political career where Trump so obviously lost his cool because he was helpless to direct attention where he wanted it.
And it’s likely to only keep Epstein at the center of attention.
Update: Mike Cernovich has already posted that, “We will continue asking about Epstein.” Elon asks, “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”
Update: Liz Wheeler (no relation–but one of the propagandists originally promised Epstein files) wrote a long screed about how Trump is misreading his base. This is just part of it!
President Trump snaps at reporter who asks him Epstein question.
Trump is massively misreading his base on this one.
It could cost him the midterms.
People CARE about Epstein. Not only because of the grisly crimes against children, but because there’s evidence of a government cover up.
Evidence like Epstein’s autopsy showing injuries incongruent with suicide. Evidence like the British Palace’s response to ABC’s nuked report on Epstein & Prince Andrew & Bill Clinton. Evidence like former U.S. Atty Alex Acosta saying he was told to back off because Epstein was an intel asset & then finding his DOJ emails mysteriously disappeared, etc.
And now government officials are telling us to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes & believe them—without evidence. Nope. Not gonna do it. We voted for radical transparency & JUSTICE.
President Trump should not underestimate how much goodwill he’s lost among his base due to Pam Bondi’s mishandling of the Epstein files. People are furious. I would know, I was the collateral damage in Bondi’s infernal Epstein binder debacle. She should’ve been fired on the spot.
[snip]
Epstein is foundational. That’s why Trump’s base has a visceral reaction to being told we’ll get the Epstein files… and now being told actually we’re getting nothing.
Pam Bondi didn’t tell us the truth. She seems more interested in being a Fox News star than keeping promises. Something is fishy about the Epstein stuff. His racket. His death. His friends. His intel connections. Patting us on the head & telling us “nothing to see here” is infuriating.
President Trump should not underestimate the significance of this moment. He’s losing goodwill by the day—thanks to Pam Bondi. Trump is smart. He cares about his base. He listens.
He should listen now, so it doesn’t cost him the midterms.
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Even before Trump was inaugurated, I had great fun boosting expectations that Trump would release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
I didn’t do so because I believed there would be a massive Epstein release (partly because some of the conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein are not true and partly because what is true is that Trump is among the powerful men who are implicated). I didn’t do so because I believed any files would ever come out.
I did so because beliefs about Epstein are non-falsifiable. I did so because even if there were no damning materials tying Trump to Epstein, the President would still never be able to satisfy the expectations of his mob.
I did so because the promise (from Kash Patel, long before he was confirmed, and then from Pam Bondi) and expectation that Trump would release the files was an expectation that Trump’s supporters should expect to have fulfilled — after all he ordered DOJ to do just that, with the JFK, RFK, and MLK files.
But there’s no chance their expectations can ever been fulfilled. It was a way, I knew, where Trump was going to disappoint some of his most rabid fans.
Trump promised to release the secret files the continued secrecy of which have fueled decades of conspiracy theories, so why wouldn’t he release files about pedophilia, the legitimate concern that has fueled the Trump-supporting QAnoners?
I fueled such expectations on Xitter because if the demand to see the Epstein files ever took hold, Bondi would be stuck.
Then Bondi made things worse when she told Fox News that Epstein’s client file was on her desk for review. She made things worse when she orchestrated the re-release of the already-released files to a select group of right wing propagandists, all packaged up to look special, a spectacle that stoked divisions among MAGAts but also raised concerns that she was covering stuff up. She made things still worse when — responding to James Comer’s role in making things worse, when he claimed the Epstein files had been disappeared — she said there were tens of thousands of videos involving Epstein.
Kash Patel, who promised to release the files, and Dan Bongino, who begged his readers never to let go of this scandal? They fed the fever too with their years of spreading conspiracy theories about the Epstein files. And when FBI’s conspiracy theorists in chief tried to reverse course a month ago, it only further fueled suspicions.
Then Elon joined the fun, accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files as part of his tantrum against Trump (but then deleting that file). As someone who was also close to Ghislaine Maxwell, Elon might know!
Dan Goldman joined in, expressing, “grave concern about what appears to be a concerted effort by you to delay and even prevent the release of the Jeffrey Epstein Files,” and asking whether Trump’s identity was being redacted from any of the files. Robert Garcia and Stephen Lynch joined in, writing Pam Bondi a letter, asking Bondi to formally answer whether the Epstein files are being withheld — as Elon Musk alleged — because Trump is in them, and further asking (among other questions) whether Trump had a role in the delay of their release.
Bondi’s stonewalling, after both she and Kash promised everything would come quickly, was becoming the story.
So yesterday, DOJ and FBI released (or rather, made available to Axios without yet, apparently, releasing it via normal channels) a two-page unsigned notice (which may be on letterhead created for the purpose).
It included two main, credible conclusions:
Much of the material that FBI has depicts victims and any release of that material would retraumatize the victims.
FBI concluded (and Trump’s flunkies agree) that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. DOJ released two files (one unaltered, one enhanced, both with titles that do not even mention Epstein) showing that no one entered his cell the night he killed himself.
But there’s also a short, broader conclusion that is less sound.
This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties. [my emphasis]
Emphasis on credible?
Of course there’s a client list; one version of it was already released. There are also the names or descriptions shared by victims of the men who abused them. And while there may be no evidence in the FBI files that Epstein did blackmail Trump or anyone else, he had blackmail material on them. There’s certainly credible reason to believe that information is one of the reasons he was allowed to persist so long; it was useful for other powerful people, possibly even spooks in one or another country. That FBI didn’t uncover evidence confirming that others were involved in trafficking young people is dramatically different from saying that there’s no damning information implicating Epstein’s Johns.
But let’s assume for the moment that these conclusions are impeccable (and as I said, the decision not to release videos showing victims and the conclusion about the suicide are sound), that means that the people who’ve been claiming to have inside knowledge who promised to release the files — starting with FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Direct Dan Bongino — are braying conspiracy theorists who cannot be trusted in any position of authority.
If it’s true that all this was a conspiracy theory, Kash and Bongino must leave the FBI, because they’ve just confessed they will endorse any kind of conspiracy theory to spin up Trump’s rubes. Pam Bondi must call for their resignations immediately, and while she’s at it, she should leave herself, because her original stunt release created the very expectations that she’s now trying to squelch.
They all promised to fulfill conspiracy theories and are now claiming they were lying about their certainty there was some there there.
Honestly, they’d be doing themselves a favor by doing so. But that won’t happen, and because these conspiracy theories are non-falsifiable, this attempt to make the entire promised reveal go away will simply fuel further conspiracy theories. Indeed, it already is.
Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi have now confirmed they are raging conspiracy theorists. And yet even that will not be enough to tamp down further conspiracy theories.
Update: I’m laughing my ass off. Doocy quoted Pam Bondi’s claim from an old interview, stating she had the client list on her desk. Karoline Leavitt spun it, with Doocy making big faces.
In addition, Unusual Whale notes that the last minute of the day (these may be PT time), from 11:58:59 to 11:59:59, missing from the video. Oh, and it turns out it’s not even the right cell.
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The magistrate judge who presided over a detention hearing for Kilmar Abrego Garcia (KAG) last week, Barbara Holmes, has ruled that the government is not entitled to further review of his detention, but even if they were, they would not meet the standard under the Bail Reform Act to keep him jailed pre-trial.
The takeaway of her ruling is that the government’s attempt to claim the alleged presence of minors in the van he drove made his alleged crime — transporting undocumented migrants — serious enough to merit detention failed. The evidence didn’t pass the sniff test.
But the ruling is important because it documents just how shitty the case against KAG is, which (as far as I saw), just Adam Klasfeld and Katelyn Polantz attempted to do before this.
The alleged kid in the van
There were two main problems with the evidence. First, the evidence that one of the guys in the van KAG was driving through Tennessee when he was stopped back in November 2022 was a minor is based on hearsay after hearsay.
The TN State Trooper who stopped KAG passed around a piece of paper and asked everyone in the van to write down their name and date of birth. The government introduced this part of the roster, claiming it showed that one guy was born in 2007, and so would have been 15 at the time. That was the primary basis of their claim that KAG’s alleged crime involved a minor.
But the direct witness to that would be the guy in question, and the government hasn’t tracked him down.
The next most direct witness would have been the Trooper, who (Holmes noted) could have described whether he thought that guy looked young. But for some unstated reason, the government didn’t call him as a witness. Instead, everything came in through the government’s sole witness, whom Holmes describes as ICE HSI Special Agent Peter Joseph.
Note, I’ve seen other people say Joseph is an FBI Agent; if he really is HSI, it would make another of these politicized cases that don’t involve the FBI. Thus far, the sole exception is the Hannah Dugan case.
The Trooper’s own body cam got purged; what was presented was his partner’s. And while that body cam footage corroborates the hearsay claim that the Trooper got the roster, it doesn’t capture the guys filling it out.
While the body camera footage – which is itself hearsay – includes the passing around of a piece of paper among the vehicle occupants at the direction of a THP trooper on the scene, the detail of the roster is visible only briefly in the body camera footage.
The Trooper claims that he photographed the passports and saw no entry stamps. But those photos can’t be found. And the body cam footage that exists doesn’t show him taking photos.
However, even though the photograph of the roster was produced, the photographs of the passports cannot be located, according to Special Agent Joseph’s testimony. 17
17 According to Special Agent Joseph, THP Trooper Foster also stated he is almost 100% certain that none of the vehicle occupants’ passports had stamps from port of entry. However, the body camera footage, which the Court fully reviewed, does not show THP Trooper Foster taking any passport photographs or even that he was provided with passports. The Court recognizes that the footage is not from THP Trooper Foster’s body camera. The footage does, however, appear to show THP Trooper Foster’s entire interaction with the vehicle occupants.
And all that’s before you look at the number, which (KAG’s lawyers pointed out in the hearing) looks like it could have been overwritten, and even if it weren’t, Holmes observes, 1s and 7s are numbers that can be confused.
So Holmes found that that allegation was not credible enough to win the government a further detention hearing.
The criminal aliens Pam Bondi wants to free
The other primary claims about KAG go through three familially-related cooperating witnesses. As I noted when I unpacked the indictment, this entire case rests on their credibility.
As Holmes described it, this was double (or triple) hearsay testimony of three witnesses all of whom hope to remain in the country, two of whom are felons the government will or already has freed. And the testimony of those guys as to whether KAG brought his special needs kids with him is not remotely credible just as a matter of logistics.
Special Agent Joseph testified that the first and second (male) cooperators testified or stated in interviews that Abrego typically took his children with him on trips during which he was allegedly smuggling undocumented people from one place to another. The first female cooperator testified to also having knowledge of this alleged conduct. Importantly, each cooperating witness upon whose statements the government’s argument for detention rests stands to gain something from their testimony in this case.
The first cooperator, who provided interview statements and grand jury testimony, has two prior felony convictions, has previously been deported five times, and was released early from a 30-month federal prison sentence for human smuggling as part of his cooperation in this case. He is the purported domestic leader of the human smuggling organization in which Abrego is accused of participating. He has been granted deferred action on deportation in exchange for his testimony. Special Agent Joseph acknowledged on cross-examination that the first cooperator will likely be granted work release as part of the conditions of the halfway house in which he currently resides following his early release from prison.
The second cooperator is also an avowed member of the human smuggling organization and is presently in custody charged with a federal crime for which he hopes to be released in exchange for his cooperating grand jury testimony. He has also been previously deported and has requested deferred action on deportation in exchange for his cooperation. The second cooperator is a closely related family member of the first cooperator.
The first female cooperator is also closely related to the first and second male cooperators. She testified before a federal grand jury in Texas about the investigation of Abrego and has requested deferred action on deportation in exchange for her cooperation. Special Agent Joseph did not personally interview this first female cooperator.
The Court gives little weight to this hearsay testimony – double hearsay through Special Agent Joseph’s testimony – of the first male cooperator, a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation, who has now obtained for himself an early release from federal prison and delay of a sixth deportation by providing information to the government. Nor do the hearsay statements of the second male cooperator on this issue fare any better, as his requested release from jail and delay of another deportation depends on providing information the government finds useful. Even without discounting the weight of the testimony of the first and second male cooperators for the multiple layers of hearsay, their testimony and statements defy common sense.
Both male cooperators stated that, other than three or four trips total without his children, Abrego typically took his children with him during the alleged smuggling trips from Maryland to Houston and back, some 2,900 miles round-trip, as often as three or four times per week. The sheer number of hours that would be required to maintain this schedule, which would consistently be more than 120 hours per week of driving time, approach physical impossibility. For that additional reason, the Court finds that the statements of the first and second male cooperators are not reliable to establish that this case “involves a minor victim.”
The problems with these guys’ testimony goes further still. The claims that KAG at one point transported guns goes through them — which raises the question why the repeat felon has never been charged for having them.
The first cooperator, the leader of the human smuggling operation, in a changed statement from his initial interview, stated that he was a collector and buyer and seller of guns, that he would regularly give guns to his drivers, and that he gave one or two to Abrego, who took them back to Maryland during transports.29 The second cooperator made similar statements about witnessing Abrego purchase and transport guns.
If truthful, these circumstances are concerning. However, the reliability of the evidence is questionable, which detracts from the weight it will be given. The first cooperator only provided this information in a second interview, described in Special Agent Joseph’s testimony as “different or evolved” from the first interview. Further, there is no other evidence of Abrego possessing firearms.
29 The first cooperator’s admitted prior criminal history at least suggests that he might be prohibited from possessing firearms. If so, it is unclear whether the first cooperator is receiving immunity from prosecution or some other concession for this information.
Worse still, the first guy — the repeat felon — debunked the second guy’s claim that KAG was an MS-13 member.
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.
In a footnote, Holmes basically says, “this is all you’ve got on this gang claim?”
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.
The one other witness (who has been paid for her cooperation in the past) implicating KAG with MS-13 membership, offered a vague, unsworn description from five years ago, when she was a teenager, and. her family has ties to 18 Barrio gang, the gang against which KAG was found to have credible fear of retaliation in his immigration proceedings.
Some of this evidence would get stronger at trial, where all these avowed human smugglers would have to testify under oath themselves.
But you still have the patently obvious case where Pam Bondi’s DOJ is larding on benefits for the kind of people that Stephen Miller likes to disappear to CECOT, and they’re doing so primarily so they can send KAG to CECOT instead of them.
Pam Bondi went on TV and talked about how dangerous all this is (accusing him of human trafficking, with which Hughes notes, he was not charged), implicating that KAG was grooming children but she was prosecuting and convicting them.
These facts demonstrate Abrego Garcia is a danger to our community.
[snip]
Co-conspirators allege that and we were clear to say that he is charged with, it’s not, only very serious charges of smuggling. And again, there were children involved in that. Human trafficking, not only in our country but in our world is very, very real. It’s very dangerous. And as you saw recently in Virginia, the arrest we made of the MS-13 member, unrelated to this, we learned at that press conference, that’s where they bring young children into our country and they start grooming them at middle school age to become MS-13, full-fledged members commit violent crimes throughout our country. It is highly organized, it is very dangerous, and they are living throughout our country. But no more because they are being arrested. They are being prosecuted and being convicted and deported when appropriate.
Except not her star witnesses, whose testimony conflicts, and who were the guys allegedly directing KAG to do what he did.
Pam Bondi is going to free those guys into the United States — maybe even let them stay.
Does Stephen Miller know about this? Because this is the kind of thing he accuses Democratic politicians of doing, threatening to arrest them for doing so.
The government has already appealed this decision, and everyone involved admits KAG may simply be snapped up in immigration detention if he is freed. But for now, a judge has debunked much of the inflated claims DOJ made.
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Less than three weeks ago, Pam Bondi’s DOJ got admonished by a Magistrate Judge for charging first, investigating latter.
When dismissing Ras Baraka’s charges on May 21, Magistrate Judge André Espinosa scolded the AUSA present — and by proxy, DOJ — for arresting Newark’s Mayor before doing basic investigation.
The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office. An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.
It’s precisely that commitment to rigorous 19 investigation and thoughtful prosecution that has 20 characterized the distinguished history of your Office, Mr. Demanovich, particularly over the last two decades. The bench and the bar have witnessed in that period, the diligence and care demonstrated by prior U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, whose leadership has consistently upheld the highest standards of prosecutorial ethics and professionalism. Their legacy is one of careful deliberate action where charges were brought only after exhaustive evidence gathering and a thorough consideration of all facts That bedrock principle, consistently honored by your predecessors, is the foundation upon which the credibility and effectiveness of your Office rests.
So let this incident serve as an inflection point and a reminder to uphold your solemn oath to the people of this District and to your client, Justice itself, and ensure that every charge brought is the product of rigorous investigation and earned confidence in its merit mirroring the exemplary conduct that has long defined your Office.
The apparent rush in this case culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges suggests failure to adequately investigate to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power Your Office must operate with higher standard than that.
But just 18 days later, Pam Bondi’s DOJ charged another prominent Democrat — this time, SEIU CA President David Huerta — via complaint, without first doing basic investigation. The complaint, which was released before Huerta’s initial appearance yesterday, charges Huerta with one count of conspiring to impede an officer, a felony (h/t to Meghann Cuniff for releasing the complaint).
The incident occurred outside of this fast fashion factory, where officers were conducting a search.
As Bondi’s DOJ did with Ras Baraka (the charges that were dismissed) and LaMonica McIver (she has a hearing tomorrow), ICE team members physically grappled with their target, and then arrested them for the interaction. In this case, agents picked up Heurta and knocked him over, knocking his head into a curb and wrenching what he said was a bad shoulder in the process of cuffing him. He went to the hospital for treatment during his weekend detention.
There are two elements that have to be proven to convict Huerta of this felony: first, that the defendant used force, intimidation, or threats to induce a US official to stop doing his job. When this same charge was used against January 6 militias, prosecutors relied on actual assaults of cops, threats to spray them, military formation and kit, and threats to assassinate members of Congress. All of it threatened physical violence and even death.
The closest such threat to these guys was someone — no tie to Huerta is alleged — who told officers to shoot themselves.
As a crowd gathered outside of the vehicular gate, individuals in the crowd began screaming expletives at law enforcement officers through the gate in an attempt to intimidate them.For example, one individual yelled “I want you tokillyourself!Go home and drink a lot of vodka and shoot yourself with your own god damn revolver!”
As to Huerta specifically, the affiant of this complaint claimed that Huerta’s banging on the gate to the facility was an “attempt to intimidate us,” and pointed to Huerta’s repeated taunts about his mask and claimed that this was necessarily an attempt to dox and intimidate the officers “in the future.”
I told HUERTA that if he continued to block the gate, hewould be arrested.HUERTA replied “I can’t hear you through yourfucking mask.”Others in the crowd repeatedly asked me and otherlaw enforcement officers to take our masks off and attempted to film our faces and badges in an apparent attempt to intimidate us.Based on my training and experience, I know that protestors often do this so that they can publish identifying information about law enforcement officers online.1That way, otherscan harass or threaten the law enforcement officers in thefuture.
The affiant’s name is redacted in several places in the affidavit, but not in the section where he introduces his background. He doxed himself, while citing the imagined threat of doxing as the intimidation necessary to sustain these charges.
But it’s the conspiracy part of this that is particularly nutty. Prosecutors need to show that Huerta entered into an agreement with at least one other person to intimidate an ICE team to stop them from doing their job.
As a threshold matter, the complaint presents no evidence that Huerta or anyone else knew what the law enforcement officers were doing — executing a judicial search warrant rather than conducting a raid based on an administrative warrant. That may matter to proving intent.
More importantly, the affiant just points to person after person and says, well maybe that indicates a conspiracy.
A woman provided details of the law enforcement presence into her phone. Maybe that was a conspiracy.
Protestors who arrived at the site — video-taped by an undercover officer!! — were communicating with each other. Maybe that was a conspiracy.
Huerta was “apparently typing text into his digital device while present at the protest.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.
Huerta lives nine miles away from the garment factory, so had to have learned of ICE activity from someone “coordinating a protest at this location.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.
Someone — no tie to Huerta is alleged, and there’s no indication he was arrested — attempted to padlock the gate. Maybe that was a conspiracy.
Huerta said, “What are you going to do, you can’t arrest us all,” which the affiant presents as proof that “he and the others had planned in advance of arrival to disrupt the operation.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.
Nowhere does the affiant even allege that Huerta and the others entered into a conspiracy to intimidate the beleaguered ICE officers standing behind a 7-foot steel fence, which protestors didn’t try to breach when it opened, remaining all the time on a public sidewalk. Rather, he alleges a conspiracy to disrupt what the protesters might have thought was an ICE raid, meaning any attempt to provide proof of a conspiracy to impede officers by intimidating or threatening them is almost nonexistent. And he repeatedly calls this a protest, even while describing Huerta using the language of protests and pickets.
One of the nuttiest parts of this is that the affiant — the guy who cited the threat of doxing as proof of intimidation and then doxed himself — is a senior HSI Agent pulled off his normal duty conducting cyber financial investigations, the kind of thing that normally targets international crypto-facilitated crimes.
I am a Supervisory Special Agent (“SSA”) with the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”).I currently supervise the Cyber Financial investigations group at the HSI Los Angeles office.
The bread and butter of cyber investigations are digital tracks: cell phone, social media, and financial records.
The FBI collected reams and reams of such things before charging the aforementioned 18 USC 372 conspiracies against Jan6 militias. There were Signal and Telegram chats, Parler posts, saved communications from walkie-talkie chats during the riot, reported conversations from a number of cooperating witnesses, on top of the actual assaults of cops and weapons and direct threats.
And this guy, whose forté is to collect such things … hasn’t. He refers to Huerta’s digital device twice, but doesn’t say whether he tried to exploit it. He refers to social media posts (even while assuming the woman who first reported from the scene was using a videoconference app rather than just posting to TikTok or something), but he doesn’t cite a single post. He doesn’t even have phone records — available via subpoena even on a weekend — to identify with whom, if any, of the other protestors Huerta was really communicating.
Ryan Ribner, who wouldn’t have gotten where he was in his day job without highly developed skills at collecting and analyzing digital tracks, hasn’t (claimed to have) done any of that.
Another instance of charge first, investigate later.
There are several indications that may be the point.
First, there’s that undercover officer, who was filming the entire time but apparently didn’t produce a single video that could substantiate a conspiracy. This protest was miniscule. Why was there an undercover officer present at all? Did it have everything to do with Huerta’s presence (the undercover, as described, seemed focused on Huerta)?
Our trusty cyber expert also suggests that the van entering the gate of the facility — the predicate for making Huerta move and therefore the predicate to tackling him, injuring him, and then arresting him — may not, after all, be the only entrance. He describes that “as far as I was aware,” it was.
As far as I was aware, this gate was the only location throughwhich vehicles could enter or exit the premises.
I wonder whether his awareness has changed over the weekend.
As this goes forward, it’s likely that our intrepid cyber investigator will actually subpoena some phone records, do the kind of thing he has been doing for over a decade. It’s likely he will then try to substantiate a conspiracy for which he has presented no more than speculation. Given his conflation of what he himself calls a protest and the intimidation and physical force contemplated in 18 USC 372, given the calls — including from Trump — to substantiate some organized background behind the larger protests in a city of 10 million, he may well imagine a conspiracy in SEIU’s organized protests.
Protests are what unions do, and SEIU is an enormously important union with close ties to the Democratic party. Will official and private communications among SEIU personnel planning protests look like plans for protests? Yes, of course. And DOJ will claim that banging on a gate is so intimidating to a bunch of armed law enforcement officers standing behind it that those plans for protests amount to a felony.
Pam Bondi’s DOJ first assaulted and injured, then charged, a very important labor leader with a conspiracy charge the evidence for which they didn’t even bother to look for.
Yet.
And that seems to be the point.
Update: The crack staff in Los Angeles’ US Attorney’s Office finally docketed the case. They asked for Huerta to be detained (which, I guess, is how they got a judge to impose a $50K bond)!
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As part of an Executive Order ordering Pam Bondi to start a witch hunt against Joe Biden’s aides, Donald Trump implied that the only reason Joe Biden was not prosecuted for harboring classified documents was “his incompetent mental state.”
The Department of Justice, for example, concluded that, despite clear evidence that Biden had broken the law, he should not stand trial owing to his incompetent mental state.
That’s a wild misstatement of the record, starting with the fact that the only documents that Robert Hur showed Biden wittingly took — his notebooks and a memo he sent to Barack Obama about withdrawing from Afghanistan — Biden believed he could take based on DOJ’s treatment of Ronald Reagan.
But let’s take the premise on its face.
Donald Trump — who was charged by a Special Counsel appointed on the same basis as Hur was — claims that Joe Biden would have been legitimately prosecuted if only he weren’t senile.
Wow, Donny, you just said that Aileen Cannon was wrong for dismissing the case against you!!!
Let’s go, baby!
This whole thing (especially the order to David Warrington to review which orders Biden signed with an autopen) is a grotesque nuisance. As with Trump’s apparent waiver of Biden’s Executive Privilege invocation on his own Special Counsel interviews, it presents a troubling breach of Executive equities of precisely the kind of that Trump never stopped wailing about when he was investigated.
But I really think this order, like so much of Trump and Eagle Ed Martin’s push to review what Biden did while serving as President in his late 70s, could backfire in spectacular ways.
For example, Trump is trying to criminalize White House aides lying to the public about the mental and physical state of the President.
Investigation. (a) The Counsel to the President, in consultation with the Attorney General and the head of any other relevant executive department or agency (agency), shall investigate, to the extent permitted by law, whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President. This investigation shall address:
(i) any activity, coordinated or otherwise, to purposefully shield the public from information regarding Biden’s mental and physical health;
(ii) any agreements between Biden’s aides to cooperatively and falsely deem recorded videos of the President’s cognitive inability as fake;
(iii) any agreements between Biden’s aides to require false, public statements elevating the President’s capabilities; and
(iv) the purpose of these activities, including to assert the authorities of the President. [my emphasis]
We don’t even have to consider what Trump has done — the incidences of mental breakdowns — in the past five months to get to things that Trump wants to treat as a crime. After all, Trump’s White House went to great lengths to lie to the public about how COVID nearly killed him. All the reports from Trump’s physicians are riddled with obvious false claims.
This order would make it a crime to lie about how fat Donny is!!
Plus there are a number of things — starting with the Alien Enemies Act declaration — that Trump claims he did not personally do. This EO would make it a crime for whoever did make that declaration (cough).
And the push to review whether Biden was cognizant for the pardons of his family members? Have at it. Particularly given some obvious errors made in the pardon for January 6ers (such as a commutation for Jeremy Bertino, who had not been sentenced), we’ll just start chipping away at the pardons for Trump’s cop assailants and adjudged terrorists.
The entire premise of this EO is that things Trump and his White Houses have done — from lying about his weight and height to his theft of classified documents — must be prosecuted.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screen-Shot-2022-08-31-at-6.40.53-AM.png11481718emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-06-05 09:24:212025-06-05 09:33:48Donald Trump Declares He Should Have Faced Trial
To get a sense of how much releasing recordings of Rob Hur’s interview with Joe Biden in advance of the legal release of them was about attention management, you need look no further than the Fox News homepage (this was from shortly after midnight ET).
The humiliating defeat for Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in the House? Buried on the bottom of the front page.
The Supreme Court’s ruling protecting due process rights for those Trump tried to render to El Salvador using an Alien Enemies Act, which made it clear at least two Republican justices believe they can’t trust the Trump Administration? Second row.
Judge Paula Xinis’ rebuttal of DOJ’s claims that deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia without a warrant, in spite of an order prohibiting it, was legal? Third row down.
A clip from the exclusive interview Bret Baier had with the President, in which Trump falsely claimed China needed to make a deal more than he did and bizarrely refused to say the work “nuclear”? Also buried there on the bottom.
For Fox News, a cherry-picked excerpt of Robert Hur’s interview of President Biden merited the entire top of the page, with six different stories based on that cherry-picked release to Marc Caputo and Alex Thompson.
Biden.
Biden.
Biden.
Biden.
Biden.
Biden.
Other outlets weren’t much better. While Caputo and Thompson misrepresented the Hur investigation and the reason wby Bob Bauer would object to Hur and Marc Krickbaum’s persistent request that Biden speculate, presumed that Biden did intentionally keep classified documents not covered by a personal use exemption, and made false claims about Biden “acknowledging” that he kept a document he viewed to be classified, they were diligent about two other points.
They described that “overall [Biden] was engaged in the interview” and admitted that the interview took place immediately after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Reality check: While Biden had clear memory lapses and needed assistance at times (with words such as “fax machine” and “poster board”), overall he was engaged in the interview.
He cracked jokes and made humorous asides, and was able to respond to the general gist of the questions. But he had little memory of how he came to have classified documents after he left office as vice president.
On Oct. 8 — the first day of the interview and the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel — Biden often was slow and forgetful of basic facts.
That day, it took Hur more than two hours to clearly determine how the documents could have ended up in various personal desks and file cabinets after Biden left office. That was because Biden kept veering into other subjects.
On Oct. 9, however, Biden sounded much more engaged and vigorous.
When the full recording is released, it will show the ways that old geezer Biden caught prosecutors trying to sandbag him, parts of the interview wildly inconsistent with Thompson’s little project (not unlike the time Thompson screencapped himself ignoring evidence that Hunter Biden’s plight, not necessarily age, may have explained Biden’s very worst collapses).
Indeed, the fact that two rabid sensationalists only presented eight minutes of recording out of five hours to back their claims may explain why these recordings got released in advance — to undercut the possibility that the recordings would instead undermine the claims Hur and everyone else made about Biden (as DOJ’s release of the transcript on the eve of his testimony did).
But the people who leapt on these cherry-picked recordings were even less responsible than Caputo and Thompson.
[!!!]
CNN, Politico, NYT, and NBC didn’t mention the Israeli attack the day before. Politico and NBC did not explain that Axios released just 8 minutes of recording (CNN did, as did a second NYT story). And yet, presumably not having reviewed the full recording themselves, journalists are making claims about what the recording reveals that goes even beyond what Axios claimed.
There is a bit of news, or scandal, to this release, but it’s not covered there (or even by Axios).
Biden invoked Executive Privilege over the recordings, correctly predicting that (as Axios noted without mentioning the privilege invocation) scandal-mongers like Alex Thompson would “chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
But, as Politico acknowledged when it previewed the release weeks ago, DOJ was faced with the question of what to do with the recordings in the face of Biden’s privilege claim and DOJ’s own rationale that making recordings of voluntary interviews that then get released for partisan purposes will make people less likely to do such voluntary interviews in the future.
A deadline of sorts is approaching on May 20: In separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by conservative groups like Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation and various news organizations, the Justice Department has been ordered by a judge to say whether it will stand by Biden’s assertion of executive privilege to block the release of the tapes. Last May, Biden and his Justice Department claimed releasing the tapes would have a chilling effect on witnesses cooperating in high-profile investigations.
DOJ officials will also have to indicate whether they will continue to press other arguments for keeping the audio secret, including that disclosure would invade Biden’s privacy and that it could interfere with future investigations by making high-level officials less willing to cooperate.
When Trump was asked yesterday about the release, he claimed he wasn’t involved. Pam Bondi made the decision.
Trump said Friday that White House was not directly involved in handling the disclosure.
“I haven’t looked into that. That’s up to Pam and the group,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned from the Middle East, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
If no one at the White House was involved, it would be fairly big news. It would mean someone other than the President or his surrogate (like White House Counsel David Harrington) had simply blown off the privilege invocation of a prior President.
By contrast, Biden’s DOJ overrode Trump’s own privilege invocations in conjunction with January 6 in one of two ways. For matters pertaining to the investigative materials held by the Archives, Biden himself waived privilege based on what Congress asked for; there’s no record DOJ obtained information outside this scope, meaning there’s no record that Merrick Garland shared any information about the criminal investigation with the President. For waivers of privilege pertaining to interviews with Trump’s aides, DOJ got Biden’s White House Counsel to make the waivers.
But as far as we know, the Biden White House always made the waivers, an Executive finding that a waiver overrode whatever concerns his predecessor might have about privilege.
Here, Trump is at least claiming that he wasn’t involved, effectively ceding the very concept of privilege to DOJ.
To be clear, critics of Biden were absolutely justified in claiming that the release of the transcript effectively waived privilege, and it may be that DOJ simply adopted that argument. But the legal basis matters, especially coming from a guy who won’t stop complaining about an investigation in which DOJ spent ten months carefully working through Trump’s privilege claims.
And the pre-release of these recordings to a White House mouthpiece and a lead Dick Pic sniffer was bound to maximally serve scandal.
It is an utterly masterful example of playing the press, of eliciting precisely the same kind of shitty reporting right wingers claim they’ve shown. Because most of the people commenting on these excerpts exhibit no awareness Biden matched the wits the much younger prosecutors in other parts of the interview.
Update: Heritage, which was suing to release the recording, is pissed about Thompson’s cherry picking.
The American people must take the snippets leaked to Axios and have apparently been spliced without notation; not the true accounting which Heritage Plaintiffs seek to provide. In the hours since the Axios release, the news has been plastered with the Axios clips. They are everywhere; apparently all concede the voices match the interview participants; they may have even been officially released. Axios released approximately 14 minutes and 28 seconds of the nearly five-and-a-half hours of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Hur. The media has created a running narrative about President Biden’s mental fitness based on less than 4.5 percent of the entire interview.
