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Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

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I joked the other day that it’s as if Trump offered his cabinet members a free condo for whomever best distracted from his Epstein problem.

Tulsi Gabbard is, thus far, winning the contest for the sheer shamelessness of her ridiculous claims.

She has manufactured claims of sedition out of her conflation — whether deliberate or insanely ignorant — of voting machines and the DNC server, built on top of President Obama’s perfectly reasonable request to document all the ways Russia tampered in the 2016 election. Then, she released a different report — a 2020 GOP HPSCI report complaining about Intelligence Community tradecraft in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. The HPSCI Report not only exhibits all the tradecraft failure it complains about, but it conflicts in some ways with her original propaganda.

In a presser at the White House yesterday (skip ahead to 12:30), Tulsi went one better, presenting the contents of the HPSCI report without context, focusing closely on a section that cites a cherrypicked selection of Russian intelligence reports purportedly (but not certainly) based off documents stolen from Democrats, the State Department, and a think tank.

Tulsi stood at the podium of the White House press room and delivered Russian intelligence, with an occasional “allegedly” thrown in, without explaining clearly that’s what she was doing.

In so doing, the Director of National Intelligence effectively teamed up with Russian spies, parroting analysis those Russian spies did on documents stolen from Hillary and people associated with her, without masking Hillary’s identity as required by intelligence protocol. This is precisely the kind of (then unsubstantiated) abuse that first animated right wing grievance back in 2017, outrage over the possible politicized unmasking of political adversaries, carried out by the head of intelligence from the White House podium.

They have become the monsters they warned about.

The SVR documents

Let me explain the documents. By 2016, there were actually two parallel Russian hacking campaigns targeting Hillary (and others). One, starting in 2016 and conducted by Russia’s military intelligence (GRU, often referred to as APT 28), obtained and caused the dissemination of documents during the election — the hack-and-leak campaign that Trump exploited to win the election. But starting years before that, Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR, often referred to as APT 29) targeted a number of traditional spying targets, including the White House, DOD, and State, some think tanks viewed as adversarial to Russia, and the DNC.

Here’s a report on APT 29’s hacking campaigns published in September 2015, which I wrote about here. Here’s a more recent history that includes those earlier hacks. I’ve been told that the interactions between APT 29 and APT 28 hackers inside Democratic servers was visible, but reluctant. APT 29 had and still has the more skillful hackers.

Unlike GRU, SVR did not use most of the files it stole in a hack-and-leak campaign. Russian spies analyzed the documents and wrote reports on them, like normal spying. But then someone — some other spying service, probably — spied on their spying efforts. And that entity shared what they found, including both the things SVR stole and the reports that Russian spies wrote about those stolen files, with the US Intelligence Community. And starting at least by 2018, right wingers have been obsessed with those stolen files and Russian intelligence reports, using them to feed one after another investigation into Democrats.

This gets a bit confusing, because we’re seeing the results of that obsession out of order. We first saw a right wing campaign based off them when John Ratcliffe, then the Director of National Intelligence, released a report about one particular analytical report, then released background documents; both were used as part of the effort to undermine the Mike Flynn prosecution in advance of the 2020 election. That particular report — allegedly claiming that in July 2016, Hillary endorsed a plan to focus on Trump’s ties to Russia to distract from the Clinton email investigation — served as the animating force for the Durham investigation, though Durham had to fabricate new details in the intelligence to do so. For years, Chuck Grassley has been frothing to release a classified appendix of the 2018 DOJ IG Report on the Clinton email investigation that pertained to the SVR documents, which Pam Bondi released the other day. Yesterday’s propaganda presser was based on the release of a 2020 critique of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of the 2016 hack (there were earlier versions in which Kash Patel was involved), written by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI).

We’re surely not done. There’s a classified annex to the Durham report in which he tries to justify treating Russian intelligence product as true. And yesterday, Grassley and House Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford asked to get more of the SVR files, this time focused on Barack Obama.

So, these documents were addressed at length by Michael Horowitz (it’s not yet clear how prominently they figure in earlier HPSCI work), then packaged up as part of Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, then further fluffed up by Durham in his failed prosecution effort and, on top of these recent releases, will no doubt feed the frothers indefinitely. But this order matters, because right wingers kept forgetting what they learned in earlier iterations of this obsession.

 The 2018 classified annex

The DOJ IG classified annex considers FBI’s treatment of two kinds of files from that SVR collection: first, report(s) claiming that Loretta Lynch was trying to cover up the Clinton investigation and Jim Comey was trying to exacerbate it (Comey only appears in one), and, also, a set of files that might have raw State Department documents stolen by Russia that could be used to investigate Hillary.

The reports became important to Horowitz’ discussion of the Clinton email investigation because Jim Comey claimed in June 8, 2017 congressional testimony that one reason why he decided to make the prosecutorial decision on the Clinton investigation is because he worried that the two reports on Lynch might leak.

The raw intelligence became a focus because early on, alleged Trump adversary Peter Strzok sought to review the raw collection, a request that ultimately fell through the cracks, which Grassley uses to claim the investigation was not diligent enough.

A several page section of the report describing the collection — eight thumb drives, along with a set of data provided via other means — makes clear that, on top of normal concerns about allowing the FBI to review stolen US person data, the hesitation to access the data arose from the large number of privileged files, from the White House, from State, and from Congress, in there.

  • Thumb drives 1-5: These thumb drives included files stolen from US victims, including the Executive Office of the President, the State Department, and the House of Representatives, probably including a number of unknown US victims. The FBI did analyze these files, which helped them to identify where the Obama ones came from, that the Russians had obtained “advance intelligence about a planned FBI arrest of a Russian citizen,” and network maps of classified US government systems. Two drives, drives 3 and 4, “focused primarily on State Department communications,” as did much of the content of the other thumb drives. The FBI never comprehensively reviewed these files because of concerns about Executive and Congressional privileges tied to the victims. The FBI has queried them, three times:
    • In early 2016, FBI queried the drives using some approved keywords, apparently to understand Russia’s targets.
    • FBI later conducted a second set of limited queries, without reading the actual content. It did, however, create a “word cloud” of what was in the US victim data, which FBI treated as an index.
    • In August 2017, FBI OGC permitted an analyst working with Mueller to query the word cloud index on Clinton and clintonemail.com.
  • Thumb drives 6 and 7: These drives appear to include Russia’s reports about their hacks; victim data was included as attachments. The FBI permitted analysts to review non-victim data for foreign intelligence and evidentiary purposes, but not any content from the Executive Office of the President, State, or Congress.
  • Thumb drive 8: This data was never uploaded until 2018 and by the time of this report (also 2018) had never been reviewed. It was believed to include data redundant to what was on drives 1-5, including privileged material.
  • Post-8 data: This data appears to have come to the FBI via a medium other than a thumb drive. Their source filtered out certain kinds of victim data before passing it on. It also was unlikely to have the privileged sources of information — from EoP, State, and the House of Representatives — that presented concerns about the data on thumb drives 1-5. The FBI was permitted to review this data under the same rules as applied to Thumb drives 6 and 7 — that is, they could review the non-victim information.

Staring in August 2016, Andy McCabe started asking to access all eight drives. While the Obama White House told the FBI in October 2016 that their request for access was overly broad, they never got around to negotiating that access because the FBI was too busy working on the Russian investigation and exploiting Anthony Weiner’s laptop. White House Counsel Neil Eggleston circled back on this issue in his last day on the job, January 19, 2017.

Ironically, the most aggressive attempt to access these files up to the IG Report came from an analyst on the Mueller team — no doubt someone who has subsequently been fired. The IG Report describes that this person likely exceeded search protocols prohibiting searches on victim information, including on Clinton and clintonemail. Now, however, Trump will undoubtedly use Tulsi’s propaganda campaign as an excuse to read emails stolen from Barack Obama, waiving any privilege concerns (indeed, that should be understood as one goal of the task force Bondi set up yesterday, to collude with Russian spies to spy on President Obama).

For the purposes of understanding how Tulsi colluded with Russian spies yesterday, the most important detail from the classified annex is that the FBI didn’t treat the two Loretta Lynch reports as credible — the report describes that FBI considered them “objectively false.”

[W]itnesses told us that the reports were not credible on their face for various reasons, including that they contained information that the FBI knew to be “objectively false.”

One reason they likely believed that is because one of the two Lynch reports said that Comey was deliberately trying to stall the investigation.

Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections; in order to effectively undermine the chances for the [Democratic Party] to win the presidential elections. [brackets original]

It also revealed that the FBI never found the underlying stolen documents on which the reports were purportedly based — at one point, the DOJ IG Report notes that it wasn’t clear “if such communications in fact existed.”

The FBI didn’t believe these documents were credible.

But if you do believe the reports are credible — if you treat the reports as “true” — then it is not just “true” that Jim Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, but Russia believed that Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans win the election.

HPSCI’s Jim Comey problem

The HPSCI report includes these SVR files, years after the FBI determined at least two of them were not credible, as “true” statements of Putin’s belief. I’ll write up the entire report separately; parts of it are quite rigorous and interesting, while the section on the Steele dossier was riddled with errors and this part — the part that relies on these SVR reports — was sort of an exercise in desperation to find as many reasons to discredit the claim that Putin tried to help Trump get elected as possible. This section is the mirror image of what the report alleges John Brennan was engaged in with the 2017 ICA Report, intelligence analysis that came to a conclusion and then found intelligence to back that conclusion. They include the SVR reports to argue that if Putin really wanted Trump to win, he would have released all these reports.

In a page and a half, the HPSCI report cites one after another of these reports.

  • In September 2016, Russian spies claimed that President Obama found Hillary’s health to be “extraordinary alarming.”
  • Russian spies claimed it had communications showing Hillary was suffering from “psycho-social problems” and even (Tulsi parroted there in the White House) “was placed on a regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’.”
  • Russian spies claimed Hillary had Type 2 Diabetes and deep vein thrombosis.
  • The claim — which John Ratcliffe noted could “reflect exaggeration or fabrication” in his report in 2020 — that Hillary had a plan to link Trump and Putin to distract from the Clinton email investigation.
  • Russian spies claimed Hillary traded financial funding for electoral support with religious organizations in post-Soviet countries.
  • US allies in London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome doubted her ability to perform the functions of President.
  • European government experts assessed that Trump’s only chance of winning was allegations about the Clinton Foundation.

The HPSCI Report includes in three bullets the allegations laid out in the two reports described in the IG Report, split up across two pages, as if they represent three reports.

[snip]

Not only do they ignore that the FBI viewed at least some of these reports as “not credible,” nor address the question of whether these reflected real intercepts at all.

But they don’t mention that the first of those two reports (probably the January 2016 one) also claimed that Jim Comey was going to stall the investigation to help Trump win.

If you believe the reports were “true,” then you believe that Jim Comey had a plan to help Trump win — much like what he did do — and that Putin shared that same belief.

It was bad enough that a bunch of right wing Congressmen desperate to create a propaganda document to help Trump get elected in 2020 exhibited such shoddy tradecraft.

But yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence stood at a White House podium and repeated one after another Russian intelligence report about which multiple entities have raised serious questions as to its accuracy.

In the guise of complaining about politicized spies exercising inadequate due diligence, Tulsi Gabbard just parroted these Russian intelligence reports — reports that either rely on intercepts of an American citizen or just make shit up — uncritically.

This was Russian spy product, delivered from the White House, from the head of US intelligence.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

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Yesterday, I wrote about how utterly fucking ridiculous Tulsi Gabbard’s influence operation claiming a Deep State plot against Donald Trump because Barrack Obama knows the difference between a voting machine and the DNC server (which Tulsi claims not to know in her little project).

Her propaganda project is not without benefit. I mean, not only have I called on all the right wing members of Congress who’ve been duped by Tulsi to demand that Pam Bondi fire Kash Patel for covering this all up when he reviewed the same files in 2020. But Tulsi declassified a somewhat classified version of the 2017 ICA (there were two classified versions, a super classified version for President Obama, Trump, and the Gang of Eight, and a less-classified version for other members of Congress — this is the latter). So not only can we see what secrets about Russia’s 2016 interference Director Tulsi wants to keep from us, but we can compare the classified version with the publicly-released version to see what was sensitive in 2017 but no longer is.

There are a number of things that either did not exist in the public version or remain significantly redacted. For example:

  • The classified version includes more discussion of the confidence levels. “We have high confidence in this assessment [that both SVR and GRU hacked political targets], the assessment described, “because it is based on a body of [redacted] intelligence reporting that reinforces and elaborates on publicly available commercial cyber analyses.” Elsewhere such language explains why some agencies were less certain.
  • Speaking of Russian spooks targeting political targets, the classified ICA provided more details on the RNC hacks, which had been reported but never explained in detail. GRU hacked GOP targets in early July 2016, but (it appears) that server hadn’t been used for over six years. But that paragraph immediately precedes one of the only entirely redacted paragraphs in the assessment. A paragraph in a later section describing that “we saw Russian collection on some Republican-affiliated targets,” also includes three redacted lines.
  • There’s a bit more detail on senior Russian officials, such as details about what hacked information was shared as intelligence, rather than used as an information operation.
  • There’s an entire section on Russia’s targeting of state election infrastructure, including details on an Illinois hack that, I had been told by sources, was far more serious than publicly acknowledged. There’s one short paragraph addressing one of the several hacks revealed by Reality Winner. In general, the report was overly optimistic about Russian targeting of voting infrastructure, and simply didn’t imagine that Russia might steal registration data so it could conduct an attack like Cambridge Analytica.
  • There’s a section explaining the ways that the attack could have been worse (though that claim is based, in part, on an assessment that “We did not detect extensive [redacted] influence operations as part of the Kremlin’s campaign.” Perhaps that part of the assessment would change as Robert Mueller investigated.
  • There’s more detail on Russia’s past election interference (this section is worth comparing side by side), along with a map of operations spanning 2000 to 2016 (though the details remain classified). The ICA also predicted (in two still partly redacted paragraphs) that Germany’s fall 2017 election would be the next one targeted; it ended up being France’s May 2017 election.

Those are just interesting details, nothing really that (no matter how much Tulsi misrepresents all this) disrupts years of questions about the attributions.

There are just two passages I’m far more interested in.

In the section on the trolls, in the paragraph before one that addresses Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s role in funding it, there’s both a subheading and the first few lines of that section redacted.

I’m interested in that because, as I’ve gotten further from 2016, I’ve seen more reason to believe that the Russian effort to use trolls to make stuff go viral closely overlapped with the far right effort to do the same.

And finally — unsurprisingly — I’m interested in details about the Guccifer 2.0 attribution that wasn’t in the public report. The italicized language below is new in the classified report.

The Kremlin’s campaign aimed at the US election featured disclosures of data obtained through Russian cyber operations via WikiLeaks, as well as via the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com, which are both likely GRU operations; GRU intrusions into US state electoral infrastructure; and overt propaganda. Russian foreign intelligence collection both informed and enabled the influence campaign, [redacted]

[snip]

Public Disclosures of Russian-Collected Data. We assess the GRU used both the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com operationally to release US [victim] data obtained in GRU cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets. We have high confidence that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com published GRU- hacked data, but moderate confidence that they were under direct GRU control [redacted]. We base our judgments on several factors: the information that was disclosed was information we assess the GRU accessed as part of its operations against US political targets; the initial data leak occurred the day after the US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike publicized Russia’s intrusion into the DNC; and signals intelligence placed the operators of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com in Russia. 

Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his identity throughout the election; [redacted] intelligence indicated the persona was controlled from Russia, and press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists, based on [redacted] and interactions with the press.

Content that we assess was taken from [redacted] e-mail accounts targeted in March 2016 by a GRU cyber espionage unit subsequently appeared on DCLeaks.com in June.

On several occasions, the administrators of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com logged in to accounts associated with those personas using a Russia-based mobile broadband provider [redacted] although they generally attempted to obscure the source of their Internet traffic.

Of particular interest, to me especially: the IC was pretty sure that Russia was using Guccifer 2.0 to disseminate the stolen files, but was less sure what the relationship between the persona and the spooks running it was. The passage includes the allegedly accidental log-ins via a Russian provider, which was reported years ago. But in early 2017, anyway, all this was ambiguous.

Given the conspiracy theories Tulsi is spewing, all these questions seem quaint now.

But the ambiguity from the period did carry over for some time later.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Suspected Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard has released a report of screen caps out of context and one 114-page collection of documents purportedly showing what she claims is a conspiracy against Donald Trump.

It serves its purpose — because a broad swath of very stupid people are currently frothing madly about it on Xitter.

What Tulsi purports to show is that the FBI didn’t back expansive claims of Russian involvement in election interference in September and October 2016, refused to participate in a assessment in December, only for Obama to order a new assessment, after which — Tulsi claims — the assessment changed to reflect more confidence in Putin’s involvement.

In general, Tulsi accomplishes the circus trick of getting stupid people to buy her narrative by conflating whether spooks thought Russia hacked the US voting tabulation infrastructure with Intelligence Community confidence that Russia was involved in the hack of the DNC and DCCC and then involved in the dissemination of files stolen from it.

So:

Voting infrastructure

Hack and leak

Not the same things

Tulsi assumes her rubes won’t notice she’s doing that and — lo and behold!! — she’s right!!

As one example of how transparently shoddy Tulsi’s “work” is, note how she misquotes a story (which she attributes to spooks but which might come from Congress) talking about the larger Russian intelligence operation in 2016, claiming it pertains exclusively to the “U.S. Election Hack.”

Tulsi doesn’t link the underlying story, for good reason, because reading the story gives away her game.

While it does use the word “hack” in the title, it includes two details that undermine Tulsi’s information operation.

U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack

New intelligence shows that Putin became personally involved in the computer breach, two senior U.S. officials say.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

[snip]

The latest intelligence said to show Putin’s involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.

Most importantly, the story describes that the Intelligence Community got new information. Wow! An explanation for why the assessment changed in December 2016!!!! All readily available if you just check Tulsi’s sources!!

Just as importantly, nothing in the article addresses tampering with the voting infrastructure, the topic of almost all the other screen caps in Tulsi’s propaganda, in her effort to conflate the voting infrastructure, the hack and leak, and the larger information operation.

There are a slew of other problems with Tulsi’s book report. It ignores:

  • The Russian investigation into Trump didn’t arise out of this intelligence. It arose out of Mike Flynn’s efforts to undermine the Obama sanctions on Russia in response, and Trump’s efforts to undermine the investigation of Flynn.
  • The Russian investigation discovered abundant new evidence, including proof that Trump’s campaign learned of Russia’s operation in advance. Trump’s Coffee Boy, Campaign Manager, National Security Advisor, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all eventually adjudged to have lied to cover up aspects of Trump’s involvement in the Russian investigation. And through their confessions, we learned that Russia dangled an impossibly lucrative real estate deal, told a Trump campaign official and his rat-fucker about their operation, got campaign data and strategy — possibly in exchange for millions of dollars and involvement in a plan to carve of Ukraine — and then undermined Obama’s foreign policy to help Russia.
  • After all these 2016 assessments, the NSA later developed evidence — according to the document Reality Winner leaked — that showed Russia did attempt to and had some success in hacking voting infrastructure.

Which is to say, Tulsi’s entire little book report is unrelated to the Russian investigation into Trump and her claims about hacking the election infrastructure were eventually revised.

But her report is not without interest.

If her story is true — if there is a shred of truth to her claims that Obama tried to alter the intelligence in 2016 — then evidence to that fact was available in 2020, when Kash Patel was reviewing precisely the same intelligence while serving as Ric Grenell’s handler, and that evidence was available from 2019 through 2023, when John Durham reviewed it all and determined that the spooks did nothing wrong.

In other words, if Tulsi’s allegations are true, it means Kash Patel and John Durham are part of the Deep State plot against Donald Trump!!!!

It means Trump’s hand-picked FBI Director was part of a sustained effort to cover-up Obama’s devious intervention in 2016.

If Tulsi’s allegations have any merit, then Pam Bondi must fire Kash Patel and include him, right along with all the nefarious actors Tulsi targets, because Kash covered this up when he could have helped Trump win the 2020 election.

Update: Corrected how long the primary document collection is.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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The IC (with an Assist from Journalism) Liberates the IC’s Debunking of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act

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The two NYT journalists who would be targeted in an investigation of the sources of leaks debunking Donald Trump’s Tren de Aragua Alien Enemies Act invocation have published a memo that further debunks Donald Trump’s Tren de Aragua Alien Enemies Act invocation. Charlie Savage and Julian Barnes published the memo, which Freedom of the Press Foundation liberated via FOIA.

The contents of the memo themselves are newsworthy. Like the initial report from Savage and Barnes and a follow-up about this memo in the WaPo, the memo describes that the Intelligence Community doesn’t think that the Maduro regime directs the actions of TdA.

The Maduro regime generally does not impede illegal armed and criminal groups from operating in Venezuela, but it does combat and seek to contain them when it fears they could destabilize the regime or when corrupt dealssour. Venezuela’ssecurity services lackthe capacity to fully control Venezuelan territory, giving the regime an interest in cooperating with armed groups for insight and control in areas outside the services’ traditional areas of operation. Furthermore, combatting such groups often results in personnel losses, probably encouraging the regime to at times cooperate with some groups instead of contesting them.

Some mid- to low-level Venezuelan officials probably profit from TDA’s illicit activities, according to [(b)(1), (b)(3)] and press reporting. For example, local military officials have alerted other armed and criminal groups conducting aerial drugshipments to Venezuelan Air Force patrols and might have alerted TDA leadership of a planned raid in 2023 against the prison that was its base of operations.

Even the FBI — the single agency of 18 that backed a claim that Maduro directs TdA — only claimed that some officials directed the migrants, and (as NYT also noted) other agencies think that may be based on fabrications.

While FBI analysts agree with the above assessment, they assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries, based on DHS and FBI reporting as of February 2024.

[snip]

In some cases, reporting warns that these sources could also be motivated to fabricate information.

[snip]

Some reports come from people detained for involvement in criminal activity in the United States or for entering the country illegally, which could motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise “valuable” information to US prosecutors.

But I’m just as interested in the significance of a successful FOIA that undercuts investigations into these leaks (and therefore, into the debunking of the core AEA invocation).

The AEA, which Trump secretly invoked on March 14, was used as justification to deport at least two planeloads of mostly Venezuelans on March 15. The NYT published their first story on March 20, as Judge James Boasberg queried whether the government defied his order not to do so. That same day, the government first moved toward invoking State Secrets to cover up the basis for their rendition flights, followed by a declaration from Todd Blanche. NYT published the story in their dead tree version only after Blanche announced an investigation into what seemed to be that leak. As I noted, in one of his first acts as Deputy Attorney General, Blanche was launching a witch hunt into a leak that exposed his actions.

Days after the WaPo followed up on the NYT story reporting the results of this report, Tulsi Gabbard adopted Dick Cheney’s habit of lying about intelligence assessments, accusing those who leaked the true contents of the assessment to be weaponizing intelligence.

I noted that her claims of a classified leak were likely overstated: what WaPo reported went little beyond an answer Gabbard gave to Joaquin Castro in the Global Threats hearing.

Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?

Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.

Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.

Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.

[Kash moves to speak.]

Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?

Gabbard: That’s correct.

Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.

Nevertheless, days later, Tulsi announced an investigation into the leaks.

And just days after that, Pam Bondi reversed Merrick Garland’s press protections, describing only the NYT and the WaPo stories to include classified information.

The leaks have not abated since President Trump’s second inauguration,6 including leaks of classified information.7

7 See, e.g., John Hudson & Warren P. Strobel, U.S. intelligence contradicts Trump’s justification for mass deportations, Washington Post (Apr. 17, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/17/us-intelligence-tren-de-araguadeportations-trump; Charlie Savage & Julian Barnes, Intelligence Assessment Said to Contradict Trump on Venezuelan Gang, New York Times (Mar. 22, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/intelligence-trump-venezuelan-gang-alienenemies.html.

That created the appearance that, like Blanche before them, Tulsi and Bondi were also ratcheting up attacks on the press because the press and its sources called out Trump’s corrupt AEA declaration in real time.

These repeated paranoid leak investigations attempted to squelch public debunkings of Trump’s efforts to use a false claim about TdA to chip away at due process (a project that Stephen Miller has been pursuing for years).

And at a time when Trump’s Administration is falling further behind on FOIA requests, FOPF got near immediate response for its FOIA showing that even if any material in the NYT and WaPo stories was classified, it has since been publicly released. That kind of response only happens when people within an agency want something to be released. And in this case, it means that Tulsi has not sufficiently commandeered ODNI to prevent FOIA professionals to carry out a classification review and release information publicly.

It likely means that the people who leaked these debunkings in the first place have found a way to undercut claims that they committed a crime by doing so. At the very least that will make it hard for the FBI to argue this leak is of sufficient seriousness to obtain warrants and subpoenas targeting journalists. It may even make it impossible for the FBI to claim a crime was committed in the first place, because the FBI will have to prove that the NYT and WaPo stories relied on more than made it into this memo.

And all the while, even as one after another judge — including Trump appointees like Fernando Rodriguez Jr! — rule that the original AEA invocation was unlawful (in Rodriguez’ case, because any claimed invasion from Venezuela does not resemble what Congress would have understood an invasion to be in 1798 when AEA was passed), the IC is finding ways to make clear that Donald Trump knows or should know that the claimed ties between Nicolás Maduro and TdA are false.

Stephen Miller is trying to eliminate due process based on a nesting set of false claims.

And the spooks have, for a third time, exposed the core lie on which that effort builds.

Update: Lauren Harper, who liberated the memo, has posted the letter granting her FOIA. She submitted the FOIA on April 25; she got the memo on May 5.

Update: Judge Alvin Hellerstein also held the AEA invocation to be unlawful, finding there’s no war or invasion. But this may be more pertinent to these times:

The third consideration set out by Mathews, the “Government’s interest,” is more complicated. Drafting complaints with particular allegations against individual aliens, providing aliens with time to contact counsel and file a habeas petition, and preparing for a hearing before a federal judge takes time and manpower. However, it is the nature of due process to cause fiscal and administrative burdens. Rule by the ipse dixit of a President is likely more efficient than the deliberative procedures of a court. But it is what our Constitution, and the rule of law, demand. And due process, once surrendered, is difficult to reinstate.

Update: Citing the memo, Jim Himes and Joaquin Castro call on Tulsi to explain “Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings.”

Last month, we jointly wrote a classified letter to Director Gabbard asking her to declassify the April 7, 2025 Statement of the Community Memorandum entitled ‘Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua.’ We are pleased that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a redacted declassified copy of that analysis in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. As the now-public document makes clear, the Intelligence Community assesses that the ‘Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA operations in the United States.’ This assessment reinforces the finding of a District Court judge last week that the Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act with respect to Tren de Aragua was illegal.

Now that the public can read the Intelligence Community’s analysis that the Maduro regime does not direct Tren de Aragua, Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings. The most basic responsibility of the Director of National Intelligence is to speak truth to power and, where possible, the American people. Misrepresenting intelligence in public causes grave damage to the IC and to national security.”

Update: In another sign that the Spooks are not impressed with their new boss, WSJ reveals that they’re being asked to collect for actions that would support regime change in Greenland and Denbmark.

Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.

The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.

The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.

Tulsi continues to squeal about the Deep State Actors exposing her actions.

In a statement, Gabbard said: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”

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Tulsi Gabbard’s NIE Lies Make Dick Cheney Look Honest by Comparison

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Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard posted this tweet.

The last sentence of the tweet, referencing an “assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime,” makes clear it pertains to a National Intelligence Estimate described last week by WaPo (and that Tulsi’s bossy claims about leak investigations pertains to the story itself, which I’ll return to).

As WaPo described it, 17 of 18 intelligence agencies say Tulsi is lying.

According to WaPo, the NIE says that,

although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.

[snip]

The finding was nearly unanimous among the U.S. intelligence agencies with the exception of the FBI, which assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government, two people familiar with the matter said.

At least as WaPo describes, Tulsi may even be overstating the FBI conclusion that TdA had a moderate level of cooperation with the government, instead spinning that as, “Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime.”

If WaPo’s reporting is accurate — and we can be virtually certain it is — Tulsi is trying to rewrite the NIE to support Trump’s view, all the while screaming about weaponization.

WaPo describes the stakes of this dispute, but not very clearly. Whether TdA operates at the direction of Venezuela is one key prong on which Trump’s bid to deport Venezuelan makeup artists and soccer players with no due process to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador.

Trump’s manic bid to deport hundreds of migrants to Nayob Bukele’s concentration camp rests on a series of tactics. Many of the tactics were evident in the mad rush last Friday, in the face of a legal injunction prohibiting deportation under the Alien Enemies Act in Southern District of Texas, to instead load a bunch of Venezuelans on planes in Northern District of Texas, from the Bluebonnet Detention Center.

Most of this (the bottom four entries describing how Trump is trying to use AEA deportations) is a bid to use the Alien Enemies Act in a particular way: to bypass deportation proceedings, providing last minute notice (reportedly in English) that guards demand detainees sign, rather than information about the availability of habeas corpus petitions, loading them onto flights where there is not yet an injunction, with demands that men sign documents affirming they are TdA members along the way. Those tactics are what we’re seeing in one frantic legal fight after another.

The Administration seems to want to get the AEA interpreted in this instance to allow virtually no due process — nothing more than Stephen Miller screeching on Fox News that you are TdA, without proof — to deport people who presented in the US, often making asylum claims.

But the larger scheme will only work if courts uphold the AEA in this context, for use in peacetime against a population from one particular home country. Here’s how Trump pitched TdA in the declaration itself.

Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.

TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, El Aissami was appointed as Vice President of Venezuela. Soon thereafter, the United States Department of the Treasury designated El Aissami as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, 21 U.S.C. 1901 et seq. El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.

Like El Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.

Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States. Indeed, in December 2024, INTERPOL Washington confirmed: “Tren de Aragua has emerged as a significant threat to the United States as it infiltrates migration flows from Venezuela.” Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens. [my emphasis]

Some of this (we’re not at war no matter how inflammatory Trump claims migration is) is not legally apt to the statute. Some of this (the specific ties between Maduro and the gang, including his intent to use the gang as a weapon) is not true.

Which is why Tulsi is attempting to claim it is. Thus the stakes on the NIE. Thus Tulsi’s need to claim the NIE concluded something other than it concluded.

As ACLU is arguing in cases challenging the use of the AEA around the country (in this case, men in NDTX saved from deportation by SCOTUS’ intervention on Saturday), the Trump Administration shouldn’t be able to use the AEA at all in this context, because the US is not at war, and the convoluted assertions Trump made to claim we are — that the US is being invaded by a gang backed by Venezuela — does not hold up.

In a Proclamation signed on March 14 but not made public until March 15 (after the government had already attempted to use it), the President invoked a war power, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (“AEA”), to summarily remove noncitizens from the U.S. and bypass the immigration laws Congress has enacted. See Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (Mar. 15, 2025) (“Proclamation”).1 The AEA permits the President to invoke the AEA only where the United States is in a “declared war” with a “foreign government or nation” or a ‘foreign government or nation” is threatening to, or has engaged in, an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the “territory of the United States.” The Proclamation targets Venezuelan noncitizens accused of being part of Tren de Aragua (“TdA”), a criminal gang, and claims that the gang is engaged in an “invasion and predatory incursion” within the meaning of the AEA.

[snip]

Petitioners contend that the Proclamation is invalid under the AEA for several reasons. First, the Proclamation fails to the AEA’s statutory predicates because TdA is not a “foreign nation or government,” nor is TdA is engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursions” within the meaning of the AEA. Thus, the government’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA. Second, the Proclamation violates both the Act and due process by failing to provide notice and a meaningful opportunity for individuals to challenge their designation as alien enemies. Third, the Proclamation violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed for the removal of noncitizens in the immigration laws, including protection against being sent to a country where they will be tortured.

If ACLU successfully argues that there’s an NIE that shows even the Intelligence Community knows the basis on which Trump declared AEA is false, then it will undermine the entire effort to use AEA to achieve due process-free deportations.

As I said above, we can be pretty sure that Tulsi is lying on Xitter. That’s not just because her Global Threat Assessment, released a week after Trump invoked the AEA, makes no mention of such invasion or even Tren de Agua (which I noted here). But also because because when Joaquin Castro asked her about such assessment, she confessed that there were competing assessments.

Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?

Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.

Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.

Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.

[Kash moves to speak.]

Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?

Gabbard: That’s correct.

Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.

For his part, John Ratcliffe admitted that “we” (possibly meaning the CIA) has no assessment that backs Trump’s claim of invasion. The CIA would be one of the 17 agencies that debunked Trump’s claim.

So now that WaPo confirmed what was evident just from this exchange (the WaPo story notes that both Castro and Jim Himes raised the AEA during the hearing) Tulsi is trying to lie about the assessment by claiming this is an illegal leak, precisely the weaponization against which Trump ran.

The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be held accountable under the full force of the law. Rooting out this politicization of intelligence is exactly what President Trump campaigned on and what Americans overwhelmingly voted for.

Blah blah blah.

Unless Tulsi wants to start going after her former House colleagues, it’s likely there was no classified leak. It goes little beyond what Tulsi herself said in this exchange with Castro, and otherwise relies on named expert sources.

“The idea that Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua members and sending criminals to infiltrate the United States is ludicrous,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

The group, which started as a prison gang in the Venezuelan state of Aragua in 2014, has expanded into a transnational gang that has carried out brazen crimes from Santiago, Chile, to New York City. But it does not operate with a clearly defined hierarchical structure, Ramsey said.

“Tren de Aragua has become more like a brand that any group of carjackers from Miami down to Argentina can invoke to further their criminal activity, but there’s really no clear sense of hierarchy,” he said. “And the reality is that Tren de Aragua has not always gotten along with the Maduro government: We saw just a few years ago, the military in 2023, stormed a prison that Tren de Aragua controlled and allegedly carried out extrajudicial executions.”

And Tulsi is trying to silence experts with unbridled Orwellian claims that up is down — that the single FBI assessment, assessing moderate contacts — says that TdA is acting with Venezuelan support, a claim that even still falls well short of what Trump claimed in his declaration.

Tulsi built her entire career around opposing the wars that Dick Cheney ginned up two decades ago. Now, in Cheneyesque fashion, she’s grotesquely inventing a war that doesn’t exist so she can help Trump destroy the Constitution.

Update: In a CO case granting two detainees a Temporary Restraining Order forbidding their deportation under the AEA, Judge Charlotte Sweeny said this about the AEA:

According to Petitioners, the Proclamation exceeds the President’s “statutory authority in three critical respects.” ECF No. 2 at 11. First, there is no “invasion or predatory incursion.” Id. Second, any purported invasion is not perpetuated by a “foreign government or nation.” Id. And third, there is “no process to contest whether an individual falls within the Proclamation.” Id. Skepticism of the Proclamation’s contrary findings is required, Petitioners urge, to the point of satisfying their first TRO burden. Id.; see also M.G., 117 F.4th at 1238. The Court agrees.

That said, Sweeny’s analysis did not focus on the relationship between Tren de Aragua and the Maduro regime.

Petitioners contend, as with its failures to identify an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation likewise fails to assert a “foreign nation or government” is “invading the United States.” ECF No. 2 at 14. The Court agrees with Petitioners. The Court discerns little reason to linger on this point, especially where, as Petitioners observe, the Proclamation finds TdA is “closely aligned with [and] infiltrated[] the Maduro regime.” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033. The Proclamation does not find TdA itself is a foreign nation, country, or government. At bottom, the Proclamation fails to adequately find or assert TdA is a “foreign nation or government,” § 21, sufficient to justify the Act’s invocation. Indeed, if TdA was such a “foreign nation or government,” id., there would be no need for it to “undertak[e] hostile actions . . . at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033 (emphasis added).

Rather, in lengthier analysis, she focused on the absence of military invasion. She did not rely on Ratcliffe’s comment, but she could have.

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Stephen Miller’s Presumed Babysitting of JD Vance’s European Animosity … and DOD’s Potential War Crimes

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Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony at the threat hearings was clear: After falsely claiming that fentanyl was the top threat to the United States, she said the second threat was China. That’s important background to the most interesting comment I’ve seen about the chat.

The Trumpsters on the chat were obsessed with making Europe pay for the operation. But — as  Nathalie Tocci noted in this NYT story focused on the Trumpsters’ obsession — the entire conversation ignored the import to China of transit through the Suez Canal.

“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top E.U. official. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”

[snip]

He and others, like Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor of Die Zeit, noted that the explicit demand for payment, rather than just political and military support, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, was new. And it ignored the fact that “the U.S. depends on global trade,” she said, and that “France, Britain and the Netherlands have deployed ships to the region” for the same purpose. The Americans, she said, “are constantly overlooking European efforts.”

China, for example, gets most of its oil imports through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and does much of its export trade with Europe through the same sea route. But no one is asking China to pay, Ms. Tocci noted.

In the texts released by Atlantic, there’s actually even more focus on the trade that transits the canal than the original story.

Indeed, it was at the center of debates over whether the strikes should go forward, which decision Tulsi Gabbard claimed had been made long before the chat started, and which debate, in yesterday’s cover story, was hailed as a policy process working.

Eleven minutes after Mike Waltz kicks off the thread with instructions that Joint Staff is sending “a more specific sequence of events in the coming days,” JD Vance piped in to say he thought the strikes were a mistake.

He focused on the fact that (he claimed) just 3% of US trade goes through Bab el-Mandeb, whereas 40% of Europe’s does.

Both Joe Kent (Tulsi’s unconfirmed aide) and John Ratcliffe respond that they could wait; indeed, in an arguably classified text, Ratcliffe says that more time would “be used to identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.” Kent also offers to provide unclassified details on shipping, perhaps to correct JD’s claim.

Remember, the person most likely to have been the “JG” whom Waltz tried to add to the chat instead of Jeff Goldberg is Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade representative, who likely would have had the precise details (and also might be sufficiently grown up to point out how stupid this Signal chat was).

Then Pete Hegseth pipes up to second JD’s specific concerns about messaging, including his worry that (ha!) the plans will leak and “we look indecisive.”

Waltz responds to JD’s original point, correcting him about how much US traffic transits Bab el-Mandeb, accounting for the fact that the stuff transiting the canal ends up in trade with the US.

That’s the first 27 minutes of the substantive discussion. Somewhere between 8:32 and 8:42AM, Waltz adds “SM,” believed to be Stephen Miller.

After adding Miller (but without mentioning he added him), Waltz returns to the issue of sea lanes, asserting that unless the US reopens them, they won’t get reopened.

JD suggests that if Hegseth is okay with the strikes, “let’s go.” He suggests Houthi targeting of Saudi oil facilities are one downside risk, not Saudi involvement, which is why the US has often chosen to lead on Houthi strikes.

Then Hegseth agrees that the Europeans are “free-loading It’s PATHETIC,” and says “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can” reopen the shipping lanes — which may suggest he believes China could do it too.

As Tocci pointed out to NYT, there’s no discussion of asking China to pay for these strikes. No discussion of how doing so for China helps China build its influence in Europe. No discussion at all in how this might affect China.

These boys purportedly intent on confronting China simply don’t consider the policy decision’s affect on China. JD and Whiskey Pete, at least, are interested primarily in hurting Europe.

Another 46 minutes elapse before SM — added after JD was wailing about the Europeans — comments. He offers an interpretation of what Trump said: a green light on the operation, he opines, but the US would harass Egypt and Europe after the fact to extort a payback.

Eleven minutes later, Hegseth — the guy to whom JD appealed on this issue — agreed with SM’s interpretation of the President’s intent.

That settled it. As I noted, SM’s — presumed to be Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy advisor — interpretation of the President’s intent is the sole backup in this now public document that the President authorized the strike at all: “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light.”

And the next thing we know, after Waltz resets how long until this PRA/FRA-covered communications will be destroyed illegally — DOD is flattening the apartment of someone’s girlfriend.

Fist-flag-fire!

By March 17, locals in Sanaa were claiming 53 people had been killed in this and ensuing strikes, including five children.

Even ignoring the foreknowledge of a civilian target, that makes the whole thing legally precarious, because everyone on the list is relying on SM’s interpretation of presidential intent. With the foreknowledge, it puts everyone involved in the strike at much greater legal risk because the legality of it, seemingly a target with significant civilian exposure, is so fragile.

But the other thing it does is show SM — again, believed to be Trump’s top domestic policy advisor — serving as the surrogate for Trump, and doing so in a way designed to shut JD up.

Like wormtongue, his mere gloss of the leader’s intent is treated with uncontested authority.

 

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Clean on OpSec: Pete Hegseth Spilled Specific Details of an Attack in Advance

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The Atlantic has published the texts (except for one naming a CIA officer whose name John Ratcliffe insists is not classified) it earlier withheld.

The White House is frantically spinning, claiming these attack plans — the likes of which both Tulsi Gabbard and Ratcliffe claimed not to recall in sworn testimony yesterday — don’t amount to “war plans.”

Karoline Leavitt is even sniping at the Wall Street Journal for its shock that Steve Witkoff was on the Signal chat thread while meeting with Putin at the Kremlin.

A real security scandal is that the Signal chat apparently included Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s envoy to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Press reports say Mr. Witkoff was receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow. This is security malpractice. Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr. Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter. This adds to the building perception that Mr. Witkoff, the President’s friend from New York, is out of his depth in dealing with world crises.

The meaning of Leavitt’s rebuttal is not remotely clear.

.@SteveWitkoff
was provided a secure line of communication by the U.S. Government, and it was the only phone he had in his possession while in Moscow.

If the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board cared about the truth, they could have reached out to our team for comment before running these lies.

This is classic Fake News from an outlet clearly determined to knock Steve Witkoff, who is a great patriot working effectively on behalf of President Trump to secure world peace.

She’s not denying he had Signal on the device with which he traveled (nor explained what devices he has had on his other international travels).

Update: Witkoff makes it more clear. The personal phone on which he was discussing military operations was at home.

I am incredulous that a good newspaper like the@WSJ would not check with me as to whether I had any personal devices with me on either of my trips to Moscow. If they had, they would have known the truth. Which is, I only had with me a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised. That is why CBS News reported that Goldberg himself said that he “has not recounted Witkoff making any comments in that group chat until Saturday, after he left Russia and returned to the U.S.”. Guess why? Because I had no access to my personal devices until I returned from my trip. That is the responsible way for me to make these trips and that is how I always conduct myself. Maybe it is time for media outlets like the Journal to acknowledge when some of their people make serious reporting mistakes like this. I would appreciate it if the WSJ and other media outlets check with me the next time they make serious allegations. Thank you.

The desperate panic to deny the gravity of this situation, however, is a real testament to the contempt in which the White House holds the men and women whose lives were put at risk — may still be at risk — because their Defense Secretary is so incompetent he can’t bother with the least little OpSec.

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The FISA 702 Canard at the Core of Trump Debates

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By now you’ve heard about Peter Thiel’s batshit column, in which (with no explanation) he suggests Trump’s second term might bring about an apocálypsis that his first term did not, a revelation of all the secrets that, Thiel claims, “the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs” have been keeping.

Among the secrets Thiel thinks Trump will tell in his second term that he did not in his first are:

  • Who else — potentially including “Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles” — worked with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK.
  • How longtime Trump and Elon Musk friend Jeffrey Epstein died in a prison overseen by Bill Barr, whose family ties with Epstein go back even further.
  • Whether Anthony Fauci secretly believed and covered up that, “Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme?”
  • Joe Biden Administration’s hypothetical involvement in Brazil’s decision to uphold its data sovereignty, an Aussie law imposing age limits on Internet use, or the UK’s prosecution of violent rioters whom Thiel describes as guilty of no more than speech.
  • Whether Charles Littlejohn’s leak of Trump’s and others’ tax records was anomalous or whether the same thing happened to Hunter Biden. (I kid. Of course he ignored that it happened to Hunter.)
  • What’s behind a “50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt” (in the same way he ignored that Hunter’s tax records had been leaked, Thiel also ignored how easy it would be to fix public debt if he and his buddies paid their fair share in taxes).

Nutty, right?

And right in the middle of these fevered conspiracy theories, intelligence contractor Peter Thiel wondered whether there’s such a thing as a right to privacy at all so long as Congress keeps reauthorizing FISA Section 702 under which the FBI continued to have violative queries incorporating US Person identifiers all the way through the Trump first term and in queries done as part of the January 6 investigation.

And on that same day, Tulsi Gabbard issued a statement reversing her opposition to Section 702, and in the process won the support of James Lankford and presumably some other hawkish Senators.

If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people. My prior concerns about FISA were based on insufficient protections for civil liberties, particularly regarding the FBI’s misuse of warrantless search powers on American citizens. Significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues.

And all these Senators, reassured that Tulsi will continue America’s best spying advantage, will ignore all the other reasons she’s wildly unsuited for the position.

Thiel is not alone among those naively investing his hopes to end surveillance by ending 702. A slew of privacy activists have focused there, too.

It’s like none of these people remember that people close to Trump used Israeli surveillance contractor Black Cube to spy on Barack Obama’s Iran deal negotiators, Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes.

It’s like none of these people remember that Trump had DHS — which has fewer protections for US persons than the FBI does and which was run by a Trump flunkie — to surveil journalists covering the Portland riots.

It’s like none of these people have thought through the implications of Trump’s baseless claim that Hizballah was somehow involved in January 6, which is that all the people already identified who participated in the riot will be searched under 702 for ties to Iran; searching for ties to foreign terrorist groups is literally the initial use case for 702.

It’s like none of these people have through through the implications of the immunity ruling, which would mean that Trump could spy on Daniel Ellsberg’s shrink or even his Democratic opponents, and John Roberts would still let him off the hook.

It’s like none of these people have yoked that reality to Trump’s chumminess with most of the most prolific sources for Section 702 — Facebook and Google, probably Amazon — providing him a way to get what he wants directly (to say nothing of whatever DMs Elon might find to be interesting), targeting the actual Americans rather than the people overseas with whom they interacted.

Craziest still, Thiel presents the concern that the government will continue to partner with companies run by Tech Bros like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Apple and Sundar Pichai to surveil the world (likely with the help of Palantir software) as some great conspiracy theory. But he doesn’t realize — or wants to pretend — that he and his Tech Bro buddies are the key villains here.

Do tell us your secrets, Peter. But first, come to grips with the fact that you are the conspiracy you’re wailing about.

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To Pay Off His Election Debts, Trump Seems Prepared to Destroy the United States

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Kimberly Strassel is struggling with cognitive dissonance. She’s trying to convince Republicans to reject the nomination of RJK Jr, whom she believes Trump named to head Health and Human Services only as electoral payback.

Welcome to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nomination, one of the more counterproductive Washington charades in recent history. Donald Trump has, in payback for late-stage election support, nominated a man for the vital cabinet position (health and human services) whom he once labeled a “Democrat Plant” and a bigger threat to the country than Joe Biden. Now meet the Republican senators, activists and influencers who are so clueless—and so blindly eager to salute the leader—that they can’t see the opportunity to save Mr. Trump from a deal he would never have made in other circumstances.

[snip]

It seems not to have occurred to Senate Republicans—who ought to have learned a little bit about Mr. Trump by now—that he needs a rescue here. No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional. Mr. Trump saw an opportunity to gain RFK’s endorsement. The price was a promise of a big post. The president-elect is holding true to that deal as a businessman, so he won’t dare whisper misgivings for fear of leaks.

Instead Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated. Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalist big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda. Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap? But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.

Murdoch’s top columnist believes Trump needs to be saved from himself.

It comes with no small discomfort to admit that my approach to Trump’s nominations is not much different than [gulp] Strassel’s. I think Democrats, rather than fostering polarization by attacking Trump’s nominees as the partisan hacks they are, should instead frame the question in terms of the damage they’ll do to the US, the damage Republican Senators will own if they confirm them.

How hard can it be, after all, to convince Republicans that they don’t want to be responsible for letting Bobby Kennedy get rid of childhood vaccinations, revoking approval for the polio vaccine entirely, with the resultant death and destruction that’ll directly cause in their own states (as it did already in Samoa)?

How hard can it be, after all, to convince Republicans that the same billionaires who bankrupted Silicon Valley Bank then promptly begged for and got bailed out, shouldn’t be recommending the elimination of the FDIC?

That is, I think Democrats would be best served by laying out that if the Republicans approve these charlatans, they cannot claim they were not warned. They own the destruction Trump is embracing. If Trump gets his way on all these picks, it will be more destructive to the United States than dropping a nuke on NYC. And Republican Senators have a choice to sanction that … or try to prevent it.

All that said, in her valiant struggle to make sense of why the man she has blindly defended for years might take steps that will foreseeably do grave damage to harm the US, Strassel may simplify things somewhat when she imagines this is just about electoral payback.

For starters, much of the criticism Trump launched against RFK during the campaign was kayfabe, an attempt to appear to be on opposite sides as him, in a ploy to harm the Democratic ticket. That “charade,” as Strassel calls this, was about stealing Democratic votes, not feigned approval for RFK now.

Plus, Donald Trump is famous for reneging on his debts, whether personal or financial, and he would happily do so with RFK if he saw an advantage in it. Hell he has already reneged on the offer to Bill McGinley to be White House Counsel and given the job instead to David Warrington. While Elon Musk likely has a great deal of leverage over Trump for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to see how RFK could enforce any deal they made, if indeed they had one.

On the contrary, at least according to Trump whisperer Marc Caputo (citing Roger Stone, who has long been a professional Kennedy conspirator), Trump has affirmative reasons he wants RFK and … Tulsi Gabbard.

But the most critical fights for the president-elect, at least in regard to his immediate political legacy, center around Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr., former Democrats tapped to head the nation’s sprawling intelligence and health bureaucracies, respectively.

Gabbard’s and Kennedy’s nominations, like Hegseth’s and Patel’s, have met resistance in pockets of the Senate. But Trump allies view the stakes differently. Confirming Gabbard and Kennedy is seen as an opportunity for the president-elect to cement his legacy of broadening the Republican coalition to include disaffected Democrats and independents. They note that the two are considered Blue MAGA rock stars among the Trump faithful. They’re both loved by the new influential podcasters whom Trump courted this election and give Trump the chance to burnish his anti-establishment bona fides.

“The appointments of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard represent a realignment in American politics that you saw in the election,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser. “He understands the historical significance of that realignment.”

For that reason, there is an expectation in Trump world that the president-elect will expend more of his political capital on Gabbard and Kennedy than on any of the other nominees. And that he could go apoplectic if their prospects begin to dim.

“Frankly, Pete [Hegseth] might not make it,” said one Trump adviser. “We’ll see. I’m not sure if the boss is willing to fight for that because there are people in our own camp who aren’t sure it’s worth it. But Kash [Patel] should get confirmed. And if they try to touch Tulsi and Kennedy, then it’s war.”

Added a second adviser: “If Tulsi or Bobby face real trouble, that’s when Trump will really start to fight. They represent the challenging of the status quo of the bureaucracy. That’s what MAGA is about.”

Now, Caputo is incredibly well-sourced in the vicinity of people like Stone, but he can be credulous.

And I’m not sure I believe that his sources believe what Bobby and Tulsi give you is some magical realignment among actual Democrats, who long ago dissociated from these nuts.

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

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

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

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

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There Are No Backsies on Dobbs

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Since the day after the debate in June, I have conceived of the shift from a Joe Biden to a Kamala Harris campaign in three ways: The Vice President would more vigorously explain the wildly successful policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. She might (and indeed, has started to) chip away at the Double Hater logjam that has embodied presidential elections since 2016. And she would speak about choice far better than Biden ever could.

At the time, I maintained that Gretchen Whitmer was the only Democrat nationally who speaks better to choice than Harris does. In assuming the presidential ticket, Kamala’s team has made abortion something far more. They have made reproductive rights a cornerstone of a revamped democracy agenda.

That has happened in a curious way. Dobbs only happened because the Supreme Court has become a supercharged, wildly undemocratic wing of right wing policy. The fight to get abortion referenda on state ballots has repeatedly, perhaps most notably in Ohio, had to first defeat anti-democratic efforts to disempower referenda generally. In Wisconsin, voters first had to put Janet Protasiewicz on the Supreme Court before they could turn to protecting reproductive choice, but organizing to do that has laid the groundwork for renewed Democratic vitality. To restore reproductive rights, in state after state, democracy must be renewed.

But all that’s in the background. Kamala’s team has succeeded in making abortion something more: the most obvious item on a laundry list of the ways the far right has tried to take rights (and books) away, a fight for Freedom, one that has enthused millions of younger voters, especially women of child-bearing age.

And so, as I thought it might, Kamala’s focus on choice is one of the things that has remade the race.

It didn’t take rocket science to offer that prediction (though surprisingly few pundits did so, and most people pushing for a Thunderdome primary, who were overwhelmingly men, missed it). Democrats have successfully run on choice since Dobbs;  it has played a central role in Democratic campaigns even in places like Andy Beshear’s Kentucky. Yet Kamala’s clarion voice on the issue largely got ignored as people plotted for ways to bypass the first woman Vice President to replace Biden.

Thus far in this campaign, a focus on abortion has also provided a way to make visible the patriarchy presumed in most threads of the right wing coalition backing Trump, especially but by no means exclusively Christian nationalism. Lest voters ever forget, Kamala’s campaign keeps rolling out one after another video in which JD Vance demands women get back to the role his Church dictates for them: breeding children.

A number of things — the successful convention, a surge in registration among those women of child-bearing age, polls showing that abortion is the most important issue for a larger number of voters — have led horserace journalists to finally cop on.

Or perhaps they’re just noting Trump’s response to Kamala’s focus on choice. I think choice (and the way it harms Trump with women voters) is one reason Trump’s team made Tulsi Gabbard a more formal surrogate; in their appearance together in LaCrosse, billed a Town Hall, Tulsi told the story of her own attempt to conceive using IVF, effectively adopting Tim Walz’ story and focus. Certainly, it’s the reason why, over the course of one day, Trump said wildly contradictory things about choice.

Yesterday, both NYT and WaPo had stories describing the background to that. Trump whisperers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who in July first seeded the false narrative that a GOP platform that enshrines fetal personhood reflects a “softened” stance on abortion, treat it as primarily a matter of messaging.

Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.

It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.

The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.

[snip]

Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.

Twice divorced serial philanderer Donald Trump doesn’t have social conservatism. He has a politically expedient con. Trump has convinced Christian nationalists he was anti-choice in public while attempting to limit the political damage of anti-choice policies behind the scenes. And that con is running headlong into the consequences of the actions he took to sustain the con.

WaPo states this more clearly; this is not about messaging (though WaPo cites Republicans mocking how bad Trump’s messaging on it is). It’s about Trump’s record. Trump had wanted to run on other policies, immigration and Trump’s distorted claims about the economy, but now he’s having to answer for his anti-choice policies.

Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.

But, as noted, in the month since she has entered the race, Kamala has made abortion the primary issue for more voters than immigration is, and it rivals the economy as the most important election issue among women voters.

Swan and Maggie describe how Trump became what they describe as “agitated” after watching the way the DNC made abortion a primary focus.

In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.

This is more than agitation.

It is flailing.

Panic.

A recognition that he is losing because of actions he took as President, he is losing because of what the payoff he owed to social conservatives who put him in the White House, a far right SCOTUS, did to women. What NYT journalists with another book contract describe as “head-spinning” is not about branding, it’s about panic because Kamala threatens to hold him accountable for his actions.

No matter how many contradictory statements Trump makes about what a second Trump term would do, there’s no escaping what his first term did do. There are no backsies on Dobbs. There are no backsies on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. There aren’t even any backsies on that platform granting fetuses protection under the 14th Amendment, even if NYT’s Trump whisperers continue to pretend that didn’t happen.

I mean, come on! If not for the three people Trump added to SCOTUS and those, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, paid for by the same far right Christian nationalists that pushed Vance as a candidate, Trump would be sitting in trial for his attack on January 6 as we speak. Trump is only here, in the race, because of those ideologues who were willing to alter the Constitution to serve a far right agenda. Trump has survived thanks to that Court; he is panicking as he considers the possibility it’ll sink him as well.

And even as Kamala already has Trump panicking, it could get worse for Trump and his party.

There’s something about the WaPo version of this story that I can’t get out of my head; it’s actually one of the reasons I went through the trouble of writing this post. Its subhead (presumably not written by the journalists) suggests Trump’s wild gyrations on choice come during the “final stretch” of the campaign. “Heading into the campaign’s final stretch, Republicans careen between their base and swing voters on the powerful issue of reproductive rights.” The temporal observation, that we’re in the last stretch, is undoubtedly true viewed through the lens of the traditional interminable US presidential campaign. Labor Day kicks off the last, most intense period of a campaign, though importantly, the period when low-information voters first start to tune in. Given Trump’s attempt to stave off criminal charges by announcing his run early, in November 2022, it’s far more true of Trump, who is 91% of the way through his run to regain the presidency.

Not so Kamala Harris.

As I calculated Wednesday, Kamala is just starting the second third of her campaign, what we might call her second trimester if it were three times as long. As of today, she has 60% of her campaign, 64 days of 107, left to go.

And so, even as Kamala has already made Trump an equivocating wreck, nine-tenths of the way through his campaign and just in time for low-information voters to witness it, she has only just laid a foundation to build on. Even as the press described Trump’s flopsweat as abortion threatens to ruin his bid, Kamala’s campaign rolled out a bus tour to focus on reproductive rights.

They are, quite literally, taking it to Trump, to Palm Beach, for the kickoff.

Today, Team Harris-Walz is announcing the launch of its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour with a kickoff event in Donald Trump’s backyard in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, September 3. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Republican TV personality Ana Navarro, and reproductive rights storyteller Anya Cook will hold Trump directly accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade, including threatening access to IVF.

This fall, the bus will make at least 50 stops in key states, touching blue communities and red ones, with support for reproductive rights transcending party lines. Each stop will emphasize the stark contrast between Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, who will restore the protections of Roe when Congress passes a bill to do so, and Donald Trump and JD Vance, who will enact their dangerous Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, create a national anti-abortion coordinator, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF.

This is a bus tour of diverse surrogates, not Harris or Walz themselves. The grand-daughter of César Chávez, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, is the only royalty on this bus. But the bus provides the campaign a low-effort way to build on the foundation established at the DNC, to try to yoke state referenda more closely to partisan races, to try to make races like that of Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (or that of Angela Alsobrooks or Dan Osborn) more competitive. If that works, who knows how close Kamala might make the Florida race itself? Even assuming Kamala won’t beat Trump in his own state, it will serve to reinvigorate a state party that had been struggling, but which also just recently delivered embarrassing defeats to Moms for Liberty, the book-burners who serve as both Ron DeSantis and Trump’s surrogates to reach women.

Thus far, horserace journalists have been absolutely loathe to hold Trump accountable for the bad things that happened when he was President: his failures on COVID as well as jobs lost for reasons other than pandemic, the spike in crime, his corruption of rule of law.

But Kamala has finally made Trump own something, his role in stripping women of their bodily autonomy.

And in response, Trump has started to panic.

Update: This Public Notice piece on the press’ willingness to let Trump flip flop on choice with impunity him on it names several other policies he should not have backsies on either.

There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.

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