Month: August 2025

What a lucky guy

Donald Trump is a private citizen? Jason Leopold, Bloomberg’s FOIA guy says that’s what the government has determined, at least when it comes to the crimes he committed before he was president:

We know from news reports that Trump’s name was in the Epstein files. But what hasn’t been reported is that an FBI FOIA team redacted Trump’s name—and the names of other prominent public figures—from the documents, according to three people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak with the media.

That team, tasked with conducting a final review of the voluminous cache, had applied the redactions before the DOJ and the FBI concluded last month that “no further disclosure” of the files “would be appropriate or warranted.”

From the government’s perspective, Trump was a private citizen when the Epstein investigation took place and therefore is entitled to privacy protections.

[…]

While reviewing the Epstein files, FBI personnel identified numerous references to Trump in the documents, the people familiar with the matter told me. Dozens of other high-profile public figures also appeared, the people said. (The appearance of Trump’s name or others in the Epstein files is not evidence of a crime or even a suggestion of wrongdoing.)

In preparation for potential public release, the documents then went to a unit of FOIA officers who applied redactions in accordance with the nine exemptions. The people familiar with the matter said that Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.

In particular, the reviewers applied two FOIA exemptions to justify their redactions. The first, Exemption 6, protects individuals against “a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” The Supreme Court has said the exemption protects “individuals from the injury and embarrassment” that would result from the disclosure of personal information in possession of the government.

The second, Exemption 7(C), protects personal information contained in law enforcement records, the disclosure of which “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Leopold doesn’t think we’ll see the unredacted Epstein files any time soon:

Here’s the bottom line: The FBI’s behind-the-scenes decision-making suggests that the chances of aliens resurrecting JFK are greater than Trump’s name ever being unredacted from the Epstein files.

Of course, Trump could agree to let his name out or sign a privacy waiver. Or, when he—and everybody else named in the files—eventually dies, most of their privacy rights will disappear.

I can’t wait. For many reasons…

BY the way, if you missed this Guardian expose from 2020 about Trump’s escapades with his modeling agency in the early 90s (about the time he started hanging out with Epstein) take the time to read it. It’s obvious that he was trolling for teenagers in his 40s. Plenty of the models had complaints. It seems very likely that he was running a similar scam as Epstein’s, holding out the promise of a big career in return for sex.

They were very young…

Greg Sargent at TNR has a big scoop today. I think we always knew this was coming, didn’t we?

[A]n internal memo circulated inside the Department of Homeland Security suggests that Trump’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement on immigration could soon get worse. The memo—obtained by The New Republic—provides a glimpse into the thinking of top officials as they seek to involve the Defense Department more deeply in these domestic operations, and it has unnerved experts who believe it portends a frightening escalation.

The memo lays out the need to persuade top Pentagon officials to get much more serious about using the military to combat illegal immigration—and not just at the border. It suggests that DHS is anticipating many more uses of the military in urban centers, noting that L.A.-style operations may be needed “for years to come.” And it likens the threat posed by transnational gangs and cartels to having “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells and fighters operating freely inside America,” hinting at a ramped-up militarized posture inside the interior.

For now this appears to be a secret policy which means they know it’s unconstitutional but they plan to barrel ahead anyway:

Participants listed comprise the very top levels of both agencies, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and several of his top advisers, Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine, and NORTHCOM Commander Gregory Guillot. Staff include Phil Hegseth and acting ICE commissioner Todd Lyons.

“Due to the sensitive nature of the meeting, minimal written policy or background information can be provided in this briefing memo,” the memo says.

The person leading the meeting is Phillip Hegseth, Whiskey Pete’s brother who is a top adviser to Kristi Noem. Only the best!

I’m sure this will go up to the Supreme Court which will no doubt find that the president’s foreign policy prerogatives of course means that he can use the military within the United States to police American citizens. What could be more obvious?

Really

Philip Bump does a nice job of laying out the contours of the latest Trump nonsense about the Russia probe. In case you’ve missed it, here’s the basic idea:

On Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel — chosen for that role in large part because of his commitment to undermining the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — declared on social media that his team had uncovered a document, “along with thousands of other documents, buried in a back room at the FBI.” A classified annex to the report compiled by Special Counsel John Durham, Patel insisted that the document revealed “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”

Patel’s post quoted writer John Solomon, who called the annex a smoking gun that, if “authenticated by further investigation” would show a plot by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to invent a Trump-Russia link. Oh, and rest assured, George Soros got a mention, too.

Solomon, along with Patel, had been tapped by Donald Trump in 2022 to serve as the then-former president’s representatives for records held by the National Archives. The point of that appointment appeared even at the time to have been to cherry-pick available material to make a case that the Russia investigation was a political hack job.

The effort simply took a few years to manifest.

The current allegation

The problem here is that the annex had been investigated further, by John Durham. The New York Times writes that Durham had come to the conclusion that the email at the heart of the claim was “probably manufactured” by Russian intelligence, the source of the email in the first place. Journalist Marcy Wheeler, who has tracked all of this closely for years, thinks that probably overstates Durham’s conclusion — but paints a compelling picture for why he should have. Either way, Durham relegated it to an annex when, if his probe had shown it to be legitimate or useful, it would have largely made the case he was seeking to prove.

The other thing is: none of this is new. Not only because Durham looked at it during his investigation, itself an effort to formalize a means of undercutting the public understanding of the overlap of Trump and Russia in 2016. But the core claim was made public back in 2020, in the waning days of Trump’s failed effort to secure a second consecutive term in office.

At that point, John Ratcliffe (now the director of the CIA) was serving as Director of National Intelligence, despite his thin resume. But he was a Trump ally, which one might fairly assume is why he first produced the allegation that Patel revived this week. There was a July meeting in which Clinton’s campaign discussed tying Trump to Russia, see, and that was how all of this started! Oh, also, this was a product of Russian intelligence analysis and the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

It didn’t get much traction in part because of that (warranted) caveat and in part because of the other tumult of the campaign. (Trump had just been diagnosed with covid-19, for example.) It also didn’t get much traction because there wasn’t the same investment by Trump’s allies in debunking the Russia allegations — and because the effort to cast all of the Russia-Trump investigation as a “hoax” was still relatively young. Yes, Trump was calling all of it a hoax since his first months in office. But it took a while for that idea to percolate out to his base and, more importantly, for the right-wing media universe to distill the disparate, cherry-picked elements of that purported hoax into something that served as a convincing post hoc explanation for what had happened. By 2025, by now, Trump had both the burning desire for vengeance and the inoculation of his base necessary for the appointment of unabashed loyalists to intelligence positions and for a full-on assault on the reality of what had happened.

The New York Times has some details:

Where did the information come from?

In 2016, a Dutch spy agency hacked a Russian spy agency and copied internal memos and messages by Russian intelligence analysts. The Russians were writing reports about various topics based on the emails of American victims of Russian hacking operations. The Dutch shared a copy of the trove with the United States.

From the beginning, U.S. officials have said, they viewed the material with caution. Among other things, some reports were said to make inconsistent or false claims — raising the possibility that Russians had exaggerated things for their own purposes, or knew the server was compromised and deliberately mixed in disinformation.

What is the new report?

It is a 29-page annex to Mr. Durham’s 2023 report. The annex, which was declassified on Thursday, quotes the purported July 27 email and reveals that there was a related one on July 25.

The report also shows how Mr. Durham expended significant effort trying to prove that the emails were real, but gathered evidence that led him to conclude that Russian spies likely concocted them.

[…]

The two crucial emails were most likely manufactured by Russian spies, who appear to have assembled them in part using passages lifted from various hacked messages written by people other than Mr. Benardo.

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

In other words, it’s all bullshit. But we knew that. If Durham couldn’t make it stick — and you know he badly wanted to — there’s nothing there.

Lemme just say if President Bernie Sanders had unilaterally imposed, by executive fiat, hundreds of billions of new taxes, personally browbeat executives about job cuts and investments and then fired the head of BLS, the Chamber of Commerce and the business orgs would not be sitting idly by.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) 2025-08-01T21:07:14.312Z

Imagine if Clinton, Obama or Biden tried any of that? Hell, I think they would have had a meltdown if Bush had done it. But Trump? He’s a magic man for whom there are never any consequences for any stupid, ill-informed thing he does so why bother? Everything will be ok for Trump and, therefore, will be ok for everyone.

I honestly think that’s part of their rationale. They think that his total imperviousness to accountability means that nothing bad can happen while he is president. It seems unlikely but then he staged a violent coup attempt and stole classified documents in boxes full of garbage and stored them in the toilet yet was re-elected so anything is possible.

Budget recisions kill off CPB

During the post-Helene storm recovery in Asheville last fall, I was safe but offline for a week. Digby reported that readers missed me. I appreciate it. Power was out most everywhere. Water was out for weeks. The Internet was out. Cell service was out.

What wasn’t out? Our local public radio station, our only source for information about recovery efforts, assistance and emergency supplies.

So Trump and his Project 2025 lackeys in Congress want public broadcasting dead. Russ Vought and Stephen Miller must be toasting this news with flutes of liberal tears:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will begin an orderly wind-down of its operations following the passage of a federal rescissions package and the release of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s FY 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-H) appropriations bill, which excludes funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades.

"WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 1, 2025) – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will begin an orderly wind-down of its operations"cpb.org/pressroom/Co…

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) 2025-08-01T16:59:51.414Z

A little history from The New York Times:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created in 1967 by the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, part of an ambitious domestic policy agenda labeled “the Great Society” by President Lyndon Johnson. Congress was responding, in part, to the growing popularity of commercial television, which had been derided by Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as a “vast wasteland.”

[…]

Now, public broadcasters are turning to foundation funders, philanthropists and local donors to help resolve the coming cash crunch. Local stations across the United States have seen an outpouring of financial relief, with members in their areas turning out in droves to support their favorite programs.

And now? Jamelle Bouie tweeted, “the republican party hates public goods and wants to force feed you and your family slop produced by its billionaire allies.”

They also want to feed you data slop produced by tRump-sniffing hacks. Trump just fired Erika McEntarfer, the Biden-appointed Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner behind the bad jobs report issued on Friday.

Trump's cratering continues. This is a good example of why authoritarian/autocratic rulers fail. They can't accept new info and adapt, because everything must always confirm their sublime world historical greatness without exception, and anyone producing contrary info is purged pic.twitter.com/8ciTZEoFY8

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) August 1, 2025

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research summarizes:

The unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent in July as the rate of job growth slowed to just 73,000 in the month. Perhaps more striking than July’s figure was the sharp downward revisions to the prior two months’ data, putting May and June job growth at 19,000 and 14,000, respectively. The average for the last three months now stands at just 35,000. Furthermore, all of the job growth was in health care, which accounted for 142 percent of the gains.

While the 4.2 percent overall unemployment rate is still relatively low by historical standards, Black workers have been disproportionately affected. Their unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent, the highest since October of 2021, 2.4 percentage points above the low hit in April of 2023. The employment-to-population ratio for Black workers is down 3.6 pp from its peak in March of 2023.

His Lordship was not pleased:

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said, after baselessly accusing McEntarfer of having “faked” statistics.

McEntarfer has served in the federal government for 20 years, including positions at the U.S. Census Bureau, the Executive Office of the President, and the Department of Treasury, according to the BLS website.

It was only a matter of time before Trump reached the Queen of Hearts stage and started calling for heads. In the CPB case, talking heads. We’re there.

* * * * *

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The honey badgers of clean energy

Donald Trump is obsessed with wind turbines, or windmills as he insists on calling them. As far back as 2012 he complained to the Scottish Parliament about an offshore wind farm planned near his Aberdeenshire golf course. They would ruin the vista at his golf resort and harm Scottish tourism, he declared. Never mind that they would power 80,000 homes. What evidence did he have? “I am the evidence,” he insisted.

Trump has his priorities. He fought the government in court, as is his habit, and lost.

This week in Scotland he raged again against renewable energy from wind. Trump thinks wind is “the worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy.” He thinks wind turbines cause cancer and calls them ”the biggest Hoax of them all.” But then, Donald Trump thinks his epic comb over hides his baldness.

But here’s the great thing about “windmills.” They’re badass. They’re like the honey badgers of clean energy. They don’t give a shit what Donald Trump thinks about them. Or if he calls them windmills. They don’t flinch when he issues angry “Truths.” (They don’t follow social media.)

Jeff Tiedrich’s readers know what he thinks about Donald Trump. On Friday, Jeff had some pointed words for Trump’s plans to replace the White House with a “gaudy golf motel.” Then he celebrated the people behind a not-too-subtle dig at Trump in a commercial for Wind Farmed Seaweed Snacks:

here are your heroes of the day: the Swedish state-owned energy company Vattenfall, who hired Samuel L. Jackson to star in a commercial entitled “Motherfucking Wind Farms.”

enjoy.

So I’ve taken to listening to the Dropkick Murphys lately. They don’t give a shit about Donald Trump either and aren’t subtle about letting audiences know he’s “not their kind of guy.”

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50501
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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

More Capybara pups!

Get ready for a triple dose of adorable! New Orleans Audubon Zoo is happy to announce the much-awaited arrival of three baby capybara pups in its Jaguar Jungle River’s Edge exhibit.

The babies are the offspring of capybara mom “Turkey” and dad “Sequoia”.  Capybara give birth after about 100 days of gestation. The pups were able to walk right after they were born so they are busy exploring their world. They are still nursing from mom, but are beginning to nibble grass and other food.

Capybara are the world’s largest rodents and are native to South America. Capybara love to swim, but these little ones will have plenty of growing to do before they can swim with their parents in the large lagoon in River’s Edge.  For now, they are living and playing in the capybara yard and barn that are mostly behind the scenes. Guests can catch a glimpse of the trio from the Zoo’s Swamp Train that follows a path right by their play yard.

No names yet. I’m sure they’ll be adorbs.

Remember when Trump said every single day on the campaign trail that Biden was going to start WWIII? Yeah, I knew you did.

You have to love this verbally incontinent moron lecturing anyone on inflammatory statements leading to unintended consequences. His lack of self-awareness knows no bounds.

More importantly, what the hell is going on with this war of words? Axios reports:

After Trump shortened the timeline for his ceasefire-or-sanctions ultimatum, Medvedev responded Monday by warning him that was a step towards war. He added, “Don’t go down the Sleepy Joe road!”

• Trump responded in a post on Truth Social calling Medvedev a “failed former President” and warning him to “watch his words” as he’s entering “dangerous territory.”
• On Friday morning, Medvedev fired back with an allusion to Russia’s “Dead Hand” automated strike system — which purportedly could unleash a full-scale nuclear response in the event Russia was struck first.
• Medvedev also mocked Trump, saying “if a few words from the former President of Russia can provoke such a jittery reaction from the mighty President of the United States, then Russia must be completely in the right.”

Great. I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong. All the people involved are extremely level-headed and have the most stable and reliable experts around them. It’s all good.

You have to see it to believe it:

In May, ABC News first broke the story that the president was going to accept a the gift — a Boeing 747 jumbo jet referred to as a “palace in the sky” — from the Qatari government. At the time of writing, the plane was undergoing a costly retrofit to serve as a temporary Air Force One while the actual Air Force One is going through its own upgrades.

That decision to accept the plane was met with a great deal of backlash from members of the Democratic Party, who questioned what Trump would do with it once his second term as president ended. Members of Congress opposed the idea of his continuing to use the plane when he was no longer president, but the Trump administration insisted it would not be for personal use.

ABC News reported earlier in the year that the Pentagon’s “plan” for the plane “called for transferring ownership of the plane to the Trump presidential library foundation” after he left office, which would still leave it under Trump’s control.

On Thursday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said on X/Twitter that he offered an amendment to the Appropriations Committee to “prohibit the Qatari jet that was gifted to Trump” to be transferred to him after his presidency.

“The fight against corruption has to be ceaseless,” Murphy added.

How’d that go over?

Update: I offered the amendment. Not to refuse acceptance of the Qatari jet; just to prohibit Trump from taking it with him when he leaves office – after the taxpayers spend $1 billion to retrofit it.

Failed 14-15. Every single Republican voted to allow Trump to take the jet. https://t.co/4bb8ONvOpO

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) July 31, 2025

Unbelievable. Their shamelessness knows no bounds.

A coincidence, I’m sure

Drip, drip, drip:

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to minimum-security prison camp in Texas, her lawyer said on Friday.

The move, which was reported earlier by The New York Sun, came about a week after Ms. Maxwell was interviewed over two days in prison in Tallahassee, Fla., about the Epstein case by Todd Blanche, the No. 2 official in the Justice Department and one of President Trump’s former lawyers.

I’m sure this is all above board and that Trump and Blanche had nothing to do with it. Move along…