Remember that old fashioned term “the appearance of conflict of interest?” This is a full blown, living color illustration of it.
I just want you to take a moment to consider that these assholes made Hunter Biden into a political pinata for four years while Jr and Eric are openly profiting from Trump’s presidency without any consideration for how it looks. And if you think these bets weren’t “informed” by people on the inside you’re being naive. Of course they were.
Democrats have zero reasons to offer any support for this. That doesn’t mean that some won’t. We’re already seeing some reflexive clinging to “process” in which the main argument isn’t about why it’s daft and dangerous to do it but that he didn’t follow the right rules in doing it. That is a cowardly tactic to try to have it both ways. The reason to oppose this war is because it’s a felony stupid decision based upon prodding from the Israeli government, hawkish weirdos like Lindsey Graham and Trump’s megalomania.
Maybe Trump does some bombing, gets bored, and moves on to something else. But if we take him at his word, this will be a protracted conflict that could cost American lives, destabilize the region, and spike energy prices here at home.
Democrats must loudly and boldly oppose this war. They have a moral responsibility and a political obligation to do so. If Democrats cannot bring themselves to oppose an idiotic, unjustified regime change war in the Middle East, they do not deserve the power they seek.
The vast majority of Democrats are in the right place. Many have been loudly criticizing Trump and pointing out the stupidity and hypocrisy of this war. But we need to be as unified as possible and speak with one voice.
That starts with a vote in the House next week on a bipartisan War Powers Resolution, which would require Trump to seek congressional approval to continue bombing Iran. Almost every Democrat and at least one Republican is expected to vote for it.
Two Democrats — Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz — have said they will vote no. Moskowitz even obnoxiously called the resolution the “Ayatollah Protection Act.” By blocking a Congressional vote on the war, Gottheimer and Moskowitz are playing cynical national security politics, and I hope they face vigorous primary challenges because of it.
The resolution could, but probably won’t, pass the House. Even if it passed the Senate, Trump would veto it, and there aren’t the votes to override. That said, many of the Democrats who will vote for the resolution are less firm on the underlying policy question of the war itself.
Axios reported earlier this week that a potential U.S. strike on Iran is exposing a quiet but consequential split inside the Senate Democratic caucus. The Democratic base strongly opposes war with Iran, but some of Chuck Schumer’s colleagues are more open to military action — provided Congress has a say.
That’s the “process” BS.
No. Not this time. Not with Trump, a criminal president with a 36% approval rating. Jesus.
There are two reasons Democrats behave this way. Many still carry a post-9/11 mentality, perpetually worried about being cast as weak or unpatriotic by Republicans and the right-wing media machine. That fear is an increasingly outdated notion in today’s political environment, but learned helplessness is hard to unlearn.
There are also Democrats who genuinely believe that regime change in Iran is a top national security priority and are willing to support military force, under the right circumstances, to achieve it. That’s not a view I share — I think it means failing to absorb every lesson of Iraq — but it’s a position someone can hold in good faith.
Even so: how can anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump, a corrupt, erratic wannabe dictator who couldn’t find Iran on a map, is the right person to manage that incredibly complex undertaking? Even if the military achieves regime change, do we really want Trump deciding what comes next in Iran? His first priority will probably be a Trump-branded golf course outside Tehran. The idea that Trump should be the one doing this is indefensible.
The American people are on our side. They don’t want this war. They elected Trump to stop wars, not start them. Democrats need to stop complicating something that is actually pretty simple — and loudly, boldly oppose a dumb and dangerous man launching a dumb and dangerous war for no good reason.
The fact is that the United States has proved over many decades now that this “regime change” concept, usually taken with the fatuous notion that we are killing the people for their own good, backfires every time. This self-serving idea that we’ll be greeted a liberators never proves true and the death and chaos we inflict in the process is never worth it.
Wars of choice are bad, period. We should have learned this by now.
Moreover, Rachel Maddow’s point from yesterday — that you have to look at who will really benefit — is especially true with this corrupt bunch of gangsters leading the charge. There is simply no doubt that Trump was persuaded by the prospect of somehow getting our hands on all that oil. It’s not like he ever made a secret of it, since he’s said “we should have kept the oil!” hundreds of times over the years.
No, this is one is very easy (as was Iraq) — just say no. Democrats have a head start this time, the public is already against it. Even Republicans are tepid much less the Democrats and Independents. They’ve never had a better case, from “wag the dog” to “no war for oil” to “he promised no more wars.” They simply must stick together and oppose this war unequivocally.
Image shows a young woman receiving surgical procedure at Jeffrey Epstein’s apartment. Photo via Department of Justice
Citizen and professional journalists more motivated than Donald Trump lackeys at the Department of Justice continue to uncover disturbing items in Epstein files released to date. Among them, photographs that the DOJ should have been redacted but missed, “including pictures of a young girl kissing Jeffrey Epstein on the cheek and personal data on passports and drivers’ licenses,” CNN found.
The New Jersey mother of four is among hundreds of citizen-journalists, or sleuths, absorbed by the material connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein. She’s determined to learn the stories behind his illicit sex ring and relationships with some of the world’s most powerful people — and publish what she finds on Substack.
[…]
With all that, there’s plenty of room for people like Leonard. She’s been journalism-adjacent for much of her career, running a business that offered transcription services until AI rendered it largely obsolete. She worked briefly in education and wrote about politics and social issues on her Substack, The Panicked Writer.
But after seeing the interest generated when she started looking at Epstein documents a few months ago, she began devoting all of her professional time to it.
[…]
Journalist Wajahat Ali, who runs the Left Hook Substack, said he admires Leonard’s work and often features her on his site. Some of the Epstein citizen journalists gather on livestreams to talk about what they’ve found.
Over the past decade, Ali has watched the growth of a subculture of people obsessed with true crime stories who love to comb through evidence and advance their own theories.
The Epstein files are “the mother lode,” he said. “If you love conspiracy theories, if you love true crime, this is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of true crime. It is the unfortunately sordid gift that will keep on giving.”
These sleuths are Trump’s worst nightmare as well as for the men and women not yet publicly named in connection with Epstein or who had their names “helpfully” redacted by the Trump DOJ. They’ve escaped American justice for crimes committed with Epstein while overseas counterparts to U.S. policing are “eager to examine the American documents as part of criminal investigations into potential wrongdoing,” the New York Times reports:
In Britain, two arrests have taken place, of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, and of Peter Mandelson, a former ambassador to Washington. Both were arrested on suspicion of the same offense: misconduct in public office. It’s a broad, centuries-old common law offense that makes it a crime to act with “wilfull abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office.”
“We don’t have those sort of generic, open-ended kinds of crimes in the United States,” said Paul G. Cassell, a professor of law at the University of Utah. For a decade, he represented Virginia Giuffre, who accused Mr. Epstein of trafficking her to his friends, including Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, in the early 2000s.
As in the United States, the Epstein files have forced some firings or resignations outside of the criminal justice system.
In Britain, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and his communications director, Tim Allan, stepped down amid ongoing questions about how much they were aware of connections between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Mandelson, the man they pushed to be Britain’s ambassador to the United States. Neither Mr. McSweeney nor Mr. Allan has any known ties to Mr. Epstein.
CNN worked with Visual Layer, an Israeli software company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze massive sets of images, to review 100,000 photos that the DOJ released related to Epstein, the late convicted sex offender who was accused of abusing hundreds of girls. Those images were among millions of pages of documents and videos released by the DOJ.
These previously unreported findings add to a growing list of botched redactions in the DOJ releases. This includes multiple videos showing women’s faces, documents that named a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, footage showing an undercover FBI agent on the job, and at least one court filing in which sensitive material could be unredacted via copy-and-paste.
CNN reached out to the DOJ on Monday about the problematic images that were still viewable on the government site. After CNN’s inquiry, DOJ uploaded new versions of these images with proper redactions, covering up private data and faces of women and minors.
“Our team is working around the clock to address any victim concerns, additional redactions of personally identifiable information, as well as any files that require further redactions under the Act, to include images of a sexual nature,” a DOJ spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Tuesday.
The transparency law that Congress passed last year requiring the files’ release said the DOJ could withhold or redact images depicting child sexual abuse or any materials that would lead to an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” especially for victims.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in January said that his document team had redacted every woman in images except for Ghislaine Maxwell. They undertook “painstaking” efforts redact “personal identifying information” as well as all “victim information.”
Apparently not painstaking enough. What’s helped keep such images hidden in plain sight is a terrible search engine on the government’s site:
CNN used Visual Layer’s technology to find unredacted items that simpler searches on the Justice Department’s database may have missed. The company’s founder, Danny Bickson, said the Justice Department website has a “basic search engine” that can find text in Epstein’s emails and court filings, “but if you need to search for an image or video, it’s impossible.”
So, Bickson imported the full original DOJ dataset onto his platform, and “it was pretty easy to find, in a few minutes, problematic content,” he said.
So while Trump is ordering the U.S. military to throw up a massive Epstein smokescreen in Iran, people obsessed with the obvious coverup are poring over the documents and making connections that redactions fail to hide. And it is not simply pedophile men, but a stable of medical professionals with flexible ethics that Epstein kept on informal “retainer” to ensure his girls were sexually fit. (Follow gift link.) The amateurs will keep digging. They will ensure that this scandal keeps unfolding for years. Trump is almost powerless to stop them. Almost. But more careers will come crashing down. He’ll be fine with that so long as it’s not his.
If it comes down to it, Trump will throw the world under the bus to save himself.
An old Soviet-era joke goes “There is no truth in Pravda, and no news in Izvestia”.
Pravda (Truth) was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. It now publishes three times per week, mostly online (Wikipedia). Izvestia (News) was the mouthpiece of the government and published by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Izvestia is now Russia’s national newspaper. The wry joke Soviet citizens told acknowledged that theirs was a country awash in official propaganda.
Here in the U.S., Republicans in leadership are also propagandists and lead by a pathological liar at best averse to truth in advertising. Daily Beast’s Michael Daly sees the irony:
What better dodge is there for draft-dodger Donald Trump than to get elected as the “peace president,” promise an end to forever foreign wars, then hype the founding of a “Board of Peace” while contriving to slap his name on the United States Institute of Peace.
The president delivered the opening address at the renamed The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace on Feb. 22.
“What we’re doing is very simple,” Trump said. “Peace. It’s called the Board of Peace, and it’s all about an easy word to say but a hard word to produce. Peace. But we’re going to produce it, and we’ve been doing a really good job.”
Six days later, barely two months since removing the leader of Venezuela in an unsanctioned military strike (leaving the rest of the Nicolás Maduro government in place), the peace president started an illegal war with Iran aided by Israel. Someone with comedy chops needs to write Americans a Pravda/Izvestia joke about that. Watch Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert on Monday night. Maybe one of theirs will catch on.
When Mr. Trump ran for president in 2024, he boasted of starting “no new wars,” and asserted that if Kamala Harris won, “she would get us into a World War III guaranteed,” and send the “sons and daughters” of Americans “to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.”
Barely a year later, Mr. Trump is racing to topple foreign regimes, and is sending American sons and daughters to wage another war in the Middle East. The self-declared “president of PEACE” has chosen to become the president of war after all, unleashing the full power of the U.S. military on Iran with the explicit goal of toppling its government.
Baker sees no explanation in Trump’s statements to date for why Iran and why now the peace president is suddenly the regime-change president.
“One way or the other, his allies were already talking about it being a legacy moment for Mr. Trump,” Baker concludes. “What kind of legacy is not yet clear. But it will not be the one that he originally promised.”
The “truth in advertising president” Trump is not and has never been. He still means to have his Nobel Peace Prize if he has to kill, maim, and destroy his way to one. If the imperial monster has other reasons for starting a war with Iran, he’s not telling. But as always with Donald Trump, follow the money. Who stands to gain?
The Iran attack is a helluva distraction from Epstein files revelations that keep leading to Trump’s doorstep and, when he leaves office, potentially to jail. His mind is an open tweet. The “projection president” has a history of accusing enemies of what’s swirling in his fetid brain.
@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get re-elected.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff believes Trump may not himself grasp where his recent paroxysms of violence lead, except to scratch an immediate itch. He discussed the Iran action on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
Co-host, Joanna Coles reflected on Trump’s early morning video announcing “major combat operations in Iran.”
“He basically gives a potted history of Iran,” Coles noted. “It’s almost as if he’s giving it to himself as much as to anybody else—but reminding people of the American hostages, which is such a Boomer moment. It’s probably perhaps the moment most seared in Boomers’ memories in terms of foreign policy. Jimmy Carter tried to release them, absolute disaster. Reagan swings into power and immediately they’re released.”
She added, “I wonder if that’s at the back of Donald Trump’s head, too.”
“There’s always a mishmash of factual, semi-factual, and historical references that he doesn’t quite understand and that he skimmed over,” Wolff said.
But Epic Fury, amirite? How big-swinging-dick is that? Made for TV by a made-for-TV president.
The familiar pool of Trump critics are aghast: “former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, far-right figure Alex Jones,” manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. Thomas Massie.
I am opposed to this War.
This is not “America First.”
When Congress reconvenes, I will work with @RepRoKhanna to force a Congressional vote on war with Iran.
The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war.
Trump’s base voters have a history of saying, “Yes, sir, how high?” when Trump demands that they pivot like a windsock to his whims. Will they this time? Have they finally realized that they’ve been conned? Pray that this action will blow up in Trump’s face (with as few casualties as possible) by November and not in ours.
