BANNON: We either own 2019 or it will surely own us
EPSTEIN: Im back in the f and b biz only
BANNON: F and B director
EPSTEIN: No it does not stand for f*ck and bl*w
EPSTEIN: Spoke to my dems. This weekend. Boy are emotions running high
BANNON: Going to blow him up right our of the box– WH has zero plan to punch back– Fort Apache with no cavalry enroute
EPSTEIN: And no soldiers in the fort. He really is borderline. Not sure what he may do.
BANNON: I think it’s beyond borderline — 25 amendment
Now he ‘s telling everyone that Trump is running for a third term and he is for it.
Bannon is something else. I want to see the movie made about him. Jesse Plemons is the guy to play him. He’ll be about the right age when Bannon is finally out of the picture.
If Joe Rogan is any indication, February 2026 may go down as the month that the Epstein files saga cemented itself as a lasting political liability for President Donald Trump and Republicans. The podcaster has spent the lastweek discussing the disjointed release of files by the Department of Justice, analyzing emails and redactions, and concluding that a myriad of conspiracies might actually be true.
And what is he saying? That the slow-walked and highly censored presentation of information by the Trump administration is “the gaslightiest gaslighting shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” that “none of this is good for this administration,” and that “this is not a hoax…if you’re not protecting victims…then who are you protecting?”
Rogan is representative of a large swath of voters who delivered Trump his 2024 victory: distrustful, low-propensity, and anti-system voters. And what he and other spokespeople for this suspicious segment of America — Tim Dillon, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz — are saying matters: it suggests that these anti-system voters, who were once thought to be a permanent part of the new GOP coalition, are nothing of the sort.
Those voters tend to skew politically moderate, independent, and, perhaps most importantly, young. They don’t tend to follow the news or know too much about Trump or politics. They get informed through nontraditional avenues like podcasts and social media, and aren’t wed to a political party or identity.
In 2024, all of this created an opportunity for the Trump campaign — to promise to release the so-called Epstein files. But what these Americans are hearing and thinking now is very different. They feel like they are being lied to again, being gaslit, and seeing another cover-up happen in real time.
I will hold my tongue about the extreme naivete of these people. If they are having their minds opened by Trump and the GOP’s obvious cover-up, that’s all to the good. The fact that most of them (not Rogan who’s almost 60!) have only vaguely paid attention to politics before mitigates in their favor. Gotta live and learn. Hopefully this lesson will stick.
“There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and political consultant with 40 years of experience, speaking with Politico Monday.
“And it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term. Joe Biden’s fundamental message in 2020 was to restore normalcy, and that seemed to be persuasive to enough people to get him elected.”
Indeed, many have described Trump’s second stint in the White House as “chaotic,” with its unpredictability only increasing in recent months.
For instance, the Trump administration has increasingly pivoted from its previous positions. Trump has backtracked on his bid to acquire Greenland, the administration announced plans to end its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, and Trump’s recent threat towards Canada over a bridge came and went with no follow-through.
That chaos, Ayres argued, had largely been responsible for bringing Trump’s approval ratings to “his lowest point in the second term.” As of Friday, a new AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval rating sits at 36%, a figure that Ayres warned could spell doom for the Republican Party this fall.
The problem is that the chaos is intentional and even if it wasn’t Trump doesn’t know how to operate any differently because he still doesn’t know how to do the job. It’s all flash and PR and hurtling headlong from one thing to the other. They call it “shock and awe” but that’s just another word for chaos. And people are tired of it.
It’s been a rough six years since the pandemic. People were severely traumatized and Biden suffered from the hangover. Too many people thought that Trump would magically restore us to the time before it happened and instead he’s made it worse.
THAT is what’s happening in our society. It isn’t just the economy although that’s key. It’s the fact that we just keep getting battered, over and over and people are starting realize who is at fault for most of it. It’s not just the last six years. It’s the last decade — ever since that moment when Orange Julius Caesar came down that escalator and took a wrecking ball to America.
On Wednesday America was subjected to a monumentally outrageous performance by one of the most powerful people in the federal government — and for once it wasn’t by Donald Trump. Pam Bondi was called to Capitol Hill to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, and she chose to behave like a bratty schoolgirl having a temper tantrum in the principal’s office. If the stakes weren’t so high, it would have been almost comical to see an adult behave so childishly in such a formal setting. As it was, the attorney general embarrassed herself, the Justice Department and the country with the insulting, irrational attitude she apparently adopted to impress her boss and mentor, who has worked to shatter the rule of law.
The next Democratic-appointed attorney general will have a mess to confront and clean up. They will need their ethical, intellectual and political wits about them to craft reforms and regulations, and to restore a sense of confidence in the department’s independence. But they can also look to the not-too-distant past for inspiration.
There was a time when Americans considered the attorney general to be one of the most distinguished, consequential appointments in government. Occupants of the office were assumed to be people of high integrity and good character, qualities considered necessary to remind Americans of the commitment to dispense justice fairly and impartially.
Of course this was not always the case. The office of the attorney general is a political position tasked with carrying out the priorities of the president, and that may inevitably lead to at least the appearance of partisanship. It also opens the door to abuse of power by a president inclined to go there.
Richard Nixon’s behavior during Watergate brought those prospects into clear focus. The president attempted to use the Justice Department to block investigations into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as many other abuses that slowly came to light as the scandal unfolded. Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed to head the investigation, prompted Attorney General Elliot Richardson to resign, followed swiftly by Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, crystallized for the public the corruption at the core of Nixon’s presidency.
After Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Congress realized that reforms were needed to insulate the Justice Department from political pressure by the White House. Years of congressional investigations and in-depth reporting had made the country aware of massive abuses of power by the executive branch. J. Edgar Hoover, who led the FBI for 48 years, had established a personal fiefdom devoted to consolidating power and pursuing his own personal obsessions, sometimes with blackmail and coercion. The intelligence community was implicated as well, along with Nixon’s exploitation of the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies for partisan and personal gain.
Advertisement:he Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which was passed by Congress to, among other provisions, prevent conflicts of interest and create the Office of the Independent Counsel, a position designed to be insulated from political pressure by the president. (The independent counsel statute was allowed to expire 20 years later following the debacle that was the Starr Investigation in the late 1990s.)
Presidents Gerald Ford and his successor Jimmy Carter took up the mantle of reform, instituting new norms and rules designed to rein in an out-of-control presidency. Edward H. Levi, a respected legal scholar who served as Ford’s attorney general, began working to mend the department from within, which included limiting the scope and power of the FBI. His successor Griffin Bell, who served under Carter, came up with the idea of making the Justice Department a “neutral zone,” which was designed to formalize the idea that the White House would not directly involve itself in any law enforcement decisions. This led to new oversight mechanisms, including the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Personal Responsibility, to keep the abuses in check. Carter’s administration instituted the most sweeping reforms of the civil service since 1883’s Pendleton Act, which replaced the spoils system and created a professional, merit-based system.
According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, with the exception of the Independent Counsel Act and the War Powers Resolution — legislation from 1973 that required congressional authorization for military intervention — those reforms held up quite well, even as various presidents attempted to push the envelope.
In retrospect, George H.W. Bush’s pardons of Iran-Contra participants was an early attempt by the executive branch to circumvent the post-Watergate reforms. But it wasn’t until the election of Donald Trump that the full scope of the reforms’ inadequacies in the hands of a real tyrant became obvious. Having had no ethical boundaries in his business and personal life, he saw no purpose in observing any such guidelines in government.
One of Trump’s first scandalous acts as president was firing James Comey. The FBI director ran afoul of Trump early on when he refused to publicly state that the president was not under investigation in the Russia probe or to let his newly-named National Security Adviser Michael Flynn off the hook for lying to the bureau. Since then, Trump has never looked back in treating the norms and rules established after Watergate as rubbish. He would simply ask if he had the power to do something and that would be all he needed to know, ethics and traditions be damned.
In his second term, Trump hasn’t even bothered to ask that question. He simply does what he wants, and if the courts tell him he can’t, only then might he consider pulling back. When it comes to Bondi’s Justice Department and Kash Patel’s FBI, the results are clear. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye laid out in detail, the department is being decimated from top to bottom. The brain drain is overwhelming, with hundreds of career prosecutors being fired or leaving voluntarily; they are being replaced by unqualified lackeys and loyalists.
The wreckage left behind is what will await the next Democratic attorney general who, with an equal commitment from Congress, will have no choice but to reform the entire department from the bottom up. At the end of Trump’s first term, the New York Times’ Peter Baker reported that Goldsmith and former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer created a bipartisan blueprint for what such a rebuilding would require. They proposed to restrict the president’s pardon power and private business interests, enhance protections for journalists and give more powers to future special counsels among other things.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and others in the Congress have similarly drawn up plans to overhaul the ethics rules and create various mechanisms to prevent the gross abuses of power that Trump and his loyalists are practicing. According to Baker, these would include “limits on a president’s authority to use declarations of national emergencies to take unilateral action; more protections for inspectors general and whistle-blowers; and an accelerated process to resolve disputes over congressional subpoenas.”
With a Supreme Court determined to give presidents more power rather than less, even in light of Trump’s absolute monarchical power grab, it remains to be seen whether any of these restraints will come to fruition. Democrats will have to do everything in their power, including such bold acts as expanding the high court, to make it work. If they don’t, the damage done by Trump will be permanent.
Once they have seen the door is open to abuse, future tyrants will eagerly walk through it — and there are plenty more waiting in the wings and willing to take advantage of what Trump has wrought.
I rarely ask people to sign petitions but this one is worthwhile — on the merits and on the politics:
The editors of In These Times are joining the editors of The Nation in formally nominating the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
Please sign this petition right away to join us in amplifying that nomination and demonstrating mass public support.
In recent months, the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of armed federal agents to the Twin Cities and indiscriminate raids under “Operation Metro Surge” have brought horrific state violence to Minnesota’s streets. Local residents, ICU nurse Alex Pretti and mother, Renée Nicole Good, were murdered by federal officers, sparking outrage and accelerating a movement of resistance across Minneapolis and beyond.
In the face of these attacks, the people of Minneapolis have stood their ground with nonviolent protest, mutual aid, and solidarity, confronting fear and authoritarianism with dignity and resolve. Thousands marched in freezing temperatures; communities have organized legal observers, delivered groceries to those in hiding, and whistled warnings in demand for human rights and constitutional freedoms.
Also this week, his department’s assault on medical research has led Moderna to withdraw from MRNA stage three trials for a whole range of diseases because it’s pointless. And the FDA decided not to approve the new flu vaccine.
But not to worry. They’re telling us all to drink beef tallow to be healthy again so we won’t need those vaccines anyway.
Aleksei A. Navalny was most likely poisoned by a toxin found in a South American frog, five European countries said on Saturday, making the most concrete Western accusation yet that Russia’s leading opposition figure was murdered by his government in an Arctic prison two years ago.
Samples taken from Mr. Navalny’s body showed the presence of a toxic substance, epibatidine, according to a statement released by the foreign ministries of Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
“Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia,” the statement read.
“Only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin against Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in Russia,” it read.
Remember Viktor Yuschenko? They poisoned him with Dioxin:
Before and after
Trump loves to get revenge on his enemies but he’s a piker compared to Putin. (I’m sure he wishes he could get away with what Vlad gets away with but then he’d have to pretend that he didn’t do it and that’s just no fun.)
Remember that Trump thinks the world of Putin — the man who does that to his political enemies. He’s a monster and our president eagerly sucks up to him every chance he gets.
“The conclave that elected Pope Leo was more rigged against Donald Trump than the 2020 presidential election.” — Steve Bannon pic.twitter.com/y1tiZBkh4q
He didn’t like Pope Francis either. Get a load of this excerpt from the Vanity Fair article about Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein’s very close friendship, which is a real mind-blower:
In November 2018, as Bannon was hatching a plot to export MAGA-flavored nationalism abroad after his success storming Washington with Trump, Epstein suggested he build his campaign around a media company, not an NGO. The latter would afford less privacy and invite more scrutiny. “Press. Private. Protected,” Epstein told Bannon. “Think of it as a battle plan. You have made great strides. Forged ahead. [At] some time you stop and build a fort to protect your gains.”
Within a year, Bannon launched War Room, a live podcast beamed out daily from a basement studio near Capitol Hill. He styled himself as a general barking orders to the shock troops of the MAGA movement. The extent to which Epstein inspired the launch of War Room, which The Washington Post once described as “a far‐right Meet the Press,” is unclear, and Bannon hardly mentions his old friend anymore. The crimes of Epstein—who a medical examiner determined died by suicide as he awaited trial—have been a fixation of Trump’s base for years, yet these days they barely merit a mention on War Room.
One possible reason for that came into focus last year as Trump’s Justice Department, under pressure from Congress, began to dump out millions of documents from their cache of files related to the Epstein case. These documents further illuminated the extent of the friendship between Bannon and Epstein, whose private exchanges are jocular, even affectionate at times.
Epstein sent Bannon caring messages about his health and offered him stays at his properties and trips on his plane. After organizing a flight for Bannon, Epstein joked that he was “the most highly paid travel agent in history,” and added: “Massages. Not included.” In one text from 2018, Bannon actually messaged Epstein, “You up???” In another, he told Epstein that a Fox Business anchor who had him on her show was “so wet” during their interview. When prosecutors upheld Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, the two celebrated: “Dude!!!!!!” Bannon messaged. “Tell me this is real.” They seemed to relish in confiding in each other about Trump’s struggles in office, including in one exchange where Bannon called Trump “stupid” and another where he mocked him as a “stable genius.” Epstein once messaged Bannon, “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
And yet Bannon remains in very good graces with the MAGA set. In fact, he’s one of their most respected intellectual strategists.
I love this part:
For Bannon, Epstein was a conduit to an international network of elites. For Epstein, Bannon offered insight into Trump, an old friend he remained fascinated by. “They were both using each other,” the source who knows both men explained. “Jeffrey would introduce people together a lot, as a way of making himself useful for his patrons.” (The files also demonstrate that despite Bannon’s frequent diatribes against “the ruling class,” he remains a Barbour-clad member of the cosmopolitan elite himself. This is a man who stays at The Pierre when he visits New York and Le Bristol when he’s in Paris. His quest to spread populist nationalism across the globe was aided by private jet travel. In one exchange, eager to get to Paris from Rome, Bannon asks Epstein: “Is it possible to get your plane here to collect me[?]”)
FFS…
As for the Pope, Bannon and Epstein apparently plotted against Pope Francis:
Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to Trump, told Epstein that he wished to “take down” the leader of the Catholic Church. In June 2019, Bannon wrote to Epstein: “Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”
In the text exchange, Bannon references the book In the Closet of the Vatican, which exposed much of the secrecy and hypocrisy at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. Another text exchange from April 2019 shows Epstein emailing himself “in the closet of the vatican.” He then sent Bannon an article titled “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose.” Bannon responded: “Easy choice.”
Rome and the Vatican were once a very important priority for Bannon. In 2014, the former Trump adviser established a Rome bureau while he was running the right-wing outlet Breitbart News. He also wanted to set up a “gladiator school” for Judeo-Christian political training near the city. Those plans were blocked by the Italian government in 2021; Bannon reportedly was furious.
If you get the chance to read the Vanity Fair article it’s a really great distillation of all the evidence that’s come out about the Bannon Epstein friendship. He was talking to him and making plans to hang out all the way up until the day he was arrested in 2019.
And it’s all good in Trump world. No big deal at all.
Remember how Donald Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal and then four years later bombed their alleged nuclear program and Trump said it was “completely and totally obliterated? ”
President Trump’s top advisors reportedly warned him that making a deal with Iran on its nuclear program is historically “difficult to impossible.”
Trump asked special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner what the chances were of reaching an agreement with Tehran, according to a senior US official, Israel’s Channel 12’s Barak Ravid said on Telegram Saturday.
The pair told the president history shows the West has never been able to strike a positive deal with the Islamic Republic leaders, but that they would continue to “take a tough line” during negotiations, Ravid reported.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday embraced potential regime change in Iran and declared that “tremendous power” will soon be in the Middle East, as the Pentagon sent a second aircraft carrier to the region.
[…]
Asked if he wanted regime change in Iran, Trump responded that it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” He declined to share who he wanted to take over Iran, but said “there are people…For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” Trump said after a military event at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “In the meantime, we’ve lost a lot of lives while they talk. Legs blown off, arms blown off, faces blown off. We’ve been going on for a long time.”
Trump has threatened strikes on Iran if no agreement is reached, while Tehran has vowed to retaliate, stoking fears of a wider war as the U.S. amasses forces in the Middle East. The U.S. targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in strikes last year. When asked what was left to be targeted at the nuclear sites, Trump said the “dust.” He added: “If we do it, that would be the least of the mission, but we probably grab whatever is left.”
[…]
The Gerald R. Ford, the United States’ newest and the world’s largest carrier, has been operating in the Caribbean with its escort ships and took part in operations in Venezuela earlier this year. Asked earlier on Friday why a second aircraft carrier was headed to the Middle East, Trump said: “In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it … if we need it, we’ll have it ready.”
He’s really working that Nobel Prize Committee, isn’t he?
Hundreds of judges across the nation have ruled over 4,400 times that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement arm is detaining people unlawfully, according to a new Reuters review of court documents. And that’s just since October.
The Trump administration’s immense increase in detainments rests, in part, on their decision to detain people while their immigration cases are moving through the system—a departure from previous administrations’ interpretation of immigration law. This has led to a steep increase in immigrants petitioning the courts to be released, as Reuters reports, and the thousands of rulings finding that these prolonged detainments were unlawful.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, told Reuters that the increase in lawsuits came as “no surprise” because “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.” But not all of the judges challenging the Trump administration’s mass deportation mechanism were appointed by Democrats.
It’s always rigged when it goes against them. The greateest whiners in world history.
