Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

There’s just no end to the Epstein liars. We knew Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick met with Epstein on the island with his wife, children and nannies (which is gross in itself) but there are even more lies:

Lutnick has had a big problem since the trove was released last month. He previously insisted he and his wife cut ties with Epstein in 2005, after they moved next door to Epstein’s mansion in New York City. In an interview last year, Lutnick said that Epstein had given them an unsettling tour of his home and that he vowed he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.

But the files showed that Lutnick and his family visited Epstein on his private island in 2012, that Epstein in 2017 donated $50,000 to a charity dinner honoring Lutnick, and that the following year the two communicated about countering an expansion of a neighboring museum.

Earlier this month, CBS News revealed more on their connection by reporting that Lutnick and Epstein each signed a contract in 2012—four years after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes—to invest in a digital ad technology company called AdFin Solutions Inc. The deal was dated just five days after Lutnick and his family visited Epstein on his private island. Lutnick signed on behalf of a limited liability company controlled by Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm where he served as CEO.

Lutnick’s camp has tried to minimize his involvement with Epstein through their shared investment in AdFin. A spokesperson for the Commerce Department told CBS News, “Secretary Lutnick had limited interactions with Mr. Epstein in the presence of his wife and has never been accused of wrongdoing.” And a source close to Lutnick told the network that Cantor was “a small minority investor” in the venture. This source added that at “the time of doing the deal, as a minority investor, Mr. Lutnick would not have any knowledge of who the other investors were.”  

That is misleading. Emails and documents in the massive Epstein release not yet reported reveal that Lutnick went on to become a prominent figure in AdFin—not merely a minority investor—and that he and his company were financially interconnected with Epstein in the venture for at least six years. They also show that Cantor essentially took over AdFin, as Epstein played a role as an investor in the struggling firm. It is highly improbable that Lutnick did not know Epstein was a key shareholder.

Come on:

An email exchange from May 28, 2018, shows “HWL” (Lutnick’s middle name is William) discussing AdFin with Epstein—an apparent sign that Lutnick was aware of Epstein’s involvement in the company and that he maintained a business relationship with Epstein far longer than he has acknowledged.

In this exchange, the two discussed AdFin’s status. Epstein asked HWL, “what do you think the prospects for adfin are?” In an email marked “confidential” and “the sole property of Cantor Fitzgerald LP and its affiliates,” HWL replied, “Producing revenue finally. This is their year. Next 12 months they need to become economically self sufficient.

This is long after everyone knew that Epstein was a criminal and even longer since Lutnick supposedly was so offended about seeing the massage table in the middle of the room at Epstein’s house (which was next door to his own) that he vowed to never speak to him again.

The British government is arresting people for similar behaviors. Lutnick remains by Trump’s side, completely insulated from scrutiny along with dozens of others, including the president himself.

But then, consider this:

The Department of Justice spoke four separate times to a woman who credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein—but most accusations against the president appear to have been removed from the government’s documents on the alleged sex trafficker.

A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens. When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984.

Yet last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.

Justice Department records indicate that the FBI spoke to this woman not once but at least four separate times, according to independent journalists Roger Sollenberger and Nina Burleigh. Now those records appear to have been removed from public viewing—despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires all documents relating to the alleged sex trafficker to be made public.

Sollenberger discovered a record of four separate interviews, which took place in the summer of 2019, in a separate database of documents downloaded from the government’s public files on Epstein. That document indicated that the first of the four interviews was conducted on July 24, 2019, and the last conducted on October 16, 2019. That document was given to Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers as part of her trial, though the specific allegations predated Maxwell’s involvement with Epstein, Sollenberger wrote.

The woman’s first interview was entered into the FBI’s case files on August 9, 2019, just one day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. FBI agents typically have a deadline of five working days to file interview write-ups, indicating an abnormal 16-day gap, Sollenberger noted.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along …

I don’t think anyone is surprised by this. She’s angling for the Supreme Court slot when Alito or Thomas retire (which will probably be soon.)

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report describing President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and allegations that he obstructed government efforts to reclaim them.

Cannon lit into Smith for a “brazen stratagem”: compiling the detailed report even after she ruled in July 2024 his appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional and dismissed the case against Trump and two co-defendants. The Justice Department had appealed Cannon’s decision but dropped the case altogether after Trump’s election.

“Special Counsel Smith and his team went ahead for months, undeterred, preparing [the classified documents report] using discovery collected in connection with this proceeding and expending government funds in the process,” Cannon wrote in a 15-page ruling issued Monday. “To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it.”

The Trump-appointed judge said releasing the report now would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice” and amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never reached a jury. It could also risk revealing information protected by attorney-client privilege and grand jury secrecy, she said.

“While it is true that former special counsels have released final reports at the conclusion of their work,” Cannon wrote, “it appears they have done so either after electing not to bring charges at all or after adjudications of guilt by plea or trial. The Court strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt.”

Oh please. Everyone knows she had her thumb on the scale of that case and she will forever be known as Trump’s lackey.

It’s really a shame that we haven’t been able to see that report because it is the most damning of the cases. Trump stole documents and blabbed about classified intelligence to anyone who would listen. We know this for a fact. It would have been nice to see the whole thing put down in one place for posterity if nothing else.

I would imagine this report will be hidden in the same place they hid the torture report during the Obama administration. Someday they will come out and I have no doubt they will take your breath away.

They are his one big idea

I think what’s most alarming about this is how he’s got so many people who absolutely know it’s idiotic going along with it. Even CEOs, investment bankers and economists have kowtowed to this daft idea which is just astonishing.

Now that the Supremes have struck down his tariffs regime you might think that he would at least give lip service to going to Congress as the majority opinion clearly indicated that he must do. But no. That would require that he change and he just doesn’t do that.

CNN’s Steven Collinson:

True to his philosophy of never accepting a defeat, he’s already battling back after the Supreme Court declared his exercise of emergency trade war powers unlawful. Ahead of his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump is vowing to avenge the most damaging loss of his second term by promising even higher duties on imports. Many Republicans, however, would prefer a course correction as midterm elections loom.

The president’s defiance brings great political risks for him and his party, and new uncertainties for an uneven economy. It is also already opening a new lane for Democratic attacks. But he’s still convinced tariffs will unlock booming prosperity, even if a likelier outcome is a heavier affordability burden on millions of American voters.

“What the Supreme Court said is that the president cannot use the IEEPA, the Emergency Economic Powers Act, to do this,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. “The president does have other authorities.”

[…]

Trump will press on for two main reasons.

First, he believes in tariffs with evangelical intensity. His faith in them is so intense it blanks out any evidence they are a tax on consumers or that they don’t work. He regards globalization’s gutting of industrial heartlands where he won millions of votes as vindication of protectionist views he’s held since the 1980s.

“I have very effectively utilized tariffs over the past year to make America great again,” the president said Friday, ignoring new data that shows an unmoving annual trade deficit and declining manufacturing jobs.

The second reason for Trump’s refusal to bend is that tariffs are a means to his ultimate ends of unfettered presidential authority and rejection of a constitutional system that by design shares power across government. This was highlighted by the most revealing comment from Trump’s fulminating press conference Friday following the court’s decision, when he was asked why he didn’t just work with Congress to pass new tariffs.

“I don’t have to. I have the right to do tariffs,” he said.

Yes, he’s five years old.

He is ranting and raving as usual but unless he decides to just openly defy the Court’s ruling (which still might happen) he has had his sails trimmed a bit:

Trump has used tariffs more expansively than any modern president, in a way that stretches far beyond economic policy. If a foreign nation angers him, it’s punished — as with Brazil, which got a 50% tariff slap for investigating his friend former President Jair Bolsonaro over alleged election-meddling. If a world leader shows insufficient deference, their nation pays the price. Trump has explained, for example, that he hiked tariffs on Switzerland after taking exception to how its leader “talked to us” — apparently referring to former President Karin Keller-Sutter.

But showing such muscle will be harder going forward.

Alternative powers Trump now plans to use to maintain tariffs contain compliance requirements and more limited authorities that may mean he can’t use levies as a personal thermostat to crank up heat according to his whim.

Unfortunately, it may be that his answer to that is to use the military instead of tariffs to threaten those he thinks have disrespected him. He’s already done that to some extent (at least threat of it, as with Greenland.) For now he’s going to be a tiny bit constrained by the other tariff authorities. It’s better than nothing.

Trump did a 3 minute comedy set with Team USA after they won the gold medal.

“I’ve got to tell you I have to also invite the women’s team as well…or I’d be impeached”

pic.twitter.com/OqNBZ1O1VX

— Jack Mac (@JackMac) February 23, 2026

That happened when the FBI Director, spending millions to attend the game and then guzzling beer with the players in the locker room, called the president. They all thought his quip about those loser hockey bitches — who also won a gold medal — was just hilarious. The woman’s hockey team should refuse to attend.

There is literally nothing these people do that that doesn’t make me throw up a little bit.

Update —

Hooray!!!

The U.S. women’s hockey team said it is declining President Donald Trump’s invitation to attend his State of the Union address, a day after the president jokingly told the U.S. men’s hockey team that he would be impeached if he didn’t also invite the women’s team.

They said they had previous commitments but I think we know what really happened here.

Donald Trump went down to Georgia last week to tout the economy to voters in former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. But there was really only one thing he wanted to discuss. While touring a steel company and stopping in at a restaurant, the president spent most of his time talking about the FBI raid on the Fulton County election offices, his tiresome claims of voter fraud and his new onerous voter identification plans. In other words, it was a typical Trump appearance. 

His incessant demands to revisit the 2020 election means he will go down in history as the man who refused to accept his loss and inspired an insurrection. Trump will forever be known as the president who was intent on sowing doubts about the integrity of America’s elections — despite a total lack of evidence and dozens of investigations and judicial findings. When all is said and done, this may be his greatest legacy. 

But as much as Trump has taken these cries of voter fraud and rigged elections to an extreme, it is not one of his narcissistic innovations. He merely took what has long been conservative orthodoxy and put his own deceitful spin on it. Decades before he came along, the right was pushing the voter fraud myth — and using it as an excuse to suppress the vote.

The South’s discriminatory practices during Jim Crow were justified as fraud prevention. Conservatives claimed that unless a poll tax was instituted, poor people would sell their votes. They believed that Black people, regarded as intellectually and morally inferior, were especially likely to do so. Similarly, some “reformers” in Northern cities went to great lengths to make it difficult for immigrant populations to vote, creating barriers to registration and constantly changing the rules, all in the name of stopping so-called fraud. States openly gerrymandered districts in a way to deny Black people representation and created “whites-only” partisan primaries.

But there was never any real evidence of voter fraud, according to historian Alexander Keyssar. In “The Right To Vote: The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States,” he details how the accusation was simply raised as a method to suppress the votes of groups the people in power wished to disenfranchise and disempower. The desire was a precaution — a reflexive response to the idea that the votes of the poor, along with racial and ethnic minorities, might overwhelm the elite and, once in power, they would use the government to seize their property. This was a key part of the systemic strategy in the Jim Crow South to ensure Black Americans retained their second-class status throughout society — a system that remained in place at least until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally guaranteed their right to vote. 

The Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent switch of Black voters’ partisan loyalty from the GOP to the Democratic Party led to the Southern Strategy, in which the Republicans exploited racism as an electoral game plan by pandering to the Southern white voter backlash. The strategy’s blueprint formed the basis of modern conservatism’s war on voting rights that has persisted to this day. 

Years ago, conservative activist Paul Weyrich put it plainly at an evangelical gathering. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said, “as a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” From that point on, every attempt to make it easier to vote and open up the franchise was met with fierce resistance. 

President Jimmy Carter’s proposals for Election Day registration, public financing and abolition of the Electoral College were met with shrieks of horror by GOP activists, who labeled the plan “Fraud and Carter’s Voter Registration Scheme.” The legislation was never taken up by Congress. Ten years later, the motor-voter legislation, which allowed people to register when they renewed their driver’s licenses and car registration, was derided as an open door to corrupting the voting rolls; it was vetoed by George H.W. Bush before finally becoming law under Bill Clinton. After the voting age was lowered to 18, states with GOP legislative majorities created onerous rules for college students designed to keep those younger citizens from voting. But in 2000, when the election of George W. Bush turned on a tiny margin of 537 votes in Florida, Republicans went into overdrive, recognizing that as the country was becoming increasingly polarized they could manipulate rules to ensure themselves an advantage. 

The party homed in on one particular form of exceptionally rare voter fraud: voter impersonation. As Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center for Justice pointed out, the potential cost for an individual to impersonate someone at the polls is very high, while the return to a particular candidate is very low — how much can one vote really matter? Throw in the idea of undocumented immigrants committing this fraud and you can see why it’s so absurd. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Nonetheless, Bush’s attorney general John Ashcroft pursued dozens of investigations into voter fraud, as did Republican attorneys general across the country, and they came up with nothing. 

The GOP’s strategy with crying “voter fraud” has always been to get their base motivated. By the time Donald Trump came on the scene in 2015, his advisers had schooled him on all the right-wing tropes, and illegal immigration and voter fraud were at the top of the list. As the man who had put birtherism — the lie suggesting that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and had thus illegally run for president — on the map, he was a perfect messenger. 

Even before Election Day in 2016, Trump was claiming that the election was rigged and that he would only accept the results if he won. As president, he convened a voter fraud commission to prove that he had not just won the electoral vote but the popular vote as well. Ten years later, he continues to promote that lie as truth. Month in advance of the 2020 election, he teed up the false notion that mail-in votes were fraudulent. We know the rest. 

Now we are awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could see the Voting Rights Act completely gutted if the conservative justices, as is expected, decide in favor of the state. This is a long-held dream for the American right — and for Chief Justice John Roberts, who served as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration arguing against the act.

As for Donald Trump, he is surely one of the sorest losers in history; his fragile psyche cannot accept defeat. But he had over a century of help with his lies about voter fraud. Conservatives laid the groundwork — and he took it to the next level. 

Salon

Not what they legislate

The right wing in this country believes liberals behave as underhandedly as they do so long as they can get away with it. So they legislate to prevent the left from getting away with what we’re not doing but they would do in our shoes. It’s called projection. Clear?

Let Kyle Whitmire explain it:

Republicans says they believe in voter ID, but when one of their own got caught in the snare, what happened? Donald Trump endorsed him. I give you the curious case of John Wahl. pic.twitter.com/pTQEaf398D

— Kyle Whitmire (@WarOnDumb) February 21, 2026

They’re like “teetotaling” Southern Baptists who are in fact closet alcoholics.

They’re like law-and-order types who secretly take and sell drugs.

They’re like gay-hating fanatics who are … you know.

They’re like “principled” fiscal conservatives who spend like drunken sailors.

And they don’t even know what to spend it on.

But you can bet good money that they have plans for whom to spend it with.

The great betrayal

Behold:

In Brooklyn Park, an officer in Minnesota was stopped as she passed ICE while going down the roadway.

ICE Agents boxed her in and asked for her paperwork which as she’s a U.S. citizen, she clearly would not have it on her.

When she became concerned at the way she was being treated, she began to record the incident.

The phone was knocked out of her hand to prevent her from recording it.

The officers had their guns drawn. After the officer became so concerned, they were asked to identify themselves in order to de-escalate the situation.

The agents got in their cars and left with no apologies.

“ I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident. In fact, many of the chiefs standing behind me have similar incidents with their off-duty officers.

If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think at how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. It has to stop.

This behavior erodes the trust that these police chiefs have worked tirelessly for the past 5 years and theoretically for the last 60 years to stop this behavior from happening,”

https://twitter.com/Dede_Watson/status/2025509779867640061?s=20

More responsible police chiefs must step up and speak out.

But not this guy. He’s done.

🚨 BREAKING: Quakertown, PA Police Chief Scott McElree was caught on video putting a teenage girl in a chokehold, while in plainclothes and not in uniform, during an anti-ICE protest.

Her “crime”? Exercising free speech.

Local journalists identified him through photos, videos,… pic.twitter.com/d6MFSn3u4d

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) February 21, 2026

The Bucks County district attorney is investigating this clown (h/t SO):

“From what we could see, the students were just on the sidewalk,” one witness said. “From our angle, a man in a brown jacket lunges towards a group of students, grabbing one of them, and then the students start hitting the man in the brown jacket.”

Both witnesses provided videos to WHYY News that they took from inside the restaurant that show a man in a light-brown jacket on the street struggling with a group of people who appear to be students.

“Oh my god, it’s a grown man and a kid,” someone in the restaurant can be heard saying. “Where are the police?”

The man then places a person, who appears to be a female student, in a chokehold.

The Cincinnati Hospital Chaplin that was released after 73 days in ICE detention is speaking out and saying that he was legal from Day one and has no criminal record especially one with 34 felonies! He said most of the ones detained have no criminal record especially! pic.twitter.com/FGPogeI6Q5

— Suzie rizzio (@Suzierizzo1) February 21, 2026

We are in Anne Frank territory. The United States of America is abusing and jailing its own citizens, legal residents, and innocent tourists as well as humiliating itself before the world.

The only thing American about the thugs Trump’s employed is their birth certificates. They’ve betrayed everything else American about them. That goes for him and his MAGA cabinet and staff as well.

I wish I could share this whole piece by JV Last on what he found on the ground in Minneapolis but you’ll have to subscribe to the Bulwark. (The site is very good, so if you have the means I recommend it.) I can share this one excerpt however:

Nearly every person I spoke to in Minnesota told me about a web of clandestine services that have sprung up to support neighbors targeted by the government.

The Twin Cities have tens of thousands of residents who cannot leave their homes for fear of being abducted by DHS. These people cannot go to work. They cannot shop for groceries. They cannot go to doctors’ appointments. Many of them cannot send their children to school.

Various civic groups have self-organized to help them. Food banks deliver groceries. People donate money to pay rent. Doctors finish their shifts and then make house calls. The governor told us about a group of doulas who make secret home visits to deliver babies to mothers who cannot go to a hospital, because DHS agents view health care facilities as abduction traps.

Think about that: You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth.

This is not a hypothetical. It is your lived reality. It is America.

It’s both a beautiful and a horrific thing all at once. That we have to have a clandestine, underground railroad in 2026 in a major American city is almost too much to absorb.

The piece goes on about how ICE is adapting its tactics to the resistance and how the resistance is doing the same. It’s war whether we want to admit it or not.

This piece in the NY Times by Ian Buruma discusses how the Germans adapted to the horrors all around them and he surmises that their apparently ability to carry on with everyday life was because people kept thinking it was just temporary and everything would return to normal any day. He writes:

This is the problem when the destruction of moral norms and the rule of law is incremental. Germans should have known that politics would take a criminal turn as soon as Hitler and his brutal paladins grabbed total state power in August 1934. The racial laws of 1935 robbed Jews of their civil rights. But Jews made up less than 1 percent of the German population. So most people could live with the racial laws. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and grabbed a chunk of Czechoslovakia. OK. Perhaps that would satisfy the Führer’s imperial lust. He surely wouldn’t go any further.

By September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, it was clearly too late for normal life to resume. But even then, many Germans believed that Britain and France would not resist. Surely, the war would soon be over. Erich Alenfeld, a Jewish banker married to a Gentile wife, wrote a letter to Goering asking to serve in the invading army. After all, he was still a German patriot. He never received an answer.

And so life continued. People kept hoping that the next act of war and assault on decency would be the final one and the nightmare would finally end. Even in 1945, when terrifying Soviet artillery was within earshot and much of Berlin lay in ruins, there was still hope that wonder weapons — fearsome missiles that would destroy and demoralize London or machines that would pull Allied bombers from the skies like giant magnets — would turn things around.

I worry that we are on that sort of delusional merry-go-round. We really need to fight the temptation.

Buruma says that this comes from the natural human default to hope. And that’s important. We can’t do without it. But as he also says, we can’t let that cloud reality. He concludes:

What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal.

But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.

How do we prepare for the worst? I’m not at all sure I know what that looks like. I just know it will be bad.

That’s an awful lot of retirements. Not that I particularly blame them. Politics is a sewer right now and anyone can be forgiven for not wanting to be a part of it. Of course there are more than few who are probably just cashing in and other have announced for other offices. But I suspect that plenty of them just want out.

Like no time in recent memory, lawmakers are setting their sights anywhere but Capitol Hill — setting the stage for crucial midterm elections that will feature fewer incumbents than usual and ensure more fresh faces in Congress next year.

As of late February, 68 Senate and House members have said they will not seek reelection. An unprecedented 31 of those lawmakers have filed to run for another office. In some cases, members exiting the House are hoping to enter the Senate. In others, lawmakers are seeking to return home as governor.

While looming midterms often prompt a swell of retirements, the number of announced departures at this point in the election cycle is notably higher than in other recent cycles, according to a Washington Post analysis.

“It looks like we’re heading toward a record number,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some who are leaving Capitol Hill are frustrated with how little is getting done. In recent terms,Congress has passed the fewest number of bills that have become lawsince the early 1900s. Lawmakers largely attribute the inability to legislate tobitterly partisan politics, intraparty feuds and narrow majorities that make it difficult for leaders to compromise without backlash from influential corners of their caucuses.

Partisan gridlock makes it hard for people with ambition to actually do something. And dealing with a president like Trump, who thinks he is a dictator and has little interest in working with Congress, has to be frustrating.

I also thing that when it comes to the Democrats anyway, there is a hunger for generational change that has quite a few of the elder statesmen finally throwing in the towel. It’s time.

One of the more noticeable polling results recently has been Trump’s loss of support among seniors. That’s really deadly for Republicans.

As with other Republican politicians before him, white and male voters are among the most likely to approve of Mr Trump’s job performance, while younger voters and members of ethnic minorities are among the most strongly disapproving. People who have the most education—college graduates and postgrads—are least likely to support Mr Trump. Voters of pension age, normally a solidly Republican bloc, are also surprisingly lukewarm on the president.

Seniors are the most reliable voting bloc of all voters. They simply cannot afford to lose them.

Older people remember when presidents didn’t act this way. Maybe some of them are beginning to see why it’s important that they don’t? I don’t know. They’re probably like everyone else — worried about inflation and not comfortable with the police state tactics. But they vote and if he’s alienating them the GOP is going to have a problem in November.