John Durham, the former special counsel who spent nearly four years examining the origins of the FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Federal prosecutors in Virginia met remotely with Durham in August to understand the findings of his investigation, according to sources familiar with the meeting, and his conclusions raise the prospect that Durham — who was once elevated by Trump and other Republicans believing he would prosecute high-level officials involved with the investigation of the president’s 2016 campaign — could now become a key figure aiding Comey’s defense.
The prosecutors also met with a team of lawyers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., who had investigated Comey for years — including calling him to testify before a grand jury in 2021 — but were unable to identify any chargeable offenses committed by Comey, sources familiar with the meeting said.
We all know that John Durham and his team and all those DC prosecutors are Antifa deep state operatives. Why would anyone believe them? Much better to rely on influencers and podcast hosts.
President Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a visionary, someone who sees important things before others. Trump has been claiming for the last decade that in a book he published the year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he warned the authorities that they needed to deal with Osama bin Laden.
Trump’s claim is false. His 2000 book contained no warning at all about bin Laden. His tale about the book’s nonexistent warning was conclusivelydebunked in 2015. CNN published another debunking when he revived the tale in 2019.
But the president repeated it once again on Sunday – to a crowd of sailors celebrating the 250th birthday of the US Navy.
This time, Trump delivered the phony narrative after saying history wouldn’t forget how it was Navy Seals who killed bin Laden (in 2011 under then-President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Trump criticism). Trump added, in an apparent ad-lib, “And please remember, I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago,” then corrected himself and said, “One year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You’ve got to watch Osama bin Laden.’ And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true.”
It’s not true, as news outlets have pointed out for years. But Trump continued: “In the book, I wrote – whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you – but I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and, ‘You gotta take care of him.’ They didn’t do it; a year later he blew up the World Trade Center. So, you gotta take a little credit, because nobody else is gonna give it to me.”
People don’t give Trump credit for his book’s warning about bin Laden because that warning doesn’t exist.
The book, titled “The America We Deserve,” did not tell anyone they needed to “watch” or “take care of” bin Laden. That wouldn’t have been particularly prescient advice even if Trump had offered it in January 2000 – bin Laden was already a well-known threat to Americans at the time – but the book simply did not offer it.
Here’s the book’s single mention of bin Laden, in a section criticizing US foreign policy: “Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess – one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”
That is clearly not any advice to anyone about bin Laden. And it contains an acknowledgment that bin Laden had already been targeted by then-President Bill Clinton (after the 1998 terror attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya).
We all knew about bin Laden. He was a major figure in the news for years. I would bet that millions said the same thing on 9/11 that I did: “Gotta be Osama bin Laden.” The Oracle of Mar-a-lago here didn’t know anything the rest of us knew.
He “remembers” this but doesn’t remember the name of the book he supposedly wrote.
By the way, that event was shameful:
Trump: "The problem with Vietnam, we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would've won easy. We would've won Afghanistan easy. We would've won every war easy. But we got politically correct. 'Oh, let's take it easy.' We're not politically correct anymore, just so you… pic.twitter.com/YKmMuf95K6
Trump: In recent weeks, the Navy has supported our mission to blow the cartel terrorists out of the water. Did you see that? There are no boats in the water anymore. Cannot find any. We are having a hard time finding them. pic.twitter.com/pdm0QVWRZ7
Trump: But we have to take care of this little gnat on our shoulder called the Democrats. They want to give all of our moneys to illegal aliens who pour into the country. pic.twitter.com/0swlb2pudy
“The main scene of crime in Washington, D.C. is the White House,” argues Marcy Wheeler in a new video. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi are working hard to paint Trump opponents as violent terrorists. In part, to distract from the crimes the Trump administration is committing, and to construct a pretext for prosecuting his enemies and perhaps implementing martial law.
Wheeler insists that Americans opposed to Trump cannot sit back and let them establish that narrative without serious pushback.
Remember. Donald Trump is a criminal. He is a career criminal, a convicted criminal. He is using his office to engage in criminal acts in plain sight. He is accepting bribes to the tune of billions. He is ordering the U.S. military to murder people in small boats in international waters. He is defying the courts. Don’t forget that, advises Marcy Wheeler. The career criminal is trying desperately to paint his opponents as the real criminals.
What I think we really need to do is to constantly remember that Donald Trump is a felon, is to constantly remember that none of these people — not, a single Republican, certainly not anybody in the White House, certainly not Pam Bondi — every single time we talk about somebody who is complicit with the system of trying to criminalize their opposition, we need to make it clear that what is going on instead is these people are part of a criminal cover up. These people are part of a criminal conspiracy. These people are part of covering up a violent assault on their workplace (if they’re members of Congress). These people are trying to whitewash the assault of 140 cops on January 6th.
They are doing it, Wheeler argues, by charging their opponents with the same crimes for which Jan. 6 criminals were tried, convicted, and subsequently pardoned by Tump. Trump and MAGA are “fostering criminals.”‘
Trump and his crew have their own ambitions. But what we are also seeing is how their criminality dovetails into their supporters’ desire for consequence-free violence.
Consider these warnings about accelerationism from before the January 6 insurrection.
Accelerationism is a term white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it. The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms. We have also recently seen tragic instances of its manifestation in the real world.
Of all the radical right’s multiple permutations in the era of Donald Trump—Proud Boys, QAnon conspiracy theorists, “Patriot” militiamen, and “Boogaloo Bois” among them—the most worrisome by far is the spread of white-power “accelerationism”: a belief system predicated on the idea that modern human civilization (and especially its multicultural features) is a blight, and that the only solution is to encourage its destruction through acts of terroristic violence. Its followers explicitly embrace violence as the only viable means for change, because they see politics as a waste of time.
By painting opponents as domestic terrorists, the Trump administration is creating a permission structure for MAGA to cut loose.
PORTLAND FROG is Back after being “Pepper Sprayed In the Vent”
The Trump White House believes no law can bind it. No restraining order can restrain it.
“The terrorism is coming from inside the government,” writes Lisa Needham at Public Notice. Her detailed post summarizes weekend attempts by the Trump administration to send National Guard troops to whatever city Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem decide needs a little terrorizing.
MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin reported via Twitter on the “game of whack-a-mole” theTrump administration is playing to circumvent court orders prohibiting the deployment of National Guardsmen from California and Texas to Oregon and Illinois:
NEW: An Oregon federal court just blocked the deployment, reassignment, or relocation of not just the CA National Guard, but also — after learning about the memo calling up 400 members of the Texas National Guard — any other state or DC’s Guard members to/in Oregon.
Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump nominee, former U.S. Attorney, and member of the Whitewater investigative team, ruled that neither the facts on the ground in Portland nor the claimed legal bases for the deployments had changed since the order she previously issued this weekend.
“How could bringing in federalized National Guard from California not be in direct contravention to the temporary restraining order I issued yesterday?” Immergut asked the Justice Department’s Eric Hamilton. before cutting him off.
“Aren’t defendants simply circumventing my order?” she said later. “Why is this appropriate?”
A most important question is the timing of this Secretary Hegseth Memorandum
On 10/4/2025 3:40pm PT, Judge Immergut signed opinion holding President exceeded his authority by federalizing the (Oregon) National Guard because the situation did not meet the statute's conditions: pic.twitter.com/5vD2kETirn
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, declared Immergut’s earlier restraining order “legal insurrection.” While social media users posted videos of DHS agents violently abducting people off the street and tear gassing bystanders, the president’s pet psychopath spent the weekend fuming in Twitter rants about federal agents “facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life.”
From “terrorists” like the Portland Frog (above).
Judd Legum at Popular Information calls DHS actions against residents “systemic violations of U.S. citizens’ Constitutional rights.” He recounts the experiences of six U.S. citizens detained and held for days, sometimes after being injured, before release without charges. In a September 8 Supreme Court decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh dismissed such detentions as a minor inconvenience in a free country.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” Kavanaugh wrote. Promptly indeed.
With no touch of irony or self-awareness, Miller insisted Sunday evening:
The core purpose of the organized terrorist attack on DHS is to reverse, through assault and assassination, the 2024 election mandate to expel the millions of illegal aliens the Biden Administration criminally imported into our cities.
They seek to overturn votes with violence.
Kill me now.
Did you see this one? Portland in front of an ICE facility. Hard pressed to see anything these women are doing wrong other than peaceful protest and exercise of freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/qo1NkQgXme
It honestly isn’t clear where we go from here. There are no mechanisms in the structure of American democracy for one state to defend itself against another, or to defend itself against the federal government. There’s no precedent for this sort of thing because it was, until Trump, inconceivable.
It also would’ve been inconceivable not so long ago that both the Supreme Court and Congress would stand aside and let a lawless president try to tear America apart with impunity. But if no one will check Trump’s behavior, why should he stop?
When courts draw the line, Trump steps over it. Draw another line, as Immergut did over the weekend, and he steps over that. With this lawless administration, court orders enjoining Trump’s illegal behaviors amount to no more than double-dog dares.
Seth Abramson offers grim advice to the journalism community:
As a retired journalism professor, I believe every newsroom in America must now develop Civil War Protocols: how it will conduct the profession of journalism when Donald Trump declares martial law and systematically ends our democracy. If your newsroom isn’t prepared for this, it’s rank malpractice.
Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview in March 2025 with the understanding it would only be released after her death. This is her final message from it.
Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview in March 2025 with the understanding it would only be released after her death. This is her final message from it. pic.twitter.com/ViMgNm6C37
This is chilling and I think we’re just at the beginning. Rolling Stone reports that after the Kirk killing the White House quickly saw their opportunity to go after their political opposition and immediately drafted plans to begin the crackdown.
The memos and legal justifications leaned heavily on the infrastructure and the statutes left behind from George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Trump administration aides and attorneys talked among themselves about how the Kirk slaying made it clear they needed a new “war on terror,” in their words, but one launched and branded by Donald J. Trump, and aimed straight at the homegrown domestic enemies of MAGA world. It came at a moment when the administration was already throwing around the “terrorism” label widely as it tried to accomplish its most extreme goals, from blowing up boats of alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean to revving up its militarized deportation operations.
In the earliest moments of Team Trump’s rapid-fire drafting process in mid-September 2025, administration officials say, names that kept coming up in the revenge-minded deliberations included: antifa, America’s disparate anti-fascist movement; the liberal-donation processor ActBlue; megadonor George Soros; the anti-Trump organizing group Indivisible; a variety of pro-immigration and Know Your Rights organizations; and the anti-war group CodePink, whose activists recently protested Trump at a restaurant. And, of course, administration officials couldn’t help themselves from brainstorming new ways to try to target the American trans community.
[…]
“We need to use our anti-terrorism laws, our RICO statutes, our conspiracy statutes — we need to use every tool in our law enforcement arsenal to crush these left-wing terrorists legally, financially, and politically, and to cut off their funding sources, and throw them in prison,” Mike Davis, a conservative attorney close to Trump, tells Rolling Stone. “George Soros, and the octopus of his left-wing organizations, must be investigated. NGOs importing and harboring illegal aliens must be investigated. Nobody is above the law. I’m very excited for these Democrats to face criminal probes for their real crimes.… Justice is coming — and justice is best served cold.”
May I just take a moment to address those of you who’ve been following me for years? You will recall that I always said, “if you build it, they will use it” referring to the erection of the surveillance state and assault on civil liberties. The great irony, of course, is that that was the “deep state” we were all warning about, not this silly evocation of the name for anyone who isn’t a MAGA sycophant.
Anyway, I digress. The article says that there were quite a few people in the White House who “felt something was off” about all this since Kirk was obviously killed by yet another lone wolf psycho and the groups they were targeting were run-of-the mill non-violent liberal groups. But I guess they just shrugged and went along with it.
Read the entire article if you can. It lays out much of the program of repression that’s just beginning. It doesn’t get to the immigration and deportation strategy and the escalating street violence that’s being perpetrated by DHS and associate agencies. There’s only so much space. But it’s all connected. Stephen Miller’s ongoing tantrums this weekend make that crystal clear:
Guess who he’s going after next?
What say you John Roberts?
Oh, never mind. He’s already bent the knee as have the rest of that Supreme Court majority. And they were all happy and privileged to do it.
White House officials have grown tired of her posts and Loomer’s efforts to work around them, several administration officials said. Top administration officials have launched a hunt to try to find out what motivates her posts and attacks, the officials said.
On Wednesday, she claimed that Nicholas Waytowich, a U.S. Army official, was fired because she had identified him as the creator of Red Dot, an app that tracks ICE officials. An Army official said Waytowich is suspended and under investigation.
“I don’t work for the administration, and I don’t control hiring,” said Loomer. “I’m posting facts.”
Some White House officials have also grown concerned about Loomer’s access to Trump and suspected that she was being paid for some of her attacks. Several posts outside her usual national security interests, including a campaign against a Food and Drug Administration official and push for the administration to approve a drilling license off the coast of Venezuela, raised particular concerns at the White House, according to administration officials. Loomer has denied taking money for specific posts.
Let’s back up a little bit, shall we? Some White House officials have also grown concerned about Loomer’s access to Trump. Really? Does that mean she really is behind all the firings of national security officials and others? She’s calling up Trump and he’s just issuing he orders?
I think that’s probably right. How else to explain how this stuff is happening? And why does Trump do whatever she wants? It’s kind of strange, don’t you think?
Anyway, here’s a bit of information I didn’t know before:
Her work has often been funded by conservative donors who supported right-wing positions on Israel or critical views of Islam. She has worked for years with an Israeli-American cyber intelligence analyst, Yaacov Apelbaum, who was involved with analyzing and distributing content from Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.
Apelbaum has provided Loomer with research for her recent attacks, according to a person with direct knowledge of the work, including against national security officials the two deemed to be Muslim sympathizers.
Hookay.
Meanwhile. Loomer is starting to go after MAGAs, which is the main thrust of the article:
In recent weeks, the right-wing conspiracy theorist has:
Gone after former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, dubbing him “Tucker Qatarlson” who is being “bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood,” and attacking his son who works for Vice President JD Vance;
Accused Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of funneling government money to her own daughter and called her a “loud-mouthed bitch.”
And she said that Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose wife was killed by a suicide bomber, was soft on terrorism.
“They can attack me all they want, I’m more America First than them,” Loomer said in an interview, adding that she believed she faced targeting herself because she is Jewish.
Loomer’s intraparty attacks have expanded as some Trump allies have openly started criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and veering into antisemitic conspiracy theories. Carlson and podcaster Candace Owens, for example, have suggested that Israel may have been involved in the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last month, which had allegedly targeted him for his shifting views on the country.
In his speech at Kirk’s memorial, Carlson likened the killing to that of Jesus Christ, saying: “I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about what to do about this guy telling the truth about us.”
Netanyahu has said it is “insane” and “outrageous” to suggest that the country had anything to do with Kirk’s death. Top Turning Point officials have denounced the theories.
Loomer has since claimed Carlson took money from Doha and suppressed damaging information about Biden, referencing claims derived from Apelbaum’s analysis.
Carlson said he has never taken money from any government, including Qatar, and has no debt or investors. “I’m the only one to blame for my opinions,” he said. Owens said supporters of Israel were “scraping the very bottom of the barrel, and at the bottom is Laura Loomer.”
Loomer’s attacks on other Trump officials have continued.
I don’t have an opinion on Israel’s involvement in anything but the horrors in Gaza but it’s very weird how much this stuff is affecting American politics. If it manages to be the catalyst for the MAGA freak show to eat it’s own I can’t say I’m sorry.
Again, Loomer is a very, very bizarre person who has a very bizarre relationship with the president of the United States which apparently no one in the White House can do anything about. I guess that’s just another data point in our increasingly surreal body politic.
Republicans don’t seem to care so I’m not sure it matters, but here are some of the latest numbers. This is from CBS:
Trump’s overall approval rating hovers around 43% in all the polls similar to where he was the last time. I guess the price of eggs is low enough that people don’t care that much about the economy anymore.
What happens when a leader of a democratic country believes he has a license to kill and proceeds to use it? It appears we are finding out.
During the arguments in Donald J. Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court case that conferred immunity from prosecution for presidents committing crimes in the course of their official duties, the prospect of a president ordering Seal Team Six to carry out assassinations of political opponents was raised to illustrate the breadth of powers being considered. This chilling scenario was raised in separate dissents by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But in his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed such concerns as “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.’”
As anyone could have predicted with Donald Trump’s return to office, it hasn’t taken long to test a different but nonetheless related scenario. Right now we are being forced to consider whether the president of the United States can legally order the military to murder “non-international” civilians he has unilaterally declared to be drug trafficking terrorists.
On Friday morning, for the fourth time in a month, American forces launched a strike on a boat off the coast of Venezuela that the administration claimed was trafficking drugs. Four people were killed, bringing the total number of casualties from all four strikes to 21.
As he has done with each operation, Trump took to Truth Social to brag: “A boat loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE was stopped, early this morning off the Coast of Venezuela, from entering American Territory.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chimed in on X, “Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike and no U.S. forces were harmed in the operation.”
No evidence has been provided about the alleged drug trafficking operations. When questions have been raised about the legality of the strikes, the administration has brushed them aside. Vice President JD Vance even joked that there probably aren’t any fishermen in the area anymore. “I don’t give a s**t,” he posted on X in response to concerns about the strikes.
Congress, though, apparently does. After asking politely if they could please see some sort of legal justification for the actions, the administration finally found time to send notice, as required by law, of a military action they are now defining as an active “armed conflict” with drug cartels. On Oct. 2, the New York Times reported the president’s decision that we are formally at war, and acknowledged the serious implications of such a position.
Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt wrote, “Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.”
But international law doesn’t apply here, at least according to Trump. The president, the Washington Post reported, has declared this to be a “non-international conflict [with] designated terrorist organizations” that have helped to kill U.S. citizens through drug smuggling. The attacks were provoked, he also claimed, using drugs as weapons instead of guns, and the U.S. is “[using] force in self-defense and the defense of others.”
By this logic, since Americans are voluntarily taking the alleged drugs, does that make drug users material supporters of terrorism?
Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer and former Army senior adviser for law-of-war issues, stated the obvious to the Times: That selling a dangerous product is different from an armed attack:
Noting that it is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals — Mr. Corn called the president’s move an “abuse” that crossed a major legal line.
“This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
What else is new? Since we have not heard of any member of the military objecting to this action, it would seem that the reassurances we all received that the military would never agree to undertake an illegal order were a bit overblown. They are murdering civilians on the high seas on the president’s order. Just as in the Seal Team Six scenario, the president’s pardon power is also plenary, so there’s no exposure there either.
This operation appears to be a Stephen Miller special, coming from his role as the head of the Homeland Security Council, which he successfully parlayed into a stand-alone entity instead of reporting to National Security Adviser (and Secretary of State) Marco Rubio. During Trump’s first term, Miller famously asked why the president couldn’t order migrants in boats to be killed. He was told then that such an act was illegal. All these years later, the response has apparently not dampened his enthusiasm for the idea.
As I noted in September, Rubio has seen these actions as a way to pursue his white whale: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Along with Miller and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Rubio is now pressing for direct military action against Venezuela — predicated, one assumes, on the assertion that Maduro is directing the drug traffickers, despite findings by America’s own spy agencies that he is not. In planning that strongly echoes the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Rubio is working with exiled opposition politicians on day-after regime change plans. And just like with that debacle, the administration is relying on bogus legal theories, manipulation of evidence and lies to justify their actions.
Apparently, some lessons have to be learned over and over again.
There are many motivations for what’s about to happen; drugs are just the excuse. Rubio has a vendetta against Maduro, Miller wants to punish foreigners and Trump wants to show that he has the biggest, most powerful trigger finger in the world. Overriding all of it is what the president has said many times: “To the victors belong the spoils.”
And as the Times pointed out about what sad fate likely awaits Venezuelans, “with its oil, gold and other minerals, there are many spoils.”
