The delicate flowers of ICE were so scared of people making hand gestures that they had to pulled them over the next day, pull their guns and threaten to shoot them:
Agent: These guys were all threatening us yesterday with hand guns. … Agent: Hand guns, like threatening to shoot us.
Reporter: You mean like with hand symbols?
A: Pulling them out, trying to engage us.
R: Pulling out literal guns?
A: No. Making… assuming we were going to do something.
These poor fellas need a safe space. The streets of Minneapolis are triggering them. (No pun intended.)
The first one is being pooh-poohed by all the experts. “He can’t do that, the constitution is clear that states control elections.” He’s just having a tantrum.
Ok, but who’s going to stop him? How would he “take over” the election systems and “nationalize” elections? I don’t know. Declare martial law? Say we’re at war? Do you doubt that he is capable of trying anything?
Perhaps he could do it the same way they did it in Georgia. I don’t know where he came up with “15 places” but I assume he’s thinking about states where the Republican Party has control and could unilaterally declare that certain big city elections offices are corrupt (or something.) I’m not sure where this might be and it’s doubtful that he can get enough critical mass to swing an election doing this but you never know.
I still believe that the real plan is to contest the election and throw the next Congress into chaos as the cases wend their way through the courts. And who knows what the Supremes might do if it gets to them? I’m sure Johnson and Thune will be happy to help.
Republicans are now saying that state control of elections is wrong because they have different standards so maybe the Supremes are open to that argument now”
BASH: Would you be comfortable w/Trump 'taking over' elections nationally?REP GONZALES: POTUS is bringing up a fact on many Americans' minds – election integrityB: Isn't the issue that he's not telling the truth?G: One of the issues is every state does it differently. That gives a lot of doubt
I doubt he’s going to get anywhere with this but I’m not going to dismiss these threats because I still recall this:
This time he will still be president and he has a crew of ruthless henchmen in the DOJ, DHS and the military who will do his bidding. So, no one should be too sanguine that he won’t do anything. The only thing that mitigates against it is that he’s drunk with power and only cares about himself so he no doubt figures he can do whatever he wants whether he has a GOP Congress or not.
Pirro? I think she may have had an extra glass of wine at dinner. That statement is like waving a red flag in front of the gun nuts.
Blanche: That’s a great quote and should be what he’s remembered for. “It’s not a crime to party with Epstein.” Love it.
Trump’s tantrum about Harvard is hilarious. Harvard refused to buckle under to his administration’s blackmail. So now he’s going to sue, just like he’s using Trevor Noah and the IRS and the DOJ and anyone else who looks t him sideways. But the fact is that Harvard won and he lost. If only all the elite institutions had banded to get her and told him to pound sand last year, this administration would have gone differently.
It was just another morning for the GOP — and the rapidly accelerating destruction of America.
Donald Trump announced last week that he is suing the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion because a contractor leaked his tax returns. This isn’t the first time the president has sued the federal government. He has already filed claims against the Justice Department for $230 million over the investigations into Russian collusion and the stolen classified documents. In each of these cases, it will be up to the agencies, which he oversees, whether to settle — with him. Gosh, I wonder what he’ll decide?
When asked about this curious arrangement over the weekend, Trump told the press, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself… We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Evidently, American taxpayers are going to have to pay for yet more of Trump’s grievances — and give him what will almost certainly be a nice tax write-off. That’s assuming these “very good charities” aren’t along the lines of his defunct Trump Foundation, for which he was sued by the state of New York for funneling funds to himself and barred from ever running a charity in the state again.
Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the New York Times in October that Trump’s “the ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it… It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
There was a time when that would have been true. But today, the administration’s corruption and profiteering are so blatant and commonplace that they hardly merit anything but a brief notice in the media.
When the Times asked him why he was openly doing deals in his second term after largely adhering to long-held norms against conflicts of interest in his first, Trump wasn’t wrong in his response: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.” (He went on to claim that he previously prohibited his kids from doing business and didn’t get any credit for it, and then he saw “what went on with Biden.” Trump also noted that he “has a very honest family.”)
But it isn’t exactly true that nobody cared. There were several lawsuits filed against Trump during his first term over his business interests. The Supreme Court sat on them for months, as they often do with thorny questions that might require them to let their partisan flags fly, and then dismissed the cases after Trump lost the election, saying they were moot. As the Brennan Center noted at the time, “[A]ny future president can use the Trump experience as a guide to avoid the constitutional prohibition on foreign emoluments. So long as foreign governments’ political spending is laundered through a future president’s business, he or she can make the argument that this is perfectly fine since Trump did it.”
Was that prescient or what? The Brennan Center also noted that all a president with only one term has to do is run out the clock, which the courts are happy to help him do. And Trump, lucky fellow that he is, essentially has had two single terms and will almost certainly be able to do the same thing again.
Now he is openly fast-tracking pardons, handing them out to everyone from drug kingpins to personal business associates willing to pay top dollar to lobbyists who will advocate for them. The going rate is reportedly set at a million dollars. The money mostly goes to the middle men, but one can assume it gets spread around in various ways.
In the case of “crypto’s richest man” Changpeng Zhao — a billionaire felon who was sentenced to a four-month prison term in 2024 after pleading guilty to federal money laundering charges — the money spreading reportedly came in the form of a deal his company struck that hinged on using a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, a stablecoin company partially owned by a Trump family entity. The result, according to the Wall Street Journal: World Liberty’s credibility was enhanced and its market capitalization skyrocketed to over $2.1 billion (from $127 million). The paper also reported that “World Liberty raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year…far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually.” In October 2025, Zhao received a pardon from Trump.
The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick has been tracking Trump’s graft for the last several months and recently published an update to mark the president’s first year back in office. By Kirkpatrick’s reckoning — and he’s very conservative in his estimates — Trump and his family have made at least $4.05 billion in the last year alone. This does not count any of the pre-existing Trump Organization properties and businesses, and he even generously left out the “funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value,” such as Trump’s shares in his social media company Truth Social.
Most of the profits have come from crypto markets, which Trump’s son Eric is spearheading, along with special envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach. There is American Bitcoin, a company to which Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have lent their name and nothing else in an arrangement that makes Hunter Biden’s penny-ante Burisma deal look like a sidewalk lemonade stand. But the big one is World Liberty Financial — the very company that became entangled with Zhao. According to Kirkpatrick, the president is listed on the web site as a “co-founder emeritus” with sons Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron, along with Witkoff and his son Zach, who serves as CEO. (Again, recall the GOP’s shrieking over Hunter Biden “trading on his father’s name.”)
There have already been several scandals associated with this scheme. But this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported on what appears to be a massive bribe from the man known as the United Arab Emirate’s “spy sheikh.” Sheikh Tahnoon, a senior member of the Emirati royal family, reportedly took a secret ownership deal worth $500 million in World Liberty just prior to Trump’s inauguration. A couple of months later, the U.S. agreed to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to the UAE, a move that surprised most national security experts, since up until then there had been serious concerns about them being diverted to China. According to the Journal, Witkoff — Trump’s Middle East envoy — also got a $31 million piece of the action.
Considering the vast sums that are changing hands, it’s grimly amusing that Trump himself is still hawking consumer goods, including an online merchandise store owned by the Trump Organization. (He also has a little “store” in the White House where he keeps the merch to give away to foreign dignitaries anxious to get their hands on a “Trump was right about everything” hat.)
At this point, you may be wondering if the Republican House Oversight Committee, which spent years investigating Biden and his son’s dealings in Ukraine from a decade before, will be looking into these billion dollar deals. The answer is no. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the committee, explained that “the difference between the way the Trump family operates and the Biden family is they’re admitting they’re doing this.”
Apparently, the new rules are that the more flagrant the corruption the more legal it is.
John Ganz this morning follows Lenin’s advice and digs a little deeper into “Who stands to gain?” from Donald Trump’s Stephen Miller-run ethnic cleansing project. Adam Tooze at Chartbook this morning pointed Ganz to a Financial Times piece: “Companies reap $22bn from Trump’s immigration crackdown.” It turns out that a surprising number are “regional, dynastic family businesses and major GOP donors. In addition, they have engaged in legally questionable practices.”
For instance, the top company at the top of the list, Fisher Sand & Gravel, is owned by the Fisher family of Dickinson, North Dakota. The Fishers give generously to the Republican Party, and Tommy is a guest on conservative TV and talk radio, where he may have caught Donald Trump’s eye. The Fisher business has a bit of a checkered past: environmental violations, shady labor practices, and most notably, fraud.
In 2009, Micheal Fisher, then-owner of Fisher, pled guilty to nine counts of felony tax fraud,[11][12][13] being sentenced to 37 months in prison and over $300,000 in restitution. Amiel Schaff, FSG’s former chief financial officer, and Clyde Frank, FSG’s former comptroller, also pled guilty to one count each of conspiracy to defraud the United States in 2009. The 2009 Department of Justice settlement required FSG to pay a total of $1.16 million in restitution, penalties and fines, implement measures to prevent future fraud at the company, and cooperate with the IRS in audits of its tax returns.[14]
And this next part is a little bit too on the nose:
Another former head of the company, David William Fisher, pled guilty in 2005 to possession of child pornography of a 10 year old child and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Although in exchange for his guilty plea, the charges of sexual exploitation of minors was dropped.[15][9] He was released on April 30, 2010.[16]
You can go down the list and check; SLSCO, CSI Aviation, and Barnard Construction all have a similar pattern: a regional, closely-held company that is “politically integrated,” so to speak.
That is, GOP donors seeing handsome returns for their investments in political donations. They belong to the Epstein class or are at least adjacent to it. Out there where questionable deals are handshake-informal and, Ganz writes, “often downright criminal.”
When you add in the presence of Thiel-backed firms like Anduril, you begin to get a picture of the Trump coalition’s material basis. It’s an alliance of this family-based regional scam capital and a reactionary fraction of the tech sector that focuses on defense and security. Then you add in ICE’s function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob and all the illiterate influencers and, voila, you have the class composition of actually-existing American fascism, which characteristically enough, is also a racket. It’s the mob from top to bottom.
Gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. Public domain.
The divide in the country is often described as right vs. left. In Lakoffian terms, a divide between “strict fathers” and “nurturant parents.” But there is another, less talked about divide.
We saw it in the Wall Street wilding leading up to the financial crash, and in the coke-fueled “greed is good” 1980s, and in the self-delusions of trickle-down economics and the Laffer Curve. We see it in what I’ve dubbed the Midas cult, twisted souls who believe anything that might be turned into gold should be. Most recently, we see it in corporate CEOs, law firms, and universities willing to sacrifice their democratic birthrights to keep the money machine turning. And in Donald Trump.
Trump, the professional conman and self-promoter, is famously said to have refused to visit Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018. He blamed rain. Trump reportedly said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In another conversation, he called the fallen “suckers.” During a 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery, he stood with then-homeland security secretary John Kelly beside the grave of Kelly’s son, Robert, killed in 2010 in Afghanistan at age 29. Sources told The Atlantic that Trump turned to Kelly and said, ““I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
I revisited those events in light of something Paul Krugman writes about our country’s slide into autocracy. (I’d argue that we’re beyond that.) Krugman contrasts the acceleration of democratic backsliding under Trump to that of Hungary and other recent examples. (Digby touched on this on Sunday.)
“It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s,” Krugman writes.
That national backlash has stunned the congenitally cocky Trump and his boot-licking lieutenants.
Krugman continues:
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
Standing up for principles is a concept “alien to them.” It simply does not compute. There must be something monetary in it for citizens to gather en masse in the frigid streets of Minneapolis. Otherwise why face off against Trump’s mercenary thugs on behalf of neighbors? Especially those of different races and ethnicities?
Politifact recently addressed the only explanation that makes sense to a man without principles. They must be getting paid:
“The thugs that are protesting include many highly paid professional agitators and anarchists,” he said Jan. 18 on Truth Social.
“They’re paid agitators and insurrectionists,” Trump said at a Jan. 20 press conference.
The next day in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said the “fake” protests were “done by agitators and professional insurrectionists. … They’re professional troublemakers.”
He added, “We are looking very strong at the money, too, in Minnesota and other places.”
Politifact concludes “social media posts we found that claimed to show evidence of paid protesters were either AI-generated, recycled conspiracy theories or unsubstantiated.” (I’m sure the amount of backpay George Soros owes me is staggering.)
Trump the pitchman came to power having convinced large swaths of Americans that he had their backs, understood their struggles, was more American at his core than snooty liberals. His base has yet to come to terms with the fact that he and his inner circle neither understand them nor share their values. Self-aggrandizement is not among the virtues recognized by any of the world’s major faiths.
I waited tables for several years after getting my first degree. Customers regularly asked if I was in school. When I told them that I’d graduated, they asked in what. Philosophy. Their eyes would glaze over. You could see the gears going around in their heads as they asked themselves how that (philosophy) translated into [mentally rubbing their fingers together] cold, hard cash. They’d ask, “But what are you going to do with it?”
I’m still doing it.
And there it is again: the divide. What’s not marketable has no value. What the Trumps and those who bend their knees to them cannot fathom is why anyone would risk their lives in defense of the Constitution, the principles behind it, and the rights enshrined therein. Why people would face police dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and jail to demand that America make good on the promissory note that came back marked “insufficient funds” if they weren’t being paid?
The same government reactionaries who once brutalized American citizens during the Civil Rights era 60 years ago are back at it. Back, like the fascists the Allied dead who lie in Arlington and Aisne-Marne sacrificed their lives to defeat 80 years ago: for democratic principles, for their neighbors, and for foreigners they did not know. And to defeat the banality of evil.
The divide is too great. They’ll never understand.
Trump: "These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that I won that show I didn't win. You're gonna see… pic.twitter.com/H5hT3OvtLE
Trump: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. You’re gonna see something in Georgia.”
Did you think he didn’t mean it? He does. Whether he can pull it off is another question. He’ll just do it anyway and wait for someone to stop him.
Don’t worry. It’s obviously unconstitutional and I’m sure the Supreme Court will get around to dealing with it sometime before 2038. They only move quickly when it will benefit Trump.
The following grotesquely racist email was written in 2013, nine years after Trump supposedly exiled Epstein from his life for being “a creep.”
It would have been nice to know who the person who wrote the original email was but the DOJ redacted many of the names of the powerful so it’s going to be hard to ferret out the details. But there are a whole bunch of emails like this in the files which indicate that Trump was hanging with Epstein for years beyond 2004. And it explains why there was so much “PR” talk about their friendship among Epstein and others once Trump got traction in the presidential race in 2016. Their relationship was anything but ancient history.
By any measure, the F.B.I.’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Ga., last week was extraordinary. Agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots, as President Trump harnessed the levers of government to not only buttress his false claims of widespread voter fraud, but also to try to build a criminal case against those he believes wronged him.
What happened the next day was in some ways even more unusual, The New York Times has learned.
Behind closed doors, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, met with some of the same F.B.I. agents, members of the bureau’s field office in Atlanta, which is conducting the election inquiry, three people with knowledge of the meeting said. They could not say why Ms. Gabbard, who also appeared on site at the search, was there, but her continued presence has raised eyebrows given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work.
What occurred during the meeting was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure. Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, who did not initially pick up but called back shortly after, the people said. The president addressed the agents on speakerphone, asking them questions as well as praising and thanking them for their work on the inquiry, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.
The supervisor of the squad, which investigates allegations of public corruption and civil rights violations and developed the evidence for the search, primarily fielded Mr. Trump’s queries, the people said. One U.S. official said the call was fairly short, perhaps just a minute long, and compared the conversation to a pep rally or a coach giving an encouraging halftime speech to his players. That person said the president gave no substantive direction to the investigators.
Mr. Trump personally ordered Ms. Gabbard to go to Atlanta for the search, and coordinated her actions with Andrew Bailey, one of two deputy F.B.I. directors, according to the U.S. official.
If asked he will just say, “I’m allowed to do it,” which I guess is true, at least according to current understanding of the king’s prerogatives. He is the head of the executive branch and can order any of his henchmen to do anything he wants them to do now that they don’t have any concerns about maintaining credibility or public opinion there’s really no stopping them. And he always has the pardon power, so there’s that.
A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.
The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint. Gabbard’s office rejects that characterization, contending it is navigating a unique set of circumstances and working to resolve the issue.
A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.
They say the report is politically motivated and lacking credibility. Uh huh. That must be why they’re keeping it in a locked safe and refusing to inform the Congress.
Tulsi knows he has a willing soldier in Tulsi. The question, as if has been for years now, is which army she’s working for. But then, the same could be said of Trump.
Anand Giridharadas sees the Epstein sex trafficking saga as part of a larger cultural milieu. An “Epstein class,” as Rep. Ro Khanna (D) of California puts it. It is not a new concept even for Girdharadas. He studied the global elite in “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.” But Giridharadas revisits the first tranche of Epstein files at The Ink this morning and adds fresh perspective. (His commentary is from a New York Times essay published in November, but newly unpaywalled. I thought it important to revisit.)
The documents reveal a privileged network of the well-connected that floats — like cream, do they think? — above and outside the society the rest of us inhabit. Epstein is but one node of an elite insulated from and numb to the consequences others suffer from their self-aggrandizing actions:
At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.
They may resent being outed, their secrets revealed, but what Epstein emails reveal, insofar as they are unredacted, validates what the plebs knew all along: “there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.”
For the Epstein class, there are few comeuppances and near-infinite second chances. Squads of lawyers to do battle in their place like medieval vassals. Donald Trump’s attorneys endlessly delay his days of reckoning. They stand ready to smite commoners who fail to bow low enough before them. A favorable judgment is not the goal. For his targets (and for U.S. citizens brutalized and released by CBP/ICE), the process is the punishment.
Giridharadas continues:
The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.
What his correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing, profiting, thinking and giving back. Some members, like Mr. Summers, are embedded in all aspects of it; others, less so.
“’Where are you today?’ is the Epstein-class query,” Giridharadas writes.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote about the resentment the rich feel about educating the golden gooses that fill their plates and coffers:
In the Atlantic’s “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Chrystia Freeland describes the super-rich as “a nation unto themselves,” more connected to each other than to their countries or their neighbors. Freeland writes that “the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting ‘their’ taxes to paying down ‘our’ budget deficit.” Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, explains that globalization means, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Why should it be?
In a global economy driven more and more by bottom-line thinking, public education is just another community expense the elite would rather not bear, isn’t it? The rich can afford private schools for their children and have little need for educated workers in the multiple cities where they own houses. How much education do gardeners and waiters really need anyway?
Why should the global elite pay taxes to educate the children of those below their station? Why pay to educate workers when they can import them on H-1B or L-1 visas and pay them less than American workers? As Allstate’s CEO implied, their companies can easily set up shop in India, Indonesia or China. Globalization means multinational corporations can simply swoop in and exploit an educated workforce in countries that have already incurred the sunk costs of developing that resource. And multinationals get to pay those foreign workers less to boot. Whether here or abroad, why not just let somebody else pay taxes for educating other people’s children?
Epstein’s emails reveal a barter economy in insider information that is often less information than meets the pixel. If you are rich, or perceived as smart enough, people ask your opinions on topics better informed simply by reading a newspaper. What’s important is not the information. It’s remaining active in the network of people with the power to decide things. At that, Epstein excelled.
Nomadic bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money.
Underage women? They were disposable. Justice for their elite abusers? A long shot.
Giridharadas concludes:
Shaming the public as rubes for succumbing to conspiracy theories misses what people are trying to tell us: They no longer feel included in the work of choosing their future. On matters small and big, from the price of eggs to whether the sexual abuse of children matters, what they sense is a sneering indifference. And a knack for looking away.
Now the people who capitalized on the revolt against an indifferent American elite are in power, and, shock of all shocks, they are even more indifferent than anyone who came before them. The clubby deal-making and moral racketeering of the Epstein class is now the United States’ governing philosophy.
Make them facing a reckoning something more than what we pay to cheer in the movies.
Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated him, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as attorney general last year, she established a “Weaponization Working Group” to review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as “politicized justice.”
She said the group would focus on investigations into Trump conducted by former special counsel Jack Smith and his staff; Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James; and any “improper” investigations into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. But after a year, the group has not produced anything publicly.
In recent weeks, Trump has been pressuring Justice Department officials for results in these and other investigations, recently admonishing a group of US attorneys for failing to deliver on cases he wants brought.
The Weaponization Working Group is now expected to start meeting daily with the goal of producing results in the next two months,according to the person familiar with the plan. Throughout her time as attorney general, Bondi has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for alleged political weaponization while, at the same time, federal prosecutors brought investigations and indictments against Trump’s political adversaries. “I took office with two main goals: to end the weaponization of justice and return the department to its core mission of fighting violent crime,” Bondi told lawmakers in October.
Keep in mind that weirdo Ed Martin is heading up this effort. It might as well be Laura Loomer.
Ed Martin, who has been working inside the Trump Justice Department for over nine months after failing to secure a confirmation as US Attorney in Washington, DC, is expected to leave the department in the coming weeks, according to a source familiar with his plans.
Martin had been previously described as President Donald “Trump’s favorite US Attorney,” but sources say his imminent departure is the result of moves made by another one of Trump’s favorite Justice officials — Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“President Trump appointed Ed Martin as Pardon Attorney and Ed continues to a great job in that role,” a Justice Department spokesperson told CNN Monday.
Trump appointed Martin to serve at the interim US attorney for Washington, DC, shortly after taking office in January 2025. Martin immediately started working on Trump’s agenda, including demoting senior prosecutors who worked on cases related to January 6 and vowing to protect employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
He ultimately failed to receive enough support from the Senate and Trump pulled his nomination for the position in May 2025.
Trump then put Martin in serval new positions within the Justice Department, including the director of the Working Weaponization Group and pardon attorney.
Sources familiar with the situation say that once Martin was installed in his office inside Justice Department headquarters in Washington, Blanche – one of Trump’s former personal lawyers – made moves to significantly limit Martin’s ability to wield power.
Even though he was tapped to the lead the Department’s Weaponization Working Group, a source tells CNN Martin was “layered” by the deputy attorney general and was not really in charge of that effort.
“The fact is that Ed was given all opportunity to lead this group and deliver on its mission, but he did nothing,” a person familiar with the efforts of the Weaponization Working Group said. “Others across the Department have since been making great progress and doing the work that should have been happening under Ed’s leadership.”
CNN reported Monday that the Weaponization Working Group was expected to begin meeting every day to deliver on those issues that are a priority for the president. It was unclear if Martin was even invited to that meeting.
Martin appears to have more power in his role as pardon attorney, according to sources familiar. He has been actively involved in reviewing clemency applications, but the final decision on pardons in the Trump Administration, as in other administrations, are largely made inside the White House.
What’s he going to do? Nobody knows for sure. But there is this:
Martin’s office is currently located inside the pardon office. It is unclear where Martin is headed after he departs the Justice Department, but a source familiar with his plan says he spent most of last week at the White House.
