Wednesday Reads: Could the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Disrupt Trump’s Agenda?

Posted: July 16, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: #We are so Fucked, Donald Trump, just because, U.S. Economy | Tags: Epstein Files, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Julie K. Brown, Kevin Hassett, Mike Johnson, Pedophilia, rape, sexual abuse of minors, Suicide | 16 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

How can such a stupid person do so much damage so quickly?

I’ve finally begun to accept that what is happening to our country will not be reversed in my lifetime. When I think about it, I feel so despairing that I can’t bear to focus on it for long. But I know it’s true. How can such a stupid person do so much damage so quickly?

Trump has already done so much damage and he is likely to do much more before we can get rid of him–if we succeed in doing that. He has destroyed the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and has likely done irreparable damage to the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the office of DNI (Director of National Intelligence). He has also damaged Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare.

His insane tariffs are wrecking the economy, and he may soon be able to do even more damage by naming a new Fed chairman who will carry out his orders. Guess who Trump is likely to appoint? According to Bloomberg, it will be Kevin Hassett! The story is behind a paywall. I read the headline on Memeorandum.

He has begun weaponizing the military and with the new funding for ICE in the big ugly bill, he will control a vast private army. He has begun to establish a system of concentration camps.

Have I forgotten anything? Probably.

I can’t cover all of these issues today, but here’s some commentary on Trump’s ongoing destruction of our economy.

This piece by Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark is truly depressing: LOL Nothing Matters. Inflation is back. The government is nationalizing one private company and blackmailing another. But no one cares because . .

Remember back in 2024 when Americans had to vote for the insurrectionist felon because there had been 14 months of inflation in 2021–22?

Yeah, well inflation is back now.

US inflation climbed to 2.7 per cent in June, surpassing expectations and signalling that Donald Trump’s tariffs are hitting prices. Tuesday’s annual consumer price index figure was up from 2.4 per cent in May and above expectations of 2.6 per cent among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

How upset are voters about this? They are a solid “Meh.” Trump remains at only -7 net approval, which is a huge improvement from where he was in late April.

Why am I feeling nihilistic today? It’s not just the voters; it’s the markets. We got a bad inflation report this morning and then the markets reacted by . . . betting that the Fed is going to cut rates in September.

Which is, you know, the opposite of what you’d expect in an environment where tariffs are pushing prices higher. Are the markets betting on TACO? Or preparing for Fed Chairman Kevin Hassett? Or going full-nihilist, too?

Trump embracing socialism?

Here is another thing that doesn’t seem to matter: Democrats are freaked out because their nominee for mayor in New York City wants to run a pilot program with five municipal-owned grocery stores, which is “socialism” or something.

Meanwhile, last week the U.S. government became the largest shareholder in the mining company MP Materials. Which is, you know, kind of like socialism? […]

On May 27, MP began a sudden climb. After months of sitting around $25 a share, it moved consistently upward for a month, to almost $40. On June 20 a selloff started and the share price lost a quarter of its value over three weeks. The government announced its purchase on the morning of July 10 and MP went to the moon.

Any of this look to you like someone knew the score?

But that’s just the first layer of corruption.

This morning, Apple announced that it would also ~~contribute~~ invest $500 million in MP stock.

That’s right: Apple, which is currently negotiating with Trump on the 25 percent tariffs the president wants to put on iPhones made in China, decided to do the government a solid and throw some cash behind Uncle Sam’s MP position, thus driving the price higher and forming a shareholder bloc that will, along with the government, be enough to control MP.

And since Apple’s business now depends on what the U.S. government allows it to do, I suspect Apple’s share will be a pure proxy for whatever the Trump administration’s wishes are.

There’s more at the link.

Here’s what Paul Krugman has to say about Trump’s economic policies: Hawks, Doves and Lapdogs: The next Fed chair will be an obedient partisan.

Yesterday’s CPI report looked fairly tame on the surface, but if you look at the details it showed clear signs that Trump’s tariffs are starting to drive up prices. And private surveys suggest that there’s a lot more inflation in the pipeline. For example, look at S&P Global’s Purchasing Managers’ Index for manufacturing, which shows the percentage of firms reporting higher prices. A higher number almost always points to higher official inflation ahead, and right now it’s definitely telling us that tariffs are about to hit hard (see figure at the link)….

The next Fed chair?

Why aren’t we seeing the full effects of the tariffs in official statistics? For the record, I don’t believe Trump officials are cooking the books — yet.

That’s not to say that they won’t at some point, and there’s a good chance that they will. But so far what we’re probably seeing is a combination of ordinary lags and the temporary effects of the TACO (Trump always chickens out) narrative. Buyers get pissed off at sellers when prices rise, so sellers who don’t want to lose market share have an incentive to hold prices down despite higher costs if they think the Trump tariffs will come back down in a few weeks.

I, however, am a TACO skeptic. I think Trump really is a Tariff Man who will keep us at Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs indefinitely, and businesses will eventually realize that and raise prices accordingly.

And then what? Clearly, we shouldn’t expect Trump to admit that his tariffs are raising prices, or even to admit that prices are rising. What we can expect is that he will keep putting pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates. I don’t think he’ll manage to push Jerome Powell out before next May, but as I wrote last week, whoever he picks after that will do his bidding.

Bloomberg has an interesting article about Kevin Warsh, one likely choice — although a newer article suggests that Kevin Hassett, whom nobody suspects of having any independent principles, may be in first place. The article expresses puzzlement over Warsh’s support for rate cuts now, despite above-target inflation, when he was a big advocate of higher rates in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. How did such a monetary hawk suddenly become a monetary dove? But one of the people the article quotes hits the nail on the head.

Read the Bloomberg excerpts at the link.

We are so screwed.

Right now the only hopeful signs I see is that Trump’s policies are very unpopular with Americans, and his association with Jeffrey Epstein could possibly damage him before the midterm elections. I’m probably wrong and Trump is clearly trying to fix the midterms. Anyway, I’ve gathered some stories on the Epstein scandal.

Ewan Palmer at The Daily Beast: White House Freaked Out Over a Question About Trump’s Ties to Epstein.

White House officials were left scrambling after a reporter straight-up asked whether Donald Trump knew if his name appeared in files connected to Jeffrey Epstein, according to Axios.

The media inquiry was posed after reports that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino had a screaming match with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Department of Justice’s handling of the files on the pedophile who died in 2019.

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, best buds

The question helped the administration figure out how badly holding back any release of the Epstein files was playing in MAGA world.

In a memo, the DOJ and FBI denied the existence of any so-called “client list” belonging to Epstein featuring potential high-profile names, and said they will not be releasing any more information regarding Epstein. The agencies also stated that the billionaire financier took his own life in his New York City jail cell, rather than being murdered, a conspiracy theory pushed for years by Trump loyalists, including Bongino.

In the wake of the Bongino-Bondi blow-up, one reporter asked if Bondi had told Trump that his name was in the Epstein files. For the first time, White House and DOJ personnel realized how bad the optics were of refusing to release more information on Epstein after multiple MAGA figures, including Trump himself, vowed to do exactly that. Officials feared it suddenly looked like they might be shielding Trump from potentially damning revelations.

“It put people in a tizzy,” an unnamed source familiar with the matter told Axios. An administration source added, “It didn’t look like a coincidence at that point” that the Trump administration had stopped releasing Epstein files.

Read more at the link. It’s weird that the White House was taken by surprise by this question, since Trump and Epstein were close friends for years.

I was stunned yesterday when House Speaker Mike Johnson actually disagreed with Trump about covering up the Epstein files. Marianna Sotomayor at The Washington Post: Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans break with Trump on Epstein.

One of the leading Republicans on Capitol Hill broke with the Trump administration’s decision not to release the files of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as the controversy deepened over the handling of an issue that has caused unprecedented division among the GOP base.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson that he supported the release of the Epstein files, days after President Donald Trump’s Justice Department said the matter was effectively closed. Johnson is a close Trump ally and has never broken so publicly with the president on an issue.

“I’m for transparency,” Johnson told Benny Johnson. “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.”

Even as Johnson publicly called for the files to be released, he opposed a procedural motion advanced Tuesday by Democrats that would have set up a House vote to release them.

On the podcast, Speaker Johnson said that Attorney General Pam Bondi “needs to come forward and explain” the confusion she has brewed after she said in interviews earlier this year that the purported Epstein “client list” was sitting on her desk for review, suggesting it would be released. Bondi and other Justice Department officials now say the client list — which some claim would reveal the names of powerful figures who allegedly participated in Epstein’s crimes — does not exist.

“I like Pam. I think she’s done a good job, but we need the DOJ focusing on the major priorities,” he said. “I’m anxious to put this behind us.”

Trump will have to have a stern talk with Speaker Johnson.

Oliver Holmes at The Guardian: Donald Trump says those interested in Jeffrey Epstein inquiry are ‘bad people.’

Donald Trump has dismissed a secretive inquiry into the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as “boring” and of interest only to “bad people”, but said he backed the release of any “credible” files, as he sought to stamp out a conspiracy-fuelled uproar among his supporters.

The US president is facing a political crisis within his usually loyal Republican Make America Great Again (Maga) base over suspicion that the administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect the rich elite he associated with, which included Trump.

One of the most dramatic theories circulating among supporters is that Epstein – who killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody – was murdered by powerful figures to cover up their roles in his sex crimes against children.

“I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday night when asked why his supporters are so interested in the case. “It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring, and I don’t understand why it keeps going.

“I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going,” he added. “But credible information, let them give it. Anything that is credible, I would say, let them have it.”

Sex trafficking, pedophilia, and prison suicide are boring stuff?

Frankly, I have no doubt that Epstein committed suicide. He was looking at years in prison, loss of his status, his fortune, and his fabulous lifestyle. As a narcissistic sociopath, he couldn’t tolerate that. But Wired has found new evidence that the surveillance tape outside Epstein’s cell was manipulated. It may be perfectly innocent, but the MAGA crowd won’t see it that way. The magazine had previously found 1 minute missing from the tape; now it’s 3 minutes. Rich Friedman writes: The FBI’s Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out.

Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut from what the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation described as “full raw” surveillance video from the only functioning camera near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The video was released last week as part of the Trump administration’s commitment to fully investigate Epstein’s 2019 death but instead has raised new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.

WIRED previously reported that the video had been stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files, contradicting the Justice Department’s claim that it was “raw” footage. Now, further analysis shows that one of the source clips was approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video, indicating that footage appears to have been trimmed before release. It’s unclear what, if anything, the minutes cut from the first clip showed.

The nearly three-minute discrepancy may be related to the widely reported one-minute gap—between 11:58:58 pm and 12:00:00 am—that attorney general Pam Bondi has attributed to a nightly system reset. The metadata confirms that the first video file, which showed footage from August 9, 2019, continued for several minutes beyond what appears in the final version of the video and was trimmed to the 11:58:58 pm mark, right before the jump to midnight. The cut to the first clip doesn’t necessarily mean that there is additional time unaccounted for—the second clip picks up at midnight, which suggests the two would overlap—nor does it prove that the missing minute was cut from the video.

The footage was released at a moment of political tension. Trump allies had spent months speculating about the disclosure of explosive new evidence about Epstein’s death. But last week, the DOJ and FBI issued a memo stating that no “incriminating ‘client list’” exists and reaffirmed the government’s long-standing conclusion that Epstein—whom the US government accused of committing conspiracy to sex traffic minors and sex trafficking minors—died by suicide. That announcement triggered immediate backlash from pro-Trump influencers and media figures, who essentially accused the administration of a cover-up.

In response to detailed questions about how the video was assembled, WIRED sent a request for comment to the Department of Justice at 7:40 am on Tuesday morning. Just two minutes later, Natalie Baldassarre, a public affairs officer for the DOJ, replied tersely: “Refer you to the FBI.” The FBI declined WIRED’s request for comment.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: July 12, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration | Tags: Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp, Camp Mystic, Dan Bongino, deportations, DHS, FEMA, ICE raids in California, immigration, Jaime Alanis, Jeffrey Epstein, Kash Patel, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Texas floods | 15 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Immigration and deportation are dominating the news today, with stories about ICE in Los Angeles and developments in the Abrego Garcia story. The Texas flood is still in the news, with articles about failures of local officials and the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, MAGAs are still very worked up about Pam Bondi’s handling of the “Jeffrey Epstein files” and Epstein’s supposed suicide.

Immigration/Deportation News

CNN: Judge orders Trump administration to stop immigration arrests without probable cause in Southern California.

A federal judge on Friday found that the Department of Homeland Security has been making stops and arrests in Los Angeles immigration raids without probable cause and ordered the department to stop detaining individuals based solely on race, spoken language or occupation.

US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ordered that DHS must develop guidance for officers to determine “reasonable suspicion” outside of the apparent race or ethnicity of a person, the language they speak or their accent, “presence at a particular location” such as a bus stop or “the type of work one does.”

Friday’s ruling comes after the ACLU of Southern California brought a case against the Trump administration last week on behalf of five people and immigration advocacy groups, alleging that DHS — which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has made unconstitutional arrests and prevented detainees’ access to attorneys.

The ruling is limited to the seven-county jurisdiction of the US Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

Frimpong said in her ruling that the court needed to decide whether the plaintiffs could prove that the Trump administration “is indeed conducting roving patrols without

reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.”

“This Court decides—based on all the evidence presented—that they are,” Frimpong wrote.

Frimpong went on to say that the administration “failed” to provide information about the basis on which they made the arrests. The temporary restraining order also applies to the FBI and the Justice Department, which were also listed as defendants in the lawsuit and have been involved in immigration enforcement.

NBC News: Cannabis farmworker in California is on life support after chaotic federal immigration raid, family says.

A farmworker at a Southern California cannabis farm is in critical condition after being injured during a chaotic immigration raid by federal officers, local officials said Friday.

Jaime Alanis Garcia is hospitalized at Ventura County Medical Center and remains in critical condition, county officials said in a statement authorized by the man’s family.

His family told NBC Los Angeles that the man is on life support using an assistive breathing machine and has “catastrophic” injuries. He has a broken neck, broken skull and a severed artery, a niece said.

The United Farm Workers had previously said Garcia, an employee of Glass House Farms, died after falling some 30 feet.

“These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families,” UFW President Teresa Romero said in a statement to NBC News.

Texas Flood Updates

The New York Times: FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show.

Two days after catastrophic floods roared through Central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The lack of responsiveness happened because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters.

The agency laid off the contractors on July 5 after their contracts expired and were not extended, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The details on the unanswered calls on July 6, which have not been previously reported, come as FEMA faces intense scrutiny over its response to the floods in Texas that have killed more than 120 people. The agency, which President Trump has called for eliminating, has been slow to activate certain teams that coordinate response and search-and-rescue efforts.

After floods, hurricanes and other disasters, survivors can call FEMA to apply for different types of financial assistance. People who have lost their homes, for instance, can apply for a one-time payment of $750 that can help cover their immediate needs, such as food or other supplies.

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.

The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.

Some FEMA officials grew frustrated by the lapse in contracts and that it was taking days for Ms. Noem to act, according to the person briefed on the matter and the documents. “We still do not have a decision, waiver or signature from the DHS Secretary,” a FEMA official wrote in a July 8 email to colleagues.

The Washington Post: Kerr County did not use its most far-reaching alert system in deadly Texas floods.

The Texas county where nearly 100 people were killed and more than 160 remain missing had the technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm, but local officials did not do so before or during the early-morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights, inundating campsites and homes, a Washington Post examination found.

Kerr County officials, who have come under increasing scrutiny for their actions as the Guadalupe River began to flood, eventually sent text-message alerts that morning to residents who had registered to receive them, according to screenshots of the texts. But The Post’s review of emergency notifications that night found that even as a federal meteorologist warned of deteriorating conditions and catastrophic risk, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used to warn of potential flooding. The National Weather Service sent its own alerts through this system, beginning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4.

That mass notification system, known as the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, is used by National Weather Service meteorologists to warn of imminent threats. Warnings of life-threatening weather events sent on that system — similar to Amber Alerts — force phones to vibrate and emit a unique, jarring tone as long as they’re on and have a signal. They also allow qualified local officials to send tailored messages to targeted areas.

The lack of alerts sent through IPAWS from Kerr County officials as the Guadalupe River flooded was a critical misstep in their response, said Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches emergency management. Residents are more likely to trust — and listen to — their local government officials, he said, and the alert could have made a difference for some people despite the spotty cellphone service along the river and the fact that many people were probably asleep as floodwaters surged.

“If the alert had gone out, there might be one or two people who might have still been able to receive that message, who now, through word of mouth, alert people around them,” Sadiq said.

AP: FEMA removed dozens of Camp Mystic buildings from 100-year flood map before expansion, records show.

Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain in the years before rushing waters swept away children and counselors, a review by The Associated Press found.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency included the prestigious girls’ summer camp in a “Special Flood Hazard Area” in its National Flood Insurance map for Kerr County in 2011, which means it was required to have flood insurance and faced tighter regulation on any future construction projects.

That designation means an area is likely to be inundated during a 100-year flood — one severe enough that it only has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.

Located in a low-lying area along the Guadalupe River in a region known as flash flood alley, Camp Mystic lost at least 27 campers and counselors and longtime owner Dick Eastland when historic floodwaters tore through its property before dawn on July 4.

The flood was far more severe than the 100-year event envisioned by FEMA, experts said, and moved so quickly in the middle of the night that it caught many off guard in a county that lacked a warning system.

But Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.

“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.

News about MAGA’s Jeffrey Epstein Obsession

Yesterday Dakinikat wrote about FBI Assistant Director Dan Bongino’s threat to resign over Pam Bondi’s handling of the “Jeffrey Epstein files.” Now Mediaite reports that FBI Director Kash Patel is also threatening to resign: FBI Director Kash Patel ALSO Considering Resigning If Pam Bondi Keeps Her Job, Per Report.

According to a Friday report from Axios, Bongino and Bondi clashed over President Donald Trump’s administration’s handling of the case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department, led by Bondi, released a joint memo with the FBI announcing that the rumored “Epstein list” naming his associates never really existed. That conclusion contradicted Bondi’s previous claims that the supposed list was on her desk.

As a result, Bongino and Bondi reportedly got into it. That led to Bongino taking off from work on Friday “in protest.” The deputy director, according to The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan, had also made it clear that he would be leaving his post if Bondi kept hers.

Not long after that reporting, Olohan added that Patel has joined Bongino in his stand against Bondi.

“Source close to DOJ says Kash Patel also wants Pam Bondi gone, and that he’d consider leaving if Bongino leaves,” Olohan said. “Also that there are more frustrations with other documents Bondi hasn’t released.”

Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic: If This GOP Conference Is Proof, Trump Is Totally Screwed Over Epstein.

The Trump administration’s complete dismissal of the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to backfire as some of the most intense, involved members of his voting base think they’ve lost him to the “deep state.”

As the Student Action Summit conference hosted by Charlie Kirk’s right-wing Turning Point USA group kicked off on Friday, multiple MAGA loyalists expressed anger and exasperation with President Trump’s handling of the case that has dominated much of the conspiratorial far-right.

“It’s not about just a pedophile ring and all that. It’s about who governs us, right? And that’s why [the Epstein case] is not gonna go away,” MAGA godfather Steve Bannon yelled from the conference stage. He then went on to detail just how important the case is to the deep base. “For this to go away, you’re gonna lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement. If we lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement right now, we’re gonna lose 40 seats in [20]26, we’re gonna lose the presidency, they won’t even have to steal it … because [the Trump administration] will have disheartened the hardest core populist …”

Trump supporters who felt that the president was the answer to years of liberal and neoconservative deep state corruption are now reeling, feeling lost and confused as their knight in shining armor turns his back on one of their most important issues.

Bannon turned to three young conference attendees and asked them for their take on the situation.

“We need to, we need to enforce the laws of this country and you know, like you said, Steve, there’s no better question than who rules America. It’s not the people. So we need to obviously have the declassification of the Epstein files,” one said before Bannon chimed in.

A bit more:

“You don’t think Donald Trump as president — you would tell Donald Trump in the Oval Office that you think there’s an open question, with him as commander-in-chief and doing all he’s doing, you would actually tell Trump you don’t know, you question who rules this country?”

“I definitely would because it’s a blackmail ring and anybody who wouldn’t is not paying attention. Simply put, Epstein himself said that he was best friends, on the stand, with Donald Trump. So anybody who thought that these files were going to get just declassified because we pressured him enough or you voted harder enough is just lying to yourself frankly.”

The young man continued on.

“In 2016, we trusted the plan with Trump, but now Trump has become the deep state. The exact thing he we voted him in—”

‘Why do you say he’s become the deep state?” Bannon asked.

“What is more deep state than covering up for pedophiles? Why would you go to that island? Why? Tell me why would you go to that island? Why would you go on the plane? … Why his top donors—why are his top donors neighbors with Epstein?”

It seems that Trump’s most ardent supporters are finally asking the important questions. And while some in the MAGAsphere zero in on Attorney General Pam Bondi, others grasp that the one person with the most power over the case, the one person who could even come close to validating any of their theories, is Trump. And he has expressed no interest whatsoever in doing that. In fact, he can’t even believe that his base is still talking about it. And as we approach one full week of uproar, it’s clear that the Epstein thing won’t be going away anytime soon.

Politico: Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer sharpens her knives for Pam Bondi.

MAGA activist Laura Loomer has set her sights on ousting Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the White House fends off fury from the president’s base over its handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal case and death.

Loomer called on FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino to ask for Bondi’s public resignation Friday morning, writing on social media that Patel and Bongino had clashed with Bondi over the investigation.

Loomer also claimed that Bongino had taken the day off from work “to evaluate whether or not he wants to continue his position,” which POLITICO has not independently confirmed. Axios later reported that Bongino did not attend work on Friday after butting heads with Bondi earlier this week.

“Pam Blondi is very damaging to President Trump’s image. She drags the administration down and the base doesn’t want her as AG,” Loomer wrote in a post on X. “She is harming Trump’s administration and she’s embarrassing all of his staff and advisors by creating a PR crisis for them. It’s incredibly unfair to President Trump and his team.”

Thursday Reads: Texas Flood Disaster and MAGA Rage Over Epstein Files

Posted: July 10, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump | Tags: Camp Mystic, David Richardson, FEMA, James Comey, Jeffrey Epstein, John Brennan, Kash Patel, Kerr Country, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Ron Filipkowski, Russia investigation, Texas floods, Trump MAGA cult | 7 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

As usual lately, here’s a massive amount of news today, and I can’t possibly address everything. So I’ve decided to focus on the Texas flooding story, and then I’ll turn to a crazy story about Trump and his MAGA cult.

The catastrophic floods in Texas are still a huge story, and we’re beginning to see the recriminations on how badly the disaster was handled, by local, state, and federal officials. As of now, the death toll is 111, and there 173 missing. 116 of the missing are from Kerr County.

Here’s the latest from The New York Times live updates:

No survivors have been found since Friday in Kerr County, where the worst flooding occurred. The statewide death toll rose to 111, with at least 173 unaccounted for statewide….

At least 173 people remained missing on the fifth day after devastating floods swept through the Texas Hill Country, Gov. Greg Abbott said on Tuesday. Those unaccounted for include 161 in Kerr County, where the worst of the flooding occurred and where local officials said no one has been rescued since Friday.

The number of missing cited by the governor — the first time an official had identified the scale of the recovery operation still ahead — suggested the death toll of 111 could more than double as rescue teams sift through debris in search of bodies….

Search and rescue teams from across Texas, other states and even Mexico are pouring into flood-ravaged Central Texas to aid the strained crews that have been hunting for victims along the Guadalupe River.

Volunteer fire departments from across Texas have sent teams to the hardest-hit areas, as have fire departments from out of state, including those from Shreveport, La., and Memphis….

What about FEMA? I’m reminded of George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina. Remember “Heck of a job, Brownie”?

Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket: Have you seen this man? In the wake of deadly floods in Texas, FEMA Acting Administrator David Richardson is nowhere to be found.

From his very first day as Acting Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), David Richardson’s approach was clear: “I’ve never read a book on leadership,” he said in an all-staff Zoom on May 9th, a fact that quickly became abundantly clear. He told anyone who planned to obstruct his work on behalf of President Trump “I will run right over you. Don’t get in my way…I know all the tricks.”

There have been many Weird Little Guys since the start of Trump’s second administration. In this context, a Weird Little Guy is someone who’s elevated to a position of power with little to no relevant experience and has proved unwavering loyalty to Trump. He allows the higher ups to exert actual power, while he exists mostly as a face and warm body. And as we watch the paltry FEMA response in Texas after floods killed at least 119 people on July 4th and where at least 160 remain missing, Acting Administrator Richardson is proving he can’t even be the face of the agency by staying silent.

Search and recovery crews use a large excavator to remove debris from the bank of the Guadalupe River in Center Point, Texas, on Wednesday. Jim Vondruska Getty Images

As I wrote on Monday, FEMA staffers are alarmed by what they say is the agency’s impossibly slow and deficient response to the death and destruction wrought by the Texas floods. Figures shared with The Handbasket showed just 86 people deployed as of Monday evening. Per Tuesday’s FEMA evening briefing, an additional 204 people had been deployed—just 19 from FEMA, and 185 from other agencies. Few—if any—federal staff are on the ground to help survivors register for assistance.

But perhaps as galling as the weak response is Richardson’s disappearing act: While the former Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office is not a particularly vocal leader even during quieter weeks, he still has yet to make a single internal or public comment about the impact of the Texas floods and how his agency is helping survivors.

“It is unprecedented for the leader of FEMA to be absent from the public response to a disaster that has killed over 100 Americans,” Dr. Samantha Montano, Associate Professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told The Handbasket on Wednesday. “Richardson should be on the ground in the impacted areas meeting with local, state, and nonprofit stakeholders. He should be holding press conferences and providing interviews for national outlets. He should be monitoring FEMA’s resources and the broader federal response to ensure it is moving effectively and efficiently.”

And what has Kristi Noem been up to?

CNN: FEMA’s response to Texas flood slowed by Noem’s cost controls.

As monstrous floodwaters surged across central Texas late last week, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency leapt into action, preparing to deploy critical search and rescue teams and life-saving resources, like they have in countless past disasters.

But almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.

As CNN has previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.

For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.

Kristi Noem meets with Gov. Abbott and others in Texas

In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.

“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”

For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.

But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

More details at CNN.

The New York Times: As Texas Flood Raged, Camp Mystic Was Left to Fend for Itself.

In the first three hours after the National Weather Service sent out an alert at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, warning of “life-threatening flash flooding” near Kerrville, Texas, the Guadalupe River would rise 20 feet. Yet local leaders would remain largely unheard from, raising questions about both local preparedness and whether the state of Texas should be doing more to notify flood-prone rural counties when they are in danger.

Camp Mystic, a girls’ camp along the river where at least 27 people lost their lives, experienced severe flooding sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., according to accounts from parents whose children were at the camp. Counselors in one cabin had to force open windows to help young girls get out. “The girls were saying it was a rushing river,” said Lisa Miller, whose 9-year-old daughter, Birdie, had to climb onto a counselor’s back to escape.

At the nearby Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly camp, a facilities manager was awake around 1 a.m. when he saw the rising waters and alerted his boss, which prompted a quick effort to move people to higher ground, camp officials said. No lives were lost.

Yet even as these dramas were unfolding, many of the key local leaders in Kerr County were still asleep or had not been alerted to the danger. The survival of people in local camps and low-lying areas in many cases depended not on official evacuations, but on whether they were paying attention, on their own, to weather alerts in the middle of the night.

After the flood alert shortly after 1 a.m., the National Weather Service went on to put out a series of warnings of mounting intensity, with one at 4:03 a.m. warning of “catastrophic” flooding.

“This came at night when people were asleep, in bed,” Kerrville’s mayor, Joe Herring Jr., said at a news conference. He later told CNN that he had not received the weather alert and was not awakened until 5:30 a.m.

Sheriff Larry Leitha of Kerr County said he had first been notified around 4 or 5 a.m., when “one of my sergeants was in dispatch when the first calls started coming in.”

It’s been reported that campers and counselors at Camp Mystic weren’t allowed to have cell phone with them. Apparently cell phone coverage is poor in the area anyway.

CNN: Officials have yet to explain who did what during critical early hours as deadly floods hit Texas.

Nearly a week after floodwaters swept away more than a hundred lives, Texas officials are facing heated questions over how much was – or was not – done in the early morning hours of Friday as a wall of water raced down the Guadalupe River.

Several officials in the past few days have deflected or become defensive when asked clarifying questions about the county’s actions before and during the disaster.

“We’re in the process of trying to put together a timeline. That’s going to take a little bit of time,” Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said Tuesday, adding his priority was recovering victims, identifying bodies and notifying families.

Authorities were pressed again Wednesday when they shared little information about the early hours of the emergency, instead calling attention to their swift response later in the day on July 4.

“I know that this tragedy, as horrific as it is, could have been so much worse,” Kerrville Police Department Sgt. Jonathan Lamb said.

As search and rescue efforts continue for a seventh straight day, frustration grows over lingering questions about what officials did during those crucial early hours, if existing warning systems worked and whether any loss could have been prevented.

I suppose any even could be worse, but that is hardly the point. See the post for a timeline CNN has created.

NPR: Kerr County struggled to fund flood warnings. Under Trump, it’s getting even harder.

Years before the flooding took more than 90 lives in Kerr County, Texas, local officials knew residents faced threats from rapidly rising water. They started planning a flood warning system, one that could alert residents when a flash flood was imminent.

Still, like many other communities around the country, Kerr County struggled to find a way to pay for it. They turned to the largest source available for most localities: funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

For years, Kerr County officials debated how to fund a flood warning system. Under Trump administration changes, disaster funding opportunities are getting more limited for communities. Denise Rios WaPo

FEMA has granted billions over the last five years to help communities prepare for disasters. The idea is one that has been proven on the ground: When communities invest in infrastructure and preparation before a disaster, it can dramatically lessen the damage when a disaster hits, as well as save lives.

Kerr County’s funding application was turned down by Texas officials in charge of administering the federal funds. As with most of FEMA’s programs, there was more demand for money than was available. Kerr County looked into a Texas state grant program for flood projects, but gave up when they learned it would cover only a small portion of the cost. In Texas alone, more than $54 billion in flood projects are waiting to be built, and state legislators have only dedicated a small fraction of that funding so far.

Now, funding prospects for communities at risk are getting even more limited. The Trump administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars dedicated to help communities prepare for disasters. Trump signed an executive order saying states should be responsible for funding disaster preparedness, instead of the federal government.

I know I’ve spent a lot of time on this story, but it seems to me that we will see more disasters like this with hurricane and tornado seasons coming up.

Now I want to address a crazy story about Trump and his MAGA cult. This story grew out of Pam Bondi’s announcement that the Jeffrey Epstein files would not be released, as she previously promised.

Axios on July 5: Exclusive: DOJ, FBI conclude Epstein had no “client list,” died by suicide.

President Trump‘s Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list” or was murdered, according to a memo detailing the findings obtained by Axios.

— The administration is releasing a video — in both raw and “enhanced” versions — that it says indicates no one entered the area of the Manhattan prison where Epstein was held the night he died in 2019.

— The video supports a medical examiner’s finding that Epstein died by suicide, the two-page memo claims.

Why it matters: The findings represent the first time Trump’s administration has officially contradicted conspiracy theories about Epstein’s activities and his death — theories that had been pushed by the FBI’s top two officials before Trump appointed them to the bureau.

– As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI’s director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died.

– Patel and Bongino have since said Epstein killed himself. But it has become an article of faith online, especially on the right, that Epstein’s crimes also implicated government officials, celebrities and business leaders — and that someone killed him to conceal them.

– The memo says no one else involved in the Epstein case will be charged. (Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and related offenses.)

You can read more at the link. The problem is that Bodi promised a big reveal and a client list and now she’s changed her mind–probably because Trump is all over the Epstein files. But MAGA is enraged. They don’t get that she’s probably protecting Trump. They think Democrats and the “deep state” are involved.

Yesterday, MAGA expert Ron Filipkowski wrote about the firestorm at Meidas: Trump Made His Epstein Problem Much Worse. And how this could hurt Republicans in the midterms.

Years have gone by since Jeffrey Epstein was tried, convicted, sent to prison, and committed suicide (allegedly). Trump made it through his first election and term with the Epstein case not affecting him negatively with his MAGA base despite his obvious personal connections with him, which were pretty extensive. His MAGA cult accepted his explanations that none of his contacts with Epstein involved girls and he cut ties with him as soon as he learned about the allegations against him.

In February, MAGA influencers showed off their copies of the so-called Epstein files.

Four years went by with Trump out of office and the Epstein story largely fell out of the public consciousness as these things do with so much other news happening. But not with Trump’s MAGA base. The various conspiracies surrounding the case continued to build online on social media and in right-wing podcasts. The conspiracies garnered huge numbers of clicks and views for the grifter class, so they were more than happy to feed the beast.

There were many different conspiracies involving Epstein, but most who are obsessed with the case generally fall into either one of two camps. The first believes that there is a “Deep State” cabal that secretly controls all aspects of government and society run by elites from both parties, and that many of them were caught up in what Epstein was doing so there is ample incentive for leaders of both political parties to cover everything up to try and get the public to move on. The second group believes that Epstein was a Mossad agent used to gather blackmail videos of powerful elected officials so Israel would be able gain control of the US government through extortion.

When Trump won the 2024 election, many of the influencers with huge followings believed that all the information would finally be released by his new FBI Director and Attorney General. They believed that former AG Bill Barr was very much part of the Deep State and covered everything up in term one. They were primarily interested in 3 things: 1. The names of everyone who Epstein brought into his orbit to rape girls; 2. Evidence that his death was not a suicide and who killed him; 3. Who were Epstein’s co-conspirators?

Filipkowski notes that Trump appointed heavy-duty MAGA conspiracy theorists to high level law enforcement posts.

…which only poured gasoline on the fire for MAGA anxiously awaiting the big reveal. Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi may have been chosen for their loyalty to Trump over qualifications and competence, but they also carried with them a lot of baggage on Epstein. Their mouths had written a lot of checks to MAGA on this issue, and they expected to be cashing them right about now.

But it was not to be. Patel and Bongino told Maria Baritromo on Fox last month that they had reviewed the files and were convinced that Epstein killed himself, which infuriated MAGA. But still they were assuaged by the fact that Bondi gave two separate interviews to Fox where she said there were hundreds of victims and thousands of videos that were “on her desk” that she was reviewing. She said some of the materials had to be “redacted,” but everything would be released shortly. Then DOJ posted a memo on their website this week that nothing would be released and the case was closed. No formal announcement, no press conference, no Fox interview. Just an unsigned memo posted on a website.

So now the crazies are outraged. Click the link to read the rest of Filpkowski’s post.

Axios: Trump faces MAGA trust crisis over Epstein debacle.

Top MAGA influencers warn the Trump administration is bleeding trust over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and that the president is drifting out of step with the movement he built.

Why it matters: The MAGA base was blindsided by the Justice Department’s conclusion that the notorious sex trafficker died by suicide in 2019 and had no “client list.” Days after the initial shock, Trump’s insistence on moving on is fueling a deeper sense of betrayal.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump asked incredulously during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting after a reporter pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi on the findings.

“I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein at a time like this,” he added, calling it a “waste” of time and a “desecration.”

Driving the news: The chorus of MAGA outrage has only intensified since the Justice Department and FBI released a memo on Sunday finding no evidence that Epstein was murdered, had a “client list” or had blackmailed powerful figures.

Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon — influential Trump allies who have feuded with the president at times — are among those who have accused the administration of a cover-up.

But even MAGA’s most loyal foot soldiers are struggling to explain how top Trump officials could close the Epstein case after promising — for years — that it would expose shadowy global elites.

The Independent: MTG says Americans are ‘not going to accept’ there is no Epstein client list.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said Americans are “not going to accept” that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had no client list.

A memo released by the Justice Department and the FBI on Monday stating there was never any client list caused waves among President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again base.

Greene, a prominent MAGA figure, told Real America’s Voice network on Wednesday, “I think the Department of Justice and the FBI has more explaining to do — this is Jeffrey Epstein,” The Hill reports.

“This is the most famous pedophile in modern-day history, and people are absolutely not going to accept just a memo that was written that says there is no client list,” she said.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers had pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to release what was suspected to be a record of high-profile names associated with Epstein, a wealthy financier who died in jail ahead of his trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.

You’d think it might dawn on these morons that Bondi and the rest are protecting Trump, who was pals with Epstein for at least 15 years, but they are too brainwashed, I guess.

The Daily Beast: Pam Bondi Hanging on by Her Fingertips Amid MAGA Firestorm.

Pam Bondi is clinging to her job as she faces a firestorm of criticism from MAGA loyalists over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

It’s hard to find a Trump official who has faced more wrath than Donald Trump’s attorney general, as the president’s supporters pile on after the Justice Department indicated this week there was no more information to release on the convicted sex offender and denied the existence of an Epstein “client list.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo on Monday stating that the department and the F.B.I. had determined “that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

Across social media, the president’s supporters have been accusing Bondi of lying to the American people. They’re calling for the president to fire her or for her to resign. Some have even thrown around the word “impeachment.”

Some of the biggest conservative activists have added fuel to the burning outrage with their heated takedowns of the attorney general.

“She can say whatever she wants to say. She also said she is committed to ‘combatting human trafficking.’ Do you really believe her? I don’t,” posted far-right activist Laura Loomer.

“She can say whatever she wants to say. She also said she is committed to ‘combatting human trafficking.’ Do you really believe her? I don’t,” posted far-right activist Laura Loomer.

The MAGA’s are angry because they were invited to the White House in February where they received binders of information that turned out to be old news.

Alt-right podcaster Jack Posobiec skewered her on his show for calling the Epstein case closed and saying that’s “not how you treat the American people.”

“I feel very angry, upset, used… from having gone to the White House and receiving this binder full of baloney that was completely publicly available information already that we were told was new information on Epstein. It wasn’t,” he said. “We were told that more information was coming. It wasn’t.”

He was referring to influencers being invited to the White House in February, where they were handed binders marked “Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained Epstein material that was largely already public knowledge.

Megyn Kelly suggested on Tuesday that Bondi was “too lazy” to check if any of the information was new before handing it over to influencers earlier this year.

Now Trump and the gang have leaked supposed criminal investigations of James Comey and John Brennan, most likely in an effort to change the subject.

Another one from Axios: Trump on Brennan, Comey probe reports: “Maybe they have to pay a price.”

President Trump responded Wednesday to reports that former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey are being investigated over allegations that they made false statements to Congress during the Russia probe.

…Brennan and Comey were under criminal investigation over the FBI probe into possible links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia after CIA director John Ratcliffe referred evidence to the FBI of possible wrongdoing….

“I know nothing about it other than what I read today, but I will tell you, I think they’re very dishonest people,” Trump said when asked about the investigation by a reporter during a White House meeting with African leaders….”I think they’re crooked as hell and maybe they have to pay a price for that….”I believe they are truly bad people and dishonest people,” Trump added. “So whatever happens, happens.”

Ratcliffe last week released a review that criticized intelligence leaders for rushing the Russia report and for the intelligence community assessment relying on a single source to express “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the 2016 election….However, it did not dispute “the quality and credibility” of the CIA’s conclusions….”Agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy,” Ratcliffe said in a statement on the report.

What they’re saying: Brennan told MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” Wednesday afternoon that neither the Department of Justice nor the CIA had contacted him about the investigation.

The New York Times on the Comey “investigation”: Comey Tracked by Secret Service After Post Critical of Trump.

The Secret Service had the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey followed by law enforcement authorities in unmarked cars and street clothes and tracked the location of his cellphone the day after he posted an image on social media in May that President Trump’s allies said amounted to a threat to assassinate the president, according to three government officials.

Mr. Comey and his wife, Patrice, were tailed by the authorities as they drove from the North Carolina coast, where they had been vacationing, through Virginia to their home in the Washington area, the officials said, describing the details of the surveillance on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a federal investigation.

At the same time, the Secret Service was receiving information showing the location of Mr. Comey’s phone while federal authorities were stationed at his home waiting for him to return, the officials said.

The intense surveillance occurred a day after Mr. Comey, long perceived by Mr. Trump as an enemy, had posted a photo on social media of seashells he said he had found while walking on the beach. The shells were arranged in the formation “86 47,” combining a slang term meaning to dismiss or remove with the numerical designation of Mr. Trump’s second presidency. Trump critics have often displayed the phrase on signs and clothing at protests….

Shortly after the image was posted, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on social media that Mr. Comey was “casually calling for my dad to be murdered.” The accusation created a firestorm online, as Mr. Trump’s supporters accused Mr. Comey of plotting to assassinate the president.

When Mr. Comey learned of the uproar, he deleted the post, said he did not know that it had a violent connotation and that he opposed violence of any kind. The Secret Service interviewed him by phone that evening, and Mr. Comey said he had no intent to cause the president harm.

The Secret Service followed him home and then insisted on taking him back to DC to be questioned. I don’t know that is what the so-called “investigation” is about. Frankly, I don’t think there really are investigations of Brennan and Comey. It’s just Trump’s effort to distract from the Epstein furor.

That’s it for me today. What do you think? What’s on your mind?

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: April 26, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, just because | Tags: deporting U.S. citizen children, Doge, ICE, Jeffrey Epstein, Judge Hannah Dugan, Pope Francis, Russia, Ukraine, Virginia Giuffre, Volodyur Zelensky | 5 Comments

By Jussi Taipaleenmäki

Good Afternoon!!

Early this morning ET, Pope Francis was laid to rest.

The Guardian: World bids farewell to Pope Francis with pilgrims and the powerful among 400,000 at funeral.

Pope Francis has been eulogised as “a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone” during a funeral mass that brought 400,000 mourners to Rome, from pilgrims and refugees to powerful world leaders and royalty.

Francis, 88, died on Monday after a stroke and subsequent heart failure, setting into motion a series of centuries-old rituals and a huge, meticulously planned logistical and security operation not seen in Italy since the funeral of John Paul II in April 2005.

The crowd erupted into applause as the late pontiff’s wooden coffin was carried from the altar of the 16th-century St Peter’s Basilica, where it had laid in state for three days, by 14 white-gloved pallbearers and into the square for the open-air ceremony.

Applause also rang out when the Italian cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who presided over the funeral mass, spoke of Francis’s care for immigrants, his constant pleas for peace, the need for negotiations to end wars and the importance of the climate.

Under a blue sky, crowds stretched along Via della Conciliazione, the road connecting the Italian capital with the Vatican.

Among the pilgrims were Rosa Cirielli and her friend Pina Sanarico, who left their homes in Taranto, in southern Italy, at 5am, and managed to secure themselves a decent position in front of a huge TV screen. “When Pope Francis was alive, he gave us hope. Now we have this huge hole,” said Cirielli. “He left us during a very ugly period for the world. He was the only one who loudly called for peace.”

The pilgrims were joined by leaders from more than 150 countries, including the US president, Donald Trump, who had repeatedly clashed with Francis over immigration, and his wife Melania. A White House official said Trump had a “very productive” meeting before the ceremony with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A photo showed the pair sitting opposite each other on chairs inside St Peter’s Basilica. Another image showed them together with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and French president, Emmanuel Macron. Trump and Zelenskyy were also expected to meet after the mass.

Other guests included the former US president Joe Biden, who last met Francis at the G7 summit in Puglia in June 2024, the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Prince William.

More than 2,000 journalists from around the world travelled to Rome to cover the event.

The 90-minute mass was celebrated by 220 cardinals, 750 bishops and more than 4,000 priests.

Trump did not belong at the funeral of Pope Francis, but he bulled his way in and demanded special treatment. Can you believe didn’t even wear black?

The Daily Beast: Vatican Caves and Gives Trump Front-Row Seat for Pope’s Funeral.

President Donald Trump, wearing a blue suit in a sea of black, was seated in a prized front-row seat for the funeral of Pope Francis.

The seating location will likely be a source of great satisfaction for the famously thin-skinned president, who mercilessly mocked Joe Biden after he was seated in the 14th row at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022.

By Jos Rian

Based on precedent, Trump was expected to have been seated in the third row, behind anointed monarchs.

In the end, however, he and Melania were seated in the front row, along with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, whose appearance triggered a spontaneous outburst of applause from the assembled crowds.

Vatican sources told Sky News that Trump met with Zelensky before the ceremony, just hours after the president talked up a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.

The controversy over Trump’s seating would doubtless have prompted a wry reaction from the overtly humble Pope Francis, who dedicated considerable political capital to confronting Trump, denouncing his immigration policy as “un-Christian” and schooling his minion JD Vance on the issue in his final hours.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, previously told the Telegraph the ceremony would be a “masterpiece of stage management when you consider those state leaders who have high opinions of their importance.”

“They’ve been doing it since the emperors ruled Rome—they know how to deal with big egos. And I think every leader of a nation that comes here on Saturday will go home reasonably content,” he added.

David Sanger at The New York Times: Trump Meets With Zelensky in Vatican City.

President Trump met privately with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday in Vatican City, the first time the two leaders have met since their televised argument in late February in the Oval Office exacerbated the deep breach between the two countries.

The meeting took place in St. Peter’s Basilica, the two men perched on metal chairs, deep in conversation for several minutes as they waited for the funeral for Pope Francis to begin. A White House spokesman, Stephen Cheung, called it a “very productive discussion,” but gave no details.

It came at a critical moment. The United States has presented Ukraine with a plan for a cease-fire in its war with Russia, leading to a postwar plan that would give Russia de facto control over all of the lands it has illegally seized since the invasion began three years ago. The proposal also includes a major reversal of American policy: a formal recognition by the United States that Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014, is now Russian territory.

Mr. Zelensky said this past week that Ukraine would never make that concession, noting that it would violate Ukraine’s Constitution; most of the other nations in Europe would almost agree with Mr. Zelensky’s view. But the Ukrainian leader has a counterproposal of his own, Ukrainian officials said, one that would end the conflict on far less generous terms for Russia, and would include billions of dollars in reparations for Ukraine, paid by Russia.

The White House did not respond to queries about the specifics of the meeting in Vatican City. But it was a remarkable scene: an impromptu meeting between two men who have made no secret of their deep dislike and distrust for each other. In the minutes after they last saw each other, Mr. Zelensky was essentially evicted from the White House, a lunch for the two men left uneaten and an economic accord allowing the United States to help exploit much of Ukraine’s minerals left unsigned.

Some very sad news: Virginia Giuffre had died by suicide.

The Guardian: Virginia Giuffre, Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew accuser, dies aged 41.

Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent victims of the disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein who also alleged she was sexually trafficked to Prince Andrew, has died aged 41.

Her family issued a statement on Saturday confirming she took her own life at her farm in Western Australia, where she had lived for several years.

“It is with utterly broken hearts that we announce that Virginia passed away last night at her farm in Western Australia. She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking,” the statement read.

By Nicolai Tonitza

“In the end, the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle its weight.”

Giuffre was one of the most vocal victims of Epstein, alleging she had been groomed and sexually abused by him and his longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, beginning in her teens.

The family described her as a “fierce warrior” against sexual abuse and sex trafficking and a “light that lifted so many survivors”.

“Despite all the adversity she faced in her life, she shone so bright. She will be missed beyond measure,” they said.

Giuffre is survived by her three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, who her family said were the “light of her life”.

“It was when she held her newborn daughter in her arms that Virginia realised she had to fight back against those who had abused her and so many others,” they said.

“There are no words that can express the grave loss we feel today with the passing of our sweet Virginia. She was heroic and will always be remembered for her incredible courage and loving spirit.”

Some background on Giuffre from NBC News: Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent abuse survivors, dies by suicide.

Giuffre, 41, died in Neergabby, Australia, where she had been living for several years.

Giuffre was one of the earliest and loudest voices calling for criminal charges against Epstein and his enablers. Other Epstein abuse survivors later credited her with giving them the courage to speak out.

She also provided critical information to law enforcement that contributed to the investigation into and later the conviction of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as other investigations by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York….

Raised primarily in Florida, Giuffre had a troubled childhood. She said she was abused by a family friend, triggering a downward spiral that led to her living on the streets for a time as a teenager.

She was attempting to rebuild her life when she met Maxwell, Epstein’s close confidant. Maxwell groomed her to be sexually abused by Epstein, and that abuse continued from 1999 to 2002, according to Giuffre. Giuffre also alleged that Epstein trafficked her to his powerful friends, including Prince Andrew and French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel.

Epstein, a wealthy financier, died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

Maxwell, a former British socialite, was found guilty on five counts of sex trafficking in 2021 for her role in recruiting young girls to be abused by Epstein.

Giuffre filed a federal lawsuit against Andrew in 2021, alleging that he sexually abused her when she was 17. Andrew, who stepped back from his duties as an active royal as controversy related to Epstein swirled around him, agreed to settle the case for an undisclosed amount in 2022. He has denied having sex with her.

Brunel, who headed several modeling agencies, was charged with sexual harassment and the rape of at least one minor in December 2020. He denied wrongdoing and died by suicide in his jail cell in February 2022.

Several months prior, Giuffre testified against Brunel in a Paris courtroom in June 2021. In an interview after her daylong closed-door testimony, Giuffre said she appeared in court to be a voice for the victims and to make sure Brunel was brought to justice.

“I wanted Brunel to know that he no longer has the power over me,” Giuffre said, “that I am a grown woman now and I’ve decided to hold him accountable for what he did to me and so many others.”

Giuffre moved to Australia with her husband before Epstein’s 2019 arrest. The couple has three children.

There was quite a bit of immigration news yesterday.

Topping the list: the FBI arrested a judge. Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo: FBI Stages Courthouse Arrest of Wisconsin Judge.

The federal government used brazen, heavy-handed tactics on Friday to arrest a Wisconsin state judge on obstruction charges related to an immigration case.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan received the distinction of being arrested at her courthouse. She does not appear to have been given the opportunity to surrender to law enforcement.

By Nicola Slattery

Instead, Trump administration officials immediately used the arrest to create a spectacle and broadcast to the country that state officials — including sitting judges — must cooperate with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign or else face overbearing actions from federal law enforcement.

A U.S. Marshals Service spokesman told TPM that FBI agents arrested Dugan at around 8:30 a.m. Milwaukee time. They made the arrest, Marshals spokesman Brady McCarron told TPM, as she arrived for work on the state courthouse grounds, detaining her outside of the building.

Around half an hour after, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a tweet announcing the arrest.

“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse,” he wrote. Patel deleted the tweet minutes later, though he would later repost it.

Contrast the brazenness of Dugan’s arrest, and Patel’s efforts to manufacture publicity around it, with how a somewhat similar case proceeded during Trump’s first term. In 2019, a Massachusetts state judge was indicted on obstruction charges over allegations of blocking ICE officials from taking custody of an undocumented citizen of the Dominican Republic. In that case, itself an extremely rare federal prosecution of a state judge over a decision related to the use of her office, the defendant was allowed to surrender. The DOJ dropped the charges in September 2022.

Read the rest at TPM. This will be an important case to watch. I suspect this isn’t the last judge who will be targeted by Trump goons.

Chris Geidner at The Law Dork: The Trump administration deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen on Friday.

Over the course of the past three days, the Trump administration took a two-year-old U.S. citizen into custody, along with her mother and sister, and deported the child to Honduras with little to no individualized process, prompting sharp concern from a conservative federal judge on Friday.

The Justice Department does not appear to dispute the underlying facts, given its position in a filing faxed to the court about 3:45 a.m. CT Friday in response to a habeas petition filed on behalf of the child, referred to as V.M.L., on Thursday evening.

Instead, the Justice Department’s entire argument was simply that, once in custody and told she was going to be deported, V.M.L.’s mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, wrote a note stating that she would bring her two-year-old daughter with her to Honduras.

By Jos Rian

As the habeas petition made clear, however, many federal officials knew that both V.M.L.’s father, Adiel Mendez Sagastume, and provisional custodian, Trish Mack, were desperately trying to get in touch with Jenny and/or get V.M.L. released to them throughout the 70 hours between when the two of them and Jenny’s other child were taken into custody and flown to Texas before Friday’s flight to Honduras.

On Friday, in the wake of all of this information, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued an order setting a hearing “[i]n the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The order was first reported by Politico.

That the order came from Doughty, a far-right Trump appointee known for his harsh criticism of the Biden administration in a case about social media that was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, was yet another reminder of how alarming the Trump administration’s actions are being seen by judges of all backgrounds.

Of the deportation of a two-year-old U.S. citizen, Doughty wrote on Friday, “The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that.“

Read more details at the link. There’s even more information about this case and others in this piece by James Joyner at Outside the Beltway: We’re Deporting US Citizens, Including Children.

This is a press release from the ACLU: ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation.

New Orleans, LA – Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.

ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.

As a result, the families were completely isolated during critical moments when decisions were being made about the welfare of their minor children. This included decisions with serious implications for the health, safety, and legal rights of the children involved–without any opportunity to coordinate with caretakers or consult with legal representatives.

New Orleans, LA – Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.

By Alberto Morrocco

ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.

As a result, the families were completely isolated during critical moments when decisions were being made about the welfare of their minor children. This included decisions with serious implications for the health, safety, and legal rights of the children involved–without any opportunity to coordinate with caretakers or consult with legal representatives.

These actions stand in direct violation of ICE’s own written and informal directives, which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers–regardless of immigration status–when deportations are being carried out.

Both families have possible immigration relief, but because ICE denied them access to their attorneys, legal counsel was unable to assist and advise them in time. With one family, government attorneys had assured legal counsel that a legal call would be arranged within 24-48 hours, as well as a call with a family member. Instead, just after close of business and after courts closed for the day, ICE suddenly reversed course and informed counsel that the family would be deported at 6am the next morning–before the court reopened.

Read the rest at the link.

Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic: Trump DOJ Ordered ICE to Invade Homes Without Search Warrant.

The Justice Department quietly invoked the Alien Enemies act last month to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the power to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes as long as they suspect them to be an “alien enemy.” USA Today obtained the memo that contained this order on Friday.

“As much as practicable, officers should follow the proactive procedures above—and have an executed Warrant of Apprehension and Removal—before contacting an Alien Enemy,” the memo reads. “However, that will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing Alien Enemies.… An officer may encounter a suspected Alien Enemy in the natural course of the officer’s enforcement activity, such as when apprehending other validated members of Tren de Aragua. Given the dynamic nature of enforcement operations, officers in the field are authorized to apprehend aliens upon a reasonable belief that the alien meets all four requirements to be validated as an Alien Enemy. This authority includes entering an Alien Enemy’s residence to make an AEA apprehension where circumstances render it impracticable to first obtain a signed Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal” (emphasis added).

In the memo, the Justice Department defined an “alien enemy” as anyone who is 14 years of age or older, not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, a citizen of Venezuela, and “a member of the hostile enemy Tren de Aragua,” per the Alien Enemy Validation Guide, a document that has already been slammed by immigration experts.

Some DOGE news from ProPublica: Inspector General Probes Whether Trump, DOGE Sought Private Taxpayer Information or Sensitive IRS Material.

A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show.

The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.

The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies that is typically highly restricted.

By Arthur Io

The review appears to be in its early stages — one document describes staffers as “beginning preplanning” — but the email directs the IRS to turn over specific documents by Thursday, April 24. It’s not clear if that happened.

The inspector general is seeking, for instance, “All requests for taxpayer or other protected information from the President or Executive Office of the President, OMB, or DOGE. Include any information on how the requestor plans to use the information requested, the IRS’s response to the request, and the legal basis for the IRS’s response,” the email says.

The inquiry also asks for information about requests for access to IRS systems from any agency in the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and DOGE.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration office, known as TIGTA, is led by acting Inspector General Heather M. Hill. When Trump fired 17 inspectors general across a range of federal agencies in January, those working for the Treasury Department were not among the ones axed.

Wednesday Reads

Posted: December 20, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, morning reads | Tags: 14th amendment, Adolf Hitler, Colorado, fascism, Godwin's law, Jeffrey Clark, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, Mike Godwin, Rep. Scott Perry, Roberts Court, Rudy Giuliani, Supreme Court, Ukraine | 6 Comments

Good Morning!!

Foggy Landscape, by Raul Cantu

Pretty soon the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to get involved in the Trump mess. That became even more likely after the we got big news out of Colorado. The state’s supreme court has banned Trump from the 2024 ballot.

The Washington Post: Trump disqualified from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot by state Supreme Court.

In a historic decision Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court barred Donald Trump from running in the state’s presidential primary after determining that he had engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

The 4-to-3 decision marked the first time a court has ruled to keep a presidential candidate off the ballot under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that bars insurrectionists from holding office. The ruling comes as courts in other states consider similar cases. All seven justices on the Colorado Supreme Court were initially appointed by Democratic governors.

If other states reach the same conclusion, Trump would have a difficult — if not impossible — time securing the Republican nomination and winning in November.

The decision is certain to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it will be up to the justices to decide whether to take the case. Scholars have said only the nation’s high court can settle for all states whether the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol constituted an insurrection and whether Trump is banned from running.

“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the decision reads. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”

The U.S. Supreme Court justices separately are weighing a request from special counsel Jack Smith to expedite consideration of Trump’s immunity claim in one of his criminal cases — his federal indictment in Washington on charges of illegally trying to obstruct Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s majority determined that the trial judge was allowed to consider Congress’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which contributed to the determination that Trump engaged in insurrection.

“We conclude that the foregoing evidence, the great bulk of which was undisputed at trial, established that President Trump engaged in insurrection,” the majority wrote.

Frosty Morning, by Ottis Adams

From Talking Points Morning Memo by David Kurtz: Like It Or Not, The Roberts Court Is About To Be Confronted With The Trump Problem.

The decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Donald Trump from the GOP primary ballot has cast us deeper into uncharted waters.

I had a vague notion even into adulthood that the constitutional order in America was challenged every 50 years or so in ways that stress-tested the system. By that measure, I regret to inform you that we live in extraordinary times.

Since 1998, some of the markers – by the numbers:

3 going on 4 presidential impeachments;

2 winning presidential candidates losing the popular vote;

1 going on 2 presidential elections decided by the Supreme Court;

1 attempted coup; and

4 criminal prosecutions of an ex-president.

While it’s not just Donald Trump, you can see his outsize impact on those numbers.

I’m not of the view that testing constitutional limits is somehow dangerous or ill-advised. We should thoroughly ventilate the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause, as is being done now. It’s been a mistake, in my view, to spend decades circling around but never quite confronting the true extent of executive privilege. In the half century since Watergate, we shouldn’t have operated under the untested specter of a Justice Department opinion that sitting presidents can’t be criminally charged.

So I don’t think there’s anything inherently ill-advised about treating the Constitution as a robust mechanism to be used, tested, amended, and reinvigorated. Not every brush with a constitutional question is a constitutional crisis. (To clear up any possible confusion, I’m talking here about the constitutional structure itself, not the scope of individual rights protected by the Constitution, whose developments have their own history and evolution under the law.)

The next few months are going to see a series of new tests.

Read more, with suggestions for further reading at the TPM link.

More commentary from Rick Hasen at the Election Law Blog: Will the U.S. Supreme Court Keep Donald Trump Off the Ballot ? Some Initial Thoughts.

I am traveling and so I offer only some brief and initial thoughts here about what the United States Supreme Court may and should do in light of the Colorado Supreme Court’s determination that Donald Trump is ineligible to serve as president under Section 3 of the 14th amendment for encouraging insurrection.

By Anatoly Deverin

My bottom line is that the Colorado opinion is a serious and careful opinion that reaches a reasonable conclusion that Trump is disqualified. Nonetheless the opinion reaches many novel legal issues that the U.S. Supreme Court could decide the other way should that court reach the merits. (The three dissenters on the Colorado court did not really reach the merits.) Trump would need to prevail on only one of these legal issues to win on any appeal, so in some ways the legal odds are with him.

It is far from clear that the U.S. Supreme Court will reach the merits—there are many legal doctrines like ripeness and mootness that would give the Court a way to avoid deciding the issues in the case. But it is imperative for the political stability of the U.S. to get a definitive judicial resolution of these questions as soon as possible. Voters need to know if the candidate they are supporting for President is eligible. And if we don’t get a final judicial resolution before January 6, 2025 a Democratic-majority Congress could decide Trump is disqualified even if he appears to win the electoral college vote. That would be tremendously destabilizing.

In the end the legal issues are close but the political ramifications of disqualification would be enormous. Once again the Supreme Court is being thrust into the center of a U.S. presidential election. But unlike in 2000 the general political instability in the United States makes the situation now much more precarious.

The media has finally begun talking about Trump’s fascist tendencies and actually comparing him to Hitler. Calder McHugh writes at Politico Magazine: ‘Trump Knows What He’s Doing’: The Creator of Godwin’s Law Says the Hitler Comparison Is Apt.

Any time people start fighting on the internet, someone will inevitably reach for the Hitler comparison. It’s a virtually unbreakable rule known as “Godwin’s law,” named after Mike Godwin, an early internet enthusiast who coined it back in 1990. It’s also understood that often the party mentioning Hitler or the Nazis is losing the argument, though that’s not part of the law itself.

Godwin’s law was invoked this weekend when President Joe Biden’s campaign said former President Donald Trump had “parroted Adolf Hitler” when he accused undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

But according to Godwin himself, that doesn’t mean Biden is losing the argument.

Lights in the Murk, 2022, Jeremy Miranda (American, b.1980)

“Trump’s opening himself up to the Hitler comparison,” Godwin said in an interview. And in his view, Trump is actively seeking to evoke the parallel.

Trump made almost identical comments in an interview with the far-right website The National Pulse in November, around the same time Trump also called his political opponents “vermin” — all rhetoric that Hitler used to disparage Jews.

“You could say the ‘vermin’ remark or the ‘poisoning the blood’ remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence,” Godwin said. “But both of them pretty much make it clear that there’s something thematic going on, and I can’t believe it’s accidental.”

Comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis happen all the time, particularly in online discourse, but they’re often dismissed as ridiculous or clumsy. When public figures or their staff mention the H-word, it can provoke derision. But the Biden campaign has made a deadly serious statement, and a political wager that the public won’t dismiss the charge as hyperbole.

Read an interview with Godwin at the Politico link.

At The New York Times, Michael Gold writes: Trump, Attacked for Echoing Hitler, Says He Never Read ‘Mein Kampf.’

Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his widely condemned comment that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” rebuffing criticism that the language echoed Adolf Hitler by insisting that he had never read the Nazi dictator’s autobiographical manifesto.

Mr. Trump did not repeat the exact phrase, which has drawn criticism since he first uttered it in an interview with a right-leaning website and then repeated it at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday.

But he said on Tuesday night in a speech in Iowa that undocumented immigrants from Africa, Asia and South America were “destroying the blood of our country,” before alluding to his previous comments.

“That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country,” Mr. Trump continued. “They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’”

He added that Hitler said it “in a much different way,” without making his meaning clear.

Undocumented immigrants, he added, “could be healthy. They could be very unhealthy. They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country.” And he again said that they were “destroying the blood of our country” and “destroying the fabric of our country.”

Mr. Trump and his campaign have dismissed the comparisons between his remark and language used by Hitler using the words “poison” and “blood” to denigrate those who Hitler deemed a threat to the purity of the Aryan race.

In one chapter of “Mein Kampf” named “Race and People,” Hitler wrote, “All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.” In another passage, he links “the poison which has invaded the national body” to an “influx of foreign blood.”

I believe that Trump has never read “Mein Kampf,” because he doesn’t read anything; but I have no doubt that Steven Miller–who writes Trump’s speeches–has read it. Trump was reading these Hitler-like words from his teleprompter.

Winter in the forest, Isaac Levitan 1885

Speaking of media troubles, NPR’s David Folkenflik has a troubling scoop about the next boss of The Washington Post: New ‘Washington Post’ CEO accused of Murdoch tabloid hacking cover-up.

When Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wanted an assured hand to right the newspaper’s shaky finances, he turned to Will Lewis, a 54-year-old former editor of The Daily Telegraph and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, whom he called “exceptional, tenacious.” Lewis will start as the Post‘s publisher and CEO in early January.

A dozen years ago, media magnate Rupert Murdoch also turned to Lewis when he wanted to find someone to rectify the hacking and bribery scandals engulfing his British Sunday tabloid, News of the World.

Lewis’ publicly stated charge was to root out newsroom corruption, cooperate with police and help settle claims from people targeted by the company’s journalists for voicemail and email hacking. The Guardian called him “News Corp’s clean-up campaigner.”

A very different picture of Lewis emerges from material presented in London courtrooms in recent months and reviewed by NPR. The man picked to lead the Post — a paper with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — stands accused of helping to lead a massive cover-up of criminal activity when he was acting outside public view.

In lawsuits against News Corp.’s British newspapers, lawyers for Prince Harry and movie star Hugh Grant depict Lewis as a leader of a frenzied conspiracy to kneecap public officials hostile to a multibillion-dollar business deal and to delete millions of potentially damning emails. In addition, they allege, Lewis sought to shield the CEO of News Corp.’s British arm, News UK, from scrutiny and to conceal the extent of wrongdoing at News of the World‘s more profitable sister tabloid, The Sun.

In sum, the Duke of Sussex and Grant argue that Lewis was a linchpin of efforts to limit the fallout during a key period between late 2010 and 2012.

These concerns about Lewis’ actions have been percolating for years.

Through a spokesperson, Lewis declined to comment to NPR for this story. He previously denied the broad outlines of these accusations, saying they are utterly unfounded. Lewis has not personally been sued as part of any of this current litigation, which offers greater specificity and sweep to the allegations.

Read all the details at the NPR link.

It’s all over for Ron DeSantis; even he must realize that by now. Jake Lahut writes at The Daily Beast: How Ron DeSantis’ $100 Million ‘Death Star’ Collapsed.

Long before Ron DeSantis’ presidential ambitions began to falter, it was clear to anyone paying close attention that there were fatal flaws in his much-hyped political operation.

“I had to have it explained to me the first time DeSantis came here for a parade,” an early DeSantis supporter in New Hampshire recalled to The Daily Beast. “I was gonna show up for the parade and I was informed, ‘This is a Never Back Down event, so you can’t mention anything about the campaign.’ And I was like, what the hell is this?”

This, the New Hampshire presidential campaign veteran would come to learn, was how the DeSantis campaign thought they’d cracked the code to beat former President Donald Trump.

Never Back Down was launched as a super PAC—loaded up with $80 million transferred from DeSantis’ state-level PAC in Florida—designed to carry him to the presidency through sheer force. The prospect of a talent-stocked PAC spending historic sums on organizing and campaign messaging was initially so fearsome that some Republicans dubbed Never Back Down the “Death Star.”

As the New Hampshire source’s befuddlement at the parade showed, however, Never Back Down’s ambitious vision was destined to collide with the strict federal rules barring campaigns and super PACs from cooperating on strategy or even communicating at all.

But few in Republican politics expected just how spectacularly this vaunted Death Star would ultimately implode.

“This will go down as maybe the worst-orchestrated effort in modern presidential history,” said a person familiar with Never Back Down’s operations.

Forest in Winter, Lawren S. Harris, Canadian, 1885-1970

After months spent out of sync with the campaign, a number of officials with Never Back Down have either resigned or been fired; top PAC strategists have cursed at each other and nearly come to blows in private meetings; and a new breakaway PAC has formed.

Most troubling of all, DeSantis might be sliding backward in his quest for the presidency despite the staggering sum of nearly $100 million that his PAC has spent to support him.

With DeSantis struggling to maintain even second place as the Iowa and New Hampshire contests near, the governor’s sympathizers are fully considering the consequences of his team’s big bet that they could outsource a huge primary victory to a super PAC.

“It is gonna cost us the election,” the DeSantis supporter, who later switched allegiance to a rival non-Trump campaign, recalled thinking to themselves several months ago, now describing the decision to outsource so many critical functions to Never Back Down as “a huge, huge mistake, and we could not afford one on this.”

“We’ll never win another election if we don’t stop PACs trying to become the campaign,” the former DeSantis supporter said.

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