Senate Republicans have largely backed President Donald Trump’s agenda since he returned to office — but many refuse to support his campaign to scrap the filibuster.
Trump asked Republican senators at a meeting at the White House on Wednesday to end the government shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster and reiterated his demand Thursday at a news conference.
By Tatyana Rodionova
The filibuster, a long-standing Senate rule, allows a single senator to block most legislation unless 60 senators vote to cut off debate. Democrats have used the filibuster to block Republicans’ government funding bill for more than a month despite Republicans’ 53-seat Senate majority.
Some Senate Republicans returned from the White House saying they were open to ending the filibuster. But doing away with the rule would require the support of almost every Republican senator — and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and many other Republicans say they are implacably opposed to it.
“There’s nothing that could move me on the filibuster,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) told reporters Wednesday after the White House meeting.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: November 12, 2025 Filed under: just because | Tags: Chuck Schumer, Donald Trump, Epstein Files, FBI, Ghislaine Maxwell, government shutdown 2025, Jeffrey Epstein, Kash Patel, Michael Wolff, Rep. Adelita Grijalva, Rep. Robert Garcia 9 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
I was going to write about how the Democrats actually won the government shutdown. But bigger news has broken. I’ll get to the shutdown story after that and then some news about Kash Patel, Trump’s incompetent FBI director.
It looks like the Epstein shit is about to hit the fan.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
James Hill, Lauren Peller, Katherine Faulders, and Jay O’Brien ABC News: House Democrats release new Epstein emails referencing Trump.
Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein referred to Donald Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked” and told his former companion Ghislaine Maxwell that an alleged victim had “spent hours at my house” with Trump, according to email correspondence released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote in a typo-riddled message to Maxwell in April 2011. “[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”
“I have been thinking about that … ” Maxwell replied.
That email exchange — which came just weeks after a British newspaper published a series of stories about Epstein, Maxwell and their powerful associates — was one of three released by the Democrats from a batch of more than 23,000 documents the committee recently received from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena.
The other messages are between Epstein and author Michael Wolff.
“I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you–either on air or in scrum afterwards,” Wolff wrote to Epstein in December 2015, six months after Trump had officially entered the race for the White House.
“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever,” Epstein wrote, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop” [….]
Wolff in a phone interview on Wednesday said of the 2015 exchange that he couldn’t remember “the specific emails or the context, but I was in an in-depth conversation with Epstein at that time about his relationship with Donald Trump. So I think this reflects that.”
“I was trying at that time to get Epstein to talk about his relationship with Trump, and actually, he proved to be an enormously valuable source to me,” Wolff said. “Part of the context of this is that I was pushing Epstein at that point to go public with what he knew about Trump.”
You can read the original emails along with more context at the ABC link.
A bit more from the emails from Hailey Fuchs at Politico: Jeffrey Epstein, in newly released email, says Trump ‘knew about the girls.’
Also in the emails released by Oversight Democrats Wednesday, Wolff wrote in a 2015 message to Epstein that he heard Trump – then a presidential candidate – would be asked by CNN about the convicted sex offender. Epstein asked Wolff what he thought an ideal response from Trump would be.
Michael Wolff
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff responded. If [Trump] says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency.
“You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you,” Wolff continued, “or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”
Wolff added that Trump could potentially praise Epstein when asked. Wolff’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The materials were received by the House Oversight Committee last Thursday, meaning the move by Democrats to release the materials was likely timed to coincide with the House’s return from a lengthy recess to vote Wednesday evening on ending the prolonged government shutdown.
Michael Gold at The New York Times (gift link): Epstein Alleged in Emails That Trump Knew of His Conduct.
House Democrats on Wednesday released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims, among other messages that suggested that the convicted sex offender believed Mr. Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged….
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)
…Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said the emails, which they selected from thousands of pages of documents received by their panel, raised new questions about the relationship between the two men. In one of the messages, Mr. Epstein flatly asserted that Mr. Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage. In another, Mr. Epstein pondered how to address questions from the news media about their relationship as Mr. Trump was becoming a national political figure….
“These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a statement.
The three separate email exchanges released on Wednesday were all from after Mr. Epstein’s 2008 plea deal in Florida on state charges of soliciting prostitution, in which federal prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges. They came years after Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein had a reported falling out in the early 2000s.
See the ABC story above for descriptions of the emails.
House Democrats, citing an unnamed whistle-blower, said this week that Ms. Maxwell was preparing to formally ask Mr. Trump to commute her federal prison sentence.
The emails were provided to the Oversight Committee along with a larger tranche of documents from Mr. Epstein’s estate that the panel requested as part of its investigation into Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges.
Republicans argued that Democrats omitted context from the emails they released.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of politicizing the investigation. “Democrats continue to carelessly cherry-pick documents to generate clickbait that is not grounded in the facts,” a committee spokeswoman said. “The Epstein Estate has produced over 20,000 pages of documents on Thursday, yet Democrats are once again intentionally withholding records that name Democrat officials.”
The Republicans also identified the victim whose name was redacted in the emails as Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April. Ms. Giuffre had said that Ms. Maxwell recruited her into Mr. Epstein’s sex ring while she was working at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, as a teenager.
In a 2016 deposition for a civil case, Ms. Giuffre was asked if she believed Mr. Trump had witnessed the sexual abuse of minors in Mr. Epstein’s home. “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said.
“I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein,” Ms. Giuffre added. “I’ve heard he has been, but I haven’t seen him myself so I don’t know.”
Use the gift link to read the whole article.
This afternoon at 4:00, Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) will finally be sworn in. She will then sign the discharge petition to require the DOJ to release all of the Epstein files.
Kaanita Iyer at CNN: Rep.-elect Grijalva says she plans to confront Johnson at long-delayed swearing-in ceremony.
Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who is set to be sworn in on Wednesday, said she will confront House Speaker Mike Johnson after waiting nearly 50 days to be seated as a member of Congress.
“I won’t be able to like sort of move on if I don’t address it personally and we’ll see what kind of reaction he has,” Grijalva, a Democrat, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” Tuesday.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.)
“I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to say,” Grijalva added but said she will stress that Johnson refusing to swear her in for over a month is “undemocratic.”
“It’s unconstitutional. It’s illegal. Should never happen — this kind of obstruction cannot happen again,” Grijalva said.
Grijalva won a special election on September 23 to replace her father, longtime Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March.
The House has been out of session since September 19 and Johnson refused to swear in Grijalva in the chamber’s absence amid the government shutdown.
One more on the Epstein story from Meredith Lee Hill, Hailey Fuchs and Nicholas Wu at Politico: Here’s how the House battle over the Epstein files will play out
The monthslong bipartisan effort to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson and force the release of all Justice Department files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is kicking into high gear this week, setting up a December floor battle that President Donald Trump has sought to avoid….
The process of doing so will begin around 4 p.m., when Johnson swears in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva right before the House votes to end the government shutdown — ending a 50-day wait following the Arizona Democrat’s election. Shortly afterward, Grijalva says she will affix the 218th and final signature to the discharge petition led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to force a vote on the full release of DOJ’s Epstein files.
The completion of the discharge petition, a rarely used mechanism to sidestep the majority party leadership, will trigger a countdown for the bill to hit the House floor. It will still take seven legislative days for the petition to ripen, after which Johnson will have two legislative days to schedule a vote. Senior Republican and Democratic aides estimate a floor vote will come the first week of December, after the Thanksgiving recess.
The discharge petition tees up a “rule,” a procedural measure setting the terms of debate for the Epstein bill’s consideration on the House floor. This gives the effort’s leaders greater control over the bill, which will still require Senate approval if it passes the House.
Senate Republican leaders haven’t publicly committed to bringing up the Epstein measure if the House passes it. Republicans expect it will die in the Senate, but not before a contentious House fight.
Could Johnson stop the petition from getting a vote in the House?
While Johnson has options to short-circuit the effort before it gets to the floor, he said in an interview last month he would not seek to do so. Republicans on the Rules Committee have also warned Johnson they will not help him kill the bill in the panel, and he’s in turn privately assured some of them the Epstein measure will get floor consideration if the petition reaches 218 signatures.
At that point, the speaker can only defeat it if he siphons away enough Republican votes — a tall order in a majority where Johnson has only a two-vote margin after Grijalva is sworn in. GOP leaders don’t plan to formally whip against the Epstein vote when it gets to the floor, according to three people granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
“I’m certain the House vote will succeed,” Massie said in an interview. “Some Republican members who are not signers of the petition have told me they will vote for the measure when the vote is called. I suspect there will be many more.”
Read about which members might end up voting for the release of the files at the link.
Next, did the Democrats really lose the shutdown?
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark: Give Chuck a Break. It Could Have Been Worse.
Like Dr. Strange, I have seen all six possible endgames from the shutdown fight and I’m here to tell you that yes, Democrats could have done better. They probably should have done better. But they exit this event in a stronger position than they entered. And also: They could have done much worse.
We’re going to rank the shutdown endgames from best to worst and then I’m going to make the case simultaneously that (a) Democrats played their hand poorly from the start, but that (b) they were ultimately bailed out by Trump’s obsession with dominance, and (c) we ought to appreciate the bad stuff that didn’t happen here.
You’ll need to go to the link to read the possible endgames; I can’t copy that much from the post. But here’s the final argument:
Here’s what Democrats should have said from the start:
- Republicans control the White House, the House, and the Senate. They have the votes to pass this budget any time they want. They do not need a single Democratic vote.
- All Republicans have to do is repeal the filibuster.
- If Republicans are so inept that they can’t find the votes to repeal the filibuster or to pass their legislation, then they should feel free to come to the minority and ask for help.
- But the Democrats have no offer. The voters gave Republicans unified control of government. If Republicans are incapable of governing, voters deserve to see that.
The problem isn’t that Democrats caved on the shutdown. Just objectively speaking, they emerge from this fight in a slightly better position than they entered it.
- They prolonged the longest government shutdown in history.
- This shutdown damaged Trump politically. (Just look at the polling.
- They centered health care costs as a major issue for 2026.
- The fake concession they got from Senate Republicans—a meaningless future vote on extending the ACA subsidies—will (a) put Republican senators on the spot and (b) create a point of vulnerability for House Republicans when they refuse to take up the bill.
- They avoided the worst-case outcome. Which is not nothing.
Please read the whole thing at The Bulwark link.
Annie Karni at The New York Times: What if Democrats’ Big Shutdown Loss Turns Out to Be a Win?
At first blush, the deal that paved the way to end the government shutdown this week looked exactly like the kind of feeble outcome many Democrats have come to expect from their leaders in Washington.
After waging a 40-day fight to protect Americans’ access to health care — one they framed as existential — their side folded after eight defectors struck a deal that would allow President Trump and Republicans to reopen the government this week without doing anything about health coverage or costs, enraging all corners of the party.
But even some of the Democrats most outraged by the outcome are not so certain that their party’s aborted fight was all for naught.
They assert that in hammering away at the extension of health care subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of next month, they managed to thrust Mr. Trump and Republicans onto the defensive, elevating a political issue that has long been a major weakness for them….
It may turn out that the long-term outcome of the longest government shutdown in history will be a grand-scale political and policy defeat for Democrats. The head-scratching end to a fight they were not willing to see through to victory deflated the party and deepened long-simmering divisions ahead of next year’s critical midterm elections. But in the shorter term, there could be benefits.
Senate Democrats believe that they held together long enough for Mr. Trump to reveal a new level of callousness in his refusal to fund food stamps for 42 million Americans who rely on the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. And they believe all of that helped contribute to a mini-blue wave last week, one that could continue if Democrats can keep the right issues at the forefront.
In my opinion, the shutdown fight demonstrated to many voters who don’t usually pay attention to politics that Trump doesn’t care one bit about their concerns.
Kash Patel’s Reign at the FBI
The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Sadie Gurman, Aruna Viswanatha, Josh Dawsey, and Jack Gillum about Trump’s FBI director: Kash Patel’s ‘Effin Wild’ Ride as FBI Director.
On Halloween morning, FBI Director Kash Patel had a big announcement to make: “The FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack,” he said in a 7:32 a.m. social-media post that referenced arrests in Michigan.
There was one problem: No criminal charges had yet been filed and local police weren’t aware of the details. Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.
Justice Department leaders complained to the White House about Patel’s premature post, saying it had disrupted the investigation, administration officials said.
In his nine months on the job, Patel has drawn flak from his bosses in the Justice Department and from his underlings at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he has fired dozens of agents deemed hostile to Donald Trump or to conservative ideals.
But the Halloween announcement wasn’t the biggest controversy to envelop the director that week. Patel hit the news for taking an FBI plane to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend, a country western singer, performed, and then to her home in Nashville. A former FBI agent, Kyle Seraphin, publicized the trip and called the taxpayer funded travel in the middle of a shutdown “pathetic.”
After that, Patel visited a Texas hunting resort called the Boondoggle Ranch, according to flight records and people familiar with the trip, which hasn’t been previously reported.
Patel’s travel has frustrated both Justice Department officials, who complained to the White House about it, and the White House itself, which had told cabinet officials months ago in writing to limit their travel, particularly if it was overseas or unrelated to Trump’s agenda, according to an administration official. Details about Patel’s trips to visit his girlfriend and an August trip to Scotland have been passed around the White House in recent days, officials said.
The FBI director is required by law to take the bureau’s private plane instead of commercial flights in order to have access to secure communications. If the travel is personal, the director is required to reimburse the government for the cost of a commercial flight—typically far less than the actual costs of private-jet use.
A bit more:
Last month, Patel gave Trump an unusual public presentation in the Oval Office, where he credited the president for the bureau’s successes on everything from drug seizures to the arrests of several most-wanted fugitives.
“We are absolutely crushing violent crime like never before and defending this homeland, sir,” Patel said, gesturing toward large poster boards showing a surge in arrests this summer.
Patel’s presence at the bureau has been something of a culture shock for a buttoned-up workforce, used to wearing suits and ties. Instead, Patel has appeared at events in hooded sweatshirts, jeans or hunting vests, and often speaks colloquially, calling agents “cops,” and telling podcaster Joe Rogan that the job of FBI director was “effin wild.”
He has also handed out an oversize commemorative coin to colleagues resembling the logo of the Marvel “Punisher” character, who came to embody a general distrust of the U.S. justice system. The coin also has a large number nine on it, in a reference to himself as the FBI’s ninth director.
Patel’s supporters say he is trying to present himself as down-to-earth and accessible to the workforce. He “wants the Bureau to get back to focusing on field and agent work vs. an elitist D.C. culture,” FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said. The FBI declined to discuss Patel’s plane travel, citing safety concerns. Justice Department and FBI representatives said the two agencies closely coordinated plans for the terrorism operation in advance.
The story is behind a paywall, but I was able to get through by clicking the link at Memeorandum.
The New York Times (gift link): F.B.I. Director Is Said to Have Made a Pledge to Head of MI5, Then Broken It.
At a secret gathering in May, south of London, the head of Britain’s domestic security service asked Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, for help.
British security officials rely on the bureau for high-tech surveillance tools — the kind they might need to monitor a new embassy that China wants to build near the Tower of London. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, asked Mr. Patel to protect the job of an F.B.I. agent based in London who dealt with that technology, according to several current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the episode.
Kash Patel and girlfriend Alexis Wilkins
Mr. Patel agreed to find funding to keep the posting, the officials said. But the job had already been slated to disappear as the White House moved to slash the F.B.I. budget. The agent moved to a different job back in the United States, saving the F.B.I. money but leaving MI5 officials incredulous.
It was a jarring introduction to Mr. Patel’s leadership style for British officials. They had long forged personal ties with their U.S. counterparts, as well as with three other close allies, in an intelligence partnership known as the Five Eyes.
The relationships among the organizations matter because many top national security officials view trust and reliability as paramount to sharing critical information with allies — vital for communication between agency directors, and hard to restore once lost.
On the same day in 1946 that Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech in the United States, Britain and the United States secretly signed the pact that formed the basis for their intelligence alliance. It was an outgrowth of their collaboration during World War II. The partnership expanded during the advent of the Cold War to include other countries — Australia, Canada and New Zealand — earning it the name Five Eyes.
All rely heavily on American intelligence to help keep their countries safe. Though the F.B.I. is a criminal investigation agency, it is also a major part of the Western intelligence-gathering community. Alongside other U.S. agencies like the C.I.A., the F.B.I. has offices in embassies around the globe.
Mr. Patel’s inexperience, his dismissals of top F.B.I. officials and his shift of bureau resources from thwarting spies and terrorism have heightened concerns among the other Five Eyes nations that the bureau is adrift, according to the former U.S. officials and other people familiar with allies’ reactions to the bureau changes.
Five Eyes officials have watched with alarm as Mr. Patel has fired agents who investigated President Trump and invoked his powers to investigate the president’s perceived enemies. The officials and others spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Use the gift article to read the rest.
A few more interesting stories:
The Guardian: UK pauses intelligence-sharing with US on suspected drug vessels in Caribbean.
The Guardian: Venezuelans sent by Trump to El Salvador endured systematic torture, report finds.
The New Republic: Damning Video Shows DHS Agents Pepper-Spray a Baby.
Politico Magazine: ‘He’s Actually Weakening the Economy’: Why Trump’s Strategy May Fail. A top economist says Trump is doing industrial policy all wrong.
NBC News: Trump’s Pentagon name change could cost up to $2 billion.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: November 8, 2025 Filed under: just because | Tags: ACA subsidies, Broadview ICE facility, Chicago, Donald Trump, government shutdown, ICE, immigration, Inside Trump's Head, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michael Wolff, SCOTUS, Senator Chuck Schumer, SNAP benefits, Steve Vladeck, Trump polls 6 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Raphael Balme, Three cats and wallpaper.
I’m feeling slightly more optimistic after Tuesday’s Democratic sweep of theoff-year elections on Tuesday. According to the polls, Trump is very unpopular, and I have to believe that his efforts to avoid giving food to starving Americans are not going to help him. Democracy is still in danger, but it is beginning look as if there’s still hope for saving it.
Julia Manchester at The Hill: Trump approval drops as Dems show more motivation for midterms: Poll.
President Trump’s approval rating is dropping as Democrats signal more motivation than the GOP ahead of next year’s midterm elections, according to a new Emerson College Polling survey released on Friday.
Forty-one percent of voters said they approved of the job Trump is doing as president, a four-point drop from Trump’s October approval rating of 45 percent. Forty-nine percent of voters said they disapproved of Trump’s job in office, up from 48 percent last month.
Meanwhile, the same poll found that 71 percent of Democratic voters said they were motivated to vote in next year’s midterm elections compared to 60 percent of Republicans. Forty-two percent of Independents said the same.
Fifty-seven percent of all voters said they were more motivated to vote than usual, while 12 percent said they were less motivated. Thirty-one percent said they were motivated as usual ahead of the midterms.
The polling comes after Republicans suffered losses to Democrats in Tuesday’s off-year elections, which were seen as a referendum on the first year of Trump’s second term in office….
The same poll found that 43 percent of voters said their vote in the midterms would be an expression of opposition to Trump, while 29 percent said their vote would be an expression of support.
The Emerson College national poll was conducted Nov. 3-4 among 1,000 active registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.
Here’s the full report from Emerson College polling.
I’ve been listening to/watching regularly a Daily Beast podcast called Inside Trump’s Head.” The show consists of interviews with journalist Michael Wolff, who has written 3 books about Trump. You can watch it on YouTube. Wolff is not only an expert on Trump (and Jeffrey Epstein), but also has numerous current sources inside the Trump circle. In addition, he is often funny.
Robert Davis at Raw Story:
Controversial journalist Michael Wolff made a bold prediction about the future of the second Trump administration on Thursday during a new podcast interview.
Wolff joined The Daily Beast’s Joana Coles on a new episode of “Inside Trump’s Head” that aired on Thursday, where the two discussed what Tuesday’s election results mean for President Donald Trump. Democrats won a spate of key races, including two governor’s offices and a host of statewide offices.
By Timothy Matthews
Trump and Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have tried to brush off the Democratic victories. Wolff argued that they reveal a troubling trend for the Trump administration.
“Let’s look at that in the context of we are not today in an autocracy and [with] a measure of optimism, which is that we’ve just spent a year since last Election Day with Trump as this omnipotent figure in politics,” Wolff said. “And while I would not say that today spells in any way the end of Trump, I would say that the end of Trump could well happen.”
Leading up to Tuesday’s election, Trump shared multiple social media posts attempting to help his preferred candidates win. However, Trump-aligned and Trump-backed candidates did not fare well in the election.
“That’s what happens in American politics,” Wolff continued. “That’s one of the great things in American politics. Reversals, landslides. Things that you would not dream of happening, happen.”
“This has been a horrifying year of Trump, and without any sense that anyone could stand in his way,” he continued. “But in American politics, that’s what happens. You think these people are permanent, and it turns out that they are fleeting.”
Late last night, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson allowed Trump to continue withholding full SNAP benefits to the states after an appeals court ordered the payments to begin immediately.
Jennifer Ludden at NPR: Supreme Court temporarily blocks full SNAP benefits even as they’d started to go out.
The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily granted the Trump administration’s request to block full SNAP food benefits during the government shutdown, even as residents in some states had already begun receiving them.
The Trump administration is appealing a court order to fully restart the country’s largest anti-hunger program. The high court decision late Friday gives a lower court time to consider a more lasting pause.
The move may add to confusion, though, since the government said it was sending states money on Friday to fully fund SNAP at the same time it appealed the order to pay for them.
Shortly after U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. issued that decision Thursday afternoon, states started to announce they’d be issuing full SNAP benefits. Some peoplewoke up Friday with the money already on the debit-like EBT cards they use to buy groceries. The number of states kept growing, and included California, Oregon, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Connecticut among others.
The Supreme Court’s decision means states must, for now, revert back to the partial payments the Trump administration had earlier instructed them to distribute. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected the administration’s request for an administrative stay, the appeals court said it would consider the request for the stay and intends to issue a decision as quickly as possible.
SCOTUS whisperer Steve Vladeck quickly published an explainer at One First: SNAP WTF?.
Basically, Vladeck thinks that Jackson knew that if she didn’t issue the hold, the 5 right wing justices would go along with Trump’s wish for an administrative hold, and it might take a long time for them to get around to making a final decision on the SNAP payments.
I wanted to put out a very brief post to try to provide a bit of context for Justice Jackson’s single-justice order, handed down shortly after 9 p.m. EST on Friday night, that imposed an “administrative stay” of a district court order that would’ve required the Trump administration to use various contingency funds to pay out critical benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Willem den Ouden (NL 1928) Ferry with cat
It may surprise folks that Justice Jackson, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the Court’s behavior on emergency applications from the Trump administration, acquiesced in even a temporary pause of the district court’s ruling in this case. But as I read the order, which says a lot more than a typical “administrative stay” from the Court, Jackson was stuck between a rock and a hard place—given the incredibly compressed timing that was created by the circumstances of the case.
In a world in which Justice Jackson either knew or suspected that at least five of the justices would grant temporary relief to the Trump administration if she didn’t, the way she structured the stay means that she was able to try to control the timing of the Supreme Court’s (forthcoming) review—and to create pressure for it to happen faster than it otherwise might have. In other words, it’s a compromise—one with which not everyone will agree, but which strikes me as eminently defensible under these unique (and, let’s be clear, maddening and entirely f-ing avoidable) circumstances.
Everyone agrees that, among the many increasingly painful results of the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can no longer spend the funds Congress appropriated to cover SNAP—a program that helps to fund food purchases for one in eight (42 million!) Americans. Everyone also agrees that there are other sources of appropriated money that the President has the statutory authority to rely upon to at least partially fund SNAP benefits for the month of November. The two questions that have provoked the most legal debate is whether (1) he has the authority to fully fund SNAP; and (2) either way, whether federal courts can order him to use whatever authorities he has.
The dispute in the case that reached the Supreme Court on Friday involves a lawsuit that asked a federal court in Rhode Island to order the USDA first to partially fund SNAP for November, and then, as circumstances unfolded, to fully fund it. Having already ordered the USDA to do the former, yesterday, Judge McConnell issued a TRO ordering it to do the latter (to fully fund SNAP for November)—and to do so by the end of the day today.
I won’t quote any more, but I hope you’ll go read the explanation. Vladeck thinks that Jackson did the right thing under the circumstances, because she wants to make sure that the full court debates the case and makes a decision quickly. Vladeck also notes that Trump could just approve payment of the SNAP benefits. There’s no need of a court order. Democrats should make sure people understand that Trump is willing to starve children and old people in order to get his way on the shutdown and the cruel cuts in his big ugly bill.
Meanwhile, Democrats have offered a new proposal to reopen the government. NBC News: Democrats make a new offer to end the shutdown, but Republicans aren’t buying it.
Senate Democrats made an offer Friday to reopen the government, proposing a one-year extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies alongside a package of funding measures in order to secure their votes.
By Kichisaburou Hirota
The offer, rolled out on the floor by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., includes a “clean” continuing resolution, which would reopen the government at current spending levels, and a package of three bipartisan appropriations bills to fund some departments for the full fiscal year.
“After so many failed votes, it’s clear we need to try something different,” Schumer said, calling it “a very simple compromise.”
The short-term health care funding extension would prevent a massive increase in insurance costs for millions of Americans on Obamacare next year. In addition, Democrats proposed creating a bipartisan committee to negotiate a longer-term solution.
“This is a reasonable offer that reopens the government, deals with health care affordability and begins a process of negotiating reforms to the ACA tax credits for the future,” Schumer added. “Now, the ball is in the Republicans’ court. We need Republicans to just say yes.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called the Democratic offer a “nonstarter.”
“The Obamacare extension is the negotiation. That’s what we’re going to negotiate once the government opens up. … We need to vote to open the government — and there is a proposal out there to do that — and then we can have this whole conversation about health care,” he said.
Yeah, no. Republicans can’t be trusted to honor their promises.
Trump has started trying to get Republicans to get rid of the filibuster in order to reopen the government. Theodoric Meyer at The Washington Post: Trump wants to abolish the filibuster. GOP senators aren’t on board.
Senate Republicans’ unwillingness to scrap the filibuster underscores the limits of Trump’s influence in his second term, during which lawmakers have been reluctant to defy him.
There is quite a bit of immigration news out there today.
A federal judge in Oregon on Friday issued a permanent injunction barring the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard on the streets of Portland in response to protests against the president’s immigration policies.
“This Court arrives at the necessary conclusion that there was neither ‘a rebellion or danger of a rebellion’ nor was the President ‘unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States’ in Oregon when he ordered the federalization and deployment of the National Guard,” U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, wrote in her ruling.
The Trump administration can appeal the ruling if it wants to.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek responded to the ruling Friday, calling Trump’s move to federalize the guard “a gross abuse of power.”
“Oregon National Guard members have been away from their jobs and families for 38 days. The California National Guard has been here for just over one month. Based on this ruling, I am renewing my call to the Trump Administration to send all troops home now,” Kotek said.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose justice department argued in the case objecting over his state’s National Guard’s deployment, called the decision “a win for the rule of law, for the constitutional values that govern our democracy, and for the American people.”
There are a number of immigration stories coming out of the Broadville neighborhood in Chicago where there is a large ICE facility.
Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark: ICE Has Created a ‘Ghost Town’ in the Heart of Chicago.
DHS’S IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS continue to land like hammer blows on communities across the United States. Families are being torn apart, protesters are catching pepperballs, businesses are at risk, and, increasingly, entire neighborhood economies in areas with large Latino populations are grinding to a halt.
The worst consequences occur when these different aspects of the Trump administration’s deportation regime overlap. Case in point: Chicago’s food scene, specifically the capital of the Mexican Midwest, Little Village, where I got both a firsthand look at the compounding harms of ICE’s actions and the best gorditas I’ve ever had in my life.
By Cindy Revell
The first sign of how different things are come well before you take a bite of the gordita. It’s when you look around and realize that there is now an eerie emptiness to a once-vibrant place.
As I pulled into Little Village for dinner with some local Chicagoans, we experienced no traffic and had our pick of parking spots. “Traffic used to be bumper to bumper for decades and start blocks away, I’ve never experienced it like this,” Chicago food writer Ximena N. Beltran Quan Kiu told me. In a TikTok about the neighborhood, she noted that Little Village is the second-largest shopping district in the city after Michigan Avenue, which is home of the “Magnificent Mile” of luxury stores.
Our destination that day last month was Carniceria Aguascalientes, which sits on the main thoroughfare of 26th Street. We passed through a glittering Mexican grocery store at the street side to get to the large diner-style restaurant lined with tables and booths. Only two or three of roughly thirty tables were in use when we sat down. As we enjoyed our food, the largely vacant dining room became less and less comprehensible.1
When I told our friendly waitress, Michelle Macias, 24, what I do and why I was in town, she was eager to share what had happened to the restaurant. Aguascalientes, a staple of “La Villita,” has welcomed customers for half a century. But lately, its business has plummeted. Sales are down a staggering amount: more than 60 percent compared to last year.
Everything has been turned on its head, Macias explained. While in past years Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were bustling, lately Mondays have become the restaurant’s busiest day—perhaps a result of people trying to avoid the usual crowds of the weekend. The restaurant announced this year that it would be closing an hour earlier, a money-saving measure. And as I had noticed, there’s now parking readily available, a fact that shocks longtime patrons accustomed to the gridlock that formerly surrounded the popular eatery.
Everything has been turned on its head, Macias explained. While in past years Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were bustling, lately Mondays have become the restaurant’s busiest day—perhaps a result of people trying to avoid the usual crowds of the weekend. The restaurant announced this year that it would be closing an hour earlier, a money-saving measure. And as I had noticed, there’s now parking readily available, a fact that shocks longtime patrons accustomed to the gridlock that formerly surrounded the popular eatery.
The bleak reality facing Carniceria Aguascalientes weighs on its forty employees—especially Macias, whose parents own the restaurant.
As I took it in, I couldn’t help but think back to when Trump’s mass-deportation policy was just getting underway, and the many conversations I had then with Democratic lawmakers who wondered aloud about where we would be in three years. Forget three years: In the Latino enclaves of Little Village, and in Back of the Yards, in Pilsen, and on the North Side, they’re wondering how they will get through the next three weeks.
“Everyone is staying home, everyone is scared,” Macias told me. “There’s so much uncertainty. COVID was bad, but this is way worse.”
It sounds like what happened in Washington DC. Read the whole thing at the Bulwark link.
Charles Thrush at Block Club Chicago: Feds Tell Faith Leaders ‘No More Prayer’ Outside Broadview Facility.
BROADVIEW – Federal authorities told demonstrators Friday that there would be “no more prayer” in front of or inside the Broadview ICE facility, in a move that mystified local leaders and raised legal questions.
A federal representative delivered the news to a huddle of faith leaders and activists standing outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility Friday, speaking after faith leaders were denied entry to the building for the third time Friday.
By Miroslaw Hajnos
Broadview Police Chief Thomas Mills, whose department helped facilitate the phone call, said that he was “trying to figure out” in discussions with Mayor Katrina Thompson and an attorney if a federal agency could legally ban religious gatherings on land owned by the village. Religious groups previously have been allowed to practice outside the facility, he said.
“I’m just a messenger,” an anonymous voice stuttered over the phone to a huddle of faith leaders and activists standing outside the Broadview immigration processing facility on Friday.
During the call, which took place with a Block Club reporter present, the anonymous representative told a group of faith leaders and activists that “There is no more prayer in front of building or inside the building because this is the state and it’s not [of a] religious background.”
“I’m dumbfounded,” the police chief told Block Club. “Every time I talk with [federal officials], it feels like their rules keep changing. We don’t really know what’s happening, I’m sorry I can’t say more. We just want to keep people safe and let them peacefully protest without getting hurt.”
That sounds like a violation of the First Amendment to me.
Chicago Sun-Times: 14 suburban moms arrested in sit-in protest outside Broadview ICE facility.
A group of moms from the western suburbs were arrested Friday morning during a protest against the separation of families outside of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview.
Fourteen mothers jumped over the barricades and sat in a circle on Beach Street to “demand an end” to the immigration raids that have swept through the Chicago area since the Trump administration launched “Operation Midway Blitz” in September.
Less than a minute later, the women were arrested by Cook County sheriff’s deputies. The women were charged with obstruction, disorderly conduct and pedestrian walking on highways.
“We want to encourage other people who feel strongly about ICE’s actions to step off the sidelines and take our cities back,” said Teresa Shattuck, a mother from Oak Park. “We want to use our collective power and our white privilege in the way it should be used.”
Meghan Carter, another mother from Oak Park, said the women who were arrested understood the risks when they chose to take a stand, adding their experiences paled in comparison to what the detained immigrants inside the facility were enduring.
Carter said the suburban moms were a group of parents “fed up” with seeing immigration agents “terrorizing” their communities.
One more immigration/deportation story from NBC News: ‘Mega detention centers’: ICE considers buying large warehouses to hold immigrants.
The Trump administration is exploring buying warehouses that were designed for clients like Amazon and retrofitting them as detention facilities for immigrants before they are deported, a move that would vastly expand the government’s detention capacity, according to a Homeland Security Department official and a White House official.
By Timothy Matthews
The precise warehouses that Immigration and Customs Enforcement may buy have not yet been determined, but the agency is looking at locations in the southern U.S. near airports where immigrants are most often deported, the DHS official and the White House official said. Selecting such warehouses would “increase efficiency” in deportations, the DHS official said.
A deal to purchase the warehouses, which on average are more than twice the size of current ICE detention facilities, is past the early stages but not yet final, the DHS official and the White House official said. The DHS official described the warehouses as future “mega detention centers.”
Amazon would not be a part of any deal and would not profit from it as the warehouses were built by developers for Amazon but never used or leased by the company, the officials said.
An Amazon spokesperson said that the company is not involved in any discussions with DHS or ICE about warehouse space and that it leases and does not own the vast majority of its warehouse space.
It was not immediately clear who owns the warehouses that the government may buy and the DHS official and the White House official did not know how much the deals could be worth. The DHS official said some of the warehouses under consideration were built by developers with Amazon in mind but never used.
That’s it for me today. I hope everyone is having a relaxing weekend. I’m working on it.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: August 20, 2025 Filed under: just because | Tags: Andrew Bailey, Dan Bongino, DC food delivery drivers, DOJ, Ed Martin, Epstein Files, Fascist crackdown on Washington DC, Fascist secret police cars, ICE and the economy, Letitia James, Michael Wolff, National guard troops in Washington DC, Trump ignorance, Trump-Putin summit 2025, Vladimir Putin 7 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
I’ve been surveying the day’s top news stories and my head is spinning. I don’t know what to focus on or where to begin, and there’s no way I can cover everything. There is too much happening, so I’ve just chosen the stories that interested me the most.
Trump’s fascist crackdown on Washington DC
The New York Times: National Guard Troops in Washington Stick to Tourist Areas.
The 800 National Guard troops sent into Washington last week will soon be augmented by hundreds more, as several states with Republican governors commit to supporting President Trump’s crackdown in the city.
But Army officials appear to be trying to keep the troops on the sidelines of the mission, despite the tough-on-crime image that Mr. Trump has sought to project.
The troops have joined an array of federal agents who appeared on city streets after Mr. Trump declared last week that the federal government was assuming law enforcement responsibility in the capital, which he has falsely claimed is essentially lawless.
The first wave of troops sent to the city all came from the D.C. National Guard, which the president can call out directly. National Guard troops from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia will soon also be deployed, according to the governors of those states. National Guard officials said that there were 869 troops in Washington as of Monday night; the Republican-led states so far have pledged 1,000 more.
The Republican governors said they were providing the additional troops at the request of the Trump administration. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had asked for the extra troops. “When the secretary of the Army asks for backup support to our troops that are already deployed, yes, we will back up our troops,” Mr. DeWine told the Columbus Dispatch.
The number is still expected to grow. But the role of the additional troops appears vague, and the answers to even basic questions, including whether they will be armed, have shifted.
What is the purpose of this militarization of a city beyond Trump’s effort to distract from the Epstein story and his overall fascist dictatorship project?
“There is no justification for any deployment of Guard forces in D.C., let alone the deployment of hundreds of Guard forces from multiple states, which smacks of a military occupation of the district,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
“Local crime is a matter to be handled by local law enforcement,” she added.
Members of the National Guard stand near D.C.’s Union Station, within view of the U.S. Capitol.
The places where the troops have been deployed so far tell part of the story. Most have been seen near the National Mall, large monuments and other tourist-heavy areas.
Army officials said that more would be sent to 10 metro stations, most of which are also near tourist and entertainment sites. They include the Foggy Bottom, Smithsonian, Eastern Market and Waterfront stations.
Near the Washington Monument over the weekend, troops posed for photos with tourists. The National Guard presence, with desert sand-colored vehicles parked near the capital’s most visited tourists spots, is now showing up regularly on social media feeds in posts by visitors to Washington.
The rules of engagement for the troops, at the moment, remain limited to supporting, but not providing, law enforcement. That means that troops are not making arrests, though Army officials acknowledged that could change if Mr. Trump decides that he wants an even more forceful presence.
CNN: National Guard troops from GOP-led states begin arriving in DC as part of Trump’s crime crackdown.
West Virginia National Guard troops have begun to arrive in Washington, DC, to assist with President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital, a defense official told CNN on Tuesday.
The troops could begin assisting the DC National Guard operationally as soon as Wednesday after they have completed their in-processing, the defense official added.
Their arrival comes after the Republican governors of six states — West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee — announced they will send guard members to Washington, DC.
The deployment of other states’ troops marks an escalation of Trump’s efforts to amass forces in the capital. The president previously announced that he was deploying DC National Guard troops to the city, surging federal agents into the streets, and federalizing DC’s police force. The president has repeatedly complained about rising crime in DC, but overall crime numbers are lower this year than in 2024.
Servicemembers from the West Virginia and South Carolina National Guards receive an orientation brief upon their arrival at the Washington, D.C. Armory, Aug. 19, 2025
The defense official said Tuesday that while there are roughly 2,400 personnel in the DC National Guard, assistance from other states was needed because of how many troops are either undergoing training elsewhere or are on leave.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Monday he approved about 135 National Guard troops to DC, while Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced he would deploy approximately 200 members.
Tennessee will send roughly 160 guard members to the city this week following a request from the Trump administration, Gov. Bill Lee’s press secretary said in a Tuesday statement to CNN.
Over the weekend, West Virginia’s governor said his state was sending 300 to 400 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. South Carolina authorized the deployment of 200 troops, and Ohio said it will send 150.
Federal officers assigned to DC are focusing on beating up food delivery people. NBC4 Washington DC: Detentions of D.C. delivery drivers leave immigrant communities on edge.
Washington, D.C., resident Tyler DeSue woke up tired and craving breakfast Saturday morning, so he did what many people in that situation would do: He used Uber Eats to put in an order for burritos.
When his driver took longer than usual, DeSue checked the app and noticed something seemed wrong — the delivery driver’s GPS location had stopped short of his address. He went outside to look for him.
“I stepped into the street, I looked down and see lights in the direction, like police lights, in the direction of where my driver was,” DeSue said in an interview. “It was my driver by himself and, like, nine different officers all wearing different uniforms. … Most of them had face coverings on.”
When DeSue went to investigate, the driver — whose name appeared on the food app as “Sidi” — was being questioned, first about his vehicle’s registration and then about his immigration status, he said.
“You’re gonna come with us, you’re gonna come with us today,” a masked agent can be heard telling Sidi in video that DeSue recorded and provided to NBC News.
“Can you tell me in Arabic, please?” Sidi says, adding that he did not understand what was being said and that he was nervous.
One of the agents, wearing a vest emblazoned “POLICE HSI” — short for Homeland Security Investigations, a part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — replies that they do not have an Arabic translator. The men then cuff Sidi’s hands, waist and feet before they put him in an unmarked car. DeSue said he has since reported the incident to Uber.
There have been other such reports.
The incident is one of several arrests of delivery drivers recorded by eyewitnesses across the Washington area that have gone viral since the Trump administration took over law enforcement in the nation’s capital last week.
An Uber Eats delivery driver is arrested Saturday in Washington, D.C.Tyler DeSue
The videos, scattered across social media and shared among D.C. delivery driver chat groups, are having a chilling effect on the drivers themselves. Some of them have chosen to stop making deliveries in the city.
It has been “five days since working, looking at what to do. And, well, closed down here waiting for things to pass, because I don’t know what to do,” a D.C.-area delivery driver who did not want to be named told NBC News in a voice message in Spanish.
On Sunday afternoon, DeSue said, an area where 15 to 20 delivery drivers typically would be parked out front of his home looking at their phones for their next orders was an empty lot.
“I haven’t seen a driver anywhere in the last two days,” he said.
There’s more at the link.
Immigration, deportation, and ICE
Paul Krugman at Substack: ICEing the U.S. Economy. Mass deportations will hurt more than people realize.
Donald Trump has been able to convert Immigration and Customs Enforcement (and Customs and Border Protection, which is effectively part of the same operation) into a huge secret police force — because what are we supposed to call an organization whose masked agents, bearing no identification, simply grab people off the street? Who shoot at a family fleeing in their truck, after agents refused to identify themselves and smashed the car window, claiming – apparently falsely according to video footage – that the driver tried to harm them?
We’ve also seen both deportations to foreign gulags and the creation of a network of domestic detention centers — call it the ICE archipelago — that are overcrowded, filthy, and breeding grounds for disease. Last week a judge ordered that detainees at ICE’s Manhattan facility be given bedding mats rather than being forced to sleep on dirty concrete floors, have access to decent hygiene, and receive three meals a day. We’ll see whether this order is obeyed, but it gives you an idea of the conditions detainees are currently facing.
And the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill gives ICE $45 billion to expand its network of detention centers, making room for around 100,000 more detainees, plus $30 billion for arrest and deportation efforts, enough to hire around 10,000 more ICE agents.
I worry, as everyone should, about how a huge expansion of this deeply un-American organization may be used as a tool of presidential power and repression. Furthermore, give people power without accountability — and it’s hard to give a better example than masked, unidentified agents authorized to use force — and some of them will abuse their position. And given what ICE has already been doing, what kind of people do you think are likely to sign up as it massively expands?
Compared with these issues, concerns about the economic impact of mass deportations are definitely second-tier. But they’re still important, and a subject I know something about. So the rest of this post will be devoted to how the Trump administration is about to ICE the economy.
A bit more:
First things first: Trump officials and some of their allies have been touting numbers that appear to show 2 million native-born Americans gaining jobs over the past year. But this claim is, as Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute says, a “multiple-count data felony.” Read Kolko for the details showing that this is a statistical artifact, not something that really happened. No, the native-born adult population didn’t suddenly jump by 4 million in a single year.
What will actually happen is a large decline in America’s foreign-born labor force. When Stephen Miller began promising to deport 3,000 immigrants a day, many people dismissed this as an idle boast. It’s true that we can’t possibly deport people anywhere near that rapidly while obeying the law and following due process. And your point is? [….]
We don’t know how many workers will eventually be incarcerated and deported. But undocumented immigrants make up around 5 percent of the U.S. work force. It seems plausible that a significant fraction of those workers will be pushed out, along with a number of legal workers snatched up based, as Trump’s border czar has said, on their physical appearance.
Losing large numbers of workers sounds as if it will be bad for the U.S. economy. In fact, it will be worse than you may think.
The reason is that immigrant workers aren’t spread evenly across the economy. They’re strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations, where they constitute a large share, sometimes a majority, of the work force. As a result, the Trump administration’s latter-day Edict of Expulsion will be far more disruptive to the economy than the aggregate number of workers deported might suggest.
Read the rest at the link.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark: Fascist Secret Police Cars.
ICE has some new cars. They are cartoonishly fascist….
What is the purpose of these vehicles?
ICE has been performing its snatch-and-grab operations largely with unmarked vehicles. ICE officers in the wild seem to eschew any sort of identification: No badges, no uniforms. Most of the time they go to great lengths to conceal their identities, wearing mask, balaclavas, and ballcaps.
Fascist ICE trucks
Are these new vehicles meant for new kinds of operations, as ICE expands to a size commensurate with its funding?
Also: What is the use-case for an ICE pickup truck? Park Rangers and firefighters can use pickup trucks to haul large loads of gear. Why would ICE need pickup trucks in its fleet?
Next, let’s look at the design. You will notice that ICE employs the slogan “Defend the Homeland.” This slogan is emblazoned in multiple spots: On side panels and on hoods. On the Mustang variant—because apparently ICE operational requirements also necessitate a two-door sports coupe—the slogan appears to be plastered on the spoiler.
It is an odd slogan for a law enforcement organization. For starters, it’s not a statement of principle, like common police tag lines: “Protect and Serve,” or “Duty, Honor, Community,” or “Service Before Self.” It’s a command: DEFEND THE HOMELAND.1
This command implies a threat. The “homeland” is under assault, right now, and must be defended from some unnamed enemy. I cannot think of any LEO that uses the specter of an enemy as part of its self-projection.
Then there’s the word “homeland.” Not “America,” or “the United States.”
The Mustang variant
America and the United States are places that anyone might join, or become a part of. But the homeland is about blood and soil. It’s the patrimony of the true volk.
Finally: “Defending the homeland” isn’t even ILstice Department weaponization chief, called for the resignation of New York Attorney General Letitia James and posed for photos outside of her Brooklyn home last week – all as he is conducting investigations into her conduct.
His investigation of James, whose office brought civil fraud charges against Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Organization resulting in a half-billion-dollar judgment last year, is one of several the Justice Department has launched into the president’s perceived enemies.
But since beginning of the investigation into James, Martin has taken several unusual steps that fall outside the norms of prosecutorial conduct. He sent a letter to James’ attorney Abbe Lowell on August 12 suggesting New York’s top law enforcement officer resign, he appeared outside of James’ home with a colleague trailed by a photographer for the New York Post, and appeared on Fox News pledging to take an expansive look into all of James’ conduct.
In video obtained by CNN, Martin can be seen posing for photos outside of James’ home.
“This is a criminal investigation, not social media,” said Elie Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst. “A stunt like that might get clicks, but it’s patently inappropriate for a prosecutor to do and it certainly will give James and her attorney a basis to oppose any indictment, to argue it was prejudicial to the jury pool and that an indictment was brought in bad faith.”
The conduct is “outside the bounds of DOJ and ethics rules,” Lowell said in a response to Martin.
Justice Department policy generally prohibits discussing criminal investigations publicly, and attorneys are not supposed to pursue investigations for political means or to go on fishing expeditions.
Jah’han Jones at MSNBC: Trump’s ‘weaponization’ chief seems to admit to punitive fishing expeditions.
Ed Martin is going fishing. On Sunday, the lawyer and Donald Trump loyalist tapped to lead a Justice Department “weaponization” group that’s targeting the president’s perceived enemies vowed to rummage around in the lives of New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in search of what he says could be potential fraud — or … something.
Ed Martin
During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly targeted people who had been investigated or opposed him with thinly veiled threats of legal prosecution. Now, Martin, in his capacity as head of the so-called Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, has been tasked with putting those prosecutions into action. The list of targets includes James, who led a successful mortgage fraud case against the Trump organization that resulted in a judgment of hundreds of millions of dollars; and Schiff, who served on the House Jan. 6 select committee that documented Trump’s role in fomenting insurrection in 2021.
Officials at DOJ are investigating both Schiff and James of mortgage fraud; both deny any wrongdoing and accuse the administration of political retribution. Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer and attorney for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, has been assigned to oversee the cases. He’s previously said his group would be used to “shame” people it can’t charge with crimes.
In comments to Fox News this Sunday, Martin suggested his group intends to use its powers to poke around in other parts of James’ and Schiff’s lives in search of things unrelated to the mortgage allegations.
He said, “We’re gonna go to the very bottom of the facts, and if somebody did something wrong, we’re not only gonna hold them accountable, we’re also gonna look at everything else that they’ve been doing. Because when you’re a liar, you lie not just on one thing. When you’re a cheater, you cheat not just on one thing. When you’re doing corruption, you generally don’t just do it on one thing.”
The Independent: Bongino to work alongside ‘co-deputy director’ of FBI after sparring with administration over Epstein files.
The FBI has moved to appoint Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as its new “co-deputy director,” meaning its current deputy, Dan Bongino, will be expected to share his duties in the role in the future.
The appointment was made by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel and comes after Bongino, 50, a former Secret Service agent and podcaster, reportedly clashed with Bondi over the administration’s failure to release the Jeffrey Epstein files last month.
“I am proud to announce I have accepted the role of Co-Deputy Director of the FBI,” Bailey wrote in a brief post on X. “I extend my thanks to President Donald Trump and AG Bondi for the opportunity to serve in the mission to Make America Safe Again. I will protect America and uphold the Constitution.”
Bongino responded to a journalist’s post about the appointment by writing simply, “Welcome,” accompanied by three Stars and Stripes emojis.
Explaining the decision, Patel told The Daily Beast that the FBI “will always bring the greatest talent this country has to offer in order to accomplish the goals set forth when an overwhelming majority of American people elected President Donald J Trump again.
You have to wonder why Bongino hasn’t resigned. Maybe this is a step toward pushing him out.
The Epstein case caused controversy in early July after the FBI and Justice Department put out a statement saying that the late pedophile and sex trafficker left behind no “client list” among his possessions and died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in August 2019.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino will find himself sharing his official duties after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Mitchell was hired by the Trump administration
The assessment started a civil war among Trump’s MAGA movement, many of whose members had long been encouraged to suspect foul play in Epstein’s death and had hoped to see influential people brought to justice over their alleged involvement in the disgraced financier’s crimes.
The controversy raged for more than a month, with the president himself repeatedly urged to release all federal files on Epstein and to explain his past friendship with the disgraced financier, a cause of apparent frustration to him….
Even before the contested verdict on Epstein was published, Patel and Bongino, both of whom had stoked conspiracy theories on conservative media before joining the Trump administration, had drawn fire for attempting to pour cold water on the case during a May interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.
The Epstein story is not going away, and now supposedly the DOJ will begin releasing the Epstein files to the House Oversight Committee on Friday.
CNN: House panel to make Epstein files public after redactions to protect victim identities.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform intends to make public some files it subpoenaed related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, though it will first redact them to shield victims’ IDs and other sensitive matters, a committee spokesperson said Tuesday.
The panel is expected to start receiving materials from the Justice Department on Friday, though it appears the public release will come some time after that. The spokesperson said the committee would work with the Justice Department on the process.
“The Committee intends to make the records public after thorough review to ensure all victims’ identification and child sexual abuse material are redacted. The Committee will also consult with the DOJ to ensure any documents released do not negatively impact ongoing criminal cases and investigations,” the spokesperson said.
Democrats on the committee complained that Comer was slow walking the release of the material by allowing the Justice Department to miss the Tuesday deadline that had been set by the panel and instead turn over the materials to the committee gradually over time starting Friday. They said DOJ had already been directed by the House subpoena to redact material related to victims’ identities and child sexual abuse – questioning the need for further delay to do so.
“Releasing the Epstein files in batches just continues this White House cover-up. The American people will not accept anything short of the full, unredacted Epstein files,” said Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the panel. “In a bipartisan vote, the Committee demanded complete compliance with our subpoena. Handpicked, partial productions are wholly insufficient and potentially misleading, especially after Attorney General Bondi bragged about having the entirety of the Epstein files on her desk mere months ago.”
I hope this will really happen, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Trump and Putin
This post is already too long, but I couldn’t resist including this story from The Daily Beast: Trump’s Jaw-Dropping Ignorance Exposed During Putin Meet: Author.
Donald Trump displayed a stunning ignorance of the Cold War during last week’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to his biographer.
Author Michael Wolff told the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head on Tuesday that, in the president’s telling of the decades-long 20th century engagement, “it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side.”
Michael Wolff
Wolff, who said his sources are “twice removed” from the principals, said Trump began the meeting with “a combination of flattery” and “a combination of things that he’s just pulled out of somewhere…observations, it’s both inconsequential and incoherent.”
When either Special Envoy Steve Witkoff or Secretary of State Marco Rubio interrupted him to lay out an agenda, Wolff said, Trump just talked over them.
“Again, we’re nowhere in this meeting. We’re probably now, you know, 20 minutes in. Nothing is clear about what anyone is doing there except that Putin is totally impassive,” he said.
When Putin did speak, Wolff said, he gave a “history lesson” about ”why [Russia] should conquer Ukraine.”
And a bit more:
“Trump, not to be outdone, as this is relayed to me, goes into his own history lesson, and this is a history of the Cold War,” he said. “And as this is described to me, in Trump’s history of the Cold War, it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side.” [….]
Trump, who has been attacking “woke” history museums for not talking about “the future,” then seemed to go along with Putin’s statement resisting a ceasefire, Wolff said.
“And Trump seems to accept this and seems to agree with this,” according to the author. “Yes, let’s just move on to the peace.”
Witkoff and Rubio, meanwhile, are “basically helpless.”
“They sit there occasionally trying to interject, but you can’t really interject because Trump just talks all the time,” he continued.
“And this is then to… Putin’s advantage, because rather than any discussion of the details of what might happen here, what territory—what are you going to give for that, what are the trade offs—I mean, that level of detail Trump is not interested in, probably not capable of following the logical sequences that would be necessary there.”
What’s important to Trump, Wolff said, “is to keep talking” and “to have people listen to him.”
Those are the stories that interested me today. There’s much more happening. What’s on your mind?
Wednesday Reads: How Many Ways Can Trump Fail to Distract from The Epstein Files?
Posted: August 13, 2025 Filed under: just because | Tags: 2001, Big Balls Corsitine, Bureau of Labor Statistics, DC Home Rule Act, DC National Guard, Donald Trump, EJ Antoni, Epstein Files, fascism, January 5, Michael Wolff, Smithsonian Museums, Trump tries to distract from Epstein files, virtual meeting on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin 4 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Trump’s efforts to distract from his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein are doomed to failure.
It’s just another day under the rule of fascist dictator wannabe Trump. All I can say is whatever is in the Epstein files about Trump must be really damaging, because every day he dreams up one or two new distractions.
Raw Story:
President Donald Trump has reportedly been frantically calling aides and allies seeking a “big thing” to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and he’s purportedly considering a major geopolitical move to turn the page politically.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast’s new podcast “Inside Trump’s Head” that the president has been making “relentless” phone calls demanding ideas to get him past questions about his longtime relationships with the late sex offender and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Let me go back about a week or so, or 10 days, when Trump started to say to everyone who would listen — and everyone listens to Donald Trump — to staffers and on the phone calls, the relentless phone calls that he’s constantly making, he said, ‘I need a big thing, I need a big thing,'” Wolff told the podcast. ”What’s the ‘big thing?’ And everyone understood that this was code for I need a distraction from Epstein. What’s the thing that will move us beyond that?”
Trump considered turning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into a MAGA villain and reportedly called his chief rival Andrew Cuomo to discuss the plan, but Wolff said that option “didn’t get that traction,” so he next moved on to deploying soldiers and federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., before landing on something else to distract his base.
“That is what he got to,” Wolff said. “‘I’m going to have to do Ukraine.’”
Wolff claims the president will pull the U.S. out of any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which Trump believes will appease the isolationist MAGA base, after he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Alaska.
“He’s going to sacrifice Ukraine for Epstein,” Wolff said. “Essentially, this is, in his mind, a trade. It is the MAGA people who have pressed this Epstein issue constantly. I mean, they’re the threat.”
Wolff doesn’t think that will work either.
The National Guard began to show up on the DC streets yesterday.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Trump’s brownshirts deploy in DC.
On Monday, Trump dropped two executive orders, two fact sheets, and two “articles” (who knew that the White House issues articles?) about his decision to federalize the DC police and deploy the National Guard. Then, he held a bonkers press conference where he gave Attorney General Pam Bondi control of the DC police “as of this moment,” at which point Bondi took the podium to declare that “crime in DC is ending and ending today.”
It’s important to be precise about what’s happening in DC and why. As Chris Geidner explains at Law Dork, calling this a “takeover” of DC itself or the DC police is inaccurate.
DC’s Home Rule Act has a provision that lets the president direct the mayor to provide District police force service for federal purposes if he deems it necessary and determines an emergency exists. He can do that for 48 hours without informing Congress. Once he informs Congress, he gets 30 days. Past that, Congress needs to enact a joint resolution to extend it.
In theory, the legislative branch should act as a check on a lawless president. But given that the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate have willfully abdicated their responsibility to do so, there’s no reason to think lawmakers won’t let Trump’s brownshirts occupy DC as long as he wants.
There are no real impediments to the president calling up the DC National Guard. Unlike state National Guards, which are under the control of state governors, DC’s Guard is commanded by the president. Further, the position of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is that the DC National Guard can be used for federal work without being federalized, unlike state National Guards. This means it can be used for law enforcement purposes without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which otherwise prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian enforcement efforts.
National Guard troops arriving in DC yesterday
So, the DC Home Rule Act, combined with the structure of its National Guard, gives the president a perfectly legal and relatively friction-free way to make local police do his bidding and to have the National Guard roam the streets.
At the moment, there’s a pretense that the DC National Guard will not be performing law enforcement duties. Instead, they have the authority to detain people temporarily until federal agents arrive. But as any first-year law student can tell you, if someone cloaked in the authority of the government has the power to detain you, they are engaged in law enforcement duties. It doesn’t matter that they eventually hand you off to someone else with the proper authority to detain you.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be so hyped for this. He can pretend he’s a five-star general in charge of a vast array of troops rather than a doofus civilian whose main achievement currently consists of posting misogynist and eugenicist garbage on his social media accounts — well, and sharing classified military plans in the group chat. He’s pretty good at that. But now, Hegseth gets to do Fox hits and bray about how the DC Guard “will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.”
Read more at Public Notice.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Crackdowns Are Only Going to Get Worse.
President Donald Trump has expanded his military campaign against the United States by deploying armed troops to yet another major metropolitan area, announcing on Monday that he is sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., to “liberate” the city.
Big Balls before and after attack
The D.C. operation, launched two months after the start of his Los Angeles crackdown, broadens a police-state-style domestic campaign that some senior Trump administration officials describe to Rolling Stone as a “shock and awe” show of force, a reference to the foreign war in Iraq that Trump has pretended to oppose.
It’s only going to get worse.
The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.
“Make no mistake, this is just the beginning,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — a staunchly pro-Trump former Fox News host whom the president tapped specifically to “crack skulls” — said Monday night.
Can you believe Pirro is actually the US attorney anywhere?
At a press conference Monday announcing that the federal government had seized “direct” control of D.C.’s police department and that the National Guard would soon occupy the city, Trump warned that if he and his officials decide they “need to,” he will deploy military forces to other Democratic cities, too. The president named a few, including Chicago, Oakland, and Baltimore. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat whom Trump attacked by name, compared Trump’s use of the military to the Nazis tearing apart Germany’s constitutional republic, per the Chicago Tribune.
Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.” [….]
In recent months, according to government officials and other sources with knowledge of the situation, administration staff and lawyers have crafted detailed plans and menus of options for Trump to feed his desire for replicating and proliferating his militarized crackdowns — on immigrants and citizens alike — to different Democratic strongholds. National Guard troops are already mobilizing in D.C., and Trump has privately said, according to two sources familiar with the matter, that if he sees something that he feels crosses his line (like if street protests in the city grow too big or if he deems them a threat suddenly), he will gladly order larger numbers of troops to nation’s capital, as he did in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Trump has insisted to administration officials that it’s ridiculous that troops like National Guard members are not allowed to conduct various forms of domestic law enforcement, sources add. The president and his administration to some extent have had their hands tied on this due to the Posse Comitatus Act — which prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement — though that isn’t stopping them from actively exploring ways around the law. “There are ways things were done, and that’s not always going to be how they should be done now or tomorrow,” a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone.
MAGA mob attacks police line on January 6, 2001.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Deploys National Guard for D.C. Crime but Called Jan. 6 Rioters ‘Very Special.’
The heart of D.C. was in a state of lawlessness.
Roving mobs of wild men smashed windows, threatened murder and attacked the police.
One rioter struck an officer in the face with a baton. Another threw a chair at police officers and pepper-sprayed them. Others beat and used a stun gun on an officer, nearly killing him.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob committed a month’s worth of crime in the span of about three hours.
The F.B.I. has estimated that around 2,000 people took part in criminal acts that day, and more than 600 people were charged with assaulting, resisting or interfering with the police. (Citywide, Washington currently averages about 70 crimes a day.)
But President Trump’s handling of the most lawless day in recent Washington history stands in sharp contrast to his announcement on Monday that he needed to use the full force of the federal government to crack down on “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” in the nation’s capital.
A bit more:
After a prominent member of the Department of Government Efficiency, known by his online pseudonym, “Big Balls,” was assaulted this month, the president took federal control of Washington’s police force and mobilized National Guard troops. His team passed out a packet of mug shots, and Mr. Trump described “roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
That was nothing like the message he delivered to the mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, when he told them, as tear gas filled the hallways of the Capitol: “We love you. You’re very special.”
“If we want to look at marauding mobs, look at Jan. 6,” said Mary McCord, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law and a former federal prosecutor. “If you want to look at criminal mobs, we had a criminal mob and he called them peaceful protesters.”
In one of his first actions upon retaking the presidency, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack. The president issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
He has sought to rewrite the history of the riot and called those arrested “hostages.”
In another fascist takeover attempt, Trump is trying to control what The Smithsonian puts on display.
The New York Times (gift link): White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions.
The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, scouring wall text, websites and social media “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”
White House officials announced the review in a letter sent to Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Museums will be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic within 120 days, the letter said, “replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.”
The review, which will begin with eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, is the latest attempt by President Trump to try to impose his will on the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself outside the purview of the executive branch.
Kim Sajet, the head of the National Portrait Gallery, resigned in June after Mr. Trump said he was firing her for being partisan. The Smithsonian’s governing board said at the time that it had sole responsibility for personnel decisions.
News of the letter was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal. It is signed by Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president; Vince Haley, the director of the Domestic Policy Council; and Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
A bit more:
In a statement, the Smithsonian said that its “work is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research and the accurate, factual presentation of history.”
“We are reviewing the letter with this commitment in mind,” it continued, “and will continue to collaborate constructively with the White House, Congress and our governing Board of Regents.”
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Mr. Bunch did not immediately returned a call seeking comment.
Some historians expressed concern at the political interference in an institution that was long viewed as independent. Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard and president of the Organization of American Historians, said the Smithsonian was already doing a “fantastic job of presenting American history.”
“People are voting with their feet,” she said. “It’s a very popular place. The content of exhibits shouldn’t simply reflect any one administration’s preferences. They are the product of a lot of hard work by dedicated and honorable people who want to present the most accurate picture of American history as possible. That includes the triumphs and the tragedies.”
Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written extensively about the Smithsonian, called the administration’s review “a full assault on the autonomy of all the different branches of the institution.”
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
At Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance has a few choice words about this attack on the Smithsonian: Living in 1984.
The headline tonight reads, “White House to Vet Smithsonian Museums to Fit Trump’s Historical Vision.”It’s in The Wall Street Journal, not exactly a bastion of liberal views. “Top White House officials will scrutinize exhibitions, internal processes, collections and artist grants ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.”
Why? The Journal answers that question in the opening paragraph: “The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history.”
Trump’s interpretation of American history? The man isn’t exactly a scholar.
During his first term in office, at a breakfast celebrating Black History Month in 2017, Trump said: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Douglass, the famous abolitionist, died in 1895. At the time he made that comment, Trump seemed more enthusiastic about our national museums than he does today. He led into the comment by saying, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things.”
Perhaps this gaffe explains Trump’s subsequent antipathy to celebrating Black History Month. But he’s not someone who should be defining our history.
In 2009, Trump purchased a Virginia Golf Club. Its beautiful location on the Potomac River wasn’t enough for him—he needed it to have some historical importance. So he, or someone working for him, made it up. He put up a plaque claiming, “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot…The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ” According to multiple experts, nothing of the sort ever happened there.
The New York Times reports that when Trump was confronted with the lie, he said, “How would they know that? Were they there?” Trump is clearly not the man to entrust with the telling of our national history. “Write your story the way you want to write it,” Trump told reporters who pressed him for any evidence to support the supposed history he attributed to the site.
In a phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his first term in office, Trump insisted that Canadians burned down the White House during the War of 1812. As every school child knows, it was the British.
And of course, there were Trump’s exaggerated claims about the size of the crowd at his first inauguration.
Read the rest at Civil Discourse.
This morning, Trump met virtually with European leaders and Ukraine’s President Zelensky ahead of his meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday. I don’t really think that anything Trump said can be trusted, but here are some reports:
CNN: EU leaders hold call with Trump and Zelensky ahead of Alaska summit.
A call between European officials, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump took place today.
Speaking at a news conference alongside Zelensky afterward, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Europe’s leaders are doing everything to ensure an upcoming meeting between Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin “goes the right way.”
Here are the latest developments:
- Joint meeting: A virtual summit involving US President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders took place today.
- Trump support: In comments made after the meeting, Zelensky said that “there should be a ceasefire first, then security guarantees – real security guarantees,” and that Trump has “expressed his support.”
- Renewed calls: Speaking alongside Zelensky after the meeting, Merz reiterated his call for Ukraine to be at the table for negotiations and said that a ceasefire must come first in any deal, as he said Kyiv needed “robust guarantees.”
- “Major decisions:” Merz said there could be “major decisions” made during the Trump-Putin summit as he said Europeans are therefore “doing everything we can in order to lay the groundwork to make sure that this meeting goes the right way.”
- Territorial exchange: Also speaking after the call, French President Emmanuel Macron said any territorial exchange in Ukraine “must only be discussed with Ukraine, as he added that it was a “good thing” that Russia and the US were talking, but it was important that Europe is “heard.”
- Territory: Meanwhile, a Russian foreign ministry official has poured cold water on the idea that both Russia and Ukraine would need to swap territory to reach a peace agreement
Territorial questions that fall under Ukraine’s authority cannot be negotiated and will only be negotiated by the President of Ukraine, Macron said, adding that Trump had expressed the same. Philippe Magoni EPA
The Independent: US and Russia suggest ‘West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine.’
The U.S. and Russia are set to suggest a West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine as a way of ending the war, according to The Times.
Under the proposed plans, Russia would have both economic and military control of the occupied parts of Ukraine, utilizing its own governing body, mimicking Israel’s control of Palestinian territory taken from Jordan during the 1967 conflict.
The suggestion was put forward during discussions between President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterparts, a source with insight into the U.S. National Security Council told the paper.
Witkoff, who also serves as the White House’s Middle East envoy, reportedly backs the suggestion, which the U.S. thinks solves the issue of the Ukrainian constitution prohibiting giving up territory without organizing a referendum.
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected any notion of ceding territory, the new occupation proposal may lead to a truce following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
According to the proposal, Ukraine’s borders would remain officially unchanged, similar to the borders of the West Bank, even as Israel controls the territory.
I can’t see how Zelensky could accept that.
One more report from Politico: Trump agreed only Ukraine can negotiate territorial concessions, Macron says.
Finally, at The Wall Street Journal, Paul Kiernan has a profile on Trump’s pick for Bureau of Labor Statistics head: The Partisan Economist Trump Wants to Oversee the Nation’s Data.
Conservative economist Erwin John “E.J.” Antoni sometimes jokes on social media that the “L” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ acronym is silent.
President Trump this week tapped Antoni to run the agency whose data and methodologies he has long criticized, especially when it produces numbers that Trump doesn’t like. He recently proposed suspending the monthly jobs report, one of the most important data releases for the economy and markets. On Tuesday, a White House official noted that Antoni made the comment before he knew he was going to be chosen and that his comments don’t reflect official BLS policy.
E.J. Antoni was nominated by the president this week to oversee the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo by C-SPAN
If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would run a 141-year-old agency staffed by around 2,000 economists, statisticians and other officials. The BLS has a long record of independence and nonpartisanship that economists and investors say is critical to the credibility of U.S. economic data.
According to a commencement program from Northern Illinois University, Antoni earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from that school in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Antoni’s LinkedIn profile says he attended Lansdale Catholic High School outside Philadelphia from 2002 to 2006.
According to the profile, Antoni went to work in 2021 as an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin that has sued the federal government to overturn climate-change regulations. The following year, he joined the conservative Heritage Foundation as a research fellow studying regional economics. He is now the foundation’s chief economist and an adviser to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group of conservative economic commentators.
Past BLS commissioners have had extensive research experience, and many have climbed the ranks of the agency itself. Antoni doesn’t fit that profile. He doesn’t appear to have published any formal academic research since his dissertation, according to queries of National Bureau of Economic Research working papers and Google Scholar. Much of his commentary on the Heritage website praises Trump’s policies and economic record. He frequently posts on X and appears on conservative podcasts such as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” where he criticized the economy under President Joe Biden and lauds Trump’s economy.
The Heritage Foundation declined to make Antoni available for an interview and didn’t respond to questions about his background.
There’s more at the link. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.
That’s all I have today. What’s on your mind?
Chaotic Friday Reads
Posted: January 5, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, white nationalists | Tags: Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff, white nationalist terrorism, winter is EVERYWHERE (but the west coast) 34 Comments
The frozen Josephine Shaw Lowell Memorial Fountain located at Bryant Park in New York is viewed on January 2, 2018 as New Yorkers return back to work after the holiday break. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
Well, it’s another week in Drumpfistan where most of us–including the news media–can’t keep up with all the craziness that’s going on because there’s an insane person wankering his way through the presidency. How could any one not see this man is a moron with more personality disorders than listed in DSM-5. The weather is crazy too but don’t blame climate change whatever you do if you want to be a good Republican Stooge and justify opening up all the coasts and national parks of the country to massive extraction exploitation.
While Americans on the East Coast are battling a bomb cyclone, a recent NASA image shows quite a different weather scenario out west—one bathed in excessive heat. Comparing the current scenario to the past eight years—which is exactly what this striking new image does—shows just how drastically the weather has changed.
The image was taken by NASA’s terra satellite and is based on data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), an instrument onboard the satellite that takes readings of the Earth’s surface. To create the visual map, NASA used land surface temperatures from December 26, 2017, to January 2, 2018, and compared these with average temperatures of the same time period over the past 8 years ago.
Red represents areas that were hotter than average and blue areas were colder than average. (White represents normal temperatures and gray represents inadequate data.) The vast amount of color on the map show just how distinct this year’s temperatures are compared to that of the past.
Well, that explains why we’re colder down here in the South than Alaska. The oldest living confederate widow has laid claim to her new priorities. We must see that state’s rights only apply when we’re talking taking rights away from Black Americans, the GLBT community, and women. States must follow his lead on weed. Also, the FBI must go back to investigating the Clintons at any cost!!!
The Justice Department sent a shiver of uncertainty through the now-thriving legal marijuana industry Thursday by rescinding Obama administration policies not to interfere with state laws allowing people to use pot for medical and recreational uses.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions characterized the dramatic policy shift as a “return to the rule of law” in a memo outlining the change. But federal officials could not answer whether people selling or using marijuana – in certain states where it’s considered legal – would now be more at risk of prosecution.
Senior Justice officials said the previous administration’s position, mainly drafted by former Deputy Attorney General James Cole, had provided a “de-facto safe haven” for a now thriving weed industry.
“This (Sessions) memo has no de-facto safe haven in it,” said the officials, who briefed reporters under condition of anonymity because the memo had not yet been circulated to U.S. attorneys across the country.
The probe may also examine whether any tax-exempt assets were converted for personal or political use and whether the foundation complied with applicable tax laws, the officials said.
One witness recently interviewed by the FBI described the session to The Hill as “extremely professional and unquestionably thorough” and focused on questions about whether donors to Clinton charitable efforts received any favorable treatment from the Obama administration on a policy decision previously highlighted in media reports.
The witness discussed his interview solely on the grounds of anonymity. He said the agents were from Little Rock and their questions focused on government decisions and discussions of donations to Clinton entities during the time Hillary Clinton led President Obama’s State Department.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the White House to denounce this act of terror in Nebraska. I doubt it’s coming because this dude is undoubtedly part of Trump’s White Supremacist base. How on earth do you board a train carrying an arsenal? Why are guns allowed?
The FBI says an armed 26-year-old Missouri man who breached a secured area to stop an Amtrak train in southwest Nebraska in October has links to a white supremacist group and expressed an interest in “killing black people,” according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
Taylor Michael Wilson, of St. Charles, Missouri, is charged in U.S. District Court in Lincoln with terrorism attacks and other violence against railroad carriers and mass transportation systems.
In an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint, FBI Special Agent Monte Czaplewski said there was probable cause to believe that electronic devices possessed by Wilson and firearms owned by him “have been used for or obtained in anticipation of engaging in or planning to engage in criminal offenses against the United States.”
Just before 2 a.m. on Oct. 22, an assistant conductor felt the train braking, searched for what was causing it and found Wilson in the engineer’s seat of the follow engine “playing with the controls,” Czaplewski wrote.
The conductor, and others, subdued Wilson, then held him and waited for deputies from Furnas and Harlan counties to arrive in Oxford, 23 miles southwest of Holdrege, where the eastbound California Zephyr with about 175 people aboard stopped.
No injuries were reported.
Czaplewski said Wilson, who has a permit in Missouri to carry a concealed handgun, had a loaded .38-caliber handgun in his waistband, a speed loader in his pocket and a National Socialist Movement business card on him when he was arrested.
He also had a backpack with three more speed loaders, a box of ammunition, a knife, tin snips, scissors and a ventilation mask inside.
Michael Wolff’s book has been released early. The DC crowd lined up at midnight in bookstores every where.
The wind chill hit minus-3 degrees the night “Fire and Fury” came to town.
But neither polar vortex nor “bomb cyclone” nor gloom of night could keep Washington’s political gossipmongers from lining up at Kramerbooks Thursday night for the midnight sale of Michael Wolff’s newly published romp through the Donald Trump White House.
“This is a D.C. moment, and I wanted to be a part of it,” said Steve Dingledine, a fifth-grade teacher who showed up shortly after 11 p.m. and now held the pole position in a line that snaked through the Dupont Circle bookstore/cafe. And it was definitely a D.C. moment: Dingledine found himself flanked by a cluster of cameras — the BBC, Fox News, someone conducting interviews in Turkish, and emissaries of various local TV channels. Reporters from BuzzFeed, HuffPost, the Weekly Standard and Vice News hovered nearby.
Dingledine was not fazed. This was not his first D.C. moment.
“Mark Halperin came to my classroom last year to film his show, ‘The Circus,’ ” he said, laying down two tens and a twenty before tucking his purchase under his arm and exiting into the cold night air.
Meanwhile, back in the craziest wing of the party of crazy, Bannon is as much a target as Wolff. He’s a man without a country or sponsor or friends. Here’s some delicious words from Never Trumper Rick Wilson.
Steve Bannon’s spectacular fall from gracein Trump World is a big, salty, delicious bowl of schadenfreude from the political gods in celebration of the new year.
Bannon wasn’t just one of Trump’s most senior aides and an architect of the destruction of the Republican Party; he was the multi-shirted, red-eyed White House troll, leaking tales of his brilliance to a constellation of reporters in the ostensibly hated mainstream media. His house organ Breitbart and a host of Trump-right websites and news outlets sang praises to his dank genius. Bannon, they proclaimed, was Trumpism in its distilled essence: revanchist, ahistorical, racially inflected, and consumed with an imaginary war on the media and America’s broader society.
Now, like two rats in a bag, Trump and Bannon are tearing at one another in a delicious public spat that has every possible bit of drama, except Bannon drunkenly bellowing for a round of fisticuffs with all comers and Trump offering to compare the length of their relative manhoods on live television. They deserve one another in so many ways.
Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury (President Postliterate Bestwords is waiting on either the audio book or for Kellyanne to organize tableaux vivants of the various chapters) is blowing Washington apart today, and the biggest rift is between Trumpism and Bannonism. I’ve written before about the inevitable, tragic dynamic of this brokeback bromance; Trump needs a mindless cheering section screaming hosannas no matter how often he stumbles toward the nuclear and political precipice. Bannon needs an avatar for his Alt-Reich national socialist—oh, sorry, I meant populist—fantasies.
Speaking of White Nationalists and other full blown racists and Trump, here’s another bit from the book via The Daily Beast, Oh, and don’t forget the misogyny!
Michael Wolff’s infamous Fire and Fury alleges that President Donald Trump privately rationalized “why someone would be a member of the KKK.” According to Wolff’s reporting: “As [Trump] got back on Marine One to head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump Tower, [after addressing the Charlottesville murder,] his mood was dark and I-told-you-so. Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK—that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes now?” The book, which is still making waves after three excerpts and its release at midnight Friday, contends the White House is particularly hostile toward what it calls “D.O.J. women”—women who work in the Justice Department. Earlier this week, an excerpt revealed that Trump specifically reviled former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Wolff wrote that Trump at one point called her “such a c—t.”
So, I could go on about a bunch of stuff but frankly my fingers are still quite cold, stiff, and sore and I’d rather head back to bed to read what you’ve come up with. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Stay warm!!!!!
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