Trump's World (Trump news/discussion) Trump tells reporter, “Quiet. Quiet, Piggy.”

[squistion 2,555]

 

[squistion 2,555]

SMH.

 

[Mike Honcho 5,464]

12 minutes ago, squistion said:

SMH.

 

Most corrupt president ever, pardons co-conspirators. 

[Ron_Artest 2,272]

59 minutes ago, Mike Honcho said:

Most corrupt president ever, pardons co-conspirators. 

It's to be expected.  America elected a guy that tried to steal an election.  Of course he's going to pardon everyone involved.  Completely disgraceful but it started on election day.

[squistion 2,555]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/world/europe/trump-bbc-lawsuit-documentary.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20251110&instance_id=166159&nl=breaking-news&regi_id=125207237&segment_id=210335&user_id=14502a7228c5a9b835a15627514bfe28

Trump Threatens to Sue the BBC for $1 Billion After Jan. 6 Documentary

A lawyer for the president said the BBC’s editing of a speech Mr. Trump gave on Jan. 6 was “defamatory.” The broadcaster on Monday apologized for an “error in judgment.”

President Trump on Monday threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion for a documentary that his lawyer claimed included “malicious, disparaging” edits to a speech Mr. Trump delivered on Jan. 6, 2021.

The legal threat came in a letter from Alejandro Brito, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, to the BBC that was obtained by The New York Times. The letter demanded a full retraction of the documentary, an apology and what his lawyers said would be payments that “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.”

The letter said that if those demands were not met, “President Trump will be left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1,000,000,000 (One Billion Dollars) in damages.”

The letter said: “The BBC is on notice” and concluded: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.”

The BBC said on its website that it had received a letter threatening legal action and that it would “respond in due course.” The documentary, called “Trump: A Second Chance?” and broadcast before the presidential election last year, had already been removed from the BBC’s online player.

Samir Shah, the BBC’s chair, said in a separate letter Monday that complaints about the editing of the clip had been discussed by the standards committee in January and May, and that the points raised in the review had been relayed to the BBC team that produced the documentary, part of a long-running current affairs series called Panorama.

“With hindsight, it would have been better to take more formal action,” he wrote. He added: “We accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action. The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgment.”

The head of the BBC, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday after growing pressure over the editing of the documentary. 

[squistion 2,555]

 https://x.com/kylegriffin1/status/1988603965190139955

BREAKING:

House Democrats just released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Trump had "spent hours at my house" with one of Epstein's victims — among other messages that suggested Epstein believed Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged.

https://tinyurl.com/5yj3dfpx

In a separate email with author Michael Wolff in 2019, Epstein stated explicitly that Donald Trump, "knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop."

 

[squistion 2,555]

 

[Strike 6,030]

We already have this thread, pigeon focker.  No need to duplicate.

 

[MDC 7,919]

3 hours ago, squistion said:

 https://x.com/kylegriffin1/status/1988603965190139955

BREAKING:

House Democrats just released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Trump had "spent hours at my house" with one of Epstein's victims — among other messages that suggested Epstein believed Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged.

https://tinyurl.com/5yj3dfpx

In a separate email with author Michael Wolff in 2019, Epstein stated explicitly that Donald Trump, "knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop."

 

There’s some speculation out there that Don was an FBI informant.

[squistion 2,555]

 

[squistion 2,555]

Hmmm...

 

[Fnord 2,548]

3 hours ago, squistion said:

Hmmm...

 

"The more elite you become..."

Not the more "educated." Because it's all just a sham and indoctrination and you're not really learning anything, of course.

Mike Judge is a prophet and my swami. Idiocracy may be the most prescient piece of art produced in my lifetime. I may start a religion. I could use the tax break.

[Meglamaniac 796]

40 minutes ago, Fnord said:

"The more elite you become..."

Not the more "educated." Because it's all just a sham and indoctrination and you're not really learning anything, of course.

Mike Judge is a prophet and my swami. Idiocracy may be the most prescient piece of art produced in my lifetime. I may start a religion. I could use the tax break.

Brawndo's got what plants crave!

[Fnord 2,548]

33 minutes ago, Meglamaniac said:

Brawndo's got what plants crave!

I may have found my first Archbishop!

[squistion 2,555]

 

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

Today’s looking glass America is complete madness. Trump ordering investigations, his AG clicking her heels in response in full view, Trump ordering Crazy Gen. Flynn be paid $50 million, the HHS revealed to be taking psychedelics & near-death narcotics, the 2nd in command in FBI was given a waiver on a security background check, the DHS Secretary awarding millions on contracts to a firm she has ties with… it’s just constant lunacy.

[The Real timschochet 7,504]

1 minute ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Today’s looking glass America is complete madness. Trump ordering investigations, his AG clicking her heels in response in full view, Trump ordering Crazy Gen. Flynn be paid $50 million, the HHS revealed to be taking psychedelics & near-death narcotics, the 2nd in command in FBI was given a waiver on a security background check, the DHS Secretary awarding millions on contracts to a firm she has ties with… it’s just constant lunacy.

MAGA: This is what I voted for! Owning the libs! 

[squistion 2,555]

 

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

Ponzi Schemer Who Won Trump Clemency Gets New 37-Year Term

Judge stated he was a predator who stole life savings.

>>A convicted Ponzi schemer whose 24-year prison term was commuted by President Donald Trump in 2021 was sentenced to another 37 years behind bars for stealing $44 million from investors after he was released. 

Eliyahu “Eli” Weinstein, 51, was sentenced Friday for defrauding investors who believed their money was buying Covid-19 masks, baby formula and first-aid kits bound for Ukraine. Instead, Weinstein and his conspirators used the money to repay early investors and for personal expenses like gambling in casinos and buying real estate, prosecutors said in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey.<<

[seafoam1 3,455]

1 hour ago, squistion said:

 

What would Biden do if he had the fictional Epstein files? Oh, wait, we already know.

[squistion 2,555]

 

[MDC 7,919]

16 hours ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Today’s looking glass America is complete madness. Trump ordering investigations, his AG clicking her heels in response in full view, Trump ordering Crazy Gen. Flynn be paid $50 million, the HHS revealed to be taking psychedelics & near-death narcotics, the 2nd in command in FBI was given a waiver on a security background check, the DHS Secretary awarding millions on contracts to a firm she has ties with… it’s just constant lunacy.

It’s a rare mix of arrogance, corruption, and total incompetence.

[dogcows 1,084]

President Autopen

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/justice-department-quietly-replaced-identical-015109518.html

[TBayXXXVII 2,673]

18 hours ago, The Real timschochet said:

MAGA: This is what I voted for! Owning the libs! 

Yup.  We need to remove the terrorists on the left from the government. 

[TBayXXXVII 2,673]

On 11/10/2025 at 11:14 AM, Mike Honcho said:

Most corrupt president ever, pardons co-conspirators. 

Trump is the president, not Biden or Obama.   I think you have blank spots in your memory. 

[squistion 2,555]

 

[Fnord 2,548]

NY Times talks to 60+ current and former DOJ attorneys. They are mad as hell at how corrupt the DOJ has become.

Even in the context of today's politics, it's an insane read.

It's a long subscriber-only article. If someone can tell me how to make a hidden box in this ridiculous forum, I'll put it in there, but don't want to pollute the page with a wall of text. @SaintsInDome2006, I think you may know?

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

4 minutes ago, Fnord said:

NY Times talks to 60+ current and former DOJ attorneys. They are mad as hell at how corrupt the DOJ has become.

Even in the context of today's politics, it's an insane read.

It's a long subscriber-only article. If someone can tell me how to make a hidden box in this ridiculous forum, I'll put it in there, but don't want to pollute the page with a wall of text. @SaintsInDome2006, I think you may know?

Thanks - you put the word ‘spoiler’ in brackets. [spoi ler] above & below the text. 

[squistion 2,555]

Trump with the American Flag on the ground pretty much says it all, doesn't it? 

 

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

1 minute ago, squistion said:

Trump with the American Flag on the ground pretty much says it all, doesn't it? 

 

What the hell.

[Fnord 2,548]

1 hour ago, Fnord said:

NY Times talks to 60+ current and former DOJ attorneys. They are mad as hell at how corrupt the DOJ has become.

Even in the context of today's politics, it's an insane read.

It's a long subscriber-only article. If someone can tell me how to make a hidden box in this ridiculous forum, I'll put it in there, but don't want to pollute the page with a wall of text. @SaintsInDome2006, I think you may know?

The Unraveling of the Justice Department

Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion.

resident Trump’s second term has brought a period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department. Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture. To date, more than 200 career attorneys have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. (The Justice Department says many of them have been replaced.)

What was it like inside this institution as Trump’s officials took control? It’s not an easy question to answer. Justice Department norms dictate that career attorneys, who are generally nonpartisan public servants, rarely speak to the press. And the Trump administration’s attempts to crack down on leaks have made all federal employees fearful of sharing information.

But the exodus of lawyers has created an opportunity to understand what’s happening within the agency. We interviewed more than 60 attorneys who recently resigned or were fired from the Justice Department. Much of what they told us is reported here for the first time.

Beginning with Trump’s first day in office, the lawyers narrated the events that most alarmed them over the next 10 months. They described being asked to drop cases for political reasons, to find evidence for flimsy investigations and to take positions in court they thought had no legitimate basis. They also talked about the work they and their colleagues were told to abandon — investigations of terrorist plots, corruption and white-collar fraud.

Some spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation against them or their new employers. We corroborated their accounts with multiple sources, interviewing their colleagues to confirm the details of what they described and reviewing court documents and contemporaneous notes. We also sent a list of questions to the Justice Department and the White House. “This story is a useless collection of recycled, debunked hearsay from disgruntled former employees,” a spokeswoman for the D.O.J. responded in an email. “Targeting the department’s political leadership while ignoring the questionable conduct of former attorneys who do not have the American people’s best interest at heart shows exactly how biased this story is, and further illustrates why Americans are turning away from biased, outdated legacy media platforms.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, sent this statement: “These are nothing more than pathetic complaints lodged by anti-Trump government workers. President Trump is working on behalf of the millions of Americans who voted for him all across the country, not the D.C. bureaucrats who try to stymie the American people’s agenda at every turn.”

The attorneys who spoke to us for this project, many of whom have spent decades in government service, disagree.

 

Jan. 20

On his first day in office, President Trump made it clear that lawyers loyal to him would lead the Justice Department. One of his personal defense attorneys, Emil Bove, became the temporary No. 2, and Trump nominated another of his lawyers, Todd Blanche, to take the position permanently once the Senate confirmed him.

Trump also undid one of the largest investigations in the Justice Department’s history by pardoning or commuting the sentences of the nearly 1,600 rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The group included more than 200 defendants who were convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers.

Ryan Crosswell, Public Integrity Section, which handles corruption cases: When I saw it was Blanche and Bove, I was actually relieved. OK, it’s gross that they were Trump’s personal attorneys, but before that they were federal prosecutors in New York. They’ve done the job. They know the prosecutors’ code. We’re the only lawyers whose job is not to get the best result for our client. Our job is to get justice. Sometimes that means losing or walking into court and saying we made a mistake.

But then things were 10 times worse than I thought they would be.

Liz Oyer, pardon attorney: We had no knowledge that the Jan. 6 pardons were coming on Day 1. Everybody was concerned that our office was being completely sidelined from the review process.

Gregory Rosen, chief of the breach and assault unit of the Capitol Siege Section, which prosecuted the Jan. 6 rioters: When I was alerted to the pardons, a lot of thoughts ran through my head about how absurd this could get, but first I had to do my job. We had to ask, Did we believe the order was lawful and constitutional?

My team and I determined that it was. The president has the right to pardon people and commute their sentences. So then it was a blitzkrieg of hundreds of cases. We stepped to it.

I was numb. As career prosecutors, we don’t talk about our feelings. We’re not partisans. We’re public servants just doing the job. Early on, we stayed away from using emotional language about our own reactions.

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 prosecutor: Anyone who spent any time working on Jan. 6 cases saw how violent a day that was. I’d spent four years living with that day, the things done to people. It’s incredibly demoralizing to see something you worked on for four years wiped away by a lie — I mean the idea that prosecution of the rioters was a grave national injustice. We had strong evidence against every person we prosecuted. And I knew that if they’re going to wipe all of that away based on a lie, either I’ll be fired as retaliation or pretext or asked to do something unethical. Or both.

Until that point, I’d hoped the second Trump term would be similar to the first one, or similar enough for a while. Then the pardons came down and I knew, in light of that, there is no way I can stay.

 

Jan. 27-31

Trump appointed Ed Martin, another longtime ally, as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin had promoted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud in 2020 and then turned to the cause of defending the Jan. 6 rioters. He had never worked as a prosecutor.

Martin soon fired 15 attorneys in the Capitol Siege Section who prosecuted the Jan. 6 defendants. They joined more than a dozen other prosecutors fired for working under the special counsel, Jack Smith, on the criminal investigations of President Trump. According to the D.O.J.’s new leadership, they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s agenda.

Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: When 15 employees were fired from the Capitol Siege Section, I was the angriest I’ve ever been. Most of them were younger attorneys. I’d hired them. They came from firms, federal and state government, all over. But some naïve part of me thought, Maybe this is the new leadership’s “pound of flesh.”

Prosecutor, Capitol Siege Section: It was inconceivable to me they’d fire people for no reason except they’d worked on cases that were now disfavored. People like me, who are career attorneys, work within a structure. We don’t have much latitude. To be told that you are being punished for your decisions, when you were following guidance created by very talented and skilled prosecutors above you, which judges blessed for the most part — it’s completely bizarre. It flipped the culture of the institution. It’s a culture now of fear. And they are losing people all the time, very good people, who were the future of the department.

Peter Carr, senior communications adviser: I had never seen prosecutors targeted simply because the case they brought was something that current D.O.J. leadership did not like. How can you take these very difficult and challenging cases involving high-profile individuals with the knowledge that at some point in the future, someone is going to end your career because of it?

FEB. 5

Pam Bondi, another former Trump defense lawyer, was sworn in as attorney general. She issued a first-day flurry of 14 memos that radically redefined the department’s mission. One mandated that government attorneys “zealously defend” the president’s agenda, no longer giving them the latitude to decline to sign a brief or appear in court because of a personal judgment about a case — a longstanding practice in the department. Another pulled back on enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a watchdog law that requires people to disclose when they’re working for international powers.

 

Katie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: When Bondi’s 14 emails started coming in, one was crazier than the next. It’s hard to explain how shocking that was. In the Biden administration, there were all these checks in place to make sure we weren’t acting on our political biases. It was so by the book. It was too slow, to be honest. Now that seemed farcical.

Lawyer, Federal Programs Branch, which defends legal challenges against government agencies: Bondi’s memo on zealous advocacy suggested we could be disciplined or fired for pushing back on legal or factual claims we believed were unsupported. That threw up red flags for me. It was just completely improper.

Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: Some of us referred to them as “Pam Bondi’s mixtape,” both because they were so random and there were so many dropped all at once. One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Lawyer, National Security Division: Bondi signaled the Foreign Agents Registration Act would be enforced only in very limited circumstances after the Justice Department had done a lot over the last decade to give it teeth. At its core, FARA is a transparency statute, to let the American public know when foreign actors engage in political activities or try to influence U.S. discourse. If you’re concerned about foreign money and influence in politics, it’s a bad time to go dark.

FEB 11-18

 

Trump signed an executive order initiating mass cuts to the federal work force at the direction of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the effort led by Elon Musk to slash federal spending. The order called for large-scale layoffs and directed the heads of federal agencies to fill positions only with DOGE approval.

Defending the order in court, the government denied that the president had given DOGE authority over personnel actions. Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who ultimately ruled in favor of the government, suggested this statement could be false. She reminded the Justice Department lawyers of their “duty to make truthful representations to the court” and issued a warning to them by citing Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which allows lawyers to be disciplined for filings that aren’t based on sound facts.

Second Lawyer, Federal Programs Branch: When Judge Chutkan’s order came down, that was brutal. Our bar licenses would be on the line if someone associated with DOGE lied about things we had to represent in court. One of the lawyers in the case said he emailed the political leadership about what the judge said about possible sanctions and they said, “NBD” — no big deal.

I realized that the line attorneys were just pawns. If we got sacrificed on the way to taking these cases to the Supreme Court, that would just be how it was. Out of 110 lawyers who were in my branch in January, more than 75 have left. (The Justice Department said the point of the “NBD” email “was to assure the team they had done nothing wrong” and that about half of the 75 lawyers who have left have been replaced.)

FEB 10-14

 

In a memo, Emil Bove, as acting deputy attorney general, directed Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City. Bove said he ordered the dismissal in part because the pending prosecution impacted Adams’s ability to “support critical, ongoing federal efforts” to enforce immigration laws.

Sassoon wrote to Bondi, saying she couldn’t make a good-faith argument to dismiss the charges, asking for a meeting and offering to resign. Bondi didn’t respond. Instead, Bove took the unusual step of bringing the case to another unit, the Public Integrity Section (PIN), which is based in Washington and was created after Watergate to oversee enforcement of public corruption laws.

Prosecutor, U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York: The New York Times reported that Bove accepted Danielle’s resignation. That’s how we all found out. A lot of people were shellshocked and upset, and also proud, I think. My impression was that people thought the way Danielle handled it was right and admirable.

Ryan Crosswell, PIN: Bove’s memo to Sassoon was such a drastic change from anything we’d ever seen.

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: Then Bove instructed the acting chief of PIN, John Keller, to dismiss the case. He resigned, effective that day.

The whole staff of PIN was called into a meeting, around 25 attorneys plus support staff. John told us what happened. We were stunned. Three of the four deputy chiefs of PIN were there. (The fourth deputy chief was on maternity leave.) I recall them saying they anticipated being asked to dismiss the case, and if so, they’d resign too. John was pretty matter-of-fact and stoic. You could tell he was affected, but he was trying to be a good leader. Some people cried.

Afterward, we went to a bar a couple of blocks from the office and started drinking. This is, like, 2:30 p.m. I had my one beer. I told John how much I appreciated what he’d done. I went home, and after that, the deputies were called into a meeting, asked to dismiss the case and resigned.

Crosswell: On the morning of Friday, Feb. 14, we got an email for a video call with Bove at 9:45. It was intense. The camera made clicking noises as it zoomed in on Bove at the end of a long table. It was surreal. We were watching one another’s reactions onscreen.

Bove’s spiel was short. He directed us to sign the motion to dismiss the Adams charges. They could have done it themselves but I believe they wanted our imprimatur. We all huddled in a conference room and tried to figure out what to do. We had an hour. There were three options. One, someone signs. Two, we all resign. Three, we call their bluff, don’t do anything and see if they fire us. I recommended Option 3. I’m still thinking we have civil service protections. But someone said if you don’t sign, they could say you’re insubordinate, and that could affect your security clearance, which could affect getting hired for other jobs. I backed off.

Romano: I thought 100 percent he’d fire everyone because no one would sign. Then one of the lawyers in the section agreed to file the motion to dismiss. I didn’t know him super well. He was older, on the verge of retirement. People saw it as protecting the rest of us, not trying to advance himself.

Crosswell: To my mind, he did something pretty heroic. Then there was a daylong negotiation over how the motion would be worded. It was important to us to be clear we were effectively put at gunpoint. Before, I said, I don’t want to leave because I don’t want a hack to replace me. But I started writing my resignation letter. I’m a Marine officer. Aside from how wrong it was to drop the case for political reasons, I felt so mad that our deputies had lost their jobs for protecting us.

Katie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: What happened to PIN was an alarm blasting everywhere. That’s when I was like, They’re just going to break every rule. They don’t care. That’s when private meetings started among staff to talk about whether you have more legal protections if you resign or are fired.

FEB 18

The Justice Department asked a court to freeze a legal challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision during the Biden administration to tighten one of its most important air-quality standards, the limit on soot. The E.P.A. found in 2021 that the new standard would save thousands of lives and that the health benefits would outweigh the cost of compliance. The Trump administration put the litigation on hold in preparation for rolling back the regulation.

Sarah Buckley, Environment and Natural Resources Division: We made blanket requests to courts to put cases on hold where we were defending E.P.A. rules. The soot case was a real gut punch to me. Soot pollution is a major public health problem. The rule we were defending would reduce the number of people getting sick and dying, from pollution-caused diseases, by a lot.

We’d just had oral argument in December. I thought we were going to win. It felt like victory was being snatched away.

FEB 28

Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, demoted seven senior supervisors and leaders in the office. It was the latest step in the purge of career attorneys involved in prosecuting the Jan. 6 rioters as well as two Trump allies, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. The administration had already removed at least a dozen senior leaders from their positions across the Justice Department, giving some the choice to join the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group, which was newly formed to target jurisdictions that refused to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration enforcement.

Tovah Calderon, principal deputy chief of the Appellate Section in the Civil Rights Division: They assigned me and my chief to this new working group and then essentially didn’t give us anything to do. Most of us had no experience in immigration law. They took the most experienced, talented people out of their positions, and it had an immediate effect. They were able to change the work of our offices more easily without us there.

Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: I laughed when I found out we were demoted. But it was clear to me just how truly vindictive this would get. All of us collectively had over 100 years of prosecutorial experience. The brain drain was beginning. Maybe the Justice Department survives but loses all the experts.

I’d been promised the position of deputy of narcotics and violent crime in D.C. But instead I was demoted to the Early Case Assessment section to review arrest warrants, among other things. While the job is important, because this is where we initiate criminal charges, I assumed Martin viewed it as entry-level work and was punishing us.

MAR 5

Trump-appointed leaders in the Civil Rights Division began directing career attorneys to investigate the University of California system for antisemitism and employment discrimination. These investigations were overseen by Leo Terrell, a former Democrat turned Fox News commentator selected by the president to head his multiagency task force on antisemitism. They marked a new stage in the escalating attack on college campuses by the administration, which had already canceled billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, and opened investigations into 60 universities for what it described as a failure to protect Jewish students.

 

Ejaz Baluch, Civil Rights Division: The way we did investigations drastically changed. Normally, line attorneys investigate cases and follow the facts and law on a nonpartisan basis. If we discovered a law was violated, we recommended a lawsuit to the leadership of the division. It was bottom up.

That process turned upside down. It was outcome driven. The prime example I saw was the investigation into the U.C. school system about allegations of antisemitism on campus. In March, Andrea Lucas, who Trump appointed to be acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filed what’s called a Commissioner’s Charge, which is essentially a complaint of employment discrimination. It was my section’s job to investigate it. We were told: “You have 30 days to do an investigation and give us a Justification Memo” — which is what we write after we conclude there is a legal violation.

Multiple teams of attorneys went to Berkeley, U.C.L.A., U.C. Davis and U.C.S.F. Mostly they didn’t find sufficient evidence to bring suit. The teams were so scared that in real time, every day, they were summarizing and reporting up to office management, back to Michael Gates, the deputy assistant attorney general, to create a paper trail for how they were not finding evidence.

Julia Quinn, Civil Rights Division: Leo Terrell, who ran the antisemitism task force, sells merch, and one of the very few people in our office who stayed behind, who got in with the administration, bought a hat, one of his “Leo 2.0” hats. He had it in the background of a Zoom.

Ejaz Baluch: The only school, it became clear, where there might be a violation was U.C.L.A. One colleague said, “We have to feed something to the wolves.” The team concluded that the complaint process at the school was broken. Some professors we interviewed really did suffer on campus. They were harassed by groups of students.

But the D.O.J. demand letter to U.C.L.A. asked for $1 billion in damages. We thought, $1 billion? They are making that up out of thin air. There is no way the damages we found added up to anything like that amount.

MAR 6

Trump issued the second in a series of executive orders punishing elite law firms that had performed legal work for prominent Democrats or helped investigate the president’s ties to Russia and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The order accused the firm Perkins Coie of “dishonest and dangerous activity” and racial discrimination; it directed federal agencies to terminate the firm’s government contracts, stripped its employees of their security clearances and barred them from federal buildings, including courthouses. Perkins Coie and three other firms sued the Trump administration to block the executive orders, arguing that they violated the First Amendment.

 

Dena Robinson: One of my colleagues was pulled into working on the investigations. Every single time that this colleague pointed out factual or legal or ethical issues, the people running them just shrugged.

For example, the administration was saying they wanted to go after Perkins Coie because of Trump’s commitment to ending discriminatory D.E.I. policies. The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men. But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm — only 3 percent of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn’t care. They’d already reached their conclusion. They continued instructing my colleague to just find the evidence for it.

Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative that the administration already had. That is not how the division worked. My colleague told me that the experience demoralized and eventually broke them. It ended up being the reason they left the Justice Department.

MAR 11

 

PIN, which in part oversaw corruption cases brought by U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country, was largely stripped of the authority to bring its own prosecutions. Most of the lawyers in the department were reassigned, eventually leaving only two, down from 38 at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: At the meeting where D.O.J. leadership told our managers that PIN would shrink dramatically, one of them said the administration didn’t trust lawyers in D.C.

You can imagine the level of experience it takes to prosecute complex public-corruption cases. In New York, for example, the U.S. attorneys have the personnel, in size and experience, to do this. But some U.S. attorneys offices are much smaller. Maybe they don’t have anyone who has done one of these big corruption cases before. PIN was dedicated to these cases.

APR 3

 

The acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba — another former personal lawyer of Trump’s — asked to dismiss a case against two American executives charged with authorizing $2 million in bribes to obtain a construction permit in India.

Trump has long disparaged the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was the basis of the New Jersey case, for supposedly putting American companies at a disadvantage. The law bars any company that sells securities like stocks in the U.S. from paying bribes to foreign officials. In February, he issued an order pausing its enforcement. (Later, scaled-back enforcement resumed with a smaller team.) The Justice Department also disbanded the team that prosecuted foreign officials for public corruption in their countries based on money-laundering in the U.S. — a team that recovered hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from poor countries.

lexis Loeb, Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section and later deputy chief of the Capitol Siege Section: There was a whole series of signals that the administration would de-emphasize the prosecution of corruption. Our laws gave American companies cover so they could resist shakedowns to pay bribes, and it’s way too black-and-white to say they create an uneven playing field. The laws were often used to prosecute foreign companies and individuals. People across the political spectrum saw promoting the rule of law abroad as important for promoting American interests and national security. You could see these ideals fall away quickly in the moves the administration made.

Prosecutor, Fraud Section: We were ensuring that anyone who used U.S. banking or our stock markets was complying with the law. I would meet with my foreign counterparts abroad, and they’d say this is a good form of American exceptionalism. It really did change compliance globally.

I don’t think anyone expected a full pause. It was so sweeping. And we were hearing all these reports of lobbying to affect how individual cases were being handled, at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere. When the New Jersey case was dismissed on the eve of trial, that showed how much we weren’t in normal times anymore.

APR 7

 

Harmeet K. Dhillon, a civil liberties lawyer who has represented several conservative activists and helped Trump challenge the 2020 election results, was sworn in as the head of the Civil Rights Division, which has a long history of redressing discrimination.

Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: Harmeet Dhillon didn’t seem to have any interest in interacting with career staff. We knew what she was saying on radio and podcast appearances about how the career staff didn’t want to do any of the work of the administration and that we needed to be cleared out.

Lawyer, Federal Coordination and Compliance section, Civil Rights Division: People had sound machines at their desks because they were convinced that everyone and everything was listening to us. It really was psychological warfare.

Julia Quinn, Civil Rights Division: Leadership started dismissing racial-discrimination cases. They wanted us to include language that suggested the cases had been brought under an illegitimate theory of discrimination.

Jen Swedish, deputy chief of the Employment Litigation Section, Civil Rights Division: To demand lawyers put language in filings suggesting that we had filed a frivolous lawsuit — we thought that was unethical. We worried about our bar licenses.

Brian McEntire, Civil Rights Division: My goal was always to become an attorney in the Civil Rights Division. That was my dream. I ended up working a lot on fire department cases. In Cobb County, Ga., we got information that even though African Americans and whites were applying for positions at about an equal rate over the previous decade, 90 percent of the hires had been white and 10 percent had been African American. And we didn’t quite understand why that was.

So we did an investigation and found out that there was a credit check that was disproportionately knocking out African Americans, particularly for student loan debt. And when we asked them why they were doing that, their response was essentially, Well, if a firefighter is deeply in debt and he’s fighting a fire, he might steal grandma’s pearls. So we brought suit.

In February, we got a note saying that the attorney general wanted us to withdraw the case. The next day, division leadership insisted that we put additional language in the notice of dismissal that implied it was all about reverse discrimination.

I didn’t know, quite frankly, if I could sign it. If I have to say what I argued before was illegal, then I could have been accused of misleading the court, which could have ended up with me being disciplined, sanctioned and my bar license revoked. So I did not sign it. My colleagues didn’t sign it. They pulled us all into a room, and we were all prepared to get fired because none of us were going to sign. My boss signed a modified version of the notice of withdrawal on our behalf.

We also had a racial-discrimination case involving the sole African American attorney working for the Mississippi State Senate, who, during the years she worked there, was paid less than half of what her similarly situated white colleagues were making. It was as clear-cut a case of disparate racial treatment you could find. The Senate stalled the case until Trump’s appointees could come in and order our section to drop it. When you talk about the rule of law and treating people fairly and equally, that’s obviously a slap in the face.

Liz Oyer, the former pardon attorney at the Justice Department, testified before Congress about the circumstances of her firing. Oyer lost her job after she refused to recommend restoring gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence. The Justice Department said the disagreement over Gibson was unrelated to the decision to fire Oyer.

Liz Oyer, pardon attorney: In February, I was assigned to a working group that the attorney general created to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes. I was asked to identify suitable recipients, so I looked for people who had committed minor low-level offenses in the very distant past and demonstrated exemplary conduct in the community for many years since their conviction. The pool was narrowed to nine people. And then I was asked to add Mel Gibson to the list.

Mel Gibson has a history of domestic violence, and I’m well aware from my experience and training that it is very dangerous for a person with a domestic-violence history to possess a firearm. As attorney general, Bondi has the power to restore rights without my blessing. My recommendation was sought, I believe, to give a veneer of legitimacy to what was actually a political favor for a friend of the president. I said I couldn’t recommend restoration. And then I waited for the other shoe to drop.

I finally got a phone call from Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general. It was strongly suggested to me that Mel Gibson is someone who had a personal relationship with the president and that really should be all I needed to know. I felt sick. I literally did not sleep at all that night. I wrote back still not making the recommendation. At 2 o’clock that afternoon, I was in a meeting when I learned that I was fired. My deputy told me to grab my bag and literally pulled me out of the room by my elbow and told me in the hallway that she had gotten a call saying that there were security officers in my office waiting to walk me out of the building. I threw everything into a grocery bag and walked out of the office. I passed a lot of people I knew on the way out, and everybody was just looking on in shock.

Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, issued a statement saying that I was lying about the circumstances leading up to my firing. Then I was invited by the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to testify in front of Congress. The administration sent armed U.S. Marshals to my home to deliver a letter warning me about testifying. A career employee who was still at the department helped me get it called off before they got to my house, where my teenager was home alone. I felt the purpose was to intimidate me. And I think it was intended to send a message to other department employees, too, who might be thinking about speaking up.

I needed a lawyer. I spent the entire weekend calling all of the lawyers that I know at law firms around D.C. Everybody I talked to was saying: “Thank you so much for what you’re doing. We’ll do whatever we can behind the scenes to support you.” But nobody actually wanted to sit behind me at a congressional hearing. Nobody wanted to put their name on a letter to Todd Blanche.

Unfortunately, only Democrats attended the hearing. There were no Republicans. It has really perplexed me that there’s not a shared level of bipartisan concern about what’s happening inside the Department of Justice.

APR 4-15

A senior lawyer in the Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, acknowledged in court that the Trump administration wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran construction worker who lived in Maryland for a dozen years, to El Salvador, where he was being held in a notorious maximum-security prison. In previous administrations, including Trump’s first term, the government routinely worked to get people back when they were deported without legal authority. In this case, however, Bondi put Reuveni on leave and then fired him.

 

David McConnell, director of the Office of Immigration Litigation: Erez was one of the more aggressive litigators over the years. He vigorously defended Trump 1 policies. I thought he’d be the go-to person for defending them in the second term. When he got fired, everyone doing district court work thought, This could happen to me. Traditionally, we didn’t have a lot of turnover in the office. But now I’ve heard that around 60 out of 320 attorneys have left since February.

Sarah Buckley, Environment and Natural Resources Division: When Erez Reuveni got fired, that really affected morale. He was working under the gun with his clients to say, This isn’t a reasonable way to proceed in court — what’s a reasonable way? And they punished him for it.

Ryan Crosswell, PIN: To do our job, you have to be willing to do the right thing when no one is watching. If prosecutors are just going into court to win at all costs, think of all the other things taking place you’ll never know about.

MAY 3

The Associated Press obtained an internal memo sent by Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump-appointed head of the Civil Rights Division, instructing voting-rights lawyers to focus on investigating voter fraud and to “vigorously enforce” a Trump executive order transforming how elections are run. The order purported to institute new voter-ID requirements, grant DOGE access to voter data and change the rules of absentee voting and the counting of absentee ballots. Courts later blocked parts of the order.

Anna Baldwin, Civil Rights Division: When the president issued his executive order related to voting, the Civil Rights Division was initially charged with defending it. But many provisions of it were an unlawful power grab — under our Constitution, Congress and the states set the rules of elections, not the president.

Lawyer, Voting Section, Civil Rights Division: The Trump administration had already made us dismiss our Georgia statewide lawsuit for intentionally suppressing Black votes. They didn’t ask for any information about it. They just told us to dismiss it. Then they issued a press release condemning the Biden administration for bringing the lawsuit — accusing us, the line attorneys, of fabricating evidence. It was obvious they didn’t look at the memo explaining what the evidence was.

Lawyer, Housing Section, Civil Rights Division: I was detailed to work in the Voting Section enforcing the National Voter Registration Act, which says states have an obligation to make sure that their voter rolls are accurate. We were tasked with obtaining states’ voter rolls, by suing them if necessary. Leadership said they had a DOGE person who could go through all the data and compare it to the Department of Homeland Security data and Social Security data. The idea was, We want to identify undocumented immigrants that have registered to vote. There was no pre-existing evidence this is a problem.

I had a concern that the data would be used not for purging voter rolls of people who aren’t eligible to vote but for broader immigration enforcement. I had never before told an opposing party, Hey, I want this information and I’m saying I want it for this reason, but I actually know it’s going to be used for these other reasons. That was dishonest. It felt like a perversion of the role of the Civil Rights Division.

MAY 12

 

A memo from F.B.I. officials ordered field offices to devote one-third of their time to immigration enforcement — which meant scaling back investigations related to national security, corporate fraud and violent crime.

Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: The F.B.I. had to divest serious resources from investigations of violent crime, gun and drug trafficking and child exploitation. Agents were diverted from those cases because they had to be on the street doing immigration roundups.

Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: It’s unprecedented to shift resources away from national security to this degree. Virginia and D.C. have the most important offices for counterterrorism and espionage. We get cases from the Middle East, long and complex investigations of terrorist threats from abroad and also domestically. In the Eastern District, there were 12 to 14 lawyers in the national security unit and now there are four, with no deputy or chief. In D.C., the national security unit is down about 50 percent. I was recently on the floor where F.B.I. agents work on domestic terrorism and it was completely hollowed out.

You have to have good, experienced, trained people doing this work on a daily basis. If you don’t, because you demand they do immigration shifts, there is real danger to national security and public safety.

Prosecutor, Ohio: We’re in northern Ohio. We don’t have an immigration problem here, but our agents — I.R.S. and Secret Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — were getting detailed to Homeland Security. I was getting frustrated. We have a certain amount of time to bring charges, and often we don’t find out right away when a business is committing fraud, so we may lose a year or two. Then it takes time to do these investigations. Agents have to get the records and do the interviews. We don’t have time if they’re riding around trying to hit daily immigration quotas.

MAY 21

The Trump Justice Department withdrew from a consent decree with Minneapolis intended to address a pattern of racially discriminatory policing and excessive use of force, based on a D.O.J. investigation in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. The Justice Department also refused to stand by the factual findings about police abuses in Minneapolis and five other cities, retracting them from the record.

 

atie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: I’d left D.O.J. by then. I found out when I started getting a million texts. People were saying, “I’m sorry.” At first I had no idea what they meant. I expected something bad, but it was so much more total and cruel than I imagined. The new leadership was erasing our work.

Withdrawing the findings was completely unprecedented. And if you read the Minneapolis findings and the remedies we negotiated with the city, you’ll see they document retaliation against journalists or civilians who film the police, the use of weapons or tear gas indiscriminately in a crowd or law enforcement agents hiding their identities. And we’re seeing federal agents do all those things now.

There was a statement from the Justice Department in court saying you can’t do these things. They took that statement away, and now the federal government is the most prominent violator.

MAY 28

Trump pardoned a series of white-collar offenders, including Charles Scott, who had been convicted last year in Ohio of helping the chief executive of his company manipulate its stock value.

Prosecutor, Ohio: Scott was sentenced to 42 months for a multimillion-dollar fraud. His family was wealthy. He spent all of two weeks in jail. That put a damper on a lot of the work we were doing, to know that someone who defrauded everyday folks in Ohio was able to find their way to a pardon.

Afterward, defense attorneys are telling us they can’t get their clients to take good or reasonable plea offers because they felt they’re better off spending their money on a political donation, drawing Trump’s attention, and getting the case dismissed or going to trial and getting a pardon.

Alexis Loeb, Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section: When prosecutors bring a new case, do they need to think about how the Trump administration views the defendant? Those are not the kinds of considerations prosecutors are taught they should pay attention to — very much the opposite.

JULY 9

 

The Justice Department subpoenaed more than 20 doctors and hospitals that provide gender-related care to minors (including puberty suppressants, hormone therapy and surgeries) accusing them of having “mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology.” Trump had already issued a series of executive orders dismantling protections for trans people, banning them from military service and allowing open discrimination by federal workplaces. The subpoenas demanded patient information protected by privacy law.

Barbara Schwabauer, Civil Rights Division: It’s one thing to say we’re no longer going to stand up for trans people in this administration, we’re not going to file briefs in support of them. But to affirmatively go after them? I could not in good conscience continue to be a part of that. These are teenagers.

Lawyer, Federal Coordination and Compliance section, Civil Rights Division: Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department had joined private plaintiffs in suing Alabama over its ban on gender-affirming care. Now attorneys on the case were told by leadership to produce, on a rolling basis, all communication that they had with all parties and each other. It felt like we were being investigated by our own office. It was very threatening and ominous. Like, what do we think they’re going to do with that information? Nothing good.

JULY 11

Bondi fired around 20 prosecutors and support staffers who worked on the special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his refusal to return classified documents after leaving office. One of the lawyers fired that day was Joseph Tirrell, the department’s top ethics adviser.

Peter Carr, senior communications adviser: These were support staffers, you know, the people who helped us with managing the operations of the office or with travel arrangements and reimbursements. You have paralegals who help prepare documents for discovery. The idea that someone can be terminated from the Justice Department for a case they were assigned to work on is something that has never happened before.

Joseph Tirrell, director of the Departmental Ethics Office: I had done some work for Jack Smith, so I assumed that would bring some heat down on me. But in my gut, I also think they didn’t want the ethics office calling them up and telling them what to do.

As a federal employee, you’re restricted from accepting gifts from anyone because of your position. I briefed Ms. Bondi about the ethics rules, and we talked about accepting gifts from employees in the department — for the most part, leaders can’t accept gifts from their subordinates.

We had about a 10-minute conversation about whether or not she could accept challenge coins from offices within the department. And that seemed to me an odd thing given everything else that we might have discussed. But that started to be a recurring theme with the A.G.’s office. They didn’t want to return gifts, they didn’t want to not accept gifts, whatever the source.

We got a request about some cigars from Conor McGregor and a soccer ball from FIFA. And I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to convince the A.G.’s office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item or you can throw the item away. There’s no other way to do this. (A Justice Department spokeswoman said that, after consulting with ethics officials, the soccer ball was accepted and the cigars were destroyed.)

And then I got a call from the general counsel at the F.B.I. about changing exceptions to the gift rules because his boss, Kash Patel, felt like he should be able to accept more expensive gifts. I reminded him that his client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.

LATE SEPT

 

Trump demanded the prosecution of several of his perceived political enemies, including the former F.B.I. director James Comey and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Based on the results of investigations by career prosecutors, Erik Siebert, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, told senior Justice Department officials that he did not think there was sufficient evidence to indict Comey or James. Siebert was forced to resign under pressure from Trump, who then installed one of his attorneys, Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer who had never prosecuted a case before.

With no career attorneys agreeing to handle the case, Halligan personally asked a grand jury to indict Comey on charges related to allegations that he made a false statement to Congress. Halligan later obtained an indictment of James for mortgage fraud. Comey and James pleaded not guilty.

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: No one should be charged with a crime because the president says “Do this,” and the people he has installed do what he says. The decision should be in the hands of people who know the evidence and have experience evaluating it and working criminal cases. If I was in that office, I’d wonder what the point is of exercising my professional judgment. If we’re indicting people because the president hates them, that’s counter to the whole point of doing my job.

Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: The thing is, Erik bragged about how close he was with Trump’s former lawyers at D.O.J. But it didn’t save him.

We all knew Erik said no, and the career attorneys recommended against it. So for Halligan to go ahead was enraging. The Eastern District of Virginia has a long reputation of being very proficient and competent, and it all vanished.

This is the whole problem with the White House directing criminal investigations. This is what you get. We won’t get the benefit of credibility from judges that we had, and I’m even more concerned about juries. I really fear the Justice Department — which has a good record of convicting dangerous, violent people — won’t see the same success rate, because people will think it’s not on the level.

Ryan Crosswell, PIN: The Eastern District of Virginia handles some of the biggest espionage and counterterrorism cases. Now it’s being led by someone who doesn’t know what she is doing.

OCT 21

The Times reported that Trump demanded $230 million in compensation for being prosecuted following his first term. Bondi and Blanche, Trump’s former lawyers, could decide whether Trump receives the money. (Asked about the $230 million demand, a spokesman for Trump’s personal legal team emailed, “President Trump continues to fight back against all Democrat-led Witch Hunts, including the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax and the un-Constitutional and un-American weaponization of our justice system by Crooked Joe Biden and his handlers.”)

 

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: It seems comically corrupt. First, there was nothing inappropriate about this prosecution. Second, he won the presidency, so how was he harmed to the tune of $230 million? And third, he has appointed the people tasked with deciding whether he gets the money, and we’ve seen that his appointees do what he wants. It’s as if he’s robbing the Treasury to pay himself.

Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: It shows the president has no regard for ethics or rules or the appearance of impropriety or any of the guardrails we used to have before. It feels like this should be criminal, but he’s acting as if he has immunity, which he does, from the Supreme Court.

The Mar-a-Lago case was buttoned up. They begged him to give them the documents so it wouldn’t rise to the level of the F.B.I. going in to get them. To say there’s abuse here — it’s absurd.

OCT 28-30

Two career prosecutors in Washington were put on leave because of a sentencing memo they filed in the case of Taylor Taranto. Taranto was convicted in May of crimes including illegal possession of firearms and ammunition after he showed up in Obama’s neighborhood in Washington with two guns and hundreds of rounds in his van. The sentencing memo mentioned that Taranto reposted a social media post by Trump, which disclosed Obama’s address. The memo also said that Taranto was accused of participating in the Jan. 6 riot. (Trump pardoned him for the Jan. 6 charges before trial.)

The next day, another pair of prosecutors substituted a new sentencing memo that did not mention Trump’s post or Taranto’s connection to Jan. 6. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump nominee, praised the prosecutors who were put on leave for upholding “the highest standards of professionalism” in the case.

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: I’ve worked with both of those prosecutors, and Judge Nichols was right — they are excellent. With that sentencing memo, they were just doing their jobs. They were stating facts that were already known. Jan. 6 was relevant because the defendant’s participation in the riot is relevant to the risk of his future criminality.

Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: The D.C. office is hemorrhaging bodies, and they will probably get rid of two competent people for stating relevant facts that were on the record.

I don’t think people will truly understand what’s happening to justice in America until it impacts them. Even my family: My parents voted for Trump. I don’t think they see it as a priority. I mean, they’re not going to be criminally indicted anytime soon. When I tell them what’s happening, I don’t think they really believe me.

It would take a lot of restraint not to retaliate in the next administration. A lot of career people are helping the administration now. I have a list in my head, and if we get out of this, some of them I’m holding to account. A lot could be validly criminally probed. But the back-and-forth will not be good.

Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: I wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore. It’s become Trump’s personal law firm. I think Americans should be enraged. We all deserve better than this. I keep telling my colleagues still working in the division that I’m holding the line with them from the outside. But I feel guilty that I’m not holding the line with them from the inside.

 

 

[Fnord 2,548]

EVERYONE SHOULD READ THAT ARTICLE!!!!

The corruption is absolutely stunning, out in the open, enabled by right wing media and hordes of folks that have been told they can't trust actual journalism. This is the American death spiral, MAGA, and you are responsible. Wake the hell up.

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

Just continuing craziness that would drag down any other administration:

- A DHS staffer with an actual neo-Nazi background who intervened on behalf of notorious international sex traffickers the Tate brothers who was being investigated by the DOJ.

- Trump calls a woman “Piggy” as he tells her to be quiet when asked about another neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, who… he refuses to disown.

- There’s American flag on the ground at the White House.

- Crazy rant on multiple levels in front of a McDonalds logo, like telling Americans he turned the water on for them.

- Switzerland gave Trump a heap of gold personal gifts, left it on his desk, then soon after saw their tariffs reduced from 39% to 15%.

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

21 hours ago, Fnord said:

The F.B.I. had to divest serious resources from investigations of violent crime, gun and drug trafficking and child exploitation. Agents were diverted from those cases because they had to be on the street doing immigration roundups.

This whole article - it’s abandonment of ethical, National Security & crime fighting responsibilities across the board. 
 

I saw an article yesterday where a notorious ponzu scheme felon who had defrauded scores/hundreds out of tens of millions was pardoned by the Leader, & then he just got busted for doing it *again. People of all types robbed of their life savings. The President is actually a menace to his supposed constituents.

[Fnord 2,548]

3 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

The President is actually a menace to his supposed constituents.

Not to mention all other Earthlings. We are incredibly fortunate that there hasn't been some kind of catastrophe yet, but there will be. Whether a terrorist attack, weather event, or something else, it will only take one for the even more folks to realize how much emergency response capability has been dismantled. Quite the stroke of luck for the Don that immediately after dynamiting FEMA, we had the quietest hurricane season in years (I mean the ones that affected the black Caribbean people don't really count, amirite?).

[squistion 2,555]

 

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

1 hour ago, Fnord said:

Not to mention all other Earthlings. We are incredibly fortunate that there hasn't been some kind of catastrophe yet, but there will be. Whether a terrorist attack, weather event, or something else, it will only take one for the even more folks to realize how much emergency response capability has been dismantled. Quite the stroke of luck for the Don that immediately after dynamiting FEMA, we had the quietest hurricane season in years (I mean the ones that affected the black Caribbean people don't really count, amirite?).

It’s really astounding. I live in Femaland so it’s quite a stressor. And I haven’t heard a word about the US government helping Jamaica, which is a longtime ally in the Caribbean against Cuba. There’s a lot more. I saw in one news report that Trump has practically shuttered the US’s WMD monitoring agency. It just goes on & on. I felt a good deal of relief when Biden won in 2020 for just that reason. The risks only seem to have increased this go round.

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

51 minutes ago, squistion said:

 

I really used to blow off the misogyny claims about Hillary & Harris. People who won’t vote for a woman because supposedly they’re too emotional, or emotive, or whatever. Meanwhile this man is completely emotionally unhinged, he belongs nowhere near decisions affecting lives & weapons. 

[SaintsInDome2006 678]

The fact that no one stood up for her (including her) & the fact this story has run in People & not MSM are also horrendous touchpoints.

[squistion 2,555]

33 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

The fact that no one stood up for her (including her) & the fact this story has run in People & not MSM are also horrendous touchpoints.

It is appalling. Can you imagine the reaction if any other President had said that to a reporter? 

I doubt any of his supporters in this forum will have a problem with it.

Edited to add: If she had stood up to him, I am certain she would have been removed from the WH press pool.