Just the facts, ma’am – election rigging edition

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

For a guy who promised to keep “piling up the facts” about our president to illuminate the truth about his ongoing assault on our country and our way of life, it may seem out of character to offer a prediction.  But this prediction is grounded in facts and a clear-eyed review of past actions, which all point to one incontrovertible fact: Donald Trump is trying to rig the November elections to keep MAGA world in charge in Washington.  He’s been doing it right out in the open, in front of our eyes, stacking lie upon lie about a false “crisis of election security” so he can undo enough MAGA losses in November to maintain Republican control of the House and Senate for the last two years of his term of office.  So he can get away with God knows what.

We all witnessed him try to unlawfully snatch victory from the jaws of his defeat in 2020 and fail, thanks to the dozens of lawyers and judges who argued against and struck down his nonsensical pleadings in court cases across the country, and to the members of Congress and Vice President Pence who refused his treasonous efforts on January 6, 2021.  But his basic approach – to election stealing, to everything – is to never admit defeat (even when defeat is obvious) and always fight back with greater force.  Getting his ducks lined up before this November’s election is critical: he knows that if Democrats take control of either house of Congress he won’t be able to get the Compliant Congress® to pass anything to smooth the MAGA path for 2028.

The “facts” he is abusing to make his argument concern voting by mail and voting by non-citizens.  Voting by mail is a simple, reasonable, pretty uncontroversial method of voting, which Trump himself has reportedly taken advantage of for years (apparently without any fraud, eh?).  Yet Trump has been lying about problems with voting by mail for years, despite research by conservative and GOP organizations finding no significant issues: as reported recently by the New York Times,

An election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes just under 300 cases of proven “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” over a 43-year period, from 1982 to 2025. And in 2025, the Brookings Institution found that fraud accounted for only four out of 10 million mailed ballots.

Only 300 cases of fraud in 43 years !?  Only four cases (one two three FOUR) out of 10,000,000 ballots!?!   (BTW,  Brookings headline is that there was “very low fraud and significant benefits to voters” [emphasis added])  Hardly an issue of fraud, or of election results being compromised.  Might Trump have something else in mind?

Mr. Trump has admitted that combating fraud is not the only reason to target the practice. In March, he told Republican lawmakers that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots, which Democrats now use more than Republicans, would “guarantee the midterms” for his party.

I.  Am.  Shocked.  So shocked.

I’m all for keeping non-citizens from voting in our elections.  As it so happens, it is already illegal for non-citizens of the U.S. to vote in U.S. federal elections.  Also illegal for non-citizens to vote in state elections in all 50 states; municipalities in three states and the District of Columbia do allow them to vote in some municipal elections.  The documented instances of non-citizens becoming registered to vote is exceedingly small; the number of those illegally registered to vote who then actually voted  is even smaller than that.  In summary, there is no evidence that non-citizens have ever voted in large enough numbers to have changed the outcome of any election, despite the hair-on-fire claims of TFG.

There has been a lot of activity in the past week over voting by mail, starting with a Supreme Court ruling that “allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.”

…the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order.

It’s important to remember that the Constitution gives the states — the states — the authority conduct elections for Congress (both houses), subject to Congressional approval or revision of those plans by virtue of laws passed by the Congress.  Laws passed by Congress, not executive orders from the president –- Constitutionally speaking, the president has ZERO authority over conducting elections, including through the use of executive orders.  (It is believed that the Supreme Court justices are aware of this.)  Yes, Congress has passed laws concerning federal elections: for example, to establish a uniform election date across the country, to require states with more than one representative in the House to draw districts rather than elect all representatives statewide, and to limit campaign contributions.

But this Congress has refused to pass the SAVE Act that the president wants enacted to “ensure election integrity and prevent non-citizens from voting.”  If passed into law, this proposal would “add a new layer of documentation requirements on top of a verification system that is already in place and working.”  In practice,

Every American, including people who have been registered for decades, would need to appear in person at an election office with qualifying documents. Online voter registration, which 42 states currently rely on, would be upended or eliminated. Mail registration would end entirely. Voter registration drives would become functionally ineffective, since they depend on reaching people at events and public spaces where no one carries a passport or birth certificate.

A standard driver’s license alone does not qualify in most states. A REAL ID alone does not qualify. A military ID alone does not qualify. A tribal ID alone does not qualify. Only five states currently issue enhanced driver’s licenses that meet the bill’s requirements on their own.

(snip)

For most Americans, qualifying requires one of the following: a valid U.S. passport or passport card, a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. If your name does not match across those documents, additional paperwork such as a marriage certificate would also be required.

(snip)

The requirement applies any time a voter updates their registration, including after moving, changing their name, or switching political parties. Millions of already-registered Americans would need to comply, not just people registering for the first time.

Meanwhile, back in court last week: opponents of Trump’s plan refiled their objections in light of the Supreme Court ruling, leading to a federal judge halting Administration efforts to restrict voting by mail, and to the Justice Department appealing that ruling.  And since the election is only two months away and the first mail-in ballots are about to be sent out, “The whipsawing legal battle could have major ramifications for the midterms. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail and election officials contend there isn’t enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new Postal Service directives.”  The Postal Service, officially, insists it has to obey the executive order, and “won’t deliver mail ballots unless states provide a list of voters who should receive them and format the envelopes in a certain way.”

But, a Postal Service official has filed a federal whistle-blower report that claims “the agency is moving forward with a ‘secretive, rushed’ effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.”

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

(snip)

The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised “grave concerns” that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the portal would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

(snip)

The Postal Service confirmed in a statement that it had continued work on the portal amid the legal battle, but asserted that it was in compliance with the courts because it was not currently using parts of the new system that could invalidate people’s votes.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents have been pulled off of their regular duties of “investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism” to scour state voter rolls using the personally identifiable information of individual voters looking for non-citizens who are registered to vote.

Given the decades of evidence showing how rare noncitizen voting is, it’s unclear what the administration will discover, how verifiable any findings will be and what President Trump or Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin plans to do with those findings.

(snip)

Mr. Trump’s unrelenting focus on noncitizen voting has concerned election officials from both parties. So far, the administration has been unable to verify his claims, and has effectively admitted at times that its numbers have been overstated. Yet the public repetition of falsehoods about election fraud has continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process ahead of a charged midterm election that will determine control of Congress [emphasis added].

All of it has left voting-rights groups and Democrats increasingly concerned that the president will try to interfere with the election. And it has alarmed former officials with the Department of Homeland Security that the agency is being weaponized as part of the effort.

Jamelle Bouie summarizes that “the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.”

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

Is it a plan to rig the election?  To rig the counting of the votes in this election?  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, do you have any doubt it’s a duck?

No facts are a match for the denier in chief

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

On this day in history it is noted that the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia and were purchased by English colonists (1619), to begin legal slavery in North America; Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery suffered the only death of one of its members (1804) from what is now believed to be peritonitis after a burst appendix; Leon Trotsky was assassinated (1920), the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia (1968), President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president (1974) and the Menendez brothers murdered their parents (1989).  I am daydreaming that if someone casually mentioned this list of carnage to President Trump today, his likely response would be to quickly declare that none of it was his fault.  Nothing ever is, you see.

Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.

The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the Republican president insists, even though the office of a prosecutor he put in the job has said the damage was due to shoddy workmanship.

The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Pithy slogans aside, all modern presidents shift responsibility onto others to some degree, frequently blaming the commander-in-chief who preceded them, Congress — or both. But Trump has taken it to a new level, effectively embracing a de facto political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly.

(snip)

Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.

For all of his praise of his own father – whose emotionally cold parenting bears much of the blame for Trump being the way Trump is – TFG’s personality was molded critically by legendary lawyer Roy Cohn.  You know: prosecuting the Rosenbergs, assisting Joe McCarthy, defending the Trumps from charges of racial discrimination in their housing developments…that Roy Cohn.  It was Cohn who taught Donald Trump that the way to respond in any dispute is never apologize, always fight back with greater force, and never admit you were wrong.  Especially if you were wrong.  Explains a lot.

In the interest of providing more facts about “your favorite president,” I wonder if you can pick your favorite Trump Truth (a truth that is not): the lie about the stolen 2020 election has to be the biggest, but there’s also the “longest” lie, the one about issues with election security that he has been reinforcing (with more lies) for years and years to set the stage for the real election interference to come.

That [federal] interference [in state elections] could take many forms: demands for access to voter rolls, pressuring state officials, attempts to station federal monitors at voting locations or even efforts to seize ballot boxes, voting equipment or election records.

States need to stiffen their spines now. It doesn’t require much imagination to see that Trump may be setting the stage to keep his options open to subvert state elections.

Governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state should review their legal authority, secure voter data, clarify chains of custody, establish procedures for resisting unlawful federal demands and prepare emergency litigation in advance. They should not wait until federal agents arrive, ballots are threatened or the president manufactures a crisis.

Republican officials especially must understand that federalism is not a slogan to be used only against Democratic presidents. If a Democratic administration attempted to seize ballots in Texas, Republicans would be outraged. It doesn’t become just constitutional because Trump orders it in Pennsylvania.

The Constitution gives states control over their own elections. Executive branch interference in state elections is a violation of separation of powers. If Washington attempts to influence or take control of state elections, the states should resist, for the sake of the Republic.

Not counting all the documented untruths of his pre-presidential business career, CNN and the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 lies during his first term – nearly two dozen every single day!  That is, I think, partly due to the need to battle back with new lies to appear to bolster the veracity of the original lie, and his inherent nature as a salesman to need to promote every single thing as the best, the greatest, the tallest, the richest, the most beautiful.  “Like no one’s every seen before!”  Even when it is not any of those.  Maybe especially when it is not any of those.

Yesterday we marked 19 months of the second Trump Administration…just 29 more to go!

Boss jock spinning stacks of facts

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It was one thing – one incredibly corrupt thing – for private citizen Donald Trump to wait until after he’d returned to his side hustle as president of the United States to file a personal $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (that he himself just coincidentally again commanded), and then withdraw that suit in exchange for blocking the IRS from auditing his past taxes and creating an almost $2 billion fund to pay off people (like January 6 rioters) who had been “injured” by the allegedly corrupt Justice Department of the prior president.  The judge says that original lawsuit was a sham to set the stage for the “settlement” that tried to end it; she sanctioned Trump’s private lawyers for their part, and wondered where in the hell the Justice Department was in defending the IRS from these highly-Constitutionally-questionable claims.

That, and the small groundswell of opposition to the “settlement” from Republican members of Congress, made it seem that, just maybe, Trump had gone too far this time.  And it provided cover for two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to demand a written promise that those settlement terms would not be pursued before they would join the committee’s majority vote to send acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination for the job on to the full Senate.  It was a “promise” that they got this past weekend.  Or did they?

Critics, however, say the written assurances are a political solution to a political problem, rather than a legally binding document.

“This case was flagrantly illegal from the start and they’re clearly trying to find a political way out of it that gets the attorney general confirmed without giving up their legal rights to actually enforce this illegal settlement,” said Matthew Platkin, a Democratic former New Jersey attorney general. He is now in private practice, representing various people suing over the fund.

(snip)

One of the two documents Mr. Blanche released stated that the order creating the fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” The second document limits a provision that gave broad protection to Mr. Trump, his relatives, and “related or affiliated individuals” from tax audits. The new written order from Mr. Blanche says that the provision only covers the president, two of his sons and his company, and that it applies “only retroactively.”

[The senators] said in a statement that the documents assuaged their concerns, ending an intraparty stalemate that had stalled Mr. Blanche’s confirmation process for days. The senators added that they believed the department had “acknowledged in a binding written order” that the audit protections were limited, “addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share.”

Mr. Platkin said that was clearly not the case. He pointed to the original wording of the documents that created what Democrats have called a slush fund that could be used to pay convicted rioters of Jan. 6, 2021, and other supporters of Mr. Trump who have been investigated, prosecuted or claim to have been mistreated by the federal government.

The original terms of the documents creating the fund said it “may be modified only with the written agreement of the parties” — a reference to Mr. Trump, his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., the Trump Organization and specific government agencies.

As of the time of this posting, there have been no written agreements to this modification signed by any of the Trumps, their businesses, or the government agencies involved.

Mr. Blanche’s order, however, is a government document signed only by him. “So absent any, a new executed agreement that they enter into, all of this is meaningless as a matter of law,” Mr. Platkin said.

For one, an order from the attorney general can be reversed by a future order from an attorney general, so in theory the fund could be revived by the same type of written document any time after Mr. Blanche is confirmed.

Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, echoed those concerns in a statement, asserting that the new written promise did not prevent the administration “from bringing the slush fund back from the dead next week.”

As a matter of fact, last weekend the president promised he was going to do something he hardly ever does: get a law passed, one that would revive the “slush fund” because he’d “like to see [the January 6 rioters] compensated for their pain.”

Take this president’s “promise” with as much salt as you can stand, especially since it is a promise that will require him to work with Congress rather than just executive action a thing into being, the modus with which he is much more comfortable operandi ng.  In The New Republic, Matt Ford argues that TFG lacks any skill at all at legislating, but has set a new standard among politicians for using the office for the benefit of himself.

The only thing truly impressive about Donald Trump is his skill at corruption. This is not, strictly speaking, a good thing to be good at. Yet one cannot help but be awed at the talent that he possesses for abusing power and enriching himself. The last 10 years have seen more innovations in corruption by Trump than the 240 years of American history that preceded them.

Take, for example, his latest scheme to enrich himself and others at the expense of everyone else. Trump owns a social media company named TruthSocial…

(snip)

Last week, TruthSocial announced an extraordinary new “product”: Truth API, a version of his social media feed that gives subscribers “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” (Truths is the hyper-Orwellian name that TruthSocial gives to posts.) In practical terms, it would allow Wall Street firms and other financial institutions access to Trump’s market-moving posts a handful of seconds before they reach the general public.

Why would anyone bother to pay for a few seconds’ advantage to read a Trump post? Because TMTG, the company that operates TruthSocial, can make money off it. Imagine, for instance, that Trump announces higher or lower tariffs against U.S. trading partners, a new bombing campaign against Iran, or his decision to support or oppose a publicly traded American company. A few seconds of lead time could allow firms with complex trading algorithms to cash in on market movements by Trump’s posts—all by handing him a small monthly slice of the profits.

(snip)

The scheme is functionally no different than if he asked for giant burlap sacks of cash from Wall Street executives in exchange for reading his executive orders the day before they are issued.

Trump has largely given up on anything resembling policymaking or governance during his second term. His legislative agenda is practically nonexistent, save for a constitutionally dubious bill to reshape American elections that is dead on arrival in the Senate. He has outsourced his foreign policy, which largely consists of being humiliated by the Iranian government over closures of the Strait of Hormuz, to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy guru, is largely running the mass-deportation portfolio without real supervision.

That gives Trump plenty of free time to devote himself to his two great loves. When it comes to remaking Washington, D.C., in his own image, Trump has had a mixed record of success. The Kennedy Center no longer bears his name, thanks to a court ruling, while the ruins of the East Wing are slowly being built over into a gaudy ballroom. The administration also plans on erecting a giant marble arch outside Arlington National Cemetery to honor Trump himself; the next Democratic president will likely demolish it as soon as they can.

When it comes to corrupt self-enrichment, however, there are no obstacles or guard rails. He has stuffed the Justice Department with his former (and, in a way, current) personal lawyers to end its post-Watergate tradition of independence. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that Trump enjoys “absolute immunity” for any crimes committed in connection with his “core constitutional powers.” This anti-constitutional decision amounted to a blank check to collect bribes, kickbacks, and other forms of graft.

To that end, Trump has taken millions from various donors in exchange for pardoning a wide range of white-collar criminals. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the rumored going price for clemency is at least $1 million. In one instance, Trump pardoned a Democratic member of Congress whose family had petitioned him for help and then lashed out at him on social media for not switching parties, implicitly suggesting a quid pro quo of sorts. (Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, the lawmaker in question, has denied any wrongdoing over his original bribery charges or the pardon he obtained from Trump.)

This is fairly unimaginative by Trumpian standards, of course. A more characteristic scheme is assigning a personal aide—Meredith O’Rourke, a fundraiser whom he reportedly calls his “princess of darkness”—to collect tens of billions of dollars in contributions from major corporations for various pet projects. The Journal reported last month that O’Rourke has taken to referring to Trump as “the boss” and telling the companies, many of whom have regulatory concerns in Washington, that “the boss wants this money.” Those companies have in turn donated hefty sums for the new White House ballroom, Trump’s planned presidential library, and more.

And the hits just keep on comin’!

The lipstick on a pig

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The artificial intelligence that is squatting, uninvited, in my Google search engine is trying to reassure me.  There are people  involved in this equation, it says, and “absolute proof that leaves no room for denial does not exist in human  discourse” because people may deny an obvious conclusion if it hurts their feelings.  Or if, as we’ve seen, it casts the Mayor of MAGAtown in a less than a blindingly positive glow.  My conclusion is you’ve got to keep piling up the facts and remain confident they will lead, eventually, to the scales falling from the eyes of enough people to make a difference.  As may be happening now, both in the Senate’s consideration of the nominee for attorney general and in a federal judge’s finding that a Donald Trump lawsuit against the IRS “was manufactured simply to justify its settlement”.

In May we discussed the very clearly corrupt intentions of the lawsuit filed by private citizen Trump (and his elder sons and their businesses) against the Internal Revenue Service of the government run by President Trump, seeking $10 billion to punish the IRS for laxity in letting TFG’s personal income taxes be stolen and later published (by the New York Times) against his wishes during his first term.  He swore in the court filing that letting the public see his tax returns “caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”  But just as Judge Kathleen Williams began to question the legitimacy of Trump suing his own government – with Trump controlling the lawyers on both sides of a case in which there seemed to be no real conflict – Trump withdrew the suit (hoping to take away the judge’s control of the proceedings) and then his Justice Department announced a stunning settlement.

  • The creation of a tax-funded $1.8 billion fund to pay damages to persons who claim to have been victimized by the government under Democratic presidents, apparently to include those convicted (and later pardoned, by TFG) of offenses related to the treasonous assault on the Capitol on January 6; the fund was to be controlled by Trump-appointed trustees with no oversight permitted from Congress or the courts; and
  • The IRS would be barred, in perpetuity, from auditing any of the past tax returns of Trump or his elder sons or or any of their businesses, which I had characterized as “An after-the-fact non-disclosure agreement, shielding any evidence of any prior tax evasion” from use in court or from disclosure to the public.

It took less than two weeks for the prospect of a “slush fund” of tax money being used to pay off the rioters who attacked police officers on January 6 to rouse some GOP members of Congress who had conveniently forgotten the concept of “checks and balances” among the branches of government, while always remembering the political power TFG holds over MAGA America.  Acting attorney general Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee that plans for that fund were dead.  Deceased.  Irretrievably unrevivable.  And you could take his word for it, although he refused to put this new part of the agreement in writing.  But the part of the agreement preventing the IRS from auditing the Trumps?  Oh, that would stay in effect.

Meanwhile, Judge Williams had re-opened the case to investigate whether the court had been deceived through the misconduct of lawyers.  She was prompted to that action by a letter from three dozen former federal judges who argued “that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his ‘candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system.’”

Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies. If she succeeds in moving forward with her inquiry, it could ultimately result in questions being asked of the Justice Department leaders who signed the agreements to settle the suit — chief among them, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official in the department.

In her order, Judge Williams asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her…”

Did she ever.  In mid-July,

A federal judge held [July 13] that President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was manufactured simply to justify its settlement, including a multibillion-dollar “anti-weaponization” fund for political allies and a shield from IRS scrutiny.

“This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process,” U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams wrote in a blistering 56-page ruling. “This was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

The fact that the federal government did not ever counter arguments that the arrangement was unconstitutional —and that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche unilaterally canceled plans for the Anti-Weaponization Fund — were glaring signals that the lawsuit was not genuine, Williams said.

And furthermore,

Though the administration has argued that Trump had filed the lawsuit — a demand for a $10 billion payout for the leak of his tax returns — in his personal capacity, Williams said that explanation was untenable.

“The court declines to adopt or accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here,” she wrote. “The Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.”

Williams added that Trump could have brought the lawsuit while he was a private citizen but appears to have waited until he was reelected president and appointed his former lawyer to help lead the DOJ.

Trump is appealing that ruling, which is a “full-throated repudiation of Trump and his administration” that came just as Blanche’s nomination as attorney general was going before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Where, as luck would have it, sit two Republicans who object to provisions of the Trump/IRS lawsuit settlement AND who are ending their terms this year and so are beyond the reach of Trump’s political threats.  By earlier this week,

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) had insisted that the Trump administration limit — in writing — central provisions of a controversial deal struck this spring between the Justice Department and the president to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. DOJ was not able to provide the senators sufficient assurances to win their agreement to support Blanche.

The senators have said their votes for Blanche’s nomination hinge on their requested changes to the deal. A “no” vote from either one of them would be enough to sink Blanche’s nomination at the committee stage, given the expectation that all Judiciary Committee Democrats will oppose Blanche’s confirmation.

(snip)

Tillis, who opted not to seek reelection this year and has shown an increasing willingness to tangle with Trump, has expressed concern that the payout fund could end up rewarding defendants who attacked police during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Cornyn, who lost his reelection bid in May after Trump endorsed his primary opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, shared Tillis’s worries on the fund and has said he wants the administration to clarify, in writing, that the tax protections afforded by the deal do not apply to the Trump family’s future actions.

This resistance led to a rescheduling of the committee vote to next week.  Cornyn and Tillis had continued discussions with Blanche and reported some progress…until Blanche’s former law client couldn’t resist the urge to show everyone who is boss.

President Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to revive his controversial plan for federal payouts to people he says were “badly treated” by the Obama and Biden administrations, telling senators that he would “push hard” for legislation to fund the payments if they did not confirm his nominee for attorney general.

“It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account, vowing to pass an “Anti-Weaponization Bill” should his nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general fail in the Senate.

Trump added that he would keep Blanche as acting attorney general and blasted two GOP senators — John Cornyn (Texas) and Thom Tillis (North Carolina) — who have blocked the nomination from advancing over concerns about the fund.

It was not immediately clear what legislation the president was referencing, and the White House declined to elaborate on Trump’s post.

So, what do we have here:

  1. A man who ceaselessly brags about his business acumen (even though he is a man who ran casinos  into bankruptcy), but who swears in court that public disclosure of his tax returns causes him public embarrassment and tarnishes his business reputation.
  2. A man who, at any time in the years when he was not president of the United States, could have sued the IRS over its contractor’s theft of his tax returns that got leaked to the New York Times, but who didn’t do so until he was president again and thus controlled the governmental department that runs the IRS as well as the department that files lawsuits on behalf of the government.
  3. A man who claimed he really really deserved $10 billion dollars in compensation for real damages done to him, but who dropped the suit without argument when the judge began to question the suit’s legitimacy.
  4. A man who claimed not to know anything about the settlement of that lawsuit (sorta like he claimed not to know anything about Project 2025), but who was all on board with paying almost $2 billion dollars to people he had already pardoned for their crimes in attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6.  And still is, even after a federal judge found that the suit was just the lipstick put on the pig of an effort to legitimize a multi-billion dollar payoff to Trump supporters while shielding his possible past tax evasion from government scrutiny.
  5. A man who wants his former personal criminal defense lawyer to run the Department of Justice (so he can punish his political enemies), but who thinks nothing of bastardizing the legal procedure for putting him in that office in order to get his way after officials in another branch of government have the temerity to do their job instead of rubberstamping his edicts.

When a man’s actions tell you who he really is…it’s time to believe him.  Not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, you know; just piling up some facts over here, boss…

Hey Houston, hope you’re happy with the new chief federal prosecutor who says there’s at least one religion that’s incompatible with our civilization

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The Trump Administration has gamed the system to install without Senate confirmation a new U.S. Attorney in the nation’s fourth largest city, a man who has said he believes that hundreds of thousands of the residents of that district are unfit to be Americans because of their religious faith.  In a country where everyone is guaranteed freedom of religion by the U.S. Constitution, the new chief federal prosecutor for a district that is home to nine million people in an area bigger than 16 other whole states is on the record stating – without caveat – that “Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.”

This is probably not what the smug Trump spokesrobots had in mind when they smirked that “elections have consequences,” but they were right.

Each president of the United States is responsible for nominating people to serve in about 4000 government jobs, and you can assume that virtually all of those people share the president’s political views to some extent.  By law, there are about 1200 of these nominees who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and that is generally easily done when the president’s party has a majority in the Senate, as the Republicans do now.  Barely.  And yet, this president – or more accurately, this president’s men, since this president himself is too uneducated in government operations and too disinterested in learning about the actual inner workings of government to have ever thought up this workaround on his own – has chosen to evade that requirement of confirmation in a number of cases after Senate Democrats “stymied some of the Trump administration’s more controversial picks. While the Senate confirmation process is intended to vet candidates for these high profile jobs, many of Trump’s picks have sidestepped that process.”  Including, now, Aaron Reitz, described by his new office here.  The Texas Tribune reports:

Aaron Reitz has been appointed the next U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas. Reitz previously worked as a top deputy to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and worked in the Trump Justice Department before running for attorney general earlier this year.

Reitz finished fourth, despite Paxton’s endorsement, in a crowded and expensive primary. The Marine Corps veteran ran on a militant platform of destroying the left, going after DEI and waging “counter-jihad” on radical Muslims.

(snip)

Reitz enters the position at a perilous moment. The U.S. attorney’s office is likely to be involved in deciding whether to prosecute anyone in relation to [last] week’s fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Houston. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General is leading the investigation, and the Harris County district attorney has vowed his own investigation, as well.

I wrote about Reitz’ campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry here.

It’s no surprise that this Administration would favor someone like Reitz for this job; it is becoming less and less surprising to learn how it has bent the rules of nomination and confirmation all out of whack to slide him into the post without him having to defend his odious beliefs in a public confirmation hearing.  Like he had to do in February 2025 when he was appointed to another top Justice Department post:

During a confirmation hearing in February 2025, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Reitz on a social media post where he said President Donald Trump should follow the lead of President Andrew Jackson and ignore a Supreme Court decision.

“There is no hard and fast rule about whether, in every instance a public official is bound by a court decision,” Reitz told the committee. “There are some instances in which he or she may be lawfully bound and some instances where he or she may not be lawfully bound.”

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin called Reitz’s appointment to the OLP “a danger to the rule of law,”; while some conservative lawmakers and scholars defended the stance amid debates about the power of district-level courts to issue nationwide injunctions on controversial issues.

Politico reported almost a year ago how the Administration is working around the requirement for Senate confirmation in the cases of some of its own nominees.  The law allows the Administration (any Administration, not just this one) to appoint an interim or acting U.S. Attorney to take over the job for up to 120 days while awaiting Senate confirmation of the permanent nominee.  If the Senate does not confirm the nominee after 120 days, the federal judges in the district can appoint someone to take over the responsibility of running that office, and that  person can serve indefinitely (no 120 day limit) until the Senate does finally confirm a nominee.  If the Senate never  does confirm a nominee – or an Administration never nominates anyone else for the job – the person picked by the judges can stay in place until they leave on their own or the president asks them to step down.  No Senate confirmation ever required.   Here’s how it’s worked in the Southern District of Texas:

  • Alamdar Hamdani was nominated by President Biden in November 2022, and was confirmed by voice vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee and then the full Senate that next month; he resigned at the end of the Biden Administration in January 2025…it is customary for most political appointees to resign so a new president can appoint a new person to the job.
  • Nicholas Ganjei was sworn in as the acting  U.S. Attorney in Houston in January 2025, the start of the second Trump Administration.  When no permanent nominee was named, the district judges in the Southern District of Texas voted, unanimously, on May 28 to make Ganjei the new permanent U.S. Attorney.
  • President Trump nominated Ganjei to be a federal judge in Houston in November 2025; he was confirmed by the Senate in February 2026 and started his new job in March 2026.
  • John Marck was appointed acting  U.S. Attorney in March 2026, succeeding Ganjei.
  • Then Marck was himself nominated to the federal bench on April 6, less than a month later, and he was confirmed to that new job June 24.  He left the U.S. Attorney’s office July 9 (last week).
  • On that same day, July 9, it was reported that the judges in the Southern District of Texas had voted unanimously to confirm Reitz as the new man.  With no 120-day limit, no Senate confirmation needed.

And so we have a new chief federal prosecutor in Houston who said just months ago, while running to be Texas attorney general, that Islam just doesn’t fit in with life in Houston…or Texas, or America, or anywhere in the Western world!  To quote me again from this past January:

He didn’t blast the individual Muslims who’ve committed acts of terror in Western nations, he didn’t accuse all Muslims of hating America, he didn’t even nonsensically claim – as Greg Abbott and others have – that Muslims in Texas are trying to build towns where only Muslims can buy property and their religious law will supersede Texas law, although he did do that later in the ad.  No, he relied on some unspecified religious and civilizational authority to proudly proclaim, as if there was ever any real doubt, that “Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.”  Without specifying why, of course.  Perhaps we can construe that he feels Muslims do not conform to the (unspecified) “Christian values” which he promises to defend from the Muslim “invasion” that has been supported by “politicians.”  (Do you wonder if the Christian value of recognizing that others may find their own path to God is one of the Christian values he’ll defend?)

That’s some pretty assertive, take-no-prisoners religious bigotry.  And just the dreary worldview that Christian nationalists – who by definition reject the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty for all  in the United States – are selling.

Do you still need to be persuaded of the importance of voting?