You damn right nobody’s ever seen anything like this before

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Do I have this straight: the president as a private citizen sued a department of his own government for billions of dollars, then dropped the suit as the Justice Department announced a fund that gives (essentially) him control of $1.8 billion to disburse at his whim, with no oversight, and the government agreed never to audit any of his prior income tax returns?  That doesn’t seem right…how did we get here?

As a candidate for president, who later was convicted of multiple dozens of felonies, he was asked to release his income tax returns as is customary in these elections, but said he was being audited and would release them once the audit(s) were complete.  (There is no law that prohibits the release of returns that are under audit, although some lawyers would urge their client not to while the matter is ongoing; the public release of tax returns is a nod to openness and to prove that the candidate will have no secret conflict of interest once in office.)

But then this candidate never did release his tax returns, and never gave any further reason why he chose not to do so.  (Some returns were released later by a House committee, though.)

The candidate (and we all know who I’m talking about) won the 2016 election, and later some of his federal tax returns were published after an investigation by the New York Times.  Those returns show the man who claims enormous wealth twice paid only $750 in federal income tax.  This same man had proudly boasted during the campaign that not paying taxes was an indication of his intelligence, rather than his greed or his unwillingness to pay his fair share of the operation of our nation’s government.

After the twice-impeached former president won re-election in 2024, which itself forced the termination of several other criminal cases against him due to a custom not to prosecute sitting presidents, he filed a $10 billion lawsuit – yes, TEN BILLION DOLLARS – against the Internal Revenue Service – yes, an arm of the same Executive Branch that he himself was now (again) the leader of – to recover for the alleged damages done to him by the Service’s alleged laxity in allowing his tax returns to have been published against his wishes.  That’s right: the president admits – he swears in the suit– 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.”  Curious claim for such an outstanding and successful businessman, right, but there it is.

As the judge assigned to this case started to ask questions that indicated the suit may not have smooth sailing – that, for example, there didn’t seem to be any real conflict here if the president is suing his own government and he controls the lawyers on both sides – the president announced he has withdrawn the lawsuit.  As is his right.

But THEN, the president’s Justice Department – which has in this second TFG Administration brought shame upon itself and the nation for openly seeking revenge (under the cloak of “justice”) against the boss’ political enemies and those of the boss’ supporters – announced the creation of a giant (insert your own descriptive adjective here) fund controlled by the president’s supplicants that can be distributed by them/him, with no oversight from Congress or the courts, to those who claim damages from being victimized by a previous government of another party which had attempted (ineptly and too slowly, it turned out) to investigate allegations of lawbreaking by TFG himself.  And by his minions.

Mr. Trump’s decision to drop his suit against the I.R.S. appeared to be intended to strip Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the I.R.S. case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump was able to reach an agreement with his own appointees [emphasis added] without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter. Judge Williams, tacitly acknowledging her hands were tied, accepted the president’s dismissal of the suit and formally closed the case by the end of the day.

(snip)

Money for the fund will come from a special, unlimited account available to the Justice Department for settling lawsuits. That pool of money gives the department the authority to make monetary settlements without needing approval from Congress. A group of five people, selected by Mr. [acting attorney general Todd] Blanche, will oversee the operations of the fund, though Mr. Trump can fire its members at will. It will stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before Mr. Trump leaves office.

Creation of the fund, which could be used to compensate Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is sure to please a president who has demanded not only retribution but recompense. But it could create major political problems for congressional Republicans already dealing with the political ballast of his unpopularity — and who will now be forced to say if they support or oppose allocating taxpayer cash to his allies at a time when many Americans are struggling economically.

AND, the agreement attempts to protect itself by claiming up front that no arm of Congress or the courts, or anyone else on this planet or any other, in perpetuity, has any legal right to try to do anything at all about it.  (We’ll see about that: two police officers who were in the Capitol on January 6 have already filed suit to block creation of the fund.  I bet there will be others.)

AND MORE THAN THAT, this agreement also bars the IRS from auditing TFG’s previous tax returns, or those of his sons, or their companies.  For ever.  (A get out of jail free card?  An after-the-fact non-disclosure agreement, shielding any evidence of any prior tax evasion?)

Is that about it?  What should we think about all this?

“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog group that has been critical of the administration.

But others disagree, including some of the nearly 1600 people indicted for their role in the January 6 attack who have already been pardoned or had their convictions dismissed.  By TFG.  They could be getting a payout from the government they attacked.

Some felt that the fund validated their self-image as victims of the government. Others felt elated — albeit somewhat stunned — at the prospect of a payout. And not a few felt a bit confused at how the process of filing claims and receiving checks could play out.

“So many questions,” said Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years on a seditious conspiracy conviction arising from the riot. “But it’s a good direction.”

From the “most corrupt ever” reactions, to the folks annoyed by the nuisance of filling out the application, a more pertinent question (or impertinent, if you are TFG) would be, is this legal?  The answer is, I think: we will see.

The whole enterprise was a jarring shock to the conventional understanding of the constitutional system, raising what legal experts said were profound questions about presidential power. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, they said, Mr. Trump will have managed simultaneously to thwart Congress’s power of the purse and the ability of the courts to police the separation of powers.

(snip)

Professor [Samuel] Bagenstos, who served as the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, wrote in January about the danger posed by the Judgment Fund.

“An administration that wished to spend money on projects or beneficiaries not authorized by Congress,” he wrote, “could simply encourage its desired recipient to bring a lawsuit against the United States and then settle that lawsuit (no matter how frivolous) by making a payment from the Judgment Fund.”

While Congress has ceded power to the executive branch, it could also reclaim it. Indeed, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Tuesday that he expected lawmakers to scrutinize how the president’s lawsuit had been ended.

(snip)

A Justice Department news release on Monday said that the “plaintiffs” — that is, Mr. Trump and his family — “will receive a formal apology but no monetary payment or damages of any kind,” a provision the White House used to defend the fund. Still, the opportunity to help direct payments approaching $2 billion to allies has value.

So does the elimination of the threat of an audit. In 2024, The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump could face a tax liability of more than $100 million.

The deal was open to question for other reasons.

The I.R.S. had plenty of defenses to Mr. Trump’s suit. For instance, it might well have been barred by the statute of limitations.

Nor was it clear that the agency was liable for the acts of Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor who pleaded guilty to leaking Mr. Trump’s tax information and whose actions Mr. Trump had cited as a reason he had been wronged by the government.

The sum Mr. Trump sought was also roughly equal to the agency’s annual budget.

And the suit was palpably collusive, ordinarily a reason for a judge to toss a case.

Tuesday’s addendum to the settlement, the codicil purporting to immunize Mr. Trump and his family, raised its own legal questions.

(snip)

Even under the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision conferring broad immunity on Mr. Trump for his official acts, purely private conduct, as the filing of a tax return would seem to be, is fair game for prosecution after a president becomes a private citizen. It is not clear whether the addendum could block a future administration from pursuing such a claim.

Weaponization for me, but not for thee

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Hey Pat, why can’t you ever say anything nice about President Trump?

Um…how about this: he really knows how to hold a grudge, like nobody’s ever seen before!

You remember how he campaigned against the alleged/imagined “weaponization” of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, claiming it was “weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions.”  He was so serious about it that he made it the subject of one of those first executive orders issued the very evening he was inaugurated last year.  Today I read that order more closely and realized that it states its purpose as setting “forth a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people” (emphasis added) and directs the Administration to “correct past misconduct by the Federal Government” from such weaponization.  It never promises that this Administration won’t do the same as it claims Biden’s did.

Now, I can’t say for a fact that the Biden Justice Department (or that of any other previous president, except probably Nixon’s) never never ever went after political opponents when there was no legal case, although I have strong doubts.  But the poor Biden Administration clearly has nothing to compare to what’s going on now.  Why, just today, the Justice Department got a new indictment against former FBI director James Comey, a critic of Trump.

An indictment filed in North Carolina charged Mr. Comey with making a threat against the president, and transmitting a threat across state lines, according to court records.

The new case represents another twist in the department’s tortured efforts to satisfy the demands of Mr. Trump to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Comey, a longtime target of the president’s wrath. The first indictment against Mr. Comey was thrown out by a judge, and other prosecutorial efforts against Trump targets have faltered in the face of grand juries or judges.

(snip)

The new Comey charge stems from an incident nearly a year ago, when Mr. Comey, vacationing on the North Carolina coast, posted a photograph on social media showing seashells arranged to say “86 47,” combining the slang term “86” often used to mean dismiss or remove with an apparent reference to Mr. Trump, the country’s 47th president.

Members of the administration, as well as Mr. Trump’s family, declared that the meaning of “86” was to kill, and that the seashell message amounted to a threat to assassinate the president.

Seashells spell death threat by the seashore?

The original Comey indictment, alleging he made false statements and obstructed justice in connection with Senate committee testimony in 2020 (and had nothing at all to do with seashells), was thrown out by a judge who determined that the acting U.S. Attorney who worked the case had been illegally appointed.  By a president who likes to make his own rules.

Also today, a former federal prosecutor “who accused the Trump administration of firing her last year for political reasons, may proceed with a lawsuit in federal court over the government’s objection, a Manhattan judge ruled on Tuesday.”  Her name is Maurene Comey, James Comey’s daughter, who claims…

“…in her suit that there was no plausible explanation for her abrupt July 2025 dismissal other than Mr. Trump’s enmity toward her father or her “perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”

The Trump administration had asked the judge, Jesse M. Furman of Manhattan federal court, to dismiss Ms. Comey’s suit against the government, saying it had to be pursued first before the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that hears complaints from federal workers about employment actions.

But Judge Furman held that her claim was “outside the universe of cases” that Congress intended the board to resolve, and therefore the court had jurisdiction to consider the suit. The judge did not rule on the merits of Ms. Comey’s claim.

This president has appointed a lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election result as the new head of the investigation of an Obama-era CIA chief who has been highly critical of Trump since he first took office.

[Joseph] DiGenova is a staunch Trump ally who repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, he was forced to apologize to Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency who was fired during Mr. Trump’s first term, after Krebs said he felt the 2020 election was free of major fraud or interference.

Krebs later sued DiGenova after he called for Krebs to be “drawn and quartered” and “shot” during a television appearance. Those comments, Krebs later alleged, sparked death threats against him.

This president’s Justice Department has charged a long-time civil rights group with financial crimes, “accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.”  The fact that such an investigation will please MAGA’s white supremacist wing: just a coincidence.

At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”

The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.

“Main Justice” had been investigating Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Board chair – who Trump himself appointed to the job back in his first term – on flimsy fraud charges, apparently in an effort to strongarm Powell into lowering interest rates.  Which the majority of the board (not just Powell alone) has repeatedly decided not to do, for reasons having nothing to do with the president’s political popularity.  But when some senators refused to approve Trump’s nomination of a new Fed chair while this Powell investigation was on-going, his puppet U.S. Attorney made the surprise announcement that the investigation was closed! 

The decision came just two days after Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, vowed to continue the investigation despite a federal judge dealing the inquiry a crippling blow in court last month.The move reflected the reality that Mr. Trump, who has spent years trying to get rid of Mr. Powell and browbeating him to lower interest rates, would not be able to install his choice for the job while the inquiry continued.

Curious, I think, that in closing the investigation Pirro thought to reserve the right to restart it again later, “should the facts warrant doing so.”  You don’t suppose she knows something we don’t?

Meanwhile, the FBI denies a report that it is investigating a reporter who wrote a story about (wait for it) the FBI director reportedly using the bureau’s assets “to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation.”  They’re trying to make a case that the reporter was “stalking” Kash Patel’s girlfriend.

“The scrutiny of [reporter Elizabeth] Williamson is an example of the Trump administration examining whether to criminalize routine news gathering practices that are widely considered protected by the First Amendment.”

And it says right here that employees at EEOC say they are being pressured to bring cases that would satisfy the reverse discrimination beliefs of Trump supporters, even when there is little evidence:

Field staff at the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws in the workplace say they are under intense pressure from leadership to bring in cases that fit the Trump administration’s priorities, including charges of discrimination against white men and charges of antisemitism on college campuses.

That pressure has led investigators and lawyers at the agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to focus its thin resources on pursuing and fast-tracking cases that have little evidence and tenuous legal bases, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, both Republicans and Democrats.

Last Thursday, two days before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at which a man was arrested for allegedly trying to assassinate the president, ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about TFG’s age and health when he said Melania Trump had the glow of “an expectant widow.”  Yesterday morning she criticized Kimmel’s comments, and just hours later her husband offered the opinion that Kimmel should be fired.  Today, the Federal Communications Commission “ordered a review of all station licenses owned by ABC, an extraordinary move to pressure a major television network whose programming has frequently angered President Trump.”  It said the review would be focused on ABC’s “diversity and inclusion policies.”  Right.

The F.C.C. action represented an escalation by the Trump administration and the president to punish major media outlets for their coverage. Mr. Trump has personally sued several news organizations, including The New York Times, and the Pentagon has tried to sharply restrict news media access.

Mr. Trump’s F.C.C. chairman, Brendan Carr, has repeatedly threatened to take action against broadcasters, including to take away their valuable station licenses. His agency’s action on Tuesday was the first direct step toward potentially doing so.

You want to know how you can tell that this Administration is serious about ending the evil of weaponizing government to fight political battles?  Well, there is this sign: it is arranging to pay “damages” to the subjects of Biden-era investigations like Michael Flynn, Mark Meadows and Carter Page.

“The settlements, arranged by the Justice Department, could help fuel the Trump administration narrative that the federal government had wrongly investigated or prosecuted these subjects — even though no court has made such a determination. And the payouts could be used to bolster the president’s repeated claims that the Justice Department had been weaponized to go after him and his supporters, making them victims of a corrupt legal system.

(snip)

Since Trump’s return to the White House last year, the Justice Department has paid at least $8.5 million to resolve high-profile legal claims brought by allies and supporters who allege they were improperly targeted by federal law enforcement during previous administrations, according to legal filings and people familiar with those deals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss privately held details about the settlements.

And more could be coming.

The Justice Department has looming requests for major payouts that could help define the legacy of the law enforcement agency and its leaders during Trump’s second term. Two of those requests totaling about $230 million, alleging prosecutorial abuse in multiple cases, were made by Trump himself.

As a private citizen, Trump claimed he was entitled to money to compensate him for what he calls politicized investigations.

Because of course he is.  Of course they were.

This list of examples of Trump’s weaponization of the presidency to punish his opponents and reward himself and his family (the grift that keeps on giving) is not exhaustive, and I’m sure you have some favorites of your own; feel free to share.  All these stories happened just within the last ten days, a rate so bigly that I bet no other Administration could possibly match it.

Here’s another reason I couldn’t work for this president

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The first reason, of course, is that he would never ask me to.  Or more correctly, the deeply cynical and hyper-efficient Christian nationalists, and the vacuous and power-hungry suck-ups who run his administration, would have no use for me since I am not on board with their plans to turn back time to an America where white men alone are in charge of everything, women are meant to serve the men even when they are put in positions that seem to carry authority, and anyone not from their tribe – nationally. ethnically, religiously, or otherwise – knows better than to cause trouble.  (You don’t really think TFG himself came up with all these ideas for government “reforms,” do you?  He’s focused mainly on self-aggrandizement and financial corruption.)  The second reason is I could never keep my mouth shut long enough about the national embarrassment that is the Republican-controlled Congress and their complete abrogation of their responsibility to be a check and/or balance on the Executive branch to win Senate confirmation.

And the third is, it’s got to be just too exhausting, what with all the work they have to do to constantly kiss his ass and to flex for the public to show what big strong masculine manly men they are.  Here are two shining examples from just the past few days.

In more than fifty years of paying attention to the operations of the federal government I never once before saw anything meant to be so stupefyingly ego-massaging, while also as appallingly degrading, as the televised opening of a Trump Cabinet meeting, at which each member is expected to publicly slather the boss up one side and back down the other with excessive praise for some imagined achievement, all as he sits by with a canary-eating grin to feign embarrassment and gratitude for the unsolicited praise.  Imagine, if you will (if you can), how the titans of industry and government who agreed to serve in this administration, even when they had little to no respect for TFG himself, were silently thinking that they now knew what it must have been like for Prometheus to be chained to that rock.  Since then our government leaders have suffered no shortage of sickening superlatives any time they are called upon to describe Trump’s abilities, his wisdom, his patriotism or his leadership.  Now some of them have been called on to measure their praise of the president in another way.  Another, very weird way.

Will Marco Rubio’s humiliations never end? Recent photos show the secretary of state, whom Donald Trump dubbed “Little Marco” at a campaign rally almost exactly one decade ago, clomping around in shoes that are far too large for his feet. They’re black and freshly shined, an otherwise appropriate choice for a political leader a few heartbeats away from the presidency, but with a gap around his heels that could fit a sizable tube of lip gloss in a pinch.

The shoes cut an absurd figure, like a little boy pretending to be a businessman in Daddy’s oxfords. And they’ve got to be hideously uncomfortable. If you’ve ever walked a mile in the stiff leather dress shoes of someone bigger-footed than you, you know the blisters, toe stubs, and awkward gaits that can come as a result.

But a little fashion faux pas and a touch of foot pain are a small price to pay for pleasing the temperamental king of the GOP. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Rubio’s shoes came as a gift from the president, who has taken to bestowing his favorite brand of shoes on Republican lawmakers, right-wing A-listers, and the men who work in his administration. A pair of affordable Florsheims has become Trump’s go-to token of appreciation for his bro gang—or, depending on how you look at it, a mandatory uniform signaling the loyalty of his acolytes.

Having to wear the same stupid shoes to every White House meeting because your self-obsessed boss wanted you guys to be matchy-matchy is embarrassing enough. But the particular circumstances of Rubio’s shoes are downright pathetic. As Vice President J.D. Vance recalled at an event in December, the Journal reported, he was meeting with Trump, Rubio, and an unnamed third politician in the Oval Office when the president accused Vance and Rubio of having “shitty shoes.” Trump asked them all for their shoe size; Vance made sure to put in the record that he’s a size 13, while Rubio claimed to be an 11 and the third man a 7. The president then launched a sideways insult at the guy with the daintiest feet: “You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.”

That the “locker-room talk” president would place an inordinate, genital-related premium on a man’s foot size was surely no surprise to Rubio, who has risen in GOP influence in direct proportion to his willingness to contort himself to Trump’s exact desires. It does not seem out of the realm of possibility, then, that Rubio would inflate his own shoe specs to impress Trump with his masculine bulk.

You can imagine the gears in Rubio’s brain whirring as he sat across the Resolute Desk from Trump. If he shared his actual shoe size, the president might scoff at his presumably small penis. If he lied and offered a larger number, he’d end up shuffling around D.C. in Daddy’s big-boy shoes for the rest of time. The correct answer was clear: Rubio’s pee-pee reputation had to remain intact, whatever the cost to his feet.

(snip)

Perversely, Rubio’s gaping shoes might do more to please the president than any pair of ample-sized feet ever could. Humiliation is exactly how Trump prefers to test the fealty of those in his employ. If you want to be in the president’s orbit, you’d better pretend it’s the pinnacle of artistic excellence when Lara Trump belts out a nasal Tom Petty cover at the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party. You’ve got to smile and choke down your Big Mac on Air Force One, even if you’ve made your name as the clean-eating guy. As the vice president, you’re supposed to graciously nod as Trump calls you incompetent, accuses you of being a buttinsky, and says you’ll never be his successor. Every time Trump makes these people lie to themselves or endure a public shaming, he weakens their sense of self and their public image, reducing their worth to their proximity to him.

Regardless of how they used to do things in whatever world they came from, the men of Trump World know they are now expected to be confrontational with the news media.  Aggressively confrontational, whether or not either aggressiveness or confrontation is appropriate.  Always.  It is part of the lesson Trump learned more than fifty years ago from the infamous New York City lawyer Roy Cohn, whose mantra when it came to any dispute was: never apologize, always fight back with greater force, and never admit you were wrong.

Even though he catered to the New York City newspapers in his business career, Trump the politician and president has always accused journalists – all journalists – of being against him.  Unless they are sucking up to him (yes, I’m looking at you, Fox News, Newsmax and some others) and/or inventing new ways to curry favor, any journalist who dares acknowledge provable reality and ask a non-fawning question is “the enemy of the people.”  Now, Trump didn’t invent this strategy, and there are plenty of conservative Americans who don’t believe impartiality is really a thing, who view any negative story as evidence of opposition rather than the result of regular old honest reporting.  We know that all of establishment journalism is not against this president, nor were they nor will they all be against any other president.  It is not their job to be “for” any president or elected official, but to ask questions and report news for the benefit of the readers, listeners and viewers.

That does not mean that there can be no complaints about how a story is covered.  Not all journalism is perfect…most of it is not perfect, probably.  And Trump is only the 47th president ever to complain about stories written about his government.  (I assume.)  In his case, the complaints are usually not that any particular story is inaccurate, but that it is insufficiently flattering of him.  What is different now is that this president accuses those who do not flatter him of committing treason.  And his top broadcasting regulator is busy showing how tough he can be with “the media” but forgetting everything he should have learned about the First Amendment last September.  Back then he was pressuring a television network to discipline a talk show host for expressing an opinion that Trump didn’t like or agree with; now, he is blatantly, unconstitutionally threatening to use the power of the government to put the offenders out of business.

Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”

(snip)

Previous White Houses also complained about domestic news coverage of American intervention in the Middle East. But this administration’s attempts to shame, and in some cases punish, journalists for straightforward reporting on the war has engendered comparisons to the demands of foreign authoritarian leaders.

(snip)

The licensing threat from Mr. Carr, the F.C.C. chairman, raised eyebrows in part because the agency has been traditionally viewed as independent. As a regulator, Mr. Carr has government tools at his disposal to punish media organizations, though the process for revoking a broadcast license is onerous and can take years. On Sunday, the Democratic minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, called his comments “vindictive, fascist stuff.”

Mr. Carr made his remarks on a day when he was seen speaking with Mr. Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., according to CNN. Mr. Carr was criticized last year for implying that he might retaliate against ABC for on-air comments by Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night host, who was then temporarily suspended by the network.

To Trump and Carr, and Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt and all the others crying about their bad press this week: toughen up, snowflake.  (Maybe, don’t do those things that people are criticizing?)  And, seriously, what part of the government “shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” don’t you understand?

Our elections ARE at risk, if you know who gets his way

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The most surprised I ever was about anything in my life was the day I watched on television as thousands of members of MAGA world rioted at the U.S. Capitol, physically assaulted the law officers on duty there and tried to illegally interfere with the peaceful transfer of presidential power, because they believed Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.  Ultimately they only delayed the work of Congress, and the fact that the criminal convictions of more than 1200 people for their actions that day were erased by TFG’s clemency doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; it did, and we all saw it.  He hasn’t stopped lying about that ever since; he’s now laying the groundwork to easily steal the next election.

Earlier this month the president repeated a call for the Republican Party to nationalize federal elections.  Despite the Constitutional provision that elections for federal office are to be run by the states (or perhaps just ignoring the Constitutional direction, as he often does), Trump appeared on a podcast and said he “believed the federal government should ‘get involved’ in elections that are riddled with ‘corruption,’ reiterating his position that the federal government should usurp state laws by exerting control over local elections.”  You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the places he believes to be “riddled with corruption” are places where Democrats do well.  Only  places where Democrats do well.

Mr. Trump’s comments and an intensifying Republican push in Congress to tighten voting laws — along with an F.B.I. move last week to seize ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga., — suggests a broader drive by the president and his allies to sow distrust of American elections ahead of midterm balloting in November.

Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly forecast in recent months that Republicans would lose midterms, after the party was rattled by losing several local races last November, and a Democrat won a special election in Texas last week in a district that Mr. Trump had won by double digits.

Voting by noncitizens happens rarely, and it is already illegal in federal elections. But Mr. Trump and many of his allies repeatedly and baselessly insisted during the 2024 election that noncitizens were flooding to the polls — a campaign of misinformation that has ramped up in recent weeks as the election nears.

The Justice Department, which has been newly politicized under Mr. Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file.

You’ve got to give the Trumpers credit for being better organized about election rigging this time around: his new director of election security and integrity, “with the power to refer criminal investigations…into things that have been thoroughly debunked,” is “Kurt Olsen, a rather prominent character in Mr. Trump’s election denialism movement. Mr. Olsen, who is a lawyer, was considered by people in the first Trump administration to be a fringe menace.”  Fox, meet henhouse.  (No, not that Fox.)

No matter how many times the results of the 2020 election have been rehashed, Mr. Trump’s fixations have not abated. Mr. Olsen’s position is proof of that.

But he is not the only one. The president has installed proponents of his fraud claims all across his administration. And increasingly, he has started to cast doubts on the coming midterm elections as Republicans face potentially big losses in November.

(snip)

“Kurt Olsen has a history of abusing his law license to spread lies about our elections,” said Christine P. Sun, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections. “Now, he’s using his role in the administration and the power of the federal government to take actions fueled by those same lies. It’s part of a multipronged approach that threatens state power over our elections.”

Mr. Olsen has said he began his career in the 1990s at the large corporate Washington firm Kirkland & Ellis. He went to Christmas parties at the home of Jeffrey A. Rosen, a partner in the law firm at the time who would go on to become the acting attorney general during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Olsen has said. Mr. Olsen has said that he never did any election legal work.

During the frantic weeks following the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and others immediately began claiming, without evidence, a wide variety of problems with election machines. Mr. Olsen, too, came to believe that “something was not right,” he said in a legal deposition in 2023.

(snip)

That started him on a path of taking on cases that many other Republican attorneys avoided putting their names on, including one brought before the Supreme Court in December 2020 seeking to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat at the polls. Mr. Olsen has said that the team worked “round the clock” to put the case together.

After the Supreme Court rejected the case, Mr. Olsen said he spoke to Mr. Trump and discussed a strategy to have a similar suit brought by the Justice Department. He also pressed his old colleague Mr. Rosen to bring the case on behalf of the country.

But Mr. Rosen told Mr. Trump in an Oval Office meeting that the case would not be accepted because of a lack of standing. Mr. Trump responded that Mr. Olsen had promised it was a “slam dunk,” according to a report from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Even after Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Olsen continued to press the false claims about election machines. He found a like-minded ally in February 2021 when, according to Mr. Olsen’s testimony, Mr. Trump introduced him to Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, who has become best known for promoting the falsehood that voting machines are often rigged and have flipped elections.

The two worked together for years with a movement of activists and cybersecurity experts around the country to promote conspiracy theories about election machines through lawsuits, media appearances and yearly conferences.

Mr. Lindell was a public face of the movement. With less bombast, Mr. Olsen served as the lawyer for many of the cases, including an attempt to overturn the 2022 election for Arizona governor. Mr. Olsen represented Kari Lake, an election denier who ran failed campaigns for statewide office in Arizona. (She was also rewarded with a role in the new Trump administration, one that allowed her to oversee the firing of most of the journalists at Voice of America.)

Repeatedly, though, Mr. Olsen faced resounding defeats. In Arizona, he was sanctioned in federal court for making false claims. In Georgia, a legal effort on behalf of the DeKalb County Republican Party challenging the state’s use of election machines failed.

Still, the movement’s proponents have survived despite those defeats.

Heather Honey, who was a witness for the unsuccessful lawsuit that Mr. Olsen brought on behalf of Ms. Lake, was given a position in the Department of Homeland Security overseeing election integrity. Marci McCarthy, who was the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, now oversees public affairs at the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Clay Parikh, who served as an expert witness for Mr. Olsen in his cases in both Georgia and Arizona, is now a special government employee whose analysis was relied on in the F.B.I.’s Fulton County investigation, according to the affidavit.

And not least is Mr. Trump himself — the man who keeps trying to rewrite the country’s past and is now in charge of its future.

An important point to acknowledge here is that there may be  good reasons to have the federal government involved in running elections.  In a 2012 book UCLA law professor Richard Hasen argued that an independent, non-partisan body in charge of national elections “could decrease the amount of partisan fighting and litigation over election rules, increase the competence of election administration, and assure we have a system run with integrity and fair access to voting.”  But one thing has changed his mind…actually, one person:

Donald Trump has caused me to abandon this argument. As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: “What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles.”  At this point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion. [emphasis added]  Courts have ruled that parts of Trump’s executive order are unconstitutional because the president has no role to play in the administration of elections.

Trump’s comments on nationalizing elections ironically prove the point that we should not nationalize elections. He apparently wants to target the administration at blue states, doing who-knows-what to make it harder for people to vote for Democrats. He desperately fears a Congress controlled by Democrats that could check his and his administration’s power. As he did in 2020, when he unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the results of the fair presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden, Trump hangs it all on voter fraud. His comments to [Dan] Bongino about noncitizens voting, just like his comments about mail-in balloting, show Trump as either a liar or delusional. The amount of election fraud of this type is extremely rare. We know it because states, including red ones like Georgia—where Trump’s administration recently raided election offices in a serious threat to the 2026 vote—have gone hunting for fraud and found very little.

(snip)

We should now look to states to step up the competence, integrity, and accessibility of their election systems. They serve as the front line against election subversion. Diffusion of power in the states makes it much harder for Trump to mess with the midterm elections. Whether or not the Framers intended it, our messy, decentralized, partly partisan, uneven system of administering elections turns out to be the best bulwark against would-be authoritarian presidents.

This is another example of an overworked Trump trick: telling lies to “create” a problem where none exists (massive election fraud) so he can suggest a “solution” (nationalizing elections) that would allow him to benefit…himself, in this case, to take official, legal control of elections so he can dictate the results.  If it works in the 2026 midterms – helping Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate – what might happen in the 2028 general election?

He’s daring us to stop him.

A brutal forecast in effect well past winter

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The view from the front window today is beautiful: only very high, wispy clouds hanging in an almost windless afternoon that is colder than it looks, but so much better than the three days of real winter we just had, and which I expect will complete our annual allotment here in southeast Texas.  Then, it was the very definition of dreary when I looked through the glass, as it was again last evening when I did a double-take looking into my true window on the world, the television.

Since the party primaries for this coming November’s statewide elections in Texas are held in March, we’ve been blistered by white-hot MAGA-flavored political ads on TV for months already.  I don’t rush to mute these ads (like I do the ones when a particular furniture salesman shouts at me) since I’ve mostly learned to ignore them.  Mostly.  But this line broke through the noise:

“Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.”

So said Aaron Reitz, a candidate in the Republican primary for Texas attorney general.  Never been elected before, but not a fringe guy: a Phi Beta Kappa from Texas A&M University, Marine Corps veteran deployed to Afghanistan some 15 years ago, then a deputy state attorney general (while also being a campaign adviser to his boss’ re-election campaign; that doesn’t seem quite kosher), then chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz, and then confirmed by the Senate last March for a job as an assistant U.S. attorney general.  A job he resigned less than three months later to run for AG back home.  Yep, just three months.

Now, anti-Muslim bigotry is cynically worn as a badge of honor among many Texas Republicans these days.  Last year the governor declared that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations are foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations, and this year the Republicans in the U.S. Senate race in Texas can’t stop finding new ways to make it clear they are anti-Muslim.  As GOP consultant Vinny Minchillo put it for Politico, “The Muslim community is the boogeyman for this cycle….One hundred percent this message works — there’s no question about it. This has been polled up one side and down the other, and with Texas Republican primary voters, it works. It is a thing they are legitimately scared of.”

But my instinctive reaction to the Reitz ad was that this is different: no cutesy dog whistle sending a clear message only to those who own the decoder ring.  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.  Please, don’t buy it.