trump, epstein, and the amazing disappearing subpoena
Donald Trump on screen, once again starring in America’s longest-running series: ‘Have You Tried Just Asking Him Nicely?’
Ro Khanna went on Meet the Press to make what, in a functioning democracy, would be a very boring request: that Donald Trump should voluntarily testify in the Epstein investigation, just like Bill Clinton did. In 2026 America, asking a former president to answer questions about a sex-trafficking predator he used to socialize with is treated as a wild, controversial idea instead of the bare minimum.
Khanna basically pointed out the obvious: if Clinton can sit for questions about his ties to Epstein, there’s no earthly reason Trump should be shielded like a fragile museum artifact. Unless, of course, we’ve just decided that Republican ex-presidents exist on a higher legal plane where subpoenas are optional and accountability is for the poors. The whole conversation tiptoes around the fact that Trump’s orbit has been a revolving door of indicted cronies, alleged abusers, and assorted creeps, yet we’re still politely asking him to please consider answering a few questions.
The subtext is the real story: the justice system keeps bending itself into origami to avoid confronting the simple question of whether powerful men with Epstein baggage should be treated like everyone else. We’re now at the stage where a sitting member of Congress has to go on national TV to gently suggest that maybe, possibly, the twice-impeached coup enthusiast who once bragged about knowing Epstein "for 15 years" could talk to investigators of his own free will. Truly a golden age for the rule of law.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump loses tariff fight, demands to keep the loot anyway
Trump staring at a giant refund check labeled "ILLEGAL TARIFFS" like someone just suggested paying back the bank after robbing it.
The Supreme Court tells Donald Trump that, no, he cannot just slap tariffs on everything that moves like a raccoon loose in a Costco, and suddenly the administration discovers that refunding unlawfully collected billions will "take time." Translation: yes, the tariffs were illegal, but have you considered how inconvenient it is to give the money back?
Trump runs to Truth Social to explain that countries and companies who were illegally charged are somehow getting an "undeserved windfall" by… receiving refunds of money the government was never allowed to take in the first place. He even publicly wonders if a "Rehearing or Readjudication" is possible, while his own Justice Department notably does not tell the Court it plans to ask for one. The strongman routine loses a step when your own lawyers quietly back away from the podium.
Meanwhile, dozens of companies are sprinting to court to join the hundreds already suing for refunds, because when a president’s trade war is built on sand and vibes instead of law, the only winners are the litigators. The administration’s position appears to be: we broke the rules, the Court caught us, and now we’d like to delay the consequences as long as humanly possible while pretending that returning stolen cash is some kind of cosmic injustice.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
doj misplaces trump-epstein files, america misplaces its sanity
Robert Garcia pauses mid-hearing to wonder how the DOJ can track every migrant crossing but loses Epstein-Trump files like a set of AirPods.
The Justice Department’s public Epstein files database somehow released three million pages of documents but appears to have misplaced the ones where a woman says that, as a 13-year-old in the early 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump, who then allegedly forced her head toward his exposed penis, she bit him, and he punched her in the head and kicked her out. But don’t worry, the same government that loses crucial pages of child sex trafficking files swears it’s very serious about law and order.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now asking Attorney General Pam Bondi — yes, the same Pam Bondi who once dropped a Trump University investigation after a nice donation showed up — why multiple FBI interviews and notes about these allegations are missing from the public record. DOJ’s explanation so far? The usual bureaucratic word salad about documents being “duplicates, privileged, or part of an ongoing federal investigation,” which is Washington-speak for “we’re not saying we’re covering it up, but we’re definitely not not covering it up.”
Garcia is calling it what it looks like: a White House cover-up of serious allegations against the sitting president, and he’s demanding Bondi say whether Trump is actually under investigation for sexual assault. Democrats on Oversight are launching a parallel probe into the missing documents, because apparently we’ve reached the stage of the Trump era where Congress has to subpoena the Justice Department to find out if it’s hiding evidence about the president’s alleged assault of a child in the middle of the Epstein scandal. Rule of law, meet the shredder.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump accuses obama of alien leaks, remains unclear on reality
Obama jokes about aliens while Trump, somewhere on Air Force One, tries to retroactively classify basic astronomy.
On Air Force One, Donald Trump decided that the gravest national security threat of the week was... Barack Obama saying he thinks aliens are statistically likely to exist somewhere in a universe with a few trillion galaxies. Trump solemnly informed reporters that Obama had revealed "classified information" when he joked that "aliens are real" on a podcast lightning round, declaring, "He's not supposed to be doing that" and "He made a big mistake"—which is a bold line of attack from a man who once read out classified imagery on Twitter like it was show-and-tell.
Obama, for his part, clarified that he didn't see any evidence of extraterrestrials during his presidency, really, and that his comment was about basic probability, not secret hangars full of little green Democrats at Area 51. There is, as the BBC notes, no indication he relied on classified information at all—unless high school math is now Top Secret. Meanwhile, Trump insisted he "doesn't have an opinion" on whether aliens are real, which is an unusual moment of epistemic humility from someone who has very strong views on windmills, bleach injections, and crowd sizes.
So we now have a sitting president casually accusing his predecessor of mishandling classified info over a podcast quip, while Congress holds Very Serious hearings on UAPs that produce absolutely nothing. The US national security state is out here managing nuclear arsenals and cyber threats, and the commander-in-chief is turning classification law into a prop for his ongoing beef with Obama. Rule of law and responsible handling of secrets? Sorry, we’re doing vibes-based alien discourse now.
#lawlessness#full-stupid
ice discovers perjury is bad, after shooting a venezuelan through a closed door
ICE agents, bravely defending America from the mortal threat of immigrants armed with snow shovels, as long as the bodycam footage never sees daylight.
Federal authorities are shocked, simply shocked to discover that two ICE officers may have lied under oath about a Minneapolis shooting during Trump’s immigration crackdown. Video evidence appears to show that the sworn testimony from not one but two officers was, as ICE director Todd Lyons delicately puts it, "untruthful"—also known in non-bureaucrat English as perjury. The officers are now on leave and facing possible firing and criminal charges, which is the closest thing to accountability ICE has seen since its founding.
A federal judge has tossed felony assault charges against Venezuelan immigrants Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who were accused of beating an ICE officer with a broom handle and snow shovel, supposedly forcing the brave federal warrior to shoot Sosa-Celis in the thigh. The Justice Department did a rare reverse ferret, moving to dismiss after "newly discovered evidence" turned out to be materially inconsistent with the original cop fanfic. Their lawyer says the charges were based on lies by an ICE agent who "recklessly shot into their home through a closed door," which really adds that special Trump-era flavor of militarized incompetence.
Naturally, the political hype machine was already running at full volume. Kristi Noem rushed to accuse Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey of encouraging assaults on law enforcement, solemnly declaring the incident an "attempted murder of federal law enforcement" and describing an ambush with snow shovels and broom handles. DHS now concedes those claims were false, and Noem’s office has gone suspiciously quiet about her little copaganda fanfic. Meanwhile, the government still hasn’t said whether the men they shot at and falsely charged will be deported, because in Trump’s America, getting lied about and shot by the state doesn’t necessarily get you off the deportation conveyor belt—it just means you’re also a crime victim.
#lawlessness#anti-immigration
$1 million per deportee to *not* send them home
State Department officials throwing darts at a world map to decide which corrupt regime gets $7.5 million to take the next seven deportees.
The Trump administration has apparently reinvented deportation as a luxury cruise package, spending more than $32 million to ship about 300 people to random third countries they have no connection to, only for many of them to be sent on to their actual home countries at additional US taxpayer expense. Rwanda got $7.5 million plus roughly $600k in flights to take seven people. Equatorial Guinea got $7.5 million for 29 people. Palau got $7.5 million for, as far as anyone can tell, vibes. Eswatini and El Salvador cashed in too. Meanwhile, more than 80% of these migrants either already made it back home or are on their way, raising the obvious question: why not just deport them directly, instead of funding the world’s most expensive pointless layovers?
This isn’t incompetence, it’s policy. A committee member flat-out says the point is to terrorize people in the US with the threat of being dumped in places like South Sudan or Eswatini if they don’t "self deport". So ICE sometimes doesn’t even bother asking home countries for travel documents, then claims they had no choice but to send people to third countries because their homelands supposedly refused them. Jamaica publicly contradicted that, after the US paid over $181,000 to fly a Jamaican to Eswatini and then paid again to fly him back to Jamaica, which had never refused him in the first place. Fiscal conservatism, but make it a money bonfire.
Naturally, the cash is flowing to some of the world’s most corrupt and abusive regimes, with no meaningful oversight. Equatorial Guinea, ranked 172 out of 182 on the corruption index, got more money for 29 deportees than all US aid it had received in the last eight years combined. El Salvador was paid to lock more than 250 Venezuelans in its infamous CECOT megaprison, where torture has been documented, and the administration even shipped back MS-13 leaders who were US informants, blowing up a long-running federal investigation, because why not sabotage your own law enforcement if it makes the deportation numbers look good? South Sudan reportedly tried to trade taking eight people for sanctions relief and US oil and gas investments, because this is all just hostage negotiation with extra paperwork.
Then there’s Iran, where the administration struck a deal to deport 400 people, including Christian converts, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents—exactly the people most likely to be persecuted, which US law is supposed to protect. At least eight begged not to be sent back; one man attempted suicide in US detention to avoid it and was deported anyway. Many of these deportees had court-ordered protections that legally barred the US from returning them to their home countries, so the administration appears to have used Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, and others as convenient middlemen to do what a federal judge described as "evad[ing] the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly." The self-proclaimed guardians of "law and order" are literally outsourcing human rights violations to corrupt regimes and calling it a victory for the American people.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump’s ‘patriot’ pardon pipeline keeps producing monsters
Pictured: one of Trump’s "patriots," fresh off a presidential pardon and headed straight into a child sex abuse conviction. Law and order, but make it fascist fan club.
The MAGA talent pipeline has outdone itself again: Andrew Paul Johnson, a Florida handyman, Jan. 6 rioter, and proud recipient of a full Trump pardon, has now been convicted on multiple state charges of molesting children and exposing himself. Johnson, who once climbed through a broken Capitol window to yell at cops, has apparently upgraded from attacking democracy to preying on kids. Truly the best people.
Prosecutors say Johnson molested children under 12 and 16 across "a many-month span," flashing his genitals and sexually abusing them, while describing himself online as an "American Terrorist" and "Proud J6er." He even tried to buy a victim’s silence by claiming he’d get $10 million in restitution for Jan. 6 defendants from the Trump administration and would include the child in his will. So the official MAGA legal strategy now is: overthrow the government, get pardoned, then use imaginary Trump hush money as part of your grooming toolkit.
This is not some one-off aberration; it’s the latest entry in the growing file of "Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 rioters go on to commit more crimes." Johnson had already violated court orders by posing with a gun while his Capitol case was pending, and still got a presidential absolution because Trump calls these people "patriots" and hints at cash payouts. When you build an entire political movement around worshipping criminals as heroes, you don’t just get lawlessness — you get a traveling roadshow of predators who think the state exists to bail them out forever.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump decides transparency has gone far enough, thanks
Trump, bravely taking a stand against the real threat to America: too many documents about his rich friends being made public.
The Department of Justice coughed up another batch of Epstein files and, shockingly, President Donald Trump has decided that this is exactly the right moment for America to "move on." After wobbling all over the place on document releases during the 2024 campaign, he’s now landed on the very convenient position that the latest disclosures should be the last. Democracy gets sunlight, Trump wants blackout curtains.
Democrats, extremely rude as always, are insisting on the release of about 3 million more documents, presumably under the radical theory that the public might want to know who else was mixed up with a serial sex trafficker whose operations mysteriously intersected with powerful men across politics, finance, and media. The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe walks through what’s in the new files while the administration tries to pretend the rest of the iceberg is just a quirky decorative ice cube. Trump’s White House: aggressively pro-secrecy, selectively pro-justice, and deeply allergic to full disclosure.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump’s j6 pardon program continues to deliver
Trump’s pardon machine: turning "stop the steal" foot soldiers into repeat offenders, one "patriot" at a time.
Donald Trump’s buy-one-insurrection-get-a-free-pardon loyalty program is really paying dividends. Christopher Moynihan, a January 6 rioter Trump pardoned after his felony conviction for helping storm the Capitol, has now pleaded guilty to a harassment charge for threatening to murder House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. According to prosecutors, Moynihan texted that he "cannot allow this terrorist to live" and promised to kill Jeffries "for the future", which is certainly one way to spell "patriotism" in MAGA World.
The Dutchess County DA had to remind everyone that threatening to assassinate elected officials is not "political speech" but a crime that strikes at the heart of democracy — a clarification that somehow became necessary after four years of Trump and friends treating violent rhetoric as a campaign plank. Moynihan was originally sentenced to 21 months for obstructing the certification of Joe Biden’s win, but Trump wiped that away when he pardoned nearly everyone criminally charged in the Capitol attack at the start of his second term, as a little thank-you gift to the mob that tried to keep him in power.
The result: a pardoned insurrectionist, freshly emboldened by presidential absolution, moves on to threatening to kill the top House Democrat. The Republican Party keeps calling January 6 defendants "hostages" and "heroes" while one of their newly redeemed freedom fighters allegedly graduates from attacking the Capitol to fantasizing about assassinating members of Congress. Truly, the law-and-order movement of our time.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy#fascism
president felon keeps speedrunning the appeals process
Trump gazes into the middle distance, perhaps wondering if the Supreme Court will eventually rule that hush money is an official executive function.
The president of the United States, who is also the proud owner of 34 felony convictions for cooking his business books to hide a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, is back in court trying to pretend this was all part of his official presidential duties. Because when you think "Article II powers," you obviously think "covering up hush money to a porn star."
Trump’s new lawyer, Jeffrey Wall, showed up in federal court to argue that the real injustice here isn’t that a sitting president is a convicted felon, it’s that his previous lawyers didn’t sprint to federal court fast enough to claim magical immunity. Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who has already rejected this stunt twice, politely informed him that you don’t get three bites at the apple just because your client lives in the White House and screams on Truth Social. Or, as Hellerstein put it, they’re "beating a dead horse"—which is generous, because the horse died somewhere around motion number two.
The Second Circuit forced Hellerstein to rehear the case to consider whether any evidence at trial touched on "official acts" that the Supreme Court’s Trump Immunity Gift Basket might cover. Trump’s team is essentially arguing that if a single scrap of trial evidence brushes up against his presidential schedule, the whole hush-money scheme transforms into an Official Act of State. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office responded with the radical idea that you don’t get to lose in state court, then yell "federal review!" like it’s a cheat code.
For now, the conviction stands, the sentence is an "unconditional discharge"—no jail, just the permanent label of "first criminal president"—and the country gets to watch a sitting commander in chief try, again and again, to lawyer his way out of the one thing the jury was crystal clear on: he did it. America: where the justice system still works, provided you have enough money to file endless motions trying to prove it doesn’t.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump’s ice murders a mom, then fox news murders her character
Nothing says ‘land of the free’ like a memorial poster that has to clarify you were murdered by your own government.
Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mom of three, was shot and killed by ICE on 7 January. Within hours, bodycam footage torched the official fairy tale that agents fired in "self-defense"—so the Trump administration did what it does best: lie harder and smear the dead. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good had "weaponized" her car (she hadn’t), while Trump helpfully explained that "at a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement"—which is now apparently a capital offense.
On cue, the right-wing media outrage machine clocked in for its shift. Jesse Watters mocked Good as a queer "self-proclaimed poet" with pronouns in her bio, Laura Loomer announced that Good "deserved it" and wished her widow had been shot too, and JD Vance decided the real problem was that she was a "deranged leftist" whose own murder was "a tragedy of her own making". Because nothing says law and order like celebrating a state killing and then bullying the corpse.
When the public reacted with horror, the Justice Department—rather than investigate why ICE gunned down a woman in front of her home—opened a criminal investigation into her grieving widow, Becca Good, over vague ties to unnamed "activist groups." That was so grotesque that six federal prosecutors resigned in protest. In other words, the Trump administration has moved from "the police can kill you and face no consequences" to "the police can kill you, we’ll defame you on TV, and then we’ll try to criminalize your spouse for being sad about it." But sure, tell us again how this is the party of family values and freedom.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump’s gangbanger of the week turns out to be… not that
Gregory Bovino, brave warrior in the Trump immigration crackdown, pictured somewhere between ‘I lied under oath’ and ‘the jury didn’t buy it’.
The Trump administration just face-planted again in court, after a Chicago jury took less than four hours to decide that a carpenter with a few bucks in his bank account was not, in fact, running a $10,000 Snapchat murder-for-hire operation against Border Patrol hardliner Gregory Bovino. Juan Espinoza Martinez was painted by DHS as a "depraved" gang "thug" and "ranking member" of the Latin Kings, only for the judge to bar any gang testimony because the government had, minor detail, no evidence. But sure, trust them on the secret cartels hiding under your bed.
Prosecutors tried to turn a "10k if u take him down" Snap shared with a brother and a government informant into a federal assassination plot, while the defense pointed out small problems like: no plan, no money, no follow-up, a witness informant who could barely walk, and a defendant who thought he was passing along neighborhood gossip after a few beers. The jury believed reality over Trump-world fan fiction.
This isn’t a one-off: it’s the latest collapse from Operation Midway Blitz, Trump’s big Chicago immigration crackdown, where about half of ~30 criminal cases have already been dropped or dismissed. A federal judge has already found Bovino lied under oath about alleged gang threats, and in Los Angeles he was the only witness to an alleged assault on an agent that a jury also didn’t buy. In other words, the administration is trying to build a narrative of heroic border warriors under siege from bloodthirsty immigrant gangs, and the courts keep replying, "Have you tried not lying?"
#lawlessness#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump doj discovers bold new legal doctrine: laws are just vibes
Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie politely explaining to Trump’s DOJ that ‘mandatory’ does not, in fact, mean ‘whenever you feel like it, plus redactions.’
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with one very simple instruction for Donald Trump’s Department of Justice: give us the files. By 19 December 2025, no less. Instead, the Trump DOJ dumped a token 125,575 pages out of more than 2 million potentially responsive documents, then patted itself on the back while blowing past the deadline like it was a stop sign in Mar-a-Lago traffic.
Lawmakers Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie – a Democrat and a Republican, because apparently basic legality now requires a bipartisan intervention – are begging a federal judge to appoint a special master and independent monitor, since the DOJ has decided the Act is more of a mood board than a statute. The department is doing everything the law explicitly forbids: missing deadlines, hiding behind common-law privileges the Act doesn’t allow, and slathering on redactions that look suspiciously like an effort to protect “politically exposed persons”, which the law also explicitly bans. But sure, tell us again how this is the most transparent administration in history.
Just to round it out, Trump’s DOJ also ignored another requirement: a detailed report, due 15 days after the deadline, explaining what was released, what was withheld, and why. That report simply does not exist, leading the law’s co-sponsors to write, in diplomatic translation: these guys cannot be trusted with the keys to a filing cabinet, let alone the justice system. Survivors’ advocates say the delay isn’t just bureaucratic foot-dragging – it’s retraumatizing and yet another institutional failure to hold anyone with power accountable for Epstein’s years of abuse. In other words, the system is working exactly as designed.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
woman continues to larp as u.s. attorney after judge says 'absolutely not'
Lindsey Halligan, seen here shortly before a federal judge informed her that "U.S. attorney" is a job, not a vibe.
Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s favorite cosplay prosecutor, has been ordered by a federal judge to explain why she’s still calling herself the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after another federal judge already ruled her appointment unconstitutional. In other words, a court said, "you never had this job," and Halligan’s response was, "that’s cute, anyway…"—and the Trump DOJ is still helpfully labeling her "U.S. attorney" in official filings, because why stop the pretend game now.
Judge David Novak, apparently tired of living in a live-action separation-of-powers stress test, issued his own three-page order demanding Halligan justify why her name and title shouldn’t be yanked off an indictment in a carjacking and bank robbery case. He also wants her to explain how identifying herself as U.S. attorney isn’t a "false or misleading statement" and gently hinted at possible disciplinary action—because nothing says "totally normal functioning justice system" like having to ask the government’s top local prosecutor whether she’s committing fraud on the court.
This all stems from Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s November ruling that Halligan’s appointment violated the Constitution, nuking her politically convenient prosecutions of James Comey and New York AG Letitia James as "unlawful exercises of executive power." The decision is on appeal, but—minor detail—it hasn’t been stayed, meaning it’s still binding law. Other judges have resorted to putting an asterisk next to Halligan’s name on court documents, like a walking steroids-era home run record, with a note reminding everyone she "did not lawfully possess" the power she’s been flinging around. But sure, tell us more about how this administration is restoring "law and order."
#lawlessness#corruption#killing-democracy
trump doj heroically protects epstein’s powerful friends from the law
Pam Bondi explains that complying with federal law is very hard when so many powerful people might be inconvenienced by accountability.
The Trump Department of Justice has bravely managed to release less than 1% of the Epstein files it was legally required to disclose by December 19, because nothing says "rule of law" like openly blowing past a federal statute and then sending Pam Bondi to write a five-page "oops, we’re trying" note to the judge. Out of more than two million potentially responsive documents, the DOJ has coughed up 12,285 – heavily redacted, missing "all the key documents," and offering exactly zero new information on the 10 alleged Epstein co-conspirators. But don’t worry, Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Jay Clayton swear this is all about "protecting victims," which is a fascinating way to spell "protecting politically exposed creeps and government officials."
Chuck Schumer is on X yelling "What are they trying to hide?" while the department quietly ignores a legal requirement to give Congress an unredacted list of every "government official and politically exposed person" named in the files. It’s been 17 days since Trump’s DOJ first broke the law by missing the deadline, and 14 days since they bothered to release anything at all – but sure, it’s just that redactions are hard and they need "a few more weeks." Meanwhile, Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie are floating an inherent contempt lawsuit against Bondi, because when a bipartisan pair is talking about dusting off Congress’s most nuclear accountability tool, things are definitely going "all-hands-on-deck" in the best possible way.
The first trickle of documents confirms Epstein’s industrial-scale child abuse operation with Ghislaine Maxwell and features more allegations about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly known as Prince Andrew) shopping for "friendly and discreet and fun" girls – but still no major new revelations about who in U.S. power circles knew what and when. In other words, the only people being aggressively protected by Trump’s DOJ are the exact people federal law was designed to expose. But sure, this is all about victim privacy, and not at all about keeping the names of powerful friends, donors, and officials buried under a mountain of redactions and missed deadlines.
#lawlessness#corruption#forever-grifting
trump’s doj receives a million epstein files, promises to maybe look at them eventually
Pictured: the DOJ bravely preparing to spend several weeks deciding which Epstein files to read and which ones to accidentally-on-purpose misplace.
The Department of Justice says it’s going to need “weeks” to review one million new Epstein-related documents, because nothing says equal justice under law like handing a mountain of potential blackmail material on the global elite to the same political operation currently obsessed with punishing enemies and protecting friends.
According to DOJ, they’re carefully assessing these documents to determine what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s politically inconvenient enough to quietly disappear into the world’s deepest filing cabinet. They’ve already rushed out to declare one Epstein letter referencing Trump as “fake,” which is fascinating, because this is the fastest anyone at DOJ has moved since… ever. Imagine if they reviewed corporate crime or domestic terrorism with this level of urgency.
In other words: the government that can’t process asylum claims, can’t count votes without screaming fraud, and can’t comply with subpoenas without crying witch hunt is now in charge of sifting through a million Epstein files that may implicate rich, powerful people—including some very good friends of Donald J. Trump. But sure, we’re absolutely going to get transparency and accountability this time. Totally.
So now we wait while Trump’s DOJ, with all the subtlety of a paper shredder in overdrive, decides which victims get justice, which predators get protection, and which documents get “lost” in the great American tradition of elite-only law enforcement. Merry Christmas from your two-tier justice system.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump’s doj discovers epstein files are harder to release when your own name is in them
Pam Bondi, bravely protecting America from the grave national security threat of people finding out what’s actually in the Epstein files.
Donald Trump spent years promising to "totally" expose the Jeffrey Epstein network — right up until it turned out his own Justice Department was sitting on a mountain of files with his name popping up inside. Congress, apparently tired of watching Pam Bondi do performative Fox News segments about a "client list" sitting on her desk while the public got nothing, passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with a big bipartisan bow on top. The law gives Trump’s DOJ a clear deadline: cough up the documents by 19 December, unless you can justify narrow exceptions for ongoing investigations, national security, or victim privacy. In other words, basic rule-of-law stuff — which is why the Trump administration immediately stopped talking about it.
Since Trump signed the bill, Bondi has ghosted Congress on briefings while the administration continues to insist there’s no "client list" and no more disclosures are "appropriate or warranted" — a bold position for a DOJ whose boss’s name reportedly appears multiple times in the very files they’re hiding. Meanwhile, the "first phase" of releases turned out to be mostly already-leaked material repackaged as transparency, because nothing says accountability like dumping old flight logs and calling it a day. Lawmakers are now threatening to block nominees over the stonewalling, but the Justice Department still hasn’t meaningfully complied with the law it was just ordered to follow.
So we’re down to a 48-hour countdown where Trump’s DOJ has to choose between obeying a bipartisan statute or continuing the cover-up of a sex-trafficking scandal that spans billionaires, royals, and a former reality TV host who once sent Epstein a nude sketch and a note about how they "have certain things in common." If they comply, we get hundreds of thousands of pages that might finally show how Epstein skated for decades. If they don’t, we get yet another demonstration that under Trump, the Department of Justice is less a law enforcement agency and more a personal damage-control firm for the guy whose name keeps turning up in all the wrong archives — but sure, tell us again how this is the transparency presidency.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump signs shutdown law, immediately pretends it doesn’t count
Trump administration officials staring at a copy of the shutdown law like it’s written in ancient Sumerian, then deciding to fire people anyway.
Donald Trump signed a law to end his 43-day government shutdown, then apparently decided the words in it were just decorations. The continuing resolution explicitly barred agencies from implementing layoffs through 30 January, so naturally the administration tried to plow ahead with hundreds of firings at State and Education anyway—because nothing says "good faith governance" like immediately violating the law you just signed.
US district judge Susan Illston, burdened with both a law degree and basic reading comprehension, said absolutely not. She’s blocking about 400 planned layoffs at State and Education and ordering four agencies—State, Defense, GSA, and SBA—to reinstate roughly 300 people already pushed out during the shutdown. She also noted the administration’s trademark management style as "chaotic" with workers being laid off and reinstated repeatedly this year, like their livelihoods are just props in a low-budget reality show.
Unions rightly pointed out that no one should be shocked that Trump broke his word, but it’s still impressive to contradict a law he literally just signed. The White House, having no good explanation for why "no layoffs" actually means "except our layoffs," declined to comment. In other words, Congress passed a law, Trump signed it, and the courts had to step in to remind the president that laws still apply to him—a concept this administration treats as a hostile foreign ideology.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
epstein transparency: pam bondi's vanishing act
Pam Bondi: Now you see her, now you don't. Transparency? What's that?
In a shocking turn of events that absolutely no one saw coming, the Trump administration seems to have misplaced its moral compass and any notion of transparency. Senators Jeff Merkley and Ben Ray Luján, apparently still under the impression that laws matter, are blocking Senate nominations until Attorney General Pam Bondi decides to stop playing hide-and-seek with Epstein's files. Yes, because nothing screams 'justice for victims' like an administration that can't even manage a simple briefing. But sure, let's pretend this isn't a colossal middle finger to 'equal justice under the law'.
As Bondi and the DOJ ghost Congress, the White House's silence is deafening. Merkley and Luján are demanding full disclosure, but in Trump's America, it seems some secrets are meant to be buried right alongside any political accountability. Until then, the Senate's civilian nominations will sit in limbo, proving once again that lawlessness is the only constant in this administration. But hey, at least they're consistent!
#lawlessness#corruption
military personnel fear trump's boat strikes will sink them legally
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to Trump at Marine Corps Base Quantico, contemplating if he can swim out of this legal quagmire.
Ah, the Trump administration—where relentless chaos meets dubious legality. U.S. service members are scrambling for legal advice as they fear ending up the fall guys for the administration's latest escapade: sinking supposed drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. In other words, because nothing says 'protect and serve' like potentially unlawful pirate-style warfare and leaving your own soldiers to clean up the legal mess. As Trump flexes his Article II powers (read: imagines he's a sea captain in an action movie), service members are left pondering if they'll be the ones walking the plank—into a courtroom.
#lawlessness#national-security
