The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-loyalist insurance lawyer who somehow speed-ran her way into pretending to be the top federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia, is now under investigation by the Florida Bar. The nonprofit watchdog Campaign for Accountability says she falsely claimed to be a U.S. attorney while pushing doomed prosecutions of James Comey and New York AG Letitia James — and, shockingly, the legal profession has some notes about that.

Two separate federal judges — including one appointed by Trump himself, because poetic comedy is not dead — found that Halligan operated without legal authority. One said she openly defied court orders, another said she misled a grand jury, and yet somehow she got described as merely "masquerading" as U.S. attorney, as if she’d just wandered in on Halloween wearing a "Federal Prosecutor" costume. The cases against Comey and James were tossed because her appointment was unlawful, she quietly left DOJ in January, and now the Florida Bar is investigating whether impersonating a U.S. attorney and wrecking prosecutions for partisan stunts is maybe, possibly, not what the rule of law is supposed to look like.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.