The Crimes of the DeSantis Power Circle, Symbolic of Statewide Republican Corruption

If you want to know how corrupt Republicans are, not only look to their crimes but also look to how they cover up said crimes when they're in control of the investigation. Right here in Florida is a perfect example as a grand jury probe dug into political fundraising misdeeds by those in power (via Jim Vertuno with AP News, linked through PBS Newshour):

A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration "misappropriated" $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, but it declined to file criminal charges due to a lack of evidence indicating who specifically was responsible.

DeSantis on Thursday did not dispute the legitimacy of the secret grand jury report obtained and published online by CBS News Miami, but he insisted no laws were broken and said whoever leaked the sealed documents would face "consequences."

What consequences? The report already indicated nobody in a position to do anything about this is pressing criminal charges!

The Leon County grand jury completed its report in January on investigations into Hope Florida, the charity started in 2021 by Florida first lady Casey DeSantis. Despite the lack of charges, the report ignited a new round of criticism aimed at DeSantis and other top state Republicans over the charity receiving $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement intended to help poor children get health insurance.

Basically, DeSantis' own wife stole from sick kids. SHE STOLE. FROM SICK KIDS. The sociopathy is bottomless with these crooks.

Also note, the grand jury completed their work in January but it's only NOW - after the August primaries were voted on - that the report leaked.

The Hope Florida charity is supposed to help financially struggling families connect with churches and aid groups to help keep them off publicly-financed assistance programs. The $10 million was instead moved to political action committees that used the money to oppose a 2024 statewide ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana for adults in the state...

The grand jury said no one would take responsibility for sending the money to the charity or had any memory of who did.

"We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution," the report noted. "While we can't prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again."

The grand jury report concluded that James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis' chief of staff at the time, "was in a position of authority over those involved in settling," and that his Keep Florida Clean PAC was the prime recipient of the $10 million. The grand jury said then-state Attorney General Ashley Moody's office knew of the plans to divert the money. She was later appointed by DeSantis to the U.S. Senate...

Take note of all the players involved in both the crime and the cover-up, how they're all interconnected and relying on each other to stay in political power. Uthmeier and Moody both owe DeSantis their offices, and they have personal incentives to make sure they're never held accountable for any role they had in this.

The articles covering this story don't delve too much into how a grand jury investigation into this even started back in October 2025. That it was a fellow state Republican in the state House questioning the fundraising diversions seems a bit surprising unless you recognize it as an intraparty power play: Back then, Casey DeSantis was campaigning to run for governor to follow in her husband's footsteps, a blatant act of nepotism that arguably angered other Republicans ambitious for that office. The polls favored her well into February 2026, but the grand jury created enough scandal to keep her from running.

When she didn't show up on the ballot, you'll notice the other state-level Republicans didn't care to hold anybody accountable for it, even though clearly crimes took place. Their inaction reeks just as much as the DeSantis' power grabs and theft.

And this is what you get when one party runs everything at the state level for 28-plus years. The Republicans - driven more and more by their wingnut extremists - have been in control of Florida since 1998, packing the state courts with conservative judges happy to bend the laws to their favor, shredding every voter-backed referendums that supported funding schools and keeping ecosystems safe, denying local communities any sovereignty, and mocking any accountability to the voters who keep putting the same crooks back into office.

All I want - all I've been praying for the last two decades - is for my fellow Floridians to wake up to the reality that the state-level Republicans - as much as the national party - are a bunch of honest-to-God crooks. The Republican Party from trump on down to DeSantis and to every state legislator and county official are part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy to take taxpayer money for their own pockets and make most of us - even their own voters - suffer to their cruelty.

Please. I am begging every Florida voter. You want an end to criminal corruption in politics? You're going to have to recognize it's all coming from the Republicans in charge at Tallahassee, and you are going to have to vote every goddamn Republican crook out of office. Please.

ICE Thuggery In OUR Streets, What the Hell America

This is all you need to know: ICE thugs have gone back to killing people in the streets.

This happened in Houston last week (via Lekan Oyekanmi, Jack Brook, and Jeffrey Collins with AP News shared through PBS Newshour):

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for decades, as the homebuilder drove his construction crew to a Houston job site.

His death set off protests in Texas' largest city and calls from Democrats and Salgado Araujo 's family for an independent investigation. The shooting on Tuesday in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood is at least the eighth death during the Trump administration's immigration enforcement campaign.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said federal officers were looking for someone else when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo's vehicle. DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and that an officer opened fire in self-defense.

Subsequent video releases of nearby surveillance cameras established that ICE and DHS agents are lying about the "self defense" part: none of them were in front of the van, they were the ones who pursued and attacked, and none of the agents endured any kind of harm.

This is who they killed: an innocent man going to work to feed his family.

Just a reminder: ICE and DHS under trump and Stephen Miller and every other racist MOFO in their administration are NOT going after "the worst of the worst," they're going after workers, families, innocent people many of whom are going through the legal process of immigrating to the U.S.

GODDAMN trump's THUGS.

And this just happened in Maine yesterday (via Patrick Whittle, Leah Willingham, and Jack Brook at AP News):

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, the second time in a week that ICE has used deadly force and at least the ninth death since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown.

Immigrant rights groups identified the man who was killed in Biddeford as a 26-year-old native of Colombia. The Colombian Embassy said it was in contact with U.S. authorities about the Colombian national’s death and “is providing the necessary consular assistance to his family.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, said in a post on X that agents were surveilling an address for a person with a final order of removal from the country. When ICE tried to stop a vehicle driven by someone coming from that address, the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the department said.

Prior to the brief ICE statement on the incident, Maine U.S. Sen. Angus King said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against ICE agents in Biddeford, a coastal city roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Portland. The agents involved didn’t have body cameras, he said...

Subsequent video releases of neighborhood witnesses established that ICE and DHS agents are lying about the "self defense" part: There is no evidence the driver was trying to ram anybody, and the ICE thugs kept shooting after the car stopped. It doesn't help that the victim's three year old daughter was in the car, caught in the crossfire and witnessing something no child should ever see.

You should also notice how these federal officers did not wear the mandated body cameras in both situations. All that money in their budgets, all these months of operations, and they're STILL claiming they can't afford them or buy any yet? Christ, you can buy them off Amazon and get them shipped to you two days minimum, shipped in a day if you pay extra for Prime service. They don't want to record the real damage they're inflicting on innocent lives, they don't want anything to contradict their hideous Narrative justifying their violence.

JFC, Homeland Security is lying out of their collective ass here.

NONE OF THIS IS ABOUT PUBLIC SAFETY. None of this is about going after the "worst of the worst." These racist fucksticks are going after workers, families, innocent people many of whom are going through the legal process of immigrating to the U.S.

GODDAMN trump's THUGS.

Abolish ICE. Murder, torture, and criminal conspiracy charges for the whole lot of them. Send them to the deep pit of Hell where the REAL Worst of the Worst deserve to go.

The Downward Spiral of trump's War Against Justice and Reality: Reflect On THAT

When the farce turns into tragedy, it's the innocent who get burned first. trump's desperation to avoid getting blamed for the Reflection Pool fiasco has led to his thugs at the InJustice Department to file charges against scapegoats (via Lindsay Whitehurst and Meg Kinnard at AP News):

A former Olympian was indicted Thursday on a felony charge in what President Donald Trump has called vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where a renovation project he launched has been riddled with problems.

David Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, was indicted on a single count of property destruction in Washington, D.C., court.

District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Hearn ripped up recently installed sealant on the pool in “a deliberate act” that caused more than $1,000 in damage. She accused him of “forcefully and violently” pulling up the bottom liner “with both hands” and acting belligerently toward an employee who told him to stop.

“This is a case with tremendous evidence,” she said, adding that authorities have made about six other misdemeanor arrests.

That is, coming from Pirro, a lie. Hearn's version of events:

Hearn didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment. He previously told The Associated Press that he reached into the pool on June 19 to examine the newly peeled coating. He said he briefly touched a chunk that was still attached to the side of the pool, then let go shortly after a park worker told him to.

“I’m a curious citizen,” Hearn said in a telephone interview last month. “I reached down to see what it felt like. It was very rubbery.”

Saying that he stopped by the pool during a 64-mile bike ride, Hearn said he was detained by National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police for five hours before being released.

Even before Hearn got anywhere near the Pool, there were reports of pieces of paint peeling away from the granite surface. (That Reuters report is from June 18th. Hearn was arrested on the 19th.) The algae growth in the waters had been happening for days, and the whole thing had turned into a huge embarrassment for trump who crowed how his efforts were fixing a reflecting pool that didn't need a coat of paint and needed back the filters trump's people earlier removed and failed to put back.

Accusing other people of being vandals - and abusing the legal system to pursue felony charges where you can't prove actual harm - is all part of trump's downward spiral into his own madness and willingness to destroy everything he can't control.

I hope Hearn can convince the judge overseeing this case to dismiss outright. Pirro has no real evidence, just on the timeline alone Hearn can claim he didn't do anything to damage the Pool. It was already damaged by trump. And everyone - trump himself, in the darkest void of whatever replaced his soul - knows it.

The Desperate Attack by a Bad Liar to Discredit His Victims

(Update: Thank you as always, Batocchio, for sharing my blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! P.S. if anyone has suggestions for topics to cover on my new podcast, please leave comments or contact me on Bluesky! Good luck and stay safe)

Vindictive little prick, trump is.

His revenge tour of using his corrupted Department of Justice to go after the people who held him accountable for his crimes is now targeting the one person who humiliated trump the most on the public stage: his rape victim E. Jean Carroll (via Alana Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker of AP News and PBS News Hour):

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist who has said Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store 30 years ago, lied during the course of civil litigation against him, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person who confirmed the existence of the investigation was not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The perjury investigation is being led by the federal prosecutors' office in Chicago, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has had no involvement because of his prior work as Trump's personal attorney, the person said...

A jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her, and she was awarded $5 million. The following year, another jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation case related to Trump's social media posts about her...

The Justice Department is scrutinizing a statement Carroll made in the course of the civil litigation that no one else was paying her legal fees. It later became public that a Chicago-based organization backed by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had helped fund Carroll's case. Trump's lawyers in the civil case accused Carroll of concealing that information, which they said called into question whether the case was politically motivated.

A month before the first trial in 2023, then-Trump lawyer Alina Habba sought to delay it, saying in court papers that new revelations about Hoffman partially funding Carroll's case "raises significant questions as to Plaintiff's credibility, as well as her motive for commencing and/or continuing the instant action."

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a Dec. 30, 2024, ruling, upheld the $5 million jury award from 2023. The court addressed Carroll's credibility after Trump accused her of lying, during a deposition, about how her case was funded.

The court cited Carroll's explanation that when the question about Hoffman's contributions was first posed to her in 2022, she had forgotten about "the limited outside funding" received in September 2020.

"It showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs," the appeals court said.

This is something trump's lawyers have already argued, this is something the courts have already accepted. And yet trump is still desperate to label Carroll as a liar in some form or another so that he can claim she's lied about everything else, especially the sexual assault.

There's been two separate trials covering this - one on the assault itself, another on trump's public defamation of Carroll - and both juries found Carroll credible enough to find for her. In one of these trials, the judge declared during his ruling that trump's act fit the definition of rape. That's how damning the facts in this matter are.

Yet here trump is, abusing the office of the presidency to get his DOJ minions to rewrite the legal system - rewrite all of history if possible - to erase this crime (and arguably set the stage to erase himself from all the other sex crimes he's accused of).

trump can never admit he did something wrong. trump can never admit he lost at something. trump must always present himself as a winner (never a sucker); so if there is someone out there who beat him, who exposed his sins and his failures, trump must do everything he can to label that person the "real" criminal, the "real" liar. he will insist on flipping all of reality so that trump himself is both victim and hero.

Even if trump's lackeys at the Justice Department find no evidence of perjury, or even a hint of Carroll lying (even on matters that don't even relate to her court rulings), it doesn't matter: trump will use this farce of an investigation to vilify Carroll to the media and to his Far Right allies.

Don't let trump rewrite history here. Stand with Carroll, stand with all the other women who stepped forward to reveal how trump harmed and victimized them. These aren't isolated incidents, these aren't projections or fantasies or lies. They're all telling us the same thing: trump is violent and vengeful and vulgar towards women.

trump can't keep lying about all the crimes he's done to so many. he can't be allowed to commit more crimes against the rest of us.

trump and His Cronies Aren't Even Hiding the Theft Anymore

This is how corrupt trump's administration is: he sued his own government for billions of dollars so he could then weasel out of the lawsuit and claim an imaginary settlement for a mere billion to pay off his foot soldiers among the insurrectionist ranks (from Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin at ABC News):

The Justice Department announced Monday that as part of a settlement agreement in President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the attorney general is establishing an $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration. 

The announcement came after attorneys representing Trump informed a federal judge in a court filing earlier Monday that the president was dropping his suit against the IRS.

The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, subsequently ordered the case closed -- signaling that she does not plan to challenge the controversial settlement. 

In a brief order issued Monday, Judge Williams said she was "stripped of jurisdiction" to continue overseeing the case. She noted that the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, so there is no "settlement of record" -- leaving her with no authority to adjudicate the private settlement. 

Do you see it? There's no official settlement of record. There's no paper trail the legal system is supposed to rely on. And yet, there's a billion dollars that Congress never approved of getting set up in a slush fund that I doubt will have any real oversight to where it gets turned into a funnel of illegality where even more money gets siphoned off to gods know where.

As thought making the payment amount symbolic to make it say 1776 like it's for FREEDOM on our nation's 250th birthday is going to patch things over. GODDAMN THIS IS CORRUPT.

This is Paul Krugman over at the National Memo:

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.

But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.

If there's any true justice, trump's move here should get tied up in the courts - especially over that fact that there's no judge-approved agreement on record - long enough for the Democrats to win back Congress this midterms well enough to guarantee they will use their Article I constitutional powers to block trump and his cronies from stealing one more nickel from our nation's coffers.

This is why the Republicans are so desperate to gerrymander the hell out of congressional districts, this is why the Republicans are so desperate to suppress voter turnout to keep their Senate seats safe from statewide anger. They're not that stupid to ignore the polls showing how unpopular they've gotten among even independent voters (and even enough registered Republicans willing to flip their ballots).

Voter turnout still matters: that's the good news. The Republicans can't rig enough barricades and tip enough scales to stop all of us angry at them and trump. Everyone needs to understand the mission this midterms: GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR DEMOCRATS. VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE BALLOT.

We can save this nation from an eternal void of Far Right grifting and greed, if we show up and vote goddammit.

Reading Between the Redacted Lines

Update: Many thanks to tengrain for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. A joyous Io Saturnalia to all and a safe Christmas and... and... is trump threatening Greenland again???

This weekend was meant to be a revelation about the scale and horror of the crimes Jeffrey Epstein committed as a sex trafficker of teen girls to the rich elites. Instead this weekend revealed just how inept and desperate trump and his lackeys are in trying to hide the depth of his involvement (via CK Smith at Salon): 

The initial chunk, made public Friday, includes thousands of pages of documents and photographs related to Epstein’s sex trafficking case. But large portions are heavily redacted, and officials have acknowledged that additional material is still under review, drawing criticism from lawmakers and victims’ advocates who say the disclosures fall short of promised transparency.

According to public records and investigative reporting over the years, complaints and law-enforcement awareness of Epstein’s conduct date to at least 1996, years before his first high-profile arrest in Florida in 2006. Advocates argue the newly released files underscore that Epstein was not operating unnoticed, raising fresh questions about why early warnings failed to trigger sustained investigations.

The Justice Department said redactions are necessary to protect victims’ identities and avoid releasing unverified or sensitive information. But critics contend that the scope of the blacked-out material makes it difficult to assess how authorities handled the case across multiple jurisdictions and decades.

The document dump arrives amid bipartisan pressure on the department to provide fuller disclosure and explain gaps in enforcement that allowed Epstein to maintain wealth, influence and access to young women for years. Lawmakers have also questioned whether the staggered release risks obscuring institutional responsibility rather than clarifying it...

Sarah Fitzpatrick over at the Atlantic makes the observation how these redactions are an injustice to the many women who were victimized over the decades:

Just over 24 hours earlier, on the eve of the deadline for the files’ release, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had placed a call to a group that supports survivors of Epstein’s abuse, according to multiple people briefed on the outreach. On the call, the officials previewed what would and wouldn’t be in the disclosure: photographs, yes; videos, no. Victims’ names would be redacted. At one point, according to a person familiar with the conversation, the officials suggested that if video exists, it may still be in the possession of the Epstein estate—an assertion that raised alarms among survivors who have long believed that recordings were used as leverage and blackmail.

(That) morning, the Justice Department indicated via email to the group that Bondi would try to speak with survivors and expressed support for them, according to people familiar with the correspondence. But soon after, they were told that the attorney general would not be available after all, due to a medical appointment. One DOJ official familiar with Bondi’s schedule told me the attorney general “was at Walter Reed today for a prescheduled routine appointment,” and emphasized that “no call was missed,” because “that meeting was never scheduled.”

Meanwhile, Blanche appeared on Fox News and announced that the administration wouldn’t be hitting its deadline from Congress. Some files would be released, but many would not—at least not yet. Survivors were left with familiar feelings of disappointment and disillusionment, as well as unresolved questions: Why did the Trump administration change course last month on its promise to release all of the Epstein files if it wasn’t going to actually follow through? What was the government holding back—and why?

The failure to schedule a call with victims was only one piece of a broader, frantic rush inside Donald Trump’s Justice Department as it approached the final hours of its congressionally mandated deadline. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump on November 19, requires the attorney general to make public, within 30 days, “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in the DOJ’s possession that relate to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The cache was believed to include flight logs, internal DOJ communications, and even records concerning the “destruction, deletion, alteration, misplacement, or concealment” of Epstein-related evidence.

The law tries to preempt a possible work-around by the DOJ. It explicitly bars the department from withholding, delaying, or redacting records because of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity,” even for “any government official [or] public figure.”

Members of Congress and staff for the House Oversight Committee told me that they were alarmed by the DOJ’s silence in the days and hours before the release. Staff for Senator Jeff Merkley and Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie had repeatedly sought guidance from DOJ officials on what would be released and how the department was preparing. The lawmakers never got a response.

Victims said Bondi’s failure to talk with them prior to one of the most significant releases to date made them feel that those most harmed by Epstein’s crimes were just an afterthought. Marijke Chartouni was among the victims who had been hoping to talk with the attorney general before the files were made public. “Today marks a long-awaited moment for many of us,” Chartouni told me. “This is about truth, accountability, and confronting law-enforcement failure.”

Instead of truth, most of what the Justice Department released were blacked-out pages, entire paragraphs covered up to where you couldn't even tell what was being reported in the first place (via David Smith at the Guardian (US)):

Illustration: Guardian Design/Images via US Justice Department

But it soon became apparent that, once again, Donald Trump had over-promised and under-delivered. Many of the documents in the data dump were heavily redacted, with text blacked out so it was impossible to read. Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, said: “What they have released is clearly incomplete and appears to be over-redacted to boot.”

The documents extensively featured photos of former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and appeared to include few if any photos of Trump or documents mentioning him, despite Trump and Epstein’s well-publicized friendship in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Far Right - not just trump - would like everyone to think the only one culpable in this scandal is Clinton, as though trying to get liberals to defend him as a way of making it easier for them to defend trump. Little realizing that nearly everyone on the Left knows Clinton is a sex pervert, came to terms with that years ago, and if Bill does get directly linked to anything criminal with Epstein's sex ring Democrats will be the first to throw him into the jail cell.

Moreover, Friday’s release was far from complete. US deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said “several hundred thousand” documents would be made public on Friday, but the need to protect the victims meant thousands more would be released over the next couple of weeks. The initial release also appeared to include far less than Blanche promised.

It smelled of a cover-up. And the rare reticence of Trump did little to dispel that notion... The president had spent much of this year resisting disclosure and denouncing the files as a “Democratic hoax”. But a rare bipartisan uprising in Congress forced him to cave and sign legislation last month mandating release of all unclassified Epstein records to be released by the end of 19 December in a searchable and downloadable format. His administration blew past that deadline and Democrats cried foul.

It's not the Democrats, though. At least one Republican in the House is upset by the delays and redactions and is teaming up with House Dems to bring Pam Bondi to account (via Andrea Hsu at NPR):

Two lawmakers are threatening a seldom-used congressional sanction against the Department of Justice over what they say is a failure to release all of its files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by a deadline set in law.

Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie spearheaded the effort to force the Epstein files' release by co-sponsoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but both have said the release had too many redactions as well as missing information.

"I think the most expeditious way to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi," Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, told CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday. "Basically Ro Khanna and I are talking about and drafting that right now."

It's questionable if anything to pressure Bondi is going to do anything to make trump relent on this cover-up. Don't forget, he brought in William Barr to be a replacement Attorney General just as the Mueller investigation into Russia's involvement in the 2016 election was getting closer to trump's sons, forcing a shutdown of that probe and a Mueller Report heavily redacted into uselessness.

We need to remember that after the first attempt by trump and his people to "release" the full Epstein Files turned into a debacle (because they basically rehashed everything already released) trump ordered the FBI to "flag any material mentioning trump in the Epstein Files" essentially for this moment when he's terrified of getting caught in acts he kept telling his MAGA base he never did.

With nearly every page blacked out - hidden behind more walls thrown up by trump and his lackeys - what else SHOULD we do? We can accept as fact: That every redacted line IS referring to donald trump and his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein committing illegal acts with young girls (and also possible money laundering). I mean, what can trump do, call us liars without exposing what's really behind those black lines?

There is one other thing we're able to read between all the redacted lines: This is all part of the horrifying culture among the political and wealthy elite that has existed for centuries abusing, molesting, destroying young women as part of a patriarchal mindset that they - rich, connected, untouchable - can do whatever they want without answering to any form of justice.

"If you're a star they let you do it" trump said in the moment he showed the whole world how vulgar he is, and it may be the only true thing he's ever said about the sordid world he and his fellow power elites live in.

We as a nation need to hold such corrupt people like trump to account. When the hell will any of those 77 million who voted for him in 2024 realize that and denounce that monster for the good of all?

Playing Calvinball, Uh trumpball, With Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Life

I hadn't been following up on this case from April, as the situation surrounding it was in flux and under serious legal review. But a major step happened last week when the judge overseeing the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia ordered the man released from custody as well as ripping into trump's corrupted Justice Department for blatant lies and stonewalling (via Edith Olmsted at the New Republic): 

In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s request to be released from ICE custody. In her ruling, she torched the prosecutors’ efforts to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, after they claimed they could not deport him to the country of his choice, Costa Rica.

“This time, when the Court sought information about Liberia and Costa Rica so to fairly assess the validity of Abrego Garcia’s claims, Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote.

“They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica ‘does not wish to receive him,’ … and that Costa Rica will no longer ‘accept the transfer’ of him,” she wrote. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there.”

Costa Rican officials had previously put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody—while Liberia had made no such assurances. Xinis wrote that the government’s continued lies made clear that Abrego Garcia’s lengthy detention was not for the basic purpose of a timely removal to the third country.

Xinis saw what a lot of others saw: there wasn't much legal foundation to what trump and his lawyers were doing in the first place.

Xinis also found that there was never any order for Abrego Garcia’s removal in the first place. “Indeed, Respondents twice sponsored the testimony of ICE officials whose job it is to effectuate removal orders, and who candidly admitted to having never seen one for Abrego Garcia,” she wrote.

Instead, the government argued that the court should take an October 10 “withholding decision” as evidence that an original order existed—but Xinis didn’t buy it. “The October 10 withholding decision is unambiguously not an order of removal,” she wrote.

Continued detention without a removal order violates Abrego Garcia’s rights under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as due process.

Of course, given the bullying and vengeful mindset of trump and his entire administration, DOJ lawyers tried to pull a runaround to Xinis' ruling by manufacturing a last-minute "removal order" from an immigration judge as though it would supersede the original order six years ago (something even enraging Andrew C McCarthy over at the National Review (yeah, I know!)):

In a nutshell, after months of playing “hide the ball” (or is it, “hide the lack of a ball”?) about whether there exists an order of removal authorizing Abrego’s detention and deportation, the Trump Justice Department has attempted to cure the absence of an order by what appears to be a blatantly illegal process: To wit, without notice to Abrego, the DOJ went ex parte to a DOJ immigration judge who lacks jurisdiction over the case, but who nevertheless dutifully issued a “sua sponte order correcting scrivener’s error” order, under which everyone is now supposed to pretend — Abracadabra! — that there was an order of removal all along.

I'm not a lawyer but I know a couple of them via Ta-Nehisi's Horde. Every single one of them were screaming (Upper Case Text) in the chat channels "THAT'S NOT WHAT A SCRIVENER'S ERROR DOES!" Along with their utter disgust at how trump's people are idiots with the legal system. Meanwhile:

The entire labyrinthine Abrego litigation — featuring immigration removal actions, habeas corpus claims, and a criminal prosecution that have collectively burdened the DOJ’s immigration tribunals, the district courts of Maryland and Tennessee, the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court — has been pursued by the Trump DOJ on the premise that there was an order of removal, that had been issued in 2019 conterminously with IJ Jones’s order of withholding of removal to El Salvador.

The assumption was that the order of removal authorized Abrego’s expulsion from the United States, and that the order of withholding of removal was just a caveat that Abrego, a Salvadoran, could not be repatriated to his native country. That caveat was in place because (a) Abrego had convinced Jones that he reasonably feared persecution in El Salvador, (b) the DOJ, in the first Trump administration, did not appeal that dubious ruling (it allowed Abrego to be released to live and work in Maryland), and (c) the current Trump DOJ did not (as far as is publicly known) attempt to get the caveat removed based on, among other things, changed conditions in El Salvador...

But as Judge Xinis found, no order of removal was ever issued. The court asked the government to produce it for months; prosecutors neither produced it nor provided a straightforward explanation for its absence from the record – to say nothing of an explanation why, in the absence of the order, they would suddenly arrest Abrego without notice six years after releasing him and then controversially send him to a notorious counterterrorism prison in El Salvador — the one country to which it was explicitly forbidden to deport him...

Yet, as Xinis concluded, if there is no order of removal, then the case Abrego filed against the government cannot properly be deemed a removal proceeding. Rather, it is a habeas proceeding – a challenge claiming that, in the absence of a removal order, the government’s detention and removal of Abrego are illegal. While Xinis would have no jurisdiction to act in a removal proceeding under immigration law, federal district courts do have jurisdiction over habeas and related claims...

To repeat what I argued Friday, that’s an offer (Garcia agreeing to deport to Costa Rica) the DOJ should have leapt at. It would have drawn the curtain on this sorry saga. Instead, the DOJ tried to use Abrego’s desire to go to Costa Rica as leverage in plea negotiations in connection with the dubious criminal prosecution the DOJ brought in Tennessee. The DOJ’s refusal was also vindictive: The Abrego case has been an embarrassment, so rather than accommodate the Costa Rica transfer and end it, Abrego was kept in custody while the administration unsuccessfully tried to arrange his removal to African countries – which didn’t want to take Abrego and to which he didn’t want to go.

In any event, once the DOJ lost the case on Thursday, when Xinis ordered Abrego’s release, Attorney General Bondi and her subordinates apparently decided it was futile to continue resisting a concession that there never was a removal order. But rather than just beginning a new removal proceeding — for which there is a basis since there is no doubt that Abrego entered the country illegally and never obtained lawful status — the DOJ opted for chicanery.

On Thursday evening, without giving notice to Abrego’s counsel, prosecutors went to the aforementioned IJ Phillip Taylor. At a little after 7 p.m., Taylor issued an “Order of the Immigration Judge” with the subheading “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error...”

Essentially, Taylor has tried to insert a previously absent order of removal into the 2019 document (the order of withholding of removal), label the prior absence a “scrivener’s error” (i.e., a mere clerical mistake of negligible substantive importance), and backdate the whole thing by six years (the “nunc pro tunc” provision, as if what was not there had been there all along.

Perhaps most hilarious is the assertion that this was done “sua sponte” (i.e., of the judge’s own accord). It’s as if IJ Taylor just happened to be sitting in his office on a Thursday evening, thinking about IJ Jones’s six-year-old orders (as I guess IJs are wont to do), and suddenly decided, on his own, to correct what seemed to him to be a clerical error — as opposed to being induced by Trump DOJ officials to make a substantive addition to an order, the absence of which had caused them to lose a high-profile case earlier in the day...

The following Friday, Xinis reinforced her order to release Abrego Garcia and warned the federal government to not arrest him under any pretense. One hopes that when hearings resume during the work week that Xinis shreds the Justice Department lawyers for this circus and starts issuing sanctions and contempt charges.

Out of all of the immigration battles being waged in the United States right now - the mass deportation roundups, the violations of civil rights committed by ICE and Border Patrol goons, the decimation of an honest migrant workforce that's contributing to a growing economic recession - this one person's legal fight is representative of trump and the Far Right's entire war. But it's a little bit more because of one thing: trump made this personal.

Out of the hundreds of Latino - and African, and Asian, and non-White - men - and women and children(!) - getting detained, trump himself seemed to focus on Abrego Garcia as his perfect poster child of "criminal gang-related" stuff he and his staff want to paint in broad strokes across that entire population. By late April as the case gained national attention - and warnings from legal experts that the Justice and Homeland departments were on thin ice with this one - trump went on a media offensive that was offensive (via Julia Conley at Common Dreams):

The White House’s public response on Friday to an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who the Trump administration sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month, was to mock the migrant and the U.S. senator who successfully urged Salvadoran President Nayim Bukele to allow a visit with him—and critics said officials may come to regret that decision.

“I suspect this is going to show up in a variety of court pleadings,” said former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, who is now a law professor. “Whoever thought this was cute at the time may be less giddy when this becomes evidence of intent to disobey a court order...”

The story headline read, “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador”—but the White House crossed out the word “wrongly,” replaced “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien,” and scrawled, “who’s never coming back” on the article about the father and sheet metal worker.

The digital graffiti was shared with the White House’s 1.6 million followers even though, as software engineer and writer Lakshya Jain said, “the White House admitted in court that they deported the wrong guy.”

Journalist David Leavitt added that the White House had given a federal court “more evidence of contempt,” two days after Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. warned that there was “probable cause... to find the government in criminal contempt”—punishable by fines or prison time...

The administration has also flouted the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling last week that found the White House must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Officials have admitted he was sent to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.” Although officials including Vice President JD Vance have called him a “convicted” gang member and Bukele repeatedly called him a “terrorist” in the White House earlier this week, Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of any crimes...

trump even took the time on social media to display a photo - later proved manufactured - of Abrego Garcia's "tattoos" as proof he was a major MS-13 gang leader. The whole thing was fake (via Louis Jacobson at PolitiFact):

"This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person,’" Trump’s post says. "They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles."

The figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols don’t appear in other photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including the one taken by Salvadoran government officials (and shared on X by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele) when Abrego Garcia met with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on April 17.

We asked the White House whether "MS-13" is tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s hand or whether the photo had been altered, perhaps to show that each of the pictorial tattoos represented one of those letters or numbers. The White House did not respond to our inquiry.

Several gang crime experts urged caution about assuming that any of the tattoos provide proof of MS-13 ties. MS-13 experts said the tattoos’ iconography was unfamiliar, and that those symbols have common meanings in mainstream tattooing...

Marijuana leaves, crosses and skulls are widely used as tattoos by people who do not belong to gangs. Gang crime experts said they did not stand out to them as MS-13 markers.

"I don’t believe a ‘dangerous individual’ would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand," said Liliana Castañeda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book "Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience."

Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said that in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, "The tattoos in the photo don't look familiar to me."

This is a burden on Abrego Garcia, not that he's facing legal challenges and deportation, but that trump has targeted Abrego Garcia for his racist ire.

Always remember: trump never admits to being in the wrong, he never will admit he lost anything (a legal challenge, a fight, an election, etc). In that, trump will blame others, he will claim he really won but his victory was "stolen," he will claim "vindication" even as he's forced to pay his victims in legal settlements. trump can never lose, ergo everyone else must.

This means that trump will never admit he was wrong regarding Abrego Garcia's situation. trump will double down on the lies and gaslighting, and he will enforce his underlings to do the same. he will insist the Justice Department pursue "every avenue" - i.e. manufacture any evidence - to ensure this one man gets convicted as a gang member criminal.

trump's DOJ lawyers are going to play fast, loose, and false with the legal system to twist reality to fit trump's fantasies. But the legal system - for all its faults - doesn't work like that. trump's going to run out of lawyers to do his bidding before he will shatter the American judiciary against his will.

In the meantime, here's hoping Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his family can rest - even for a brief moment - in the middle of this chaos.

Where Would You Hide, America, When All the Laws Are Laid Flat

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!
-- from A Man For All Seasons, written by Robert Bolt

trump's thugs are arresting judges now (via Alanna Durkin Richer, Devi Shastri, and Scott Bauer at AP News): 

Protesters chanted and marched Saturday outside the FBI after agents arrested a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities. The case has escalated a clash between the Trump administration and local authorities over the Republican president’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest. The man was taken into custody outside the courthouse after agents chased him on foot.

President Donald Trump’s administration has accused state and local officials of interfering with his immigration enforcement priorities. The arrest also comes amid a growing battle between the administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters...

Court papers suggest Dugan was alerted to the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the courthouse by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that they appeared to be in the hallway.

The FBI affidavit describes Dugan as “visibly angry” over the arrival of immigration agents in the courthouse and says that she pronounced the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. It says she and another judge later approached members of the arrest team inside the courthouse, displaying what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor.”

After a back-and-forth with officers over the warrant for the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, she demanded that the arrest team speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, the affidavit says.

After directing the arrest team to the chief judge’s office, investigators say, Dugan returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” before ushering Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer through a jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse. The action was unusual, the affidavit says, because “only deputies, juries, court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back jury door. Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.”

A sign that remained posted on Dugan’s courtroom door Friday advised that if any attorney or other court official “knows or believes that a person feels unsafe coming to the courthouse to courtroom 615,” they should notify the clerk and request an appearance via Zoom.

I may not be a lawyer or an expert on law, but from what I do know - my exposure as a journalism student and research librarian - is that judges don't like law enforcement entering their courtrooms threatening to arrest people there. There is an expectation - sort of like treating the spaces as holy ground - that people required to appear before their benches be protected if only in that moment from further police harassment of any kind.

It's become a popular trap for ICE agents, appearing at courthouses to "arrest" the migrants going through the established process to be in the U.S., who are required by the laws to show up regularly for hearings tracking their approval. trump's thugs want to scare these perfectly normal people - some who have broken no laws - into staying away from the courthouses - which is why judges want courts to be safe places - so that the agents can officially claim them breaking the rules and justify arresting them in the first place. It's a sadistic Catch-22 that shouldn't even be happening. 

Marcy Wheeler has her thoughts on the matter:

After Judge Dugan interacted with the arresting officers and, upon learning that they only had an administrative warrant and after telling them they needed a judicial warrant, she directed them to go meet with the Chief Judge (who wasn’t at the courthouse, but who spoke with the ICE officer on the phone). Then, Judge Dugan apparently adjourned Flores-Ruiz’ scheduled hearing and directed him and his attorney to leave via the jury door...

Flores-Ruiz appears to have gone, via back hallways, to the same sixth floor public hallway via which he had entered the court room. According the complaint, both DEA officers saw Flores-Ruiz in the public hallway before he entered the elevator...

Rather than arresting Flores-Ruiz, whom the officers knew was unarmed, there on the sixth floor, one of them rode down the elevator with him and his attorney and the other alerted the other officers. Four of them convened outside of the courthouse and chased him down the street and arrested him, just 22 minutes after he entered Judge Dugan’s courtroom at 8:43.

If the ICE agents were still able to track and arrest Flores-Ruiz, how the hell does that justify obstruction charges? And Dugan pointed out the agents had an administrative warrant, which doesn't really establish the authority to arrest somebody.

In a criminal complaint, the government charged Judge Dugan with 18 USC 1505, obstruction of a proceeding, and 18 USC 1071, concealing a person from arrest. [docket] The FBI arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse on Friday amid a deliberate media frenzy, up to and including the FBI Director posting a picture of Judge Dugan’s arrest in violation of DOJ guidelines designed to prevent prejudice...

Both Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller also made comments that arguably violate rules prohibiting comments that prejudice a proceeding (remember that Judge Dale Ho already found that Pam Bondi’s public comments about the Eric Adams case likely violated local rules)...

For obstruction, it will be contested whether an immigration removal counts as an investigative proceeding. For concealment, it will be contested whether the administrative warrant qualifies, and whether directing Flores-Ruiz via a back hallway to the very same public hallway where the officers had planned to arrest him and had a chance to arrest him amounts to concealment.

Both charges will pivot on Judge Dugan’s intent: whether she had corrupt intent and the intent of helping him evade arrest entirely, or whether she wanted to protect the sanctity of her own courtroom.

Key to her intent is her belief, which she made clear to the officers, that they needed a judicial warrant...

It may also matter that, by description, she didn’t actually look at the administrative warrant, because it might matter if she knew whether Flores-Ruiz had been deported before. In a report published before the arrest, Dugan is quoted as stating that “a warrant was not presented in the hallway on the 6th floor,” and by description, she was not shown one.

Thus far, the complaint seems to want to suggest that Dugan had corrupt intent because she was angry...

But judges get angry for lots of reasons, including that someone showed up outside her courtroom to surprise someone with business in it.

Wheeler's key point:

The arrest has rightly been viewed as an attempt, at a time when Trump and his minions are already making wildly inappropriate attacks on judges, to bully the judiciary.

trump and his lackeys have been getting a lot of pushback from the federal judges over their violations of due process and established norms. So here's the bullies, finding excuses to arrest judges and put the fear of their executive abuses onto the entire third branch of our Constitutional government.

trump despises the legal system, mocks it with every criminal and civil violation all because he'd abused that system for decades, and he now has a Supreme Court in his pocket that will excuse away every sin he's committing now.

Our most basic rights established by the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, are all under attack. trump and his racist anti-immigrant allies may be attacking only the "dread Others" for now, but they are doing so by shredding due process, the writ of Habeas Corpus, every protection of the Rule of Law set up over centuries of British and American legal rulings that serve ALL AMERICANS to this day.

The second those "Others" - who are human, they are us in spite of the fears that the racists spread - lose legal protections under the Rule of Law, we - the rest of the nation - can and will lose those protections as well.

These judges are fighting to uphold the Rule of Law, defending the centuries of precedence and norms and case history.

And trump will throw every one of those judges into jail.

First they came for...

Update: looks like a late-day sharing at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up from Steve in Manhattan. Thank you, Steve! 

Where Is Kilmar Abrego Garcia? (w/ Update)

trump's ongoing war against legal immigrants - and basically any American who isn't White Rich and/or Male - has taken the darkest turn yet. His street-level bullies among ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are grabbing people who are innocent of any criminal activity - without presenting ANY evidence of wrong-doing in a court of law as required by Writ of Habeas Corpus - and still shipping them overseas to a private-run prison to avoid any accountability to the federal courts back home.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the most clear example of these brazen attacks on our civil rights (via Ben Finlay at AP News):

Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or savory pork.

The entire family, including his parents, two sisters and older brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy ingredients from the grocery store and make deliveries with his brother.

“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.

A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill his older brother Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.

Barrio 18 similarly targeted Abrego Garcia, according to his immigration case. When he was 12, the gang threatened to take him away until his father paid them “all of the money that they wanted.” They still watched him as he walked to and from school.

The family moved 10 minutes away, but the gang threatened to rape and kill Abrego Garcia’s sisters, court records state. The family shut down the business, moved again and eventually sent Abrego Garcia to the U.S...

Abrego Garcia fled to the U.S. illegally around 2011, the year he turned 16, according to documents filed in his immigration case. He joined Cesar, now a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and found work in construction.

About five years later, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, the records say. In 2018, after she learned she was pregnant, he moved in with her and her two children. They lived in Prince George’s County, just outside Washington.

In 2019, Abrego Garcia went to a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested by county police, according to court filings. Detectives asked if he was a gang member. After explaining he wasn’t, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Abrego Garcia later told an immigration judge that he would seek asylum and asked to be released. Vasquez Sura was five months into a high-risk pregnancy.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, alleged that he was a certified gang member based on information that came from a confidential informant used by county police, records state.

According to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in his current case, the criminal informant had alleged that Abrego Garcia belonged to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he has never lived...

Again, our legal system relies too much on "confidential informants" who can't be verified and tend to provide erroneous claims. Just the simple fact that this "informant" put Abrego Garcia with a gang in a completely different state makes no sense and should have been put under stronger scrutiny.

In October 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution, according to his case. He was released, and ICE did not appeal.

Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly while the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his attorneys said in court filings. He joined a union and was employed full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

He and Vasquez Sura were raising three kids, including their 5-year-old son, who has autism, is deaf in one ear and unable to verbally communicate, according to the complaint filed against the Trump administration. They’re also raising a 9-year-old with autism and a 10-year-old with epilepsy.

Everything about Abrego Garcia says he's a family man, raising kids, working a solid job. Nothing here screams "street gang." For whatever he'd done to come into this country, Abrego Garcia was going through the legal motions to stay here on work permit, doing everything by the book.

And still trump's ICE thugs seized him, relying again on those dubious gang claims and immediately shipping him to El Salvador without a hearing, without a judge's say-so, without any of the due process our legal system is supposed to employ.

Abrego Garcia was pulled over March 12 outside an Ikea in Baltimore with his son, according to court records. An agent called Vasquez Sura and said she had 10 minutes to retrieve their son or ICE would request child protective services.

Abrego Garcia called his wife from jail and said authorities pressed him about MS-13, according to court documents. They asked about a photo they had of him playing basketball on a public court, and his family’s visits to a restaurant serving Mexican and Salvadoran food.

“He would repeat the truth again and again — that he was not in a gang,” Vasquez Sura stated in court documents.

In the mad rush under trump's call to deport as many "illegals" and "criminals" they could, ICE was under pressure to round up any suspected "gang members" even when the existing paperwork and judicial rulings said otherwise.

Everything that happened to Abrego Garcia was so outrageous, unethical, and arguably illegal that even ICE officials admitted this was "an administrative error," the legalese spoken to try and avoid liability for any criminal or civil charges aimed their way.

You would think then in a sane respectable legal system that when the officials admit they've made a mistake like this, they would work hard to undo said mistake and return their victims back to their lives. Instead, trump and his DOJ lackeys are mocking any effort to recover Abrego Garcia, basically telling the judges to get bent (via Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico):

The Trump administration insisted Sunday that it has no legal obligation to arrange for the return of a Maryland man illegally deported from the United States, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling last week only requires officials to admit him into the country if he makes it back from a high-security prison in El Salvador.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge that they don’t interpret the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling — that the administration “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release — as obligating the administration to do anything more than adjust his immigration status to admit him if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him...

The DOJ lawyers sadists are claiming this is all on El Salvador now, even though it's trump whose migrant-bashing policies illegally sent an innocent man to that prison, and even though trump is supposed to be a President with vast executive powers. This is pure gaslighting bullshit.

The administration’s position suggests officials do not view the Supreme Court’s order as compelling them to seek Abrego Garcia’s return. The Salvadoran native entered the country illegally around 2011 and had been living in Maryland. The Trump administration has admitted it deported him to El Salvador in violation of a 2019 immigration court order barring his deportation to that country. Though Abrego Garcia was denied asylum, a judge found he could not be sent to his home country because of a legitimate fear of persecution by a local gang.

The administration continued Sunday to flout a Friday order from Judge Xinis to deliver “daily updates” to the court describing its efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Sunday’s update from Evan Katz, the assistant director of removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the administration had “no updates” for the judge. A day earlier, in a similarly threadbare update, the administration turned to Michael Kozak, the State Department’s senior bureau official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who said Abrego Garcia was still alive in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

The administration is also bucking demands from Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that officials detail the arrangement to ship hundreds of foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador. One of the Sunday filings insists those details are classified and could be subject to attorney-client and state secrets privileges...

What this all boils down to is: trump believes he has Absolute Authority as President Sadist-In-Chief - thanks to that Supreme Court ruling that granted presidents vast executive powers without checks or balances - and this is his attempt to bully and break our federal judiciary into utter uselessness against his grand scheme to rule as Dictator For Life.

This is a severe Constitutional Crisis, far greater than anything we've witnessed since Watergate or the desegregation showdowns of the Civil Rights movement. trump - and the sadists serving at his pleasure not to their Oaths of office - refuses to obey legal court orders from the Third Branch of our federal government, daring the judges to cross a line - something like holding Justice Department officials in contempt of their courts - that could trigger terrible retributions from a quisling-esque Republican Congress or trump's own brute squads.

If trump succeeds here - if Judge Xinis or any of the other judges fighting these deportations that are clear violations of our constitutional rights crumples here, if they allow Abrego Garcia and hundreds of others who were accused of criminal behaviors without proof in the courts of law - this would be a green light for trump and his lackeys to escalate their war on the rule of law and start denying our rights to more groups of Americans trump and co. would want broken and/or removed.

You think trump and Stephen Miller and half the Republican leadership will just stop at going after "illegals"? They're trying to get rid of Birthright Citizenship, something that protects ALL of us - Latino, Black, Asian, Native, Women, Gays/Lesbians, Trans, even other Whites - from losing our protections under the Constitution.

That "When they came for..." poem wasn't exaggeration. When the fascist bastards take over a government and start their purges, they'll keep removing anybody they despise/fear/hate until they get their bloodied, ashen, and morally bankrupt Utopia. trump and the Republican wingnuts are not going to stop. They will go after Latinos. They will go after Blacks. They will go after Chinese and Indians and Japanese and other Asians. They will go after people registered to vote Democrat. They will go after women who aren't already beholden to their patriarchy. They will go after anyone who offends their evangelical hate-filled faith.

We are all on that list destined for those privatized prisons, for the elimination of our citizenry, for the end of any rights - to vote, to own property, to fight for good wages, to cherish and share our lives with those we love, to speak out in protest - we've taken for granted the last 200-plus years.

We are all going to end up like Kilmar Abrego Garcia if we don't fight back.

We all need to speak out about where Abrego Garcia is, and why he isn't home with the family that loves and misses him.

Where Is Abrego Garcia?

He's in a hell that a broken, corrupt sadist sent him to. This is all on trump, and that bastard needs to answer for his crimes (again).

Update 4/15: As a helpful guide, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick drew up a diagram to follow regarding Abrego Garcia's situation and the dubious arguments trump and his thugs are using to claim the man guilty without trial.

Just updated this timeline to fix a typo and address an error in the last box where I'd gotten the manner of arrest wrong. I present the full version Mr. Abrego's time in the United States, using court documents to explain the allegations of gang membership and what actually happened in his case.

[image or embed]

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) April 15, 2025 at 11:18 AM

Reichlin-Melnick btw is a fellow at the American Immigration Council, graduate from Georgetown Law, who comments on immigration policies on social media.

Injustice For All

Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sorry I'm not in a better mood. Please leave comments below, hopefully the revised Blogspot system is easier to navigate. I just want to hear from people. It's so lonely for me.

Ever since the election results, I've been dreading this moment. Special prosecutor Jack Smith - who had been pursuing two criminal cases against donald trump for both his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection AND the theft of thousands of classified documents - filed paperwork with the courts today to cancel those prosecutions now that trump will be legally protected with presidency. David A Graham at the Atlantic tries to cover the implications (paywalled):

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority...

I decried trump's tactics, and I hated how the legal system seemed to go out of its way to play the game by his rules not theirs. And yet this is how broken our American Justice has become: 

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election...

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect...

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

With regards to the one criminal trial that did convict trump on 34 counts, even that is now facing turmoil as the prosecutors and judge try to figure out sentencing on someone who will be federally protected from the law. The civil trials that trump lost - the one involving tax fraud on his properties, and the ones involving his sexual assault and defamation on E. Jean Carroll - are likely to continue through the appellate process, but you can be damn sure trump will use every legal power the presidency can inflict on those rulings to weasel his way out of those matters.

I am angry at Garland - and at President Biden, who nominated Garland as a sign of professionalism and normalcy returning to the Justice Department - only as far as his inability to understand the seriousness and severity of everything trump represented. Dammit, man. trump was - still is - a clear and present danger to the United States.

I am more angry at a Republican Party that - confronted with multiple facts that trump was dangerous and criminal to boot - refused to hold trump accountable, and refused to regain any semblance of ethical responsibility towards the United States. They happily did something the Founders could never have imagined: They openly supported a convicted felon, tax fraud, and sex offender for the highest office in the land.

I am extremely angry at a Beltway media that repeatedly refused to remind the American public who and what trump really is. Not just the increasing signs of mental instability and the ongoing evidence of trump's sadism, sexism, and racism. They kept underplaying the facts that trump had been convicted of felonies, that he'd been exposed as a business fraud and gaslighter, that his contempt towards women drove him to acts of vulgarity. This is the same Beltway media that had fucking meltdowns over Hillary's emails, and they failed to point out how trump was the most corrupt person - in a field containing the likes of LBJ, Nixon, Harding, and Andrew Jackson - in presidential history.

But my deepest ire is for the 75 million or so fellow Americans who - with all the evidence that IS out there, with all the reporting that did happen that showed trump was a convicted felon and sex offender - still voted for a monster like him. There may have been a lot of low-information voters out there this cycle, and a number of them voted for trump without knowing - or comprehending - the facts that trump was a legal abomination. But enough of you knew. Enough of you knew he was a criminal and you voted for him anyway. Goddamn you.

trump is now the most dangerous person in America, because he's going to get granted executive powers - yet again - that he openly promises to abuse the minute he gets sworn into office. trump is going to twist the Department of Justice into his Department of Vengeance, attacking every person who exposed his criminal acts by turning them into criminals without evidence or rationale. Think of the disastrous Durham prosecutions that never proved trump's lies about the 2016 elections: Think of how worse it's going to be as trump pursues falsehoods and fantasies about 2020 being 'stolen' from him that four years of digging by his wingnut allies never confirmed. Think about all those people who were convicted for their roles in the January 6th Insurrection, that trump claims are 'heroes' and who'll get pardoned even after all those trials and juries proved how violent those insurrectionists are.

Think of how trump's entire existence - all the bankruptcies, all the acts of fraud he plead away - is proof that our legal system fails to hold everyone accountable. If you're poor, if you're a minority, if you're a woman, you won't find any justice with prosecutors or judges or cops who'll punish you even when you're innocent. If you're rich, if you're white, if you're male, you can buy and bully your way into favorable treatment and slaps on the wrist because you can afford the lawyers who play the game.

And if you're donald trump, you fucking get away with everything.

Goddamn us.

My One Sentence Thoughts About Judge Merchan Delaying trump's New York Felony Sentencing Until After the 2024 General Election

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK. 

The Threat of trump's Atrocities

Update 5/1/24 - Thanks again as always to Batocchio for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please take the time to visit the rest of the blog, and get the vote out for Biden this 2024!

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire

Well, the Supreme Court finally heard donald trump's legal arguments for getting ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY for all the criming he did as President; including taking classified documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act, and his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection. 

It didn't go well (via Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.

“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted...”

The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law...

Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him...

It would be madness for the SCOTUS Justices to consider their own destruction if they allowed Absolute Immunity for Presidents to move forward. A single man with the power to do what he will and never held to account will easily sweep aside every law and every norm until even the courts are no more. And yet, because it's trump begging for that immunity - because it will save him from the justice he's earned over 40-plus years of fraud and other misdeeds - we could well have five conservative Justices taking the absurd move to free trump from his legal fate... and create a situation where trump can become dictator on Day One of a second term and never let go. Serwer adds:

Trump has the conservative justices arguing that you cannot prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the country, because then they might try to overthrow the country, something Trump already attempted and is demanding immunity for doing. The incentive for an incumbent to execute a coup is simply much greater if the Supreme Court decides that the incumbent cannot be held accountable if he fails. And not just a coup, but any kind of brazen criminal behavior. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to,” Kagan pointed out during oral arguments. “And, you know, not so surprising, they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”

Never mind how such a legal decision could unleash absolute power from the current Presidency of Joe Biden. The Far Right Justices may try to carve out narrow definitions of "immunity" in order to save trump from both the classified documents trial and the January 6th trial, but even then they will grant that same immunity to Biden, since even under their twisted view of the Constitution they can't grant exemptions to one (trump) specific person here. And if Biden's people are smart enough, they can figure out how to expand that "immunity" to let Biden go directly after donald trump - and his Russian-backed GOP buddies - as a clear and direct threat to the national security of the United States.

Those conservative Justices - and their Republican party allies - may think that Biden is too "institutional" in respecting the norms of political office, but they themselves are creating a partisan environment - and are openly causing disruptions in foreign policy and national security - to where Biden may have no choice but to impose the expanded Executive powers the Supreme Court is about to unleash. Like Lincoln during the crisis of secession and civil war, Biden's own congenial world-view will have to move aside for the practical reality of bending the spirit of the law to prevent trump and his lackeys from breaking the entirety of the law itself.

Because on this point, Serwer has it right:

No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.

The Republicans have tied their fate to a man who is more con artist than conservative, who is more destructive to the nation than to the Democrats.

For the love of God and for the love of the Constitution and everything America ought to stand for, these Justices need to let trump go, let him face the legal system he's mocked for too long.

And for the nation, for the LOVE OF GOD, MOM, AND APPLE PIE, stop voting Republican until all their crooks are gone from power.