This first point has nothing directly to do with lying for your boss, but Glenn Kirschner raised a horrific point about the leadership of the current Department of Justice. They are all Trump’s former criminal or impeachment lawyers. As the president’s former personal, criminal lawyer, someone like #2 at DOJ, Todd Blanche, is required by law to keep any criminal information he has about the president secret. Attorney-client privilege prevents Trump’s lawyer from divulging anything he knows about his client’s criminal history, the only exception being if the client reveals to his lawyer that he intends to commit an act of violence, or other serious future crime (though the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court has given this president broad immunity to commit, and discuss, crimes as president).
If Trump told Blanche anything about any crime the DOJ is now investigating, Blanche has a legal duty to protect his former/present client by remaining mum. Clearly this creates a glaring conflict of interest and should have prevented confirmation of Trump’s criminal and impeachment lawyers to top positions in the DOJ. Conflict of Interest has gone the way of Abuse of Power, Obstruction of Justice, the Emoluments Clause, the Espionage Act, the Privacy Act, the insurrection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and all norms related to government under the lawless reign of America’s most resolutely self-interested president.
The Department of Justice concealed three of four FBI memos detailing interviews with a woman who testified credibly about being forced into sex acts, at age fourteen, by an older adult Donald Trump. The memos, when they were released, at the demand of the president’s opponents, were heavily redacted. The fact that the woman was called in to give her story on four occasions strongly suggests that the FBI found her credible. Between interviews three and four she was almost run off the road while driving and had received death threats. Neither Epstein or Trump were/are beyond that, Trump threatens to kill people all the time, politically, career-wise and with physical death. He has killed thousands of “scumbags” in just the first year of his second term. She decided against doing a fifth FBI interview since it appeared very unlikely that any kind of justice would result from her complaints, which she’d been making for years by then.
Under oath in front of a House Committee, a combative Pam Bondi (Trump’s former impeachment attorney, lobbyist for Hamas funder/Kushner benefactor Qatar and protector of Epstein in Florida for years as Florida AG) asserted that there is no evidence in the Epstein files that Trump did anything criminal. Ted Lieu (D-Ca) shot back that she was lying, the FBI interviews are evidence that Trump may well have committed criminal acts. Bondi angrily warned him not to accuse her of a crime (perjury, which she’d just committed). He stood his ground.
Under oath in front of a House Committee a combative Pam Bondi (Trump’s former impeachment attorney, lobbyist for Qatar and protector of Epstein in Florida for years as Florida AG) asserted that there is no evidence in the Epstein files that Trump did anything criminal. Ted Lieu (D-Ca) shot back that she was lying, the FBI interviews are evidence that Trump may well have committed criminal acts. Bondi angrily warned him not to accuse her of a crime (perjury, which she’d just committed). He stood his ground.
Evidence may not be dispositive proof that a crime was committed, but it is evidence that Trump may well have done something that Bondi, Blanche, Pirro, Habba, Halligan, etc. will continue to lie about, on mass media and under oath. If they want to keep their jobs, working for the world’s most shameless and prolific liar, they have to lie. None can answer the question “did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?” without some kind of grotesque semantic contortion that does not include the word “yes.” That is a condition of employment under the world’s most powerful, compulsively lying maniac. Kristi Noem let it slip that Trump knew about her waste of $220,000,000 on an ad campaign that paid her friends and that was it for ICE Barbie.
After Pam Bondi’s closed door meeting with the House Committee that subpoenaed her for an April deposition, she and Todd Blanche (there as her lawyer, one supposes) were met by reporters in the hall. To be clear, the law required her to release all files by December 19, 2025, with redactions only to protect victims, not any of the powerful men who traveled in Epstein’s criminal orbit. The DOJ is in clear, ongoing violation of this law. Let that sink in. This ensued after the sham “briefing” that Democrats walked out of after an hour:
But even as she defended her handling of the files, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged problems with the document release itself — an admission that added fuel to the controversy.
“I think it was less than 1 percent error,” Bondi stated about the botched release of files during a press gaggle, before quickly turning it over to Blanche.
“Yeah, no, that’s right,” Blanche said. “We said from the beginning that any mistakes that were made, and there should be no mistakes.” He emphasized that corrections were made as soon as issues were flagged.
Blanche repeated they fixed the mistakes “immediately” several times before stammering, “And so of course we don’t ever want to do anything to re-victimize anybody that was victimized by the horrible crimes of Mr. Epstein. But, but, and we didn’t. And we didn’t.” source
In fairness to Blanche and Bondi, the only really glaring mistake they made, aside from illegally withholding millions of documents they are legally required to disclose, massively redacting the released files in ways that violate the law, and fighting every step of the way to withhold anything that could incriminate anyone associated with Mr. Trump, including, and especially, Mr. Trump, was to release the names and nude photos of a bunch of underaged girls who were victimized by Epstein and his associates. It’s harsh, according to Blanche, to call that innocent mistake, corrected as soon as it was called to the DOJ’s attention by survivors — right after everyone who wanted to was able to download the embarrassing nude photos of young teenager sex abuse survivors (child pornography), and their names — re-victimizing anyone. As super-lawyer Todd Blanche himself said “But, but, and we didn’t [re-victimize anyone]. And we didn’t.”
Lying is a job requirement, for those working for a man who lies with almost every utterance. Tulsi Gabbard, former liberal Democrat, friend of Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad and defender of Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, was confirmed, on party lines (plus John Fetterman, the worst public ambassador people with mental illness have had for a long time) as the Director of National Intelligence. In this capacity she advises the president on national security threats. Under oath the last few days she insisted it was the president, not her, who makes the final assessments on what is or is not an imminent national security threat. Her deputy director resigned after Trump attacked Iran based on an national intelligence threat assessment that did not show Iran posed any imminent threat to the United States. Gabbard wants to keep her job, as she further demonstrated when she freelanced by going down to Georgia to watch the FBI seize boxes of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, based on an extremely shabbily supported search warrant.
Heather Cox Richardson gives a much more thorough, better account of some of the recent lies being told by people who work for the most mendacious world leader since the very stable genius who ran Germany from 1933 to 1945, when, hiding in a bunker, he poisoned his wife and shot his dog and himself. Here’s Heather, with last night’s letter.
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