Author Archives: oinsketta

Fascism does not succeed without mass desperation

Inheriting a fairly thriving economy (an unjust one, but by the measures we use to determine the health of a capitalist economy, healthy) and a Congressional budget that promoted renewable energy and allocated funds to address many other longstanding problems, Trump went to work deliberately negating the will of the majority, as expressed in Congress, and tanking the world’s richest economy. In doing so he also sought to crush all hope for a sustainable and more equitable future for 90% of Americans.

Make people insecure enough, gouge them for services they need, deny them health care, and food, demonstrate your right to rough up, detain and deport anyone you like with masked, unidentified squads of secret immigration police not accountable to any laws, remove all hope of change for the better and you have fertile ground for public panic. Mass firings, in violation of civil service law, by unaccountable, secret state actors, great for stoking fear and outrage. By putting the populace in increasing fear for their day to day existence you create the desperate, violent conditions in Germany after the Great Depression. Once you’ve set the stage on fire, creating enraging propaganda and stoking the blind fear necessary for a fully fascist state becomes child’s play for the dictator on day one.

There were at least three direct outcomes of Trump’s “in your fucking face” approach from the day he claimed victory in the 2024 election. Trump, as the Unitary Executive, on a self-proclaimed divine mission of vengeance, asserted, in a series of executive orders he never read, that he would carry out Project 2025 boldly by saying “fuck you” to Congress, which, under our constitution, has the exclusive “power of the purse” and later to every court but the 6-3 majority one that has his hideous back. He declared a fake emergency (we are supposedly at nationwide war with a super powerful Venezuelan gang) which he claims gave him the unlimited powers his idol, Mr. Hitler, assumed under the Enabling Act in the Weimar constitution after the torching of the German parliament building. Trump’s seizure of emergency powers, based on nothing, is currently under leisurely review by the courts.

The second direct, predictable outcome of his “economic” policies (and the president’s claimed right to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress is currently also tied up in court) is already hurting tens of millions, sending the poor deeper into inescapable poverty, increasing poverty and child hunger, until the rippling effects of his idiotic, economically nihilistic policies fuck the vast majority of Americans a short time later (while further enriching our most lucrative corporations). All of this predictable economic destruction, the inevitable result of his colossally stupid (or devilishly clever, depending on desired outcome) policies, is coming to pass as surely as his “clean coal” and fossil fuel pollution will continue killing people as he defunds what Congress has allocated for renewable energy and places new taxes on it to further enrich super-wealthy psychopathic fossil fuel barons who will now generate all electricity by burning up handsomely subsidized non-renewables.

The third, and probably most dangerous, is Trump’s largely uncontested insistence on his right to prevail with incoherent arguments that fly in the face of all evidence. He continually reserves to himself the right to lie and to fight, to the death, anyone who calls out his lies. Emotionally, he is two years old, and he cannot control his impulse to rage. Our acceptance, as a culture, of a powerful two year-old’s right to rage at us whenever he feels frustrated, which is several times a day, is the most damaging part of this stunted strongman’s attack on reality. That and the sycophancy of his shamelessly ambitious political appointees (and powerful unappointed “influencers” like Laura Loomer).

The capitulation of America’s most powerful individuals and institutions, the prime beneficiaries of our corrupt culture, is probably the most sickening aspect of this Project 2025 scenario. Frivolous lawsuits brought by America’s most litigious asshole, lawsuits that would be laughed out of any court, net the Orange Polyp tens of millions of dollars in settlement money (a business expense and tax write off for these craven financial giants) from corporations (and their human alter-egos) eager not to get on the madman’s shit list.

One key thing to remember during all this — there is only one true victim in the United States. Donald J. Trump. Everyone else is whining about nothing, only poor, innocent Mr. Trump is persecuted like nobody’s ever seen. In Trump’s mind there is no such thing as an “Epstein victim,” aside from Donald J. Trump, whose only “crime” was being friends with a creep.

In closing, here’s a bit from Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent letter:

Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter [Tulsi Gabbard’s Russian talking point that Obama, not Trump, committed treason — with allegedly false claims of Russian meddling — in the lead up to the 2016 election] to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.

The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

”Jeff was a creep who stole my beautiful 16 year-old Mara-Lago towel girl.”

Endlosüng

Every insane, violent, totalitarian plan for world domination has an end game, one Nazi word for this was Endlosüng — The Final Solution. This widely known secret plan of mass extermination, of all Jews and millions of other undesirables, would solve Germany’s problems once and for all, true believers in the infallibility of a morally deformed supreme leader believed. The Leader spellbound masses of otherwise hopeless Germans with promises of endless winning and eternal national glory, once the homeland was cleansed of blood poisoning and made mythically pure again. Mass belief in the Leader was fueled by his charismatic certainty in his holy mission. God, it is well known, and those He speaks to directly, can never be wrong.

94 year-old saltwater crocodile, and compelling argument against naturalization, Rupert Murdoch, and equally crusty, soon to be 90 year-old fossil trillionaire Charles Koch don’t have much time left to see the payoff for their vast investments, to watch their 50-year wet dream come to full, final fruition — a one party government that protects their privileges from “majoritarian tyranny” in perpetuity. American fascists are in overdrive now, working overtime around the clock, as their figurehead battering ram reveals himself as more and more of a liability to their cause of a government permanently controlled by the 0.01%.

Cracks are appearing daily in the transactional far right coalition currently going by the idiotic name of MAGA. It seems, by The Wall Street Journal’s current treatment of Trump (Murdoch’s other main public opinion organ, FOX, continues to play both sides for now) that Trump may be close to the end of serving his purpose for the oligarchs’ cause. An additional data point: Murdoch has always personally hated Donald Trump, outside of Trump’s usefulness to Murdoch’s cause. So, of course, Trump sues Murdoch for truthful reporting he claims is a lie and demands Murdoch immediately appear to be grilled under oath.

During Trump’s six month snatch and grab crime spree, preemptively greenlighted by the best Supreme Court unlimited dark money could buy, POTUS has done such widespread damage, in so many ways, that his political brand is probably expendable now. His inept attempts to distance himself from his good friend Jeff, a guy who appears to have become a billionaire by blackmailing his rich, powerful libidinous guests with videos of them in compromising positions with 14 year-old girls, seem to be digging him deeper and deeper into a hole he can’t get out of. What are Charles Koch and Rupert to do at this point? They’re not going to be taken down by this ranting, revenge obsessed two year-old and his cult of violent dupes. He’s crashing the economy with his demented tariffs and other destructive and widely unpopular agency closures. First order of business: make sure citizens can’t vote! Then they can deal with the Trump problem.

I would think what the FBI would posthumously identify as a flamboyantly gay Venezuelan hairdresser, former prisoner illegally rendered to CECOT, the torture prison for terrorists, on a successful mission of revenge (turn off the cameras, let the Secret Service fall asleep, not notice the crowd pointing to the nut with a gun on a nearby rooftop), after posting communist messages online, would be the perfect patsy to place the quieter, less obtrusive, equally psychopathic JD Vance into the Oval Office to put the final touches on Koch’s Project 2025. Fascists are always killers who practice strategic murder along with indiscriminate killing — death threats and murder are integral to fascist rule. A dramatic political murder would leave the base in a much better mood than removing a cognitively failing popular president (among his 39%, anyway) using the 25th Amendment. Killing makes the most sense to transactional psychopaths.

In fact, Trump’s US, in all of our names, is currently engaged in mass killing that makes Israel’s horrific killing spree in Gaza look restrained. Project 2025, demanding the closure of USAID, has already killed hundreds of thousands of poor people worldwide. As of June 15, the death toll for adults and children from aid funding cuts topped 340,000 and came out to 103 deaths PER HOUR (per HOUR!) [1] (on pace for 14,000,000 total deaths, it is widely reported [2])  by denying food and medical aid to desperately poor HIV, TB, malaria and diarrhea patients and starving children and elderly around the world. The story of this deliberately caused (illegally so, but the president may commit unlimited crimes in office with impunity, see Trump v. US) senseless program of mass death, alone, should be disqualifying for an American presidential administration. Instead, because of the far right firehouse of mendacity, always spewing disinformation full-bore, it’s a rarely covered “externality” of Making America as Great Again as it was during previous Gilded Ages.

A successful takedown of numero uno, organized with discipline, distance and perfect deniability by the ruthless Koch network (and we still don’t know exactly who was involved in Lee Harvey Oswald’s successful hit on JFK, 62 years later), committed on live TV by a “gay illegal alien radical leftist” would also inflame the public and merit imposition of martial law. That would seem to be pretty timely about now, in light of the raging unpopularity of Project 2025 and the cascading follies of Trump.

What better than something dramatic. cinematic, galvanizing — riveting live reality TV with scripted commentary — to facilitate seizing absolute power once their popular front man has proved himself expendable and becomes an involuntary martyr to the cause? Killing is nothing for Nazi types, the goal of autocratic power and limitless wealth is worth every bit of the illegality and violence it takes to achieve. Would they rule out nuking an anarchist jurisdiction? Do you think these folks would hesitate for a minute if there was a chance it could cement them into permanent power?

When the ideologically pure 6-3 Supreme Court majority, bought and paid for by our oligarchs and groomed in the extreme right judicial fraternity, The Federalist Society, declared, before his reelection, that Trump could not be prosecuted for virtually any crime he committed while president the first time and had immunity for any crimes he might commit, no matter how many or how egregious, during his second term — unless they ruled otherwise (they haven’t), that was set and match for American democracy, unless we, the People, can stop these motherfuckers first. The Federalist Society majority he recently railed against has continued to rule that Trump can engage in illegal firings, illegal agency closures, illegal renderings of humans to foreign countries without due process and so forth until they get around to ruling on the merits of things like mass firings without cause that violate civil service law, usurping the powers reserved to Congress, and the constitutionality of the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship, in a year or two, or never.

July 2024’s 6-3 decision in the aptly named Trump v. US effectively made the next president, be it Trump, JD Vance, or Peter Thiel himself, the American dictator. In order install a dictator implementing wildly unpopular programs that benefit only the top of the top 1% while immiserating tens of millions of less fortunate Americans, the vote must be suppressed as much as possible. Fortunately for Koch and Rupert, Leonard Leo and their creepy allies, this is something the Supreme Court can adjust at any time by striking down all voting rights legislation, like it did in Shelby County v. Holder, disemboweling the Voting Rights Act reauthorized last time 98-0 in the Senate and then nullified by John Roberts and four Federalist Society Libertarians, based on a lie Roberts wrote into the heart of the ruling.

Here’s something to add a bit of steel to your spine here in the shadow of the swastika and urge you not to tune out, not to give up advocating for truth, justice and the American way (well, not all of the American way, obviously, but the high principles we are supposed to always be animated by in the world’s longest running experiment in democracy).

[1] The calculator shows us that’s 2,472 deaths a day, 17,304 a week, 74,160 in a thirty day month. WHAT THE FUCK?!!! Cutting a program that cost 0.3% of the federal budget to give billionaires a little more money they don’t need? This is what happens when AI is employed to make life and death decisions that benefit a select handful of citizens at the expense of everything else.

[2] from that article:

Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts – combined with the potential dismantling of the agency – could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years, the study in The Lancet said.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse makes irrefutable case for Bove’s unfitness for office

Three major examples of prosecutorial misconduct in his short six month tenure in Trump’s DOJ, including a contempt hearing delayed for months by two Trump judges on the DC Circuit appeals court (until their colleague can be appointed to a lifetime post on the federal bench), and the creepy Emil Bove, Trump’s modern day Roy Cohn, is put up for a party line vote without any further debate or questioning.

Voted in for life with a 50-49 mandate!

In his honor, here is Trump’s tribute poem to Bove, himself, the Deep State and Project 2025.

The need for collective moral action

Robert Reich ends today’s piece about living a moral life in our age of bullying with this plea:

Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.

This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.

source

It’s hard to disagree that we all need to be part of a vast network of moral resistance. The damage to our society that the Project 2025 government is busily doing is pure, punch-you-in-the-fucking-face fascism in action. Opposition to such bullying, lying and flagrant disregard of law would seem to be a bipartisan effort, except to tens of millions who respond to the reasonable fear and insecurity that accompanies powerlessness by following a strongman who have no qualms about bullying. The bully, they feel, will protect them, so they revere him and justify his bullying as part of a larger plan that humans cannot comprehend. The face eating leopard will never eat their faces, they believe, because they faithfully worship the mighty predator.

We must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance, as Reich says. It is our only hope to save our professed, widely shared values about justice, human equality and the inherent dignity of every individual. These values are under determined attack by literal American fascists who believe in an inalterable hierarchy of unaccountable power and privilege for superior citizens. The frustrating question is “how, exactly, do we organize and participate in this desperately needed vast network of moral resistance?”

I have been trying to find a way to get directly involved and have so far come up with very little, outside of signing up for, and donating to, my local Democratic organization. This is part of our dilemma as Americans. We are programmed, from birth, by thousands of hours of ads viewed in our earliest years, to be avid consumers. There is a seductive illusion of freedom created by the vast variety of consumer items we have the complete liberty to choose among (assuming we can afford to buy them). This phantom freedom also creates a childlike dependence on the cool things we can buy at retail superstores and other, less tangible, shiny objects sold to us by hucksters.

Our politicians? They need millions of dollars to run for federal office, and that money doesn’t come cheap, most of them feel they have to take it from whoever offers it to them, if they are going to win elections. We wind up with Chuck Schumer and company as the compromised Opposition party whenever Republicans are in the majority. The Democratic party can’t condemn an American ally for starving a besieged, captive population in an area that ally is constantly bombing. Desperately hungry people, lined up for food, are shot dead by an occupying army on a daily basis. But the Democrats corporate and lobbying sponsors would be furious about an official Democratic party condemnation of these war crimes by a beloved American ally. So Amy Klobuchar condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza, decries the forced starvation of the victims of Israeli policy, and two days later smiles in a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the US to show that he can come visit his allies with impunity.

This is what decency and civilization demand. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it. It’s why, at a moment when the forces of fascism are so organized, well-funded and gleefully defiant in their sadism, terrorism (masked ICE squads accountable to nothing but unelected American Nazi Stephen Miller) and contempt for our experiment in democracy (which has allowed them to legitimately take power, as Mr. Hitler did back in 1933)

On Thursday, Trump’s loyal, cowed and bullied senators, who have already voted for cloture rather than allowing any further debate about Emil Bove III, their boss’s cynical pick for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court (the cadaverous looking, bullying, morally repellant Bove has never been even a traffic court judge) will likely have the votes to put a man currently the subject of contempt of court proceedings into lifetime office as a judge. The contempt proceeding against Bove has been delayed for months by a temporary restraining order (which usually last a week or less) granted by Noemi Rao, rabid Federalist Society federal appeals court judge crazed in her assertions of illimitable Trump Executive Power and her vigilance against “usurpation” of such power) allowing Trump’s lickspittles to put Bove onto the one man short list to replace Alito or Thomas.

How do we organize and participate in a moral movement to stop that, by Thursday? The war against fascism is a war of attrition, and we all have to keep doing our part to protect values we all believe in, values under attack by a lawless regime fueled by bullying, death threats and the thrill that unaccountable sadism inspires in millions of our fellow citizens. God bless these United Shayyyyysh.

We get very little important news from our corporate media

Here are a couple of major, and extremely urgent, real life stories that the corporate mass media (and, recall, corporations, as “persons” are psychopaths whose only goal is monetary profit) mentions marginally, if at all. The mass media covers politics as a good old fashioned horse race, with handicappers giving betting odds. The whole enterprise is a mind-numbing casino designed to fuel anxiety and generate advertising dollars. Meanwhile, in the board rooms, the human embodiments of corporate personhood who make decisions for their corporate alter egos openly bribe the most corrupt president in US history, pursuant to the plan to fully corporatize the US meticulously outlined in Charles Koch’s Project 2025.

To learn what’s really going on more of us need to become reliable citizen journalists, people so offended and alarmed by the march of fascism — masked goons squads on the streets obedient to no law, brutalizing law abiding immigrants, and the occasional Democratic elected official, to make their arbitrary arrest quotas of 3,000 per day,  unrestrained by a spineless Congress passively watching laws unenforced, and court orders defied, overseen by an openly partisan DOJ leadership composed entirely of Trump’s recent team of criminal lawyers, criminal in the sense of having defended the boss in numerous criminal proceedings and criminal in their contempt for the law — that they follow stories more closely than corporate advertisers may be comfortable with. 

ICE filling privatized for-profit detention centers (GEO Group’s former lobbyist, Pamela Jo Bondi, is on board with this highly lucrative plan) with law-abiding immigrants and American citizens with Hispanic surnames:

That tricked out used 747 that AG Pamela Jo Bondi’s former employers, Qatar, gifted to President Agent Orange? We haven’t heard a peep about it in the media for months. Did he accept the illegal emolument? We may never find out from “the most transparent administration in US history.” All media eyes are on the distraction du jour, are there videos of Trump cavorting with underaged girls at his former best friend Jeff’s place? Calling it a distraction is not to minimize the destruction done to countless young lives by these powerful, unaccountable pedophiles who anonymously participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. Wait, what about the big, fat, beautiful plane Qatar is bribing Trump with? No news. Except, there was apparently almost a billion dollars to refurbish the plane, snuck into the Big, Hideous, mass murdering Bill that Trump twisted arms to ram through Congress 51-50, as reported in the NY Times… at the same time Trump denied $15M in FEMA aid to Maryland after a devastating storm, because they are not a “red” state, like the surrounding ones, all hit by the same storm, that got FEMA money.

Most of my once large family was killed by Nazis and their accomplices in 1943. I was raised in the shadow of this horrific fact, like Armenians, Native Americans, Darfuris, Hutus, Tutsis, Gazans, Ukrainians, descendants of enslaved Africans, the list is as long as history. The fuckers who create the conditions for genocide are always the same, they change hats, colors, languages but their deadly narrative is always identical — don’t look at what I am doing to YOU, go kill THEM!

It is frustrating as hell that there is no clear organized resistance for progressives, how hard it is to jump directly into the fight, the way there is on the right with a marching lockstep and a million opportunities to prove their devotion to the cause.  We have no strong opposition party organizing resistance and making news every day by presenting facts in reaction to every single incoherent step toward fascism that Project 2025 inplements.   The Democratic party urges us to donate and vote, and sometimes sign petitions, and to please, please donate to the important fight.  The minority leader of the House of Representatives telling the American people that Democrats will address everything being done to our democracy “at a time and place of our choosing” come on, Hakeem Jeffries.

We can’t rely on mass media owned by psychopaths for accurate, actionable information about the world.   It has a single minded agenda: to sell advertising to generate profits for shareholders.  Billionaires all have the same bottom line — to make even more money.  It’s a kind of sickness that has no cure.   Corporate culture is its deadliest symptom.  We are living in it.  Keep your eyes open.

Subscribe to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s invaluable free daily newsletter, for starters; follow Robert Reich, Alison Gill, David Feldman, Katie Phang, Mehdi Hasan, Brian Tyler Cohen, Glenn Kirschner. Be alert for other trustworthy, non-corporate sources for what is actually going on during the American far-right’s determined lurch toward permanent one party rule, also known as totalitarianism.

Trump is as insane as the most powerful madmen of the 20th century, but he is only a battering ram for the interests of those much smarter and more calculating than him. The people calling the shots, even if equally mad, have been fine tuning their secretive plan for American fascism for decades, and financing it with unlimited dark money. Their goal is within reach, but for our resistance, and you can almost smell their frothy saliva at being so intoxicatingly close to their goal.

Also, never forget that mockery is what monsters fear more than anything. This short bit cracked me up. Laughing has never been more important than it is right now, my friends.

Two sides of the totalitarian coin

An old friend sent me this to ponder. She wrote: I did not quite understand this one…

Orwell was obviously right-on, tyrants always ban words, ideas, discussion, books, history, science and call it all something else, like Project 2025’s “Big Beautiful (mass murdering) Bill!” .   Huxley was famously insightful about society, I don’t think I ever read more than a few pages by him, I’m not really familiar with his philosophy.  I recall reading something he wrote about psychedelics that I liked.

About the author of this excellent analysis:

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers and mobile devices, and was critical of the use of personal computers in schools.[1] He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1970), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). source

I took away from the Postman piece that Orwell saw oppression and violence as the way to break people to totalitarianism and that Huxley saw seduction and the ready, unhealthy satisfaction of every base desire as the way totalitarians get control.  These views are two sides of the same insightful coin, tyrants always do both.  The ones you can’t win with bread and circuses, and playing to their favorite passions, you lock them up, publicly torture a few of them, burn their books, murder their leaders. 

I took from this that Huxley saw the corruption of meaning, the incoherence needed for a police state, as a function of narcotizing citizens, rendering them senseless with an ever more tempting smorgasbord of overwhelming distraction and weirdly engrossing unreality that catered to their unquenchable desires.  Giving the masses what they love, what they crave, junk food, violent sports, titillating “reality TV”, pornography, the internet, twitter, instagram, youTube, NETFLIX, ICE, DOGE, “The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”, mind altering substances, hatred of others (many, apparently, love to hate), it all feeds into the same insatiable appetite for oblivion that drives everything else in out of control capitalism.   Constant distraction and the ease of access to pleasures, often in unhealthy, addictive forms, makes citizens complacent and apathetic while the fascists go to work without interference from more than a tiny, easily manageable handful — at first, anyway, until, after enough senseless atrocity, masses start shaking themselves awake (hence the far-right’s eternal war on “wokeness”).    

Both of these thinkers (and Neil Postman, too) seem like very profound prophets at this hideous moment in human history, as global oligarchs’ stage their determined march to totalitarianism. Tyranny on a mass scale always depends on the destruction of coherence and eliminating the possibility of meaningful dialogue. There appear to be at least two equally effective routes to the goal of mass incoherence that is the foundation of the Nazi state, 

DOJ leadership is Trump’s criminal defense team

Now Trump is planning to install the first of them on the Supreme Court.

There are many other horror stories going on at the same time: mass killing and war crimes in Gaza, in Ukraine, a determined and insane plan to bring the US back to the age before there was any regulation of predatory capitalism, the deliberate erasure of history, the deliberate destruction of essential government services, incoherent denial of science and disease control, rage against those who would protect the environment, poverty and the pain associated with it about to explode in the wealthiest country in history, inhuman treatment of humans in our country who are trying to obey our laws, called “illegals” and brutalized by masked goon squads when they appear for court hearings, or simply go to work, violence and hate crimes on the rise as a result of these brutally unpopular policies.

The news cycle is currently dominated by arguments about Jeffrey Espstein, infamous pedophile and sex trafficer, a onetime close friend of Trump’s, found dead in one of Bill Barr’s jail cells (the night after Epstein’s lawyers found their client in fairly good cheer), and the DOJ’s refusal to release the vast files it has on the powerful sex trafficker’s clients and victims. The super-rich, politically connected dead pedophile’s ultra-wealthy girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the only conspirator ever charged in connection with a criminal conspiracy victimizing countless girls and young women that saw over 4,700 wire transfers to the pedophile/sex trafficker amounting to over $1,000,000,000 (in only one of several banks he had money in) [1].

Trump’s criminal DOJ recently issued a short memo concluding: nothing to see here. The shit show is vast, deliberate, relentless. Number Two in the DOJ, Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche, is set to visit Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, certainly to make her an offer in exchange for her principled silence if Congress manages to subpoena her. Nothing to see here. The Supreme Court said the president is allowed to commit crimes, as long as he uses his official chain of command to order those crimes in performance of his core duties. What? You got a problem with that?

Here’s one small but key circus act, playing out against the hideous backdrop of an openly criminal administration whose Department of Justice leadership are Trump’s top criminal and impeachment lawyers.

I am referring, of course, to Emil Bove III, Trump’s 44 year-old pick to replace one of the aging far-right hardliners on the 6-3 Trump majority.

The Grey Lady has annotated Bove’s letter to Acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sasson, accepting her resignation and snarling at her like the bully he is known to be.  Sasson was the principled Trump-appointee who tendered her resignation rather than do Bove’s unjust, unethical, illegal bidding (dismiss criminal case against NYC mayor Eric Adams, without prejudice, allowing it to be prosecuted any time Adams didn’t do his part of the quid pro quo).    

Bove, sounding more like a defense lawyer for Adams than a top Justice Department official, demeans the process by which a grand jury indicted the mayor, saying they had done so based on a “one-sided” and “partial” presentation of the evidence.

You can scroll through the annotations, there are maybe a dozen, to get a pretty good picture of Mr. Bove’s, eh, character.   He’s on Trump’s one man short list to fill Alito or Thomas’s smelly seat before the midterms.  Senate to vote on his lifetime seat on the federal bench any day now.  His nomination left the Judiciary Committee last week on party lines, 7-6 when Grassley cut off questioning of Bove, called for a vote, and Democrats walked out.

Bove is a real modern day Roy Cohn.

clickez above for the rest

[1] From Senator Ron Wyden:

The file shows Epstein used multiple Russian banks, which are now under sanctions, to process payments related to sex trafficking. A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan. You shudder to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and girls out of those countries and into Epstein’s web of abuse.

Again, these are all potential leads the Department of Justice ought to be digging into. This is about years and years of international sex trafficking. None of this is a hoax. None of it is a scam. It’s insulting to the intelligence of the American people when Trump and Bondi say there’s nothing here to investigate.

source

Beware Emil Bove III

Emil Bove III, supremely loyal Trump criminal attorney, is, unless several Republicans find their spines, about to be confirmed for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals bench, with a party line majority of 51-50 or so. That would put the relentless, unprincipled 44 year-old Trump warrior, Trump’s present day Roy Cohn, in position to take ethically compromised Samuel Alito’s or Clarence Thomas’ smelly seat before the midterms, when he could be confirmed 51-50.

Bove is, not to put too fine a point on it, a straight up evil fuck. Significantly, Bove lacks candor. A lawyer, as an officer of the court, has a duty of candor to the court. Bove (as made explicit in a 2/5/25 memo from Pam Bondi the day after she was confirmed as AG, quoting Executive Order, Ending the Weaponization of The Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025)) instructed DOJ subordinates to fuck candor to the fucking court if the court was not letting DOJ carry out the policies and directives of Mr. Trump.

A prevaricating, stonewalling lawyer is bad, unethical, an enabler of evil practices and subject to disbarment in the rare case where the stars line up correctly. If a dishonest lawyer works for the Department of Justice, it’s very dangerous, for justice and democracy. Imagine the harm a federal appeals judge without candor can do to the faithful administration of justice. Try to imagine a harm an unappealable Justice without candor, or the capacity for remorse (a feature of moral weaklings in a fascist regime) would not be capable of doing.

Here are a few highlights from the resignation letter of Trump appointee, acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sasson, on being instructed, by then acting AG Emil Bove, to conditionally drop the charges against NYC mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’ agreement to allow ICE raids in New York City. The letter was sent to Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General of the United States. Bondi apparently accepted the resignation of this principled Trump appointee:

You and I have yet to meet, let alone discuss this case. But as you may know, I clerked for the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis. I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.

I therefore deem it necessary to the faithful discharge of my duties to raise the concerns expressed in this letter with you and to request an opportunity to meet to discuss them further. I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record. . .

. . . Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case. Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law,[1] that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo. That is especially so given Mr. Bove’s comparison to the Bout prisoner exchange, which was quite expressly a quid pro quo, but one carried out by the White House, and not the prosecutors in charge of Bout’s case. . .

. . . Moreover, dismissing the case will amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department. Despite Mr. Bove’s observation that the directive to dismiss the case has been reached without assessing the strength of the evidence against Adams, Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on “fanfare and sensational claims.” Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal. As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme. . .

. . . For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C. 3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal.”). . .

. . . I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.

In the event you are unwilling to meet or to reconsider the directive in light of the problems raised by Mr. Bove’s memo, I am prepared to offer my resignation. It has been, and continues to be, my honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Here’s a short excerpt from Emil Bove’s acceptance of Danielle Sasson’s resignation letter (nicely annotated by the Grey Lady) in which he suspended lawyers working for Sasson and told her they’d all be investigated for disloyalty to the Boss and flagrant violation of Executive Order 14147.

On January 20, 2025, in Executive Order 14147, President Trump established the following policy: “It is the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement.” In a February 5, 2025 memorandum setting forth the Department’s general policy regarding zealous advocacy on behalf of the United States, the Attorney General stated:

[A]ny attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law.

Your Office was not exempted from the President’s policy or the Attorney General’s memorandum.

Here is a former AG Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memorandum, duly rescinded by Pam Bondi in footnote two of the Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft [1] memo of 2/5/25. It is now officially and explicitly NOT the policy of the totally, like not-weaponized Trump DOJ that: the Department is steadfast in its commitment to protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.

[1] Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft “the Leader’s words have the force of law”