Category Archives: Law and Justice

Total exoneration

Donald Trump has never been totally exonerated in his long life of being endlessly, unfairly persecuted, no more than he has ever been held accountable for any of his various crimes and misdeeds. He has defeated justice many times, by delay, bribe (e.g. Pam Bondi in Florida, $25,000 to her campaign if she’d drop case against his fake university) obstruction, vexatious litigation, using government resources to prosecute vendettas, making threats against judges, jurors, witnesses, calls to violence, getting others to cover up his many crimes.

The second most corrupt Attorney General of modern times, Bill Fucking Barr, lied when declaring that the Mueller report “totally exonerated” Trump when Mueller wrote, in his report:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. . .

. . . The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I know we live in a post-fact age, but consider this:

Any president who leaves office, illegally taking with him with boxes of classified and top secret papers, although presumed innocent until convicted, is a criminal suspect until investigated and exonerated of wrongdoing. Especially if, like Trump, he claims he can declassify them with his mind, that he doesn’t have them, that he returned them all already, that he’s willing to show the government that he doesn’t have them, then gets one of his lawyers to lie that no more classified documents are in his possession, and so on, rope-a-doping the authorities for a year and a half. When a federal judge signs a search warrant, specifically describing the evidence of crime being sought and the exact places where they are likely hidden, that’s not an “illegal raid”. There is nothing more legal, under our law, than the execution of a search warrant adhering strictly to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

The punchline; they find some of the classified documents the president illegally took when he was dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. They find boxes of the documents he claimed he didn’t have, in a bathroom, in a ballroom, in his sock drawer, the ones he lied about having (or selling to Putin, Mohammed bin Bonesaw, et al).

He got away with clear violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice because he had a corrupt judge, appointed after he lost the election he claims was stolen from him, throw the case out, on the shabbiest of legal theories (tip of the cap to Clarence Thomas) after dragging her feet for over a year ruling on routine motions.

Consider Trump’s long campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election, an election he was told, and knew, he lost (‘how did I lose to that piece of shit?’ he asked one of his lackies after losing the election). 60 baseless law suits, pressure on various state officials, a lying $50,000,000 ad campaign (payments for ‘Stop the Steal’ ads stopped on January 6, don’t you know?), slates of fake electors, threats to state officials, an illegal plan to get the DOJ to contest results in states he lost, a plot with his “friends” in Congress (“The Greenbay Sweep”) to throw the final certification into the House so he’d be declared the winner, increasing madness unto epic fury leading up to the passionate Day of Love on January 6, 2021, when he whipped up a crowd he knew to be armed to go to the Capital for a bloody riot the RNC later rebranded as “legitimate political discourse”. We all saw that legitimate political discourse unfold on TV, along with the president who sent the mob to disrupt the joint session of Congress and watched the assault on TV for over three hours, and how it led to 140 Capitol and D.C. policemen hospitalized with grievous injuries sustained during the legitimate political discourse. That he beat being prosecuted for his multi-tentacled treason and shitting on his oath to defend the Constitution, by delay, obstruction, threats, violence, etc. does not mean he was exonerated for jack shit.

Now Trump’s fully weaponized, selectively prosecuting DOJ, led by his criminal and impeachment attorneys, has fired everyone involved with either prosecution against their boss. At a far-right event the other day, Nazi consigliere Todd Blanche proudly announced this purge was complete. Fair is fair. Come to kill me, I kill you, how you like that, asshole?

Here’s one of the “righteously” fired DOJ attorneys, J.P. Cooney, with a short summary of how guilty Trump was of both of these disqualifying criminal conspiracies. Cooney is now running for Congress in Virginia.

Coherence in the face of brutal, incoherent force

In a habeas corpus case last month, a district judge in West Virginia, Joseph Goodwin, granted the release of a poor devil illegally rounded up, denied due process, rendered, and unlawfully imprisoned for a civil immigration violation in a privately owned detention center by Stephen Miller and ICE. The judge wrote this crystal clear condemnation of the lawless behavior of DHS, and freed the illegally detained man. The writing is beautiful and the legal analysis is consistent and completely coherent.

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

The Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus filed by Petitioner Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, [ECF Nos. 1, 26], brings just that circumstance before this court as a discrete case and controversy. This court will decide it as such. But I will not pretend, through careful procedural language, that what is at issue here is a technical question of statutory interpretation. The overarching issue is whether the federal government may deploy anonymous agents to seize persons on American streets and highways for civil violations, without warrants, without identification, and without any process before or after. The Constitution does not permit that. The remainder of this opinion explains why.

In our constitutional republic, governmental force derives its authority from the Constitution. But that authority is not unlimited. The Government’s power is legitimate only because it is derived from the People and exercised through law by identifiable public officers answerable to the public and to the courts. The structure of the Constitution guarantees visibility. Both the officer and the force he employs are traceable to authority delegated by the People and subject to the limits imposed by law. When the Government uses force against the public, the citizen can recognize the officer as a lawful representative. The public can evaluate the act. The judiciary can later review it. Every stop, arrest, detention, and use of force can be tested against the Constitution’s protections. Not so here.

For these reasons and the reasons that follow, Petitioner’s Amended Verified Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus (“Petition”), [ECF No. 26], is GRANTED. The court FINDS that both his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process have been violated. Immediate release is the only relief sufficient to remedy Petitioner’s unlawful detention.

The judge grants relief to the illegally imprisoned man in no uncertain terms:

Therefore, the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, [ECF No. 26], is GRANTED. Petitioner is ORDERED released immediately from civil immigration custody. Respondents are PROHIBITED from re-arresting and detaining Petitioner absent significant change in circumstances to justify detention or subject to the determination of a neutral and detached
decisionmaker.

The court DIRECTS the Clerk to send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to counsel, any unrepresented party, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia.

The court further DIRECTS the Clerk to post a copy of this published opinion on the court’s website, http://www.wvsd.uscourts.gov.

Judge Goodwin’s entire decision is here, well-worth a read. Thanks to Hawk for pointing this out on youTube.

Be fair, any powerful war criminal would make the same demand

For starters, a bully always looks to provoke others, weaker than him, to fight back. This gives the bully the righteous excuse to rightfully retaliate. Trump sought, by unleashing masked, untrained goons, in full riot gear, to rough people up, break car windows and deploy tear gas on peaceful protesters, to provoke a violent response that would enable him to dominate the streets with the military. His attack on Iran, as illegal an act of unprovoked war as Cheney’s war on Iraq, likely has the same larger aim. Get Iran to retaliate with terrorism in the US, then, bingo, September 11, a new Patriot Act (probably already waiting at the Heritage Foundation) and soaring, intoxicating new emergency powers for Trump. Toward that end, he seeks preemptive immunity from the International Criminal Court for war crimes he’s busily committing now.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (he got the winner to give him her prize), Donald J. Trump, is threatening the International Criminal Court to back the fuck off and stop trying to accuse righteous Christian Americans of committing war crimes in various completely necessary excursions to ensure world peace. If the ICC had existed in their time, both Hitler and Stalin would have done the same, rest assured. Trump is just the first US president with the massive balls to do this, (hence the need for the 2,000,000 square foot Trump-Epstein ballroom where the East Wing used to be — finally a place where he can feel comfortable spreading his legs with those unfeasibly gigantic balls).

After the atrocities and massive death toll of World War Two (estimated at 70-85 million– including 40-50 million civilians), and widespread war crimes committed during that war of mass murder, idealists around the world pressed for and created the International Criminal Court. Those who massacred civilians would now be held accountable for crimes against humanity, under international law. Mass murderers of civilians selected by ethnic group would be prosecuted for the newly coined crime of genocide.

Not long ago (when I was in law school, during the last years of the twentieth century) many international law experts were optimistic about the rule of law prevailing among the nations of the world. They believed this even though Reagan had already rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction over Americans and Israel and a few other countries had done the same. Modern day Nazis had other ideas about this so-called rule of international so-called law. Look what our boy Trump has to say about this stupid court:

War criminal Pete Hegseth [1], Secretary of Indiscriminate and Absolute Lethality (not pansy-ish “legality”) keeps bellowing about the right to execute enemy combatants, or suspected drug smugglers, or anyone else deemed a danger, or a potential danger, even if they’re wounded, disarmed, incapacitated or surrendering. (See, nobody has prosecuted the agents who executed Alex Pretti while he was restrained face down on the ground… so, what are YOU going to do about it, bitches?) Hegseth said the US will not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement” and will “give no quarter to our enemies” (it’s also a war crime to kill people who are surrendering) so murdering like it’s a video game is cool again. The Department of Lethality posts video game-inspired little movies about the glorious war in Iran, with mad respect to the American service members who may, theoretically, be dying as a result — “as often happens in war” as POTUS sagely notes.

And while we’re talking about complete immunity, total impunity, pre-emptive exoneration, here’s POTUS:

Last night, Trump posted on social media: “We are totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise, yet, if you read the Failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think that we are not winning. Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth. We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time—Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” source

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.”

[1] See, for example, his order for a “double tap” strike to kill South Americans clinging to the wreckage of their sinking boat after a drone strike destroyed it, killing everyone else aboard (and sending any evidence of the crime they were never charged with to the bottom of the ocean). See also his recent U-boat torpedo sinking of an Iranian vessel returning from the Indian Ocean, and then letting the survivors drown. The Tomahawk missile that made a direct hit on an Iranian middle school, killing 170 girls the same age as Epstein’s victims? Not his problem. He’s not going to be restrained by no stupid rules of engagement! He’s maximally lethal, yo. No quarter for the godless enemies of Christ! Like it says on his arm: Deus Vult.

Heather Cox Richardson concludes last night’s letter

The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.

Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”

On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.

After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”

“It’s the bad part of war.”

read the whole, very much on point, letter here

So true, sad, and also, bad

War crimes are not war crimes, if done in the name of justice, truth, freedom, decency and Jesus, according to people like unindicted war criminal Secretary of Virile Maximum Lethality, Pete Kegsbreath. Genocide is not genocide, if God tells you to do it, according to indicted war criminal Bibi Netanyahu, whose radical religious allies, and a multifront all-out war of mass destruction, are keeping him from standing trial for corruption. Every mass murder in history has been committed with God on the side of the murderers. Thoughts and prayers, y’all, and a dignified transfer to each of us.

Stolen Elections, 2026 edition

The flailing president, sinking to a historic low in the polls and recently “betrayed” by members of a partisan judicial fraternity that he appointed, is railing against — among many other things — mail-in voting. He wants to ban it, has threatened to do so with a stroke of the Sharpie at the bottom of a royal decree. He claims, without evidence, that mail-in voting is ripe for cheating, as the corrupt Bill Barr also insisted, on national TV, in the lead-up to the election his boss would insist was stolen from him (Barr later said under oath that he told Trump the election fraud claim was “bullshit”). The entire idea of widespread voter fraud, of any kind, is definitively debunked by the far right Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database.

I was super concerned, in the lead up to the 2024 election, that Trump megadonor, pugnacious Postmaster Louis DeJoy, had the motive and the means, the lack of scruples and the demonstrated track record of slowing mail delivery, to not deliver ballots from selected zip codes. Aided by, as far as I could tell, the unprincipled “independent” Kyrsten Sinema, the Postal Board of Governor nominees that could have removed DeJoy were permanently stuck in committee as the swing vote, Sinema, kept the status quo in place. There was no reporting on this deadlock.

There was also virtually no reporting that DeJoy had refused the Postal Inspector General’s recommendation that USPS postmark ballots the day they arrived and segregate ballots from the rest of the mail to make tracing and counting ballots easier. DeJoy, to my knowledge, refused both of these conditions, at least when the IG made the recommendations and he refused those two specifically, from a list of ten.

I read somewhere recently that mail in voting in Fulton County decreased from 29% of votes cast in 2020 to 5% in 2024. This would support my theory that MAGA man was on the job in Fulton County, Georgia, and other key counties nationwide, for his corrupt buddy in 2024, the guy who never met Jeffrey Epstein, the guy who told Florida officials, after Epstein’s arrest, that Ghislaine Maxwell was evil.

I did a search for percentage of votes by mail in Fulton County, 2020 vs. 2024. Elon Musk/Peter Thiel/Mark Zuckerberg/Jeff Bezos’s AI belched out this non-answer, the first search result that always comes up, a dubious one at best. You can type -AI at the end of your search term and sometimes avoid this Artificial Idiocy bullshit with its disclaimer that it might be totally false.

Auto-generated, may contain inaccuracies, or outright falsehoods. Bots programmed by those who work for psychopathic oligarchs do not necessarily reflect the views of the transactional oligarchs who had them programmed. Tried doing ten or twenty more searches, for potentially better results.

Georgiavotes.com has this number for early voting in 2020, but nothing for 2024:

Early Voters (Fulton County)

318,565 (71.4%) of 2024 general election early voters voted early in the 2020 general

It has been virtually impossible to compare mail-in ballots from 2020 and 2024. I haven’t been able to verify the drop from 29% to 5% mail-in ballots in Fulton County with numerous searches. Google directs me to a string of articles alleging (without evidence) massive voter fraud, many involving a purported 315,000 votes, in Fulton County in 2020 and other claims related to Trump’s ongoing propaganda war against mail-in and Black, and female, voting. There were also numerous hits, totally unrelated to my search, about the seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, based on an affidavit that did not make out probable cause for a search and seizure.

After a frustrating amount of dead end searches, these, from Georgiavotes.com, seem to confirm the steep decline in mail-in voting from 2020 to 2024. I have to think pugnacious weasel DeJoy played his part, as did RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The numbers, in each case, seem to have been posted during the election. But note that almost three times as many people (451,520) requested ballots in 2024 as in 2020 (166,603), if the very specific numbers on Georgiavotes.com are to be believed. Note also, the 451,000 early ballots requested in 2024 doesn’t specify how many were mail-in. It’s not like I’ve been able to verify any of this anywhere else. Here is Louis DeJoy’s public relations press release, why would he lie?

The determined squids of the right have spread ink, mud and shit in the water, nothing to see here! Frustrating that straightforward searches no longer yield relevant search results. Place AI in charge of internet searches and you can cook the information people get to see. AI, of course, can be programmed to do whatever its masters need. The horror. Here’s another piece of random data I was able to glean somewhere:

If you have any questions about the United States Postal Service’s commitment to the timely delivery of every mail-in ballot, this should reassure you.

Meanwhile, call your senators, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them to vote no on the SAVE MAGA Act. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.

CEO of “the most transparent administration” in US history

Why Heather Cox Richardson is the best at what she does

And why Donald J. Trump is the biggest psycho grifter ever to hold our experiment in democracy hostage. Heather begins:

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

source

Russell Vought, the Koch Brother’s own Project 2025 Nazi state architect and unelected Czar of the US budget (apart from his party-line confirmation in the Senate), the constitutional scholar/genius who declared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs unconstitutional and grounds for denying funding already approved by Congress, quietly diverted $15,000,000 in appropriated USAID funds (cut by nongovernment employee/new government agency head Elon Musk’s nongovernment DOGE) to pay for his security detail. Better, for him, that his super important life be protected from every possible threat, by a $15,000,000 private army, than to have two or three hundred thousand insignificant brown children die preventable deaths formerly prevented by USAID.

Happy belated Presidents Day to these Nazi motherfuckers. Don’t forget to give generously to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, a wonderful new charity that, since an IRS ruling in September, 2025, can accept tax-free donations. USA! USA!!!!

The SAVE MAGA Act, in 60 seconds

Liz Oyer, the former DOJ Pardon Attorney (until Trump 2.0 began and all pardons became purely transactional) lays out the real intent of the SAVE Act. Not only is it designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote, its real purpose is to create complete chaos ahead of the midterm elections. Liz does an excellent job laying out the method and desired effects of this heavy handed Nazi attempt to fully Nazify our United States in the midterm elections. This proposed law (which does not yet have support in the senate to become law) will be particularly important in the disobedient, so-called Blue States, the places Bill Barr dubbed “Anarchist Jurisdictions” under Trump’s first wild spin as president. They can’t afford another Minneapolis!

Generally a sweeping nationwide change in laws takes a year or more to efficiently roll out, but efficiency is clearly not the goal here. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) don’t have that long, they’ve got to get this done chop chop, with the zeal of billionaire “disrupters” who break the thing into too many parts to ever put back together before asking permission, or getting sued and stopped by courts enforcing the law.

The business model of disrupters is also the business model of MAGA. Break things you hate, smash them to smithereens, like Trump Postmaster Louis DeJoy did by disassembling gigantic mail sorting machines in “Blue” cities, delaying mail delivery and so on, and let your accursed enemies try to stop you in court. Let them keep trying this defensive tactic after you’ve ramped up to targeting them, killing them (when needed) and shoving them into concentration camps a thousand miles from their homes.

Not losing in 2026 is a TOP priority for the VERY STABLE GENIUS and his united billionaire benefactors/beneficiaries, if there is going to be a country anymore! So much the better if they are able to bring on the chaos in time to disrupt the 2026 elections, eh, Susan Collins (an announced “yay” for the SAVE MAGA Act in the Senate)?

The SAVE MAGA Act

There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA.  The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).

For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)

The U.S. Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.  Ask to be connected to your senators’ offices.  

Update:

The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.

“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”

The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)

Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:

Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.

Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.

Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.

for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move

Script for ICE/CBP reforms

It is imperative to call and email our senators (and members of Congress) as they negotiate conditions for funding ICE and CBP.   You can reach them at (202) 224-3121. 

Have a short script ready.  This will be mine, starting with thanking my otherwise weak-willed senators for taking principled action in severing ICE/CBP funding from the rest of the government appropriations bill in order to rein in their unchecked abuses.

Thanks for taking a stand for democracy, your votes are crucial and I greatly appreciate you holding the line in negotiations over reforms of ICE and CBP. 

ICE and CBP have been deployed to cities under a false national emergency in an attempt to violently provoke a violent response from citizens.   They should not be armed for anti-riot duty as though facing an insurgency in Fallujah — they have faced zero violence, in spite of their constant violent provocations including cold blooded murder.  

At minimum, they must not be allowed to conceal their identities and must be placed under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.  They must not be armed with assault rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and green gas — a chemical weapon illegal under international law.   Do everything possible to restrict the ability of these armed goons to gas children, smash car windows, break into homes, schools and churches,  and murder law abiding civilians with impunity.

Stand strong against this brazen, lawless assault on our democracy!

And for my follow-up email:

A federal judge had to order this the other day, after massive ICE gassing (the plume of chemical irritant was visible from a mile away) of a peaceful crowd in Portland:

“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads,” he wrote.

Federal agents are restricted under the order from using chemical or projectile munitions unless the target of such weapons “poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Agents are not allowed to deploy munitions at the head, neck, or torso of any person, “unless the officer is legally justified in using deadly force against that person.” And agents are restricted from deploying munitions if doing so would “endanger any other individual who does not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Source

For help understanding the stakes and preparing your message, read this from Indivisible.

Trump DOJ fucks the Epstein survivors again

Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the best in the business, describes the “inadvertent” outing of previously unidentified Epstein victims in the recently released Epstein files, 50% of the total in the possession of DOJ.   O’Donnell reports that the DOJ had repeated requests from survivors to redact their names.  The names of Epstein co-conspirators in the sex trafficking of girls were all redacted, in direct defiance of the law Trump signed in November, while the names and birthdates, and even photos, of many of the girls themselves were … whoops, uh…  released publicly — also in direct violation of that same law. 

The DOJ’s new front man, soul dead Deputy Attorney General/Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche (sidelined AG Pam Bondi’s idiocy has been recognized even by Trump) whined that the DOJ corrected these little “mistakes” as soon as they were informed by the women whose nude photos as girls had been publicly released.  Blanche claimed that these “mistakes” reflected like 0.002% of the millions of files, you know, perfectly understandable, given the enormous pressure DOJ is working under (to protect powerful pedophiles). 

Do the math, boys and girls, 0.002% of 3,000,000 is a lot of mistakes (6,000, a fraction of the number of times Trump is mentioned in the released pages) for the country’s top law enforcement agency, The Trump Department of Justice. It’s also a thousand times the incidence of election fraud as documented by the Heritage Foundation in their exhaustive online database. Were these errors incompetence due to any DOJ attorney of character, competence and experience being fired, quitting or being sidelined, or simple vicious retaliation/intimidation against sexually exploited girls who, as adult women, pose an ongoing threat to powerful white billionaire men? You be the judge.

A constantly lying administration, when caught lying, always has an excuse, often a barrage of excuses. The technique is familiar to anyone who has ever encountered an angry narcissist: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). The Trump propaganda machine doctored a photo of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, arrested after peacefully protesting in a Minnesota church. Using AI in the service of truth, justice and racist propaganda [1] it transformed her calm, dignified face, as she was led away in shackles, to a disheveled tearful portrait of an unhinged prisoner. One of the president’s spokes-liars dismissed concerns by calling it a “meme”. Case closed, cucks.

[1] The White House posted a manipulated photo of her arrest to its official social media account, depicting Ms. Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist, as hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”

While President Trump and the White House regularly circulate imagery altered by artificial intelligence, including demeaning and racist deepfakes, it is usually so over the top that the goal seems more about cartoonish mockery than outright deceit. (source above)