Heather Cox Richardson:

In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”

But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward. . .

. . . Despite how explosive these documents [a trove of creepy email] were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Trump have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.

With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00.

In the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording.

“CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting.”

When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

source

Since then, of course, the criminally insane Dementor-in-Chief ordered his former lawyer and lobbyist for Qatar, Attorney General Pam Bondi, to open an investigation into DEMOCRATS who had connections to pedophile / sex trafficker/ blackmailer/ criminal mastermind Jefferey Epstein, who was found dead in federal detention during Trump’s first term. The loyal AG promptly obliged, appointing another Trump toady to head the investigation.

Now she can self-righteously claim that all the files that she decided didn’t sustain any further criminal investigation, according to her and FBI director Kashyap Patel, must now remain under seal because they are part of an ongoing criminal investigation of any Epstein associate not named Trump. That Trump’s name appears 2,000 times in the 20,000 pages of recently released emails? Hoax. The “Epstein hoax”, “created by Democrats”, according to MAGA-man, apparently was built around a kernel of truth that his DOJ is now determined to get to as they prepare to indict and prosecute the guilty parties.

This is transparent obstruction of justice by Trump, who had his DOJ comb through files that contained his name thousands of times and then close the investigation into Epstein that Biden’s DOJ had initiated. Obstruction of justice is a crime. Trump, as the Unitary Executive, may legally commit crimes as long as he does them in concert with other government officials — exercising his core duties as POTUS (see Trump v. US). As Trump himself famously said: God Bless these United Shayssssssh.

“We have the right to disregard the Constitution because we act according to what we think the law, and reality itself, should be.”

This is rule number one if you want to overthrow the constitutional order — no court case that we lose, no court order from any court, binds us to anything but more agitated grievance and the threat of inflicting more mass desperation (right on time for Thanksgiving, you ungrateful, “entitled”, poor people!) and state violence. These things are done to turn up the heat on the population until they are provoked to riot and then, voila!, the desired police state.

You’ll have to pardon me for calling these folks Nazis, but there is literally no daylight between these murderous zealots [1] and the original and extra crispy German versions from the 1930s. Many young Republicans (and every old fascist) can’t even denounce Hitler, they feel he got a bad rap just because he didn’t get to finish his work properly. Some joke about how much they love Hitler. Arguably as sick a joke as the one about playfully gassing people who don’t vote for them, equally fucking hitlerious. It’s just, you know, 35 year-old kids being kids…

How many brown kids under age five did you murder today, JD?

[1] Project 2025 used the richest man in the world, unelected (and generally despised) Trump/MAGA world record megadonor humanoid Elon Musk, to kill so far over 600,000 poor people (and counting, at over 2,000 a day) in foreign countries by illegally ending USAID. The world’s richest psychopath said he was cutting waste, fraud, abuse and corruption (his areas of greatest expertise) with his crack hit squad of Big Balls and company. What did USAID do? Wikipedia:

In the twenty years from 2001 to 2021, USAID saved a yearly estimated range of between 4.1 and 4.7 million lives, with a yearly estimated subset of between 1.2 and 1.7 million children under five saved.^[17]

So much for the “presumption of regularity”. Courts are starting to notice that extending the presumption of normalcy, assuming, unless there’s serious evidence to the contrary, that the Department of Justice is acting in accord with its long established principles and practices, is a game for suckers.

Federal Appellate Judge for life, Emil Bove III, a smirking weasel who makes Bill Barr look highly principled, earned his bones during a brief stint at DOJ by overruling career prosecutors and arguing to a federal judge that the substantial corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams should be temporarily dismissed, held over his head, contingent on the Black Trump’s agreed to cooperation with illegal ICE activities in NYC. While at the DOJ Bove told prosecutors to be ready to tell the courts “fuck you” if they opposed the boss’s priorities. His proud tradition at DOJ continues with the abrasively defiant Pamela Jo Bondi, eternally aggrieved Alina Habba and the highly inexperienced and unqualified, but undeniably good looking, and loyal as a dog, Lindsay Halligan.

In the past, public evidence of a president ordering the Attorney General to go after his enemies would be a major scandal, covered by the media for weeks and grounds for impeachment. Particularly if he publicly whined to her that not doing so makes him look bad for threatening something his DOJ is not following through on. It’s hurting his reputation and credibility, wrote the man with a reputation for fraud and sexual assault and the credibility of a compulsive liar lying about proven fraud, a deadly riot he incited, serial adultery, sexual assaults he committed. Then he adds, to make his vindictive intent crystal clear for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury: They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!). OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED NOW!!! President DJT.

Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, that it was dementia that caused him to send this private order over “social media”, any other president in US history would have been investigated and impeached for this “unprecedented”, “irregular”, “unethical,” illegal order to the head law enforcement officer in the US. If Joe Biden had dinner with his AG, Merrick Garland, once, the anti-woke forces would still be screaming about the unpardonable corruptness of it. Trump constantly surrounds himself with his debased sycophants, heads of “independent” agencies who compete for his attention and favor by their willingness to demonstrate their capacity for depravity. Bondi’s outraged response to a photo of her at a recent dinner with Trump, right before the Comey indictment, was to defend herself as being two seats from the president, not right next to him as a commie senator falsely claimed.

Imagine this was written by Joe “Autopen” Biden and it urged his AG to immediately go after Steve Bannon, American Eichmann Jeffrey Clarke, Peter Navarro and John Eastman (as Garland legitimately should have).

Or as the amoral servants of the bottom line in corporate media frame the flimsy indictment of NY AG Letitia James, a “second major achievement”…

When dealing with compulsive liars who fervently believe every lie they utter, understand that truth has no place in the conversation. They will say, as they did yesterday as part of their Nazi talking points “Biden sent 274 FBI agents provocateurs to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to start a riot to blame on the innocent Trump!”. You might say “The innocent Trump was still the president on that date, the riot after his rousing speech was to prevent Biden from being certified as the winner of the election, how did the president-elect order the FBI to do anything?” They will say “fuck you, you hate America, and you’re anti-fascist, and are suffering from woke mind virus and Trump Derangement Syndrome, cuck.” The rest of the discussion will be, as they say, academic.

No Kings.

It’s hard not to be distracted by the constant tantrums, threats, rage tweets, flashes of madness, impulsiveness, dementia flights, war on the constitution, criminal abuse of his office, obstruction of justice, contempt of courts (all now legal for him, as long as done in conjunction with a cabinet member, see Trump v. US, 6-3, cucks) searches, indictments, arrests and brilliant AI internet trolling of his enemies by the very stable genius, President Project 2025. Behind him is a trillion dollar network of American fascists who make most of the big decisions, as laid out in detail in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The blueprint for American fascism Trump lied about knowing anything about as a candidate, though he claimed to disagree with some of it (“the weave”).

Thousands of these true believers (they’ve gone by ‘movement conservative’, ‘alt-right’, ‘neo-con’, ‘John Birch Society’ and many less flattering names) are well-paid political operatives — lawyers, legislators, judges, influencers and lobbyists — acting on behalf of what Sheldon Whitehouse calls the “creepy billionaires” (creepy, in part, because mass death for others is a negligible price, in their collective opinion, to pay for the permanent protection of their vast privileges). There is an entire major political party now in thrall to their united will. Presumably there are also millions of enraged young white men, neither wealthy nor politically sophisticated, ready to follow their charismatic TV star leader into battle, as thousands did on January 6th. For a moment, let’s forget about Trump and look at what the network he works for is having him do.

Just as there was a long game by the American far-right to reverse the limits on presidential criminal audacity imposed by law after Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, just like the myth that slaveholding states didn’t start the Civil War, or fight for the cause of slavery, MAGA represents a return to the good old days when Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, Women, Voting Rights Advocates and others, innately inferior to white Christian men, “knew their place”. Ultimately, MAGA/Project 2025 is a return to the world the “Originalists” (an infinitely supple legal theory created by the same folks who brought you Project 2025) fondly imagine — a just constitutional order based on the judicious compromises that allowed certain rich people to own others they could treat however they wanted to.

So, while it’s despicable, it’s no shock that President Project 2025 has appointed a pliable puppet/”DEI hire” to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development who will roll back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the law that Trump and his landlord father violated for years (before and long after its passage in 1968), in the name of fighting what would later be called DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion– among their tenants. Trump and his father, Frederick Christ Trump, eventually settled DOJ’s discrimination case against them, after a rip-roaring public legal battle in which they were represented by the monstrous Roy Cohn. In the settlement the Trumps agreed not to continue their racist violations of the Fair Housing Act without admitting they had ever violated it. Now, the NY Times reports (read article by clicking on image below):

Got to love the look of the sycophant Trump appointed to head the agency, superficially perfect casting:

HUD Secretary Scott Turner apparently believes, along with Trump, the Heritage Foundation, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner and MAGA world (not to mention the Ku Klux Klan), that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a sickness, like the vaguely defined yet highly contagious “woke mind virus”, that must be eradicated. DEI, we are told, is an anti-American commie myth perpetrated to place unqualified inferior non-white, non-male people in power to bring down White America. To believe this requires a few leaps of faith, or leaps of idiocy.

First you must believe that there is no need for diversity in hiring, that everything is already equal between white men, women and so-called “people of color” in government and in the private sector. There has never been discrimination in the USA (“all men are created equal” — duh!), and racism, if you want to talk about racism, is directed toward persecuted white Christian men only (a claim made by the original KKK, too, protectors of white Christian women). Equity, which means fairness, is another way of accusing beleaguered Christian white men of being unjust and unfair! Inclusion is a sneaky way to manipulate the gullible into believing that some people are being systematically excluded!

DEI is, according to our homegrown fascist movement, just like Critical Race Theory, a divisive and false ideological “theory” that makes the world much more sinister and complicated than it actually is. Those who are in charge are there because of merit, they’ve earned the right to be in charge. Just look at Trump’s cabinet! DEI is filthy anti-meritocracy that needs to be killed!

There has been no substantial push back from Democrats on this simple principle that is it fair, just and decent to remedy historic prejudice by promoting qualified people long excluded by unfair institutional practices.

There is a lot to push back on when dealing with Nazis, granted, and the fascist right, with a four year running start as their front man escaped criminal liability for clear crimes, is spraying their propaganda from high powered hoses 24/7 as heavily armed masked agents from multiple federal agencies terrorize innocent people in various cities. But like the need for Democrats to have a Shadow Cabinet — experts in each field to immediately and publicly respond to the latest policy depredation from the brains behind Project 2025, enacted by their idiot front man — we need to counter the bullshit about the amorphous “danger” of DEI — and ending DEI being somehow a noble goal for government — with facts. No? Otherwise you have bloated fascists like Bill Barr warning Blacks that the cops won’t protect them unless they start to show some fucking respect.

USAID, dead, and mass killing

Speaking of the crazed onslaught of Project 2025’s audacious plan to make America as fascist as the Old Confederacy was, Big Balls and his enthusiastic young friends helped Trump loot and close down USAID, with the estimated 103 HOURLY deaths that resulted from their elimination of claimed “waste, fraud and abuse”. This massive, silent death toll (2,472 DAILY, 17,305 weekly, 74,160 monthly), caused directly by Project 2025 priorities, has not been reported on in months.

Every day the dismantling of USAID creates a silent 9/11 death toll (or twice the number of deaths Hamas terrorists inflicted on Israel on October 7 [1]), directly caused by the actions of the Trump administration, as President Project 2025 wildly, incoherently attacks his enemies, anybody who does not obey his every childish whim. The last reporting on the shuttering on USAID, which is projected to cause the atrocity of 14,000,000 preventable deaths in the next five years, was months ago. Too much horror to process, as there always is when Nazis are on the march, but process it we must if we are to remain human.

[1] or a daily toll of about 3.5% of the estimated 67,099 deaths (as of this post) in Gaza during Netanyahu’s war against civilians to destroy Hamas.

The Enemy Within, those living in Bill Barr’s Anarchist Jurisdictions that do not support White Christian Nationalist Autocracy, need to be subjected to lethality by the buffed up all-male, all-heterosexual US military, according to the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War. Nothing out of line, it’s totally normal for the American President to urge 800 assembled generals and admirals to use Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Portland, LA, etc. as training grounds for “maximum lethality” unbound from the international laws of warfare. There’s no such thing as war crimes when you’re out to destroy evil, according to these two embodiments of the warrior ethos.

“San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one,” Trump told hundreds of senior U.S. military officers packed into a hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

“This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” Trump said.

source

Enemies, after all, need to be punished. Death by military fire power is too good for us.

Meanwhile, here are some of Trump’s top personal enemies, targeted for vengeance

Remember the staged arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka under Acting State Attorney Alina Habba, on charges that were dismissed days later? He was arrested, after a tour of the ICE facility in Newark, for standing on the sidewalk in front of the place. On direct orders from Todd Blanche, Deputy Attorney General, recent Trump criminal attorney and benefactor of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, ICE agents were instructed to cuff Baraka and their leader told the force, as they went to grab him for not violating any laws “if you have body cams, turn them off.” It’s on videotape, it’s been on television. Representative LaMonica McGiver is facing 17 years in prison for objecting to the illegal arrest as ICE went nuts trying to cuff the mayor in the middle of a crowd of legislators and citizens. She is charged with assaulting heavily armed, masked ICE officers, at least one of whom was yelling “back up or I’ll shoot!”.

Christopher Krebs is a good one. A Trump appointee, his crime was announcing that the 2020 election had been secure and that the results were accurate. An enraged Trump immediately fired Krebs for this statement. I wonder what his alleged criminal liability will be, under an insane and desperately obsequious Trump DOJ. An outline of Krebs’s betrayal of Trump:

As CISA’s director, Krebs was the “administration’s most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election”, held on November 3, 2020.^[9] Sidney Powell, an attorney for Trump and Michael Flynn, asserted on the Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo Fox News programs that a secret government supercomputer program had switched votes from Trump to Biden in the election, a claim Krebs dismissed as “nonsense” and a “hoax.”^[10] CISA created a website to debunk election-related disinformation, much of which was being promoted by President Donald Trump and his allies.^[11] On November 12, it was reported that Krebs expected to be fired from his position.^[12][13]

On November 17, 2020, Krebs said in a tweet that “59 election security experts all agree, in every case of which we are aware, these claims (of fraud) either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”^[14] Trump fired Krebs via Twitter the same day, because the “recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud”. Trump provided no evidence of this fraud.^[14][15]

Wait a second, some of Trump most evil enemies are missing from this short list. Where’s Jack Smith? Fani Willis? Here is Fani’s unpardonable crime:

On February 10, 2021, Willis launched a criminal investigation into Donald Trump‘s attempts to influence Georgia election officials—including the governor, the attorney general, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger via a telephone call—to “find” enough votes to override Joe Biden‘s win in that state and thus undo Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.^[26][27][28] In January 2022, she requested a special grand jury to consider charges of election interference by Trump and his allies.^[29][30] In May, a 26-member special grand jury was given investigative authority and subpoena power and tasked with submitting a report to the judge and Willis on whether a crime was committed.^[31]

All irrelevant! Tens of millions of sick, dangerous enemies didn’t vote for Trump, who got a mandate in another rigged election he should have won by at least 300,000,000 votes! Treason, bloody treason! (to an insane tyrant, anyway).