Fuck John Roberts

The modern day incarnation of Roger B. Taney decided to allow the construction of Trump's White House Ballroom to continue while the case proceeds.

This is clearly an attempt to allow facts on the ground to take precedence over the the facts and the law.

The Supreme Court on Friday afternoon allowed construction on a new 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom to continue – at least for now. Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon had issued an order, slated to go into effect at the end of the day, that would have stopped above-ground work on the project. But Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary order, known as an administrative stay, that kept Leon’s order on hold to give the justices more time to consider the Trump administration’s request to pause it.

The brief, one-sentence stay did not indicate when the justices might act on the government’s request. Leon’s order has never gone into effect, permitting the Trump administration to move forward with construction while the case made its way toward the Supreme Court. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court last week that there was “a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week to keep the Project ahead of schedule and under budget”; as a result, he wrote, as of last week, the project was “65% complete in its entirety, and moving quickly toward total completion.”

Another nakedly corrupt and partisan act by a naked and partisan justice.

This is not a court of law, this is the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation.

Ha Ha!

The DC Court of Appeals has ruled that a lower court ruling blocking the construction of a White House ballroom will remain in effect.

Good.

President Trump cannot continue building the ballroom he planned as a replacement to the East Wing of the White House without explicit approval from Congress, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.

The ruling, by judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dealt a blow to Mr. Trump’s efforts to press ahead with the project and drew an angry rebuke from the president, who vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court. It upheld a lower court’s findings that no law or authority gave the president the power to raze and replace sections of the White House without congressional authorization.

The decision does not mean construction will halt immediately. The judges paused their ruling for 14 days to give the administration a chance to appeal. The lower court judge had similarly suspended his ruling to allow time for an appeal, and Mr. Trump has continued building uninterrupted, inviting reporters to tour the site and showcasing progress toward completion of the ballroom despite the court order.

………

“Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,” Judge Millett and Judge Garcia wrote. 

Indeed. 

 

Where Can I Rent the World's Smallest Violin?

Because it looks like Todd Blanch's nomination to be US Attorney General likely not going to make it through the Judiciary Committee.

You have two Republican Senators demanding a written promise not to use the, "Weaponization fund,"
 nor preemptively pardon Trump and his family for Tax fraud.

As one of them is John Cornyn, and he lost the primary to Ken Paxton in large part because Trump endorsed the latter, and so has nothing to lose, I rather think that the nomination is as dead as the parrot in Monty Python's sketch. 

The Senate committee weighing Todd Blanche’s bid to become the next attorney general postponed a key vote on his nomination Wednesday, amid a standoff between the Trump administration and two Republican senators who have threatened to withhold their support.

The postponement was a high-profile setback for President Donald Trump, and a further indication that congressional Republicans are becoming more willing to stand up to him on key matters. It also leaves the fate of Blanche’s nomination uncertain after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced the vote’s deferral just hours before it was set to take place at a 9 a.m. Thursday hearing.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) had insisted that the Trump administration limit — in writing — central provisions of a controversial deal struck this spring between the Justice Department and the president to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. DOJ was not able to provide the senators sufficient assurances to win their agreement to support Blanche.

The senators have said their votes for Blanche’s nomination hinge on their requested changes to the deal. A “no” vote from either one of them would be enough to sink Blanche’s nomination at the committee stage, given the expectation that all Judiciary Committee Democrats will oppose Blanche’s confirmation.

Hopefully, soon I will be able to say, "This nomination is no more, it has ceased to be." 

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud ……… Under Oath

In news that is surprising only because they admitted guilt, Trump and his Evil Minions™ have admitted that they cancelled grants because they came from states that did not vote for him.

Impeach Trump, Impeach Vance, jail the lot of them. 

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

Not Enough Bullets

Go old school?DOGE and DHS tried to get the Social Security Administration to declare that 2.7 million people were dead in an attempt to harass immigrants.

Everyone involved in this should never see the sky as a free man.

The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. 

The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.

Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.


Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been.

………

Schofield’s whistleblower complaint describes a tumultuous period inside Social Security, as career officials questioned the legality of such efforts and watched DOGE officials gain access to some of the government’s most sensitive databases. In one meeting, Schofield said, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security described the goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead: making immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested.

I'm beginning to think that if the DOGE boy's parents had decided to drown them all at birth, (I'm looking at YOU, Mae Musk) the world would be a far better place. 

I Like This

Did you know that you could sue any recipient of money from Donald Trump's slush fund?

By you, I mean any American citizen, and possibly domestically domiciled corporate entities as well.

You see, everyone has standing to sue under the False Claims Act, AKA the Lincoln Law:

The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which would pay out public money in compensation for alleged overreach in federal prosecutions, including for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been accurately described as one of the most nakedly corrupt actions in American history. It would give a tacit endorsement from every American taxpayer to the notion that the Capitol Riot’s only transgression, for example, came from those who tried to punish its perpetrators for attempting to halt the outcome of an election.

News of the fund has triggered massive political backlash and at least temporarily derailed a party-line reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement operations for the next three years. Senate Republicans didn’t want to go on the record siding with Donald Trump’s crony slush fund, and left Washington rather than being confronted with such a question in a reconciliation “vote-a-rama.” What they will take up in June is currently unknown.

There are efforts within Congress to kill the slush fund, but those will inevitably run up against Republican politics in the wake of Trump demonstrating full control of the party base in recent primaries. Congress has the power of the purse, but it delegated the authority for the Justice Department to pay out settlements unilaterally when it established something called the Judgment Fund in 1956. Any attempt to change that legislatively will almost certainly meet the president’s veto pen.

Yet there is another potential deterrent to January 6th rioters or anyone else taking money from the fund: a mechanism whereby any American can recover improper government payments deemed “false claims,” plus significant additional damages. Recipients of the slush fund, under this approach, could have to pay back three times as much money as they took out.

Sweet! 

………

But if a judge can be convinced that this fund, established with no transparency and no congressional or judicial oversight, which emerged from a lawsuit between a sitting president and his own government, and is arguably contrary to the purpose of the Judgment Fund from which it derives authority, is an unconstitutional scheme to defraud the government by its very structure, then anyone can sue to recoup the money, and then some, under the False Claims Act of 1863. 

This law could also apply to the Acting Attorney General as well as whoever sits on the committee making the grants. 

The legal principle behind this is called qui tam. 

Tulsi Gabbard Takes the Exit Ramp - The Atlantic

Musical Accompaniment We have just learned that Tulsi Gabbard has resigned as the Director of National Intelligence, in a late announcement on a Friday.

She is claiming that she is doing so because her husband has bone cancer, but I do think that there was a bit of a push.

That being said, this is close as, "To spend more time with their family," ever gets to being true in Washington, DC.

It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.

Gabbard, who informed Trump of her resignation today, spent 15 months as the director of national intelligence—on paper, at least. By law, the DNI is supposed to serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser. Gabbard never was, and many of her stances were at odds with administration actions. Trump was contemptuous of even her modest efforts to speak truth to power. In the spring of 2025, when Gabbard testified to the intelligence community’s consensus view that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran and did not publicly come out in support of Trump’s decision to go to war. One of her top lieutenants quit in protest of the war.

In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump that she would step down on June 30, having recently learned that her husband, Abraham Williams, has a rare type of bone cancer. “Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage,” Gabbard wrote. People who know the couple have told me that they are exceptionally close; Williams, a video producer and cinematographer, has filmed Gabbard throughout her time in public service, including when she took a trip to Syria to meet the dictator Bashar al-Assad while serving as a Democratic member of Congress. Contrary to the Washington cliché, there’s every reason to think that Gabbard really does want to spend more time with her family. But the Iran war likely made leaving an easier choice.

You can read the rest of the Trump Kremlinology at the link, but the nickel tour is, "Selling your soul for proximity to power."

 

Today in Bat Sh%$ Inane

First, we have Trump calling for Barack Obama's arrest again, basically, "Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, Russiagate," which these days is not particularly remarkable, and then we have elements of the Trump administration calling Tucker Carlson and Nuck Fuentes terrorists.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named by the White House as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.

Sebastian Gorka, himself a former right-wing influencer turned National Security Council principal, has been making his rounds on conservative media, describing the meaning and purpose behind the President’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy (which I reported on previously).

Between grandiose monologues about his vision of a crusade to save Western civilization from “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” extremism, Gorka let slip that the administration’s war on “domestic terrorism” isn’t just aimed at the left. It targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda. While Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 explicitly singles out the left with its list of so-called terrorism indicators, many of them could describe people on the right as well.

………

Asked by Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow if there’s any “right-wing terror” or “right-wing extremism” threat, Gorka replied by pointing to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and streamer Nick Fuentes — both of whom have become vocal critics of the Trump administration — arguing they aren’t actually conservatives anyway. Here’s the exchange:

MARLOW:  “ I wanna get your thoughts on any right-wing terror … Do you regard it as a threat at all or anything that's important to be considering right now?”

GORKA: “…I'm not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I'm not sure that means you're part of the conservative movement.  So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they're not conservatives, what's left?”

Gorka’s charge that Carlson lauds Sharia law is, to put it lightly, ridiculous.

To be fair, Carlson and Fuentes have been promulgating stochastic terrorism, wherein they realize that someone in their large audience will take matters into their own hands, but what Gorka is talking about is the idea that any criticism of Dear Leader is terrorism.

We really need to make sure that everyone in this corrupt administration sees the inside of a courtroom as a defendant. 

Ignoring Article 1 of the Constitution

After the House refused to pass the Senate bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, Donald Trump has issued an executive order to pay them anyway.

The exclusive role of the Congress in funding the government is Constitution 101, but Trump ignored this, and the New York Times buried the lede on this, it's mentioned in passing in the 9th paragraph out of 13.

President Trump on Friday signed a directive calling on his administration to pay all Department of Homeland Security employees, an effort to circumvent congressional gridlock and end the record-long shutdown of an agency tasked with protecting the country.

………

The Friday order came after House Republicans refused to clear a Senate plan that would have restored funding to the agency, prolonging the shutdown. Mr. Trump earlier this week had hinted that he would sign a directive calling for all Department of Homeland Security employees to be paid, as he criticized Democrats for their role in the impasse. The president signed a similar memo last week ordering the department to pay Transportation Security Administration officials after about 60,000 employees from the agency had to report for work without pay for weeks. 

………

The workaround could face legal scrutiny, since it is the role of Congress to be the arbiter of federal spending. Mr. Trump’s directive could be seen as an attempt to unilaterally circumvent that responsibility, weakening the legislative branch’s ability to hold the executive branch accountable.

………

The impasse began in February when Senate Democrats refused to support funding for immigration agencies without new constraints on immigration officers.

Weeks later, the Senate sent a plan to the House that funded the Department of Homeland Security, except the immigration agencies. It omitted the restrictions Democrats had sought on federal agents.

Hard-right Republicans declined to support a Senate agreement to fund the department because it excluded money for immigration enforcement agencies.

(emphasis mine) 

Trump's actions are clearly unlawful, and all we get in this story is equivocation ¾ of the way down.

Bad news, and bad journalism. 

Maybe It's Just a Jewish thing

But when fascists demand a list of all the Jews in an educational institution, it makes me uneasy.

I know that this could just be dismissed as just another attempt by the anti-Semite in the White House to use antisemitism as a political cudgel against his opponents, but they said exactly the same thing about that unpleasant little man with the funny mustache.

The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.

But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities. 

So, they are remaking the movie, only they have recast Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich with Stephen Miller. 

Lovely. 

The End of the Beginning?

Trump just fired Pam Bondi.

I think that this is more significant than Noem's firing for a number of reasons:

• It's the second firing from the Trump administration in a fairly short time.
• The Senate is likely to be a bit less likely to rubber stamp Trump's next nominee for Attorney General.
• Her exit is likely to slow down attempts to use the DoJ for Trump's desired vengeance.

I have no doubt that Trump will attempt to replace here with something even more bizarrely inexplicable 

Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”

The president added that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, would serve as acting attorney general. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, is said to be a top contender to replace Bondi.

Yeah, Zeldin would qualify as something even more bizarrely inexplicable

………

During her 14 months as attorney general, Bondi presided over a major purging of career justice department staff, shifted focus away from criminal prosecutions toward immigration cases, and spearheaded the defense of Trump’s towering stack of executive orders as they faced legal challenges.

But she will be perhaps best remembered for complying with Trump’s public demand last year that federal prosecutors bring criminal charges against his personal enemies. Within three weeks, federal prosecutors had indicted James Comey, a former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.

Maybe someone should refer her to the state bar. 

 

Cooking the Books

It now appears that we have evidence that the Trump administration is manipulating economic data for their own political gain.

Gee, who could have seen that coming?

An obscure methodological change lowered a key measure of inflation in January, prompting questions about how government statistical agencies produce and report economic data.

Deep inside its monthly inflation report on Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that the cost of legal services rose 1.8 percent in January. That was an unusually large increase, but not nearly as big as the double-digit gain that some forecasters were expecting.

The reason for the divergence: The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, had changed the source of its data on legal prices, relying on wholesale prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than the consumer price data it usually uses.

A technical tweak to such a small category — legal services account for less than 1 percent of overall consumer spending — would ordinarily draw little notice.

But in this case, the adjustment was enough to shave roughly a tenth of a percentage point off the monthly change in the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. That is a meaningful difference to investors, who track even tiny moves in the index for hints of when and how the Federal Reserve will next adjust interest rates. The central bank officially targets the P.C.E. index, not the better-known Consumer Price Index, when making policy decisions.

The bureau provided no public disclosure of the change. Economists learned about it only when they reached out to the agency to understand why their forecasts had been so far off.

As I have said repeatedly, the economic data from the Trump administration should not have the presumption of regularity. (See here, here, here, and here)

They are Beyond Redemption

The Trump administration has decided to validate conversion "therapy" by forcing transgender inmates in federal prisons to participate.

First, the science shows that it does not work, and second, and more importantly, they are conducting involuntary medical experiments on prisoners.

Paging Dr. Mengele.

It's enough to make me rethink my position on capital punishment.

Last Thursday, the Trump administration released its new policy outlining how it will treat transgender people in Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody. Under it, the approximately 2,200 trans people held in federal prisons will be denied access to medically necessary healthcare, subjected to constant misgendering by staff, and have all of their gender-affirming items—including binders, bras, and makeup—confiscated.

Instead, the policy will impose a treatment that targets “psychological distress/dysphoria” through “psychotherapy” (talk therapy) and “psychotropic medication” (like antidepressants) until the gender dysphoria diagnosis can be marked as “resolved.” Additionally, the new policy designates gender dysphoria as a “mental illness” that requires “routine mental health care.”

In other words, the Trump administration won’t just medically and socially detransition trans people en masse; it will actively try to ‘cure’ them of their gender dysphoria. And if this is beginning to sound like conversion therapy, that’s because it is. The BOP is giving trans people no other choice but to conform to their sex assigned at birth by forcing them into a societal role that they reject and ignoring clinical guidelines—all hallmarks of harmful and dangerous conversion practices recognized by the United Nations to be a form of torture.

This is quite literally lifted straight from the Nazi playbook in the 1930s.  (Also lifted from Florida policy today under Ron DeSantis, but I am repeating my self.)

These people need to be broken like the Nazis were, and the willing executioners among the bureaucracy need to be rooted out of government and public life completely. 

Trump Lied? Pshaw!

I am not at all surprised that the snollygoster of snollygosters Donald Trump lied when he claimed that a former President told him privately that they approved the war.

After Donald Trump claimed twice on Monday that he had spoken to a former US president who told him that he approved of his attack on Iran, all four living former presidents denied having spoken with Trump about Iran in statements from aides to CNN and other outlets.

Donald Trump is to honesty what Ebola is to French kissing. 

Headline of the Day

Welcome to the Derp State

—Paul Waldman, noting how f%$#ing incompetent Trump and his Evil Minions™ really are.

The subhed kind of says it all, "The dumbest president, surrounded by the dumbest people, making the dumbest mistakes," though the money quote is, "You’ve heard of the Deep State. This is the Derp State."

This is what happens when loyalty is valued over competence. 

 

Replaced by Something Even More Bizarrely Inexplicable

So, amid cratering poll numbers, Donald Trump has fired Kristi Noem as head of DHS and replaced her with the stupidest man in the Senate Markwayne Mullin.

There are any number of reasons for this, such as her persistent self dealing and her lying to the Senate about this under oath, or her $¼ billion PR program which primarily consisted of glamor shots of herself, or it could be that she said that Trump had approved her advertising excesses.

Mostly, I think that it's because she got caught, so Trump took her to the gravel pit along with her (alleged) adulterous "Special Advisor" Corey Lewandowski.

Her erstwhile successor mind mindbogglingly stupid, even by the standards of MAGA, which is saying a lot.

Margaret Atwood Must Be Weeping

In a move that highlights the inhumanity of the Trump administration, immigration authorities are moving detained girls to Texas to force them to have their babies.

This includes many rape victims. 

These people need to be permanently removed from anything resembling a position of power.

All unaccompanied immigrant children who are pregnant, many by rape, are being moved to a single facility in Texas in order to avoid providing abortion services in a significant human rights violation, critics say.

As detainees are frequently moved across state lines quickly, often to red states like Texas, pregnant people are facing challenges accessing reproductive health care in detention centers.

Unaccompanied minors who lack immigration documentation are at high risk for trafficking and other forms of harm, so they fall under the care of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), which previously had facilities across the country capable of caring for children under the age of 18 who are pregnant.

Since July, more than a dozen pregnant children have been moved to a single facility in the small town of San Benito, along the south Texas border. The children kept in Texas are as young as 13, and about half are pregnant because of rape, according to a joint investigation by the Texas Newsroom and the California Newsroom. In Texas, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances, including rape and incest.

 When the worm turns, the need to be taken down.  To quote Robert Graves apocryphal quote of They cannot be reasoned with.  To quote Robert Graves apocryphal quote of Germanicus Caesar, "They must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them." 

 

Today in TACO

Trump has decided to retreat in response to lawsuits from law firms he was trying to shake down.

Yeah, this sort of bullsh%$ is something that is beyond even the hackery of his most corrupt pet judges, except, perhaps,  Aileen Cannon. 

The Trump administration on Monday abandoned its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, punctuating a year of turmoil that rocked the legal industry and forced its leaders to choose between taking on the White House or capitulating.

In a court filing, the Justice Department said it was dropping its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey. The move came just days before the Justice Department’s opening brief was due in an appeal of the four cases, which were consolidated before a federal court in Washington.

………

The firm added that it viewed the case as a fight not just for itself but “for the people across this country who refuse to back down in the face of an administration that seeks to silence and intimidate them—lawyers and nonlawyers alike.”

Trump issued a string of executive orders last year against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.

………

In targeting the firms, Trump cited their connections to his political rivals and criticized their diversity initiatives and pro bono work advocating for immigrants, transgender rights and voting protections. The White House had singled out these firms for representing clients including Hillary Clinton and George Soros, and for ties to figures such as Robert Mueller, who as special counsel led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election 

It does appear that the law firms that prostrated themselves to Trump have found it hard to recruit and keep staff. 

Let the market decide, I guess. 

So, It Was Jared Kushner, Huh?

We now know who the, "Senior Trump Administration Official," who was mentioned in an intelligence intercept between two foreign officials.

You know, the one subject to a whistleblower complaint after DNI Tulsi Gabbard sat on this information rather than passing it up the chain as required by law. 

According to the WSJ, it was Jared Kushner, whose primary role in the Trump administration is arranging foreign bribes for Donald Trump.

Not a surprise.

The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

It couldn’t be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner. But the connection to Kushner sheds further light on the top-secret whistleblower complaint that bureaucratically stalled within Gabbard’s agency for eight months and was kept locked in a safe until it reached Congress in heavily redacted form last week.

………

The Wall Street Journal and others reported last week that the complaint was based on a foreign-intelligence conversation collected by the National Security Agency. The conversation included a discussion about a person close to Trump and at least in part concerned issues related to Iran, the Journal reported. 

………

A heavily redacted version of the complaint was seen by select lawmakers in Congress last week after the Journal first reported on its existence and that it had stalled within Gabbard’s office. Democrats have questioned why the complaint was held up for eight months and indicated it raises national-security concerns that deserve more investigation. Republicans have defended Gabbard and said the attention on the complaint has been orchestrated to undermine the Trump administration.

This is a significant story only because Gabbard suppressed this. 

Had it been sent to the White House, it would never have been an issue.

It's always the politics that get you. 

And the Smear Campaign Begins

It looks like the J. Edgar Hoover's bastard child is doing its best to slander murder victim Renee Good.

Why am I not surprised?

Federal investigators assigned to the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman are looking into her possible connections to activist groups protesting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, in addition to the actions of the federal agent who killed her, people familiar with the situation said.

It seems increasingly unlikely that the agent who fired three times at the unarmed woman, Renee Nicole Good, will face criminal charges, although that could change as investigators collect new evidence, the people added.

On Sunday, President Trump described Ms. Good and her wife, Becca Good, as being “professional agitators,” adding that the authorities would “find out who’s paying for it.” He offered no evidence to support his claims.

The decision by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence.

I'm not surprised that the FBI is doing this, Kash Patel is director of the FBI, but to do so so openly and blatantly is a bit of a surprise.

As I noted earlier, I would not be surprised if Donald Trump gives Jonathan Ross a Medal of Freedom for shooting a middle aged mother in the face.