GRASSLEY 3
ESTB 4 25 RULE OF LAW MUSK DARK $
MERRI OK
solomon bs
PARTISAN WARRIOR?! STAFF? JASON FOSTER POW HILLARY BENZ USAID
BONDI DOJ 3 LAWFARE
CHAIR JUDiC COMM
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IHIP YT 1 26 1ST ELECTED 45 YRS AGO IKE ADMIN? kkk SUPPORT? OLDEST 92 YO FILED PAPERS TO RUN AGAIN
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10 26
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The Republican senator who flubbed a gotcha moment while questioning former Special Counsel Jack Smith knew the evidence he cited had not been vetted, a new report claims.
Eric Schmitt was warned in advance that the series of text messages he proudly displayed at Tuesday's hearing were not properly vetted, a source familiar with the matter tells MS NOW.
Schmitt tried to corner Smith by asking whether he attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game, a roundabout way of suggesting he was colluding with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was investigating President Donald Trump's election interference in Georgia.
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Smith, Schmitt claimed, committed perjury when he said he did not go to a Hawks game in February 2024. Smith answered that he had actually been at an Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball game instead—creating a viral moment that continues to embarrass Schmitt.
Schmitt accused Smith of perjury using unvetted information. /
The mishap originated when the Justice Department shared the texts with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee, according to MS NOW. Chairman Chuck Grassley's staff omitted the texts from a memo about information to be used in the hearing. Grassley did not share the messages with his Democratic colleagues, either.
Schmitt's staff, the report claims, searched for information that might show a connection between Willis' investigation and Smith's. They were then given the texts, but with a warning that they had not been vetted. Schmitt's staff was reportedly told they would need to complete the necessary vetting.
They apparently did not.....
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an 8 26
The director of the Office of Management and Budget is infuriating Republican lawmakers by "going rogue" on what appropriations were approved by the House and Senate.
MS NOW's Hayes Brown wrote on Monday that Director Russell Vought has made a unilateral decision to control whether funds are actually sent out for projects that Congress approved.
The constitutional core is Article I’s Appropriations Clause: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” So, the president can't legally spend Treasury money unless Congress has authorized it through law. Appropriations are technically laws approved by Congress. The president's Article II powers mandate that he “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
But the executive branch is refusing to disburse the funds approved by law. In fact, Brown explained that "Vought has used every lever he can reach to stanch the flow of federal dollars."
A series of reports last week cited a group of what they're calling "zombie programs" across the U.S. government. Those are programs like the CDC's Alzheimer’s disease program or programs around epilepsy and sickle cell disease data collection operations. There's even a rape prevention unit. All of them have been approved and fully funded by Congress. When Elon Musk went through his DOGE cuts, the people who worked on the programs were let go.
Vought has encouraged the president to impound money that Congress has allocated, even if it's against the law. In fact, Brown cited "a law specifically forbidding the practice."
After the huge DOGS cuts, "OMB sent a list of rescissions," saying that it would "undo" Musk's moves to kill programs that Congress funded.
"Congressional Republicans signed off on a package cutting $8 billion in foreign aid funding and roughly $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But that wasn’t enough for Vought, who last fall enacted a 'pocket rescission' to cut another $4.9 billion in foreign aid," Brown explained. "By only informing Congress of the hold less than 45 days before the end of the fiscal year, OMB argued, the money would be cut automatically."
Then Vought deployed the “apportionment” process, stating that federal spending must align with Trump's budget proposals. It's the way that Trump's government has been able to take tax dollars from blue states while refusing to allocate appropriated funds.
"Even more troubling, a new federal rule currently in the works would give his office unprecedented control over issuing federal grants. If enacted, the rule would effectively serve as a roundabout veto over spending that fails to 'demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities,' even those that meet the specific guidelines Congress has put in place," the Brown wrote.
The tactics are angering lawmakers, including Republicans.
"Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a Senate Budget Committee hearing with Vought.
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), who is also a senior Republican on appropriations, told Politico, “Pocket rescissions would be a very interesting way to curry favor with the legislative branch — especially the one part of the legislative branch which has delivered on all of the administration’s s——."
A short-term budget bill was passed by the Senate before they left for the August recess, and its language temporarily halts Vought's takeover of federal grants. The House still must pass the bill, but the odds look good, as no one wants a government shutdown weeks before the election.
Brown pointed out that it's one of the far too few occasions on which the legislature has asserted its authority in many years. In the past two years specifically, Congress has ceded its power over trade and war to the president. He said it's nice to see lawmakers finally draw a line.
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an 5 26
Since returning to the White House on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to give the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI an ultra-MAGA makeover — including choosing far-right conspiracy theorist Kash Patel for FBI director. Many non-MAGA veterans of the FBI have either left the agency or been fired, and some of them are now pointing the finger at Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
The Hill's Rebecca Beitsch, in an article published on May 7, reports, "several former FBI agents are arguing Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) played a significant role in their firings — removals that followed his release of a number of unredacted materials about the criminal investigation into President Trump. That assertion was made in two separate lawsuits against the FBI that don't name Grassley as a defendant but point to his actions as a factor precipitating the firing of agents who worked on former special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021."
The lawsuits, according to Beitsch, allege that the agents were fired simply because of their work on Smith's election interference case against Trump for DOJ.
"The litigation also raises questions about the Senate Judiciary Committee's sprawling investigation into Smith's Arctic Frost probe, as well as Grassley's role in a conservative ecosystem focused on addressing what Republicans have branded as 'rot' at the FBI," Beitsch explains. "Grassley's disclosures include the unredacted names of agents, something their attorney argues sparks not only online vitriol but backlash from the bureau as it culls employees."
Grassley, now 92, was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980. Before entering the Senate, he spent six years in the U.S. House of Representatives. And Grassley served in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1959-1975.
Margaret Donovan, the former DOJ federal prosecutor now representing two ex-FBI agents who are suing the FBI, told The Hill, "It is appalling to me that lawmakers would so carelessly mischaracterize these unredacted disclosures, knowing that the direct result of their actions is to cause an ill-informed online mob to go after honest, hardworking federal law enforcement officers. The best-case scenario is that Grassley is so far past his prime, he is clueless as to what he's doing. The worst-case scenario is that Grassley and others are intentionally trying to harm federal agents who dared to investigate criminal activity, which happened to implicate a political ally."
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AN 1 26
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is demanding answers from Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
In a letter sent Wednesday, Bloomberg Law reported that Grassley wanted to know whether the stories by the conservative New York Post are accurate.
In early January an inspector general probe uncovered that shortly after Chavez-DeRemer was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she allegedly took staff to a strip club in Oregon. She also allegedly had an extramarital affair with one of her security guards.
The senator wanted to know whether she fabricated official work so she could “travel for pleasure, while having the American taxpayer foot the bill."
Grassley is the chair of the influential Senate Judiciary Committee.
It marks just how far Grassley has backed away from the administration. It has been less than a year that Grassley, a huge supporter of whistleblower rights, refused to allow a whistleblower to speak at a confirmation hearing for one of President Donald Trump's top Justice Department officials nominated to become an appeals court judge.
"The Judiciary panel chairman has long been focused on rooting out waste of taxpayer dollars, but has consistently fended off claims of misconduct by officials more squarely in his jurisdiction, including by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel," said Bloomberg.
The letter demands information by Feb. 11.
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MYSTERY SOLVED?
RWW REF
Inside the Hidden Conservative Network Bankrolling an “Ecosystem” of Right-Wing News – Mother Jones
GFX
“Now more than ever, the world needs an honest newsroom.” With these words, the little-known Informing America Foundation was awarded the $250,000 Gregor G. Peterson Prize in “venture philanthropy” last December for its “high-quality journalism.”
If few had heard of IAF, hinted the nonprofit’s CEO, Debbie Myers, it was by design. “We stay very much under the radar,” she said, accepting the prize at the 2024 annual summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded group that works to advance conservative policies at the state level. IAF’s goal, Myers explained, was to create an “ecosystem” of news. The group boasts of funding a network of thousands of platforms that have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the alleged corruption of Joe Biden to the supposedly nefarious mission of the US Agency for International Development, along with more recent attacks on critics of President Donald Trump.
Myers, who once led Gingrich 360, Newt Gingrich’s multimedia production firm, is a longtime TV executive who helped produce shows such as Little People, Big World; Talk Soup; and Punkin Chunkin. Her “partner in crime” in launching IAF in 2021, as she described him as he joined her onstage, is John Solomon, a former investigative reporter for the Associated Press and Washington Post and a DC fixture who has drawn criticism for pushing right-wing stories and smearing Democrats with the kind of allegations that a Post ombudsman once described as “‘gotcha’ without a gotcha.”
In 2019, Solomon was at the forefront of efforts to tie Biden to shady dealings in Ukraine on his son Hunter’s behalf, penning a series of columns for The Hill that reported dubious information from Ukrainian prosecutors with an axe to grind. A 2020 review of his work by the paper called its reliability into question, concluding Solomon had “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation.”
In the wake of the controversy, he set up the independent outlet Just the News and launched a podcast, John Solomon Reports. In an email, Solomon defended his Hill reporting’s accuracy and claimed he has no formal role at IAF, while confirming he provides it an office at the same K Street address as Just the News and another Solomon enterprise, Bentley Media Group. In 2021, Myers and Solomon also formed the Affinity Media Exchange, an advertising business that soon inked a deal with Trump’s Truth Social to be one of the platform’s ad representatives.
IAF’s tax filings, which say its mission is funding “investigative, explanatory, data-driven and multimedia journalism,” show it brought in close to $8 million in contributions during its first year, with the largest nonprofit donation coming from the family foundation of Diana Davis Spencer, whose late father, an investment banker, once chaired the Heritage Foundation. In subsequent years, millions have flowed to IAF through donor-advised charities that do not disclose the source of their initial contributions.
IAF, in turn, has doled out funds to an array of right-leaning outlets, including Just the News and Off the Press, run by Joseph Curl, a veteran of Drudge Report and the Washington Times. ADN América, aimed at Spanish speakers, received more than $1 million from IAF in the site’s first three years of operation. The foundation sent another million-plus to Performance One Media, which owns Real America’s Voice, the right-wing network best known for carrying Steve Bannon’s War Room. Real America’s Voice gave Solomon his own nightly show in 2022, which he has used to promote IAF allies.
IAF has also directed more than $1.7 million to Star News Digital Media, a conglomerate of 12 mostly battleground state sites whose names suggest a local focus but that actually push pro-GOP partisan news. Star News’ Tennessee Star, for instance, featured a section called “KamaLawfare” prior to the 2024 presidential election that highlighted incidents from Kamala Harris’ prosecutorial tenure in California, but seemed to ignore top news events in the state. One day this past June, the homepages of Star News outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia looked almost identical, all covering transgender youth health care in California, New York City’s mayoral race, and a Florida sheriff’s threats against anti-Trump protesters.
Media observers have dubbed such agenda-driven news sites “pink slime”—so named for by-products added as filler to ground beef. Pink slime news is a growing phenomenon, according to University of Cincinnati journalism professor Jeffrey Blevins, rising as partisan interests take advantage of the devastated newspaper market. “We saw these news deserts popping up,” he says. “It was very cheap to put in a website and say, ‘Okay, we’re doing local news.’ Local news is always seen as being more credible.” Sites like the Tennessee Star, he explains, use that perception to push “poor-quality” coverage “funded by some outside political interest.”
In 2023, the most recent year tax records are available, filings show IAF’s largest contribution—more than $1 million—went to the Institute for Citizen Focused Service, a secretive nonprofit set up by Interior Department officials from Trump’s first term. In turn, ICFS has funneled money to Pipeline Advisors, which holds a portfolio of local outlets—including the Midland Times, Austin Journal, Federal Newswire, and others—that have also been described as pink slime. All told, IAF says its news “ecosystem” includes “more than 2,000 hyperlocal platforms and 10 national platforms” reaching an audience of more than 50 million people.
One hallmark of IAF-connected organizations is that they often promote the same allegations and storylines. This is no accident: At the award ceremony last December, Myers provided a glimpse into how IAF works, explaining that each morning, the team gathers on a call to choose the stories they believe the mainstream media is ignoring. After hanging up, “we amplify each other,” she said, “and get it to the hands of the American people.”
Star News outlets regularly repackage Just theNews articles. Just the News writes stories based on Off the Press coverage and vice versa. They do not disclose their financial links. For example, Just the News covered the 2021 launch of Off the Press without noting that either organization was funded by IAF.
The network’s thousands of platforms have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories.
Solomon’s podcast often features guests from the broader IAF universe, including Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer and former Trump State Department official whose attacks targeting USAID as a “censorship octopus” helped fuel Elon Musk’s crusade to feed the agency to the “wood chipper.” Benz, a onetime alt-right Twitter troll, has appeared on Solomon’s show to rail against social media censorship and US foreign aid. In such appearances, he’s been identified as the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online—which is not a foundation, but which launched as a project of an organization called Empower Oversight that has also been heavily funded by IAF. An Empower Oversight spokesperson said the group served as FFO’s fiscal sponsor through February 2023. That year, Benz was paid $253,889 by ICFS.
In 2022, Benz began issuing reports from his one-man think tank positing a conspiracy to silence conservatives online. IAF-funded outlets have presented a drumbeat of interviews with him, in which he argued that outfits battling online disinformation—from media watchdogs like NewsGuard to the US military and Big Tech—were actually undertaking a project to suppress conservative voices. The interviews presented Benz as an independent expert—“Mike Benz exposes State Department’s use of USAID as an ‘intelligence cloak,’” said one Just the News headline—without revealing that his think tank was little more than a website whose existence seems to have been made possible by IAF. The interviews got repackaged as news by other outlets in the IAF stable, expanding their reach.
Empower Oversight, the organization that originally backed Benz, was formed in Virginia in 2021, just one day before IAF was registered in Washington, DC. IAF supplied Empower Oversight with the sole grant it received that year, a $400,000 allocation whose purpose, according to tax filings, was to “develop an infrastructure to cultivate, protect and work with whistleblowers.” Since its founding, Empower Oversight has focused heavily on typical MAGA obsessions, including the Russian collusion probe, purported FBI involvement in January 6, and Hunter Biden.
Empower Oversight is headed by Jason Foster—a longtime aide to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley—whom ProPublica exposed in 2018 as an inflammatory blogger who wrote under the handle “Extremist.” According to ProPublica, Foster, a “partisan combatant” known for his “conspiratorial thinking,” was the main force behind the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of research firm Fusion GPS and ex–British spy Christopher Steele, author of the 2016 memos alleging collusion between Trump and Russia.
Empower Oversight, which continues to receive most of its funding from IAF, represented Gary Shapley, an IRS criminal investigator who alleged that the Biden administration sandbagged a tax fraud investigation into Hunter Biden. (Earlier this year, Shapley briefly served as Trump’s IRS director.) Shapley’s allegations were heavily promoted by members of the IAF network, including Just the News, the Tennessee Star, and other Star News outlets such as the Pennsylvania Daily Star and the Arizona Sun Times.
During the Biden years, Empower Oversight’s work followed a familiar formula: First, it would file a battery of Freedom of Information Act requests to a federal agency, usually related to some right-wing intrigue or a query Grassley’s Senate office had submitted to that department. Empower Oversight then would frequently follow up with a lawsuit alleging deficiencies in the agency’s response. With the help of Solomon’s Just the News, it turned routine records requests and civil complaints into a PR bonanza, while fueling a narrative that the Biden administration and its supposed deep state allies were suppressing information.
While Benz did not respond to our requests for comment—and hung up when we called—he’s arguably delivered the most impact for IAF’s supporters. In April, the State Department shuttered its Global Engagement Center, which focused on combating foreign disinformation but which Benz had alleged was a government tool of anti-conservative censorship.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio rewarded Benz with an exclusive interview announcing the move. The next day, Just the News announced that the “censorship nerve center” had been shut down, and multiple Star News platforms dutifully signal-boosted the news. All cited Benz as merely a “former State official.”
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AN 1 26
President Donald Trump is deploying old-school tactics against some of his enemies: using FBI files to target them.
*The New York Times* reported Sunday morning that FBI Director Kash Patel is helping Trump target his foes using the information it has collected.
Now, the report said, "the bureau has added payback to its portfolio."
While Trump spent years alleging the “weaponization” of law enforcement against political foes, the new administration is “using federal law enforcement to carry out a partisan opposition research operation.”
The report said that Patel has been poring over files, trying to uncover documents that can “expose and discredit federal law enforcement officials who investigated Mr. Trump and his allies.”
The Times noted that it is currently unknown how “wide-ranging” Patel’s coordination with political appointees and Republican allies has been. The official overseeing the operation was Patel’s deputy, Dan Bongino, who recently left the FBI after a tumultuous year in the post. Internally, they referred to Bongino’s unit as the “director’s advisory team.”
Most of the focus has been on the investigation into the 2020 efforts to overturn the election and stage an attack on the U.S. Capitol. Former special counsel Jack Smith spoke to the House late last year about the findings of the probe and said he had "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" that what Trump did was unlawful.
During Trump’s last administration, the IRS was used to go after former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe.
While President Joe Biden’s administration refused to turn over documents tied to the ongoing investigation, Patel is now claiming that Smith broke the law. Speaking to the House, Smith said that all of the information he gathered was approved by a federal judge, which will make it difficult to argue that he went rogue or violated the law with his probes.
J. Edgar Hoover ran his own operations while overseeing the FBI. Recently released information detailed the way in which the FBI was surveilling civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences detailed, the counterintelligence campaign against MLK involved "illegal wiretaps on his phone and bugging hotel rooms when he traveled."
The FBI also spread misinformation about King being an "immoral communist."
The Times reported that the FBI now claims it is the “most transparent in history,” even as it refuses to release the legally required files on the investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The bureau has strategically released batches of anti-Smith material right before he testified behind closed doors.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who once cast himself as a champion of whistleblowers, is now helping funnel FBI leaks through his office. An unnamed FBI whistleblower, for example, alleged that one member of Jack Smith’s team was not “impartial.”
That agent, who no longer works at the FBI, is Walter Giardina, whom Trump has personally attacked for supposedly having “animosity” toward him. “Mr. Giardina vehemently denied those allegations in a meeting with bureau officials last July, two days after the funeral of his wife, who died of adrenal cancer at 49,” the report continued.
Lawyers representing FBI agents who have been fired under the Trump administration’s weaponization effort are calling out the double standard of using the government to attack someone for their politics while accusing others of doing the same. Those making the accusations are granted anonymity, allowing them to hide behind their own partisan protectors.
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// JRNL Fail
The Trump administration’s chum cycle
Media allies are fed bogus information they use to promise prosecutions of the president’s enemies
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 12/18/25 11:39 AM EST
The promise of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to his MAGA media allies, was that Trump loyalists installed at the heads of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies would finally reveal the “deep state” corruption behind the myriad investigations into his misdeeds and bring his political enemies to justice. While the administration’s actual document releases have proven little, its strategy of chumming the water with red meat for the MAGA base has worked on the Trumpist propaganda corps, which has taken the bait and used it to demand a wave of arrests and prosecutions.
In the latest such salvo, Fox News Digital reported Tuesday morning that “the FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, but moved forward amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department,” citing “newly declassified documents” to which the outlet apparently received exclusive access. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and FBI Director Kash Patel quickly promoted Fox’s story; so did Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who said he had received the “shocking new docs” that day and alleged they proved that the FBI’s search of the president’s home had been a “miscarriage of justice.”
But as legal reporters who had followed the Trump documents case swiftly noted, the GOP’s spin was nonsense.
- The FBI agents’ worries about probable cause, documented in the emails Fox News Digital reviewed, predated the acquisition of Mar-a-Lago surveillance video showing “Trump aides secretly removing boxes of records,” which convinced the bureau’s leaders that probable cause had been reached.
- Even Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon rejected the Trump legal team’s argument that “the dissenting views” by FBI agents would have “altered the evidentiary calculus in support of probable cause.”
- And concerns aside, a magistrate judge signed off on the search warrant — and when FBI agents executed it, they found reams of unsecured classified material in various rooms of Trump’s home/private club.
The right’s propaganda apparatus nonetheless sprang into action.
MAGA slop artists like Benny Johnson rushed to social media to hype the “massive” story and demand “charges and arrests” in response.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon discussed the “blockbuster” story during his December 16 show with right-wing propaganda magnate John Solomon, who suggested the documents were “the most important document to date” and “could lead” to criminal charges or a civil suit from Trump.
That night, Solomon was on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show telling millions of viewers that the news, which Hannity termed “a bombshell revelation,” could trigger “legal consequences.” (Trump himself subsequently posted a clip of the segment on social media, then denounced “the FBI’s CRIMINAL RAID.”)
On Newsmax, host Greg Kelly even declared that “Jack Smith belongs in jail” over the Mar-a-Lago search, a bizarre conclusion given that Smith was prosecuting war crimes in Europe at the time and would not become special counsel until two months later.
Video
Citation
From the December 17, 2025, edition of Newsmax'sGreg Kelly Reports
We’ve been seeing iterations of this pattern throughout this first year of Trump’s second term: The Trump administration chums the waters by handing over documents related to one of the myriad past investigations into the president’s actions; the president, top Trump officials, and Republican officeholders say they show a massive scandal; and mainstream reporters point out their narrative is farcical while MAGA media stars call for the indictment, arrest, prosecution, jailing, and perhaps execution of their political enemies.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard triggered a firestorm in July with her bogus claim that former President Barack Obama directed a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump in 2016. While the documents she cited as evidence, originally provided to Fox, proved nothing of the sort, her claim was nonetheless accepted as gospel by MAGA media figures who spent weeks regurgitating her claims and demanding arrests of a litany of purported culprits. The president himself even posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama being arrested and imprisoned.
In August, the purported “Clinton Plan” emails in a newly declassified annex to special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report supposedly unveiled a “plot” against Trump, leading to calls for Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment (Durham had assessed that the emails in question were forgeries created by Russian intelligence).
Two months later, it was FBI documents purporting to show that special counsel Jack Smith had been “spying” on GOP senators that led to right-wing outrage and calls for his arrest (the FBI had reviewed the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection).
And now it’s the Mar-a-Lago search coming under scrutiny based on similarly dishonest readings of documents the administration has released.
Maybe this is all part of the Plan B that DOJ “Weaponization Working Group” head Ed Martin laid out in May — to “name” and “shame” people who the Justice Department proved unable to indict. If that’s the case, a rude awakening may be in store for the right-wing media figures who predicted “justice” was coming — and for the audiences who believed them.
But one can’t put anything past an authoritarian president who has installed loyalists who treat the Justice Department as his personal law firm, purged the law enforcement apparatus of anyone who thinks otherwise, and frequently demands probes into his political foes that his underlings scuttle to carry out.
The constant right-wing celebrations for Trump’s revenge tour can only increase the pressure on law enforcement to try to somehow bring cases against his foes. Indeed, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a grand jury probe into Gabbard’s nonsensical accusations in August; three months later, Reuters reported that prosecutors were drafting grand jury subpoenas “to investigate Obama-era intelligence officials.”
We’ll see where that goes in 2026.
// MMA
08/06/25 12:43 PM EDT
08/01/25 4:44 PM EDT
10/07/25
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AN 10 25
President Donald Trump has been able to have the Republican-controlled Senate confirm the vast bulk of his nominees — with the lone exception of his appointees for U.S. attorney offices.
Now, Politico is reporting that the president is leaning on his party to bulldoze the last remaining obstacle preventing his handpicked prosecutors from being fully confirmed. Trump told a gathering of Senate Republicans Tuesday that the long-standing "blue slip" procedure — in which senators from a nominee's home state have to submit "blue slips" agreeing to their nomination before it can move forward — was a "problem" that should be scrapped.
"You know, I have 10 U.S. attorneys who are phenomenal," Trump said. "And the problem is, they’re not going to ever be confirmed, I guess. I put them in, they’ll be there for three or four months, whatever it is, and then they have to leave."
The "blue slip" process is done for nominees for U.S. District court judgeships as well as U.S. attorney nominees in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the committee, has so far refused Trump's demands, and promised to continue it indefinitely after the Senate gained a Republican majority after last November's election. The "blue slip" process has affected some of Trump's more controversial nominees, like Alina Habba for the U.S. Attorney's post in the District of New Jersey, with Sens. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) each declining to return a blue slip.
"Anytime you have a Democrat senator, not even two, just one, they’ll say, because of the time we’re in, ‘we’re not approving that person,'" Trump said during the Tuesday lunch with senators.
“Because of blue slip, I have to tell the person after three months, I’m sorry you’ll have to leave and I’ll put someone else in,” he continued. “This is not constitutional. And I really, I hope you can look at that blue slip thing.”
Tuesday is just the latest example of Trump zeroing in on the "blue slip" tradition. In July, he called out Grassley on his Truth Social platform and slammed the "blue slip" procedure as a "hoax" and a "scam." He complained that despite being in the minority, Democrats had exploited the procedure to impose an "ironclad stoppage" on his nominees coming before the Judiciary Committee.
Click here to read Politico's full report.
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MMA
Why the right-wing media apparatus is suddenly yelling about Jack Smith supposedly spying on GOP senators
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/07/25
Republicans and their right-wing media allies yesterday spun out frothy allegations about former special counsel Jack Smith purportedly “spying on Republican senators” in order to forestall tough questions about the state of the Justice Department. But their dark conspiracy theory immediately collapses under scrutiny.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for what seemed fated to be a grueling hearing. Potential avenues for congressional oversight could include the unprecedented weaponization of her department as an extension of President Donald Trump’s will; the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein saga, including the location of the Epstein “client list” she once claimed to possess and a potential presidential pardon for the notorious sex offender’s chief accomplice; and the legal authority for the deployment of the U.S. military on American streets.
But FBI Director Kash Patel, his deputy Dan Bongino, and the stenographers at Fox News were happy to try to help her out of that tough spot. On the afternoon before the hearing, Fox News Digital reported that “former Special Counsel Jack Smith was allegedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican Senators as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.” The October 6 article was based on a document “recently discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel and exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital,” which states that an FBI special agent “‘conducted preliminary toll analysis’ on the toll records associated with” eight senators and one member of the House as part of Smith’s probe, which at the time was called Arctic Frost. The story also included quotes from Bongino, whom the report said would be meeting with the affected members of Congress that day.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, subsequently posted the document on social media, saying that it “shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues.” He added, “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”
Their allegations were quickly promoted by MAGA media outlets and on Tuesday morning were highlighted by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as they sought to shield Bondi from criticism.
But legal reporters explained that there’s not much to the story — the FBI needed to review the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection.
Smith’s final report cites such toll records in a footnote for its statement that “at around the same time as he issued his 6:01 p.m. Tweet [telling his supporters occupying the U.S. Capitol to leave], Mr. Trump tried to reach two U.S. Senators, and he also directed Co-Conspirator 1 to call Members of Congress and attempt to enlist them to further delay the certification” of the electoral votes, as MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported.
“It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election, you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted.
“In other words, if you start from the premise that the entire probe was political, then seeking lawmakers’ toll records would be inherently bad,” Cheney added. “But if you view the probe as righteous or justified, then it’s not hard to see why those records would be pertinent.”
You won’t have trouble guessing which side the MAGAsphere came down on. Trump gave clemency to all the January 6 defendants, including those convicted of assaulting police and seditious conspiracy, still falsely claims to have won the 2020 election, and clearly believes that the only thing wrong with his election subversion plot was that it was unsuccessful. On Monday, his loyal propagandists at Fox and Newsmax leaped into action to promote the purported FBI bombshell.
On Fox, Newsmax, “stunning” story shows Smith conducted an “enemies list investigation,” is “going to go to jail
Just minutes after Fox News Digital published its story, Fox host Will Cain declared it “pretty stunning.” He went on to claim that Democrats had engaged in “projection when it comes to authoritarianism. But if this doesn't fit the bill, this doesn't fit the definition, what is the definition of authoritarianism?”
His guest, Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), replied, “This is the quintessential definition of it.”
Later that night, Fox host Jesse Watters claimed that the story shows that “Biden's FBI was spying on Republican senators.”
His prime-time colleague Sean Hannity hosted right-wing journalist John Solomon, who declared that “Arctic Frost is starting to look like an enemies list investigation” and “a really troubling diagram of how the deep state was working under Joe Biden. The FBI, the DOJ working hand and glove to spy, pry, into the lives, the conversations, and the data of Republicans.”
Solomon went on — somehow maintaining a straight face — to accuse the FBI of potentially “intruding on a constitutionally protected event” because, in the time period for which the bureau sought the toll records, Congress had been certifying the election (except when they were evacuated in the face of a violent mob of Trumpists).
Video
Citation
From the October 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity
The rhetoric was similarly over-the-top in the prime-time hours of Fox competitor Newsmax.
“Jack Smith, bad guy, and I think he's just been busted in something really bad,” host Greg Kelly said at the top of his segment on the report. He described the FBI’s actions as “illegal,” adding, “Jack Smith, I think you’re going to go to jail.”
Fellow host Rob Schmitt didn’t seem to understand what the story was actually about, even as he promoted it to his audience. He told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), “You had your phone tapped by Jack Smith,” and asked the senator to “illustrate to us how big a deal this is.” Johnson gently corrected Schmitt, saying that investigators had only obtained “metadata,” before claiming that the report “should shock and outrage every American.”
(Newsmax quickly updated its chyron from “FBI: JACK SMITH TAPPED PHONES OF GOP SENATORS” to “FBI: JACK SMITH SNOOPED ON GOP PHONES.”)
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:{GOP senator from deep-red state admits farmers are 'very upset' by Trump’s policies:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:
Ailia Zehra 9 25
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When Alina Habba, a former personal attorney for President Donald Trump, was appointed interim U.S. attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) District of New Jersey, her critics argued that the appointment was overtly political and reflected the fact that she is very much a Trump loyalist. Habba vowed to "make New Jersey red" during a podcast interview, which, critics said, is not the type of comment an interim U.S. attorney should be making.
Habba's term ended on July 24, and the status of her tenure has been in dispute.
Now, 91-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — the U.S. Senate's president pro tempore and the oldest member — is weighing in on Habba's position at DOJ.
READ MORE: 'Insufferable little tyrants': MAGA'S newest 'idiotic' delusion blasted by critics
In a Monday, August 25 post on X, formerly Twitter, Grassley tweeted, "Habba was withdrawn as the President's nominee for New Jersey U.S. Atty on July 24 &the Judic cmte never received any of the paperwork needed for the Senate to vet her nomination."
Grassley, in a separate post, wrote, "A U.S. Atty/district judge nominee without a blue slip does not hv the votes to get confirmed on the Senate floor & they don’t hv the votes to get out of cmte As chairman I set Pres Trump noms up for SUCCESS NOT FAILURE."
Grassley's comments are generating a lot of discussion on X.
CNN's Aaron Blake, formerly of the Washington Post, tweeted, "Interesting response from Grassley here, basically emphasizing that Habba couldn't get confirmed and that's why she's not U.S. attorney."
READ MORE: A truly terrifying plot lies hidden in this empty Trump threat
MAGA attorney Mike Davis, known for his inflammatory attacks on Democrats, posted, " Fact Check: True. I believe the century-old blue-slip veto is bad. But until we get all 12 Senate Judiciary Republicans and at least 50 Senate Republicans to agree to ignore blue slips, these nominees will all fail in their committee and floor votes. Tillis has already said he will vote against nominees without blue slips. So these nominees will fail in their committee votes. This isn't a Grassley problem. This is a Senate problem."
MAGA supporter Andrew Spanton commented, "Recess appointments Time to step up the heat big time on (Senate Majority Leader John) Thune."
Another MAGA Republican, Isabella Davis, wrote, "It is right that this kind of 'blue vote veto' should have been abolished a long time ago, for it will only slow down the process and aggravate the political stalemate."
READ MORE:'Delusional dim-wit' Trump is flailing to avoid his biggest enemy: analysis
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an 7 25
Two Senate Republicans are now blocking a confirmation vote for three of President Donald Trump's nominees to positions in the U.S. Treasury Department in protest of one of the administration's newest policies.
Politico's Kelsey Tamborino and Josh Siegel reported Monday that Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Curtis (R-Utah) are now holding up votes for Treasury Department general counsel Brian Morissey, assistant Treasury Secretary Francis Brooke and Treasury Department undersecretary Jonathan McKernan. According to Politico, Grassley and Curtis are blocking the officials' confirmation to protect lucrative solar and wind energy projects in their states. And they're apparently not the only Senate Republicans willing to go to the mat for those projects.
"The pair, alongside other GOP senators, have escalated their pressure on the Trump administration in recent days to back off its efforts to strangle new solar and wind energy projects, warning that potential cancellations would make it harder to meet growing power demand," Tamborino and Siegel wrote.
READ MORE:'She is very very dumb': Fox News host mocked after flubbing basic civics lesson
One part of Trump's massive new tax and spending law is the repealing of renewable energy investments made possible by former President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman detailed last month, the legislation will "kneecap America’s renewable energy industry" while making China the de facto world leader in green energy technology.
In July, Trump issued an executive order instructing the Treasury Department to "strictly enforce" provisions in the new law that end tax credits for renewable energy development, which would be the responsibility of the Treasury officials Curtis and Grassley are blockading. The order also specified when a project was said to have begun construction, which Grassley said goes against what Congress has already passed.
“What it means for a project to ‘begin construction’ has been well established by Treasury guidance for more than a decade. Moreover, Congress specifically references current Treasury guidance to set that term’s meaning in law,” the Iowa Republican said in the Congressional Record. “This is a case where both the law and congressional intent are clear.”
According to Politico, the tax and spending law defunds all projects slated to start generating power after 2027. Several Republicans fought for compromise language that was included in the final bill that allowed more time for renewable energy projects beginning construction in the next six months.
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catch hell at town hall but at least in person? 3 25
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COS JEN EX SCHED
2020
Office Listings https://grassley.senate.gov https://facebook.com/grassley https://twitter.com/chuckgrassley https://instagram.com/senatorchuckgrassley 135 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510 ...................................................... (202) 224–3744
Chief of
Staff.—Aaron Cummings. FAX: 224–6020
Legislative Director.—James Rice. 721 Federal Building, 210 Walnut Street, Des Moines, IA 50309 ......................................... (515) 288–1145 State Administrator.—Carol Olson. 111 7th Avenue, Southeast, Suite 6800, Cedar Rapids, IA 52401 .......................................... (319) 363–6832 120 Federal Courthouse Building, 320 Sixth Street, Sioux City, IA 51101 ........................... (712) 233–1860 210 Waterloo Building, 531 Commercial Street, Waterloo, IA 50701 ................................... (319) 232–6657 201 West 2nd Street, Suite 720, Davenport, IA 52801 ........................................................... (563) 322–4331 307 Federal Building, 8 South Sixth Street, Council Bluffs, IA 51501 .................................. (712) 322–7103
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NAT END DEMOC PRO USAID
James Aaron Rice is the Legislative Director for U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, for whom he has worked since June 2000. In this role, James oversees Senator Grassley’s legislative team while also serving as the chief advisor to Senator Grassley on foreign policy matters. This includes staffing Senator Grassley in his role as co-chair of the Senate Baltic Freedom Caucus where James coordinates with the three Baltic embassies and Baltic American organizations to build on the strong U.S.-Baltic partnership. James’s previous professional experience includes positions in the Iowa Senate, an internship with the British Conservative Party, and work on various political campaigns. James has received a public diplomacy award from the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his contributions to understanding of Estonia in the United States and has been awarded the National Defence System of the Republic of Lithuania Medal of Merit for civilians for his work on Baltic security. He has been selected as a National Review Institute Washington Fellow, a Hillsdale College Madison Fellow, and an Atlantic Council Eurasia Congressional Fellow. James received a B.A. from Drake University with majors in political science and history and an M.A. in Statecraft and International Affairs from the Institute of World Politics. He speaks French. James was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa.
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AN 7 25
President Donald Trump is now pushing for the Senate Republican in charge of the committee overseeing the federal courts to get rid of a longstanding tradition that would allow him to more easily prosecute his political opponents.
That's according to a Tuesday article in Courthouse News Service, which reported that Trump has now set his sights on Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). As chair of the powerful committee, Grassley is in a position to do away with the custom of "blue slips," in which senators from states under the jurisdiction of a presidential appointee to a federal judgeship or a U.S. attorney's office can effectively veto a nomination by refusing to turn in blue slips in agreement with the appointment.
One particular example is Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) not submitting blue slips in favor of controversial acting U.S. attorney Alina Habba for the District of New Jersey, who the Trump administration has allowed to remain in her post by exploiting a loophole in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. In a Truth Social post on Tuesday night, Trump raged against the blue slip system, and called on Grassley to end it so he can ram through a slew of far-right prosecutors in Democratic-run states.
READ MORE:'All power to Trump': Worst modern chief justice John Roberts bashed in scathing editorial
"Democrats like Schumer, Warner, Kaine, Booker, Schiff, and others, SLEAZEBAGS ALL, have an ironclad stoppage of Great Republican Candidates," Trump wrote in his signature style of oddly placed capital letters. "Put simply, the President of the United States will never be permitted to appoint the person of his choice because of an ancient, and probably Unconstitutional, “CUSTOM,” that if you have, even one person in the opposite Party serving in the U.S. Senate, he/she must give consent, thereby completely stopping the opposite Party’s Nomination."
"The only way to beat this Hoax is to appoint a Democrat or, a weak and ineffective Republican," he continued. "Therefore, I would never be able to appoint Great Judges or U.S. Attorneys in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, and other places, where there is, coincidentally, the highest level of crime and corruption — The places where fantastic people are most needed! ... Chuck, I know you have the Courage to do this, DO IT!"
As Courthouse News Service's Benjamin S. Weiss wrote, Trump gave no evidence that the blue slip system was "probably Unconstitutional," and that the Constitution in fact gives the Senate the power of "advice and consent" regarding presidential nominees. Weiss also noted that Trump's claim that Democrats "openly broke" the blue slip tradition was unfounded.
Democrats have abided by the blue slip system even to their own detriment. In 2023, then-President Joe Biden withdrew the nomination of Scott Colom, whom he had nominated to serve as a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Mississippi. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) refused to return a blue slip for Colom's confirmation, and then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) refused to abolish the blue slip system to confirm Colom.
READ MORE:'I thought consumers weren't paying?' MAGA rips Josh Hawley over 'out of touch' proposal
Click here to read Courthouse News Service's full report.
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7 25 raw
U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is joining a wave of Republican voices reviving criticism of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation—calling it “rigged” and saying it will be “fun” to watch Democrats “lawyer up”—as media scrutiny intensifies around Donald Trump’s ties to the late, notorious sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein and his refusal to release the files.
Fox News on Monday reported that the FBI, under then-Director James Comey, “botched” the Clinton emails investigation in 2016, citing a press release from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
The FBI “failed to perform fundamental investigative work and left key pieces of evidence on the cutting room floor,” Senator Grassley alleged. “The Comey FBI’s negligent approach and perhaps intentional lack of effort in the Clinton investigation is a stark contrast to its full-throated investigation of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which was based on the uncorroborated and now discredited Steele dossier. Comey’s decision-making process smacks of political infection.”
ALSO READ:'Sick of it': House GOP fury rises as Trump ally Johnson dodges Epstein debate
On Tuesday, Senator Tuberville told Newsmax (video below), “James Comey’s FBI rigged the Hillary Clinton investigation so we would, you know, we would never know how badly she damaged our national security when they didn’t probe those crucial thumb drives.”
“What a colossal cover-up this has been,” Tuberville alleged. “It is a huge cover-up.”
“They’ve tried to push a narrative that basically they want to change our country that’s something it’s not. They wanted to take all the ability of us as Republicans, as Americans, to try to keep our country going in the right direction,” he said. “But the mainstream media, the Democrats, and a few Republicans have pushed this narrative of, ‘Let’s do it the right way. Let’s make sure we’re doing the right thing.'”
“It has been—it’s been—something that I’ve been shocked at since I’ve been here, and now we’re finally seeing things start to leak out, the truth of really what happened,” Tuberville claimed, not offering any specifics.
“The American people are going to find out, it is going to be fun up here to watch all this start taking a narrative, a true narrative of what really happened, of the Democrats trying to change this country into a socialist communist country for the last four years,” he alleged, apparently referring to the Biden presidency, of which Hillary Clinton was not a part.
“These people need to lawyer up, and they need to find out really what it’s really like to be under the gun, putting her hand up, testifying in front of people all over this country because it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be much watched, as we look at all this narrative being brought forward.”
After she served as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton testified, under oath and television cameras, before Congress, for 11 hours in a single day in 2015.
On Sunday, Tuberville claimed that President Donald Trump’s bloated ankles are the result of him “fighting the radicals in this country.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
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AN 7 25
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday that the Justice Department has released a declassified appendix from the 2018 Inspector General’s report, shedding new light on the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
This step follows a long-standing appeal from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who has consistently advocated for more openness about the investigation.
Grassley released the document on Monday after receiving it from Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
READ MORE:Carville says this 'forceful' 4-word phrase should be Dems' 'core message' going into 2026
The newly released appendix shows the FBI retrieved thumb drives, described as containing hacked State Department data, including messages from former President Barack Obama — but did not fully analyze their contents, per theWashington Examiner.
The Clinton email controversy dates back to 2009–2013, when Clinton conducted official business via a private, home-based email system. The FBI concluded she had been “extremely careless” but did not find evidence of criminal intent, opting not to press charges.
Bondi’s Monday announcement also intersects with ongoing controversy over the handling of documents related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Conservatives had pressed for the release of Epstein’s “client list,” but a DOJ-FBI memo later said that no such list existed and emphasized that most materials remain sealed to protect victims.
Responding to calls for further disclosure, the Justice Department filed a request Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in the Epstein case — following directives from President Donald Trump and public pressure.
READ MORE:'He is failing': Top GOP pollster explains why 'the next 6 months' could seal Trump’s political fate
However, legal experts have warnedthat the request is unlikely to reveal much new information, pointing out that grand jury presentations in the Southern District of New York usually include only enough detail to support an indictment, not exhaustive evidence.
Meanwhile, Bondi's Monday decision was criticized as a "distraction" on social media.
Podcaster Brian Allen wrote on the social platform X: "Trump’s DOJ just reopened the Clinton email investigation — releasing documents from the failed 2016 probe under James Comey. Pam Bondi’s DOJ says this is about 'transparency.' But we all know what this really is: political theater to distract from the Epstein fallout and criminal referrals now hitting Trump’s own administration. They’re flailing. And they’re running out of cards to play."
Another X user wrote: "NEW: Here we go again… it’s 2025 and they’re still yelling 'BUT HER EMAILS!' Pam Bondi is releasing more Clinton email drama, because when Trump world feels the Epstein heat, they always reach for Hillary. It’s not about justice or anything serious, other than about a distraction for MAGA base. The smoke machine is on full blast."
"The desperation is so obvious," wrote another account.
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EMPTY WHL
Old Man Chuck Grassley Got Snookered by Emil Bove’s Contemptuous Dodge
July 15, 2025/26 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel
Senate Judiciary Democrats asked Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing with whistleblower Erez Reuveni to learn about Emil Bove’s contempt in the face of orders Judge James Boasberg gave DOJ on March 15. In a letter that carefully dodges smoking gun proof that Emil Bove did command others to blow off Boasberg’s order, Grassley refused.
I’m going to assume that Chuck Grassley is just really old and so vulnerable to being duped by someone devious like Bove. Otherwise, of course, we’d have to conclude he’s complicit in a clear attempt to deport innocent men to a concentration camp at all costs.
Grassley’s three main rebuttals of Reuveni’s allegations are:
- DOJ has gotten appellate relief on at least some of the misconduct Reuveni reported
- Emil Bove made the comment about telling a judge “fuck you” before Boasberg issued any orders
- Bove testified under oath that he did not order any DOJ lawyers to blow off Boasberg’s order
Grassley pretends that the files handed over by Reuveni include “almost none” that “include, reference, or even cite” Bove.
Almost none of the additional documents you published include, reference, or even cite Mr. Bove.
Almost none is not none, as I’ll show below.
Grassley further claims that most of the files reflect “litigation strategy about the scope of court orders.”
Most of the communications merely reflect Administration attorneys internally debating or discussing litigation strategy and the scope of court orders. Debate about the scope of court orders is fundamentally inconsistent with an intention to ignore them. Moreover, many of the legal positions discussed in the documents were ultimately advanced in federal court as the formal position of the United States, and the Administration has received at least some appellate relief in each of the cases described.
With regards to the JGG lawsuit to which the “fuck you” comment is pertinent, that relief consists of two Trump appointees stalling a contempt motion for months, as both TPM and NYT pointed out today. Here’s how TPM’s David Kurtz described it.
The DC appeals court — a three-judge panel composed of Trump appointees Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao and Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard (who opposed the move) — placed an administrative stay on Boasberg’s contempt proceedings way back on April 18. What is usually supposed to be a short-term pause in the case has now dragged on for nearly three months.
In that time, former DOJ career lawyer Erez Reuveni has revealed bombshell internal DOJ emails and texts. Those documents show that Bove, in his role as principal associate deputy attorney general, gave the green light for continuing with the March 15 removals of Venezuelan nationals to CECOT in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act in spite of Boasberg’s order blocking the deportations and directing the planes carrying the detainees to turn around. (For his part, Bove denies violating any court orders, and the Justice Department has made the preposterous argument that Boasberg’s written order didn’t include the direction to turn the planes around and that trumped his oral demand that they do so.)
In slow-rolling the contempt inquiry, the DC appeals court hasn’t just enabled Bove (who has engaged in other egregious conduct at DOJ). It has hung Boasberg out to dry, done nothing to staunch the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of court orders in other cases, and has left the judicial branch more exposed to a rogue executive determined to expand his power at the expense of the judiciary.
The relief Grassley is relying on is, in fact, partisan stonewalling.
That matters, because he is replicating a corrupt dodge that Bove — and DOJ itself — are both adopting.
That corrupt dodge starts, first of all, with his claim that Reuveni’s “fuck you” allegation — corroborated in four sets of texts exchanged with colleagues during the weekend in question — came before any judge had issued orders.
The gravamen of the allegations is that Mr. Bove directed Justice Department attorneys to ignore court orders, but (1) the meeting with Mr. Bove occurred before there was any litigation or court order to follow;
That’s true: Bove made the “fuck you” comment at a meeting on March 14. Boasberg issued the order not to unload any planes with Alien Enemies Act detainees on the evening of March 15.
Grassley makes much of the fact that August Flentje told DOJ HR that Bove told the lawyers to avoid an order prohibiting the AEA flights at all costs.
In an April 8th letter addressed to the Justice Department’s Human Resources Division, August Flentje—Mr. Reuveni’s former supervisor—stated: “The Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General [Bove] advised our team that we must avoid a court order halting an upcoming operation to implement the Act at all costs.”1 This statement was made under penalty of perjury months before Mr. Reuveni made the claims in his whistleblower disclosure, and directly contradicts his assertions. Mr. Bove’s comments to subordinate Justice Department litigators— made in advance of anticipated litigation—advising them to avoid a court order that would negatively impact a mission is inconsistent with instructions to ignore a court order, and entirely consistent with Mr. Bove’s sworn testimony.
But again, that was March 14.
They didn’t avoid an order prohibiting the operation. Drew Ensign tried his damndest to mislead Boasberg about flights in the air, but Boasberg nevertheless issued the order.
Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to turn the planes around, not to deplane the planes.
So, Mr. Ensign, the first point is that I — that you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States. However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.
Boasberg did give the order that Emil Bove was so inexplicably desperate to avoid.
And that’s where Grassley gets either cute or duped. He quotes Bove stating, under oath, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order” (with equivocal comments, not under oath, from Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi).
At his hearing, under oath, Mr. Bove firmly stated, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.” The Deputy Attorney General issued a statement confirming that he also attended the meeting, and “at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.” In another statement, the Attorney General unequivocally said that “no one was ever asked to defy a court order.”
All very nifty, Senator, except when you consider the smoking gun that does name Bove by his title, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.
Yaakov Roth, a top Civil Division lawyer documented in an email to Reuveni and others that PADAG (Bove) “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior [sic] the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court’s order.”
Only it wasn’t.
Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to inform its clients to turn the flights around, not to deplane the planes.
And then Bove instructed DHS — not DOJ lawyers, but DHS personnel, possibly including lawyers — something different.
Bove instructed DHS they could do something impermissible under the order Boasberg gave. And that’s the core of the contempt for which Boasberg found probable cause that two Trump appointees have bottled up at DC Circuit.
By mid-Sunday morning, the picture of what had happened the previous night came into clearer focus. It appeared that the Government had transferred members of the Plaintiff class into El Salvador’s custody hours after this Court’s injunction prohibited their deportation under the Proclamation. Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully. The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: “Oopsie . . . Too late 😂😂.” Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele), X (Mar. 16, 2025, 7:46 a.m. EDT), https://perma.cc/Y384-4TDW, https://perma.cc/6VTW-5KRD (ellipses in original)
Bove may not have lied — this is not proof he told DOJ lawyers to fuck off a Boasberg order. But he did tell DHS to fuck off a Boasberg order.
Which is it, Senator Grassley: Are you old and confused? Or complicit?
Because Erez Reuveni supplied you the smoking gun proving that Bove blew off Boasberg’s order.
Grassley does one other dishonest thing in his letter. He makes much of the fact that Todd Blanche, not Bove himself, fired Reuveni.
The whistleblower also claims his termination was the result of his efforts to ensure agency compliance with court orders. The documents Mr. Reuveni produced, however, reveal that the ultimate termination decision was made and signed by Deputy Attorney General Blanche—not Mr. Bove.
Another of the “almost none” documents that Reuveni turned over showed that Bove was gunning for Reuveni just before he was ousted.
Days before Blanche put Reuveni on leave, April 1, Flentje texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove” conveyed by Roth, the same guy who sent the smoking gun email.
On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche did put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”
That is, in response to Reuveni being placed on leave, Flentje confirmed there was a “through line” from questions about whether or not DOJ would follow an order to Reuveni’s suspension (and subsequent firing).
For Grassley, “almost none” is two too many to sustain his case, because the smoking gun documenting who defied an order after Bove proclaimed he might tell a judge “fuck you” is right there with Bove’s title on it.
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Tags: Chuck Grassley, Emil Bove, Erez Reuveni, James Boasberg
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ENFORCER
an 4 25
A report published in The Washington Post on Thursday revealed tech billionaire Elon Musk funnelled substantial funds in late March to support Republican Congress members who backed legislation aimed at impeaching judges or limiting their authority. The report cites new filings, indicating this effort aligns with his campaign to penalize judges who make rulings unfavorable to the Trump administration.
"The spending,which totaled $144,400 in support of nearly two dozen members of Congress, was disclosed Tuesdayin filings to the Federal Election Commission.While the amount is a fraction of the millions he shelled out for Republican candidates before the November election, the spending so early in the 2026 midterm cycle further cements the billionaire’s long-term involvement in GOP politics despite a decisive loss for his preferred candidate in this month’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race," The Post reported.
The filings from the principal campaign committees of the members provide only a limited view of Musk's political expenditures during the first quarter of 2025, per The Post. Additional funding channels managed by Musk, such as his America PAC, are not obligated to submit reports until the end of July.
ALSO READ:Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice says future colleague was 'bought and paid for' by Dems
In several instances, Musk's contributions were reportedly made right after House members introduced or supported legislation aimed at specific judges.
Reps. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are among the lawmakers who received donations from Musk after introducing steps to limit judges' powers.
Earlier this month — when liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, despite Musk spending tens of millions of dollars to back Schimel — the billionaire faced heavy criticism.
But despite this loss in Wisconsin, Musk intends to continue making efforts to support GOP candidates, per the Post.
ALSO READ:'Wakeup call' for Republicans as special election results send warning signs to Trump
One specific target of Musk's efforts has been Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who has made several rulings unfavorable to the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, Boasberg cited a “willful disregard" and found probable cause that the Trump administration could be held in criminal contempt of court after officials defied his order to not remove Venezuelan migrants from the country based on a centuries-old wartime law.
Boasberg, first appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, said he would launch proceedings to determine whether to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt.
ALSO READ:'Stolen': Elon Musk boosts conspiracy about Wisconsin election results
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