Todd Blanche
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PRIMARY 3 26 EZ BANNON
MERRI OK
SEE DOJ 3 FREQ FAIL
GOP STEAL ELECTION VOTER SUPPRESS essayli ca illegal bs thumb dr
SEE HANNITY FOX
~ SPLC
SEE RETALIATION 3 LAWFARE BY TRUMP
NEGLECTED?
FREQ SIDESTEP QUESTIONS/ DEFLECTION
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CPAC 3 26 NOT TRUMP JDV
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DR SEN CASSIDY CAVED BC NEXT GUY WORSE? COLLINS AND MUK NO? CORNYN AND --- ROLLED ON IOU SLUSH FUND
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an 10 26
President Donald Trump's first assistant U.S. attorney keeps getting caught in lies, according to one keen observer.
National security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed to a recent tweet from Bill Essayli listing details about the case against California and Los Angeles County over a conspiracy theory about mail ballots. According to the federal government, 20,000 of the people who got ballots were "likely noncitizens."
The administration has been caught in this fight before. In Nevada, the administration used this same system and claimed that as many as 15,903 noncitizens might be on the state’s voter rolls. The state demanded evidence, and Homeland Security whittled the list down to 185 names, claiming it had "manually" verified they were noncitizens.
Nevada officials then checked the 185 names against state records and concluded every one was a U.S. citizen.
In a letter to DHS, Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote: “As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” adding that the federal government had “provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Now California must use the same system and face the same allegations. So, the parties asked the judge to block the federal government's demand.
The Justice Department argued that California must segregate those ballots until their citizenship status can be verified, and Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the state of refusing to comply with federal law.
Essayli falsely claimed on X, "Make no mistake: California has no interest in protecting the integrity of its elections. We presented the evidence. Their answers: "It's not widespread fraud." "It's too late we already mailed the ballots." "It's already illegal to vote illegally." "We can't trust your evidence." A law that isn't enforced is meaningless. Today we are asking a court to require California to follow the law and not count ballots cast by noncitizens," he claimed.
Wheeler said that in this case, Essayli was "outright lying here."
She cited, "The same untested garbage that has been shown to be fraudulent in other states. He is confessing to a conspiracy to deprive naturalized citizens, like Harmeet Dhillon, of their right to vote," Wheeler bashed.
Indeed, Essayli's claims still have not been independently verified and resemble a system that failed in Nevada.
His problem is that the lawsuit itself describes the people as “likely noncitizens,” not confirmed noncitizens. California officials say the federal government has not explained the basis for the suspicion or provided enough identifying information to verify the list.
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an 9 26
Trump officials 'still fighting' to keep 'slush fund' alive: legal expert
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AN 10 26
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department plan to use a “a historic number” of election-monitoring initiatives is facing a challenge in court from civil rights lawyers.
The NAACP has taken legal action against Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, asking for information concerning the department's plans to deploy more than 1,000 election monitors for the November 3 election.
The lawsuit, which has been brought in the federal court in Washington, is asking a judge to compel the department to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request that was submitted on September 1. The NAACP claims that the Department of Justice failed to meet the statutory deadline for deciding on the request and is therefore seeking emergency intervention before Election Day.
According to the complaint, the planned deployment “stands to jeopardize the election” and could interfere with voters’ ability to cast ballots “free from intimidation.”
The request for records asks for information regarding the legal basis of the operation, the locations where the monitors will be deployed, how they will be selected and trained, whether state officials gave their consent, and whether personnel from federal law enforcement agencies could take part.
The extent of the operation has attracted attention since Dhillon has stated that the department aims to send around 1,000 monitors to the polling stations. Todd Blanche, the Attorney General, said on Sunday that monitors would be going to all 50 states.
Blanche described the operation as being in line with the Justice Department's long-standing role in elections. For a long time, the department has sent federal officials to oversee compliance with voting-rights laws, but the NAACP contends that this year's initiative has moved away from that traditional function and is now focused on examining allegations regarding ballot security.
The Justice Department stated to The Guardian that its observers “comply with all legal and ethical requirements” and would not intervene in the voting process.
Concerns over the way the monitors would operate grew following an incident at Wyoming's primary. The Republican governor, Mark Gordon, stated that two federal monitors came to a polling place without being informed and tried to look at the voting machines. He called their actions "aggressive, unexpected, and disruptive".
The department denied that description and stated that the monitors had not done anything improper.
Kristen Clarke, who is the general counsel of the NAACP and previously headed the Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, stated that the organization would like the government to make public the authority it considers to be the basis for the operation and the way in which it plans to carry it out.
Now that Election Day is less than a month away, the conflict is causing part of Trump's election campaign to be brought before a federal judge and may compel the Justice Department to make public the details, which the NAACP says is the largest election-monitoring operation in the history of the United States.
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FIRED BY TODD?
AN 9 26
On Thursday, September 10, attorney and veteran GOP operative Joseph diGenova abruptly resigned from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where he had been focused on a conspiracy investigation targeting President Donald Trump's foes. And according to Salon's Heather Digby Parton, the fact that he left DOJ without getting a single indictment is a major blow for the Trump administration and U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.
"The definition of a mafia made man is one who has Italian blood and is formally initiated into the 'family,' having sworn an oath of omerta and promising to put the crime family above all else," Parton explains in Salon. "Traitors take their lives in their own hands, and they often do not live to tell the tale, which means that it's rare for anyone to go against the family, especially in public. That's why it was so surprising to see longtime Republican operative Joe diGenova resign from his job as a top Trump consigliere — or, more formally, 'special counselor to the attorney general' — on Thursday. If there was ever a GOP-made man, it is him."
Parton emphasizes that "expectations in the MAGAsphere were high" when diGenova was appointed to DOJ.
"DiGenova was appointed in April to oversee the Justice Department's big inquisition in Florida after the career prosecutor who had been running it resigned over concerns that they did not have a prosecutable case against former CIA chief John Brennan," Parton notes. "DiGenova, who had not prosecuted a case since his stint in the Reagan Justice Department, was a trusted GOP loyalist. He was involved in many of Rudy Giuliani's crusades during Donald Trump's first term, including the Big Lie court cases that went nowhere."
Parton continues, "This made him widely seen as the kind of partisan stalwart the administration needed to kickstart the investigation … DiGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, have been fixtures in the Republican scandal-mongering business for decades, having first made their bones during the Clinton years."
But after his resignation, Parton observes, diGenova told the New York Post, "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem."
"What's clear from this episode is that Attorney General Todd Blanche — and, by extension, Trump — will take nothing less than indictments against his perceived enemies," the Salon journalist writes. "And if they don't materialize, he is ready to sacrifice even the mostly loyal MAGA foot soldiers. When I wrote about diGenova's appointment in April, I asked the question, 'Can the TV hit man do what none of the other Trump lawyers before him have been able to do: put the president's enemies behind bars?' Now, we know the answer is no, and it's not for lack of trying. It's for lack of evidence. Even a made man can't get that job done."
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MMA
John Solomon hyped Trump prosecutor Joe diGenova's work just days before diGenova resigned
Solomon a day before diGenova resigned: “Joe diGenova, the FBI, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche are getting their horses together now. For the first time, there is a buzzing accountability machine.”
Written by Sophie Lawton
Published 09/11/26
A day prior to Joe diGenova’s abrupt resignation from his position running Trump's “Grand Conspiracy” probe, diGenova ally and “special government employee” John Solomon — whose task force just declassified documents related to the probe, including notes from the FBI's interview of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — was seemingly caught flat-footed, boasting of diGenova's role as part of a “buzzing accountability machine.”
On September 10, diGenova resigned from his Justice Department appointment running Trump’s “Grand Conspiracy” probe into Democratic political figures, law enforcement officials, and other perceived enemies of the Trump administration.
During the September 9 episode of his program Just the News No Noise, Solomon interviewed Flynn, who also praised diGenova, calling him “absolutely the right person” for the probe and a “pit bull-type prosecutor.” Solomon also claimed that the latest documents release was “about providing evidence to Joe diGenova and the prosecutors of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and Fort Pierce.”
Solomon also appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room on September 8 ahead of the documents’ release, claiming that “there are some major cooperating witnesses that have now flipped to the state to working with Joe diGenova,” which will “accelerate the ability to bring accountability.”
Following diGenova's resignation, Solomon took to social media to reassure followers that the “Grand Conspiracy” investigation is still ongoing and that prosecutors are “continuing the work Joe started with a roadmap that includes subpoenas and some cooperating witnesses.” Meanwhile, Ryan Reilly reported for NBC that “a person familiar with the investigation” said that “Justice Department leaders had lost confidence in diGenova because they believed he was unfocused, moving too slowly and pursuing a path unlikely to succeed.”
Here is Solomon and Flynn's exchange on September 9:
Video
Citation
From the September 9, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News No Noise
JOHN SOLOMON (HOST): It isn't just about clearing Mike Flynn's name, though that's very important. It's also about providing evidence to Joe diGenova and the prosecutors of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and Fort Pierce. They are now beginning to bring grand jury witnesses to begin securing indictments against those who weaponized the government from the summer of 2016 to January of ’25. Everything from the FBI and Russia collusion all the way to Jack Smith.
In that process, they have secured cooperation for one or two really significant FBI personnel. That's a really important thing. When someone in the middle of the drama says, we lied, we made it up, we didn't do that, that wasn't the truth, we set it up, it changes the ability of prosecutors to make a case, particularly in a partisan divide like we are in America.
Joe diGenova, the FBI, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche are getting their horses together now. For the first time, there is a buzzing accountability machine. And this — these documents today are already in the hands of prosecutors. They have it down in Florida. It would be called an overt act. It happened eight, nine years ago, which means it can't charge it itself.
…
MICHAEL FLYNN (GUEST): I just want to say, I appreciate what the Government Transparency Task Force is doing. You are working to get to the bottom of it, and I think that there's going to be more to come. In fact, I know there's going to be more to come.
I think that Joe diGenova is absolutely the right person at Fort Pierce and with this grand jury. I mean, Joe — and for people to know, I mean, Joe was one of the lawyers that I was consulting after I had gotten rid of my original lawyers and working closely with Sidney [Powell] to help us out. So, Joe is the right man to take this on. He is a pit bull-type prosecutor anyway, and he has the big strategic picture that I think that the country needs to have in a prosecutor that's going to dig and expose the truth. And that's what you guys did with this Transparency Task Force breaking story that you broke.
...
We have to bring these people to account. We have to — and I do believe that Joe diGenova is the right guy to build these various conspiracy cases to show that these people were undermining, not only guys like me, but they were undermining a duly elected president of the United States. They were undermining the Constitution of our country, and they and they basically did it, you know, in a very, almost — I would just say a criminal fashion. I mean, it's beyond corruption. It's criminal. And people are going to have to be held accountable.
//
09/04/26 12:38 PM EDT
08/28/26 1:33 PM EDT
John Solomon is spreading another flimsy election fraud claim
08/07/26
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TODD SAYS WE WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED
'Not a threat — it's a promise': Judge says he'll hold DOJ in contempt
‘Public deserves to know’: Angry judge grills DOJ over hidden Epstein files
'0 for 21': Trump’s 'losing streak' proves the limits of his authority
AN 8 26
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AN 8 26
Just days after Senate Republicans confirmed US Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department of Justice this week issued a legal opinion on executive privilege that was swiftly condemned as an attempt to unfairly protect some of President Donald Trump’s top advisers from any accountability.
Historically, the president has been allowed to assert executive privilege over communications with executive branch staff, protecting them from disclosure.
However, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) said in a Monday memo that “presidential communications with private advisers can fall within the scope of executive privilege so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the president or his direct advisers, and are confidential.”
The memo is signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser. HuffPost reported that a DOJ official “argued its veracity by comparing it to a similar one made by President George W. Bush’s attorney general in 2007.”
“While the issue has not been litigated frequently, the opinion reaffirms the long-standing position of the office going back at least as far as Paul Clement in 2007 and arguably as far back as 1972,” the unnamed official said.
Jonathan Shaub, a University of Kentucky School of Law professor who served in the Obama administration’s OLC, told CNN: “I would say it’s not inconsistent with past positions... But it’s never been stated publicly.”
Shaub also told Axios that “it really could be a pretty significant weapon” for the second Trump administration “to deflect a lot of that congressional investigation of private parties.”
Republicans are at risk of losing control of both chambers of Congress in the November midterm elections, and if they do, Democratic majorities could move to impeach Trump a historic third time—for everything from the Trump family’s profiteering off of the presidency to his illegal war on Iran.
The Not Above the Law coalition’s co-chairs—Brett Edkins of Stand Up America, Praveen Fernandes of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, and Kelsey Herbert of MoveOn—said Tuesday that “Todd Blanche’s Justice Department is doing what it always does: attempting to shield Donald Trump and the people around him before anyone can hold them accountable.”
“This opinion is about protecting Trump and his allies from any real accountability, no matter where the questions come from—Congress, the courts, or investigators of any kind,” they argued. “Every senator who voted to confirm Blanche knew exactly what kind of Justice Department they were signing off on. They own it now.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—who may not have enough support to lead Democrats even if they reclaim the upper chamber in November—was similarly critical, concluding: “Donald Trump is scared. He knows accountability is coming.”
“He’s using his newly installed attorney general/personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, to cover up his communications with private advisers and special interest cronies,” Schumer said on Facebook. “These are the actions of someone with something to hide. And it shows he is petrified of the questions a Democratic Congress will demand answers to. We will not let Trump escape the accountability he deserves.”
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AN 8 26
President Donald Trump's lawyers filed an appeal on Wednesday alleging that they are the victims of a judge's abuse after they were sanctioned in court and the president was slapped with a gag order.
After losing a case last month, Trump's lawyers are now asking that sanctions against them and the Trump gag order be paused pending their appeal, Law&Crime reported.
At issue is Trump's "agreement" between the Justice Department and the IRS to create a nearly $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" for anyone who felt they were wronged by previous administrations. Already, there are dozens of Jan. 6 attackers demanding millions in financial compensation despite being found guilty or pleading guilty.
Trump sued the IRS in the Southern District of Florida after his taxes, along with those of over 400,000 others, were exposed in a data breach. In his January filing, Trump demanded a $10 billion payout for damages from the IRS. Trump then claimed he had reached a "settlement" with the U.S. government, which he runs.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams didn't buy it. In her July ruling over the matter, she not only said that there can be no "settlement," but she also issued sanctions for the lawyers involved in the case.
Finding that “sanctions are appropriate here,” Williams said Trump’s personal attorney Alejandro Brito will be referred to the Florida Bar for “its consideration, review, and determination as to whether any disciplinary action is appropriate in light of the findings and rulings made in this order.”
Williams also banned another Trump lawyer, Daniel Epstein, from seeking admission to practice law in the Southern District of Florida for one year.
Further, she attacked acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche’s “apparent capacity to speak for both plaintiffs and defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case.”
Additionally, Williams restricted Trump, the government, their lawyers and certain related individuals from discussing or using the settlement agreement.
On Wednesday, those lawyers filed an appeal with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, alleging that the judge lacked the authority to issue sanctions.
"This appeal arises from the district court’s extraordinary abuse of its sanctions power. In this action, Plaintiffs President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and The Trump Organization, LLC sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury, pursuant to a congressionally-authorized remedy, over the undeniably unauthorized and illegal disclosure of their confidential tax-return information to the press," the filing said. "After reaching a settlement with the IRS and Treasury, Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the action, which the court so-ordered."
The lawyers alleged that the judge had no "proof of collusion and bad faith," while punishing them with a "sweeping, unconstitutional, and unlawful gag order" that targets the president himself.
"The injunction categorically forbids Movants from even 'referring to' the Settlement Agreement, and separately bars any use of its provisions in official proceedings," the brief continues. "That gag order wrongly silences the sitting President, the Government, private parties, and counsel on a matter of obvious public concern at a politically consequential moment — and denies the public the right to hear their views."
The filing says that any gag order against the president is "unconstitutional," meanwhile, any penalties against them could damage their careers.
The lawyers further claim that the judge wrongly believes that because Trump runs the government, he can't sue it. In this capacity, he was suing as a private person.
The brief said her sanctions "flowed from a single predicate legal error: that presidential supervision under Article II supposedly eliminated Article III adversity."
In fact, Williams' issue is not with the suit itself; it's that Trump controls whether or not to settle with himself.
IRS employees have sued over the Trump fund, saying that the agreement has a hidden legal trap.
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AN 8 26
On Wednesday during an appearance on MSNOW, former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta warned that President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed “henchman” is going to be relentless in pushing some of the most “disgraceful” aspects of his agenda. Acosta was on a panel alongside MSNOW host Alicia Menendez and contributor Michael Steele to discuss Republican senators’ recent capitulation to Trump, in which they voted to confirm Attorney General Todd Blanche regardless of his willingness to maintain the president’s “incredibly politically toxic” slush fund for J6 rioters.
According to Steele, who happens to be the former Chair of the Republican National Committee, conservative senators are well aware that Blanche’s assurances that the fund would be killed are false because “there is no document with Donald Trump's signature on it. That's why this is still alive. That's why all these Republicans out here know that this thing is still in play, in the dirty little corners and secrets of Capitol Hill and in the Republican caucus." He added, “The reality of it is they have no problem with this because this is what their base wants. This is what Donald Trump wants. That's how Donald Trump keeps the base on the hook: 'Here's a little bit of largesse from the government for you. Stick with me. I'm going to get you rich. Everybody else is going to pay for your crimes.’”
Here Acosta joked that he felt like he’s “channeling Miracle Max from the Princess Bride when he said, it's only mostly dead. I think that's the case of the weaponization fund. Until Donald Trump says it's dead, it is not dead. And Donald Trump has been asked about this repeatedly, and he has said that he wants this weaponization fund and that he believes that the January 6th criminals — rioters and insurrectionists who beat up cops and desecrated the Capitol — deserve taxpayer money. Democrats should be running on this until the cows come home. It is absolutely disgraceful.”
Acosta went on to warn that the situation is going to continue to get worse, asserting, “People need to understand what a dangerous moment that we're moving into as a country, because Todd Blanche has been confirmed as the permanent attorney general. Democrats could take control of the House and the Senate and so on, but you still have Donald Trump's personal attorney acting as a henchman in charge of the Justice Department for the next two years, carrying out these political attacks on all sorts of perceived political enemies of Donald Trump. They want to go after David Hearn again and charge him with a misdemeanor for the Reflecting Pool case. I mean, this Justice Department is going to be cuckoo for cocoa puffs until early 2029. There's just no question about it. And every time Todd Blanche opens his mouth, you have to assume that the opposite is true.”
“Between the storylines on the Epstein files, the economy, and this,” noted Steele, “Democrats have a plethora of opportunities to not just box Republicans in the corner, but to make them eat the words that they're saying and that they don’t say when it comes to those three issues.”
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AN 8 26
A prominent former official is sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump's increasingly tyrannical tendencies, writing for The i Paper that he has now succeeded in corrupting the two offices above all that are tasked with telling him "no."
Miles Taylor previously worked as a staffer in Trump's first administration, eventually rising to the office of chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security. His tenure was most notable, however, for an anonymous op-ed he published in the New York Times, exposing the abuses and excesses that he was witnessing behind the scenes. Since departing in 2029, he has emerged as a vocal conservative critic of Trump and his MAGA agenda.
In his latest piece for The i Paper, published on Tuesday, Taylor sounded the alarm about two recent Trump appointments, which he said represented the corruption of the two offices "more than any others — whose jobs are to tell the president of the United States 'no,'" filling them with yes-men sure to follow his every order.
"The attorney general and the White House counsel," Taylor wrote. "Those jobs exist to keep the president on the right side of the law. This weekend, two men were elevated into America’s top legal jobs after working to build literal monuments to their boss."
He continued: "On Sunday, the President announced that Will Scharf, Trump’s staff secretary and perhaps the chief 'monument man,' will become White House counsel on September 1. Americans know him, if at all, as the man standing over Trump’s shoulder in the Oval Office, narrating executive orders as the President signs them. He also chairs the National Capital Planning Commission, which oversees federal construction in the capital, a role in which he has become Trump’s personal builder. He fast-tracked the White House ballroom. He expedited review of the President’s planned triumphal arch — a 250ft 'Arc de Trump' — and personally argued it should be exempt from the century-old law capping Washington’s buildings at 130ft. Approve the arch, and the leader makes you his lawyer."
The other concerning development was the appointment of Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal attorney, as Attorney General, replacing "the last attorney general was fired for not weaponizing the Justice Department fast enough."
"Blanche is a 'monument man,' too, which is evidently a requirement for elevation," Taylor added. "When preservationists sued over Trump’s demolition of the East Wing (which he tore down to construct a 90,000 sq ft ballroom dedicated to himself), Blanche took on the case. He argued in court filings that construction must resume, portraying the President’s party palace as a matter of national security urgency."
He concluded later: "I can tell you how important these two legal jobs actually are. When I served in the first term, the lawyers willing to say 'no' were the last line of defense. The president would demand something illegal... It was a wall that held — barely — a hundred times over. Trump remembers that wall as vividly as I do. He spent his four years out of power studying where it stood and who manned it. This weekend, he finished solving the problem. The next time he goes hunting for a lawyer with an answer he likes, he won’t have to look very far. The two men who should’ve been whispering 'no' into the President’s ear got his attention by whispering 'yes, sir.' Now they’re seated at his right hand."
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AN 7 26
Warning in a new piece for The Hill about the potential to supercharge President Donald Trump's abuses and fraud, a former federal director urged Congress to oppose the nomination of Todd Blanche, due to his aiding of "the most corrupt president in the nation’s history."
Previously serving as Trump's personal attorney prior to his White House return, Blanche was first appointed to serve as Deputy Attorney General before being elevated to acting Attorney General after the exit of Pam Bondi. His time in the administration has been marked by scandal and controversy, from his involvement in the botched release of the Epstein files to his support of Trump's "slush fund" lawsuit settlement, but he has managed to impress the president, who nominated him to lead the Department of Justice as the proper Attorney General.
William S. Becker is a climate action activist who previously served for over a decade as the Department of Energy's central regional director, as well as a special assistant to the department’s assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy. On Monday morning, he published a new piece for The Hill sounding the alarm about Blanche, warning that he has aided in corruption by Trump that would make Richard Nixon's misdeeds look like "child's play" and strongly urged Congress to reject his nomination.
"As deputy attorney general, Blanche proved that he will not only tolerate Trump’s lawlessness but also participate in it," Becker wrote. "He has openly violated Congress’s bipartisan law requiring the release of all Epstein files. He has collaborated with Trump’s scheme to reward Jan. 6 rioters with millions of dollars in compensation for their prosecution and convictions related to Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election."
He continued: "Blanche has collaborated to make the department Trump’s personal weapon of retribution with specious and malicious charges against the president’s perceived enemies. The Brennan Center for Justice says grand juries have refused to indict Trump’s targets at least 18 times. Courts or prosecutors have aborted 16 grand jury subpoenas, along with nearly half the cases against protesters and immigrants for alleged assaults of law enforcement officers. Courts have dismissed 16 lawsuits that sought state voter data and thousands of misdemeanor charges against migrants, quashed nine subpoenas that tried to force hospitals to turn over records on gender-affirming care, and dropped at least 79 cases related to ICE protests."
Becker also noted that Blanche has had a hand, alongside Bondi, in the massive purge of talent from the DOJ, with around 5,000 staffers being fired or pushed out under their watch, creating a "toxic and ethically challenged" environment. Blanche's push for the charges against former FBI Director James Comey, which accuse him of threatening Trump's life by sharing the "86 47" seashell photo on social media, has also been criticized as an effort to chill dissent that is right out of "the authoritarian playbook."
"Those who most covet the job of attorney general may not be worthy to have it," Becker concluded. "The best candidates are willing to resign from the department in its defense. The best outcome would be for Blanche’s nomination to die in committee."
AN 7 26
WASHINGTON — Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Oyer has posted a video to YouTube blaming Missouri Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley for an onslaught of hate messages and death threats she has received.
“Hey everybody,” Oyer said in the video. “I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week.”
Blanche has been nominated to be attorney general by President Donald Trump, and Schmitt and Hawley sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which must make an initial vote on his nomination.
Oyer’s video shows images of several emails she received, many of which came from fake email addresses and contained messages such as, “Die in hell you pos,” “I hope you die tragically,” “Let’s hope somebody murders your family and gets clemency,” and other threatening messages containing obscenities.
“Two Republican senators with a political agenda rage-baited their followers into believing nasty and dangerous lies,” she states, referencing Hawley and Schmitt.
The committee’s July 16 hearing had five witnesses, including Oyer, who was the pardoning attorney for the Department of Justice for 13 years. In her written testimony to the committee, Oyer said she was fired by Blanche after she refused to restore firearm rights for actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a close friend of Trump.
The hearing was meant to consider the pending nomination of Blanche. Schmitt and Hawley, however, did not ask Oyer about Blanche. Instead, they drilled her about the recommendation she made to President Joe Biden to commute 40 people’s federal death sentences to life in prison without parole.
“You personally recommended commuting all 40 death sentence cases, an even broader action than Biden took,” Schmitt said in the hearing.
Biden commuted 37 of the death sentences.
Schmitt was unable to be immediately reached for comment, but a spokesperson commented on his behalf.
“(Liz Oyer’s) disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns and were so extreme that even Joe Biden’s autopen handlers couldn’t stomach them,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Hawley confronted Oyer with photos of the parolees, many of whom committed violent acts of rape and murder. He showed photos of the victims and referenced them by name. In an interview with the Missourian, Hawley said that these were the real victims, not Oyer.
“The people who were murdered, and devastated and raped by the criminals that she recommended that President Biden give clemency to, those folks are the real victims here,” Hawley said. “I was proud to tell their stories.”
In her video, Oyer said that Hawley had misrepresented her by claiming that she had sympathy for the perpetrators of the crimes.
“That is dangerous misinformation, and Josh Hawley knows it,” Oyer said in the video.
In response, Hawley said that he had read from memos that Oyer sent.
“She tried to weasel her way out of it, and say she hadn’t said this or that,” Hawley said. “We have the memos, and I put them in the record.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian.
MMA
7 26
With Todd Blanche, MAGA media is finally getting its dream AG
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/14/26
President Donald Trump’s goal for the Department of Justice is to eliminate its traditional independence in favor of a gangster government in which he and his allies can do what they wish without fear of legal consequences while his enemies face zealous pretextual prosecution. He has been aided every step of the way by MAGA media that demand his federal law enforcement officials privilege personal loyalty to the president over any other ethical or moral standard, and seek their removal when they fail to live up to it.
Trump and his propagandists seem to have finally gotten their man in Todd Blanche, whose attorney general confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee begin Wednesday.
Blanche’s view is that the president — not the United States — should be seen as the Justice Department’s client. In a June interview on Trump shill Sean Hannity’s podcast, he criticized DOJ officials during Trump’s first term for “actively working against” the president by investigating him, saying, “They work for him, and make no mistake, everybody in the executive works for the president of the United States.” And his own record bears that out.
A MAGA made man who established his bona fides representing cronies like Paul Manafort and Boris Epshteyn, Blanche became principal lawyer for Trump himself between his presidential terms. As other Trump attorneys quit in the face of the then-former president’s numerous federal and state prosecutions, Blanche stayed loyal, took on more responsibility, and ultimately helped Trump avoid accountability. Trump, upon his return to the White House, rewarded his personal lawyer by appointing him deputy attorney general and, in April, acting attorney general.
At the DOJ, Blanche oversaw some of the most notoriously political prosecutions of the era. His installment as acting attorney general was followed by the spurious indictments of longtime MAGA targets, including James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the appointment of MAGA media fixture Joe diGenova at the helm of a sprawling “Grand Conspiracy” inquiry into Trump’s political enemies.
He’s also served as Trump’s all-purpose fixer. It was Blanche who got the call to interview Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in prison; after Maxwell asserted that she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting,” she was transferred to a minimum-security prison camp where she reportedly receives special privileges (former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who drew condemnations from MAGA media figures over the Justice Department's Epstein disclosures, later testified that Blanche had overseen their release). And it was Blanche who became the point man for Trump’s scheme to have the DOJ establish a $1.8 billion slush fund that could be used to pay off January 6 insurrectionists.
Blanche and Hannity use the same playbook to target Trump's perceived enemies
As he ascended within the Trump orbit, Blanche became a Fox News regular — with 23 appearances on its weekday programs since the start of the second Trump presidency — and a favorite of MAGA media stars like Hannity, who is now on the cusp of getting the attorney general of his dreams.
The Fox star has spent the last decade leading furious dual efforts by MAGA media to A) defend Trump from federal probes related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and his retention of government documents at Mar-a-Lago, and B) seek retaliatory criminal probes of prominent Democrats and law enforcement officials tied in some way to those investigations.
Hannity’s buddy-buddy podcast interview with Blanche featured him asking about the “grand conspiracy, which goes back 11 years of whether or not you had powerful, high-ranking government officials conspiring to take down Donald Trump,” and the would-be attorney general agreeing that such a conspiracy existed and the question is simply whether it was “just a deep state actor who is working within the system that we've created for destruction, or is there a crime that's being committed.”
“We're investigating,” he assured Hannity. “We have a bunch of guys investigating. Anybody, honestly, any prosecutor in this government that raises their hand and says, I want to find out what happened. I want to investigate. We have the tools in place to get them where they need to be to do it.”
The “grand conspiracy” probe is rooted in right-wing media fantasies and will likely fizzle — even Blanche stressed to Hannity that “we know everything you're talking about is true” but “we have to have prosecutors” prove a crime was committed with evidence and “it’s not easy to do that.” But it won’t be for lack of effort from Blanche or his team.
The episode concluded with this disclaimer, presumably written by Fox lawyers nervous about the vast array of figures discussed during the podcast as potential criminal targets:\
The ash heap of past Trump attorneys general
Blanche’s path forward if he is confirmed as attorney general will be precarious. His predecessors have been mauled by judges and juries when they tried to follow right-wing media demands for politicized prosecutions, or by that commentariat — and Trump — for purportedly refusing to make those cases.
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, met Trump’s loyalist qualification for the post as the first senator to endorse his 2016 presidential campaign. He also shared Trump’s anti-immigrant fervor and history of racist invective.
But Sessions was nonetheless hounded by the right-wing media throughout his tenure for being insufficiently willing to use the DOJ to protect Trump and destroy his enemies. Fox host Jeanine Pirro denounced him to the president during an Oval Office meeting for failing to pursue the Uranium One pseudoscandal, and she and other Fox Trumpists called for his removal for recusing himself from the Russia probe, a campaign that eventually succeeded when Trump demanded his resignation.
William Barr, Sessions’ eventual replacement, seemed like an even better fit for the post: A conservative hardliner, he had helped President George H.W. Bush weather the Iran-Contra scandal during a past stint as attorney general, and was on the record minimizing the Russia probe and pushing for a Clinton one. Fox commentators lauded the pick, with Hannity urging Barr to investigate an array of nefarious “deep state actors” and Democratic politicians and crowing that a reckoning was underway.
Barr was willing to corrupt the Justice Department to help the president’s friends, shield Trump from scandals, and target Trump’s foes. But his politicized prosecutions ultimately came to naught — the much-vaunted federal criminal investigation into the Russia probe failed to garner prison time for a single person. And Barr ultimately fell out of favor with Trump and was forced out for not politicizing the DOJ enough. He infuriated the president by following department policy and not announcing that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter was under investigation, and publicly refuting Trump’s claims of massive fraud following the 2020 election.
When Barr stepped down in December 2020, it triggered a power struggle at the Justice Department. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, who previously served as Barr’s deputy, refused Trump’s repeated efforts to get the DOJ to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. The president then considered replacing him with DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who supported subverting the election, ultimately backing down when it became clear that the rest of the top DOJ leadership would resign.
Trump campaigned on “retribution” in 2024, and upon his return to office, picked former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee it at the Justice Department. A longtime Trump supporter who represented him during his first impeachment trial and a Fox favorite, Bondi treated the DOJ as the president’s “personal law firm,” oversaw a series of pretextual prosecutions of Trump foes, and instigated an exodus from the department of those who disagreed.
But Bondi lost the president’s support because federal judges and grand juries kept rejecting the political prosecutions he demanded. And she bore the brunt of the criticism from MAGA media for the calamitous handling of the Epstein case, with some calling for her removal. Ultimately, Trump pushed her out and gave Blanche the job.
Blanche is the latest resident of the attorney general’s office — but even if he wins confirmation, he may not be the last of Trump’s second term. What won’t change is Trump’s desire for an attorney general who will make the DOJ an arm of his will, which means that anyone willing to take the job should be summarily disqualified.
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The Trumpist media is demanding politicized justice
- 06/14/23 1:24 PM EDT
DOJ indictments are converging with MAGA media narratives
- 04/30/26 11:44 AM EDT
“She is not to be trusted”: Right-wing media turn on Pam Bondi as Trump’s Epstein scandal grows
- 02/12/26
AN 7 26
A progressive US senator on Monday welcomed a federal judge’s ruling that found President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an illegal act of self-dealing, while calling for the Republican to be impeached for a third time.
Trump and his two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, “acted in bad faith and for an improper purpose by ‘collusively filing a lawsuit with claims subject to multiple dispositive defenses solely to provide cover for a collusive settlement,’” US District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams—who was appointed by former President Barack Obama—wrote in her 56-page ruling.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called Williams’ order “a scalding, blistering judicial opinion calling out Trump’s sham litigation, striking down his corrupt IRS immunity, and holding his sycophant lawyers to account.”
“That’s a good start,” the senator said. “Impeachment is next.”
Finding that “sanctions are appropriate here,” Williams referred Trump’s personal attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar for “its consideration, review, and determination as to whether any disciplinary action is appropriate in light of the findings and rulings made in this order.”
Williams also banned another one of the president’s personal lawyers, Daniel Epstein—who is not related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted child sex criminal and former close friend of Trump—from seeking admission to practice law in the Southern District of Florida for one year.
The judge further found that acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche’s “apparent capacity to speak for both plaintiffs and defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case.”
In January, Trump and his sons sued the Internal Revenue Service and US Treasury Department for $10 billion over the leak of the president’s tax returns by a former IRS contractor. Trump’s own Department of Justice (DOJ) then settled the case in May by agreeing to exempt the plaintiffs from future IRS audits and create a roughly $1.776 billion settlement slush fund for people claiming they were unfairly targeted by the government.
Beneficiaries of the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” were expected to include January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrectionists, roughly 1,500 of whom were pardoned by Trump and dozens of whom have since been charged or convicted for serious crimes, including child sex crimes, rape, grand larceny, burglary, home invasion, gun violations, death threats against public officials, and fatal DUI incidents.
Blanche has signaled that the DOJ will no longer pursue the creation of the slush fund.
Williams wrote in her ruling that “certainly, a court should not be a forum for a party that cynically views a lawsuit as a vehicle to achieve a predetermined outcome: ‘I’m suing myself.”
“President Trump did not pursue his claims until he once again occupied the White House and had appointed his former lawyer, and the former lawyer of persons who are putative beneficiaries of the ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund,c’ to prominent positions in the DOJ,” she continued. “These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House counsel, to reach a ‘settlement.’ It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the parties.”
“Even the fund amount—$1.776 billion—speaks of a ‘branding’ effort rather than a deliberate and thoughtful calculation of damages,” the judge added.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team responded to Monday’s order in a statement asserting that “the IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to The New York Times, ProPublica, and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.”
“President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,” the statement added.
Defenders of the rule of law welcomed Monday’s ruling, with Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, co-presidents of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, taking a swipe at Trump’s “brilliant idea of suing the government he runs and resolving the lawsuit with the creation of an illegal and unconstitutional nearly $1.8 billion slush fund, paid for at taxpayer expense and likely to be distributed to January 6 insurrectionists, among others, as well with as an immunity deal protecting Trump and his family from IRS investigation.”
“Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was a willing participant in this fraud on the court and the American people,” the pair added. “If the Senate needed an additional reason not to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, it just got it.”
AN 7 26
Newly-revealed messages show attorney general’s key role in Trump vendettas
AN 726
Meltdown: Trump DOJ in total chaos as mass exodus continues
//
A federal court judge got "really worked up" in a ruling against President Donald Trump and his Justice Department on Monday.
Legal analysts posted the ruling in Trump's IRS case, in which the judge decided the lawsuit and creation of $1.8 "anti-weaponization fund" was improper as Trump was in control of both sides of the negotiations and litigation.
One of the findings from the judge is that the plaintiff's attorney, Alejandro Brito, is being referred to the Florida Bar for an investigation to decide whether disciplinary actions are warranted. Another attorney, Daniel Z. Epstein, "will be denied for one year" admission "*pro hac vice* in the Southern District of Florida."
According to legal reporter Chris Geidner, who runs the Law Dork substack, "Judge Kathleen Williams also sanctions Trump's lawyers, issues monetary sanctions and harshly criticizes DOJ's 'untenable' conduct."
Trump legal foe Norm Eisen took a victory lap, commenting on BlueSky, that the ruling "Knocks out any legal basis for the $1.8 billion, Also undermines the accompanying settlements, And opens the way to ethics [and] financial SANCTIONS."
Among the comments from the judge includes the accusation that Trump "abused the judicial process" in what amounts to a sham case just to have "access to taxpayer funds and exemption from audits and other investigations."
"It is risible to suggest there was ever adverseness between the parties," wrote Judge Williams.
New Mexico civil litigator Owen Barcala posted specifics about the case, encouraging folks to peruse it as it's "a fun read, you can tell the judge really got worked up by what Trump/DOJ was trying to do, but I'm not really sure it invalidates or nullifies the settlement agreement as some people are saying."
"The main holding," he explained, "is that there was not sufficient adversity to support Article III jurisdiction. That means the court never had jurisdiction over this supposed claim and can't enter any orders on the merits. So, functionally, the court can't enter an order directed at the validity of the agreement."
He added, "But the court can enter non-merits orders against the parties in the form of sanctions. This supports the purpose of Rule 11 because, otherwise, a party who files a frivolous case escapes precisely because the case is frivolous. So a court has to have the ability to sanction even after dismissing. The court recognizes this because the sanction is directed toward the parties, not the merits of the settlement fund itself. The parties cannot refer to the purported 'settlement agreement' as a 'settlement' reached in this matter. The last part is important — limited to a 'settlement' in this case."
The ruling is a tough blow, coming mere days ahead of attorney general candidate Todd Blanche's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he will face questions from lawmakers on the matter.
"Blanche and [Stanley] Woodward were required to recuse themselves from issues related to the [January 6] and stolen documents criminal inquiries (because they represented Trump) and instead those were Exhibits A and B in 'anti-weaponization' claims for settlement," Law & Chaos co-reporter Andrew Torrez remarked on BlueSky.
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AN 7 26 Judge slaps Trump DOJ with sanctions and a lecture for 'manipulating' legal process - Alternet.org
//
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was called out by name in a recent ruling by Judge Kathleen Williams just days ahead of his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee
Speaking about the ruling on CNN, host Dana Bash and senior justice correspondent Evan Perez reported that there were a few Justice Department prosecutors named by the judge for possible disciplinary action.
As Perez reported, "The judge is calling out this entire thing, saying that this was essentially an attempt to defraud the court, because this was not really an adverse litigation. This was not the president suing an adverse party, but rather because the president controls the Justice Department and his own former personal lawyer essentially was involved in this, that there was really no two separate sides on this."
But then Blanche got his own take down from the judge.
"The day after the dismissal, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before Congress," the ruling reads. "In response to a question as to why the 'settlement agreement' had not been provided to this Court for review, he replied that 'there is no judge' because the case had been dismissed and, therefore, there was 'no mechanism' for reviewing the 'settlement agreement.'"
"On that same day," the judge continued, "Acting Attorney General Blanche issued an 'order' (the 'Release Order') which referenced the 'settlement agreement' and released the President, his relatives, companies, and affiliates from 'any and all claims, counterclaims, [and] causes of actions; that 'have been or could have been asserted' against Plaintiffs that arise out of '(1) any matters that were raised or could have been raised in the Case or the Pending Agency Claims; (2) Lawfare and/or Weaponization; (3) any matters currently pending or that could be pending (including tax returns filed before the Effective Date) before Defendants or other agencies or departments.'"
Blanche's name and signature were on the "Release Order," she added.
"On June 2, 2026, in testimony before the United States House of Representatives, Acting Attorney General Blanche advised that the Anti-Weaponization Fund would not be moving forward," the judge added. "He did not, however, commit to a similar termination of the audit and immunity protections set forth in his Release Order. Six days later, President Trump nominated Mr. Blanche to permanently serve as Attorney General of the United States."
Blanche has continued to refuse to sign a legal document asserting that the slush fund is dead.
"She also points out that after Todd Blanche said that the fund was dead, he has refused to say in writing that it is dead forever, that there is not some other version of this that could be resuscitated," Perez said. "Of course, Dana, all of this is important timing because, of course, Todd Blanche is headed for his confirmation hearing on Wednesday before the Senate."
Bash confirmed, "This judge is effectively saying that Todd Blanche, who is the acting attorney general and is going to be, as you mentioned, up on Capitol Hill this week, for confirmation to be the permanent attorney general, maybe should be disbarred. Right?"
Perez agreed that the judge was "referring him to the Bar Associations."
[VID]
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AN 7 26
President Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, his former personal lawyer and current acting attorney general Todd Blanche, is already under fire for allegedly not releasing millions of pages from the Epstein files and persecuting Trump’s political enemies. Yet according to former deputy assistant attorney general Tom Dupree, Blanche is also problematic because of his recent decision to subpoena New York Times reporters over the story of the plane Trump received as a gift from Qatar being allegedly insufficiently secure.
“I guess the first thing I would say is that I am a strong supporter of law enforcement, and I don't like leaks that endanger national security,” Dupree told CNN. “At the same time, I also respect the First Amendment. And traditionally, the way the Justice Department has approached these types of issues is that it will subpoena reporters only in extraordinary cases and as a last resort.”
He added that “that's what gives me pause here — that what appears to have happened is the Justice Department's first resort was to go to the reporters, subpoena them and attempt to compel them to reveal their sources.”
Dupree also pointed out that Blanche is already facing heat for his involvement in creating a $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump's supporters, as well as a deal that exempted Trump and his family from any future audits. A judge recently ruled that these deals were illegal and constituted self-dealing, and recommended sanctions against Blanche.
“As a lawyer, there is never a good time to get referred to a disciplinary hearing, but two days before your confirmation as U.S. Attorney General is like the worst possible time,” Dupree said. “My guess is that the senators will use this ruling as basically grist for the questioning. I think they will have some very fair questions about Todd Blanche's role in achieving the settlement — his willingness, apparently, to walk back the fund piece of it but not to walk back the IRS immunity piece of it. And so I think this is going to be a robust topic of debate at these confirmation hearings.”
He concluded, “The timing of this ruling is striking — literally days before he's going to go before Senate Judiciary and testify about his ability to maintain his independence from the president, which this ruling undermines.”
In the ruling, Judge Kathleen M. Williams broke down how Blanche behaved improperly.
“Acting Attorney General Blanche issued an 'order' (the 'Release Order') which referenced the 'settlement agreement' and released the President, his relatives, companies, and affiliates from 'any and all claims, counterclaims, [and] causes of actions; that 'have been or could have been asserted' against Plaintiffs that arise out of '(1) any matters that were raised or could have been raised in the Case or the Pending Agency Claims; (2) Lawfare and/or Weaponization; (3) any matters currently pending or that could be pending (including tax returns filed before the Effective Date) before Defendants or other agencies or departments,'" Williams wrote.
She later added, "On June 2, 2026, in testimony before the United States House of Representatives, Acting Attorney General Blanche advised that the Anti-Weaponization Fund would not be moving forward. He did not, however, commit to a similar termination of the audit and immunity protections set forth in his Release Order. Six days later, President Trump nominated Mr. Blanche to permanently serve as Attorney General of the United States."
To this day, Blanche continues to refuse to sign a legal document confirming that the slush fund is dead.
==
07/07/2026
by
- Daniel Hampton @ Raw Story: Todd Blanche buried by avalanche of ex-DOJ employees urging Senate to torpedo nomination
More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees have signed a letter urging senators to reject Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general, a roster of names so long it fills 59 pages.
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[KICKASS FRAUD OF CT?!]
YouTube
1 day agoUS News: In a tense Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised concerns about the nomination process surrounding Todd Blanche, arguing that lawmakers should fully ...
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PRAIRIELAND 100 YRS TODD CHEER ; TERR ENHANCE AND MAT’L SUPPORT? ---- NOT USED IN JAN 6
DOX TRESPASS CAN BE USED
30 YRS CONSPIR FOR MOVING BOX OF ZINES, NOT AT NOISE PROTEST
ANTIFA TERROR
Prairieland Nine: Texas ICE Protesters Get Up to 100 Years in Prison as Trump Targets Anti-Fascists
Jun 25, 2026 Latest Shows
:{A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell." The activists attended a protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4 of last year, during which fireworks were set off and a police officer was shot and wounded. All nine defendants were found guilty after being tried before a federal judge in Texas.
Matt Sledge, political reporter for The Intercept, warns that "we just have to watch for this playbook to be applied elsewhere." "Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence, not engaged in any violence, not interested in any violence," says Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center, who represents one of the Prairieland defendants.}:}:
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Indictment Of Cuba's Raúl Castro DOJ | Rev
RAUL CASTRO PRESSER SEN MOODY
(09:54)
I'm proud to stand here on this podium with US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones to my right. Chris Raia, Deputy Director of the FBI.
(10:10)
You're going to get to clap for Jason in 20 seconds. Chris Raia, Deputy Director of the FBI and James Uthmeier, the Attorney General of this great state. And your great US senator is here as well. She's very busy in D.C. but wouldn't miss this for the world. So thank you for being here, Senator Moody.
(10:36)
So I want to thank Jason for his leadership down here in Florida. He's doing a great job beyond today and I'd also ask him to replace me at the podium to say a few words. So thank you, Jason, very much....
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1.8B$ GOON SLUSH FUND
AN 5 26
President Donald Trump’s former adviser Michael Caputo has reportedly filed the first known claim to the new $1.8 billion fund established for supposed victims of lawfare.
“I was the target of the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation and our family suffered greatly during that dark era of political weaponization,” Caputo claimed in a letter to the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, according to a report by CNN.
The fund will be controlled by five members selected by Blanche and one selected with congressional input. The group has not established any guidelines as to who will be paid, but they have not ruled out paying Jan. 6th insurrectionists or agencies directly connected to Trump himself. They also have not explained how they will determine the amounts to be dispersed. The fund itself is controversial because Trump sued his own IRS, reportedly did not permit his Justice Department (which is supposed to defend the IRS from lawsuits) to advocate for the IRS in good faith and then skirted a judge’s order to make sure his suit was legal by having the two agencies he controlled settle without third-party oversight.
The settlement also bars the IRS from ever investigating Trump or his family members for past tax issues. Legal experts agree that there is no precedent for a sitting president pocketing money from his own IRS for himself and those he personally deems to have been wronged by the federal government. Skeptics argue that, despite Trump’s promises to not self-deal or dispense the money for partisan reasons, his past of self-dealing and using federal money to help allies suggests his promises should not be believed.
"Because the Notice does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record," Judge Kathleen M. Williams, the judge assigned to oversee the case, commented on Monday. When the case had been referred to Williams, she argued that the potential for illegality was so great that she needed to consult legal experts before the parties could continue. Trump quickly rushed to come up with the settlement before Williams’ May 20th deadline.
"Unfathomable levels of corruption,” legal reporter Chris Geidner told Politico, adding that "it's the underscore waiting to fill in the date that really does it for me."
Geidner was referring to the document's date at the top of the page which read "May ___, 2026,” with a “19” later added in.
"New addition just inserted in settlement agreement: a promise that the IRS won't go after Trump, his companies, and his families for unpaid taxes,” legal analyst Harry Litman wrote. “Potential huge additional cost to Treasury -- i.e., us -- all in exchange for, well, nothing, an uncognizable lawsuit."
Another legal expert argued the settlement is an impeachable offense.
"I assumed we would never see the 'settlement agreement,' or whatever you want to call it, but evidently, DOJ went ahead and posted it on its website,” New Mexico civil litigator Owen Barcala posted on Bluesky. “A couple things are interesting if you can steel your mind for the outrage and horror of its general nature.”
After reviewing the various ways in which the settlement is unprecedented and arguably illegal, Barcala concluded that it "must be nice to have figured out the One Neat Trick to avoid Congressional appropriations. Just sue yourself, direct yourself to settle for billions, and agree with yourself that you can put that money wherever you want.”
He concluded, “Entities can also make claims, making it possible that Trump Org could make a claim for the NY litigation. To be eligible for relief, you only have to make a 'legal claim' stating that you were a victim, presumably in some kind of crayon."
Finally Christian Mott, a criminal law expert, argued that the settlement’s language suggests Trump plans on personally drawing from the fund.
"It seems like you'd only do this if you are anticipating that Trump will make a claim," Mott said. "The agreement also appears to allow Trump to continue pursuing his monetary damages claims through the Fund set up in the agreement. See Sec. III.B. So, he has effectively created a more favorable forum for himself, which is a huge benefit given that several of his claims were very weak."
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2018, a year which like 2026 included midterm elections, Caputo argued then what Trump supporters are arguing today: That he needs to prevail in the midterm elections in order to avoid being impeached for his alleged crimes.
“I agree with Steve Bannon 100 percent: the mid-term elections are a referendum on the President and a vote for Republican House candidates is a vote to stop a bogus partisan impeachment,” Caputo, who worked as a communications adviser for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and later as his assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, told this reporter at the time. “I understand why some in the White House and official GOP organs may not behind this message — they have many reasons. But I’m not buying it: impeachment will definitely be on the Democrat agenda if they win the House, and this must be stopped. I’m not afraid to talk about this, regardless of where the Washington Republicans consultant class comes down on it.”
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AN 5 26
Trump’s document shredding boosted by DOJ memo about records: veteran reporter - Alternet.org
AN 5 26
DOJ lawyers told Todd Blanche to recuse himself from Trump cases last May: official - Alternet.org
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an 5 26
Anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump’s prosecutor allies in Florida are letting white collar crime suspects go unprosecuted while Trump pursues his political enemies.
“Shortly after ascending to the top of the Justice Department last month, Todd Blanche gathered prosecutors in Miami to press for results from a highly sensitive probe into some of President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies,” reports Bloomberg. “Blanche and Jason Reding Quiñones, the relatively little-known US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, have ramped up the months-long investigation into politically charged allegations that former senior government officials acted illegally years ago to undermine Trump.”
But “more than a dozen former prosecutors and defense lawyers” — speaking anonymously — say “there is mounting concern that the pursuit of Trump’s agenda has triggered an exodus of experienced prosecutors and hampered Miami’s expertise in building major white collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases.”
According to Bloomberg, many expressed concern that the high-profile drug, corruption, fraud and money laundering prosecutions that the district is known for will “fall by the wayside” while Trump sends his DOJ lieutenants and GOP allies to fucus on the doings of Biden and Obama from years ago.
Several dozen attorneys in the Southern District of Florida have been fired, quit or retiredsince Trump’s second term began in January 2025, which undermined the talent pool for prosecuting complex cases, say anonymous sources familiar with the office. One unit dedicated to prosecuting economic crimes is down to about a dozen attorneys from the more than 30 it traditionally had.
“A top Blanche aide earlier this year relocated to be a prosecutor in the office. Then, last month, an attorney overseeing the investigation was replaced with former US attorney and Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova following a disagreement over how best to proceed, according to people familiar with the situation,” reports Bloomberg. “Multiple grand jury subpoenas have gone out in recent weeks, and FBI officials have been conducting a flurry of interviews, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential probe.”
But as prosecutors neglect investigations against legitimate suspected wrongdoers, Bloomberg reports Trump’s focus on his political hit list is coming up dry with prosecutors struggling with cases against current and former government officials considered to be enemies of the president.
“Charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in Virginia were dismissed last year,” said Bloomberg, and an additional case against Comey last month in North Carolina has kindled criticism that US law enforcement is being directed wielded for retribution for Trump.
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AN 5 26
During President Donald Trump’s first term, he bemoaned the failure of his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to protect him from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s efforts to elect Trump in 2016.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump erupted, referring to his notorious former fixer who had also been Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet man during the 1950s Senate hearings into communist activity. Trump later fired Sessions.
For a time, Attorney General William Barr was the answer. But the two men parted ways after Barr told him repeatedly that no evidence supported Trump’s obsessive claims that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election.
In Trump’s second term, it appeared that Pam Bondi fit the bill. She tried valiantly to meet Trump’s every legal need. She transformed the Justice Department into Trump’s personal tool, prosecuted Trump’s perceived enemies, and tried to protect Trump from the fallout over the scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking of minors.
Bondi’s Deputy, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now auditioning to remove the “Acting” from his title. He hopes to succeed where his predecessors have failed—to become Trump’s enduring Roy Cohn.
But she bungled the Epstein files. She tried but failed to prosecute two key targets on Trump’s vengeance list: New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. She savaged her own reputation but could not save her job.
Bondi’s deputy, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now auditioning to remove the “Acting” from his title. He hopes to succeed where his predecessors have failed—to become Trump’s enduring Roy Cohn.
From Democrat to Trump Enabler
Blanche began his legal career in 1999 as a paralegal in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Working days and attending Brooklyn Law School at night, he graduated in 2003. After a stint as an associate in the Davis Polk firm and two federal court clerkships, he returned in 2006 to the US Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor and eventually became co-chief of the violent crimes division.
In 2014, Blanche joined the WilmerHale firm as a partner before moving to another big New York firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft. In 2019, he represented Paul Manafort on state mortgage fraud charges similar to federal crimes for which Manafort had already been convicted in 2018. (Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020). Blanche got the state law claims dismissed on double jeopardy grounds.
But in April 2023, Cadwalader balked when Blanche, then a registered Democrat, sought to represent Trump in the hush-money case involving payments to Stormy Daniels. So Blanche left Cadwalader and started his own firm. The jury eventually convicted Trump, but for Blanche it began a profitable relationship that generated over $3 million from Trump’s Save America PAC in the new firm’s first year alone.
Blanche went on to represent Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and in the election obstruction case involving Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. In 2024, Blanche switched his registration from Democrat to Republican.
Trump’s Latest Roy Cohn
Blanche is no longer Trump’s personal attorney, but you wouldn’t know it from his conduct in office.
Although he was the No. 2 official in the Justice Department, in July 2025 he tried to quiet the MAGA backlash over Trump’s breach of an election pledge to release the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Blanche went to Florida where Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell was in prison and interviewed her personally. Openly seeking a pardon, Maxwell said that she had never seen Trump do anything inappropriate.
Mission accomplished.
Shortly thereafter, Maxwell was transferred to a “club fed-type” prison camp—even though her conviction had rendered her ineligible for such placement under Bureau of Prisons policy. Blanche said that threats against her were the reason for the transfer.
As acting attorney general, Blanche has now picked up where Bondi had failed to put Comey behind bars. At an April 28, 2026 press conference, he announced Comey’s indictment alleging that in posting an Instagram photo of sea shells that formed “86 47” on a North arolina beach, Comey “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.”
A sea-shell death threat via Instagram.
“So, I think it’s fair to say that threatening the life of anybody is dangerous and potentially a crime,” Blanche said indignantly as he explained that the charges against Comey came with a 10-year potential prison sentence. “Threatening the life of the President of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice.”
Blanche continued, “[W]hile this case is unique and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate and regularly prosecute.”
Really? How about these?
“Hang Mike Pence”—Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists, some of whom may have been responsible for the sign carrying that message and the gallows accompanying it. The statute of limitations on such “threats” is five years. Where was that indictment?
“86 46”—Anti-Biden Trump social media personality Jack Posobiec posted this in January 2022. It also appeared on T-Shirts, caps, and Republican fundraising messages.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) posted this in February 2024: “We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy, McDaniel, McConnell. Better days are ahead for the Republican Party.”
Wasting Taxpayer Money
Prosecutors face a daunting task proving Comey’s subjective intent to harm Trump. Even longtime Trump apologist Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, acknowledged that the indictment “is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny. If it did, it would allow the government to criminalize a huge swath of political speech in the United States.”
When asked at his press conference how he would prove intent, Blanche said “with witnesses, with documents, and with the defendant himself,” adding: “It’s very premature for me to do that today.”
That non-answer won’t suffice when Comey’s lawyers provide evidence that this is just another vindictive prosecution on Trump’s behalf at taxpayer expense.
Someday Blanche’s progeny may ask him why—as the chief law enforcement officer in the United States—he helped a rogue president run roughshod over the rule of law.
He probably won’t tell them about Roy Cohn.
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Legal experts detail how Todd Blanche lost the James Comey case in one interview - Alternet.org
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AN 4 26
DOJ indictments are converging with MAGA media narratives
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 04/30/26
Recent Justice Department indictments whose validity have been questioned by legal experts demonstrate an increasing alignment of the Trump DOJ’s activities with the narratives of the MAGA media echo chamber.
President Donald Trump has long sought to use federal law enforcement to punish his enemies, and under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ and FBI launched scattershot and apparently pretextual probes targeting figures like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff over behavior unrelated to the president’s gripes.
But since Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche became acting attorney general last month, the president’s federal retaliation machine has seemed to sync up more closely with long-running talking points of his propaganda arm rather than simply focusing on the same targets.
Federal charges were filed or unsealed in recent days against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group; former National Institutes of Health official Dr. David Morens; and former FBI Director James Comey. Legal experts have said that each of these cases are either weak or concern behavior common among Trump administration officials.
Each set of charges, however, has buttressed MAGA arguments, and provided their proponents with fresh opportunities to leverage them for content. And they foreshadow the potential fruits of DOJ’s ongoing “Grand Conspiracy” investigation, which unifies a string of conspiracy theories promoted by Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity under the auspices of Joe diGenova, a Republican lawyer and longtime fixture in right-wing media.
James Comey
Citation
Fox News
The target. Comey served as director of the FBI from 2013 until May 2017, when Trump fired him over his handling of the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which the president describes as a “hoax”; he subsequently became a key figure in the right’s “deep state” conspiracy theories. The DOJ indicted Comey last year over congressional testimony he gave in 2020, but a judge dismissed the case, ruling that the appointment of the prosecutor who filed the indictment (and replaced a U.S. attorney who had questioned the case) had been unconstitutional.
The charges. Federal prosecutors on April 28 charged Comey with one count of “Threatening the President” and one count of “Transmitting a Threat in Interstate Commerce” related to a now-deleted May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey posted a photo of shells arranged on a beach to spell out “86 47” and commented, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” In the press release announcing the charges, Blanche said, “The temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable,” while FBI Director Kash Patel added, “James Comey disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for the world to see.”
The underlying right-wing media narrative. MAGA pundits have argued that recent examples of political violence targeting the right are the result of overheated commentary from Democrats and the media, often erasing incidents of right-wing political violence and ignoring violent rhetoric from the likes of Trump in the process. Numerous Fox News personalities suggested last May that Comey face an investigation or charges over his post, with Jesse Watters calling for it as “retribution.” And the indictment came days after a gunman allegedly targeting the president was stopped trying to breach the perimeter at the April 25 White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner, which Trump, the White House, and media allies subsequently blamed on criticism from Democrats and journalists. VID]
The response from legal experts.“Supreme Court precedent has placed a high bar for convictions in threat cases like these, and former prosecutors and First Amendment scholars alike were highly skeptical the new prosecution would be successful,” CNN reported. Even some lawyers who are Fox News contributors aren’t buying DOJ’s argument — George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox that Comey’s Instagram post would “very likely be viewed as protected speech if it was the basis of a criminal indictment” and “have a hard-time standing up in court,” while Andrew McCarthy wrote at National Review that the “bogus” indictment is a “farce,” called Comey’s conviction “inconceivable,” and added: “Of course, when the Justice Department abuses power this way, as it has repeatedly, it shreds its credibility with the courts and undermines the integrity of all its work.”
The response from the MAGA right. While the indictment drew skepticism on Fox’s daytime coverage, the network’s evening programs championed it on Tuesday night. MAGA lawyer Mike Davis said on The Ingraham Angle that the charges were “a long time coming,” offered “cheers” to Blanche and Patel, called Comey’s post “a clear threat,” and claimed, “There have been people who have gone to prison for a lot less than this.” Hannity, meanwhile, mocked the idea that “86 47” could mean anything but “get rid of Trump,” and hosted Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett to claim that Comey “surely knew what the phrase meant” and that “if he tries to claim free speech as a defense, that's not going to work.”
Dr. David Morens
Citation
Fox News
The target. Morens is an expert in public health and infectious diseases who served from 2006 to 2022 as senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The charges. The Justice Department announced on April 28 that Morens had been charged with “conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” specifically by using his personal Gmail account to conduct what prosecutors allege was government business in order to avoid public disclosure. Blanche alleged in the press release that Morens “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19,” while Patel claimed that “circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”
The underlying right-wing media narrative. The right-wing media echo chamber responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in part by turning Fauci into a hate object. Its participants also claimed that the coronavirus originated through a lab leak from a Chinese virology facility and its development may even have been funded by American tax dollars, rather than the prevailing view that the virus initially spread among wild animals before jumping to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. Morens and his email practices came under scrutiny from congressional Republicans and right-wing media in 2023 and 2024. While the Justice Department suggests Morens was acting to suppress the lab leak theory, The New York Times reports that the DOJ’s investigation “has so far yielded no evidence that scientists or health officials were involved in research that started or spread the coronavirus outbreak” and his emails in the indictment “do not show him trying to conceal evidence of a lab leak.”
The response from legal experts.Scott Amey, general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told The New York Times that “the allegations are quite concerning,” but also “noted that senior members of the Trump administration have themselves been accused of trying to evade federal record-keeping laws.” Indeed, The Washington Post reported last year that top Trump administration national security officials were communicating over their private Gmail accounts, and in March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared operational details of an impending U.S. military strike over an unsecured Signal chat with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, other Trump administration officials, and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been accidentally added to the chain.
The response from the MAGA right. The New York Post reported on — and effectively generated — “pressure on DOJ to prosecute Anthony Fauci” in light of Morens’ indictment. Its Thursday article claimed that “critics say Fauci … bears the most responsibility and that he should be hauled into court,” citing the head of a right-wing think tank, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, and a former DOJ official who is now national political reporter at the right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice.
The Southern Poverty Law Center
Citation
Fox News
The target.The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights organization best known for its monitoring, researching, and reporting on white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and others it describes as “hate and antigovernment extremist groups” that “make up some of the most extreme elements of the hard right.”
The charges. The Justice Department revealed April 21 that a grand jury had returned an indictment charging the SPLC with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.” DOJ alleges that by using paid informants to infiltrate hate groups, the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups” from 2014 to 2023, including to one individual who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.” Blanche claimed in a press release that SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” while Patel alleged the group “engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors.”
The underlying right-wing media narrative. As the American right adopted positions previously espoused only by explicit white supremacists, the SPLC drew its ire by expanding its monitoring to include “extreme” right-wing elements that were nonetheless accepted within its mainstream, like Turning Point USA. Right-wing media figures denounced SPLC’s characterizations of TPUSA after the assassination of its founder, MAGA operative Charlie Kirk, in September 2025, and the following month, Patel said the FBI was cutting ties with the group, which he described as a “partisan smear machine.” Right-wing media figures have also pushed back hard against links between Trump and the deadly Charlottesville event, and described white supremacy itself as a “hoax.”
The response from legal experts.The SPLC indictment “may contain serious legal defects that could lead to a full or partial dismissal because it struggles to articulate the elements of the alleged crimes,” CBS News reported after consulting former federal prosecutors. “Legal experts say it is not clear exactly how the SPLC's statements to donors represent material falsehoods or omissions, or why its past use of paid informants would run counter to its mission of dismantling white supremacist groups, a tactic that federal and local law enforcement also utilize to infiltrate and break up criminal organizations,” the report added. Andrew Weissmann, who led the DOJ Fraud Section from 2015 to 2019, likewise wrote in a piece for Just Security that DOJ’s claims “may sound superficially plausible in a press release against an organization dissimilar to the SPLC, but nothing in the speaking indictment against the Center appears to meet the legal standard required” for the charges.
The response from the MAGA right.Right-wing pundits have gleefully parroted the DOJ allegations, using them both to the SPLC and to suggest that the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally had been a false-flag hoax instigated by the left as a way to sabotage Trump. Fox personalities alone have mentioned the SPLC nearly 400 times since the indictment’s release, according to a Media Matters review. (The indictment was “huge breaking news,” as Hannity put it before hosting Patel to accuse the SPLC of the “ultimate definition of hypocrisy.”) Trump himself has picked up the story, rambling about how “Southern Law” is a “total scam” in an interview with CBS over the weekend. The president said in part:
I see these No Kings which are funded just like the Southern Law was funded. You all that Southern Laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election. And that’s what you really should be doing. I mean, I hope one of your 60 Minutes episodes, which really hasn’t changed very much for the last few years, I’m surprised. But one of those episodes should be on Southern Law, and the fact that they spent millions and millions of dollars on absolute far right and just bad, bad groups, and then they’d use those groups and they’d say, these are Republican groups, and we’re coming to your rescue, and they’re the ones that have funded it, and they’re the ones that kept them, keep them going. Pretty sad.
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AN 4 26
More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center -- historically one of the nation's most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.
This was the latest in a long series of signals from the White House to the president's swastika-flying fans. It means that such groups need no longer fear a resolute federal response to their criminality.
On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced -- at a blatantly political press event -- that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for "wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering." The indictment, described by Patel as "massive" and "sweeping," relies on the notion that the SPLC 's use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.
Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions - had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC "kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support."
The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC's own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.
The absurdity of the indictment ought to be obvious to anyone -- including former federal prosecutor Blanche -- who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. Over the past few decades, in fact, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis.
The indictment also charges that the SPLC "concealed" its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, following similar practices by the FBI and the Justice Department to avoid exposing their paid agents.
To suggest that the SPLC "supported" the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.
Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment's fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. "To the extent that there's any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization," he said, "that's not in the indictment."
Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government's attack on SPLC.
Doug Jones, who served as U.S. attorney in Alabama, described the indictment as "outrageous" and "pure political retribution" by President Donald Trump. Having taken down white supremacist gangs himself, Jones recalled how the SPLC "helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan's operations in Alabama and beyond" in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile, Alabama, lynching incident.
There are dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files, including major victories against the United Klans of America, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Imperial Klans of America, and the paramilitary White Patriot Party and the Aryan Nations.
It isn't only liberal lawyers who can see through the flimsy accusations in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss' Trump-friendly online publication, conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that "the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the (SPLC's) use of informants amounts to fraud."
Many other right-wing commentators and organizations have welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value more likely to be upheld on the right when convenient and comforting to their own.
The most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives but from the fascist underworld. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.
Curtis Yarvin, the authoritarian gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: "What's cool is that I don't really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn't be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of 'finally getting it.'"
On the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel -- whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders -- the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. They know that the SPLC, far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, is their worst enemy.
"The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism -- they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all," the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. "What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes -- and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy too.
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NYT
NO LNX
How the Southern Poverty Law Center Drew the Ire of Conservatives
Before the Justice Department filed charges against it, the group had faced scandal and critiques from both the left and the right.
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By Richard Fausset
April 22, 2026
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For much of the 21st century, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been at the center of a bitter partisan war in America over what constitutes hate.
The law center, which is based in Alabama, began in 1971, earning a reputation for battling the Ku Klux Klan in court and helping reporters and law enforcement keep tabs on far-right domestic extremists. More recently, however, the S.P.L.C. has earned the ire of conservatives by criticizing a number of organizations — including Moms For Liberty, the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA — that many on the right consider to be squarely within the American mainstream.
The conflict entered a new phase this week, when the Justice Department charged the S.P.L.C. with a number of financial crimes, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment focused on the law center’s past use of paid informants to infiltrate far-right groups. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
To some who have been criticized by the S.P.L.C., it was a moment to savor — a potential comeuppance for what they perceive to be a powerful, politically correct bully that has sought to shame and silence legitimate voices.
“Well, I mean, obviously I experienced a certain schadenfreude, because this couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of creeps,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports immigration restrictions and has been on the S.P.L.C.’s influential list of hate groups for years.
The S.P.L.C. defines a hate group as an organization that “has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics,” according to its website.
The indictment appears to fit within the Trump administration’s pattern of using the Justice Department to punish its political adversaries. The S.P.L.C. has certainly been adversarial toward the president: In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.”
Whether the federal charges will stick is unclear. The second Trump administration has failed to build winning cases against other political opponents, including Attorney General Letitia James of New York and James Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
But in the S.P.L.C., the administration has picked a formidable and deep-pocketed foe. Over decades, the group has been buffeted by scandal and scathing critiques from both the left and the right, yet has managed to thrive with its promise to be “a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy.”
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Morris Dees, a lawyer who started the S.P.L.C., with Katie Relf, left, and her daughters Minnie Lee and Mary Alice. The girls were part of a lawsuit involving sterilization procedures in 1973.Credit...Gary Settle/The New York Times
The law center was founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, white Alabama lawyers intent on ensuring that the gains of the civil rights movement in the Deep South stuck. With Julian Bond, the African American activist, as its first president, the S.P.L.C. took to the courts, filing suit after suit attacking the remnants of the segregation system, reforming juvenile justice and addressing matters of concern to immigrant workers, women, gay and lesbian people, and others.
The work engendered significant good will among like-minded Southerners. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an African American environmental activist from the Black Belt, recalled in an interview that the S.P.L.C. bankrupted a group called the United Klans of America with a lawsuit after two members lynched a Black man named Michael Donald in 1981.
“A lot of the work they were doing early on, was work around insuring that marginalized communities were not terrorized,” Ms. Coleman Flowers said.
Rumblings of discontent came later. In 1994, The Montgomery Advertiser ran a series of articles in which Black employees of the S.P.L.C. raised concerns about racial discrimination inside the organization. (Mr. Dees denied the accusations.)
But the law center remained influential. In 2001, its multimillion-dollar headquarters — a daring contemporary building in the sleepy heart of Montgomery — was completed. Many national news outlets regularly turned to the group’s Year in Hate reports, relying on them to give a portrait of homegrown extremism around the country.
Even so, left-wing critics soon began accusing the group of hoarding millions of dollars and paying its leaders big salaries while soliciting donations from wealthy coastal liberals and exaggerating the grass-roots threat. In a column for The Nation in 2009, Alex Cockburn, the provocative leftist writer, called Mr. Dees, who had become the face of the organization, “the arch-salesman of hate-mongering.”
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“A lot of the work they were doing early on, was work around insuring that marginalized communities were not terrorized,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental activist.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times
“Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fund-raising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the S.P.L.C,” wrote Mr. Cockburn, who died in 2012.
The rise of the so-called alt-right, and a deadly rally organized by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, showed that racist extremism remained a tangible threat. But old concerns within the S.P.L.C. came to the fore again in 2019, when Mr. Dees was fired, and a number of top executives quit, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and racial discrimination within the organization. Mr. Dees denied wrongdoing, but acknowledged that a female employee had filed a complaint against him in 2017, stating that his actions had made her feel uncomfortable.
Conservatives took notice. For years they had bristled as the S.P.L.C. put groups that opposed L.G.B.T.Q. rights and immigration on its hate list. The Center for Immigration Studies earned a spot, the S.P.L.C. argued, as a result of its “repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers in its weekly newsletter and the commissioning of a policy analyst who had previously been pushed out of the conservative Heritage Foundation for his embrace of racist pseudoscience.”
In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies sued Richard Cohen, then the president of the S.P.L.C., in federal court, saying that the organization had violated civil racketeering statutes in trying to “destroy C.I.S. by ruining it financially.” The lawsuit was rejected by the courts.
That same year, Senator Tom Cotton wrote to the Internal Revenue Service, asking the agency to consider revoking the law center’s nonprofit status.
“Recent news reports have confirmed the long-established fact that the S.P.L.C. regularly engages in defamation of its political opponents,” Mr. Cotton wrote. “In fact, the S.P.L.C’s defining characteristic is to fund-raise off of defamation.”
The effort was unsuccessful, but the pressure from Republicans has only ramped up since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. In October, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced that the bureau would no longer cooperate with the S.P.L.C., calling it a “partisan smear machine.”
That same month, Elon Musk posted on social media that the group was “guilty of incitement to murder Charlie Kirk,” the co-founder of Turning Point USA who had been killed a month earlier. Mr. Musk cited another post that noted that Mr. Kirk had recently been featured in the S.P.L.C.’s Hatewatch newsletter.
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HUH?
MMA
April 20, 2026, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show
ALEX JONES (HOST): So, last segment I was breaking down how the federal courts wouldn't let the Democrats criminally shut us down, so they have the state court order the electricity and internet shut off. They're already starting to turn it off. We may make it to April 30th, I'm not sure, but that's the date when we know after that things are shutting down.
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So Trump knows it's Paul Weiss law firm that ran the lawsuits against him and against me. They did a $40 million settlement with him and admitted it was illegal. But remember six months ago, Todd Blanche killed the criminal investigation into what they were doing to me. He shut down Ed Martin.
So Trump has joined with the Democrats to shut us down. And I haven't really shot a report on this yet, but I'm going to do it the next few days, that has all the details and all the proof and the documents in it, and that the CIA, FBI ran all this, came out in court in our depositions, that Trump signed on to the deep state closing us and is bragging about it.
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an 4 26
President Donald Trump vowed that in his second term, he would go after the foes that he claimed "weaponized" the government against him. In a deep dive on the failed effort, New York Magazine writer Andrew Rice explained that little has come from it.
Writing Monday, Rice described the story of Jan. 6 attacker Jared Wise, the FBI agent who egged on pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol as they assaulted Capitol Police officers. While Wise recently resigned, he was a key player in the so-called "weaponization working group" within the Justice Department.
"The term weaponization was one of Trump’s rhetorical tricks, a fancy way of saying 'I know you are, but what am I?'" wrote Rice. "So what if prosecutors had indicted him on four occasions and convicted him of 34 state felony counts? That just meant the government was criminal. During his campaign, Trump had promised retribution. They had tried to get him, so he would get them back"
Wise was hired to join the "weaponization working group" along with other close Trump allies. Attorney General Pam Bondi created a target list in her memo: "Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted him; Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who convicted him; and New York attorney general Letitia James, who had brought a civil fraud case against him and his family."
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who oversaw the effort officially, was a key Trump defense lawyer who purports to be dedicated to Trump's weaponization cause.
After it became clear that lawyer Ed Martin couldn't get confirmed to be a U.S. Attorney, he took over the day-to-day efforts of the "working group." Another on the team is Neil W. McCabe, a national personality for the Real America’s Voice channel, a pro-Trump political commentary channel.
The story said that Martin prepared for his role as the "captain" of the weaponization working group by reading books about the Italian Mafia. He then divided the DOJ leadership into “competent and incompetent villains," one ex-federal prosecutor told Rice.
Rice explained that during the first Trump administration, the DOJ was populated primarily by Federalist Society members who simply saw Trump as a means to achieve their political ends. "In Trump II, the conservative bar was no longer sending its best."
Blanche and Martin began to clash, however, as it became clear that the two were taking different approaches, creating a "source of tension," one department official involved in the operation described. Blanche wanted to hold people accountable for weaponization "without becoming the weaponizer yourself." Martin was an arrest-at-all-costs kind of ideologue.
The only thing the DOJ has been able to achieve is going after New York's James for stating on a mortgage application that the house would be her primary residence. Another targeted former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying under oath before Congress. The U.S. attorney appointed by Trump wouldn't put his name on the cases. He was ousted and they found someone who would. Judges found the appointment to be unlawful and contrary to the laws that set deadlines for appointing a U.S. attorney. Both cases have fallen through.
Another effort was to prosecute Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), but the prosecution couldn't move forward, and those in the U.S. attorneys' office fear it has stalled completely.
According to the report, Blanche has been furious about the failed attempts, saying this is what happens when they're not cautious in their approach.
Someone familiar with Blanche's thinking told Rice, “That’s how big wins end up as gigantic, embarrassing losses."
The weaponization working group under DOJ expanded. They began working with other Trump loyalists at the White House, IRS, Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CIA. They were looking for anyone in President Joe Biden's administration they could find who broke the law.
Trump was furious. According to right-wing host Steve Bannon, the president wanted to see "perp walks." He hasn't and it has been over a year.
Wise, the FBI agent who participated in Jan. 6, was once a well-respected agent. One former colleague called him "smart" and "detail-oriented." Some had other opinions. One alleged that after Wise became a squad supervisor, “a number of things fell through the cracks." Wise grew irritated that he was taken off monitoring homegrown extremists to manage staff.
“This happens in the Bureau all the time,” the former colleague told Rice. “It’s called orders.”
Wise later said in court documents that it was Trump who inspired him to leave the FBI. He claimed he heard someone disparage Trump and was so furious he quit. He then took a job working for Project Veritas, a political organization that at the time was trying to shift into "something resembling a political-intelligence service," the report said.
Meanwhile, Martin has failed in his efforts to go after Comey and James. He appeared on Bannon's show and was pressed to work on the 2020 matters. Martin said he was on it. Since then, the DOJ has seized ballot documents and servers from the Fulton County Board of Elections, despite the judge expressly saying they could only take "copies." Officials complained that by taking everything, there was no longer a way to compare any discrepancies.
Behind the scenes, Blanche wasn't supportive of the cases.
"They tried to shut it down,” McCabe told Rice of the prosecutions.
Martin ended up ensnared in his own scandal, allegedly leaking grand jury information from their Schiff probe. He was stripped of all of his titles and would only be working on pardons from that point forward. Since then, Blanche has been hit by Martin's allies as having a "Democrat mentality."
The report noted that U.S. attorneys discovered that a way to make a name for themselves is by using their offices to go after Trump foes. So, subpoenas dropped for "John Brennan, the final CIA director under President Obama, who was one of at least 30 current and former intelligence officials who were served at that time."
“What they’re doing here is exactly what they accused the former administration of doing,” said one person the FBI contacted for information about the earlier Trump probes, Rice said. “Taking that tinge of what they want to believe and turning that into a criminal prosecution.”
The DOJ then began going after six lawmakers who worked in the military or intelligence. They have failed there too.
Overseeing all of this was Blanche. A "dismayed" former friend told Rice, “I keep waiting for there to be some red line that he won’t cross."
Over the recent CPAC event in Texas, Blanche told the crowd he's still pressing to be successful.
"Everybody’s afraid that in the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted," Blanche said. "And why are they afraid? Because that’s exactly what happened during the last administration."
At each turn in every investigation where someone in the Trump orbit was prosecuted, it was approved by a grand jury and a judge. In the case of several who were convicted and later pardoned by Trump, juries found them guilty, or they entered a plea agreement, admitting their guilt. Thus far, the same has not been true of the targets of the "weaponization working group."
Rice noted that about a day after he sent fact-checking requests to the Justice Department, Wise announced his resignation. A few hours later, Bondi was fired by the president. He alleged on X that he could only “fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ” if he were “outside of government.” Blanche now runs the DOJ.
“Americans are in the painful process, of realizing that our government isn’t so different than the evil ones they’ve told us about for many years," Wise wrote on X.
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OMG AN 3 26
The Department of Justice has awarded Michael Flynn, the retired three-star Army general who served as Trump's National Security Advisor for less than a month, a $1.25 million settlement—a decision that legal experts are comparing to outright theft of taxpayer funds.
Flynn's settlement, announced this week, compensates him for what the Trump administration is characterizing as wrongful prosecution. The irony is stark: Flynn pleaded guilty under oath in 2017 to intentionally making false statements to the FBI. He admitted to the crime in court with a lawyer present, with a judge confirming his understanding of what he was confessing to. Trump later pardoned him in 2020.
Now, with a new Trump administration in place, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has agreed to hand over more than a million dollars in public money to a man who has already admitted guilt.
"I really do not understand how you justify this as anything but theft," said Andrew Weissmann, a former DOJ prosecutor who spent 20 years at the Department of Justice and served as general counsel at the FBI,during an appearance on "The Illegal News" podcast this week. "To make this a legitimate settlement, there would have to be a good faith belief that he has a meritorious argument and that there might be some downside in litigating this."
Weissmann's critique goes to the heart of how government settlements are supposed to work. When the DOJ settles a case, there must be a reasonable belief that the other side might actually win if the case went to trial—a genuine legal dispute, in other words. But in Flynn's case, Weissmann argues, there is no such ambiguity.
"I don't see the downside of having taken it to court," Weissmann said. "The issues here seem so completely one-sided that I really do not understand how you justify this as anything but theft."
The case against Flynn was straightforward. As National Security Advisor, Flynn had engaged in back-channel communications with Russian officials during the transition period. When FBI agents questioned him about these contacts, he lied. Vice President Mike Pence later went public saying he had repeated Flynn's denials on air, only to discover they were false—a betrayal that led directly to Flynn's firing after just 24 days in the job.
Flynn initially tried to withdraw his guilty plea, leading to years of litigation, but ultimately the legal process confirmed the guilty plea stood. There was no meritorious legal argument waiting to be discovered. There was no ambiguity about whether Flynn had committed the crime he admitted to committing.
Yet Bondi and Blanche signed off on the settlement anyway.
Weissmann raised additional concerns about the precedent this sets. "This is something that Michael Flynn admitted under oath he did, which was lied to the FBI. Now he then moved to withdraw his guilty plea. There was lots and lots of litigation back and forth, and that ultimately ended up with Donald Trump pardoning him," Weissmann explained.
The settlement also raises questions about potential conflicts of interest. Blanche was Trump's personal criminal defense attorney during his hush money trial and conviction. Now, as Deputy Attorney General, he's using government resources to benefit his former client.
"The next administration can look into this as an ethics issue," Weissmann said. "Remember, they represented Donald Trump individually. And they have to be looking out for the interests of the public, not for the interests of Donald Trump."
Perhaps most troubling to Weissmann is what this settlement signals about future Trump administration conduct. "This is the harbinger of more to come," he said, "because we know that Donald Trump wants to do this. And for all we know, this has been happening with other people doing this without bringing a lawsuit—just having a private agreement with the Department of Justice where they give out money and we just don't know."
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DAVID CORN 3 26
For a year, the Trump Justice Department has been on an odd mission: to assist a mysterious former FBI informant with ties to Russian intelligence who ended up in prison for passing disinformation about Joe Biden to the bureau. His crime deeply affected American politics. The false claim he slipped to the FBI—that Biden and his son Hunter each were paid a $5 million bribe by a Ukrainian energy company—became the main evidence in the House Republicans’ reckless and ill-fated impeachment drive against the 46th president.
For pushing this phony tale, Alexander Smirnov, who pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI, was sentenced a year ago to six years of incarceration. (The punishment also covered failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in income.) But for some strange reason, Trump’s DOJ has been helping him to get out of prison. On March 4, in a move that has drawn no media attention, the department quietly filed an unusual brief—submitted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—supporting Smirnov’s attempt to throw out his sentence and withdraw his guilty plea.
The Smirnov saga has the feel of a spy thriller.
This was not the first time the Trump Justice Department sided with Smirnov in his ongoing legal battle. It has forged a curious alliance with this convicted Russia-connected fabricator whose lies were embraced by Trump, MAGA Republicans, and right-wing media and cited as smoking-gun evidence for Biden’s impeachment.
The Smirnov saga has the feel of a spy thriller. A fortysomething Israeli American businessman who grew up in Ukraine, he was a longtime confidential informant for the FBI. Court filings do not reveal the details of his work for the bureau, but they note he participated in operations in which he was authorized to engage in illegal activity as part of FBI criminal investigations. He apparently shared information about oligarchs and the business contacts he made around the world, possibly including some shady characters. He made millions of dollars through activity federal prosecutors could not identify.
During the 2020 campaign, Republicans—most notably, Rudy Giuliani—were promoting the debunked allegation that Biden, when he was vice president, had threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless its government quashed an investigation of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had recruited his son Hunter to be a well-paid board member. As that conspiracy theory was being hyped by the right, Smirnov told his FBI handler that in late 2015 or 2016 the CEO of Burisma had said to him that Hunter, through his father, could end an investigation of Burisma if the two Bidens each were paid a $5 million bribe.
The FBI handler dutifully recorded Smirnov’s account in what the bureau calls an FD-1023 form. The FBI reviewed this information—which was much at odds with previous statements Smirnov had made to his handler about Burisma—and decided there was nothing to it. (There was no active probe of Burisma at the time of the supposed bribe.) And that was that.
Yet three years later, someone in the FBI passed the FD-1023 to congressional Republicans, and they went to town, claiming this was the proof President Biden had pocketed a huge bribe and was leading a crime family.
The document clearly stated there was no confirmation of the hearsay information Smirnov had provided. But for months, through that summer and fall and into 2024, House Republicans—led by Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who chaired the House oversight committee—hailed the FD-1023 (which redacted Smirnov’s name) as Exhibit A for their baseless impeachment inquiry targeting Biden. Fox News aired scores of segments about it. Kash Patel and other MAGA stalwarts cited it as evidence of Biden criminality.
His new allegations about Hunter Biden were also false. It appeared he had been trying to plant anti-Biden information within the bureau.
With Republicans raising a fuss about this once-confidential report, the FBI brought Smirnov in for questioning. He stuck to his story. He even added new allegations about Hunter Biden that he said he had received from four Russian officials, including two associated with Russian intelligence, telling the bureau the Russians had made incriminating recordings of the president’s son.
The bureau dug into all of this—reviewing Smirnov’s travel records and other information—and concluded that he was lying and that he had never even had those conversations with the Burisma CEO outlined in the FD-1023. His new allegations about the younger Biden were also false. It appeared he had been trying to plant anti-Biden information within the bureau.
On February 14, 2024, as Smirnov arrived from an overseas trip at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, FBI agents arrested him. The next day, David Weiss, a Justice Department special counsel who had been appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, announced that Smirnov had been indicted for making false statements to the FBI. His indictment was later expanded to cover the tax charges. Smirnov’s arrest outed him as the confidential informant cited in the FD-1023—and essentially ended the GOP impeachment crusade. The Republicans had been duped.
In subsequent legal filings, federal prosecutors stated that Smirnov professed to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies, including the Russian spy services. The feds characterized Smirnov’s interactions with Russians as “extensive.”
“Smirnov’s contacts with Russian officials who are affiliated with Russian intelligence services are not benign,” the prosecutors said—a suggestion that Smirnov had actively been in cahoots with the Russians.
One filing revealed he had numerous contacts with a Russian official “who has been described by Smirnov in a number of ways, including as the son of a former high-ranking Russian government official” and someone “who purportedly controls two groups of individuals tasked with carrying out assassination efforts in a third-party country,” a reference to Ukraine. “Smirnov’s contacts with Russian officials who are affiliated with Russian intelligence services are not benign,” the prosecutors said—a suggestion that Smirnov had actively been in cahoots with the Russians.
The Justice Department’s filings in the case depicted Smirnov as having “spread misinformation” about Biden, adding “the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November [2024].” It looked as if Smirnov had been part of a Russian operation to tarnish Biden in both 2020 and 2024.
On January 8, 2025, after Smirnov accepted a plea agreement, federal Judge Otis Wright of the Central District of California sentenced him to six years. “In committing his crimes he betrayed the United States,” Weiss stated in court papers.
A scamster tied to Russian intelligence who had promoted disinformation to the FBI to harm Biden in two elections was behind bars. A win for the Justice Department. Case closed.
Not quite. Shortly after his conviction, Smirnov requested he be released on bail from prison pending an appeal he had filed. The Justice Department, now tightly controlled by Trump, joined Smirnov in supporting this request. Smirnov and the feds filed a joint stipulation asking he be freed while his appeal was underway.
This was weird. The Justice Department had just locked him up. But with Trump in the White House, it was under new management.
What was different now—and peculiar—was that that the Justice Department had flipped and was supporting the request of a man who had tried to deceive the FBI and who, as Weiss said, betrayed the United States.
During Smirnov’s criminal case, Justice Department lawyers had argued that because he had access to $6 million in funds (the origins of which he hadn’t been able to explain), was an Israeli citizen who could easily obtain an Israeli passport, and claimed to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence services, he was a flight risk. They requested he be kept in prison prior to his trial. Smirnov’s lawyers contended at that time that he ought to be released on bail because he had a serious medical condition related to his eyes that required continuing care. The court didn’t buy that and imprisoned him while he awaited trial.
Following his conviction, Smirnov made the same argument: Due to his eye condition, he should be let out on bail while his appeal proceeded. What was different now—and peculiar—was that that the Justice Department had flipped and was supporting the request of a man who had tried to deceive the FBI and who, as Weiss said, betrayed the United States.
The government had once said Smirnov was a flight risk; now it argued the opposite. During a hearing last April, a department prosecutor pointed out that Smirnov had “the lowest incentive that he would ever have to flee the country…when he has a receptive ear to people who are willing to look anew” at his case. A “receptive ear”? That was a surprising statement, indicating that the Trump Justice Department was considering reviewing the case of this suspected Russian agent. The Trump administration was advocating for him.
On April 30, 2025, Judge Wright turned down the joint Smirnov–United States request for his release, noting that nothing significant had changed since Smirnov was determined a flight risk and “the fact remains that Smirnov has been convicted and sentenced to seventy-two months in prison, providing ample incentive to flee.”
That was not the end of the Trump Justice Department’s cooperation with Smirnov. And the former informant did catch a break after losing the fight for bail.
In November, independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet discovered that Smirnov had been released from FCI Terminal Island, a low-security prison in Los Angeles, where he had been fulfilling his sentence. A process server who had been trying to serve Smirnov with papers related to a civil lawsuit had been informed that Smirnov was “furloughed.” David Chesnoff, Smirnov’s lawyer, told the New York Post that his client had been released on a “medical furlough” due to his eye condition, which required surgery. A health-related furlough from a federal facility can last up to 30 months. Chesnoff said at the time he expected to request multiple furloughs for Smirnov.
With Chesnoff, Smirnov had a high-powered and widely connected lawyer who was part of the Trump administration. A well-known celebrity attorney based in Las Vegas, he was appointed in June to serve on an advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security.
Several years ago, Chesnoff represented Republican political operative Corey Lewandowski, when Lewandowski was accused of harassing and inappropriately touching a Trump donor at a fundraising event. Chesnoff obtained a plea agreement in which Lewandowski admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to impulse control counseling and 50 hours of community service. When Chesnoff was named to the DHS council, Lewandowski was serving as the chief adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Other members of this advisory board include Giuliani, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, right-wing commentator Mark Levin, Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox, and Lewandowski.
It’s unclear how long Smirnov was out of prison for the medical furlough. Chesnoff did not respond to an inquiry. On Friday, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Smirnov was currently in custody at Terminal Island.
This month, the Justice Department continued to go all-out for Smirnov. On March 4, with no fanfare, it submitted a filing supporting Smirnov’s appeal of his conviction.
Smirnov had agreed to a plea deal in which he acknowledged lying to the FBI and committing tax evasion. But following his conviction, he filed an appeal that hinged on a technical point. He claimed Judge Wright had not stuck to the deal’s provision regarding a reduction in Smirnov’s sentence to match his pretrial detention.
The Trump administration appears to be bending over backward to help him escape his sentence and win another trial—or perhaps avoid one.
The plea agreement between the Justice Department and Smirnov stated that Smirnov was “entitled” to a credit for time served. But at sentencing, Judge Wright said he would not “get involved” in the calculation of the credit and would leave that to the Bureau of Prisons.
In the appeal, Smirnov’s lawyers argued that even though Smirnov ended up being credited by BOP with time served, Wright, by not directly recommending the time off to BOP, had not adhered to the plea agreement. Consequently, they contended, the sentence should be revoked and Smirnov permitted to withdraw his guilty pleas and return the case to the pre-agreement stage. The Justice Department filing supports Smirnov’s argument and his requests.
The Trump administration appears to be bending over backward to help him escape his sentence and win another trial—or perhaps avoid one. There’s no guarantee the Justice Department would continue the prosecution if Smirnov succeeds with his appeal. One government official who has followed this case tells me he wonders if the ultimate plan of the Trump administration is to let Smirnov go free.
Judge Wright has challenged this argument advanced by Smirnov and the DOJ. In a ruling last year, he said that Smirnov’s claim that he had not followed “all of the stipulations” of the plea agreement was “factually and legally incorrect.” Wright cited the exact language of the agreement: “The parties also agree that the defendant is entitled to credit…for the period of his pretrial detention…and that credits that the Bureau of Prisons may allow…may be credited against this stipulated sentence.”
Wright pointed out the agreement did not “provide that the Court would order that Smirnov receive credit for time served…This provision regarding credit requires nothing of the Court.”
Smirnov’s case does not seem a strong one, turning on the question of whether the provision that he was “entitled” to credit for time served compelled Wright to make an explicit recommendation to the BOP. It certainly doesn’t come across as a matter that would call for the participation of the deputy attorney general. Yet Blanche signed this filing. Deputy attorneys general usually don’t get involved in such matters.
I asked the Justice Department why it decided to back Smirnov’s appeal. A spokesperson replied, “We have no comment.” I also asked if the DOJ would renew its prosecution of Smirnov if he wins his appeal. I received the same response.
Trump’s Justice Department has shown an unusual amount of consideration for Smirnov, a confessed criminal tied to Russian intelligence who betrayed the FBI and who perpetuated a fraud that roiled American politics. But he did make trouble for Biden and the Democrats. This case warrants scrutiny as Smirnov’s appeal proceeds.
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ed martin wiki talk
Martin's attempted DoJ harassment of Sandy Hook school shooting victims' advocate
Shouldn't we add information about this incident to this Wikipedia article? It seems rather notable.
{Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has ordered a senior U.S. Justice Department official to drop an inquiry into a retired FBI agent's involvement in a defamation lawsuit involving Alex Jones's conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025.Ed Martin Jr., who leads the Justice Department’s “weaponization working group,” sent a letter dated Sept. 15, 2025 to the Sandy Hook families' lawyer asking for information about former FBI agent William Aldenberg, who responded to the 2012 school shooting and was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with victims' relatives, that led to a $1.4 billion judgment against Jones for calling the massacre a hoax.*}:
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/us-justice-department-official-ordered-drop-inquiry-sandy-125904544
98.123.38.211 (talk) 23:11, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes, absolutely should be included. 172.58.10.83 (talk) 18:34, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
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OMG AN 3 26
Political scientist Austin Sarat on Wednesday warned that Donald Trump's Justice Department is making a "virtually unprecedented" demand on behalf of MAGA activist Steve Bannon that would effectively "rewrite the past" and further encourage supporters to break the law on his behalf.
Writing in a piece for The Hill this week, Sarat, a professor of political science at Amherst College, highlighted an extremely unorthodox legal request submitted by the DOJ last month, asking a federal judge to dismiss the contempt of Congress indictment leveled against Bannon over four years ago. This would, in turn, essentially vacate his conviction on that same charge.
Bannon, a former adviser to Trump and outspoken proponent of the MAGA agenda, was initially indicted by Congress in late 2021 for refusing to answer a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. By the summer of 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to serve four months in prison and pay a $6,500 fine. Despite years' worth of appeal efforts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, Bannon ultimately ended up serving his time from July to October 2024 at a federal prison in Connecticut.
While the DOJ's new request on Bannon's behalf might fly under the radar for many as another in a long line of efforts by Trump to reward his loyalists, Sarat argued that this effort to dismiss a conviction after the prison sentence has been completed is "unprecedented" and would represent a new escalation in Trump's efforts to incentivize loyalty towards him at all costs.
"To dismiss an indictment after a prison sentence has already been served is virtually unprecedented and shows the lengths to which the administration will go to whitewash history and rewrite the past," Sarat wrote. "The judge, Trump appointee Carl Nichols, would be well advised to refuse."
It is not unheard of for prosecutors to ask that indictments or convictions be overturned, though Sarat said it is "extraordinarily rare" for it to happen after a sentence has been completed. Typically, such requests are only made after new evidence of the convict's innocence has been discovered or if there is a clear argument that their constitutional rights were violated.
"Again, none of that applies to Bannon," Sarat wrote.
Trump previously decried Bannon's indictment and conviction, claiming that the attempt to compel his testimony before Congress was a violation of his legally dubious assertions about "executive privilege." In the request from February, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called the original subpoena "improper" and claimed that the DOJ is attempting to "undo the prior administration’s weaponization of the justice system."
"Bannon had his day in court. He was tried and convicted. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and lost before going to prison," Sarat wrote. "The only thing that has changed is that his friends have returned to power. What the Justice Department is doing in the Bannon case is just the latest example of why, as former Secretary of Labor Robert ReichRobert Reich puts it, 'Trump justice is an oxymoron.'"
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An 2 26
It was reported earlier this week that Ed Martin, President Donald Trump's leader on his "anti-weaponization" effort, was sidelined and is expected to leave the Justice Department altogether.
According to CNN, the reason for Martin's departure is he leaked secret grand jury information to the public, which is illegal. An investigation by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that began last year found Martin leaked information about the Trump administration's efforts to indict Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calf.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The Trump DOJ has been unable to indict Schiff and the charges against James were dismissed after a judge found that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was not in the post legally. A new grand jury then refused to indict James.
The CNN source that was briefed on the matter said Martin tried to deny he leaked secret information, but he evidently used emails to coordinate it.
"The review of Martin’s handling of materials burst into public view in December after a witness who received a subpoena showed up at the courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, seeking to testify," the report said.
The woman said she was asked about two people who have been working on investigations with Martin and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. The DOJ wanted to know whether the people were impersonating federal agents.
Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X, “There is no investigation into Bill Pulte," but never mentioned Martin.
Martin hasn't been charged with a crime yet and CNN said that the DOJ hasn't determined "whether any law was broken."
Leaking federal grand jury information is a criminal offense, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It violates Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e). The Justice Department's own website outlines the rules in detail.
Blanche denied there were any "misconduct investigations into Ed Martin." He said, "Ed is doing a great job as Pardon Attorney.”
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// BOOT BOVINO?
AN 2 26
A battle between two high-ranking officials within President Donald Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) is now ending with one of them headed for the exits.
That's according to a Monday article in CNN, which reported that Ed Martin – who was once tapped as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — is preparing to leave the DOJ in the coming weeks. This is apparently the doing of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who CNN said "made moves to significantly limit Martin’s ability to wield power."
Martin is currently the DOJ's pardon attorney, whose motto when screening potential candidates for pardons has reportedly been "no MAGA left behind." He has also led the Trump DOJ's "Weaponization Working Group," though one of CNN's unnamed sources told the network that Martin's efforts have been underwhelming to his superiors.
"The fact is that Ed was given all opportunity to lead this group and deliver on its mission, but he did nothing," the source said. "Others across the Department have since been making great progress and doing the work that should have been happening under Ed’s leadership."
Martin was seen as a particularly divisive figure, given his past history leading the "Stop the Steal" campaign after the 2020 election, and his work representing defendants charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. After Trump nominated him to be the DOJ's top prosecutor in Washington D.C., he failed to convince enough Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to support his confirmation.
Judiciary Committee member Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he was "not comfortable" voting to move Martin out of the committee to the full Senate due to his work representing January 6 defendants. Martin also hosted Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli on five different occasions after his ideology became publicly known.
"Tim Hale is an extraordinary guy. I’ve gotten to know him really well. I’d say we’re friends over the last few years, and especially in the last month since he’s been out of jail," Martin said of Hale-Cusanelli in July of 2024
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AN 1 26
White House deputy chief of staff James Blair on Friday called out media outlets for not posting in their headlines that reporter Don Lemon was arrestedas a result of a grand jury indictment. That information, however, remains under seal.
"Any 'news' outlet failing to make clear in their headline that Don Lemon was indicted by a federal grand jury is intentionally misleading the public. Thank you for your attention to this matter," said Blair on X.
Speaking at a press conference about an hour later, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he couldn't provide any reaction or further information on Lemon's indictment because it was still "under seal."
Blair was quickly questioned by reporters asking for the sealed indictment.
"It would actually be malpractice to report that without an indictment being docketed or announced or confirmed by a participant in the proceedings — unless this is the formal announcement by the White House?" said Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney.
"Please share the indictment, James, since you seem to know," wrote Politico's senior legal affairs reporter, Josh Gerstein.
Legal commentator and national security expert Marcy Wheeler quipped, "Likewise any 'news' outlet failing to make clear that two judges said there was no probable cause AND ALSO that the [Attorney General Pam Bondi] violated every ethical rule to get this indictment. Gonna be a long headline..."
"Was the grand jury convened in the Cabinet room yesterday?" asked White House correspondent S.V. Dáte from the Huffington Post.
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AN 1 26
A new court filing by disqualified former interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan is now accusing a judge appointed by President Donald Trump of committing a "gross abuse of power."
On Tuesday, All Rise News editor-in-chief Adam Klasfeld tweeted that Halligan — backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General BLANCHE? Pam Bondi — attacked U.S. District Judge David J. Novak (who Trump appointed to the Eastern District of Virginia in 2019) as "flat wrong" for suggesting that Halligan should no longer call herself a U.S. attorney due to her prior disqualification. Klasfeld called the filing an "extraordinary, pugilistic brief."
The DOJ's briefing submitted Tuesday is Halligan's official response to an order Novak handed down last week giving the disqualified prosecutor seven days to explain why she continues to wrongly use the title of U.S. attorney given that senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie (an appointee of former President Bill Clinton) in November disqualified her in a binding ruling.
In the 11-page filing, Halligan, Bondi and Blanche used former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith as an example of why Judge Currie's order was not binding. They noted that when Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith's 37-count felony indictment of the then-former president, she also deemed him to be improperly appointed under the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution as he was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate, yet Smith continued to use his special counsel title in subsequent briefings. This is despite multiple DOJ special counsels appointed under both Democratic and Republican presidents never having been confirmed by the full Senate and still having their findings respected and found credible.
Klasfeld observed that Halligan and DOJ leadership accused Novak of making a "rudimentary error," and of using his powers as a judge as a "cudgel" against the executive branch. They also referred to his order demanding Halligan explain her continued use of the U.S. attorney title as an "inquisition."
"To put it mildly, this isn't the type of language one typically sees by a party addressing a judge," Klasfeld tweeted. "Halligan, Blanche and Bondi downplay the ruling disqualifying Halligan as a 'disagreement' with the government, which they say isn't binding on any other case."
Trump initially named Halligan as acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia after former U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert was forced to resign after declining to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are two of Trump's most high-profile political opponents. Halligan indicted both Comey and James shortly after replacing Siebert, though both indictments were dismissed after Judge Currie disqualified her.
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an 12 25
A judge has released documents naming Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's office as responsible for telling Tennessee U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire that targeting Kilmar Ábrego García was a "top priority."
An order from Dec. 3 was unsealed late Tuesday showing Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. reviewed about 3,000 government documents in his chambers and allowed "a few dozen" to be turned over to Ábrego's defense team.
In 2019, under the first Trump administration, Ábrego was given a work permit in the U.S. and a federal judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador. Under President Donald Trump's new administration, however, Ábrego was taken into custody while driving his 5-year-old son home. Despite a judge's attempts to stop it, Ábrego wad deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to bring Ábrego back to the U.S. It took more than two months for the administration to comply with the demand. Upon returning him, the Justice Department then charged Ábrego with human smuggling in the middle district of Tennessee stemming from a 2022 traffic stop. It has been an ongoing battle to deport him ever since, emblematic of the battle between the administration and the federal court system.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg has initiated contempt proceedings because the Trump administration defied his orders.
The newly-released documents not only confirm the orders were intentionally ignored, but it also proved the Justice Department only pressed to prosecute Ábrego after it mistakenly deported him. Ábrego's legal team is now alleging "vindictive prosecution."
McGuire previously swore he alone was behind the indictment of Ábrego, but the new documents show Blanche telling McGuire that an indictment was a “top priority." He said that the DOJ wanted it “sooner rather than later” and they even oversaw its content, noted Lawfare's Roger Parloff.
Legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance said that releasing the documents to Ábrego's lawyers "is bad news for the Trump administration, which is going to have to defend itself against Ábrego Garcia’s claim he’s being vindictively prosecuted. But that claim is supported by some of the government’s own emails."
The vindictiveness case "hinges on timing," Parloff explained in a BlueSky thread. "For 3 years the government took no steps to charge him for his 11/30/22 traffic stop. It sent him to CECOT on 3/15/25 and on 4/1/25, closed his arrest file."
"Only after Ábrego won his Maryland civil case, with the Supreme Court on 4/10/25 ordering the government to facilitate Ábrego's return, did the government reopen Ábrego's criminal case," Parloff added.
Blanche confessed to Fox News in an interview that the reason they went after Ábrego was "a judge in Maryland" accused the government of doing something wrong.
"That sounds vindictive," said Parloff.
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MMA
What we know about the relationship between Alex Jones and DOJ official Ed Martin
A new report highlighted Jones bragging about receiving sensitive information from Martin. Jones has said that he has known Martin for 20 years and repeatedly called for Martin to have more power.
Written by Gideon Taaffe, Noah Dowe, Reed McMaster, Pete Tsipis & Ben Van Bloem
Published 11/26/25
As conspiracy theorist Alex Jones deals with cascading legal issues stemming from his defamation of the families of Sandy Hook massacre victims, he has found an ally in the Trump administration in the form of Ed Martin, who serves as the director of the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group.
According to Jones, Martin – who is now facing internal scrutiny following potential misconduct in his investigations – met with Jones in September for “three hours plus.” Martin also reportedly sent a letter requesting information from one of the plaintiffs in Jones’ defamation trials. On his show, Jones has repeatedly touted Martin as an insider source for potential legal actions by the administration, using his supposed conversations with Martin to preview indictments and other legal actions for his audience.
Jones has also repeatedly attacked Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who “reportedly admonished” Martin for attempting to help Jones with his trials. Jones has called for Blanche to be removed and suggested his continued presence in the administration is “political suicide” for Trump.
- ## Martin’s actions in multiple roles have come under scrutiny from the Justice Department
- Ed Martin serves in the Trump administration in multiple roles, including as associate deputy attorney general, and he has played a role in the indictments of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. CNN, [10/30/25]
- According to The New Republic, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche encouraged a federal grand jury investigation into Martin over potential misconduct.The investigation, now under way, will consider whether “mortgage fraud charges against California Senator Adam Schiff and possibly New York Attorney General Letitia James were tainted by the methods of Martin and [Federal Housing Finance Director Bill] Pulte, who allegedly shared sensitive information with individuals who were not authorized to be part of the investigation.” ABC News reported that Martin may have “shared sensitive grand jury information about the James case with at least one unauthorized individual as well as worked with another person from outside the federal government to examine potential evidence in the Schiff and James probes.” ABC News, [11/20/25; The New Republic, 11/21/25]
- ## Alex Jones and Martin seem to have a longstanding relationship
- Infowars founder Alex Jones says he’s known Martin for 20 years, and The Bulwark reported that on his show, he previewed Martin’s strategy to go after Comey and James using “process crimes” and “grand juries.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [6/3/25; The Bulwark, 11/25/25]
- Martin also sent a letter with requests for information to an FBI agent who was awarded damages from defamatory claims Jones made about the Sandy Hook massacre.The Bulwark reported the letter was sent to the FBI agent the day after Alex Jones posted a picture of him and Martin on social media captioned “The Deep State is in DEEP SHIT!!!” Martin later withdrew his request after internal scrutiny from Blanche, who “reportedly admonished” Martin for sending the letter. The Bulwark, [11/25/25]
- ## Jones has repeatedly praised Martin and boasted about their relationship, even calling for him to be made attorney general or “anti-deep state czar”
- Jones said Republicans who voted against Martin’s confirmation as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia were “traitorous.”Jones accused the “deep state” of having “traitorous Republicans led by Sen. Thom Tillis.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [5/7/25]
- In May, Jones attacked Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) for “trying to block Trump from getting people in like Ed Martin” and announced that the Trump administration “created a special office” for Martin to go after “corruption in the deep state and weaponization.” “They've now created a special office, with power, to go anywhere [Martin] wants in the country after corruption in the deep state and weaponization,” Jones said. Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [5/18/25]
- On Bannon’sWar Room, Jones called on Trump to make Martin an “anti-deep state czar” and give Martin $20 billion to act “in a DOGE-like way, just go in, look at the files of all these globalists, all these deceivers, and just purge them.” Jones said Trump needs “a thousand Steve Bannons, a thousand Gen. Flynns, a thousand, you know, Ed Martins to put in all the key positions that don't play games.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [5/22/25]
- In June, Jones boasted about knowing Martin for two decades as he brought up his new role in the DOJ.He stated, “I broke this two and a half weeks ago, and I told you that Ed Martin is now the head pardon lawyer in the Justice Department and the head of this new anti-corruption, anti-government weaponization against the American people task force with a billion dollars in funding. And he's staffing his crew at breakneck speed right now. And he is fearless, and I've known him for 20 years." Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [6/3/25]
- In July, Jones attributed “every major win” by the DOJ to Martin and suggested he should take over as attorney general if Pam Bondi ever leaves, calling him “the real deal.” He stated, “I'm just saying, constantly, every major win we have against the deep state, it turns out in the DOJ, it's Ed Martin. And I'll just say it: If Pam Bondi ever resigns or goes, Ed Martin should be the attorney general. And/or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. … I mean, I've known Ed Martin 20-plus years. … He is the real deal.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [7/25/25]
- Jones claimed Trump bringing in Martin showed Trump “was serious about taking down the deep state.” He said, “I have said that if Trump was serious about taking down the deep state, he would bring in Ed Martin, which he did. I've known 25 years as super smart and super courageous because it's dangerous taking people on, to say the least.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [8/19/25]
- In September, Jones posted a photo of himself with Martin, and said on his show that they met for “three hours plus” about “things being done to Infowars and the fake auction and the DOJ funding the attacks.” Jones also referenced instances where he “talked to [Martin] on the phone over the last few months” about “action” planned by the DOJ. Twitter/X, [9/12/25; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 9/14/25]
- Jones later praised Martin’s “hard work” in investigating “how the DOJ funded” lawsuits and “ran propaganda” against Infowars. Jones stated, “That’s going to be interesting with Ed Martin’s task force. We appreciate his hard work. This is what his task force is against. Strikeforces. Government weaponization against citizens.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [9/24/25]
- ## Jones has seemingly gotten inside scoops on investigations into Democrats, including Letitia James and James Comey
- When Martin was appointed as special attorney for mortgage fraud, Jones bragged, “I told you Adam Schiff and Letitia James and Fani Willis will probably be the first indictments. … And I specifically told you, I just might have heard it would be Ed Martin.” Later in the show, Jones said, “Ed Martin is going to indict you. He was given over a billion dollars and 800 people. And for the last three months, he's been getting and vetting his 800 people. And now they coming after you like a pack of wild dogs.” CNN, [10/30/25; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 8/8/25, 8/8/25]
- In August, Jones teased that Martin had given him “incredible information” from Jack Smith's emails about supposed mass trials following the January 6 Capitol riot. He claimed, “Pelosi had all the troops put around the Capitol. And as I broke exclusively, and I'm going to give you the details tomorrow, Ed Martin told me it's incredible information they got out of Jack Smith's emails, you know, the former U.N. war crimes prosecutor, that they were going to set up in D.C. giant Soviet or Nazi-style show trials, trying thousands of people at a time and not even giving them due process." Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [8/24/25]
- In a social media video, Jones said he had a 45-minute call with Martin, alleging that “the grand juries are open” and “they’ve already got a bunch of them, you know, clear-cut — on just clear-cut tax evasion.” Jones continued, “I’m going to go big with it in the morning, and say there, this, that, that, and I’m the source of it, and it’s directly to Ed Martin.” Twitter/X, [8/24/25]
- Jones teased that he was working with Martin on “how I was persecuted by the Democrats,” adding, “You’ll be hearing about that in the news very, very soon.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [9/20/25]
- In October, Jones celebrated the indictments of Letitia James and James Comey, adding that “a lot more is coming thanks to Ed Martin and other people’s work getting these log jams out of the way.”He continued, “But if Trump can't protect people like Mike Lindell or yours truly, what message does that send to everyone when we deliver to the Justice Department all the documents of how this was done?” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [10/14/25]
- ## Jones has repeatedly attacked Todd Blanche over “gunning for Ed Martin” and not allowing Martin to communicate with Jones
- In September, Jones said Blanche “killed” an “investigation into my persecution by the DOJ.” Apparently referring to Blanche, Jones complained, “I haven't addressed the DOJ launching an investigation into my persecution by the DOJ, which is what Ed Martin's job is, what Trump told him to do, and how the deputy director of the DOJ, the deputy AG, killed it and repudiated him for it.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [9/26/25]
- In October, Jones claimed a “DOJ source” told him Blanche is “gunning for Ed Martin” and declared, “Blanche needs to be removed. Ed Martin needs to be put in if you want to save the country.”Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [10/7/25]
- OnThe Tucker Carlson Show, Jones again claimed Blanche had forced Martin to end the investigation into Jones and “bragged about it all over the news.” Jones also claimed, “Todd Blanche, the deputy AG, calls up the news, chews out Ed Martin, says, End this investigation and pull this.” YouTube, *The Tucker Carlson Show*, [10/13/25]
- Amid reporting that Blanche was “encouraging” a grand jury investigation into Martin, Jones raged at Trump in November: “I am not going to aid you in your political suicide and my own destruction.”Addressing Trump, Jones said, “If you allow people like Todd Blanche to then persecute and prosecute your champions like Ed Martin and Pulte, I am not going to aid you in your political suicide and my own destruction.” He continued, “How you’re screwing this up, I have no idea.” The New Republic, [11/21/25; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 11/22/25]
- Jones claimed Blanche “got so mad at” Martin over the Infowars investigation that “he’s not allowed to talk to me right now.”He added, “Martin said correctly when we met on the phone, yeah, they think I'm behind everything. It's crazy. I get the blame and the credit for everything. I'm just one guy.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [11/24/25]
- In a November 22 social media video, Jones said he spoke with Martin on the phone about Blanche.Jones said Martin gave “no comment,” but added, “I know Martin got told, you know, kill the investigations into what was done to Jones and, you know, don’t talk to Jones. And that’s from Blanche.” Twitter/X, [11/22/25]
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AN 11 25 TODD BLANCHE PO’D UNFORCED ERRORS?
Grand jury investigating Trump allies over 'tainted' probes of White House critics
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msnbc 8 20 25
todd blanche ordered arrest of nj mayor
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BONDI HARMEET D INVEST EMPLOYEE REFUSE PRINT KIRK FLYER
AN 9 25
A takedown of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche by a U.S. lawmaker and former federal prosecutor received acclaim by critics of the Trump administration on Wednesday.
U.S. Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) slammed Blanche for suggesting that the loud protest of President Donald Trump at a D.C. restaurant qualifies for racketeering charges and prosecution.
“RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is available to all kinds of organizations committing crimes and wrongful acts, not just organized crimes,” Blanche told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins. “So … is it sheer happenstance that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner and accost him with vile words and vile anger? … [I]s it completely random that they show up? Maybe. But to the extent that it’s an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States there’s potential investigation there.”
Trump spoke about being confronted by protesters at a Washington D.C. restaurant last week during a Monday press gaggle in the Oval Office.
READ MORE: Morning Joe predicts Trump’s rhetoric will lead to 'massive Democratic victories next year'
“… [T]hey should be put in jail. What they're doing to this country is really subversive," Trump said of protestors railing against his federalization of law enforcement in the capital city and calling for an end to hostilities in Gaza.
Collins pushed back on Blanche’s claim during his interview. “Were they inflicting harm or terror and damage to the United States ... by shouting in his vicinity?”
“That cannot be a serious question, said Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney defending him against multiple criminal indictments, including a case in which Trump was found guilty of using campaign money to bribe a woman for her silence over an alleged sexual escapade.
“People can protest the president,” Collins told Blanche, and Goldman agreed.
“I charged RICO cases. Yelling at the President is not a racketeering act and cannot be the basis for a criminal charge,” Goldman posted on X. “Blanche knows better. He is corrupting the DOJ with ridiculous comments like this.”
READ MORE: 'This is insane': Conservatives demand Trump official’s removal over 'hate speech' blunder BONDI
Social media backed up Goldman’s claim, with one commenter saying on X: “Wondering when it dawns on these guys that Trump will soon be gone and I mean in the permanent sense and what will they do with their careers? Who could possibly take them seriously?”
“To suggest that [Blanche] knows better is naïve, commented another X user, while a third said: “This echoes Trump's 2024 campaign vows to jail opponents, blurring protest with organized crime and chilling dissent.”
Another commenter questioned Blanche’s scope of knowledge: “Maybe he doesn’t know better … His ineffectual defense of Trump at trial certainly suggests either a corrupt or inaccurate understanding of the law.”
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an 7 25
'Pathological liar': Trump deputy AG ripped for seeking meeting with Epstein co-conspirator
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DOJ Run Amok
The Justice Department under new Attorney General Pam Bondi continues its steep decline, setting new precedents almost daily for supplication to the White House, corrupt and unethical conduct, and dubious representations to judges.
Yesterday was its own special, to use the legal term of art, shitshow.
The acting deputy attorney general appeared all alone in federal court in Manhattan to try to seal the deal on his corrupt scheme to dismiss criminal charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. The deputy attorney general runs the Justice Department on a day to day basis; yet here was Emil Bove by himself at the counsel table, with apparently no other DOJ lawyer willing to sit with him. Behind him providing visible support was Todd Blanche, the nominee for deputy attorney general who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Both men until last month were personal attorneys to Donald Trump.
After the hearing (no ruling yet on the motion to dismiss from U.S. District Judge Dale Ho), Bove sent a tone-deaf, Trumpian message to DOJ employees trying to turn his solo appearance in court from a personal humiliation into a model of diehard MAGA-tude. In a snarky conclusion that is astonishing coming from a DAG, Bove said that anyone who wasn’t onboard the Trump train could resign and pointed them to the letters penned by their colleagues who resigned over Bove’s order to dismiss the Adams case:
As that unprecedented scene was playing out in NYC, President Trump’s nominee to be the U.S. attorney in DC was further showering himself in disgrace. Ed Martin, who is the acting USA for the moment, sent another one of his wildly inappropriate emails to colleagues that was apparently promptly leaked again.
Martin for the third time that we know of made grand and obsequious gestures toward Elon Musk’s DOGE: “We will protect DOGE,” he declared:
Most alarming was Martin’s willingness to launch pseudo-investigations of prominent Democrats and to castigate them in politicized terms while touting his own bonafides in going after them. Among the Democrats targeted by Martin: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA).
“Operation Whirlwind” is what Martin is calling his effort to prosecute anyone who targets public officials, but it appears to be more of an effort to stifle First Amendment expression and intimidate opposition leaders than to protect officials from the wave of actual threats that Trump himself has stirred up in recent years.
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