I wanted to explain how I’ve come to think of corruption not just as a thing — “corruption strips countries of their assets” — or an adjective — “Trump is the most corrupt president, ever” — but as a process.

That process not only acquires a momentum of its own that is difficult to reverse, which is one of the things you always hear about corruption. But the process can be used as a tool. The process of corruption can be useful for powerful people for more than just the immediate exchange (and the relationships of secrecy) it creates, but also because corrupt institutions and countries are weaker and easier to manipulate.

I don’t think this is any great insight. It is consistent with all the far more scholarly work on corruption, particularly Brian Klaas’ Corruptible and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc, both of which I highly recommend. It is just the lens through which I have viewed the process by which Trump thoroughly corrupted the Republican Party, and in so doing, largely destroyed the country.

And because Trump’s whack bid to steal Venezuela’s oil involves the corrupt Venezuelan who played a role in Trump’s 2019 impeachment, now’s a great time to finally write that post.

Counterfactuals are never 20/20. We can never be sure what might have happened but for certain decisions, but for certain events.

But fuck it — let’s try it here.

Do this: Take a minute to think about what would have happened if a whistleblower had not narced out Trump’s bid to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy on that July 25, 2019 Perfect Phone Call? What would have happened if Adam Schiff hadn’t found a way to make it go public? What would have happened if Trump had not released the Perfect Phone Call transcript on September 25, 2019, just before the two men would meet publicly at the UNGA, in an absolutely astonishing meeting given everything that has happened since?

What would have happened if it had all remained secret, if Zelenskyy had done … we don’t know what … in response to Trump’s demand and Trump had simply given Ukraine the security support Congress had ordered him to give?

Go ahead — go think about that for a minute!

Before I explain how I have thought about that question, let me first note that that call — a call between the predictably corrupt Donald Trump and his fellow celebrity President — was carefully orchestrated. Seven years later will still don’t know all the ways that it was orchestrated, except that Rudy Giuliani and his ability to bypass the professional bureaucracy that no longer exists in Trump 2.0 was at the center of it. We know that Rudy was led down that path by two grifters who had bought access to Trump starting with payments to Brian Ballard. Or rather — according to Lev Parnas’ selectively honest memoir — one mobbed-up grifter, Igor Fruman (who by the way was represented by Todd Blanche in his criminal case) sought out Parnas because he knew Parnas (who had prior ties to Ivana Trump) had already bought his way into Trump’s inner circle.

I knew Igor Fruman through common friends. Born in Belarus, his family emigrated to Detroit when the USSR was shedding even more Jews, Igor was six years older than me and had moved to South Florida, where the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian communities were tight. Still, he spent most of his time in Ukraine where he made his money.

I knew about Igor from various Jewish charities we were both involved in and mutual friends, but we weren’t really friends at the time. Igor became interested in me because of the pictures I was posting of myself with Trump on social media and because I was hosting events for Russians for Trump. Igor wanted to get deals done in the petroleum industry and thought I could help.

He owned two popular nightclubs in Kyiv, Mafia Rave and the more upscale Buddha Bar. Both places were very popular with well-heeled men from both the West and East. They mingled at Buddha Bar, got to know each other and made deals, often huge deals.

And after Fruman latched onto the access to Trump that Parnas had paid for, the two of them ended up leading Rudy on a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel seeking dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden, reaching out to one (Viktor Shokin) after another (Yuriy Lutsenko) after another (Dmitry Firtash) after another (Andrii Derkach) corrupt Ukrainian offering to deal that dirt.

The adventure started, at least according to Parnas’ telling, when Rudy’s former prosecutor buddy Bart Schwartz passed on a tip claiming Ukrainian corruption. And can you believe your luck? Rudy got that tip while he was sitting right there in the Grand Havana Room where, just a few years earlier, Paul Manafort (who would also be represented by Todd Blanche, in his New York case) had shared campaign strategy with Konstantin Kilimnik, just hours after a meeting with Rudy and Trump!

Rudy was sitting there in the Grand Havana Room with a different Ukrainian, one who could act as Rudy’s guide to hunt this piece of dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden.

It was one of those days when Giuliani and I were just hanging out at our favorite place, The Grand Havana Room. Operating under the belief that Giuliani would deliver on his promises, I was still very friendly with Trump’s sidekick. There was nothing like The Grand Havana. A private club with a panoramic view of Manhattan, it had the best food, the best drinks and, of course, the finest cigars. He could stay there all day, just doing nothing and shooting the breeze.

But that’s not my style. I have to work. And that’s exactly what I was doing. Giuliani and I might have been friends, but I also knew that he was the key to my future success. So, we were talking about ways to get my business off the ground when he excused himself for an important phone call.

It was Bart Schwartz. I didn’t know him personally, but I did know that he used to be a prosecutor under Giuliani at the SDNY and the two had stayed in touch for years. Schwartz was then acting as a receiver for a hedge fund (a post that would later end with him in big trouble with the SEC), but still kept his eyes and ears open. He had a tip that he thought Giuliani might be interested in.

Giuliani told me that Schwartz had heard that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, had been involved in something perhaps a bit shadier than mere conflict of interest in Ukraine. Apparently, there had been a couple of letters, whistle blower complaints.

Giuliani was alive with excitement. I had never seen him so happy. He’s a man of strong emotions, but none more pressing than hate. He had no time for Democrats, especially the country club type he considered the Bidens to be. Making it all the sweeter, Biden was the Democrats’ most likely pick to run against Trump in 2020.

And it was Ukraine! He was sitting right beside a well-connected expert on that very country. Giuliani could not believe his luck.

And that’s how it happened that Lev and Igor, with the help of Rudy, got the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who supported anti-corruption efforts, fired. And that’s how Trump came to be on the phone with the newly elected President of Ukraine — elected on a strong anti-corruption platform! — making asks that Rudy and Lev and Igor had led Trump to believe would hit paydirt.

“If it’s what you say I love it, especially later in the summer.”

When the story of that Perfect Phone Call gets told, it is always a story about what Trump did. The story, told that way, hides all the work that went into it, the purchased access, the perfectly cultivated mob ties, the appeals to both Rudy and Trump’s known venality.

But if you look at it from the perspective of the mob ties that orchestrated that phone call, then you see that the call was at least in part an attempt to use Trump’s corruption to corrupt the newly elected President of Ukraine, the guy who had been elected on a platform of fighting corruption but who was also desperate to protect his country against Russia. That the whole scheme was an attempt to capitalize on the failed attempt to use Hunter Biden’s corruption, a process that started in 2014 and leveraged Hunter’s addiction and financial needs, against his father, who also was fighting corruption in Ukraine, that was just gravy.

Once you corrupt someone, you can find any number of ways to exploit that corruption in the future.

I have three opinions about what would have happened if that whistleblower had not spoken up, had not risked his career and freedom to reveal how Trump was using funds appropriated by Congress to make a corrupt demand of the Ukrainian President elected on a platform of fighting corruption.

First, that whistleblower’s ethical decision had absolutely no effect on Trump’s corrupt purpose (except, perhaps, for Lev and Igor). Rudy Giuliani kept up his pursuit of corrupt dirt on Joe Biden. Even in the middle of impeachment, the White House did not stop Rudy from traveling to visit suspected Russian spy Andrii Derkach in December 2019. According to Chuck Grassley, DOJ performed what looks like its end of a quid pro quo in that same month, shutting down an investigation of Burisma that had been started in 2016, shutting down an investigation of Burisma’s corruption smack dab in the middle of an impeachment defense that purported to be interested in corruption at Burisma. Worse still, Bill Barr set up an entire side channel that exonerated Rudy for his knowing outreach to a Russian spy and served as the vehicle via which a different corrupt Ukrainian, Alexander Smirnov, criminally framed Hunter and Joe Biden.

The whistleblower’s sacrifice did not change a fucking thing about the effort, with participation from both Trump’s personal lawyer and his Attorney General (since merged as one in the person of Todd Blanche), to frame Joe and Hunter Biden to help Trump’s election. All that still happened.

It’s even worse though, and this is what Democrats need to both understand and prepare for as they map out how to rein in Trump’s corruption if and when they win back the House. Not only didn’t impeachment slow the corrupt effort kicked off in that meeting in The Grand Havana Room, but I firmly believe that Trump exploited the polarization of the country to use impeachment as a means to demand loyalty from virtually every Republican save Justin Amash in the House and Mitt Romney in the Senate, the latter of whom had the money to pay for private security that gave him the courage to vote for one but not both articles of impeachment.

Romney confessed that he’d spent much of the impeachment trial hoping a way out would present itself: “I did not want to get here.” In fact, that was part of the reason he wanted former National Security Adviser John Bolton to testify about what Trump had told him. “I had the hope that he would be able to say something exculpatory and create reasonable doubt, so I wouldn’t have to vote to convict,” Romney said.

[snip]

When I asked Romney why none of his fellow Republicans had reached the same conclusion, he attempted diplomacy. “I’m not going to try and determine the thinking or motives of my colleagues,” he said. “I think it’s a mistake for any senator to try and get in the head of another senator and judge them.” But as he discussed the various rationalizations put forth by other Republican senators, he seemed to grow exasperated. He took particular issue with the idea—currently quite trendy in his caucus—that Trump’s fate should be decided at the ballot box, not in the Senate.

“I would have liked to have abdicated my responsibility as I understood it under the Constitution and under the writing of the Founders by saying, ‘Let’s leave this to the voters.’” But, he said, “I’m subject to my own conscience.”

When I asked how it felt to be formally disinvited from this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he laughed and noted that he hadn’t attended the conference since 2013. But it seems clear that his journey from GOP standard-bearer to party supervillain has been jarring.

Remember: The two articles of impeachment were, first, that Trump corruptly asked a foreign country for election help and, second, that Trump ordered his government — including, among others, current CBO head Russ Vought, current DOJ head of National Security John Eisenberg, current Deputy Director of CIA Mike Ellis, and Brian McCormack — who carried out Trump’s purge of the National Security Council before being purged himself (possibly as a scapegoat for Signalgate)  — to defy subpoenas from Congress.

Every single Republican Senator, save Mitt, was willing to claim to believe that Trump was chasing corruption, not acting on his own corruption. Or perhaps for many Republicans, they just did not give a shit what Trump did to stay in power, they were perfectly cool using taxpayer dollars to extort election help. But one way or another, every single Republican Senator but Mitt — including Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey, all of whom would later go on to vote for Trump’s 2021 impeachment, for which Cassidy has since paid with his seat — every single Senator bought into the bullshit Trump was selling. And every Republican Senator, including Mitt, were cool with Trump blowing off Congress’ sacred duty of impeachment.

And that’s one of the values of corruption, as a process. I can’t tell you how many of the GOP Senators were already so venal, so polarized, they were going to be cool with what Trump did one way or another. Some of them — people like Marsha Blackburn and Ron Johnson and Rick Scott — they were already so corrupt they were bound to applaud Trump’s extortion. But for a good number, they were pushed by partisanship and cowardice and the cover provided by Trump’s lies to do something that they might not have done before Donald Trump came along. This process made them into far worse people than they had been before Trump came along. And few of them — perhaps only John Bolton, who was too cowardly to testify truthfully — have acknowledged since how they debased themselves. I don’t think even Liz Cheney has come clean with her corrupt vote against impeachment in 2019.

Impeachment was a tool Trump used to make every single Republican (save Amash and Mitt) into far worse people. From that point forward they were going to be, and have been, for the most part, far easier to manipulate, far easier to buy off. Trump used impeachment to make corruption the price of admission to the MAGAt Republican Party, that corruption is a tool he has exploited over and over ever since, and that corruption is what has prevented Republicans from standing up against Trump’s destruction of the United States.

But then there’s Zelenskyy, the real mystery in this game of second guessing.

It is impossible to know what would have happened if that call were not made public (frankly, I’m not convinced we know all that happened until it was made public). On the call, Zelenskyy slathers Trump with flattery, parroting Trump’s favorite words back to him.

I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge and were able to use .it as an example for our elections and yes it is true that these were unique elections.

[snip]

we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country

But Zelenskyy still does that. Seven years later, with the exception of that famous meeting in the White House where Trump tried to sell Zelenskyy out, Zelenskyy still butters everyone up, on a near daily basis. It’s one thing that makes him successful. And that still includes Trump.

Often forgot, though, Zelenskyy agreed to Trump’s asks, both for an investigation into the server and for an investigation of Burisma.

For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to· open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your  confidence and have personal relations·with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have. friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.

[snip]

[Zelenskyy’s new prosecutor] will look. into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. [my emphasis]

To be sure, Zelenskyy caveated his answers, especially regarding the Burisma investigation, with language about transparency (and remember, part of this, where it says “the company,” was edited in the transcription process to protect Trump), and so we can’t tell how far he would have gone to feed Trump’s demands for a Burisma investigation if this call had not been made public.

But there were reports that Zelenskyy intended to do a CNN interview on September 13 to announce that investigation, just days after Trump released the aid.

He was going to do it.

And what we do know is that Zelensky backed Trump’s attack on Marie Yovanovitch, the ambassador who, like Joe Biden, had been helping Ukraine fight corruption.

On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%.

In the expected secrecy of that phone call, Zelenskyy joined Trump in his attack on Yovanovitch.

And while Zelenskyy began that joint appearance on September 25 with a comment about how much better it is to discuss corrupt investigations on TV than it is on a secret phone call, he nevertheless played his part, denying that Trump had pressured him, an important denial in Trump’s ultimately weathering of an impeachment.

Reporter: Have you felt any pressure from President Trump to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?

Zelenskyy: I think you read everything. I think you read text. I’m sorry but I don’t want to be involved to democratic, open [asks how to say вибори in English] elections, elections of USA. No, you heard that we had, I think, good phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things. And I [shrugs] so, I think think, and you read it, that nobody push it, push me.

Trump: In other words, no pressure.

I’ll be honest: We can’t know but I think if this all hadn’t blown up, Zelenskyy would have given Trump what he wanted. I think it would have taken him down a path where his efforts to defend Ukraine against corruption — and therefore his efforts to defend against Russian dominance — would have failed.

Instead, Zelenskyy has evolved into perhaps most sophisticated leader of our time — still fighting efforts to compromise him with corruption, and fighting even more persistent efforts to defeat Russian-backed disinformation claiming he was corrupt. I think the exposure of that Perfect Phone Call changed the course of history, but via Zelenskyy, not Trump.

The whistleblower’s effort to expose Trump’s corruption failed to have any meaningful effect in the US. If anything, Trump used it as an opportunity to corrupt Republicans who would once have (and who did, in the case of 2016 and Russia) object to foreign interference in US elections. Trump used it as an tool to demand that Republicans sell out their own institutional prerogatives, appropriations (which never even made it into impeachment) and subpoena power, to protect Trump and with him the Republican Party.

Corruption is a process, and by orchestrating that Perfect Phone Call, whatever mobsters were behind the effort got Trump to corrupt almost every single Republican member of Congress, lowering the bar for the next corrupt demand.

But I do suspect that everything would have been different, the entire course of Ukrainian history and with it the history of Europe, would have been different if that call had not been exposed, because it forced Zelenskyy and gave him the means of distancing himself from Trump’s efforts to corrupt him.

It is easy to say that Trump is corrupt, the most corrupt President ever, that his corruption steals from Americans and destroys the country. It is easy to correctly describe the corruption that has always been a key part of Trump’s success.

But if you understand that corruption is a process, the tool by which Trump is easily manipulated, and the tool by which Trump himself has debased virtually every single Republican and coerced them to cede their institutional prerogatives, you understand how it happened and how the corruption he demanded years ago still prevents Republicans from standing up to Trump to save the country.

The post “It’s Better to Be on TV than by Phone:” Corruption Is a Process appeared first on emptywheel.

In a latter sent on July 2 (submitted as an exhibit to a joint objection to a continuance filed with Don Lemon almost three weeks later), Georgia Fort’s attorneys first disclosed that Harmeet Dhillon’s goons had sought her phone records from T-Mobile using a customs summons. At the time (again, sent on July 2, disclosed weeks later), they described seeing the summons to T-Mobile, but not the subpoena returns.

The government was unaware whether the various customs-related administrative summonses its agent(s) issued with respect to Ms. Fort yielded any evidence in return. Counsel for Ms. Fort forwarded to the government an investigation report indicating that they did. The government indicated that, if that were the case, those would have been produced in discovery. Mr. Hedley subsequently identified Bates Nos. 00018815-00019232 as the sum total records the government received in response to one of its summonses related to Ms. Fort, Bates No. 00012439. For avoidance of doubt, our team has reviewed the discovery produced to date, including the documents Mr. Hedley identified, and no such evidence has been provided to us. Indeed, Bates No. 00018815 is a business record certification from T-Mobile which, on its face, represents that there were records “attached hereto” pertaining to Ms. Fort (the telephone number ending in 3423). Yet, no such records were provided in discovery.

Bates No. 00012439 further suggests that the government received records related to Ms. Fort that it has yet to produce. That document states that on “April 12, 2026, T-Mobile US, Inc responded to the Homeland Security Summons with” Ms. Fort’s subscriber information and toll records, including to identify her by the name “Georgia Mcclellon.” However, none of the documents in the sequence Mr. Hedley identified (or elsewhere in the government’s discovery) appear to contain T-Mobile’s records providing Ms. Fort’s subscriber information— including her name. Bates No. 00012439 also states that the toll records related to Ms. Fort’s phone number “were uploaded into PLX.” Yet, there have been no T-Mobile toll records produced in discovery to date. We thus again ask the government to either promptly produce all records pertaining to Ms. Fort that it received in response to these summonses (identifying for us by Bates numbers those documents), or to please confirm in writing that no such records exist.

She (and Don Lemon, separately) raised the customs summonses again in motions to dismiss on August 6.

[T]he government deliberately attempted to circumvent traditional legal avenues to pursue its investigation into Fort. For example, in applying for search warrants for Fort’s devices, media platforms, and subscriber information—i.e., all items related to her newsgathering and reporting—the government failed to alert the signing judges to the Privacy Protection Act (“PPA”), a law specifically designed to protect the press from such intrusion into core First Amendment areas. See, e.g., Order at 4, In re Search Warrant, Case No. 26-mj-206-JFD (D. Minn. Mar. 3, 2026) (ECF 4) (explaining that when “the government presented these warrants, both originally and for representment, it did not direct the Court’s attention to the Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000aa. It should have.”).

When those attempts failed, the government sought some of that same evidence (as well as other evidence) against Fort through the misuse of administrative summonses purportedly issued pursuant to 19 U.S.C. § 1509, a law pertaining to customs-related investigations. See Ex. 41; see, e.g., Ex. 43. Of course, this case has nothing to do with any customs-related offense. But the government’s use of this administrative procedure allowed it to evade any judicial review or notice to Fort of its efforts to obtain discovery against her. Ex. 41 at 3. Notably, when Fort asked the government to explain why it proceeded through this route rather than the standard procedures prescribed by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the government declined to answer. Id.; see also Ex. 42 at 2-3.

Lemon included an example of such a summons that post-dated the dates in February and March when Magistrate Judge John Docherty questioned the government’s attempts to obtain warrants for materials implicating Fort and Lemon. Both Fort and Lemon argued that this use of customs summonses to obtain journalists’ records was proof of vindictiveness.

Fort’s latest filing reveals that the day before those motions to dismiss, Fort’s attorneys had another sharp exchange with the government in which she said she would take action against the use of subpoenas to obtain her call records. At the time, the letter warned that Fort would 1) file a motion to show cause for contempt, 2) reserve civil remedies laid out in the Privacy Protection Act, and 3) ask the court to sequester her records, the latter of which EDVA did in the case of Hannah Nathanson.

In light of the foregoing, and in addition to reserving all civil remedies available under the Privacy Protection Act, see 42 U.S.C. § 2000aa-6, we plan to ask the Court to issue an order to the government to show cause why it, as well as the responsible individuals, should not be held in contempt for issuing administrative summonses for Ms. Fort’s cellphone and YouTube records and, in doing so, blatantly circumventing a federal statute, implementing regulations, and multiple orders of Magistrate Judge Docherty. See, e.g., Chicago Truck Drivers v. Brotherhood Labor Leasing, 207 F.3d 500, 504 (8th Cir. 2000) (“One of the overarching goals of a court’s contempt power is to ensure that litigants do not anoint themselves with the power to adjudge the validity of orders to which they are subject.”); FTC v. Neiswonger, 580 F.3d 769, 774 (8th Cir. 2009) (contempt sanctions are “designed to compel . . . compliance with a court order”).

We also intend to ask the Court to maintain custody of the cell and text logs until it adjudicates the propriety of the government’s summonses in the wake of the Privacy Protection Act and the Court’s prior orders.

That’s what her latest filing is about: Seeking some kind of recourse for the fact that after Magistrate Judge John Docherty told DOJ that Fort (and Don Lemon) were covered by the Privacy Protection Act, HSI turned around and attempted to obtain the exact same information they were originally seeking from YouTube using a customs subpoena and did use a customs subpoena to obtain six months of call records, from October — three months before the Cities Church protest — to April, three months after it. Then, DOJ provided those call records to all 48 defendants in the case.

Her current filing makes four asks:

• A hearing
• (a) either impound or direct the destruction of all copies of the logs
• (b) require the government and the other defendants to certify in writing that they have no copies or information derived therefrom in their possession, custody, or control
• (c) require the government to adhere to this Court’s orders and applicable law in connection with any further investigation, including to provide notice to Ms. Fort before seeking her journalistic records

But the filing makes it clear that her original intent — until prosecutors threatened her own attorneys with sanctions — was for a show cause on whether prosecutors should be held in contempt for blowing off Judge Docherty’s orders.

19. The parties met two days later. During that hour-long “Teams” videoconference, counsel for the government forcefully resisted any suggestion that the government had violated the Privacy Protection Act, the implementing regulations, or Judge Docherty’s orders. Counsel for the government threatened that, if Ms. Fort’s counsel sought an order to show cause as to why the government should not be held in contempt, they would seek sanctions.4

4 Although Ms. Fort’s August 5, 2026 correspondence to the government indicated that she planned to seek such a “show cause” order, see Ex. A, she has focused herein on her overriding goal of securing her protected journalistic work-product, and not on the question of whether the government and its officials acted in contempt of court by circumventing the Court’s orders. She has therefore styled this motion accordingly.

And she also invited the judges in the criminal docket to refer it to Docherty, if more appropriate.

1 Ms. Fort is filing this motion in the main criminal case in which the Court is presiding over various pretrial matters. That said, given that this motion (a) seeks a declaration that the government disregarded directives issued by Judge Docherty and (b) seeks return of materials obtained in violation thereof (rather than, for example, their suppression at trial), Ms. Fort defers to the Court on whether the motion should be transferred to Judge Docherty for adjudication.

There are two more problems Fort laid out, beyond that DOJ bypassed, rather than appealed, Docherty’s orders.

First, Harmeet Dhillon flunky Ned Hedley claimed it was cool to subpoena Fort’s call records (in spite of Docherty’s prior orders) because Fort fit under the suspect exception to the Privacy Protect Act, because DOJ had charged her in an indictment (she doesn’t say this, but there’s abundant evidence the indictment was entirely based on false claims that she had chanted with protestors, menaced the Pastor, and blocked a van). But, as Fort noted, that argument collapses because they got six months of call records, all to investigate an alleged crime that developed over a few days!!!

Just as interesting (remember, that all the defendants are challenging the use of customs subpoenas, not just Fort and Lemon) is that after HSI asked for information on Fort’s YouTube videos from protest (along with Megyn Kelly’s interview with Harmeet), Google refused, correctly noting they can only respond to HSI subpoenas for customs related crimes.

Google requires additional information to ensure that it complies with federal law, specifically the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”). The SCA generally prohibits Google from disclosing to a governmental entity any information pertaining to a customer or subscriber. 18 U.S.C. § 2702(a)(3). While an administrative subpoena can require Google to disclose basic subscriber information, such subpoena must be “authorized by a Federal or State statute.” Id., § 2703(c)(2). Section 1509 authorizes subpoenas to obtain records relating to the importation of prohibited merchandise.

At this time, Google does not have sufficient information to evaluate the legal basis for issuance of the subpoena, including whether the subpoena relates to the importation of prohibited merchandise.

Fort doesn’t mention this, but on May 28 — the same day DOJ got the attestation of a bunch of T-Mobile business records — Hedley ordered HSI to withdraw any of 24 subpoenas that were still outstanding, from YouTube or Google, as well as Meta and GoFundMe. It’s unclear why.

But the timing is key: HSI had already gotten pushback from Google about using customs subpoenas without any attestation this was a customs investigation by April 7. Google had already told Timothy Gerber that doing what he was trying to do would violate the Stored Communications Act. But HSI nevertheless kept sending out customs summonses to T-Mobile (and, apparently, AT&T) after that, plus at least 24 customs subpoenas to other tech companies as well.

So they violated the Privacy Protection Act after a judge had specifically ruled that it applies to Fort and Lemon in this case.

And then HSI violated the Stored Communication Act by using customs subpoenas to conduct a political witchhunt.

Timeline

February 24: Timothy Gerber files for YouTube warrant

February 25: MJ John Docherty rejects application

March 6: Renewed application for YouTube warrant

March 6: Order asking for more briefing

March 26: DHS withdraws warrant requests

April 3: Summons to Google (18811-18814); Summons to Google (19242-19245)

April 7: Google rejects because there’s no basis for customs summons (19241)

April 12: Summons to T-Mobile (18819-18822); T-Mobile response (12348-12349)

May 1: Order to show cause on unsealing

May 15: DOJ response to show cause

May 22: MJ Docherty orders dockets unsealed

May 28: T-Mobile business record attestation (18815); Ned Hedley orders Gerber to withdraw outstanding summons to Google, Meta, and GoFundMe (24 in all, skipping several subpoenas in series)

July 2: Letter complaining about — among other things — the use of customs summonses

July 8: Thomas Tier’s attorney makes discovery request on use of customs summonses

July 17: DOJ provides call records to Fort (and everyone else)

July 21: Objection to continuance

August 5: Letter seeking meet and confer over call records

August 6: Motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive

August 7: Meet and confer

August 10: Ned Hedley confirms sequester

August 13: Seth Berlin backs off contempt

August 14: Hedley says they will look for that filing

August 15: Berlin asks if they need to expedite

August 15: Hedley claims records are sequestered

August 26: Motion for return of call logs

The post The Surveillance Crimes in the Cities Church Case Keep Stacking Up appeared first on emptywheel.

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through a partnership with private business, [has] secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer

The WaPo provides details about how fucking stupid this deal is.

But deal points reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with people who were close to negotiations as the deal came together suggest that for the plan to succeed in producing oil in the amounts the administration projects, the U.S. government may ultimately need to invest significant amounts.

A list shared with The Post before the deal was announced noted 17 oil fields in which the U.S. would take a stake. Several of the fields lack any infrastructure or access to transport hubs to treat and move the crude. Those where such infrastructure does exist have fallen victim to years of neglect and theft of machinery.

Pumping oil from the fields could require investments of many billions of dollars and costly security plans to protect oil workers and production facilities in lawless and violent regions. The deal points reviewed by The Post say the U.S. government stake in the newly formed oil company will be split between equity ownership and guarantees that it will purchase oil produced by it at cost to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The US:

• Has to make and keep Venezuela secure enough to develop this oil, relying on partners who themselves rely on brutal oppression
• Must invest billions to develop the fields
• Thinks all this will refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which Trump has rapidly emptied because he fucked up the Iran war, in time to matter

And that’s before you consider how renewables will have replaced petroleum by the time any of this can be developed.

WaPo also links their story, from Thursday, that hinted all this was coming. It describes how the US (including Colin McDonald, who playacts as Trump’s Fraud Task Force head), has cajoled multiple countries to drop money laundering investigations into their primary partner to make this happen, Alejandro Betancourt, and catalogs the several US cases where Betancourt has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in money laundering and bribery.

Senior U.S. officials intervened in an international criminal investigation into a Venezuelan businessman who was enlisted by the Trump administration to help assert control over Venezuela’s government and oil industries, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The officials lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against the Britain-based businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, and they have not acted on a Swiss arrest warrant against him, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Instead, the United States has allowed Betancourt to enter the country repeatedly for meetings with the Trump administration, other people familiar with his travel said.

Betancourt, 46, in the past decade has faced multiple investigations, in Switzerland, Spain and the United States, into alleged money laundering, including whether he had a role in a loan arrangement that U.S. prosecutors say embezzled more than $1 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

As good as WaPo’s background story is, it doesn’t mention a few salient facts laid out in an earlier WaPo story, from 2019: Betancourt was financially floating Rudy Giuliani during the period when Rudy was working with corrupt Ukrainians and Russian spies to frame Joe and Hunter Biden.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani went to Madrid in August to confer with a top aide to the Ukrainian president and press for political investigations sought by President Trump, he also met with a previously unidentified client with very different interests.

While in Spain, Giuliani stayed at a historic estate belonging to Venezuelan energy executive Alejandro Betancourt López, who had hired Trump’s personal attorney to help him contend with a Justice Department investigation of alleged money laundering and bribery, according to people familiar with the situation.

A month later, Giuliani was one of several lawyers representing Betancourt in Washington. The lawyers met with the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division and other government attorneys to argue that the wealthy Venezuelan should not face criminal charges as part of a $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Florida last year, said the people, who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The criminal complaint alleges that top officials of the Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, elite business leaders and bankers conspired to steal money from the company and then launder it through Miami real estate purchases and other investment schemes.

Betancourt is not one of the eight men charged in the case, a group that includes his cousin. But two people familiar with the matter said that he is referred to in the criminal complaint as a uncharged co-conspirator, as previously reported by the Miami Herald.

And since, unsurprisingly, Trump credits his Secretary of State (along with the Fox News host running the Pentagon, yikes!) with negotiating this deal, you should remember that Marco Rubio was the target of corrupt plans for a similar deal in 2017, a scheme for which his one-time best friend is going to prison.

This deal does nothing to help Americans.

Indeed, it sucks Americans deeper into the Venezuelan swamp, without doing anything to help your average Venezuelan.

Worse still, it continues to redefine what used to be a country that aspired to serve the common good into a kleptocracy serving a few cronies propped up by repression.

The post Shocked, Shocked! To Find that Corruption Is Going on in a Trump Casino! appeared first on emptywheel.

Day by day, Hegseth’s nightmare is getting closer to home

I want to follow up on Marcy’s great post on Secretary of Excursions Pete Hegseth’s attempts to deflect and deny responsibility by firing senior people at the DOD. He has gotten a lot of press over his ouster of women and minority generals, admirals, and commanders of various kind, all out of his desire to ride the DOD of wokeness and to purge those who received promotions not on merit but because of diversity quotas. (Note, please, that by Whiskey Pete’s lights, any woman or black who was promoted to a senior position was by definition a diversity hire, not a merit-based promotion.)

But there’s the other side of Hegseth’s problems in the military — promotions — and he’s got problems galore in that respect as well. These problems didn’t start with Hegseth, though. it was part of Trump’s first administration, too. From Helene Cooper in March 2021 (shortly after Joe Biden took office):

The Marine Corps is promoting Col. Anthony Henderson, a combat-tested Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, to brigadier general, a move that cracks the doorway for the service to potentially promote an African-American to its most senior ranks.

The Marine Corps, which had passed over Colonel Henderson for four years, has placed him on a highly selective list of nine colonels to be granted a coveted one star that denotes general rank status — brigadier general. The list, which was signed by President Biden, arrived Wednesday evening at the Senate Armed Services Committee, to start the required confirmation process, according to the committee’s website.

While earlier promotion boards may have passed Henderson over because he didn’t have the same relationships and mentors that other white candidates had, the last board clearly wanted to promote him but were pretty sure that he’d get his name struck off the list by Trump. Thus, they delayed sending up the list until Biden took office. Cooper wrote about Col. Henderson the previous August, shortly before the promotions board met to consider his promotion for the fourth time, and some quoted in the March article attributed to his eventual appearance on the promotions list that Biden signed.

But as bad as the story of Henderson’s promotion is, it also points to an even larger, more systemic problem for Hegseth. In the past two months, Greg Jaffe and Kate Kelly at the NYT have published two major pieces on the promotion practices under Pete Hegseth. The titles alone are instructive:

Secret Vetting and Blocked Promotions: Inside Hegseth’s War on Diversity
A Black admiral fixed one of the Navy’s worst messes. Mr. Hegseth blocked his promotion anyway. [June 19, 2026]

An Admiral’s Rise Reveals the Politics Driving Hegseth’s Pentagon
Before he was picked to lead the Navy, Adm. Daryl Caudle found ways to signal his support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-diversity goals. [July 26, 2026]

Buried deep in that first piece is a nugget that points to Hegseth’s biggest problem of all.

By law, one-star and two-star officers are chosen by promotion selection boards made up of senior military officers. The meetings are so confidential that board members are not permitted to tell others that they are part of the process.

And yet, these officers and others like them are starting to talk. That ought to scare the pants off Hegseth, but I don’t think he realized how bad that problem is.

From that second story:

Adm. Daryl Caudle saw an opening to land the Navy’s top job last year, and he seized it.

Before Pete Hegseth had even been sworn in as defense secretary, Admiral Caudle, then the head of a major Navy training command, offered to help Mr. Hegseth prepare for his politically contentious Senate confirmation hearing, according to current and former defense officials.

The outreach was a breach of military ethics, the officials said. Senior military officers are supposed to avoid any hint of partisan bias or political activity.

Nothing came of the offer. But soon after Mr. Hegseth took office, he fired the first woman to lead the Navy: Admiral Caudle’s boss. Days later, a senior officer on Admiral Caudle’s staff contacted Mr. Hegseth’s team in another breach of protocol.

His pitch: Mr. Hegseth should choose Admiral Caudle to be the next chief of naval operations, the current and former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

The officer described Admiral Caudle in terms that matched Mr. Hegseth’s view of the values that military officers should embody. There was “no one more in line” with Mr. Hegseth’s vision for remaking the military, he said, according to an official familiar with the exchange. The officer cast Admiral Caudle as a “warfighter” who wanted to remove “woke barriers” that he claimed were weakening the force, the official said.

Even though Admiral Caudle was not on a list of candidates recommended by senior Navy officials, Mr. Hegseth chose him for the job.

Caudle was willing to speak out of turn in order to get this new position, but did you notice the other folks speaking out? Those “current and former officials” – either people who had been on the promotion board, their close staff members, or close friends of the promotion board members.

That’s the real problem for Hegseth. It’s not the NYT reporters that are the problem, but the folks who seem anxious to tell their stories to the media in the first place. Skipping ahead, Jaffe and Kelly wrote:

[Caudle’s] path to that position is a case study in how the military promotion process at the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth has deviated from tradition, leaving it susceptible in the view of critics to politicization and favoritism.

[snip]

After Mr. Hegseth fired Admiral Franchetti, senior Navy officials, led by the service’s acting secretary, assembled a list of the three officers they believed were best qualified to fill her position. Admiral Caudle was not on it. Navy leaders thought he was better suited to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal, the officials said.

Mr. Hegseth reviewed the Navy’s list in a meeting with senior staff members.

“Where’s Caudle?” he asked, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting.

“Officials with knowledge of the meeting” were sharing this story? That’s a small group of very senior people, and the people around them. If they are talking like this, it means only one thing: be afraid, Mr. Secretary. Be very afraid.

These folks spoke out, I strongly suspect, because Hegseth had to bring in Hegseth’s and Trump’s legal fixer, Timothy Parlatore, to take care of a hold placed because of an IG investigation about Caudle’s less-than-enlightened mindset toward woman and sexual abuse. At an awards banquet that celebrated the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, some of Caudle’s informal comments over and after dinner were, shall we say, concerning:

According to the sailors [who spoke with investigators], Admiral Caudle offered examples: If he strode naked through the forest, coated in honey, he should not be surprised if he were attacked by a bear, officials said. If he wore gold chains and a fancy watch on a visit to Harlem, he risked getting robbed. At least one sailor believed Admiral Caudle was blaming assault victims for provoking their attacks.

“According to the sailors” who had spoken to the IG? Be afraid, Mr. Secretary. Be very afraid.

The sailor spoke to the IG, I suspect, because it is certainly possible to see Caudle’s remarks as a problem — especially when he had no problem making them at an awards dinner dedicated to Pentagon efforts to respond to and stop sexual abuse. I certainly could see where that might be a problem – but to Hegseth, this only confirmed that Caudle is the anti-woke kind of guy he wanted.

Hegseth’s real problem is that his desire to remove and replace senior leaders who do not reflect his anti-woke, “all we need is great warriors who can bust heads” mentality has broken trust with the very military people he seeks to command. More than just broken trust, he has proven untrustworthy.

Imagine you were on a promotion board, and time and time again Hegseth strikes names off the list you and your colleagues put forward. That’s gotta suck. And the fact that you’re not even supposed to tell anyone you are even on the board means you can’t vent your frustrations about having your work tossed aside so cavalierly. That’s gotta suck even more.

Now imagine you are someone else, asked to serve in silence on the next promotion board. You’ve seen how the work of previous boards has been treated, and you have to wonder if serving on the next board is worth the hassle. “Why bother, if Hegseth is going to ignore what we propose and pick whomever he wants anyway?” On the other hand, simply being asked to serve on the promotion board is a sign that your colleagues sincerely value your ability to assess leaders, and that’s an honor that would be hard to turn down.

Then Imagine you are someone up for promotion, and you’ve seen how Hegseth has unilaterally stripped folks off the promotions lists. You’ve seen how Hegseth promoted an admiral who completely went outside the system to get his desired post. You’ve spent weeks, months, and years to put yourself in the best light for promotion, your superiors have told you how they are doing their best to put your candidacy forward for those stripes, those bars, those birds, those stars. Even so, with what you’ve seen, with what appears to be getting worse by the day, you have to wonder how fairly you will be treated.

No, you don’t have to wonder. You know. And that’s Hegseth’s problem, because it touches the whole military – every branch of the service, and every rank from top to bottom.

Then step away from the promotions mess.

Imagine you are a senior leader whose job it is to manage logistics. Military units need not just weapons, but ammunition to use in those weapons. They need people to load and fire and maintain those weapons. You need food to feed those people and toilets for them to use, as well as clothes for them to wear, beds for them to sleep in, and laundry facilities to wash the clothes and sheets. You know they need these and a 1001 other things, and its your job to get them in place.

You also know the damage done to naval facilities in the Middle East at the outset of the war, that prevented the USS Abraham Lincoln from being supplied in the usual manner and prevented the sailors from getting even a weekend of shore leave. You and your colleagues are the ones who got the urgent pleas from the USS Abraham Lincoln to find other ways to deliver at least a minimum of stuff to let them keep doing their jobs. You and your colleagues are the ones who deal with the folks on shore trying to rebuild their bases and come up with alternative delivery systems. Even if you are handling logistics in the Army and not the Navy, you know these things, because handling supply chains is your Military Occupational Specialty, too.

And then you hear Trump talk about how the deployment wasn’t this bad, and should be even longer, because who knows more about deployments that Cadet Bone Spurs. Then you hear Hegseth saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln has been given everything they need, and there’s no problem to see here.

You hear this, and it no doubt pisses you off. The commander and senior officers of the USS Abraham Lincoln hear this, and it no doubt pisses them off. But it’s the lower level folks that ought to worry Hegseth. Right now, the stories of the USS Abraham Lincoln are being driven mostly by the families back home. “Here’s what we’ve been hearing and seeing in the text messages from out loved ones.”

Those loved ones are finally coming home, and what do you think is going to happen then, Mr. Secretary?

The return of just one sailor who has come home early has already driven the story here – a sailor who tried to commit suicide. His fellow sailors saved him death after he jumped overboard, out of his apparent desperation at the absolute hopelessness of his situation. And now, someone in the Navy has decided that what’s really needed here is to Make An Example out of this sailor by filing charges that he went AWOL.

Rather than try to learn what drove him to such desperation, try to help him, and try to understand what every sailor on the Lincoln has been dealing with so that the Navy can better make sure it doesn’t happen again, the Navy wants to make this sailor the bad guy and scare every other sailor into sucking it up and doing what they are told, mental health be damned.

What’s going to happen, I wonder, when all those other sailors come home? How many stories are going to get told over beers in the local watering holes, as the sailors on the Lincoln start talking with their colleagues at the base or folks assigned to other ships in port? How many sailors are going to decide not to reenlist? How many sailors are going to want answers from the Navy, and will turn to Congressional staffers with their stories? How many will turn to the media?

Hegseth has a standard pattern of how to deal with the press. Deny what they say or write, and keep them from writing their next story. He tried to silence the mainstream media by effectively removing their reporters from the Pentagon. Now he’s fired the senior leadership of Stars and Stripes. But both of these are signs of how desperate Hegseth is. He seems to think that he can manage bad news by shooting enough messengers.

But as the promotions stories demonstrate, those messengers are coming out it greater and greater numbers. The entire military has learned the truth of the saying “trust is build over years and destroyed in days” because Pete Hegseth has done just that. Hegseth’s problem isn’t the media, but the military itself. They are increasingly tired of being scapegoated, lied to, and dismissed as unimportant. Hegseth is only starting to realize the danger he is in, but it appears to be finally sinking in, even if he doesn’t know how to deal with. And that has to scare him to death.

Because with every day that passes, the USS Abraham Lincoln is a day closer to getting home.

The post Hegseth is Being Confronted by his Worst Nightmare, Too appeared first on emptywheel.

I’m not saying that with Musk money, one can’t blight the sky with computer hardware, I’m sure he can. I’m not even saying that humanity can’t decide to put a bunch of GPUs in racks and fire them at the sky, we can, if is what we’re determined to do. I’m saying they won’t be worthwhile data centers, because for all the ways Elon Musk bribes his way through the American landscape, physics isn’t, and will never be, on the take.

Data centers aren’t popular neighbors just about anywhere on Earth. They suck, pollute, and immiserate everything around them. So the titans of our gilded compute age are figuring they can get away with putting their water chugging, polluting, natural gas guzzling giant computer farms in space; specifically into low Earth orbit around our planet.

We in the media spend too much time pretending the idiotic pronouncements of rich and powerful men are meaningful, even when they are very stupid. It’s an understandable mistake — we try to avoid editorializing, to only share the story, not to tell others what to think about it. And we’ve always erred too much in the direction of believing the captains of capital must know something we don’t, after all, they are very, very rich. But right now, in this moment of collective madness, trying to treat nonsense as serious information has become a trap.

This is your captain speaking?

Americans have always assumed that someone who is rich is somehow also imbued with other qualities; canniness, intelligence, strategic thinking. After all, in a meritocracy, the winners must be men of merit, right? But none of these qualities have anything to do with how rich a person is. Sometimes, especially recently, it can even seem inversely proportionate. Humans need to be checked by their peers. If no one around you is allowed to tell you that your ideas are idiotic for long enough, you get weird.

That brings me back to Elon Musk’s desire to put datacenters in Spaaaace! It will, in theory, assuage people’s dislike for living near these disgusting omnipolluters. You can’t hear, smell, or be poisoned by a data center in space. A data center that is high above you in the sky won’t despoil the natural habitats of countless species, or ruin neighborhoods, or price people out of their homes. Just launching datacenters into space solves nearly every problem people have with the mammoth industrial blights, if you listen to tech billionaires.

Let me spoil it for you: there will never be fleets of giant floating datacenters darkening our skies, as we ask chatbots how to cook rice.

There have been computers in space for decades, communicating with systems on Earth, and there will be more in the foreseeable future. Satellite computation drives everything from the weather forecast to actually driving vehicles with GPS. But we settled the idea of big LLM services being hosted in space-based data centers a few news cycle ago. Experts spoke on the subject, and we stopped talking about it briefly. And now…

Everyone seems to be assuming there will be data centers in space. The media is talking about it like it’s a real thing. Investors are getting ready to give Elon Musk somehow even more money. It’s enough to make common sense feel like a half-forgotten dream.

I suspect the disconnect comes from the money part — to put so much compute into orbit; we imagine the cost would be the biggest barrier, and money is not a barrier for Elon Musk. But money can’t fix everything. Money can’t buy physics.

If we, just for a moment, set aside most of the normal and sensible reasons that data centers in space would be terrible, (Expensive and damaging rocket launches, hundreds of dollars per pound to move cargo into orbit, inability to staff or upgrade racks of GPUs, orbital latency, equipment failures, cooling costs… it just being a dumb idea requiring all the money and accomplishing nothing we can’t do better on Earth, etc.)

There’s a lot of stuff in our sky right now, and adding more is risky. (For illustrative purposes, and not to scale)

We also have to set aside the moral/environmental problems… (Destroying the sky for generations to come, potentially damaging the ozone layer, stupidest way to burn our limited carbon budget ever, risking a destructive Kessler event)… leave all that aside.

I want to focus on another problem most people haven’t talked about: a physics problem. Specifically, very small particle physics. I want to talk about the problem with cosmic rays/high energy particles, and how they don’t mix well with data centers anywhere, even on Earth.

Cosmic rays aren’t something we think about a lot in normal life. That’s a property of being relatively near sea level and thus fairly well protected from the excited and exciting world of particle physics in our local solar system. But cosmic rays are amazing things.

They can be birthed by a star, or in the explosive death of a star. They can travel through our universe for billions of years. They are so small that they spend those billions of years essentially oblivious to the existence of the universe itself. These high energy particles zip through space at the speed of light, and when, after minutes or ten billion years,  (It’s all the same to the particle) they hit something. That something (and the cosmic ray, because a ray is also a particle) …both kind of explode with the most extreme violence there is… but in a kind of itty bitty unbelievable total violence that is also inconceivably tiny. They hit you all the time, sometimes they pass right thought you. The universe is wild.

All the same things are true for solar particles, because they’re also cosmic rays, just locally produced.

It’s violent and energetic and deeply weird from our human perspective. But it’s also very, very small. It’s hard to overstate how truly tiny this event is, physically, wreaking itsy bitsy absolute destruction. Nevertheless, it can do damage on a human scale, if not visible damage. A lot of them over time can give a person cancer, by damaging genes in skin cells in just the wrong way. That’s why you’re supposed to wear sunscreen; to stop rays of energy, whether from the sun or perhaps the birth of the universe itself, from flipping bits in your genetic code. When you’re at the beach you let these powerful and mysterious rays destroy a particle of Banana Boat, rather than a particle of your shoulder.

This brings us to the problem of data, and space: It’s even easier for these rays to hit a bit on a chip than hit you, and flip that bit, making the data they process unreliable. A lot of them, landing in unfortunate ways, will (and have) absolutely wrecked computers. The higher up, the easier it is for a high energy ray to hit something, which is why they have been a problem for airlines over the years.

Cosmic rays aren’t too bad down here at the bottom of our wonderful little green-blue gravity well, because the vast majority of particles will have met something in our upper atmosphere and conveniently exploded each other before they got down to us. But some unknowable number of computer errors, places where the machine just went blotto, are caused by high energy cosmic rays. If you want to stop them for sure, you need to keep your data center in a lead bunker.

The opposite of a data center in a lead bunker is a data center in space. Such a data center will be bombarded by bit flipping cosmic and solar rays all the time. Orbital data centers are a terrible idea for so many reasons, but this reason hasn’t been talked about enough. It will, by the dictates of physics, be unreliable. Even shielded chips can’t take all that damage, and the ones that can take more of it can’t do the computation needed for AI at anything near terrestrial speeds. It’s just a stupid idea — introducing chaos into a system that could have less chaos if it just stayed where it was built and never lifted an inch off the ground.

To speak in the language the tech bros understand, of all the things that don’t care about your feelings, cosmic rays care the least about your feelings. They don’t even care about Elon Musk’s feelings. They’re high energy particles that fill up the universe, and the only thing that keeps them from ruining life on Earth is this wonderful, miraculous, perfect little marble we live on, and its thick blanket of atmosphere. That atmosphere is made of tiny little particles, and it spends all day everyday eating up cosmic rays before they can get to us, and mess up our genes or our computers.

That protection is not available in orbit. In fact, the higher the orbit, the less available it is. This is a manageable risk for astronauts. Astronauts are physically fit, highly trained people with bodies that repair themselves. They accepted a dangerous assignment for a greater good, and they aren’t supposed to spend too long in space anyway. (Despite that one time.)

As a general rule a lot of things AI and tech people say are insane, but they say them so often and with such confidence that despite knowing better, normal, sane, people start repeating them. It’s been an elegant proof of one thing; if you repeat something often enough to make it feel like normal information, folks just begin to think it’s true, no matter how stupid it is.

Putting data centers in space is a no good, terrible, stupid, bad idea.

For those who do pay attention and want to do everything needed to make it work, there are arguments about cosmic rays not being that big of a deal, based on hardware and software redundancy, repair, and shielding. But that requires much more weight, as well as hardware that has to be serviced. And that servicing has to be by humans, who aren’t going to be affected by the same bit flipping that the space hardware is. By the time you’re sending up people as well as machines to keep the orbital monstrosity shielded and limping along, you’ve lost the plot.

Next time you hear someone speaking with a voice of technical authority on data centers in space, please view that the same way you’d view someone talking authoritatively about the four elements, horoscopes, or the social value of medieval witch trials. They are as inane as they are expensive.

If the data center and AI business can’t turn a profit while working with local cities and communities on Earth… well, if they can’t make it there, they can’t make it anywhere.

The post Datacenters in Spaaaaaaace! appeared first on emptywheel.

This is a story about DOD’s decision to discipline a sailor who tried to commit suicide after being pushed to the brink in an eight month deployment aboard the USS Lincoln.

Before I get there, though, I want to review all the recent insanity of Whiskey Pete’s reign.

Start with Kid Rock.

Back in March, two Army Apache helicopters buzzed Kid Rock’s house in Tennessee. Doing so exhibited a collapse of military discipline. It created safety problems.

You know? Safety problems, like those that building a new helicopter pad for Marine Force One without adequate planning — an NTSB review of a near collision earlier this month confirmed yesterday — might lead to a communication breakdown that could get people killed. Those kinds of safety problems.

That’s why you don’t let people buzz a celebrity’s house, even if he is a far right celebrity.

But Whiskey Pete does. After the Army grounded the pilots involved in the March incident, the Fox News host running DOD reversed that decision.

By tweet, Trump fashion.

Because life is all just one big troll for Whiskey Pete Hegseth.

Turns out, though, someone did get disciplined — or rather fired. WaPo has a story this week suggesting that one precipitating reason Whiskey Pete fired Army Chief of Staff Randy George is because George believed the Army must maintain discipline and protocol and so had to investigate the Kid Rock incident.

Days before the Army’s top officer was abruptly fired earlier this year, he was advised by a fellow general now vying to replace him to stop the military’s investigation into an unauthorized helicopter flyby of musician Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate, three people familiar with the matter said.

Gen. Randy George, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed as the Army chief of staff without explanation, felt it was important to follow typical protocol and determine whether any safety regulations had been violated during the March 28 flyby, these people said. Like some others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the episode.

Gen. Chris LaNeve, the Army’s No. 2 officer, told George that Hegseth did not want the investigation to proceed, one person said. The two others said that George later confided in colleagues about the encounter with LaNeve and seemed troubled by it. George told them that LaNeve suggested it would be best if the review was scuttled, those people said.

The revelation, which has not previously been reported, adds a new layer of understanding to Hegseth’s potential motivations for firing George on April 2. Kid Rock, whose legal name is Robert Ritchie, is a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and avowed critic of many Democratic politicians and causes.

Now, most members of Congress, including Republicans, were pretty furious about the way Whiskey Pete fired General George, not least because George is considered exceedingly competent and had been focused on shifting the service to adapt to new ways of warfare. And also because Hegseth was two months into losing a war in humiliating fashion.

It’s never a good idea to fire competent Generals in the middle of a war you’re losing.

And now we learn that Hegseth did so because he thought it more important to protect those pilots who buzzed Kid Rock than to sustain military discipline during a war you’re losing.

NYT has a story that describes the result: a rudderless military unable to adjust to new developments (rudderless is their word, not mine — we’ll get back to the Navy and that guy who tried to kill himself in a bit).

A series of firings and feuds initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East.

The Army has not had a chief of staff, the service’s top officer, since Mr. Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George without explanation in April, and there are no signs that he is close to filling the position, said current and former officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mr. Hegseth has forced out at least three senior officers who had been viewed as potential successors to General George.

Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, is also expected to leave the administration in the next few months and has already moved out of the large family house that he was renting in Fort Myer, outside Washington, officials said.

[snip]

The most glaring Army vacancy, though, has been the absence at the very top following General George’s dismissal four months ago. As Army chief, General George was responsible for training and equipping Army units around the world. His responsibilities included accelerating the purchase of critical munitions such as Patriot interceptors, ATACMS artillery systems and other ground-based weaponry, which are in short supply.

This NYT story about the rudderless military came out two days before the Kid Rock story, and it reads differently if, after you finish each paragraph, you say, “Kid Rock” to yourself.

Meanwhile, NYT has another story not just reminding how omnipresent Jennifer Hegseth is in all of Whiskey Pete’s meetings — revisiting these details that WSJ reported just months into Hegseth’s tenure:

Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting. Hegseth’s brother Philip Hegseth has also been traveling with him on official visits, the Pentagon said.

The Brussels meeting, which took place on the sidelines of a February conference of NATO defense ministers, was a gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a U.S.-led forum of some 50 nations that periodically meets to coordinate on production and delivery of weapons and other support for Ukraine. At the closed-door discussions, national representatives routinely present confidential information, such as donations to Ukraine that they don’t want to be made public, according to officials.

Some foreign attendees at the meetings didn’t know who Jennifer Hegseth was, according to people familiar with both gatherings. Others were surprised by her presence, but proceeded without raising objections, the people said. It isn’t clear whether her presence affected what was discussed at either session.

NYT revisited that role and how bonkers it all is:

“It’s bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” said John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesman after three months working under Mr. Hegseth and has been critical of his leadership. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”

“This is not normal,” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last year on MSNBC during the uproar over Mrs. Hegseth’s inclusion in the chat and high-level meetings. “Secretary Hegseth has one of the highest levels of classification access. He can’t just hand that to his wife and say, ‘Here, honey, hold my beer, and hold my classified information.’”

But it also explains why the Fox News host turned cabinet secretary does it: to keep him from getting drunk and fucking other ladies.

One person familiar with Mr. Hegseth’s thinking said that the defense secretary likes his wife to travel with him to keep him out of trouble. Mr. Hegseth, who has a history of heavy drinking, has himself made clear he needs his wife at his side. He often credits his “two J’s” — Jennifer and Jesus — with transforming his life.

The Secretary of Defense brings his spouse everywhere — invokes his authority to be able to do something unprecedented and creepy — because he needs a babysitter. His own personal challenges are simply too much to manage without his wife with him all the time.

Keep that in mind as you consider DOD’s decision to discipline a guy who tried to kill himself after more than eight months of being at sea.

But first, let’s revisit some details about it.

Remember, when the story first broke in the Military Times and Stars and Stripes that multiple sailors had tried to throw themselves overboard — had tried to commit suicide in hostile waters because they had literally not stepped on land for over eight months — Donald Trump lied. He attacked CNN’s Kristen Holmes, who asked him about it; Trump called it Fake News.

At the White House on Monday, the president berated Kristen Holmes, a CNN reporter, at a press availability, insisting that she “be quiet” and describing the reporting as fake news.

“The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time – a good period of time – but over the years, we’ve had them out there much longer,” Trump said, describing an exchange with a veteran, whom he did not name, over the weekend.

“He happened to be an admiral, retired. He said, ‘I’ve been on ships that are out there much longer than that, sir. And I know people on the Lincoln, they say it’s beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.’ And other people went out and they found out that to be true,” said Trump. “It was fake news reporting from CNN.”

Shortly after that Fake News claim, as part of a larger story about Trump’s lies, David Rohde revealed that one reason why the USS Lincoln is in such poor shape is because Iran destroyed the Naval Command in Bahrain, which Whiskey Pete has tried to coverup.

As NYT explained, after Iran destroyed the base in Bahrain, the Navy started using Diego Garcia as a resupply hub.

The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.

The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.

The Navy needed a Plan B to continue feeding the sailors working around the clock to keep warplanes flying strike missions, and later to maintain a blockade of Iran’s ports.

With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is south of the Maldives and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman.

The loss of the hub in Bahrain has contributed to a host of reported problems on carriers supporting operations against Iran, as Democratic senators raise concerns about the Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and their nearly nine-month deployment.

That’s why life has sucked for the sailors stuck on a floating city without shore leave for months and months; because Iran did grave damage in the first days of the war, grave damage Whiskey Pete doesn’t want to acknowledge.

In an effort to cover up how terribly he is failing, former Fox News host Whiskey Pete is cracking down on free speech.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday, two journalists and the editor for Stars and Stripes whom Whiskey Pete fired claim they were fired partly because of the reporting on the USS Lincoln, which was basically a report about a public meeting with distraught family members in San Diego.

In direct contravention of those First Amendment principles, Defendants are attempting to fire Plaintiffs for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East. This action seeks to prevent the blatant violation of the First Amendment rights of these journalists and challenges the U.S. Department of Defense’s (“DoD”) extraordinary censorship efforts in violation of both the First Amendment and DoD regulations and policies.1

[snip]

7. The spark that moved Defendants to act was a news report published by Stripes on August 11, 2026. The article broke a major story about deteriorating conditions aboard the

U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. It reported that the aircraft carrier’s 5,000 Sailors have endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, long workdays, and little time off for months on end, and that the long deployment and physical hardships were impacting Sailors’ physical and mental health (hereafter referred to as “the Lincoln Story”). See Alison Bath, USS Abraham Lincoln families press Navy leaders over sailors’ mental health, Stars & Stripes (Aug. 11, 2026), https://perma.cc/GV6R-XES2.

8. The very next day, August 12, 2026, Defendants ordered Plaintiff Max Lederer, Stripes’ Publisher, to present Notices of Separation to Mr. Slavin and Ms. Korte. The notices charged them with Insubordination for the statements they made five and one-half weeks earlier on CBS Sunday Morning.

Whiskey Pete apparently believes he can avoid the reality in which he is failing, badly, simply by firing everyone who mentions it.

Which brings us, finally, to the guy that DOD has decided to discipline because he tried to commit suicide more than eight months into a shitty deployment in an illegal war.

He’s 19.

A 19-year old sailor with a 19-year old wife at home who had a baby — their second — while he was away.

I’ve lived in San Diego, which is a big city where many things revolve around the military. I had a family friend who got knocked up young, married the father, and moved with him to San Diego. It’s a hard life. The pay sucks and you’re left as a single parent for what — back then — was a month or two at a time.

And this guy, still a teenager, was 255 days into a deployment in an illegal war where his ship was being poorly supplied because Iran blew up the base that would normally supply it.

And he jumped overboard.

So DOD, which is led by a guy who takes his wife everywhere because he can’t cope without her, has accused this 19-year old sailor of faking an illness because the Navy can’t accept that anyone who hasn’t touched land for eight and a half months would be nuts, especially a 19-year old who had never seen his newborn daughter.

The charging documents, which were reviewed by MS NOW, show that the sailor has been accused of violating Article 83 for “malingering,” which is defined as a service member “intentionally faking an illness or hurting themselves to avoid work, duty or service,” and Article 86 for “absence without leave,” which means a service member failed to be at their required place of duty without proper authority.

“I think they’re insane for doing this to people who need mental help,” the wife told MS NOW. “Instead of giving them help, this is just another huge stressor.”

The couple, who are both 19, share a 3½-year-old son and welcomed a daughter in February while the sailor was deployed. His wife said he has repeatedly requested paternity leave and been denied each time.

Her husband jumped overboard on Aug. 3, she said, and was medically evacuated and returned to San Diego on Aug. 13, where he then spent five days at Naval Medical Center San Diego, known as Balboa. During that stay, she said medical staff monitored his vital signs, but he did not see a psychiatrist or a therapist. He was told to report back to work immediately after his release. His first therapy appointment came on Aug. 26, nearly two weeks after he arrived back in San Diego.

Fake news. Fake illness.

Every scrap of reality that demonstrates what a loser Whiskey Pete Hegseth is — it must be fake. It must be disciplined or fired or censored.

And we’re left with Kid Rock and teenagers jumping overboard.

The post Overboard! Whiskey Pete Hegseth Tries to Fire His Way Out of Being a Loser appeared first on emptywheel.

SSA Ribner observed HUERTA blocking and impeding the USG law enforcement vehicle by standing in the front of the vehicle by the driver’s side near the driver’s side headlight and driver’s side bumper. The ERO officer operating the vehicle stopped and wouldn’t drive forward.

SDDO C[rook] exited the gate area and walked toward HUERTA, SSA Ribner followed behind SDDO C[rook] acting as his cover agent for officer/agent safety purposes. SDDO C[rook] confronted HUERTA and placed his hands on HUERTA’s chest area and pushed HUERTA out of the pathway of the USG vehicle. HUERTA then placed his hands on SDDO C[rook] and pushed him back. At that time SSA Ribner attempted to grab HUERTA as he was falling backwards. SSA Ribner attempted to place HUERTA under arrest for impeding the vehicle and battery to a federal officer. HUERTA fell on the ground as SSA Ribner again attempted to grab his arm to place him in custody. SSA Ribner verbally informed HUERTA he was “under arrest” a few times. HUERTA made comments to SSA Ribner that he was not under arrest. HUERTA’s body shifted to the side as SSA Ribner started issuing verbal commands informing HUERTA to “stop resisting”.

SSA Ribner informed HUERTA to “stop resisting” multiple times. HUERTA continued to resist arrest as SSA Ribner noticed that a crowd of people were surrounding him and yelling. SSA Ribner took a quick glance and noticed that he was the only law enforcement agent attempting to arrest HUERTA. SSA Ribner feared being physically attacked by the angry crowd from behind or that the crowd would interfere and attempt to release HUERTA from SSA Ribner’s custody. SSA Ribner than placed his hands and at least one leg HUERTA’s back to physically “pin” HUERTA from moving; SSA Ribner then removed his leg and used his arms to hold HUERTA. SSA Ribner then looked up and began yelling to other agents for assistance. SSA Ribner was concerned for his safety as the crowd was partially encircling him and yelling. Shortly thereafter SDDO C[rook] placed his body on the back of HUERTA. SDDO C[rook] used his body weight to physically pin HUERTA to the ground. HUERTA’s arms were placed in the front of his body as he laid faced down. HUERTA had tensed his arm muscles to attempt not to be arrested. SSA Ribner attempted to physically pull HUERTA’s left arm from underneath him to place handcuffs on him and effect the arrest.

SSA Ribner continued to talk to HUERTA telling him not to resist. HUERTA displayed incredible strength and continued to physically resist by not allowing his arms to be brought to the rear of his back. SSA Ribner could not pry his arms from the front of his body. SSA Ribner then asked SDDO C[rook] if he could physically remove HUERTA’s arm (right side) so that agents could arrest HUERTA. SDDO C[rook] informed SSA Ribner that HUERTA’s arms were “locked” in the front of him and that he could not remove his arms either. SSA Ribner decided to deploy a chemical agent (pepper spray) on HUERTA due to HUERTA actively resisting arrest, the angered crowd, and HUERTA’s safety as his head was near a cement curb and SSA Ribner didn’t want him suffering an injury. Due to the concern of over spraying the chemical agent with others nearby (SDDO C[rook] and the crowd) or spraying HUERTA directly in the eyes, SSA Ribner decided to spray a small amount of the chemical agent in his hand and place his hand near the upper nose area of HUERTA’s face. HUERTA began to make noises and say that he couldn’t breathe. SSA Ribner continued to talk to HUERTA and stated, “I want to help you” as SSA Ribner requested HUERTA to loosen his muscles and give SSA Ribner his arm. HUERTA continued to tighten his muscles; HUERTA then stated, “my shoulder… I have a bad shoulder”. SSA Ribner again told HUERTA that he could “help” him and requested HUERTA to provide SSA Ribner his arm and allow agents to arrest him. HUERTA then provided his arms, still partially tensed, to agents. Both SDDO C[rook] and SSA Ribner were able to handcuff HUERTA; other agents/officers assisted with lifting HUERTA onto his feet. A few other agents walked HUERTA into the gated parking lot toward a car. HUERTA was escorted into the Ambiance building and taken into the breakroom. [my emphasis]

We can be sure Ribner is lying because none of this matches the videos available of the assault.

We can also be sure he’s lying because when SDDO Casey Crook — the guy Ribner accused Huerta of assaulting — was interviewed two months later, Crook contested that Huerta had assaulted anyone.

SDDO Crook recalled speaking with AUSA Takla regarding the incident and stating he did not believe the interaction with HUERTA was an assault because HUERTA “tucked his arms” and “stood his ground”.

To be sure, Crook told his own bullshit story to justify the assault of Huerta: He claimed that Huerta — who was standing to the side of the van — was instead splayed across it like an X.

In any case, Ribner said something pretty different when he attested an arrest affidavit for SEIU CA’s President a day earlier, on June 8.

24. A law enforcement officer approached HUERTA. Because HUERTA was being uncooperative, the officer put his hands on HUERTA in an attempt to move him out of the path of the vehicle. I saw HUERTA push back, and in response, the officer pushed HUERTA to the ground. The officer and I then handcuffed HUERTA and arrested him.

I remain far more interested in whether Ribner was lying when he claimed he only learned Huerta was a union leader after the assault.

SSA Ribner then asked HUERTA what his occupation was; HUERTA responded that he was a “union organizer”.

Agent’s Note: Although earlier that day HUERTA told SSA Ribner that his name was “David Huerta”, SSA Ribner did not have any knowledge as to the employment/occupation or background history of HUERTA. SSA Ribner only learned of HUERTA’s background history later that day.

After all, the local cop Ribner had working the crowd undercover told investigators that others at the protest identified Huerta as a union member. There’s no record Jeremy Crossen told Ribner that, even though Crossen told Ribner the institutional affiliation of everyone else present, in real time.

Call me skeptical he would leave Huerta out (or that people who greeted Huerta would refer to him generically as a union member).

The question is newly relevant given an exhibit released in the MN-15 case, where HSI investigators hunting everyone in Minnesota who opposed ICE, based on DHS’s fabricated claims of assaults, decided to use that opportunity to get customs summonses to obtain financial records on SEIU.

That exhibit shows that ten months after assaulting David Huerta on fabricated claims that he was blocking a van, Ryan Ribner (whose day job overseeing a Cyber team is hunting hackers) was still, instead, hunting SEIU.

Ribner should have been removed from the force for his clear lies, to say nothing of his brutal assault of Huerta.

Instead, he’s still chasing the same labor union whose statewide leader he assaulted last June.

Sometime today, the charges against Huerta should be dismissed with prejudice, though it may take a few days to hit the docket. And we should hear more about how DOJ disclaims using this investigation to target protected union organizing at the discovery hearing today.

SEIU subpoena exhibits

March 7, 2026: An Administrative summons targeting SEIU in Minnesota, with a due date of March 20

March 31, 2026: A FinCEN list showing that 29 subjects were subpoenaed with SCM16112-T2X2J

April 7, 2026: A subpoena response from the Federal Reserve, targeting SEIU

April 8, 2026: A report on the results of an Administrative Summons, sent on March 20, with the report finalized on April 30, 2026; the report claims to be hunting “protest domestic terrorist financing”

April 21, 2026: An email thread about SCM16112-T2X2J involving Ribner

June 10, 2026: A response to a June 5 subpoena indicating that SEIU’s accounts have been closed

Unknown date: The grand jury exhibit claiming that SEIU 26 was part of a spoke conspiracy with DAMN, the entity charged in the MN-15 indictment

The post A Year After Lying about His Reasons for Assaulting David Huerta, Ryan Ribner Is Still Hunting SEIU appeared first on emptywheel.

In a lawsuit attempting to force Texas to turn over the suspected assailant, Minnesota argued that Castro is a flight risk, based in significant part on the 394 calls Castro placed from jail to a Mexican woman presumed to be his lover, where he described moving to Progreso, Mexico where they could live in a big house together.

Governor Abbott has dicked around with the extradition request, and so Castro was released today after 90 days in jail.

Castro is just one of a small gang of Latino Texans whom Stephen Miller sent to invade Minnesota in January who allegedly engaged in violence or other crime.

As ProPublica reported in February, the two men who shot and killed Alex Pretti are Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, both from South Texas.

The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations.

Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city.

[snip]

Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units. Records show both men are from South Texas.

As Pretti’s family explained to George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, they still have gotten no accountability for the shooting.

As CBP officers from south Texas, Ochoa and Gutierrez are from the same agency and same part of Texas as Marco Antonio Muniz, the Border Patrol officer who testified in May about the false arrest on January 20 of naturalized Somali-American Mohamed Jama.

Q. You mentioned a river. Where do you currently work?

A. I work in Laredo, Texas, southern border.

Q. Now, prior to your —

THE COURT: Sorry. Just — the river you’re referring to is the Rio Grande?

At least two more of the officers involved in this false arrest were Latino, including Angel Flores, whose phone did a search earlier that day (at one point, Muniz was doing searches on Flores’ phone, because Flores was driving) and discovered the owner of the van that CBP would unlawfully pursue hours later in rental SUVs with license plates from Texas was an American citizen.

Notably, these requests for a “check” of the records were timestamped at 9:15 and 9:20 a.m. – approximately two hours before Agent Berger and Agent Muniz testified that the incident began. Both Berger and Muniz testified that agents first encountered the Defendant’s vehicle at approximately 11:00 or 11:15 a.m. (ECF No. 58, Mot. Hrg. Tr. at 49; ECF No. 1-1 at ¶ 5.) Based on the body-worn camera videos that have been produced, the first agent to choose to activate his camera did so around 12:20 p.m., about one hour after agents said they first encountered the Defendant’s vehicle.

A person on the Teams chat responded to Agent Flores’s “check” at 9:22 a.m. – still hours before the agents testified that the incident began. The responses conclusively demonstrated that the registered owner of the van was a U.S. Citizen. The first response listed the registered owner’s “COC” – i.e. country of citizenship – as “USA”:

(Ex. 3.) The second “check” response provided further detail, along with a photograph matching the Super Query record, showing that the registered owner was a U.S. citizen with a U.S. Passport:

Thus, Agent Flores knew that the owner of the vehicle was a U.S. Citizen before he told his fellow agents to stop and then pursue the driver of the vehicle.

As Jama’s attorney, Surya Saxena, laid out in a successful bid for a hearing currently scheduled for next week, both Muniz (in his testimony) and Flores (in his claims to Richard Berger, to get an arrest affidavit) lied about Jama.

Agent Berger either intentionally provided false testimony regarding the registered owner’s immigration status or he was mislead by Agent Flores. In either instance, one or both of the Agents’ dishonesty should be documented for purposes of later Giglio disclosures. These agents should not be allowed to testify in future proceedings or affidavits without their prior dishonesty being recognized by the Court and disclosed to future defendants.

Agent Muniz also testified that he personally looked that the Teams chat records checks and personally concluded that the registered owner was not a U.S. citizen. In light of the clear records shared on the Teams chat demonstrating that the registered owner was a U.S. citizen, the Court should confirm that Muniz also provided false testimony.

About a month after arresting Jama, DOJ asked for a protective order to hide the identities of what it called the “victims” in the Jama case — something DOJ did not consistently do in the Minnesota cases. While Saxena successfully pushed back on that order (the government withdrew its request to avoid a hearing on the matter), it otherwise would have hidden Muniz and Flores’ identity, along with the other two guys in their SUV and the four in the SUV that caused a collision with the van Jama was driving.

It’s almost as if DOJ wanted to hide the extent to which Stephen Miller sent a masked gang of violent Latinos from South Texas to invade Minnesota, where they murdered, shot, kidnapped, and defamed Miller’s targets, just as Miller himself defamed Alex Pretti after the ICU nurse’s death.

It’s enough to make you sick!

Which brings me to the last Latino criminal I know of that Miller sent from South Texas to invade Minnesota, Alfredo Mancillas Jr, who drove drunk into a parking lot in St. Paul on January 26 and vomited all over himself.

A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employee was charged with drunken driving in St. Paul after a state trooper found him passed out in a car Tuesday morning “covered in vomit.”

The state trooper found 31-year-old Alfredo Mancillas Jr. of Corpus Christi, Texas, “slumped over in the driver’s seat” at 3:25 a.m. Tuesday in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood near Allianz Field, according to charges filed that day by the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office.

His car was parked in a no-parking zone and smelled like alcohol while Mancillas himself had “bloodshot and watery eyes,” the charges allege.

Mancillas, at least, pled guilty last month, though will escape his 90-day prison sentence if he avoids trouble for a year.

This is just what we know of, though. If we counted all the three dozen false arrests as kidnapping and, in many cases, assault, Stephen Miller’s rap sheet would be far longer — and the list of suspected criminals from South Texas would likely grow.

And Governor Abbott would probably happy harbor those criminals, too.

The post Stephen Miller’s Armed Latino Gang appeared first on emptywheel.

In his dissent, Clinton appointee Thomas Ambro makes a far more interesting argument: Not just that Semper’s ruling on selective and vindictive prosecution was flawed, but that the Circuit should reconsider that decision by invoking collateral order doctrine.

Here’s how he made the case that politicized prosecutions of members of Congress could effectively eliminate Speech and Debate in all but name.

When “the legal and practical value” of a right “would be destroyed if it were not vindicated before trial,” the collateral order doctrine gives appellate courts the power to vindicate that right while their review still matters. Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States, 489 U.S. 794, 799 (1989) (quoting United States v. MacDonald, 435 U.S. 850, 860 (1978)). These atypical cases arise when “the issue presented is in ‘danger of becoming moot upon conviction and sentence.’” United States v. Mitchell, 652 F.3d 387, 397 (3d Cir. 2011) (quoting Flanagan v. United States, 465 U.S. 259, 266 (1984)).

As the Government acknowledges, “this is not a typical case.” Transcript of Oral Argument at 33. Despite a surface-level resemblance, the Supreme Court’s reasoning in United States v. Hollywood Motor Car Co., 458 U.S. 263 (1982), is far removed from cases involving potentially retaliatory criminal prosecutions against Members of Congress. In Hollywood Motor Car, the defendants sought vindication only of a statutory procedural right to move for a change of venue. Id. at 263–64. On one side of the ledger, the Supreme Court noted that vacating the conviction and retrial “normally are adequate means of vindicating the constitutional rights of the accused.” Id. at 268. On the other side, it worried about expanding the collateral order doctrine to cover “numerous other questions” that would cause “the policy against piecemeal appeals in criminal cases” to “be swallowed by evermultiplying exceptions.” Id. at 270.

Both sides of the ledger are quite different in this case. By the time the retaliatory prosecution of a legislator reaches final judgment, she and likeminded lawmakers will have been irreparably deterred from fulfilling their constitutional roles as checks on executive power. Indeed, the Executive can successfully intimidate its coequal branch—Members of which are not permitted to solicit pro bono legal counsel—without ever reaching final judgment at all. These prosecutions also inflict ongoing injuries to our representative government by “inevitably impair[ing]” the Member’s ability to represent constituents. United States v. Myers, 635 F.2d 932, 936 (2d Cir. 1980).

“Against these weighty concerns is only the traditional interest in judicial efficiency that normally precludes piecemeal appeals.” Id. But there is no real risk that the usual rule will be swallowed up by excepting “the extremely small class of criminal cases brought against Members of Congress.” Id. Moreover, “it seems likely that when such cases arise,” many of them will—as here—also raise “appeals grounded on the Speech or Debate Clause,” which we would have to hear anyway. Id.; see, e.g., United States v. Rose, 28 F.3d 181, 182 (D.C. Cir. 1994); United States v. Rostenkowski, 59 F.3d 1291, 1294 (D.C. Cir. 1995).

Potentially retaliatory prosecutions of sitting Members of Congress are exceedingly rare. But when they do occur, the constitutional foundation of our government is at risk. Cases of such exceptional importance and rarity fit squarely within the collateral order doctrine.2

The majority chooses not to recognize these cases as extraordinary. Real harm results from that choice. We are now forced to leave uncorrected the analytical flaws in the District Court’s denial of discovery

2 Moreover, these cases are readily identifiable. Courts need only ask three questions: (1) Is this a criminal case against a sitting Member of Congress? (2) Is the appealed order a denial of a motion to dismiss the indictment on grounds of selective or vindictive prosecution? And (3) do the selective or vindictive prosecution claims allege political retaliation? Only if all three answers are “yes” would the case fit this category. [my emphasis]

He then describes all the evidence McIver submitted over a year ago, in her original motion, that DHS was retaliating in a bunch of malign ways against people who stood up against ICE goons.

The Government’s stated justification for prosecuting Congresswoman McIver is that she physically assaulted DHS agents. She contends this is a pretext for its actual goal: to retaliate against her for exercising her oversight authority over DHS and to chill legislative oversight in the future. The Government has not identified a single other case where a defendant was charged under 18 U.S.C. § 111(a) for comparably minimal physical contact. And Congresswoman McIver cites evidence of DHS’s opposition to oversight, including its “‘inexplicable delay’” of her inspection of Delaney Hall. App. 19. She notes that, in the same month, two other Democratic officials were also forcefully detained while investigating DHS activities. The following month, DHS implemented policies restricting congressional access to immigration detention facilities. A district court has since issued a temporary restraining order preventing the policies from going into effect, determining they were likely unlawful. Neguse v. U.S. Immigr. & Customs Enf’t, 822 F. Supp. 3d 86, 112–15, 118 (D.D.C. 2026). Finally, Congresswoman McIver presents DHS press releases repeatedly disseminating falsehoods about the incident here, including untrue claims that, “as a bus of detainees was entering the security gate,” Members of Congress and protestors “stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility” in a “bizarre political stunt” and that two Members had “holed up in a guard shack.” Members of Congress Break into Delaney Hall Detention Center, DHS (May 9, 2025), https://perma.cc/G6MH-2KXF. See also DHS Debunks Fake News Narratives About Law Enforcement During Police Week, DHS (May 16, 2025), https://perma.cc/9XKE-3K3U; DHS Announces ICE Law Enforcement are Now Facing an 830 Percent Increase in Assaults, DHS (July 15, 2025), https://perma.cc/7YZP-PGWS.

The District Court did not consider any of this evidence. It decided that “DHS statements and actions are irrelevant” because they do not “‘involve anyone making prosecutorial decisions and [are] thus not a proper consideration for a vindictive prosecution motion.’” United States v. McIver, 809 F. Supp. 3d 221, 252 (D.N.J. 2025) (quoting Gov’t’s Opp’n to Mot. to Dismiss, 41).

That reasoning is untenable. There is no basis for a categorical rule blinding courts to all non-prosecutor statements.

I had already been thinking, a lot, about McIver’s prosecution in recent days, as I reviewed the three dozen fabricated assault claims DOJ then used to try to criminalize all opposition to ICE in Minnesota. At least three Americans have been shot since last August for their opposition to ICE, two of them killed. Six Democrats in Chicago were charged with conspiracy because an ICE goon drove into their peaceful protest. Fifty people in Minnesota have been charged because of their opposition to ICE (a hundred if you include Cities Church).

Meanwhile, tactics DOJ first tried with McIver have been used in other retaliatory prosecutions. There was the online mob that demanded and got the politicized prosecution, the prosecutor installed just for that kind of job, Trump’s refusal to follow the law on US Attorneys, especially those carrying out his dirty work, the direct involvement of Todd Blanche, the disappearing bodycams, the refusal to search DHS communications we’ve since learned are riddled with cheating.

It all happened with McIver before it happened to many others, and since then we’ve got accumulating evidence of the systematicity of it all.

And one point Ambro made — that members of Congress cannot, for sound ethical reasons, accept pro bono legal services, illustrates the effect of this all. McIver’s legal fees are something that has come up in profile (free link) after profile after profile of her.

In the first weeks after the incident, many of her colleagues tried to help by donating some of their campaign money to help pay her legal fees, hosting fund-raisers or sending emails on her behalf. While a small group of members still offer her moral support, she said that the aid has petered out over time.“

It’s become more difficult,” she said. “Other bad things are happening; other members are being attacked. They moved onto the next awful thing, because they have plenty to choose from.”

Unlike some of Trump’s other prominent targets, she’s not rich and doesn’t have the treasure chest of a potential presidential candidate. She ranks 358th among Members of Congress for net worth.

And so since that legislative visit on May 9, the Congressperson representing Delaney Hall, one of the most problematic ICE cages, has been forced to pay a million dollars in her effort to prove that the tussle ICE goons intentionally created does not amount to assault on her part.

And one point, Ambro is wrong. Potentially retaliatory prosecutions of sitting Members of Congress are no longer exceedingly rare. They’re going up, and it’s hard not to believe that the McIver prosecution is a test for the fascists like so much else.

If you can physically assault and then fine a member of Congress every time she tries to exercise oversight, then the ability to conduct that oversight becomes radically constrained.

The post In LaMonica McIver Dissent, Judge Ambro Describes Costs of Politicized Prosecution and Speech and Debate appeared first on emptywheel.