In honor of Don Jr’s oligarch-funded wedding fireworks and my long-delayed explanation of how I think of corruption as a process, LOLGOP and I are reissuing our Ball of Thread Series from a few years back. We did about a dozen episodes that began before 2016 and ended with Kash Patel’s confirmation in early 2025, tracing how the polarization seeded in 2016 led us to the brink of fascism.

Episode 1 covers how I understand the 2016 Russian attack to include not just several attempts to recruit Americans and stoke polarization, but also laying the groundwork for three parallel attacks on the Deep State.

By the time Kash visits Moscow this October, we should be past the point in the series where he enters the story with his MAGA-career-making effort to make the entire Trump/Russia investigation about the Steele dossier and the fucking pee tape.

Here’s more context for why we’re doing this now:

As we roll this out we want to foster more discussion about this, in conjunction with a LOLGOP Studio pledge drive (so he and I can keep doing these videos).

We’re going to see if this will work: Every week, we’ll post a re-released episode on my YouTube channel, if we can manage it, before end of day Friday. Then, we’ll post a YouTube short promoting the episode with some context like the one above. I’ll put up a post here with the video and the short. And you can comment with your questions or “more of a comment than a question.”

Then LOLGOP and I will record a conversation on that episode about what I got right, what we missed, and what matters most now — kind of like we did with a discussion of whether you should get the fuck off Xitter (you should, but I have not). We’ll also answer your questions about any other videos, current Trump/Russia nonsense, and Michigan in general. Maybe we’ll do episode by episode or in batches. There is an election going on. 

This effort also supports the first LOLGOP Studios Pledge Drive.

Members of the LOLGOP Studios Patreon will get the episodes first, though they will all end up on the emptywheel YouTube eventually. 

The post “If It’s What You Say I Love It,” Especially If You Bring Ball of Thread Back appeared first on emptywheel.

It is a big deal.

But rather than focusing on Trump’s three tweets about the attack on the press — the initial announcement, a meme suggesting someone took them out of the White House as trash, and a follow-up invoking national security behind the ban (just as, over the weekend, he invented a national security purpose for his Nazi arch, both likely attempts to give legal cover for an assault on the country) — I want to focus on the mechanics of it.

In a story reviewing how weepy Trump is that his bullying is not having the effect it used to at the beginning of this term, WSJ described that he made the decision after Natalie Harp showed him bad news.

The president has objected in public and private to media coverage of his presidency for months. But his frustrations reached a fever pitch on Friday, when one of his closest aides, Natalie Harp, showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration, according to people familiar with the matter. Hours later, Trump banned the network and two other news organizations from the White House.

[snip]

The president has been briefed on the headwinds facing Republicans in the midterms, and advisers have told him that the Iran war is a drag on his conservative base’s enthusiasm ahead of the election, though his team maintains they are cautiously optimistic about November.

The president’s frustrations mounted in the past week as two key advisers were away: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was in Florida, where on Wednesday she announced that she is cancer-free, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently left the White House.

Trump’s decision to ban MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House caught many White House officials by surprise, according to people familiar with the matter. But the president’s aides moved quickly to implement their boss’s directive, barring the outlets’ reporters from entering the White House on Saturday. A White House official said senior staff were with the president when he made the decision to ban the outlets.

One senior administration official reacted with exasperation to the decision, arguing that the move would do little to achieve the president’s goal of improving press coverage. The president has discussed banning news outlets from the White House before, according to people close to the White House. But aides have persuaded him to take less aggressive measures, such as blocking reporters from the Oval Office or limiting their participation in the pool of reporters that covers the president when he conducts events in spaces that are too small for the entire press corps.

It focuses on MS-Now, which has been focused on how badly Trump is doing in the polls, including a Katy Tur piece focused on shitty Latino polling in Texas in the hour before the ban. CNN was telling the same story, with a typically animated Harry Enten showing a up to 60-point swing in Latino support.

Both of these took place in the wake of María Salazar’s ad calling out Trump’s immigration policies.

CNN’s version of this story describes that Harp showed Trump some graphic Politico had posted.

[A] graphic from Politico was among the material that is believed to have infuriated the president and helped inform his decision to bar the three outlets from the White House grounds. The president also viewed clips from television, a second source said.

Whatever the content of these clips, consider the import of them.

Natalie Harp showed Trump bad news.

That’s not her job. Her job is to show him good news, to always feed his narcissism.

But last week, she showed him bad news, and partly because Karoline Leavitt has moved on and Susie Wiles was out of the office, Trump responded by banning three outlets, and no one thought to simply stall (as Trump’s staffers have done in the past, especially in the first term). Over the weekend, one after another credentialed journalist from the three outlets showed up at the White House, only to have Secret Service agents that know them well pull their hard pass.

Of note: Kaitlan Collins — who for better or worse has become the grande dame of the White House Press Corps in recent years, even as she suffers through harassment if she doesn’t smile at Trump — did not attempt to enter the White House in this period.

The effect of this, though, is that CNN was kicked out of the press corps days before its turn on as the TV pooler, and per Weijia Jang (former WHCA President), Brian Stelter, and even News Nation’s Kellie Meyer, there will be no TV pool today, even as Trump travels to NY for the UN General Assembly meeting. Some of his meetings — like that with Zohran Mamdani and Emmanuel Macron — are listed as closed press. But the UNGA is the kind of event where Trump has been known to exchange loaded comments in passing and he is expected to have one such meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The rest of the week includes potentially momentous meetings as well, with Xi Jinping’s visit starting Wednesday. And in the background, Trump is equivocating about whether to fulfill US promises of security to Saudi Arabia.

To be clear, the pool is one of the few areas where you can get solidarity (not least because the pool outlets pick up the costs of the coverage and then provide it free to anyone who participates in the pool). But all this is happening in a week where, with no exaggeration, the direction of the world could change dramatically.

Several news outlets were, truthfully, making the case that Trump is a loser. Unusually, Natalie Harp showed Trump that proof he’s a loser. And as a result the press will be partly blinded during a potentially momentous week.

Update: CNBC confirms the other poolers will halt coverage.

The post In Advance of a Key Foreign Policy Week, Natalie Harp Blinds the Press appeared first on emptywheel.

In this post, I noted two things: the unredacted transcript from October 16 reflected a seeming four hour gap — from 10:04AM to 2:43PM — between the first part of the transcript and the second (where the purported ICE victim testified), but the transcript ended with a timestamp, showing 10:11AM, that hid the gap, a timestamp that did not match the timestamps elsewhere in that section. In this post, I noted that the transcript as it currently appears conflicts with US Attorney Andrew Boutros’ claim that someone from the Head Office called a halt to the grand jury session after they learned Sheri Mecklenburg was throwing out grand jurors who objected to charging people for being hit by an ICE SUV. The session ended, instead, when Mecklenburg claimed her batteries ran out (a technical problem not included in the redacted transcript originally provided to Judge Perry).

The reason this matters is because AUSA William Hogan offered two excuses for why he withheld transcripts showing misconduct when he first gave Judge April Perry the grand jury transcripts: 1) he provided Judge Perry with what just the parts of the transcript that she asked for (those pertaining to legal instruction), and 2) he didn’t correct her misimpression that the redactions omitted technical problems because there were, in fact, technical problems. The first claim is false: he didn’t provide her with everything she ordered him to turn over. The second is a mess because Hogan’s redaction didn’t treat technical problems consistently.

But the anomaly matters because one thing Judge Perry is presumably assessing is whether Hogan and Boutros lied to her about the redactions and withholdings. And it appears to remain the case that the transcript leaves out critical details about Boutros’ involvement.

The exonerees’ reply brief mentions the transcript anomalies (but doesn’t call them out) in a section questioning Andrew Boutros’ intervention upon learning jurors were being thrown out of the grand jury.

Mr. Boutros would also have this Court and others believe that he stopped the grand jury proceedings “in real time” when he learned that the prosecutors had dismissed members of the grand jury who rejected the government’s proposed indictment. Per Mr. Boutros, “[w]ith respect to the excusing of grand jurors that took place, which was the second time the prosecutor sought to return an indictment, that I was aware of in real time. And once I became aware of it, I immediately called off the grand jury session.” This statement, when viewed alongside the grand jury audio recording and transcripts from October 16, 2025, raises further questions about representations made to the Court and should not be readily accepted.

A review of the grand jury transcripts from October 16, 2025, shows that “Experienced AUSA 1” dismissed the first grand juror at or about 9:30:04 during the initial portion of the proceeding that day. Dkt. 220, p. 10. The second transcript reflects that there was a break between proceedings on October 16, 2025. According to the time stamp depicted on the transcript of the second portion of the proceeding, Agent A’s last answer was at 10:11:18. Dkt. 220, p. 54. The audio recording reflects that Agent A testified for approximately twelve minutes before there was a break in his testimony to replace batteries in the recorder. According to the audio recording, after several minutes passed, the “Experienced AUSA” told members of the Grand Jury that one of their bosses just showed up and they needed to continue their presentation another day. According to the time stamp on the audio recording, this was at 1:01:18. This sequence of events raises further questions:

• Who notified a supervisor that the “Experienced AUSA 1” and “Junior AUSA” excused members of the grand jury from the proceeding? How and when was such notification made?
• Was this reported directly to the Front Office? By whom?
• And who specifically informed Mr. Boutros?
• Did the “Experienced AUSA 1” and “Junior AUSA”, in fact, continue in the grand jury after having reported this misconduct in “real time?”
• Who was the supervisor that appeared outside the grand jury and instructed the “Experienced AUSA 1” and “Junior AUSA” to discontinue the proceeding that day?
• Did Mr. Boutros accurately report to the Court that he terminated the grand jury session in real time?

6 “Junior AUSA” told the Court on May 21, 2026 that the Criminal Chief was notified and “the Criminal Chief said we need to call this off for the day to gather, understand the right protocol.” 5/21/2026 Tr. at 32.

Not mentioned in this description is the timestamp on the unredacted transcript that shows the (presumed) second session started at 2:43PM. According to the filing, the recording shows the second session happened at an entirely different time: 1:01PM.

Not does this mention that there was a first (or second?) mention of the battery (albeit one that fit into the transcript temporally) — by someone unidentified! — nine minutes into the second session.

Q. What are your duties with regard to that, car?

A. Well, any time that I need to carry out a — any duties I will — I will be in my — my government-furnished vehicle, and including home to 15:19:51 21 work. You know, trans

Q. I’m sorry. Let me stop you for a minute.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: The battery is died.

THE WITNESS: Sorry, the —

MS. MECKLENBURG: That was just the computer. We’ll get it back up when I want to show pictures.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Okay. We’re have a battery — 15:20:26

BY MS. MECKLENBURG: Q. Thank you for keeping me honest. But I think you misunderstood my question. Do you have any duties with regard to keeping the safety and condition of that car?

Here’s what the increasingly irreconcilable three known version of that grand jury session(s) show:

The problem I had recognized in the first post is that the clearly labeled presumptive second session starts at 2:43, with the first question asked at what the marginal timestamp says was 3:10 and the second-to-last at 3:33, only to somehow revert back to the time of the first transcript, 10:11.

Now, in addition to the different time of the afternoon, 1:01 instead of 2:43, by description, the ICE officer testified for a total of ten minutes less in the recording, 12 minutes as opposed to — by the timestamp in the margin — 23 minutes.

I have no idea what the reality is.

What seems increasingly the case, however, is that on top of redactions that hid how Mecklenburg threw out grand jurors who were not willing to indict people for being driven into by a bi SUV, there’s something funny with the transcripts so we can’t even tell how DOJ responded to that.

Redacted transcripts:

• October 9 redacted transcript
• October 16 redacted transcript
• October 23 redacted transcript

Unredacted transcripts:

• October 9 unredacted transcript
  • Redacted 3-61; omitted 4-60
  • Evan Hylton Testimony: pages 10-53 (pages 54-61 omitted from his transcript, but included in unredacted)
• October 16 unredacted transcript
  • Redacted 2-4; omitted 3
  • Redacted 8-11; omitted 9-10
  • Redacted 25-26 (none omitted)
  • Redacted 27-28 (none omitted)
  • Redacted 29-37; 30-36 omitted
  • ICE witness: introduced 37, testimony starts 40
• October 23 unredacted transcript
  • Redacted 3-5; omitted 4-5
  • Redacted 29-41; omitted 30-39
  • Redacted 52-57; omitted 53-55
  • ICE witness: testimony begins 68

The post Confirmed: Broadview 6 Transcript Does Not Match the Recording appeared first on emptywheel.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.

First, Julie Ioffe provided context on who Umar Kremlev is. He’s the bagman for Putin’s bodyguard, Alexei Rubezhnoy.

With Kremlev, things are much more straightforward. He has advertised his proximity to Vladimir Putin, who bestowed several state medals on him. And as the independent outlet Proekt has meticulously documented, he is also the business partner of Alexei Rubezhnoy, the head of Putin’s presidential security service and chief bodyguard. “Kremlev is the ‘wallet’ of the person closest to Putin,” said Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author of All the Kremlin’s Men, using Russian slang for a front. Even Kremlev’s last name, which he chose for himself in 2010 at the age of 28, says it all: kreml in Russian means Kremlin. His last name literally means “the Kremlin’s.”

Meanwhile, Bettina’s description of Kremlev as “a dear friend” strains credulity. Kremlev, the longtime head of the scandal-plagued International Boxing Association, met Trump Jr. last September, in Istanbul, at an event he organized with Manny Pacquiao. Trump Jr., a boxing fan, appeared on a panel with Kremlev and Pacquiao where he praised Kremlev for fighting “corruption” and returning “purity” to the sport—by which he meant banning transgender women. (Both Pacquiao and Kremlev have taken vociferously anti-LGBT positions in public.)

[snip]

While riding with the Night Wolves, Kremlev met Rubezhnoy, who had risen through an elite F.S.B. unit into the Federal Security Service (F.S.O.), Russia’s analogue of the Secret Service. Both were avid boxers, as was the president they served, who has referred to the sport as “the most spectacular and masculine.” Kremlev became a boxing promoter and, through Rubezhnoy, secured his client, American boxer Roy Jones Jr., an audience with Putin in occupied Crimea. During the meeting, Jones requested—and received—Russian citizenship.

Rubezhnoy soon helped install Kremlev as head of the International Boxing Association, which was bankrolled until recently by Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant. Kremlev built boxing gyms and organized tournaments across Russia and Central Asia. More importantly, he helped lead the charge against the International Olympic Committee to reinstate Russian athletes, barred from competing under their flag because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine and various doping scandals. (International athletic competitions are of utmost importance to Putin.)

[snip]

Although Rubezhnoy is a federal employee with a fixed income, his wealth has been documented in other ways, such as when his wife or daughters buy luxury real estate in Rublyovka, Moscow’s Beverly Hills. And as for those other companies, well, Rubezhnoy doesn’t technically run or own them: Kremlev does.

Then, Trump made a bullshit statement to try to make it go away. Not only did he claim Don Jr had or would pay back the lavish gift, but he insinuated that Don Jr simply didn’t do a background check.

President Donald Trump on Friday claimed his son, Donald Trump Jr., paid back the Russian billionaire who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund parts of Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration in the Bahamas.

“As I understand it, he paid him back,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to Umar Kremlev, the Kremlin-connected businessman who ProPublica reported paid for aspects of the party.

The assertion by Trump is the most serious sign from the administration of possible discomfort with the payment, although the president also said it was common for someone’s friend to pay for a celebration connected to their wedding.

“A person that he knows — I guess, a friend of his — gave him a wedding party. That’s very common. I’ve heard of many people giving wedding parties,” Trump said.

When asked if it was appropriate for Kremlev to fund the celebration, Trump said, “it’s totally allowed” and dismissed concerns about Kremlev’s ties to the Kremlin, saying “maybe (Trump Jr.) didn’t do a background check.”

But it’s not just Don Jr who is supposed to do background checks of the Russians he lets buy him lavish parties.

That’s true for reasons laid out in a different ProPublica story published days after the wedding. Don Jr is no longer just Daddy’s failson. He’s looting the government. More specifically, a company funded by Don Jr investment fund got a $620 million loan from the Defense Department to develop drone magnets, a crucial technology.

When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism.

[snip]

In August 2025, Vulcan announced $65 million in investments, including from 1789 Capital, the venture firm that Trump Jr. joined as a partner after his father was elected to a second term. Neither 1789 nor Vulcan has publicly disclosed how much of a stake the venture firm has taken.

Staff in the Office of Strategic Capital learned of the White House request to give a loan to Vulcan around September or October, an official involved said. It’s unclear how the White House request was delivered or if it was presented as an order or a recommendation. Companies considered for funding are generally vetted for many months, the person said, but this deal was completed in a matter of weeks because they were told it was a White House priority.

Asked about the Vulcan deal being expedited, the Pentagon spokesperson said defense officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence to close high-impact deals that directly strengthen America’s defense and empower our warfighters.”

In November, the Pentagon announced its plans to lend $620 million to the company and another $80 million to its partner, ReElement. The company would also get $50 million in incentives from the Commerce Department. In exchange, the government would take a $50 million stake in Vulcan with the right to buy more later.

Vulcan, which at the time had fewer than 50 employees, said it would use the windfall to build a large new facility that would churn out thousands of tons of magnets a year. It said it planned to ramp up in the coming years, adding hundreds of new jobs.

The deal was good news for Vulcan’s investors, including Trump Jr.’s firm. Estimates of Vulcan’s valuation went from around $200 million near the time 1789 Capital first invested, according to Bloomberg, to around $2 billion.

Bloomberg first reported on the importance of Vulcan’s deal in March.

Rare-earth magnets are part of the invisible warp and weft of modern life. They help seat belts fasten, wind turbines spin and missiles launch. But China has long had a choke hold on their production.

Vulcan Elements, a three-year-old startup, aims to build the largest rare-earth magnet factory in the world outside China. These powerful parts—much stronger than the ceramic kind loaded into household appliances—are fashioned from difficult-to-isolate elements and act as a linchpin for satellites, drones, robotics and a range of other defense technologies. Vulcan’s operations will transform a once-mainly agricultural corner of central North Carolina—and, even more, US industrial policy.

Two important changes bolstered Vulcan’s prospects last year. First, a cadre of venture capital firms invested in the company in August. The group included 1789 Capital, a fund that counts the president’s eldest child, Donald Trump Jr., as a partner. Then, three months later, the US government unveiled a deal backing Vulcan with a loan of more than half a billion dollars. Under the terms of the arrangement, the Department of Commerce will also hold a $50 million stake in the company.

Donny acquires his stake in a NatSec critical company in August, he meets his new oligarch handler in September at the same time DOD is considering this deal, in November Donny’s company gets $620 million, and just as this is becoming public, Donny excludes long-term friends from his wedding but instead invites the bagman for Putin’s bodyguard.

This is not just a scandalous failure on Donny’s part (Russia pegged him as the best combination of venal and stupid to get to Trump a decade ago). It’s a scandalous lack of vetting at DOD, to entrust a key national security investment with a guy being bribed by Putin’s closest cronies.

It’s not just Don Jr who needs to answer some questions. So does Whiskey Pete Hegseth.

The post Putin’s Bagman Bought a Party for DOD Drone Contractor Don Jr appeared first on emptywheel.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

The post Fridays with Nicole Sandler appeared first on emptywheel.

A similar uproar broke out in June 2025 after Salazar and Latinas for Trump founder Ileana Garcia called out Stephen Miller for specific tactics he was using, specifically snatching people at courthouses while they were legally pursuing due process for immigration claims.

And when I wrote a long post threading through the extent that Cuban-Americans allowed themselves to ignore the gutter racism on which Trump was running (Salazar’s district includes a good number of the Haitians Trump targeted with his dog-eating smear), I noted that Democrats need not call out their delusions, because the effect would split Trump’s base in any case.

Don’t get in their way! At this point, any pushback on Miller’s gulag, any focus on him and his lies, is welcome.

We will not make it through this unless we exploit every single break that Republicans make with Trump. We will not make it through this unless we convince a significant number of Trump voters to push back or better yet disavow their vote.

Salazar’s earlier complaints didn’t work, at least not sustainably. Cubans were on the flight to South Sudan for which SCOTUS sanctioned third country removal and their third country deportations have stepped up in recent months.

So once again, Salazar attempted to make a nuanced appeal to Trump, reminding him pointedly of the coalition that put him in the White House in 2024. The move came just a day after Karl Rove, the last prominent Republican who attempted to be a Reagan on immigration, publicly backed a Democrat after the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commission celebrated a Texas football win with what Rove described as “raw, uncut bigotry.”

As happened in June 2025, the backlash to Salazar’s public criticism of Trump’s worst immigration excesses will create even more problems for Republicans’ ability to get Latinos to the polls. It likely won’t significantly reverse momentum in Salazar’s race, and it’ll create a toxic discussion nationally, as the fascists within the party attack Salazar as a Latina.

Salazar’s video has apparently been in the works for several weeks. Newsmax’s Marisela Ramirez posted a picture of Salazar filming the ad on September 3.

Since then, at least one ratings outlet has moved Salazar’s race closer to flipping, though still Lean Republican; the more cautious Cook Report hasn’t moved her race since April, and so may be due.

But Marc Caputo (in a post which he said he’d been “been picking away at … for a few days because I’ve been really surprised by the broad-based angst in the GOP” in Florida) said a Republican pollster from Miami found Salazar’s race (and that of Byron Donalds) to be tied.

Zoom in: A bellwether, Miami-Dade is Florida’s most-populous county, which Trump flipped to the Republican column in 2020 and 2024 thanks to strong Latino support, especially among Cuban Americans.

• “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says in her ad. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
• Trump carried her district by 15 points two years ago. Today, she’s tied in polls with newscaster Eliot Rodriguez, a fellow Cuban American, who said her new ad was a sign of desperation.
• A Trump adviser told Axios: “I’m getting the Trumpiest Cubans sending me videos from Miami of guys getting busted at places like the gas station, for no apparent reason.”

By the numbers: In Miami-Dade, 62% of the county’s 1.3 million registered voters are Hispanic. They account for 76% of the registered Republicans.

• 63% of Hispanic voters said they supported “deporting illegal immigrants” while 34% were opposed to them, according to a poll conducted last month by a GOP pollster and shared with Axios
• But those numbers switched when it came to how deportations were being carried out: Just 29% were in favor; 58% were opposed.
• “The support is just evaporating. The economy sucks and ICE is just out of control,” said the pollster, who’s from Miami. “People feel they didn’t sign up for this.”

[snip]

• Republicans say they’re not too worried about conservative Hispanic voters switching to vote for Democrats, but they all believe turnout for the GOP will be low, which could affect legislative and congressional contests, and perhaps the race for governor.

Caputo describes that these polls showing a tie race were taken last month, so before Salazar shot the ad. Since then, prices just keep getting worse, and generic ballot support for Democrats has accelerated along with those prices.

Perhaps more important, given the district, around about then, Trump declared that he was stealing Venezuela’s oil, with Delcy Rodriguez’ help, which led Salazar to post, then delete, a tweet lambasting the theft.

Florida Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar did a quick about-face on President Trump’s massive Venezuela oil deal Saturday — deleting a social media post blasting the pact before returning to declare it was “a great deal” for America and the Venezuelan people

Salazar, who has been outspoken of communist Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, took to X to declare that the pact would come to an end once President Trump’s term ends.

“Any oil “deal” with Venezuela’s interim regime has an expiration date: the day President Trump leaves the White House,” Salazar wrote on the site.

Joaquin Castro made Salazar’s Venezuela equivocations worse on Tuesday, the day before she posted her video, by forcing her to vote on — after delaying for some time, she voted against — subpoenas to learn more about the corrupt oil theft.

U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar staved off Democrats’ subpoenas seeking details of dealings with Venezuela over an oil deal. But she also held a lengthy conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging total transparency over the economic arrangements.

A party-line vote closed an otherwise largely bipartisan hearing of the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. There, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat and the panel’s ranking member, moved to issue subpoenas to the State Department and War Department for any agreement between the U.S. and North American Blue Energy Partners, a private oil company run by Venezuelan billionaire Alejandro Betancourt, as well as between that corporate entity and acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez.

“For nine months, we haven’t received any information about funds regarding Venezuela or how oil money is being made or spent,” Cast[ro] said after the hearing. “Yesterday was the first time the State Department sent anybody over to even brief Congress about us, and that wasn’t even a hearing. It was an informal briefing, and so I thought it’s important to break through all of that noise and get some answers for people.”

Salazar held an extended recess of the Subcommittee while she called Rubio. “He is my constituent, and he’s Cuban American just like I am,” she said at the hearing.

It is famously difficult to poll Latino voters, especially in a community, like Miami’s, where there’s a degree of diversity built into that Latino community. But whatever else Marc Caputo is, he’s an astute reader of Florida politics.

And I suspect the most immediate effect of this uproar will be to exacerbate the same dynamics going on in Texas (where Rove is disavowing the more fascist part of his the party he helped build), which is far closer to flipping blue.

Trump has left Latino district members of Congress with no good choice between loyalty to him and distance from his bigotry. And in Salazar’s attempt, and not the first attempt, to find such a path, she likely will create waves well beyond Miami.

The post The Salazar Swing appeared first on emptywheel.

This series addresses the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the Roberts Majority of SCOTUS. Reforming the Court must begin with impeachment of these six. They will strike down any law restricting their power. This should be a campaign issue for every Democrat.

Historical restraints on SCOTUS power

Over the centuries SCOTUS has adopted guardrails that restrict their claimed unlimited reach. Self-regulation helped it maintain its facade as a court rather than as an unchecked super-legislature. That facade held up until recently.

Almost every discussion of public attitudes towards SCOTUS begins with the statement that most people approve or disapprove based on the outcome of specific cases like Dobbs, the abortion case. Republicans generally like Dobbs so they approve of SCOTUS, and almost all Democrats and most independents despise Dobbs and have unfavorable attitudes. For example in this article reviewing two recent books on SCOTUS we are told:

The Supreme Court is like ranked-choice voting or Jdate: how you feel about it depends on whether it’s delivering what you want.

But that’s not the only criticism of SCOTUS on offer. Most reasonably independent legal academics criticize decisions on technical grounds, grounds that are often not familiar to non-specialists. Many of these fall under the heading of justiciability, which includes standing, ripeness, and subject matter jurisdiction. The Court has historically deferred to lower courts to determine the facts of the cases it reviews, even thought the Constitution grants it the power to determine both law and facts. Art. II §2. It has set up a number of rules that it and lower courts follow, such as the requirements for issuance of interim relief pending final decisions, and the importance of precedent.

Legal academics most often criticize opinions of the Roberts Majority on these grounds. For example, much of the criticism, including my own, of Dobbs is based on its outright rejection of precedent acknowledged by all of the members of the Roberts Majority, and expressly acknowledged, misleadingly as it turned out, by the Trump appointees.

Examples

1. Standing. Biden v. Nebraska is the student loan case. Biden granted partial forgiveness of certain student loans to aid recovery from the national emergency inflicted by COVID. Several Red states sued to stop it. Only one had standing, Missouri. Years ago Missouri chartered Mohela as a public corporation to service student loans. The directors of Mohela are appointed by the government of Missouri, and it files regular reports with the state. It has the authority to pay dividends to the state if its directors choose, but It never had. First Missouri asked Mohela to file the lawsuit, but it refused, perhaps because winning would harm borrowers. Then Missouri sued in its own right.

The Roberts Majority claimed that this satisfied the requirement for standing. Biden’s plan might cost Mohela servicing income, and that was harm to Missouri, because, Roberts says, Mohela is affiliated with the state. Of course, Mohela has its own interests, and it chose not to sue. If Missouri didn’t like this, it could have fired the board and put in a compliant board. But it didn’t.  This just seems stupid. But it was necessary so that the Roberts Majority could strike down Biden’s efforts to help regular people on the spurious grounds of the major questions gibble-gabble.

2. Ripeness. A case is not ripe if the alleged injury rests on contingencies that may or may not come about.  Consider the case of 303 Creative, LLC v. Elenis.  Plaintiff is a web site designer. She claims that she wants to design web sites for weddings but doesn’t want to offer her services to same-sex couples because of her “religious” views. She sues a Colorado agency that handles civil rights matters on the ground that she faces a “credible threat” that it might sue to force her to violate her rights to discriminate. This case is obviously not ripe. The agency hasn’t done anything and might never. Gorsuch wants to rule on this case, so what he calls a credible threat is enough to make the case ripe.

3. Standing and ripeness: In Trump v. California, , entered August 24, 2026, the Roberts Majority granted a stay of an injunction barring enforcement of a proposed US Postal Service rule on mail-in ballots generated to comply with a Trump executive order. The plaintiff states filed suit in April, 2026, shortly after Trump’s executive order. The USPS issued a proposed rule June 2, to take effect August 21. The district court found that the executive order and the proposed rule interfered with the constitutional power of the states to administer elections, and enjoined implementation. The Roberts Majority stayed the injunction, asserting that the states lacked standing because there was no rule when the suit was filed. In addition the case was not ripe because whether the USPS would issue a final rule is “conjecture”.

The plaintiff states argued that they’d have to begin planning at once to enable them to comply, but the anonymous writer says

But the States “cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.” Clapper, 568 U. S., at 416. And the hypothetical future harm that the States fear—the Secretary’s implementation of §2(a)—is far from “certainly impending.” Ibid. By allowing the States “to bring this action based on costs they incurred in response to a speculative threat,” the District Court “improperly water[ed] down the fundamental requirements of Article III.”

So, a proposed rule with an effective date a few weeks out is not a credible threat, but a speculative threat.

The rule took effect. The lower court quickly entered an injunction against enforcement, and the case went back to SCOTUS. This time the Roberts Majority tossed it in three sentences, again per curiam. Alito and Thomas publicly dissented. Liz Dye of Public Notice gives a nice description of the “Fox News Grandpas” absurd opinion.

3. Fact-finding. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District shows the willingness of the Roberts Majority to make up its own facts. This is the case of public prayer led by a football coach after games. Here are the facts about those prayer sessions according to Gorsuch:

Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks. Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.

Here’s how Sotomayor describes the facts in her dissent:

The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes  in prayer at the same time and location.

Sotomayor put this picture of one of these prayer events in her dissent:

For comparison, check out the facts found by the district court after a trial on the merits, and confirmed by the Ninth Circuit. Here’s a sample of the facts.

Kennedy’s religious beliefs required that his prayer occur on the field where the game was played, immediately after the game concluded.

Kennedy’s testimony is incredible, and nothing this guy says can be believed. The claim that this is about religion is a nonsensical sham, and the case should be dismissed because the School District properly enforced its rules and its contract. A competent SCOTUS would have dismissed the case as certiorari improvidently granted. The Roberts Majority has an ideological stake in the case, so competent judging is irrelevant.

Conclusion

There are many other cases in which the Roberts Majority ignores the guardrails that have helped the Court maintain its legitimacy as it undoes our democracy. These six defy those guardrails in pursuit of their ideological goals.

Impeach all six.

The post The Unrestrained Power Of The Roberts Majority appeared first on emptywheel.

It included Brandon Straka, who played a role in ginning up confrontation at the Michigan vote count in 2020. Straka who was prosecuted, then pardoned, for his role in January 6; at one point current makebelieve Los Angeles US Attorney Bill Essayli — a close ally of Harmeet’s — represented him.

Straka posted Don Lemon’s video with Micko’s image superimposed on it.

Others who targeted Micko included Libs of Tik Tok, who has a long history of ginning up violence against those whose political views she dislikes.

Libs cited Fox News; Fox News’ deportation propagandist, Bill Melugin, was among the first to target Micko.

Reminder: Harmeet picked a hilarious fight with Ed Whelan over his correction of Melugin’s attempt to target the Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz.

It’s one tidy mob, this far right fever swamp.

And according to a NYT story on the struggles Minnesota’s judges have faced to uphold rule of law in January, this mob had the expected result: in the wake of Harmeet’s attack on Micko on Megyn Kelly’s show, he and his family had to be moved for their own safety.

Justice Department officials were blasting Judge Micko, noting that his wife works in the office of Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat.

“I don’t even want to say ‘judge,’” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a senior department official, said in an interview that day with the journalist Megyn Kelly. Judge Micko, she said, “exhibited bias.”

The condemnation of Judge Micko by Trump-aligned media outlets was followed by a series of violent threats, which have not been previously reported. In the interview, Judge Schiltz revealed that Judge Micko and his family had to be moved to a secure location, where they remained for several days. Judge Schiltz said that the administration’s statements were part of what had put Judge Micko in danger.

[snip]

Behind the scenes, the district’s judges were dealing with a deluge of violent threats. After major rulings, the phones in judges’ chambers would sometimes ring nonstop, with clerks logging hundreds of incoming communications each day. Judge Jerry W. Blackwell shared one anonymous email vowing to “kill u soon.” The volume of hostile communications led the bench to create its own internal system for tracking people responsible for multiple threats, supplementing the U.S. Marshals Service, which normally handles judicial security.

The response to the NYT article describing the threats against Micko and at least one other Minnesota judge is — predictably — more attacks, including from senior Trump officials.

I think in every case I’ve covered in the last five years, at least one of the case participants  faced serious threats (including, to be sure, Aileen Cannon).

But the Don Lemon case is the one where I’ve most worried about how this currency of threats might affect defendants’ ability to get a fair trial.

And that’s because the other behavior of DOJ and DHS is so outrageous. Not just Harmeet’s platforming of bets on the outcome and her comments that appear to have led to the threats against Micko, but the way DHS fabricated their entire case against Georgia Fort in the wake of Harmeet’s failure to get arrest warrants.

It should be an easy thing to throw out the case against Fort, at least, for misconduct. Harmeet’s people literally responded to that denial of an arrest warrant, first, by riling up a violent mob, then lying about what the Eighth Circuit said, then by making shit up, and during it all, by illegally spying on journalists.

This should be an easy decision.

But thus far, it has not been.

Virtually every case I’ve covered over the last 20 years has been politically charged. But none has been tainted with this much abuse. So it should be an easy decision, at least with respect to Georgia Fort.

And yet what do you do about it with Harmeet’s mob, lurking in the background?

The post Harmeet Dhillon Dialed Up Threats against Douglas Micko appeared first on emptywheel.

In recent days, there has been a slew of new visibility.

I catalog these not because they reveal anything we didn’t already know. We’ve known Iran destroyed the Navy base in Bahrain. We’ve known that Russia has been helping Iran kill Americans and attack military resources with pinpoint accuracy. We’ve known that Whiskey Pete Hegseth shot his wad and as a result left the US without missiles to face other threats.

This is not new knowledge; it is new visibility.

I catalog this to call attention to the things that have contributed to this flood of visibility now: the kinds of reporting Congress has demanded and the limitations on what they got (though Senate Democrats just demanded better information), CNN’s ability to get similar satellite data to that which Volodymyr Zelenskyy had when he pointed out Russia’s role in targeting the US, the frustration of service members in the field that “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” which led them to defy Whiskey Pete’s censorship to share what they’re seeing.

Some of this visibility may be driven by the election season. Part of it may have been forced by that meeting in San Diego where USS Lincoln family members revealed their husbands or brothers or sons were trying to jump overboard, which process of making visible I laid out here. Part of it may reflect Trump and Hegseth bleeding power.

We are not learning more. We are seeing differently.

A week ago Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao did a long interview with Epoch Times.

In an exclusive interview, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told me that Iranian forces “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”

While open-source analyses have long indicated that the U.S. Fifth Fleet Headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain sustained extensive damage in the early days of the Iran conflict, Cao’s comment represents a direct and high-level acknowledgment of the matter.

[snip]

As I asked about the USS Abraham Lincoln’s recent deployment, overall fleet operational tempo, and the logistical support it takes to sustain high-intensity operations, Cao acknowledged damage to NSA Bahrain left the Lincoln’s crew “no place for them to pull in.”

A DOD Inspector General Report that provides a global perspective on the impact of the Iran War, including the damage done to facilities and the services (like Diplomatic Services) that have had to be withdrawn as a result. While the comprehensive view is useful, it’s worth reading with the footnotes open just to appreciate how much of the information is sourced to outside public comments — from Mark Rutte, from congressional hearings and, as with this table that a number of people have pointed to, from very dated Congressional Research Service reports.

And, as Task and Purpose noted of the report, according to the report, the full mission statement behind the Iran invasion is classified.

Secretary Hegseth said that through OEF, the United States seeks to destroy Iran’s offensive missiles, missile production, navy, and other security infrastructure, and ensure that Iran never has nuclear weapons.5 General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more broadly, the OEF mission is to defend the United States and “disrupt, degrade, deny, and destroy Iran’s ability to conduct and sustain combat operations.”6 The full OEF mission statement is classified.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office offered its own accounting in a report released Tuesday. It comes to a similar number as the IG Report: $33.4 billion through June 29 in the IG Report and $38.1 billion through August 1 in the CBO Report. But it notes that DOD refuses to provide it with information and DOD’s appropriation requests are much bigger.

To estimate DoD’s costs, CBO relied on government databases and public reports because DoD did not respond to CBO’s requests for information. As a result, CBO’s estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty. This past June, the Administration requested $87.6 billion in supplemental appropriations, of which $67.1 billion was for DoD to pay for the conflict. The portion of that request that appears to be directly related to the conflict, $42.3 billion, is about 10 percent larger than CBO’s estimate of DoD’s costs.

A long section describes the opportunity cost of Whiskey Pete Hegseth shooting his wad, in terms of missiles.

So far, the main opportunity cost of Operation Epic Fury for DoD has been the high expenditures of missile defense interceptors. To thwart the large number of ballistic missiles fired at U.S. and allied targets, DoD used a significant portion of its inventory of Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, and SM-6 interceptors. Significant quantities of some of those munitions were used to defend Israel against Iranian ballistic missile attacks during the Twelve-Day War in June 2025; Operation Epic Fury has reduced those inventories further.

Missile defense interceptors are expensive, ranging from roughly $4 million for Patriot and SM-6 interceptors to $12 million for THAAD interceptors and $28 million for the most sophisticated SM-3 interceptors. Moreover, missile defense interceptors are in short supply because they have been produced at relatively low rates; thus, DoD’s inventory of such missiles was limited before Operation Epic Fury and the Twelve-Day War that preceded it. Both of those operations have demonstrated that the United States can rapidly expend large quantities of missile defense interceptors in a conflict with an opponent that relies heavily on ballistic missile attacks. Although DoD does not reveal the number of munitions it has on hand, a comparison of the reported expenditures of missile defense interceptors with the total numbers that DoD has purchased to date indicates that the United States has probably used between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of those munitions since June 2025.

That reduction in the inventory of missile defense interceptors would be relevant in a conflict with the PRC. The PRC has many more ballistic and cruise missiles than Iran had at the onset of Operation Epic Fury. The PRC also has a significantly larger economic base than Iran and can produce such missiles more rapidly. An armed conflict with the PRC could therefore place greater stress on U.S. missile defense capabilities. Having used a large portion of its missile defense inventory in combat operations against Iran, DoD now has fewer interceptors on hand to use in a potential conflict with the PRC.

Given the number of missile defense interceptors that DoD has recently used, their currently low production rates, and the historical difficulty of scaling up their production, rebuilding DoD’s inventory of interceptors would probably take at least five years—even if production was increased. Boosting missile production has historically been a slow process with lags of three to five years between the placement and delivery of new orders. After production was increased, several more years would be required to replace the missiles that have been used in the conflict with Iran.

Mark Hertling describes the budgeting reason why “the most important number in the new CBO report may not be $38 billion but five years—the time it will take to replace the munitions we’ve expended just in the last seven months.”

A great CNN video correlating how Russian satellites have given Iran pinpoint targeting information

A CBS story posting pictures that service members have sent it, showing some of the damage that was briefly available by satellite before the US government forced private satellite companies to withhold such images.

“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”

One photo, taken at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia, shows a direct hit on the back half of a Boeing E-3 Sentry four-engine aircraft, its tail severed from the charred fuselage that also supported a rotating radar that is essential for collecting midair intelligence.

Reuters and noted Amazon’s public disclosure that it has not yet been able to get its data centers in Bahrain and UAE up and running.

Amazon Web Services cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and ‌one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates following damage during the Iran war, according to a status update seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

Amazon’s (AMZN.O), opens new tab cloud computing unit AWS said the damage in Bahrain spanned multiple so-called availability zones, which are clusters of one or more data ​centres in the same geographic region.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional ​and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS said in the status update, which Reuters was ⁠first to report. AWS said it was helping Bahrain-based customers to re-establish operations in other regions.

In the UAE, AWS said ​it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, known as mec1-az2. It is continuing ​to work on recovering resources across the wider UAE region and in the other two affected zones.

The disruptions began in March following U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, which prompted Tehran to retaliate with missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases. AWS ​said at the time that two of its facilities in the UAE had been directly struck, while a drone strike close ​to one of its facilities in

Bahrain had physically damaged its infrastructure. The AWS outages affected some banking operations at the time, Reuters ‌has reported, citing ⁠a person familiar with the situation.

ArsTecnica followed up on the report, explaining the import of AWS’ failure to restore data.

Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.

The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates. The AWS update described ongoing work to replace “affected infrastructure” and promised to update customers on a restoration of services in the coming months.

But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there.

The post Seeing Iran: “Standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” appeared first on emptywheel.

As I’ve laid out, this is a three-fold effort:

• Todd Blanche has shifted resources away from fighting white collar crime, including fraud, into investigating far smaller fraud in government programs, effectively defunding bigger white collar prosecutions to fund an effort targeting poorer, browner people.
• Based on mere allegations, Trump is defunding government services generally, focusing on Blue states.
• The whole thing is a non-stop propaganda campaign demonizing brown people or immigrants, which plays out against a background of Trump stealing iconic buildings and landmarks in DC and demanding kickbacks from corporations and foreign countries.

Probably as part of a midterms campaign strategy (or possibly as a result of Aakash Singh’s promotion to PADAG), all the boys involved in this fraudulent Fraud Task Force have stepped up their flood of propaganda.

It’s rather insane against the background of DOJ’s appeal of the ruling prohibiting from immunizing Trump’s tax crimes, the the news about Don Jr’s wedding, and Trump’s frantic efforts to steal the Kennedy Center.

And amid this flood of propaganda, the propagandists keep invoking really ridiculous examples of fraud — like the time several people paid upwards of $94 an hour spent their time boasting about a SNAP fraud case charging just $277 of fraud.

Yesterday, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald — also paid $94 an hour — kept tweeting and tweeting about fraud that was far less spectacular than Trump’s hour by hour attempt to steal the Kennedy Center — like this announcement of card-skimming charges from Northern Alabama US Attorney Phillip Williams Jr (the announcement included his picture).

From the announcement, you might think these charges were recent and reflected a great deal of gains, particularly given the way both McDonald and Williams talked about the billion dollars Americans lose to card-skimming each year.

But when you read through the complaint, indictment, and docket, you see that:

• The news here is the arraignment, which in some places takes place shortly before trial; the pair were arrested back in March, indicted in June, and one of them was actually arraigned in August.
• About half of the skimmers — which targeted stores like Dollar General — had been found by the stores.
• The amounts of “bulk cash” that Feds found when they arrested the perpetrators were modest: $8,215 seized from a car and $10,215, possibly from a home (though that is likely duplicative).
• Thus far, their Romanian status has not been charged (though the woman was turned back at the Mexico border in 2018).
• Any tie to SNAP may be secondary.

It’s definitely useful detective work, work that requires Fed involvement (in this case, Secret Service), and this prosecution may lead to a larger network. But it is not a billion dollars. It is, at most $18,430.

McDonald and Williams have wildly oversold the import of this.

And in the background, as they were boasting about their $18,430 bust, Donald Trump was spending his day not resolving the Iran War nor spiking petroleum prices — which have caused Americans to spend $100 billion more because of Trump’s illegal war — but instead trying to find some way to close or steal the Kennedy Center, effectively robbing taxpayers of the $250 million appropriated to renovate it, the $100 million lost after he slapped his name on it, and potentially even the $691 million in assets of the Center, to say nothing of the damage that Trump’s tantrum has done to neighborhood businesses.

“The Kennedy Center is in many ways the anchor of the community,” says Jim Malec, an advisory neighborhood commissioner whose district includes the Foggy Bottom and West End neighborhoods. Malec has heard with alarm plans to close the venue — and threats from the administration that it might be demolished if Trump’s plans for it are blocked. “The amount of resources that would be lost with a closure or, God forbid, something crazier would just be catastrophic.”

There is no universe in which those card-skimmers in Missisippi and Alabama should be a greater focus of the guy, McDonald, whose sole job is to hunt down fraud, because Trump’s crimes are not only doing far more damage, but they’re doing all that damage in plain sight, just down the road from where McDonald is sitting, spending his days fraudulently claiming $18,430 is a billion dollars.

The time for accountability has arrived!! McDonald tweeted some more, drawing his $94/an hour salary paid by struggling taxpayers to tweet tweet tweet.

And the way you start that accountability is to treat McDonald’s charade for what it is: part of the con.

Update: In yet more proof that Colin McDonald is a fraud, here he is chumming up with a suspect in a $10M theft of Medicaid funds for political gain.

To have any credibility at all, McDonald would need to be subpoenaing Moody, not RTing her.

Update: More hobbying.

The post Colin McDonald’s Latest Fraud Fraud appeared first on emptywheel.