A Call to Arms

EL-SAYED: I want to make healthcare, groceries and gas more affordable, get rid of data centers, remove corporate money from politics and tax the rich.

HOUSTON – A Houston-area business owner who voted for President Donald Trump says he supported removing dangerous criminals from the United States. Now, he is fighting the administration he supported after immigration officers detained his fiancée at George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

John Gannon said he and his fiancée, Yasmin Carolina Suarez Reyes, arrived at the airport July 24 for a trip to Las Vegas, where they planned to attend a furniture convention.

Because the security lines were long, Gannon said the couple decided to enroll in CLEAR. They passed through security and went to the United Club while waiting for their flight.

“As we came out of the United Club, there were eight officers there that swarmed her,” Gannon said. “Nobody told us anything about any charges. They didn’t even identify themselves.”

If you’re surprised that the media isn’t covering the news about Trump related bank accounts that were closed due to potential anti-money laundering violations, don’t be. The same thing happened the year before the 2016 election, and the media said nothing.

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

On July 31, the Justice Department’s “vandalism” case against David Hearn fell apart like the Reflecting Pool’s own failed lining. Federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the felony charge against the former Olympic canoeist after the Interior Department turned over documents showing the pool’s peeling blue coating and murky green water were the product of a rushed and botched renovation. They were not, as Trump and his cronies have long insisted, the result of left wing radicals intentionally cutting the lining. The retreat followed an indictment brought by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office in early July. Prosecutors conceded, at last, that new information had made it “difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Donald Trump predictably rejected the DOJ’s conclusion within a day. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” he wrote on Truth Social, insisting “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

In an era of rising authoritarianism, with a new war of choice in the Middle East and federal thugs roaming our streets and terrorizing immigrant communities, it can feel rather silly to report on something as esoteric as the Reflecting Pool and Trump’s delusions about why it failed. In June, analyst Nate Silver waved the whole thing off entirely. “There’s the World Cup and a whole bunch of other shit going on, please seek out a therapist if you’re spending more than a few moments thinking about the White House Reflecting Pool,” he scolded. When others pointed out that the president’s obsession had led to seven arrests to cover up his corruption, Silver responded, “Who fucking cares it’s literally not even in the top 100 Trump corruption scandals.”

That is true, and yet it misses the point. The Reflecting Pool is an example of “Peak Trumpism,” noted Talking Points Memo, “both preposterous and dangerous at the same time.” While the public often has trouble grasping the scale and operation of Trump’s crypto scams, his foreign real estate deals and his massive insider trading, the Reflecting Pool story, along with the resulting criminal charges, is something voters can both see and understand. And it resonates and has broken through in a way the bigger cases and corruption stories have failed to achieve. As for whether D.C. juries would ever convict those charged, TPM noted wryly, “just remember Sandwich Guy” — the unfortunate angry citizen who wielded a Subway sandwich against a federal agent deployed to D.C. Or remember James Comey’s Instagram post of “86 47” spelled out in seashells. Or for that matter, the innocuous mortgage loan applications of Trump’s political enemies, now somehow weaponized against them.

These matters are, on their face, ridiculous. But they are also a kind of camouflage. Each became national news because the regime made it so: a presser, a Truth Social post, an over-the-top promo built around a highly public arrest. That manufactured visibility turned defendants into memes while burying an important fact: The same DOJ machine has now run this play hundreds of times against ordinary people in cases that very few have ever heard of. These small cases, it turns out, are where corruption and lawlessness are easiest to spot. And they can teach the public much about what’s going on beneath it all.

From petty grievance to criminal charges

The best-known small cases all began the same way: with a president’s public grievance followed by a criminal charge built to fit it. The Justice Department’s practice of “charge first, find evidence later” gets the order of things backward; it is not at all how things are supposed to operate. A quick review of the facts and results in these cases is instructive. David Hearn’s alleged crime was pulling a piece of already-peeling liner out of a pool that the president’s hand-picked, no-bid contractor had botched during installation. At the press conference announcing Hearn’s indictment, Pirro declared the defendant had damaged “approximately two square feet” of sealant, ignored a National Park Service employee’s instruction to stop, and told the worker she “cared too much” about the pool. Pirro called his words “belligerent, rude and disrespectful” — which apparently is enough to lead to an arrest nowadays. Trump had already cast the pool’s problems as “politically motivated sabotage” and threatened any vandals with “years in jail.” By the end of July, Pirro had walked back the allegations and placed the blame for the lining failure where it belonged: on the pool’s contractor. Three other people swept up in the same theory initially faced misdemeanor charges; prosecutors have since dropped those as well. The case of Sean Dunn, aka the “sandwich guy,” ran a similar course. Dunn was a Justice Department paralegal who was fired after he threw a Subway sandwich during a protest against the National Guard deployment in Washington. FBI Director Kash Patel personally posted a clip of Dunn throwing the edible projectile, which could be seen bouncing off a Customs and Border Protection agent’s chest. Performative outrage from the regime followed. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Dunn’s firing in a post calling him “an example of the Deep State,” while U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro taunted Dunn publicly, telling him to “stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.” No fewer than 20 federal agents arrived at Dunn’s residence in dramatic fashion to arrest him, rifles drawn and riot shields up.

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What lies beneath

Hearn, Dunn, Comey and James are the cases the regime chose to publicize. But they are part of a far wider pattern of cases, brought and then abandoned the same way against people with no name recognition and with no White House press office publicizing their arrests. When the charges ultimately collapse, as they frequently do, there is no press attention on that failure.

Reuters reviewed federal charging data and found that the Justice Department brought charges against at least 851 people for assaulting or obstructing federal officers between January 2025 and March 2026. That’s a scale and an evidentiary bar that depart markedly from past department practice. Among the cases Reuters examined were a woman charged over backing her car into an agent’s vehicle at low speed; a man charged for challenging an agent to a fight without ever throwing a punch; and another charged for jumping on a Homeland Security vehicle during a protest. Most of those 851 defendants were handed an arrest, a charge and then, in many cases, a quiet dismissal. The pattern surfaced in Los Angeles, where acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli’s office dismissed felony charges against at least eight of 26 people arrested during protests, after prosecutors found the charges rested on discrepancies and misleading statements from the arresting officers. Despite the dropped charges, Essayli’s office kept publicizing mugshots of defendants whose cases it had already dismissed.

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The cost of losing the little battles

The loss of multiple cases has built a poor record for the department. In the Comey case, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick wrote that the government’s conduct showed a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” and flagged possible Fourth Amendment violations in how evidence against Comey was obtained. And judges now know not to trust the words of the DOJ, once granted significant weight under the “presumption of regularity” that federal courts used to afford the U.S. government. The Justice Department has also been losing people. Protect Democracy’s tracker notes that career DOJ attorneys have resigned in significant numbers, with many saying publicly they couldn’t reconcile the department’s conduct with their own professional obligations. This kind of attrition may not show up in a single case docket, but it shapes who remains to bring the next case, and how unprofessionally it is brought.

The White House and the GOP have also been losing significant political support due to their overreach. Trump’s numbers are at a new second-term low, near levels not seen since George W. Bush. And while macro forces such as inflation and the war in Iran account for the bulk of the weight on those numbers, the American public now experiences almost daily distaste from these politicized, cruel and incompetent prosecutions over objectively innocuous actions.

Trump’s obsessions with these matters underscore where his priorities lie. Despite the affordability crisis and the war Trump repeatedly promised never to begin, the White House still manages to find time to indict people over sandwiches and seashells. The public watches these proceedings play out in the news, and it has now come to expect every case to meet the same inevitable structural failure.