Above ↑ cartoon by  Michael de Adder - The Washington Post  

Michael de Adder :: @deAdder

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"The most important office is office of citizen."

June 11, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

The most consequential story on Tuesday continues to be that Trump is issuing blatantly illegal and unconstitutional orders. The deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles violates the Posse Comitatus Act and does not qualify for any statutory exception. That fact is omitted from nearly every story reporting on the situation in Los Angeles. But no such story is accurate or complete unless the first line says, “In violation of federal law and without justification, President Trump has ordered federal troops to Los Angeles . . . .”

Before addressing the fake state of emergency created by Trump, let’s skip to the solution: Tens of millions of Americans must take to the streets, expressing the will of the people in opposition to Trump's unlawful actions. Thousands of decentralized protests of millions of Americans will be beyond the ability of Trump to resist—even with the US military cosplaying as law enforcement officers.

It is vitally important that everyone join the No Kings Day protests—June 14, 2025. Find a protest near you: No Kings. On June 14, Flag Day, the story must be that millions of Americans rose to defend democracy instead of the obscenely expensive military parade ordered by Trump because no one else will celebrate his birthday.

For once, the New York Times is getting it right. In its Tuesday online edition, the first headline in Column A1 reads:

The Times’ news analysis reports, in part,

Legal scholars say the president’s actions are not authorized by the statutes he has cited and are, instead, animated by a different goal. “He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power, undermine the Constitution, and destroy civil liberties,” said Ilya Somin, a libertarian professor at Antonin Scalia Law School who represents a wine importer and other businesses challenging some of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

For the usually stodgy Times, the above analysis amounts to a full-throated condemnation of Trump’s sham declarations of emergency.

The Times’ news analysis closed with a reference to the case of Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, in which the Court expressed skepticism of presidential declarations of emergencies because “emergencies beget emergencies”:

Justice Jackson wrote that the framers of the Constitution were wary of granting the president emergency powers.

“They knew what emergencies were, knew the pressures they engender for authoritative action, knew, too, how they afford a ready pretext for usurpation,” he wrote. “We may also suspect that they suspected that emergency powers would tend to kindle emergencies.”

Trump's declaration of emergency is an attempt to create an emergency justifying the deployment of troops. It is an illegal, unjustified use of the US military—and is grounds for impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.

As a point of personal privilege as an Angeleno native, I want to express my anger at the national media for facilitating Trump's misrepresentation of the situation in Los Angeles.

After seeing MSNBC play video on Tuesday of the same two Waymo cars burning (which occurred on Saturday), I drove around my neighborhood to take a video of peaceful city streets with commentary by me. The video is here:

A shareable link is here: The Real Los Angeles 6.10.25

Mayor Karen Bass imposed a curfew over a small area in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday evening. The tiny sector under curfew is a few blocks in Los Angeles County, which covers 4,752 sq. miles. Los Angeles County is roughly three times the size of Rhode Island, twice the size of Delaware, the same size as Connecticut, and half the size of New Jersey.

Imagine 10 blocks under curfew in an area the size of Connecticut because several dozen citizens are standing in front of a federal building—surrounded by 700 Marines, 2,000 National Guard, and the LAPD riot squad. That is the fake emergency that Trump has created by unlawfully deploying federal troops into Los Angeles.

The scale of Los Angeles County also highlights an important point about the limited ability of federal forces, even when they are misused by Trump. It took 700 Marines three days to travel 83 miles from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles, where they have remained secluded inside a federal building housing a detention center. The Marines occupy one building in a single block of a county spanning 4,752 square miles.

On Tuesday evening, California Governor Gavin Newsom delivered a speech condemning Trump's actions. It deserves to be viewed, in full, by all Americans. The video of the speech is here: Meidas Touch Network, Exclusive: Governor Newsom Addresses State and Nation.

The full text of the speech is here: Governor of California, Democracy at a Crossroads.

Governor Newsom addressed all of Trump's unlawful conduct over the last four months, saying in part:

Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there. Trump and his loyalists thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control. By the way, Trump – he’s not opposed to lawlessness and violence, as long as it serves HIM. What more evidence do we need than January 6th? I ask everyone to take the time to reflect on this perilous moment. A president who wants to be bound by no law or constitution. Perpetrating a unified assault on American traditions. This is a President who, in just over 140 days, has fired government watchdogs that could hold him accountable for corruption and fraud. He’s declared a war on culture, on history, on science – on knowledge itself. Databases, quite literally vanishing. He’s delegitimizing news organizations and assaulting the First Amendment. At the threat of defunding them, he’s dictating what universities can teach. Targeting law firms and the judicial branch that are the foundation of an orderly, civil society. [¶¶] Look, this isn’t just about protests in LA. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard, he made that order apply to every state in this nation. This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first – but it clearly won’t end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault right before our eyes – the moment we’ve feared has arrived. [¶¶] The founding fathers did not live and die to see this moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up. Justice Brandeis said it best: in a democracy, the most important office is not president, it’s certainly not governor. The most important office is office of citizen. At this moment, we must all stand up and be held to a higher level of accountability. If you exercise your First Amendment rights, please do so peacefully. I know many of you are feeling deep anxiety, stress, and fear. But I want you to know that YOU are the antidote to that fear and anxiety.

Governor Newsom spoke the truth in a powerful speech.1

As before, we must remain disciplined and focused on protesting Trump's unlawful actions. We must avoid blaming members of the US military and LAPD who have been thrust into a chaotic situation against their will.

Stay calm—but show up! Your democracy needs you!

Troops at Fort Bragg jeer Newsom and Biden during Trump speech

Trump gave a partisan speech at Fort Bragg on Tuesday in which he attacked Governor Newsom, Joe Biden, the news media, and Los Angeles. During the speech, members of the US military appeared to jeer and boo at the names of politicians, the media, and Los Angeles. See Raw Story, 'Boo!' Trump prompts Army troops to jeer news media and cheer Robert E. Lee.

As readers of this newsletter know, I have been steadfast in defending the loyalty and professionalism of troops in our all-volunteer military. But each of the military members who jeered and booed elected officials, the news media, and a US city violated the DoD Directive 1344.10, Guidance for Military Personnel, which states, in part,

Per longstanding DoD policy, active duty personnel may not engage in partisan political activities and all military personnel should avoid the inference that their political activities imply or appear to imply DoD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of a political candidate, campaign, or cause.

The commanders of Fort Bragg failed to maintain good military order by allowing troops under their command to participate in a partisan political rally that attacked Democratic officeholders and their former Commander-in-Chief. Allowing troops under their command to express partisan political viewpoints while in uniform is corrosive to public trust in the professionalism and neutrality of the military. The responsible commanders at Fort Bragg should resign or be disciplined for losing control of their troops.

As an aside, during Trump's speech, he announced that five military bases formerly named after Confederate traitors who killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers during the Civil War would have their original Confederate names restored.

But because Trump realized that re-naming the bases for Confederate generals was unacceptable even for his white supremacist agenda, Trump's minions located US soldiers who have the same names as the Confederate generals and then renamed the bases after those US soldiers. See Task & Purpose, Trump reverts 7 Army bases to former names with new honorees.

So, for example, the former “Fort Robert E. Lee” will be renamed “Fort Lee” “in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Black Buffalo Soldier, for his heroism during the Spanish-American War.”

The cynical ploy to rename military bases to honor Confederate traitors by using the names of real American heroes is despicable.

Concluding Thoughts

Many people are distraught over the events in Los Angeles because they feel we have no control over the situation. While it is true that we cannot control the actions of everyone—especially agitators intent on hijacking peaceful protests—it is not true that we are powerless. We can seize control of the narrative by ensuring that millions of Americans take to the streets on June 14—No Kings Day and Flag Day.

If millions of Americans protest peacefully against Trump's unlawful actions, the media will give primacy to “We, the people,” rather than to the malignant narcissist.

As Governor Newsom said, “You are the antidote to fear and anxiety . . . . In a democracy, the most important office is not president, it’s certainly not governor. The most important office is office of citizen.”

We need only to act in order to overcome our feelings of helplessness and anxiety—and to regain control of the political narrative. Indeed, Trump's actions are those of a leader who is frightened about his grip on power. By acting in unison, we will prevail. Together, there is nothing we cannot do.

Michael de Adder

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Will Trump start a war to distract from the Epstein files?

November 14, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

How worried is Trump about the potential release of the Epstein files?

It sure seems like Trump is planning to start a war with Venezuela to distract attention from the release of the Epstein files.

Before addressing the facts supporting that inference, let’s pause here to reflect on the fact that Trump has converted the executive branch into a corrupt enterprise whose sole purpose is to protect and enrich the president.

Sex scandal that needs covering up? Send in the DOJ to conduct a sham interview with the key co-conspirator in the sex trafficking ring. Impending release of potentially incriminating files? Ask the military to start an illegal war. Short on funds? Launch a cryptocurrency through the Trump family business and incentivize purchases by granting a presidential pardon to a convicted felon whose company facilitated a $2 billion purchase of the Trump-affiliated cryptocurrency.

So, while we should not be surprised that Trump would start an illegal war to create political cover for a sex scandal, we should be outraged that Trump has turned the federal government into a “long con” in which the American people are the “mark.” The reprehensible situation is made worse by the fact that it could not happen without the cowardly acquiescence of the Republican Party.

We need to vote out every single GOP officeholder who has provided aid, comfort, lies, and disinformation to perpetuate the corrupt enterprise that masquerades as the second term of Donald Trump.

The good news is that Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republican voters demonstrated on Tuesday, November 4, that Americans are fed up and ready to reassert control over the government. The end of Trump’s “government as grift” has an expiration date, so long as we stay the course.

It sure sounds like Trump will start a war to distract from the Epstein files

On Thursday, as Trump and JD Vance maintained a stony silence about the Epstein scandal, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spent the day posting on social media about “Operation Southern Spear,” a euphemism for land strikes against drug cartels in Venezuela. See The Hill, Pete Hegseth announces operation ‘Southern Spear’ to quash ‘narco-terrorists’ .

Per The Hill,

Hegseth said the mission is being led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) to defend the “Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people.” “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood – and we will protect it,” he wrote on social media.

Although Operation Southern Spear has been in the works since January 2025, Hegseth and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs briefed Trump on Wednesday about military options for attacking Venezuela—the very day the discharge petition obtained the last signature necessary to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Per The Hill,

The announcement comes as Hegseth, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine and other senior military leaders reportedly briefed President Trump on Wednesday at the White House regarding military options for the region, including potential land strikes against Venezuela.

If the US military kills residents of Venezuela for the uncharged criminal offense of distributing illegal drugs, that will be a continuation of an unlawful use of military force against non-combatant civilians.

As explained below, many experts believe such use of force against civilians is both murder and a war crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and applicable international treaties and norms.

The NYTimes reported on Thursday about the still-secret internal memo that purportedly justifies the use of military force against alleged drug smugglers. I describe the memo in more detail below, but it essentially says, “Trump says that members of drug cartels are engaged in a war against the US, so the military can kill them.”

Of course, what “Trump says” is not legally or factually binding. Whether cartel members are engaged in an armed conflict against the US is a question of fact and law that will be determined by judges, courts-martial, and international courts.

But let’s get real. No one believes that Venezuelan drug cartels are engaged in armed conflict against the US. The rationale is a sham, and anyone who relies on it risks criminal and military prosecution for killing non-combatant civilians. See NYTimes, Memo Blessing Boat Strikes Is Said to Rely on Trump’s Claims About Cartels. (Accessible to all.)

Per the Times,

[The memo said] extrajudicial killings of people suspected of running drugs were lawful as a matter of Mr. Trump’s wartime powers. In reaching that conclusion, the memo contradicts a broad range of critics, who have rejected the idea that there is any armed conflict and have accused Mr. Trump of illegally ordering the military to commit murders.

An analysis in The Independent is more direct in rejecting the legitimacy of the memo. See The Independent, ‘Just following orders’? Experts doubt legal memo shields troops from prosecution over Trump’s boat strikes.

Per The Independent, quoting expert Brian Finucane,

“The term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is murder,” said Brian Finucane, senior adviser with the International Crisis Group, a conflict policy nonprofit.

Although the memo claims that people relying on the memo would be covered by “combat immunity” for killing civilians, The Independent notes that such legal reasoning would protect military personnel only during the current administration. “A future [Office of Legal Counsel] or a federal judge could . . . find that this practice is illegal.”

An attack on Venezuela’s sovereign territory to kill civilians would be an unprovoked act of war and (as explained above) likely murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act is scheduled for next week, which may define the timeframe for Trump’s “war of distraction.”

While it may be audacious to predict that Trump will start a war to create a diversion, who could have believed that Trump would order the House of Representatives to shut down for 40 days to prevent a vote on the discharge petition?

I dearly hope that I am wrong about Trump’s war plans. But Hegseth’s public statements and Trump’s meetings with military leaders are worrisome, at least. If war happens, all Americans should condemn the perversion of the US military into a political diversion for a sex scandal (and potential crimes) involving the president.

DOJ intervenes in suit by California Republicans to invalidate Prop 50 redistricting

The Trump administration is officially regretting its attempt to call for mid-census redistricting to give Trump more “safe” Republican districts in the 2026 midterms. On Thursday, the administration joined a lawsuit by California Republicans to invalidate the passage of California’s redistricting initiative, Proposition 50. See The Guardian, US justice department joins lawsuit to block California’s new electoral map.

Giving new meaning to the definition of hypocrisy, Attorney General Pam Bondi said,

California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process. Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.

Of course, California allowed the people of the state to vote on the initiative, unlike Texas, which created gerrymandered congressional districts through a gerrymandered state legislature. Moreover, California’s effort is specifically designed to combat Trump’s effort to “entrench one-party rule” in Congress.

The DOJ’s effort comes as Trump’s effort to rig the 2026 election is encountering obstacles in multiple states. See Talking Points Memo, Trump Admin’s Nationwide Gerrymandering Assault Faces Setbacks, noting that efforts in Utah, Kansas, and Indiana have stalled.

Moreover, the wide margins of victory on November 4 and shifts in support for Trump among independents, Latinos, and young voters suggest that the newly created “safe” Republican seats in Texas may be vulnerable to being flipped by Democrats in 2026.

Trump is in a downward spiral; virtually every new action creates new controversy and unhappiness among some portion of the electorate. Starting a war in Venezuela will not boost support for Trump, nor will his veto of the Epstein Transparency Act bill if it passes in Congress.

Trump may have been better off leaving the Texas congressional districts as they were. Let’s do our best to make certain that Trump regrets his decision to encourage partisan gerrymandering.

Speaking of regret, Todd Blanche is now regretting his sham interview with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Former Trump lawyer (and current Deputy Attorney General), Todd Blanche, engineered a sham interview of Ghislaine Maxwell. The interview was designed to elicit answers exonerating Trump from wrongdoing in the Epstein sex trafficking ring.

The transcript of the interview reveals that Blanche led Maxwell to make exonerating statements, while failing to challenge Maxwell’s statements with publicly available evidence or statements that contradicted her story.

The emails released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday contradicted Ghislaine’s “staged managed” answers in several key respects. When George Conway noted that fact on social media, Todd Blanche attempted to defend his softball interview by claiming that the emails were “hidden” by the Epstein estate at the time he conducted his interview with Maxwell. See Raw Story, Todd Blanche buried for ‘huge admission’ on Ghislaine Maxwell: ‘Charge her if she lied’.

Blanche posted in reply,

When I interviewed Maxwell, law enforcement didn’t have the materials Epstein’s estate hid for years and only just provided to Congress.

Pathetic! Of course, the emails were not “hidden” by the Epstein estate. They were available to anyone with the ability to sign a subpoena and the intelligence to assume that the Epstein estate would have Epstein’s personal emails.

Apparently, Todd Blanche had neither the ability to sign a subpoena nor the intelligence to figure out that Epstein’s estate would have his emails.

Todd Blanche is going to be pressured to redo his interview with Maxwell with the emails in hand to determine if she lied to Blanche. If she did, Maxwell committed a felony. See US Criminal Code Section 1001. (Providing a five-year prison term for willfully making a materially false statement in any investigation by the executive branch.)

It appears that US Attorney Lindsey Halligan may be disqualified

James Comey and Letitia James have filed a motion to dismiss their respective indictments on the grounds that Acting US Attorney Lindsey Halligan was not legally appointed to her position. The arguments are technical and the evidence complicated, but at the hearing on Thursday, it appears that the judge assigned to the matter has serious doubts about Halligan’s appointment. See David Kurtz in Talking Points Memo, Pam Bondi Takes a Beating in Court Over Lindsey Halligan.

Per David Kurtz,

The top line was pretty straightforward: [Judge] Currie gave no indication that she thinks Halligan was lawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney. None, zero, zilch. But it wasn’t at all clear what Currie will do about it now. Almost all of her questions were either skeptical or challenging of the Trump administration’s position. None of her questions seriously challenged either defendant [James Comey or Letitia James].

If the judge determines that Halligan was not properly appointed, it may not be possible to re-indict James Comey (due to the statute of limitations). It is possible that Letitia James may be re-indicted, or not. Either way, the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice is hitting the brick wall of incompetence of Trump’s appointees.

Concluding Thoughts

Well, that was some week! (And we don’t yet know if we will add “Trump starts war with Venezuela” to this week’s list of unbelievable events.)

The week began with grassroots activists reeling from the sudden capitulation by eight Democrats, which ended the shutdown in exchange for an illusory promise. For forty-eight hours, the nation's focus was on Democratic disunity.

And then we were reminded that the current president was described by a sex trafficker as his “best friend” for more than a decade when the illegal sex trafficking was transpiring. As usual, the Trump administration’s response only fueled suspicions of corruption, criminality, and a cover-up. And just like that, Trump’s depravity was once again the lead story.

As I noted yesterday, if a sex scandal involving the trafficking of young women and girls is what effectively ends Trump’s presidency, we should be grateful. But his use of the military to attack non-combatant civilians and his use of the DOJ to persecute his political “enemies” raise grave constitutional issues justifying impeachment, conviction, and removal. Meanwhile, the economy appears to be faltering—a fact that is difficult to prove because the Trump administration is not producing monthly reports on jobs and inflation.

Is there a lesson in the torrent of the week’s events? Yes! It is that we must remain steadfast even during the darkest moments. Trump sits atop an unstable perch of improbability and fortunate circumstance. He is vulnerable to those who remain vigilant and strong. We must not waver or give up, even when facing temporary setbacks. We will win in the end; it is just a question of time.

Michael de Adder :: Check out his Substack: https://deadder.substack.com/

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March 20, 2026 (Friday)

52% of Americans believe Donald Trump launched the war on Iran at least in part to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Only 26% of Republicans agree.

Which means 74% of the president’s own party looked at everything happening at once and decided there was no connection. That is a statement about what people are willing to see.

The war began on February 28. Day 21 is today. No congressional vote preceded it. No declaration. No stated endgame. No exit. The Pentagon asked for two hundred billion dollars more yesterday, and Pete Hegseth stood at the podium and said it plainly: it takes money to kill bad guys. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor had a daughter in fourth grade and a son in his senior year of high school, and she had been set to come home soon. She died on day two.

Thirteen Americans in total have died. Fourteen hundred and forty-four in Iran. Nine hundred and sixty-eight in Lebanon. More than one million Lebanese displaced from their homes in three weeks. Twelve billion dollars spent. The debt cleared $39 trillion. The market was steady. The bombs were still falling.

74%.

She was not 13 anymore. She had not been 13 for a long time. But in the files she was still 13, still sitting across from FBI agents describing what had happened to her at a private club in Palm Beach, in a room with two men — one of whom owned the island, and one of whom she named. She told the agents what he did. She told them in the specific, clinical language that victims learn to use when they have to say the unsayable to strangers writing it down. What she described was not an encounter. It was an assault. A child defending her own body the only way she could. The agents wrote it down. They interviewed her four times.

They sent her testimony to the Washington office for follow-up. They included her name in a slide deck of prominent names. They marked her account credible enough to pursue. Then the files were removed from the public database. Then republished. Then called mistakenly duplicative. The Justice Department has released 3.5 million pages. Six million were identified as relevant. The rest remain sealed.

Two days ago, Representative Dan Goldman stood on the House floor and held up a document the Justice Department had blacked out in its public release. Unredacted, it showed that Trump’s own attorney had confirmed, in 2009, that Epstein was never asked to leave Mar-a-Lago. He was not a member. He may have been a guest. The White House story — that Trump threw him out for being a creep — was a lie. The attorney general told Congress Trump was not in the files. That was also a lie. The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed her for April 14.

Two things happened two days ago. The Pentagon asked for two hundred billion dollars. A congressman held up proof that the president had been lying for twenty-five years.

52% of Americans drew a line between them. The other 74% of his party were looking at the war.

Three days after confessing to the Monica Lewinsky affair on national television — a sexual scandal, a lie sustained for months, a presidency hanging — Bill Clinton announced airstrikes on Sudan and Afghanistan. A journalist asked the Secretary of Defense if he had seen Wag the Dog, the film already in theaters about a White House that fabricates a war to cover a president’s sexual scandal with a young girl. The Secretary said the only goal was the absolute obligation to protect the American people.

Nobody could prove otherwise. What the public had was the timing, the pattern, and a question they could not dismiss.

Shakespeare had named the move four hundred years earlier. Henry IV, dying, advises his son on how to hold power when the people grow restless: “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days.”

The instruction manual for power. Written in 1600. Still in use.

The distraction always costs more than the scandal it was meant to bury. Henry V invaded France. Thousands died in a field so a king could make people forget his father murdered the rightful king to take the throne — and question whether the son who inherited stolen power had any right to it at all. They still teach it as glory.

Nobody remembers what it buried.

Decades before Epstein, the FBI’s own Behavioral Science Unit built the science to catch exactly these men.

They documented what the organized offender becomes. He does not announce himself. He does not arrive ugly or strange. He arrives charming, deliberate, patient, outwardly amiable for as long as it suits his objectives. He learns what rooms to enter. He learns what faces to wear. Those who encountered him could seldom afterward describe exactly what he said, only that it seemed reasonable, only that the room felt safe. He accumulates access the way others accumulate debt, quietly, until the interest comes due for everyone but him. He moves through the world as though it exists to accommodate him.

The Bureau built this science so that institutions would stop protecting these men. So that the attorney saying the cost is too high, the official saying there is insufficient evidence, so that all of them would have to answer to a framework built from the victims up.

Kash Patel now runs the FBI — the man who said on tape the Epstein list had not been released because of who’s on it, and then became the man keeping it sealed. Pam Bondi runs the Justice Department — the same Pam Bondi who received a $25,000 donation from Trump’s foundation while her office was deciding whether to investigate him, and declined. The same institution that built the science to catch exactly these men is now coordinating to bury the evidence against one.

She was still in the files.

Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon podium on day 21, after asking Congress for two hundred billion dollars more, and said it plainly: it takes money to kill bad guys.

That is what impunity sounds like when it no longer needs a disguise.

The bombs and the buried files are not in tension. They are the same statement made in two registers. One says she does not matter. The other says there is nothing you can do about it.

To the 74% who looked at everything happening that same week and decided there was no connection — they know Trump appears in those files more than 38,000 times. More than God appears in the Bible. They know their grandmother told them you are who you hang with. They know all of this.

And they have decided it means nothing.

How does power announce its priorities? Through what it buries and what it funds, through who gets protected and who gets prosecuted, through which files get marked duplicative and which wars get launched the week the dam breaks.

Institutions do not hide the truth because it is false. They hide it because it is true. The files are not sealed because the allegations are baseless. They are sealed because the agents who reviewed them marked them credible enough to pursue. A society reveals itself not in what it celebrates but in what it cannot afford to look at directly. And what a country does to its most vulnerable is what it is. Not what it says it is. Not what it prints on its monuments. What it does when a 13-year-old girl sits across from FBI agents and describes what happened to her — and the files disappear, and the attorney general lies, and the bombs start falling — that is what it is.

In her final FBI interview, conducted in 2019, the woman was asked whether she would provide more information about Trump. She had given four interviews over two years. She had described what happened when she was thirteen. She had watched the investigation go quiet during his first presidency.

She asked the agent what the point would be when there was a strong possibility nothing could be done about it.

She already knew.

The war is on day 21. Fourteen hundred and forty-four are dead in Iran. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor’s daughter is in fourth grade and her mother is not coming home. Dan Goldman stood on the House floor two days ago and held up the document they buried. The files are still sealed. Patel has the keys. Bondi has the subpoena date.

52% of Americans looked at the timing and drew the line.

74% of the president’s own party did not.

Michael de Adder :: @deAdder :: The Globe and Mail

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 12, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 13, 2026

In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers, and miners, President Donald J. Trump was presented with a trophy that calls him “the undisputed champion of beautiful, clean coal.” At the event, Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to buy billions of dollars of power produced by coal and decried “the Radical Left’s war on the industry.” Anna Betts of The Guardian noted that Trump also announced the Department of Energy will spend $175 million to “modernize, retrofit, and extend” the life of coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky.

As Lisa Friedman pointed out in the New York Times last month, the United States has been the largest polluter since the start of the industrial era, but emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, have been declining since 2007. Trump maintains that climate change is a “hoax” and has withdrawn the U.S. from the main global climate treaty. Since he took office in January 2025, U.S. emissions have increased 1.9% largely because of the renewed use of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked the scientific finding that has been the basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants since 2009. That finding, called the endangerment finding, reflects the consensus of scientists that greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas endanger the health and general welfare of the American people.

The Trump administration says scientists are wrong about the dangers of climate change and that the regulations hurt industry and slow the economy. It claims ending the rule will save Americans $1.3 trillion, primarily through cheaper cars and trucks, but it did not factor in the costs of extreme weather caused by climate change or the costs of pollution-related health issues.

Last year, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post reported that at a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, then-candidate Trump told oil executives they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. In exchange, Trump promised he would get rid of Biden-era regulations and make sure no more such regulations went into effect, in addition to lowering taxes. Trump told them $1 billion would be a “deal,” considering how much money they would make if he were in the White House.

Tyler Pager and Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times reported on Tuesday that Trump’s threats to stop the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, came just hours after billionaire Matthew Moroun, whose family operates a competing bridge, called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Moroun has tried to stop the construction of the new bridge for decades.

The $4.7 billion construction cost of the Gordie Howe bridge has been fully funded by Canada although the bridge is partly owned by Michigan and will be operated jointly by Canada and Michigan. The new bridge will compete with the Ambassador Bridge—the one the Moroun family operates—for about $300 million in trade crossing the border daily.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “This is just another example of President Trump putting America’s interest first.”

This afternoon, Dustin Volz, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that the whistleblower complaint of last May involved another country’s interception of a conversation between two foreign nationals who were discussing Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, issues related to Iran, and perhaps other issues. Kushner runs Affinity Partners, an investment fund that has taken billions of dollars in funds from Arab monarchies. He does not have an official role in the U.S. government but appears to be acting in foreign affairs as a volunteer.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of the whistleblower complaint on February 2, 2026, reporting that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had bottled it up for political reasons, taking it not to Congress but to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. On February 3, Gabbard released a highly redacted version of the complaint to the Gang of Eight, the top member of each party in the House and Senate and the top member of each party on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

It may or may not be related that in early April 2025, the administration abruptly fired National Security Agency director General Timothy Haugh and his deputy, hours after dismissing several staffers at the National Security Council. At the time, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, posted on social media that Haugh and his deputy “have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired.”

In Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall has been exploring the contours of what he calls the Authoritarian International, which he identifies as “a host of authoritarian governments around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European right-ravanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley (which accounts for a larger and larger percentage of the top owners if not the larger community), the Israeli private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs and, increasingly, the world’s billionaire class.”

Marshall notes that those in this world are not just antidemocratic. They are constructing a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing national interest with individual financial interest. The model operates in part by maintaining control over key figures thanks to compromising material on them. Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone else.

Marshall’s description dovetails neatly with former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller’s 2011 explanation of the evolving organized crime threat. Organized crime had become multinational, he said, “making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement [and] cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.” He explained: “These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

To protect this system, transparency must be prevented at all costs.

The administration seems to be illustrating this principle as it denies the right and duty of Congress to conduct oversight of the government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has refused to release all the Epstein files to the public as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Yesterday Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, but it was clear she was not there to answer lawmakers’ questions or explain why she had not released the files.

Nor did she acknowledge the survivors of Epstein’s sexual assaults and sex trafficking, many of whom were in the audience and noted that she had not met with them. When Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) urged her to apologize to the survivors for the sloppiness of the release that had left many survivors’s names, identifying information, and even sexually explicit photos unredacted while covering the names of perpetrators, Bondi accused Jayapal of theatrics and, as Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported, of dragging the hearing “into the gutter.”

Instead, she came prepared with a book of insults to aim at Democrats and met questions with attacks on the questioners and praise for Trump. Republican Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has been instrumental in pressuring the White House over the Epstein files, posted on social media: “A funny thing about Bondi’s insults to members of Congress who had serious questions: Staff literally gave her flash cards with individualized insults, but she couldn’t memorize them, so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member.”

Bondi was not only stonewalling but also demonstrating the tactics of authoritarian power, turning her own shortcomings into an attack on those trying to enforce rules. Even more ominously, Kent Nishimura of Reuters captured a photograph of a page of the book with a printout titled: “Jayapal Pramila Search History.” It appeared to be the files Representative Jayapal accessed after the DOJ made some of the Epstein files available at DOJ offices earlier this week.

This is a shocking intrusion of the executive branch into surveilling members of the legislative branch and weaponizing that information. The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said he will ask for an investigation of this “outrageous abuse of power.”

Bondi’s performance drew widespread condemnation from outside the administration, and even Republicans seemed to realize she was toxic: Scott MacFarlane of CBS News noted that in the committee hearing, Republicans didn’t use all their time to question her but simply yielded their time allotted to ask questions back to the committee.

But Bondi appeared to be playing to Trump, as she made clear when she veered into the bizarre claim that what the committee should be talking about was not the Epstein files but rather the booming stock market. Last month, Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was complaining to aides that Bondi is weak and ineffective. Yesterday’s performance pleased him.

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “AG Pam Bondi, under intense fire from the Trump Deranged Radical Left Lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday’s Hearing on the never ending saga of Jeffrey Epstein, where the one thing that has been proven conclusively, much to their chagrin, was that President Donald J. Trump has been 100% exonerated of their ridiculous Russia, Russia, Russia type charges…. Nobody cared about Epstein when he was alive, they only cared about him when they thought he could create Political Harm to a very popular President who has brought our Country back from the brink of extinction, and very quickly, at that!”

An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree with the statement “There are powerful elites who helped Epstein target and abuse young girls. They protected him and need to be investigated.” Only 3% of American adults disagree. Fifty percent of American adults think Trump “was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Jeffrey Epstein,” while only 29% think he wasn’t.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Michael de Adder :: @deAdder :: The Globe and Mail

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Mikhail Iossel 

In a matter of a few short weeks, Trump's putrid regime has managed effectively to turn America into Russia.