Despite a bunch of Republican lawmakers being extremely (and mostly performatively) upset that their communications were accessed during investigations of the January 2021 insurrection attempt, the current version of the Trump administration seems to prefer a clean re-authorization of the surveillance powers it so recently deemed a dangerous part of the “deep state.”
The FISA court recently blessed an extension of this NSA collection, provided the government fixed the most problematic parts of it — that being other IC agencies’ warrantless access to US persons’ communications via “backdoor” searches of the foreign-facing surveillance dragnet.
Trump was having none of this, pressing the GOP to simply give the administration an un-reformed, un-repaired Section 702 that would presumably allow it to engage in the same abuses it was crying about less than a half-decade ago.
Fortunately for every American only allowed to vote by proxy every two-to-four years for surveillance reform, there is still no clean re-authorization on the books. The senator whose name is synonymous with surveillance reform — Ron Wyden — recently had this to say in his Bluesky post:
Update on where things stand on FISA: this deal is a win. We got the House to back down from an 18 month extension, buying us time to negotiate on real reforms. I'll be fighting like hell for reforms that put your privacy first, and will have more to share soon.
Update on where things stand on FISA: this deal is a win. We got the House to back down from an 18 month extension, buying us time to negotiate on real reforms. I’ll be fighting like hell for reforms that put your privacy first, and will have more to share soon.
Not that congressional majority leader Mike Johnson wasn’t trying his damnedest to round up GOP support for a clean renewal that would give Trump what he wanted, and very little of what the GOP actually wanted, given its years of complaining about the FBI’s warrantless access to their communications.
Johnson’s dazzling play to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by five years ended in an excruciating defeat, as the bill failed after 20 Republicans joined Democrats in striking it down. One major reason it lost was that the warrant language baked into that measure not only would have codified existing law, but also would have made it easier for Section 702–acquired data to be used against Americans in criminal proceedings.
The 200-220 vote was called at 1:22 early Friday morning.
Baratta’s report refers to this as an “eleventh hour” burst of activity, but it’s actually well past that hour. We’re looking at 13th to 14th hour desperation here, especially since Johnson went back to the well again shortly after this first defeat.
The other shoe dropped during the vote on a rule to consider a clean 18-month extension of Section 702. That rule also failed at 2:07 a.m. in a 197-228 vote.
Given that the average congressional rep is pushing 58, both votes occurred well after bedtime. It’s a testimony to the resistance to clean re-authorization of Section 702 powers that these many reps were still on the floor to shut down Mike Johnson twice.
It also shows that Mike Johnson isn’t actually leading the Republican party. He’s restricted to doing whatever Trump wants, even if that clashes with what many party members want. To get skunked twice in two hours is embarrassing, which means Johnson may not remain majority leader for long, even if Democrats can’t flip the House following the mid-terms.
The good news is this: Congress only has until the end of this month to get a re-authorization passed. If it hopes to prevent this surveillance power from lapsing, Johnson and his fellow surveillance hawks are going to have to make some concessions, which may (finally!) include warrant requirements for searches of US persons’ communications by IC agencies with access to NSA collections.
On the other hand, when push comes to shove, far too many Republicans are willing to be Trump’s doormat and argue against their own interests, along with the interests of the constituents. But this is the most concerted challenge to Section 702 mounted yet. Even the Snowden leaks didn’t manage to get this done. But even if reforms are finally put in place, the public should remember GOP lawmakers did this because they want to shield themselves from domestic surveillance. That it might better protect their constituents is just an unavoidable side effect of their self-interest.
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For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of that mattered to the MAGA ecosystem, of course, which continued to treat a handful of out-of-context sternly worded emails from Biden officials as the greatest censorship regime in American history.
Then the Trump administration came in, and a funny thing happened. The same people who’d built entire careers around the supposed horrors of government pressure on tech platforms suddenly had nothing to say when the Attorney General of the United States went on Fox News to brag — brag! — about demanding Apple remove an app and Facebook take down a group, both because their content was critical of ICE enforcement.
On Friday, Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois granted a preliminary injunction against DOJ and DHS, finding that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the government violated the First Amendment by coercing Facebook and Apple into suppressing protected speech. The ruling is short and direct in an almost embarrassingly straightforward way — largely because Pam Bondi and the rest of the government handed the plaintiffs most of their case on a silver platter, then held press conferences to make sure everyone knew about it.
We covered the DOJ’s demands on Apple back in October and FIRE’s subsequent lawsuit in February. As we explained then, the case seemed quite straightforward, and now the district court has agreed.
The plaintiffs are Kassandra Rosado, who ran a Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland” with nearly 100,000 members, and Kreisau Group, which made a phone app called “Eyes Up” for documenting ICE enforcement activity. Both services existed well before the government got involved. Both had been reviewed by the platforms and found compliant with their respective policies. In fact, as the ruling notes regarding the Facebook group:
Prior to October 14, out of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments made in the Chicagoland Facebook group, Facebook’s moderators found and removed only five posts and comments that purportedly violated Facebook’s guidelines. … When Facebook removed those posts, Facebook advised Rosado that the posts were “participant violations” that “don’t hurt your group” and that “groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”
Then Laura Loomer — a person whose entire public identity was built around suing Facebook and other tech companies for moderating her own posts, and who once argued that content moderation was literal RICO — tagged Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem in a social media post demanding they do something about the Chicagoland group. Because apparently the First Amendment only constrains Meta when Loomer herself is being moderated; when she wants other people silenced, she calls in the actual federal government.
Two days later, Facebook disabled the group. That same day, Bondi posted this to X:
Today following outreach from [the DOJ], Facebook removed a large group that was being used to dox and target [ICE] agents in Chicago.
Noem followed up with her own X post taking credit for the DOJ’s “leadership” in getting Facebook to act, adding the observation that:
Platforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our [ICE] law enforcement. … We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.
On the Apple side, Bondi went even further, telling Fox News Digital directly:
We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so.
A few days later, she added that “we had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps” and — in a sentence that should probably be framed and hung in every law school’s First Amendment classroom — followed it with: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.”
Apple promptly removed Eyes Up too, informing the developer that “law enforcement” had provided “information” indicating the app violated Apple’s guideline against “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” — the same guideline Apple had independently reviewed the app under just two months earlier, when it found no such problem.
The legal framework here is familiar territory for Techdirt readers. Bantam Books v. Sullivan from 1963 established that “thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings” against parties who don’t come around to the government’s preferred speech outcomes violate the First Amendment. 2024’s NRA v. Vullo reaffirmed and sharpened that principle, holding that “[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” The test, per Vullo, is whether government conduct, “viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff’s speech.”
That’s what was missing in the Murthy case — but was clearly present in Vullo. And here.
Judge Alonso applies this framework step-by-step. On causation — the element the Murthy plaintiffs famously failed on — he identifies three facts that, taken together, make it overwhelmingly likely the injuries trace to government coercion rather than independent platform judgment:
First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content.
Unlike in Murthy, where it was all vague speculation disconnected from reality, the causal chain here is pretty clear, helped along by a Trump administration that simply can’t resist bragging about suppressing the rights of Americans.
Bondi and Noem’s inability to resist a Fox News hit really made this case super easy. In Murthy, the Supreme Court found that plaintiffs couldn’t even establish the Biden administration had caused the content moderation decisions they were complaining about, because platforms had their own independent reasons for their policies and had often rejected government requests outright. Here, the government has publicly, repeatedly, and proudly announced that it caused the removals.
On the coercion analysis itself, Alonso walks through the Seventh Circuit’s Backpage.com v. Dart framework, noting that government officials don’t even need direct regulatory authority over the target to cross the line. What matters is “the distinction between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce.” And here, the court finds, Bondi and Noem demanded rather than requested, and made clear there would be consequences for non-compliance:
Bondi and Noem also intimated that Facebook and Apple may be subject to prosecution for failing to comply with Bondi and Noem’s demands. For example, after stating that we “had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps,” Bondi further stated: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.” … And in the same social media post where Noem wrote that “[p]latforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our [ICE] law enforcement,” she added: “We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.” … Although these statements may not be direct threats to prosecute Facebook and Apple, they are intimations of a threat. And thinly veiled threats such as these constitute sufficient evidence on which Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim.
The quote from Bondi about not stopping “at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets,” paired with her public announcement that she’d forced Apple’s hand, is about as textbook a Bantam Books fact pattern as you’re going to find. The Supreme Court’s warning in 1963 was that “[p]eople do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” Sixty-three years later, here is the Attorney General of the United States describing the process of coming around, and taking credit for it.
Of course, as you know, Bondi was fired by Trump earlier this month for insufficient commitment to his vindictive fantasies, and Noem has also been replaced. Both are automatically substituted out in the litigation under Rule 25(d) for their successors, Todd Blanche and Markwayne Mullin. The people who orchestrated the censorship may be out of power, but it’s not like their replacements are any less likely to violate the free expression rights of Americans. This injunction binds these replacement-level cabinet members all the same.
But still, in all of this, it’s astounding that we’ve heard nothing from the vocal crew who insisted the Murthy case was the quintessential example of American government censorship. The same people who were trumpeting a faux settlement in that case just weeks ago seem to have zero to say about a court finding actual censorship here.
For years, the people who built entire media careers around the supposed Biden jawboning scandal insisted — against all available evidence — that private platforms making their own moderation decisions after receiving polite feedback from the government constituted the greatest assault on free speech in American history. They refused to accept the distinction between persuasion and coercion, dismissed every platform executive who explained that moderation decisions were independent, and treated the Supreme Court’s rejection of their standing arguments in Murthy as a miscarriage of justice rather than an accurate assessment of what the evidence actually showed.
And now, confronted with an actual, documented, judicially confirmed case of government coercion — where the Attorney General literally said the word “demanding” in a Fox News interview, where the Secretary of Homeland Security publicly warned platforms they “must be PROACTIVE” and threatened prosecution, where a federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction applying the exact legal framework they claimed to care about — the response from the usual suspects has been… crickets.
Turns out they didn’t actually care about jawboning as a principle — they just cared which way the pressure was pointed. They didn’t want government neutrality about platform moderation decisions; they wanted government pressure in their preferred direction. The First Amendment, in their functional view, prohibits making life difficult for people they like and permits — encourages, even — making life difficult for people they don’t. And sure, they’ll claim this censorship was justified because it was “necessary” to “protect ICE from harm.” But that’s not how the First Amendment works, it’s wrong as a principle, and — perhaps most importantly — that same logic would have applied to the censorship they (falsely) claimed was happening under Biden regarding COVID information, which was also, in theory, done to protect American lives.
Alonso’s ruling is a reminder that the First Amendment doesn’t care about your political team. Bantam Books and Vullo don’t have political valences. Bantam Books was an 8-1 decision. Vullo was 9-0. Coercing platforms to remove speech the government disfavors is unconstitutional regardless of which administration is doing the coercing and regardless of whether the speech in question is popular with any particular political faction. But you have to actually show the coercion! A court applying the law honestly to the facts here couldn’t reach any other conclusion, because Bondi and Noem made the facts unmissable. They said the quiet part loud, on camera, to Fox News, in tweets they pinned to their profiles.
The supposedly monumental Missouri case had none of that — which is exactly why the Supreme Court rejected it. And yet it’s still held up by many as some sort of evidence of censorship, by the very same people who seem to have zero interest in this far more direct and documented example.
The takeaway is simple: if you spent five years insisting that jawboning is a grave constitutional offense, you don’t get to cheer when your team does the exact same thing. Or, well — you can, but the rest of us are going to notice. And maybe say something about it.
Everyone else gets to file this ruling away for the next time someone starts ranting about Murthy. This is what the law actually looks like when the facts are there. And the facts, in this case, were provided by the government itself, free of charge, on national television.
Late last month we noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.
Netgear is the first out of the gate to announce they’ve struck a deal with the FCC, but they’re curiously refusing to say what exactly was required to get Trump FCC approval. Actual security improvements? Backdoors for domestic surveillance? Cash payouts? Nobody knows!
“Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”
The Netgear FAQ is equally ambiguous about what the company had to do to win the Trump administration’s favor. The email I received about the approval promises that this somehow improved consumer security, but there’s zero indication anywhere as to how:
“We’re pleased to share that NETGEAR is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a trusted consumer router company. We hope this recognition gives you added peace of mind — knowing that the network powering your home meets rigorous standards.”
As you’re probably aware by now, neither Trump nor Carr ever really do anything that’s just authentically in the public interest, even on cybersecurity. Everything is always transactional.
The vast majority of the duo’s actions to date have made the United States significantly less secure, whether it’s the firing of officials responsible for online election security, or their blanket and mindless “deregulation” of a U.S. telecom sector that was just the target of one of the worst cybersecurity incidents in U.S. history (in large part because it failed to change default router admin passwords).
The original Trump FCC “router ban” also included rhetoric claiming that foreign router manufacturers would have to provide “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States,” but there’s absolutely zero indication Netgear has done anything of the sort, either in their public statements or their required alerts sent to investors.
Great stuff! Super transparent and not at all dodgy.
If you look around the web, the vast majority of U.S. media outlets covering this “router ban” operate from the belief that this is a good faith effort to improve cybersecurity and that Trump regulators are reliable narrators, and every shred of evidence to date suggests that’s a terrible assumption for a journalist (or anyone else) to make.
They approached our people observing schools during morning and afternoon drop offs, pretending to be locals. We saw through them.
They staged next to Liam’s school just to be intimidating. They staged at my kid’s school.
These fucking ICE roared through the back alleys of family neighborhoods at 50mph with garages less than 6 inches on either side of their giant rented SUV mirrors, which had stolen license plates on them. They did this to try to lose observers.
They terrorized Roosevelt school after Renee was shot, just to assert dominance after the shooting in the neighborhood.
Fuck ICE. Charge me you assholes. See you in court where I tell the stories of how ICE agents have threatened, beaten and harassed my neighbors and I. The stories of how they cried in their coffees each morning because their feelings were hurt everyone hated their NAZI bullshit.
Mike, I wonder if Ken White would take the case if I managed to be perp-walked with middle fingers akimbo?
Fuck ICE. Fuck this ethnic cleansing and flex of power in defense of ethnic cleansing.
Which experts? Have you actually educated yourself on what happened and when?
This is the sequence of events: 1. Hunter Biden (unverified) drops off a laptop for repair 2. No one comes to pick up the laptop for months 3. The owner of the repair shop starts tinkering with the laptop and pieces together a copy of the hard drive 4. The owner peruses the content, then tries to fob it off to various republicans 5. The owner also sends a copy to the FBI 6. A copy of the drive is passed around among Republicans and gets altered and modified several times 7. It finally ends up with Rudy Giuliani who sends a copy to the New York Post 8. NYP posts a story about the contents but no one at the paper wants to put their name on the byline 9. Links to the NYP story is posted on social media 10. Some links to the story is then removed on social media under the rule “hacked material” 11. A bunch of butthurt idiots scream censorship because surfing to the NYP article is impossible, only links on social media can work! 12. Social media companies walk back the decision to remove links. 13. After a lot wailing and gnashing copies of the drive eventually ends up with people that has knowledge of computer forensics 14. All examinations of the copies say some of the content appear to be authentic but there are signs of tampering and other content added, but no one can determine if the drive actually comes from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden 15. Mac Isaac, the repair shop owner, finally approaches CBS News with a “clean copy” because he didn’t like lies being flung around about the “Hunter Biden Laptop”. This drive is examined by a reputable third party which determines that the drive in all likelihood comes from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden 16. That’s it.
So these 51 experts you mentioned, did they examine the clean copy or the tampered copies?
“Hundreds of doctors and scientists wrote that covid obviously came from bats in a wet market“
No, what most said was that the virus in all likelihood came from bats that spread it to other animals which in turn ended up in the wet market. Do you understand the concept of zoonotic spillover and how bats are often carriers of very nasty viruses.
“But lol, no one cares about “letters from experts”. They probably never did, but they SURE AF don’t now.“
Willful stupidity is ignoring what knowledgeable people say. The right course of action is to listen, then actually determine if what they say is correct which may require people to learn new things that can contradict their beliefs. The latter makes the lotus eaters uncomfortable, because the apathy of belief is such a comfort in a complicated world.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the dangers of losing Section 230, both replying to claims that 230 is just a gift to the internet giants. First, it’s MrWilson responding to the idea that startups competing in the social media space is already impossible:
You seem stuck in a perspective that the purpose of every social media platform is to become as popular as Facebook has been at its peak. Alternative platforms are often niche ones that aren’t interested in becoming that popular and statistically can’t because their target audience either isn’t large or doesn’t grow much.
They deserve to survive despite your lack of imagination in how these attacks could affect them.
The law doesn’t just apply to billion-dollar companies. It protects Wikipedia. It protects Bluesky. It protects Dreamwidth. It protects individual Mastodon instances. It protects TechDirt. It protects personal blogs. It protects you.
Acting as though the Internet is synonymous with two or three giant corporations is an excellent way to get laws and rulings that only giant corporations have the resources to survive. Zuckerberg, Musk and the Ellison family win, while you and I lose.
There were fewer interactive fiction submissions in this year’s jam than there often have been in past editions, but even if the field had been more crowded, Lilac Song would have undoubtedly stood out. It’s a somber, thoughtful story that casts the player as a servant to Prussian Minister-President Otto Braun during the last few years of the Weimar Republic. It revolves around and intriguing and fitting premise: the servant has been designing a simulation game about power and politics in Germany, from which she aims to draw insights that could preserve democracy and prevent the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The story is far more than a cursory look at these events: it’s clearly rooted in robust historical knowledge about this critical time and place, with myriad details about the specifics of the political situation as well as an additional exploration of gender politics and transgenderism in the era. But what’s especially notable for this jam is the way it weaves in a wide variety of artistic and musical works from 1930, which form the backdrop of its setting and the game itself. Amidst the story unfolding (and careening towards its inevitable ending) the player wanders the halls of Braun’s house and chooses paintings to admire and music to listen to. These works (by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Felix Mendelssohn, and more) become the wallpaper and soundtrack of the game.
Though the story takes center stage, the careful selection and use of these public domain works lend verisimilitude to the story and polish to the game design, resulting in more immersion than the text alone could achieve. For employing a curated combination of newly-public-domain works that elevates the interactive fiction without overtaking it, Lilac Song is this year’s Best Remix.
Congratulations to Autumn Chenfor the win! You can play Lilac Song in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!
Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess.
By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not going to pretend like I don’t still hold that very same view. AI tools are just that: tools. If the tools are good and used at the behest of the artists in the industry to make better games, that’s a good thing. If they upend artistic intent or simply suck, that’s a bad thing. And on the matter of jobs within the industry, if there is a net reduction in jobs, that’s bad! If AI lowers the barriers of entry for otherwise creative people and the result is even more jobs within the industry spread over more studios and, importantly, more cultural output in the form of games, that’s good!
Except when it’s not. And even if the AI evangelists are right, or those of us who see the possibility that AI use will ultimately result in more people in the industry and more games released to the public are right, that can still present very real problems within the industry. And I think there could be a serious one looming for storefronts like Steam.
This concern calcified in my head somewhat when I came across indie publisher Mike Rose, known for producing Yes, Your Grace, talking about just what all of this output could mean on Steam specifically.
“From a publisher perspective specifically, it’s mega annoying,” Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. “If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it’s just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!” Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.
Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.
Claims that there are too many games being released on Steam certainly isn’t new, nor has it historically been tied to anything to do with artificial intelligence. There have been complaints about this, as well as Valve’s apparent lack of interest in playing any real curation role, going back to 2023. Wait, make that 2020. Oh, wait, it actually goes back to 2015.
But while Steam hasn’t yet collapsed under the weight of its own volume of releases on the platform to date, the through line to all of that criticism has been Valve’s stoic apathy towards keeping up with the volume when it comes to helping its customers navigate the flood.
And that could be a very real problem for the platform. Steam’s value to the consumer, besides being the most recognizable outlet for PC gaming, is in its curation capabilities. To date, other than providing some search filters and a few tools to personalize the recommendations it makes for new titles to you, Steam has mostly left curation up to the customer themselves, or third-party list-makers. Meanwhile, the process for listing a game on Steam has not changed appreciably in the past several years. It’s still the same $100 entry fee to get your title listed. You still have to jump through all the registration steps with Steamworks, generate an app ID, build the store page, upload your assets. Then you wait for Valve to do its own review before you can publish your game, but that mostly amounts to ensuring that you’re compliant with Steam policies, that the game can launch successfully, and that’s about it.
With a potential flood of PC games coming, that sure doesn’t feel like enough to keep the platform from becoming an unnavigable wasteland where you can’t tell the gems from the slop. And, barring any new rules limiting to what degree AI can be used in game creation, that tidal wave is coming.
On this point, Rose focuses on “the elephant in the room” here: “It’s probably never going away again.”
“People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy,” he reasons. “I don’t even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there’s a choice between ‘spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,’ vs ‘type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly’ – the average person is going to pick the latter.
And that’s the thing really: Our feelings on it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of us don’t like genAI. It’s gonna get used now, and it’ll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked.”
I don’t think that video games are cooked, but his point that AI will be in use in the industry is the one I’ve been making for months now. We have to be talking about how it will be used, not if. That ship has sailed.
And if Steam is still going to be of any value at all to the consumer, Valve better be thinking right damned now how it’s going to get more involved in the curation of what shows up on its platform.
Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It’s also worth remembering that every major party presidential nominee since Nixon had voluntarily released their tax returns — Trump was the exception, not the rule, and the “harm” he suffered was exposure to the same transparency his predecessors embraced without incident.
The original piece laid out why the whole thing was a scam: Trump is the plaintiff, the IRS and Treasury are the defendants, and the DOJ defending those defendants is stocked with Trump’s former personal attorneys who have made clear they still consider themselves his personal attorneys — a problem that has only gotten worse with Todd Blanche now serving as acting AG. The fix was obviously in. The only real question was how brazenly the parties would go about it.
We now have an answer, and it turns out the answer is: extremely brazenly, and in writing, on the public docket.
Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation. This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.
[…]
The Parties are engaging in discussions and need time to work through how to ensure those discussions can take place productively to avoid protracted litigation. This brief period will allow the Parties to initiate and structure those discussions in a manner that best serves the interests of all Parties and the Court.
Read that the normal way you’d read any consent motion, and it’s mundane. Two adversarial parties are exploring settlement. Courts love this. Judicial economy! Everyone wins.
Now read it again with the actual parties in mind.
The plaintiff is the sitting President of the United States. The defendants are two agencies of the executive branch that the plaintiff (again, the President of the United States) runs. The lawyers representing those defendants report, through a chain of command, to Trump’s former personal lawyers. “The Parties are engaging in discussions” means Trump’s lawyers are negotiating with Trump’s other lawyers over how much of your money Trump gets to take home. The “interests of all Parties” reduces, functionally, to the interests of one guy. The phrase “avoid protracted litigation” means “skip the part where a judge or a jury or any actual adversarial process might interfere with the predetermined outcome.”
Real negotiations require two sides with opposing interests. This is just a man haggling with his own wallet over how much of your money to take.
The filing notes that there hasn’t even been an attempt at a defense from the government yet:
None of the Parties will suffer prejudice: the case is newly filed, no scheduling order has issued, and the Government has not yet answered or otherwise responded on the merits. An extension will conserve judicial and party resources and avoid piecemeal litigation that could arise if the Parties are forced to proceed without first exploring these discussions.
The consent motion even includes, with a straight face, the boilerplate certification that plaintiff’s counsel ‘conferred in good faith’ with the very people he effectively works for:
Pursuant to Southern District of Florida Local Rule 7.1(a)(3), Daniel Epstein, co-counsel for Plaintiffs, certifies that he conferred in good faith with counsel for Defendants on April 15, 2026 by telephone regarding the relief sought in this motion. Defendants consent to the requested extension.
The only party with an actual adverse interest here — the American public — has no seat at the table and no lawyer in the room.
The structure of the scam is clear. Step one, filed back in January: sue your own government that you control for $10 billion over something that wasn’t its fault, using a complaint so flimsy it quotes the leaker himself saying Trump suffered “little harm” — and demanding damages for being exposed to information that every other modern presidential candidate simply released voluntarily. Step two, filed this week: get the defendant you control to agree with you that litigation should pause so you can work out a deal. Step three, coming soon to a docket near you: announce a “settlement” in which the taxpayers cut a check to the president for some eye-watering sum, with the DOJ loudly proclaiming that this was the responsible outcome that avoided wasteful litigation.
At each step, the paperwork will look perfectly normal, indistinguishable from thousands of other consent motions on other dockets. The corruption lives entirely in the gap between what the documents say and who is actually on each side of them.
This is worth naming plainly: what’s happening here is exactly the kind of self-dealing abuse of public office that the impeachment clause was written to address. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, defined impeachable offenses as those:
A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
If a sitting president negotiating a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded payout to himself — through agencies he controls and lawyers loyal to him personally, over damages he demonstrably did not suffer (he is richer than he has ever been and won re-election after the leak) — does not qualify as an abuse of public trust, then the phrase has no meaning.
But none of that matters, because the political machinery that would be required to act on any of this has been thoroughly captured or cowed. Congress has largely abdicated. The Supreme Court, as noted in January, has made it clear there’s not much the courts can do about presidential self-dealing. The DOJ is, for these purposes, Trump’s law firm. And so the scheme proceeds on schedule, in plain sight, with everyone involved politely pretending that “the Parties are engaging in discussions” describes something other than what it is.
We’ll almost certainly be back for part three when the inevitable settlement drops. You already know roughly what it will look like. The only real variables are the size of the number and how straight a face whoever is serving as Attorney General at that point manages to keep while announcing it.
In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.
They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.
Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.
With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.
Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?
ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.
The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.
Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.
At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.
What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.
Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms.
“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”
Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.
But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found.
ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.
Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr.
The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.
These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.
ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.
ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting.
The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.
“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.
A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls.
Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.
Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.
“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”
The Dismantling
Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.
The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.
CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.
After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.
Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA.
Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas.
“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”
A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.
It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted.
The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes.
First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election.
A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”
However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.
“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”
The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.
Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)
Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics.
After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.
A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.
But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.
“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.
In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.
Team America
Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters.
The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported.
They represented the new type of people running the show.
Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.
Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.”
This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.
These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud.
Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves.
Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings.
Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.
“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”
In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”
Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure.
Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them.
Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them.
While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”
As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theoriesabout elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.
It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”
Red Flags
Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden.
In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.
Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.
“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”
In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter.
Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair.
When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.
Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.
Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica.
Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.
An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”
Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed.
With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement.
Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)
In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.
An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.”
Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments.
“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.
The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.
The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.
Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”
Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”
John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.
“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.
“Dismantling the Brain”
The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference.
They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.
The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.
Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.”
This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government.
On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t.
Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said.
A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”
The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.
Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.
“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”
An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner.
Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.
“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”
We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a massive coalition of 80+ legal scholars, former FCC officials, and civil liberties groups detailing how Carr’s threats fly in the face of the First Amendment. Hell, just this morning Karl wrote about how Carr is still plotting to punish Jimmy Kimmel for mocking President Trump. Meanwhile, Carr has responded to the criticism with smirking emojis and culture-war memes on X, treating the whole thing as performative trolling for an audience of one.
But now, First Amendment lawyer Bob Corn-Revere has published an open letter to Carr that is, frankly, one of the most devastating things I’ve read in years. And you really should go read the whole thing.
While Carr has mostly laughed off or ignored criticism of his many First Amendment violations, a letter from Corn-Revere (beyond the incredible prose of the letter) may hit a bit different given his stature within the First Amendment world. He has famously spent decades fighting in the trenches of the hardest, most politically uncomfortable First Amendment cases in the country. He represented CBS in its challenge of the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” case, and also represented Playboy in US v. Playboy Entertainment Group and was co-counsel at the Supreme Court in the famous US v. Stevens case, which made it clear that the Supreme Court was not interested in expanding the categories of unprotected speech. There are many more famous cases on his resume as well. This is someone who has spent his entire career defending speech, including in cases where it was genuinely offensive, deeply unpopular, and legally novel — because that’s what actual First Amendment commitment requires.
Oh, and he served as Chief Counsel to former FCC Chairman James Quello, so he knows how the FCC works from the inside.
So when this person tells Brendan Carr that he has betrayed his professed values, it carries a weight that Carr’s thumbs-down emojis can’t dismiss. The letter opens by pointing to the cautionary tale of Pam Bondi’s sudden firing as Attorney General:
Pam Bondi’s sudden and ignominious end as Attorney General is an important cautionary lesson about what happens to officials in this administration who over-promise in order to curry favor with the man they see as their boss, but who under-perform because of the limits of their authority.
Bondi promised the President she would prosecute his political enemies and failed miserably. The President rewarded her misplaced loyalty by denying her the graceful exit she sought, and instead fired her during a cross-town limo ride to watch a Supreme Court argument.
You have recently threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air what you call “fake news,” which apparently includes any skeptical reporting about the war in Iran—something you know you cannot do legally.
My advice? Don’t get into a car with the president anytime soon.
That line sets the tone for everything that follows — a pointed warning from someone who’s been inside the institution and watched Carr’s transformation up close, not someone lecturing from a safe distance.
From there, Corn-Revere walks through exactly how Carr has become the precise opposite of the person he used to claim to be, quoting Carr’s own prior statements back at him:
As you may recall, shortly after you were named to head the Federal Communications Commission, I offered you some unsolicited advice in the form of an open letter entitled “A Plea for Institutional Modesty.” I suggested you should be circumspect in your assertions of power over broadcasters because “you don’t have as much power as you may think,” and flexing your regulatory muscles would conflict with both the Communications Act and the Constitution.
But as was clear from your initial acts as chairman and statements you made while campaigning for the job, your quest for political advancement overrode any previous commitment to First Amendment values. Gone were the days when, as a commissioner, you said things like “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them,” or that “inject[ing] partisan politics into our licensing process” is “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”
I never expected you would heed my gratuitous advice, but had no idea how thoroughly you would betray your former (professed) values. Instead, you emerged as a Bizarro World caricature of yourself, threatening owners of broadcast networks with summer stock Don Corleone impressions and devoting much of your social media activity to jawboning. It is as if you set out to prove that the real mental health crisis in America isn’t about teens on Instagram, but public officials on X.
If someone of BCR’s stature said any of that about me, I might log off the internet forever.
The letter is full of these moments where Corn-Revere combines deep legal knowledge with rhetorical skill matched by very few. Take his description of Carr’s reliance on the long-dormant “news distortion” policy — a regulatory zombie that only exists because the FCC never formally killed it off after eliminating the Fairness Doctrine decades ago:
The news distortion policy is like a phantom limb after the FCC amputated the fairness doctrine—it is not really there in substance, but you still seem to feel you can walk on it.
Your smug social media posts about how broadcasters will be held to their public interest obligations “on your watch” ignores this history, but your claim that “the opposition to holding broadcasters accountable to the public interest comes increasingly from those unfamiliar with longstanding FCC precedent” is even worse, because you know it is a bald-faced lie.
The letter also hammers home a point we’ve made repeatedly: the actual, messy consequences of Carr’s performative bullying, and shows how spectacularly it has backfired over and over again. After Carr strong-armed Disney into suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live:
Protesters picketed outside the gates of the Magic Kingdom, and an estimated 7.1 million people cancelled subscriptions to Disney-owned streaming services Disney+ and Hulu over the controversy—at about twice the usual churn rate.
ABC affiliate group owners Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Media Group, who had business before the Commission, and who dutifully followed your demand, also lost money. It turns out that advertisers will not pay as much for spots during reruns of Celebrity Family Feud as during Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Sinclair revenue dropped a reported 16 percent for the quarter. Nexstar also suffered losses, although the amounts were not disclosed.
The result? The suspension ended a little more than a week after it began and Kimmel triumphantly returned to the air to his highest viewership in over a decade. Kimmel’s comeback garnered 6.3 million broadcast viewers and roughly 20 – 26 million views on social media within 24 hours.
His attempt to manipulate equal opportunity rules to silence Stephen Colbert went even worse:
In January, you caused the FCC staff to reinterpret whether candidate interviews on certain talk shows were exempt from the equal opportunities rule, reversing decades of precedent.
You apparently were miffed that candidate interviews on certain TV shows did not trigger “equal time” requirements for their opponents under exemptions to the rule Congress adopted in 1959. Yet mysteriously, you said there was no need to apply your reinterpretation to conservative talk radio interviews.
But your main target of this move, Stephen Colbert, outsmarted you. He ridiculed your reinterpretation of the equal opportunities rule on air, and gleefully transmitted his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on The Late Show’s YouTube channel, which is beyond the FCC’s jurisdiction. The interview got over seven million views overnight (more than three times the on-air viewership), Talarico immediately received $2.5 million in campaign contributions, and won his primary.
Carr’s tactics are unconstitutional and tactically stupid. He keeps creating the very outcomes he’s supposedly trying to prevent — even as some less strong-willed news orgs buckle under his threats or pre-censor themselves to avoid his performative wrath.
But the part of the letter that really sticks with me is the section on Carr’s legal knowledge — specifically, the massive gap between what Carr actually knows and what he pretends to believe. Corn-Revere lays out the full chain of Supreme Court precedent cutting back on the FCC’s assumed authority over broadcast content — and then lands this:
But you know all this. Just as you know the FCC eliminated the fairness doctrine four decades ago, which is the regulatory progenitor of the “news distortion policy” you now love to cite (but only against broadcasts you perceive as critical of this administration).
This matters because it removes the escape hatch of ignorance. When politicians misstate the law, you can at least entertain the possibility they just don’t know better. Carr has been an FCC commissioner for nearly a decade. He practiced communications law. He knows what he’s doing is legally indefensible, and he knows his smug social media posts about “the law is clear” are, as Corn-Revere puts it, “a bald-faced lie.”
The letter ends by looking at what all of this does to Carr’s legacy, and it lands with a quiet brutality that no amount of trolling can deflect:
Your recent appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference is a prime example, where you explained the president is “winning” against the media by listing several media personalities who have left their jobs, including (as you put it) “sleepy eyed Chuck Todd.” I should not have to remind you of this, but it is a poor and pathetic leader who measures “winning” by what he thinks he has destroyed rather than by what he has managed to build.
And:
As I wrote in my first open letter, selling out your (professed) values represents short-term thinking. I noted that “officials who have tried to muzzle the press for short-term political gain have not been treated well by history,” and “if I were your adviser, this is not how I would want history to remember you.” Now, to the extent you will be remembered at all, it will most likely be mainly as a South Park character.
I wish you had listened.
Carr will likely ignore this, much like he brushed off the coalition letter, his own past statements, and basically every legal guardrail he’s encountered since taking the chair. That’s his whole game — the threats, the memes, the emojis, the audition tape for whatever comes next.
Still, the record is there now, written by someone whose First Amendment track record makes Carr’s look like a cheap Halloween costume. And unlike Carr’s social media posts, this letter will age well.
There’s a lot more in the letter. Go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it, even if Brendan Carr would likely wish to censor it like he wishes to censor Jimmy Kimmel.
Update: Corrected the list of cases that Bob worked on.
