The cost-effectiveness of relying on AI is pretty much beside the point, at least as far as the cops are concerned. This is the wave of the future. Whatever busywork can be pawned off on tireless AI tech will be. It will be up to courts to sort this out, and if a bot can craft “training and expertise” boilerplate, far too many judges will give AI-generated police reports the benefit of the doubt.
The operative theory is that AI will generate factual narratives free of officer bias. The reality is the opposite, for reasons that should always have been apparent. Garbage in, garbage out. When law enforcement controls the inputs, any system — no matter how theoretically advanced — will generate stuff that sounds like the same old cop bullshit.
And it’s not just limited to the boys in blue (who are actually now mostly boys in black bloc/camo) at the local level. The combined forces of the Trump administration’s anti-migrant efforts are asking AI to craft their reports, which has resulted in the expected outcome. The AP caught something in Judge Sara Ellis’s thorough evisceration of Trump’s anti-immigrant forces as they tried to defend the daily constitutional violations they engaged in — many of which directly violated previous court orders from the same judge.
Contained in the 200+ page opinion [PDF] is a small footnote that points to an inanimate co-conspirator to the litany of lies served up by federal law enforcement in defense of its unconstitutional actions:
Tucked in a two-sentence footnote in a voluminous court opinion, a federal judge recently called out immigration agents using artificial intelligence to write use-of-force reports, raising concerns that it could lead to inaccuracies and further erode public confidence in how police have handled the immigration crackdown in the Chicago area and ensuing protests.
U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis wrote the footnote in a 223-page opinion issued last week, noting that the practice of using ChatGPT to write use-of-force reports undermines agents’ credibility and “may explain the inaccuracy of these reports.” She described what she saw in at least one body camera video, writing that an agent asks ChatGPT to compile a narrative for a report after giving the program a brief description and several images.
The judge noted factual discrepancies between the official narrative about those law enforcement responses and what body camera footage showed.
AI is known to generate hallucinations. It will do this more often when specifically asked to do so, as the next sentence of this report makes clear.
But experts say the use of AI to write a report that depends on an officer’s specific perspective without using an officer’s actual experience is the worst possible use of the technology and raises serious concerns about accuracy and privacy.
There’s a huge difference between asking AI to tell you what it sees in a recording and asking it to summarize with parameters that claim the officer was attacked. The first might make it clear no attack took place. The second is just tech-washing a false narrative to protect the officer feeding these inputs to ChatGPT.
AI — much like any police dog — lives to please. If you tell it what you expect to see, it will do what it can to make sure you see it. Pretending it’s just a neutral party doing a bit of complicated parsing is pure denial. The outcome can be steered by the person handling the request.
While it’s true that most law enforcement officers will write reports that excuse their actions/overreactions, pretending AI can solve this problem does little more than allow officers to spend less time conjuring up excuses for their rights violations. “We can misremember this for you wholesale” shouldn’t be an unofficial selling point for this tech.
And I can guarantee this (nonexistent) standard applies to more than 90% of law enforcement agencies with access to AI-generated report-writing options:
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear if the agency had guidelines or policies on the use of AI by agents.
“Unclear” means what we all assume it means: there are no guidelines or policies. Those might be enacted at some point in the future following litigation that doesn’t go the government’s way, but for now, it’s safe to assume the government will continue operating without restrictions until forced to do otherwise. And that means people are going to be hallucinated into jail, thanks to AI’s inherent subservience and the willingness of those in power to exploit whatever, whenever until they’ve done so much damage to rights and the public’s trust that it can no longer be ignored.
Eric Migicovsky, who basically invented the smartwatch category with the original Pebble, just announced something much simpler: a $99 ring with one button that records voice memos. That’s it. No internet connection required, no cloud storage, no subscription fees, no wake words. Press the button, talk, release. Your note is saved locally—either on the ring’s tiny bit of memory or synced to your phone directly.
What makes the Pebble Index 01 actually interesting isn’t the hardware minimalism (though that’s refreshing). It’s that the whole thing is open source and designed to be hacked. Want long-press to do something different? Go for it. Want your voice memos piped into your task manager? Do it. The platform is yours to modify.
If you don’t know Migicovsky’s background: he kickstarted the original Pebble Watch in what became one of the platform’s most successful campaigns (I backed it), proving smartwatches could be useful. Pebble eventually got passed by bigger players, sold to Fitbit, then absorbed into Google.
A few years back, Eric moved into a different space, creating Beeper, the incredibly cool and useful universal messaging app, that pulls together basically all your messaging tools into a single unified interface. As I discussed with him on the Techdirt podcast last year, it was a cool example of how protocols let people build things that were more powerful. Last year, Beeper was sold to Automattic.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Google agreed to open source all the original Pebble software (which it wasn’t using), and Eric decided to get back to his original baby, creating Core Devices, which would create a new generation of Pebble watches which recently shipped. This time, built on open source, totally hackable software, and even the ability of others to build devices on the Pebble platform.
I spoke to Eric last week about the Index 01. The design philosophy is clear and refreshing: keep it simple enough that it works perfectly every time. As someone who constantly sends myself notes—thoughts while walking, reminders mid-conversation, ideas that’ll vanish if I don’t capture them immediately—this is a tool I’m really looking forward to. But the real story isn’t the ring itself. It’s what you can do with it.
The AI processing is local—a small on-device model that does speech-to-text without sending anything to the cloud. But because the whole platform is open source, you’re not stuck with that default behavior. You can reprogram the button. You can route the output wherever you want. I’m already thinking about piping voice memos directly into my vibe coded task management tool, turning quick verbal notes into actionable tasks without touching a screen.
This is the kind of experimentation that closed hardware makes impossible. When you buy a typical consumer device, you’re renting someone else’s vision of how you should use it (and often paying a subscription fee for the privilege). When the hardware and software are open, you’re buying raw capability that you can shape however you need.
The device also has battery life that should last quite a while. Eric says two years, but that really depends on how much you use it. As I understand it, the battery can effectively record between 12 and 15 hours before the battery dies. If you’re just doing short 5 second notes to yourself, that can be quite some time.
The somewhat controversial decision here, though is that the ring is not rechargeable. From what Eric told me, that allowed them to simplify things and also use a longer-lasting hearing aid battery in the ring. Putting in a rechargeable battery and then adding a charging port and cables and such would have made the product more expensive, and less practical.
It’s a design choice that I can understand, but also one that some may bristle at, given that the ring will only last about two years if used regularly (and less if used a lot) and then become e-junk. For what it’s worth, the plan is to allow you to send back your used up ring to Core Devices to recycle when it reaches end of life (the app will warn you with plenty of time ahead). In theory, you would send it back when you buy a new one (assuming you found it super handy over the two years you were using it).
For years, I’ve argued for protocols over platforms in software—the idea that decentralized, open systems give users more control than walled gardens, even when the walled gardens are more convenient.
Consumer hardware has often gone in the opposite direction. We’ve too frequently traded repairability and control for sleekness and integration. Your smartphone is a sealed black box. Your smart home devices stop working when the company shuts down its servers. Even something as simple as a fitness tracker often requires a proprietary app and cloud account just to see your own data.
The Index 01 won’t reverse that trend by itself—it’s a $99 ring, not a revolution. But it’s a reminder that another path is possible. Open hardware, like open protocols, creates options. The Raspberry Pi proved there’s demand for hackable hardware in hobbyist computing. Framework has shown that’s true for laptops. Migicovsky is betting there’s demand for it in everyday consumer devices too.
I put in a pre-order. Not just because I need a better way to capture fleeting thoughts, but because this represents the kind of product I want to see more of: something you control, something you can modify, something that doesn’t stop working when the company loses interest. For all the complaints about big tech dominance and ecosystem lock-in, the solution isn’t better monopolies. It’s tools that put control back in users’ hands—whether that’s through open protocols in software or open platforms in hardware.
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ICE continues to be increasingly awful as it chases arrest and deportation quotas it will never meet. The administration’s desire to rid this nation of as many migrants as possible is generating new nastiness on a daily basis.
This bit of hideousness will likely have been subsumed several times over by the time you read this, but that doesn’t mean it should pass by unnoticed. The “worst of the worst” applies more to ICE officers and officials than it does to most of the people it sweeps up. This case is no exception. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
Guatemalan native Faustino Pablo Pablo has been in the United States since 2012, following all the rules of the lengthy asylum process. He received a ruling from a US immigration judge that said it “more likely than not” he would be “tortured” by (or with the permission of) the Guatemalan government if he was forced to return. The ruling made it clear Pablo Pablo could be removed to another country but was absolutely not to be sent back to Guatemala.
From 2013 to 2025, Pablo Pablo complied with every aspect of his order or release, including making regular check-ins to ICE’s ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) office. Then this happened:
On November 5, 2025, ICE detained Pablo Pablo at a “regular check-in appointment” without notice or explanation. Pablo Pablo’s attorney promptly contacted ICE to share, inter alia, receipt of his withholding of removal to Guatemala. On November 17, 2025, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (“ERO”) component of ICE transported Pablo Pablo to El Paso, Texas, “for staging of removal to Guatemala.”
That from the recent order [PDF] issued by federal judge David Guaderrama. The judge definitely isn’t happy with ICE, which is hardly surprising since the government basically admits it did the wrong thing willfully.
Once it became clear Pablo Pablo was challenging his (illegal) deportation, ICE accelerated the removal process:
On November 20, 2025, [Pablo Pablo] filed an additional motion, asking that Respondents be enjoined from transferring him outside of the Western District of Texas during the pendency of his habeas petition. The same day, at 5:00 AM MST, ICE transported Pablo Pablo to the airport. At 6:00 AM, ICE placed him on a flight direct to Guatemala By the time the Court ordered Respondents not to remove Pablo Pablo, he had arrived in Guatemala City.
That led to the court demanding some answers from the government. And while the government was responsive (in the legal sense), it doesn’t appear to be all that concerned about Pablo Pablo’s whereabouts or well-being.
Respondents conceded that Pablo Pablo “was subject to withholding of removal to Guatemala at the time he was removed, and therefore the physical removal was unlawful.” To rectify the error, Respondents stated that Pablo Pablo’s return flight had been “tentatively scheduled” for December 4, 2025.23 On December 4, 2025, Respondents provided an update that “Petitioner was not returned to the United States.” As far as the Court is aware, Pablo Pablo currently remains in Guatemala.
But then the government argued that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over Pablo Pablo’s habeas petition because… the government no longer had custody of Pablo Pablo. This is ridiculous, says the judge.
For reasons squarely outside of Pablo Pablo’s control, his attention has shifted from challenging his detention to challenging the blatant lawlessness of his removal. In other words, “[t]he removal itself lies at the heart of the wrongs.”
You’ll notice the words “blatant lawlessness of his removal” are not in quotes. This is a judge talking directly to ICE and the government’s legal reps, telling them exactly what he thinks about their actions. This isn’t an indirect slam cribbed from precedent.
And the judge is right to be angry. As Kyle Cheney’s report for Politico notes, this is something ICE has been doing repeatedly since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
The administration has acknowledged several other improper deportations, including a man sent to El Salvador despite a court-approved settlement agreement barring his deportation while his asylum claim was pending, a man who was sent to Mexico despite immigration officials’ acknowledgment that they had no record of a “credible fear” interview to determine whether he might face persecution, a man deported to El Salvador — where he remains incarcerated — despite a federal appeals court order barring his deportation, and a transgender woman deported to Mexico despite an immigration court order finding she was likely to be tortured there.
And even though the government admitted it had engaged in a “blatantly unlawful” removal when questioned by the court, the DHS remains defiant. Assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement that basically says that Pablo Pablo is more wrong than ICE is:
“This illegal alien from Guatemala has a final order of removal from an immigration judge issued in 2015. He received full due process. One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S. We will deport him to another country.”
McLaughlin also said this in her statement, which yet again undercuts the “worst of worst” narrative that gets trotted out every time ICE starts ramping up raids.
If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a criminal with a lengthy rap sheet or someone who spent more than a decade here doing everything the government asked of him and, apparently, being a law-abiding non-citizen. Either way, this administration wants you gone.
We’ve covered how there’s a real push afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.
And among those states, not one has actually enforced them despite a wide array of ongoing corporate offenses (though to be fair to states there is kind of a lot going on).
This reform movement, which sees broad bipartisan support, had even started to reach toward the military, which is probably the poster child for over-billing, dysfunctional repair monopoly, “parts pairing,” and other predatory efforts to jack up the cost of maintenance and ownership.
Back in June we mentioned how Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll had committed to including right-to-repair requirements in all existing and future Army contracts with manufacturers. Some very light language to this effect was to be included in the latest National Defense Authorization Act by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Tim Sheehy of Montana.
“Driscoll recently pointed to a Black Hawk helicopter part to show how contractor restrictions drive up costs. The original equipment manufacturer refuses to repair or replace a small screen-control knob that grounds the aircraft when it breaks — forcing the Army to purchase an entire new screen assembly for $47,000. Driscoll said the Army could make the knob for just $15.”
Picture that problem, at scale, across the entirety of U.S. military hardware, planet wide.
But despite the bipartisan popularity of right to repair reforms, companies weren’t keen on losing money via a government crackdown on their grift. So the various policy and lobbying fronts for America’s defense contractors spent much of this fall trying to frame the modest reforms as an affront on innovation to scuttle the reforms as the House and Senate debate over bill versions.
“The House’s Data-as-a-Service Solutions for Weapon System Contracts provision, which would have required DoD to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was removed from the final text of the annual legislation released over the weekend. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was dropped from the bill as well.
Instead, the legislation requires the Defense Department to develop a digital system that would track and manage all technical data and verify whether contractors and subcontractors comply with contract requirements related to technical data. The compromise version of the bill also requires DoD to review all existing contracts to determine what contractors were required to deliver and what data DoD can access.”
That’s basically worthless bureaucracy as it applies to any sort of meaningful right to repair reforms.
Again, these reforms were about as basic as they get. Still, they would have likely opened the door to taxpayers saving billions of dollars annually when it comes to paying too much for the repair and maintenance of U.S. military equipment. It was a no brainer reform, but because the United States is genuinely too corrupt to function, even that was ultimately a bridge too far.
To add insult to injury, we’ve got fake Trump populists and Silicon Valley execs like Elon Musk running around pretending they care about efficiency. But in instances like this, where there’s real potential to improve government efficiency, you’ll notice they’re nowhere to be found because the reforms would interfere with their ability to rip off the public.
We here at Techdirt have longed complained about the DMCA takedown process being wide open for all kinds of fraud and abuse. At one point years ago, Google reported that nearly 100% of the takedown requests it receives are not the sort of targeted takedowns the creators of the DMCA imagined, but rather more of a carpet-bomb approach. Examples of this sort of thing abound, with much of them comprised of companies not taking the process seriously and making all kinds of errors or accusations as a result of not doing their due diligence. The more rare, but more concerning version is when the DMCA takedown process is used fraudulently to exact revenge against an enemy. That this can even be done should highlight the problem with our current process of taking content down first and then asking questions later.
In the last couple of weeks, a video game was released on Steam. Titled No Players Online, it was a horror game and something of a sequel to a freeware game of the same name that was released in 2019. Many of the same folks behind the original, including Adam Pype, produced its successor under the developer name Beeswax Games. And then, shortly after its release on Steam, the game was hit with a DMCA takedown.
According to Beeswax, the game was hit by a Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim filed by a “former friend” who “claimed to be co-author of the game despite not having done anything for it”. Valve then took the game down on 13th November, a week after release. The developers filed a counter-notice, and Valve have now reinstated the Steam release after the complainant neglected to respond to that counter-notice in time.
You can read developer Adam Pype’s full account of events here. It doesn’t name the “former friend”, and I’m not going to speculate about their identity. Pype says the upheaval has cost the project dearly, writing that “we spent 2 and a half years of our lives and a ton of money making this game. we also have a lot of people who believed in us and wanted us to succeed. it’s crazy to me that someone can just take down our game by filling out a simple form, and it’s been tough trying to reconcile with this betrayal from someone i considered a dear friend.”
The takedown effected the ability to list and sell the game a week after release. That is essentially in the prime window for sales for any new game, but it’s a particularly important window for a small indie game that is looking to generate buzz and boost purchases. Beeswax Games missed out on a huge chunk of that, having to instead spend its time navigating the DMCA process to get Steam to relist the game.
And why is all of that how this works? Because the process Steam follows is to takedown the game upon accusation. This appears to be nothing more than a fraudulent takedown by some scorned third party. It worked because Steam took the game down without requiring any proof of the rights the third party asserted. Steam didn’t even ask any questions. It’s as simple as get notice, take game down.
Which makes an entity like Beeswax Games guilty until proven innocent. The onus of evidence is not on the party making the claim initially. It’s on the target of that claim. There is very little else in American law that works anything like this and it’s incredibly frustrating to watch this in action.
Pype continues that “this situation has had a significant impact on us, especially given how crucial the first months after release are for small indies like us. we lost out on much needed momentum and revenue right after the release of our game and we’re unsure if we will be able to recover financially from this given our already thin margins.”
This is a problem worth fixing. Businesses like Beeswax should not face the threat of going under simply because the DMCA allows for this kind of abuse.
For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.
President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.
But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”
Despite signing a mortgage that pledged he would live in each house, Trump listed both homes as rentals. Palm Beach Daily News via Newspapers.com. Redactions by ProPublica.
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.)
But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality.
Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”
Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.
In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”
The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
The White House did not respond to questions about any other documents related to the transactions, such as loan applications, that could shed light on what Trump told the lender or if the lender made any exceptions for him.
At the time Trump bought the two Florida properties, he was dealing with the wreckage of high-profile failures at his casinos and hotels in the early 1990s. (He famously recounted seeing a panhandler on Fifth Avenue around this time and telling his companion: “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”) In December 1993, he married the model Marla Maples in an opulent ceremony at The Plaza Hotel. And in Florida, he was pushing local authorities to let him turn Mar-a-Lago, then a residence, into a private club.
Trump bought the two homes, which both sit on Woodbridge Road directly north of Mar-a-Lago, and got mortgages in quick succession in December 1993 and January 1994. The lender on both mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch.
Each of the mortgagedocuments signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.
But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself.
Trump’s real estate agent, who told the local press that the plan from the beginning was to rent out the two satellite homes, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Trump, in effect, is in a position to approve who his neighbors are.”
In the ensuing years, listings popped up in local newspapers advertising each of the homes for rent. At one point in 1997, the larger of the two homes, a 7-bedroom, 7-bathroom Mediterranean Revival mansion, was listed for $3,000 per day.
Even if Trump did violate the law with his two primary-residence mortgages in Florida, the loans have since been paid off and the mid-1990s is well outside the statute of limitations for mortgage fraud.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property and attested that it too would be his principal residence. Obtained by ProPublica
A spokesperson for Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, did not answer questions about the Trump mortgages.
“It’s highly unlikely we would have original documents for a 32-year-old transaction, but generally in private client mortgages the terms of the transactions are based on the overall relationship,” the spokesperson said in a statement, “and the mortgages are not backed by or sold to any government sponsored entity.”
Trump’s two mortgages in Palm Beach bear similarities to the loans taken out by political rivals whom his administration has accused of fraud.
In October, federal prosecutors charged New York Attorney General Letitia James over her mortgage. James has been one of Trump’s top targets since she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022.
A central claim in the case the Trump Justice Department brought against her is that she purchased a house in Virginia, pledging to her lender that it would serve as her second home, then proceeded to use it as an investment property and rent it out. “This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” according to the indictment.
Trump’s Florida mortgage agreements appear to have made a more significant misrepresentation, as he claimed those homes would be his primary residence, not his secondary home as James did, before proceeding to rent them out.
James has denied the allegations against her, and the case was dismissed last month over procedural issues, though the Justice Department has been trying to reindict her.
The circumstances around Trump’s mortgages are also similar to the case his administration has made against Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Trump declared he was firing Cook earlier this year over her mortgages, as he has sought to bend the traditionally independent agency to his will and force it to lower interest rates. Cook, who denied wrongdoing, has sued to block the termination and continues to serve on the Fed board as that legal fight continues.
In a letter to Cook, Trump specifically noted that she signed two primary residence mortgages within weeks of each other — just as records show he did in Florida.
“You signed one document attesting that a property in Michigan would be your primary residence for the next year. Two weeks later, you signed another document for a property in Georgia stating that it would be your primary residence for the next year,” Trump wrote. “It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second.”
He called the loans potentially criminal and wrote, “at a minimum, the conduct at issue exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness.”
The Trump administration has made similar fraud allegations against other political enemies, including Democrats Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, both of whom have denied wrongdoing.
In September, ProPublica reported that three of Trump’s Cabinet members have called multiple homes their primary residences in mortgage agreements. Bloomberg also reported that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent did something similar. (The Cabinet members have all denied wrongdoing.)
Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency head, has denied his investigations are politically motivated. “If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”
Thus far, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages.
Australia’s social media ban for kids is now in effect. As we’ve discussed, this is a monumentally stupid plan that will do real harm to kids. It’s based on a moral panic and a wide variety of faulty assumptions, including that social media websites are inherently bad for kids, something that none of the evidence supports. And, even if there were harms associated with social media, the way you deal with them is teaching people (not just kids!) how to use them in an age appropriate way—meaning understanding the difference between risks and harms—not banning it altogether.
But, Australia has gone in the other direction entirely, and the clusterfuck is just beginning. As with Australia’s link tax (officially: news bargaining code) the folks at The Juice Media have created their “Honest Government Ad” for the social media ban, and it’s just as biting as you’d expect.
Here’s just a snippet…
Regulating billionaires is hard work!
So we said: let’s just ban the kids. So now the billionaires can keep pegging humanity with even less incentive to moderate….
Sure we rushed this law through in just nine days Ignoring hundreds of experts, our Human Rights Commission, and our leading digital rights, Indigenous, and mental health orgs. And sure we’ve created huge privacy and identity theft risks, and taken a big shit on freedom of speech.
But think of the children.
Just not the children being hammered by gambling ads, which we’ve refused to ban. And definitely not the ones saying we need to protect them from climate change. Those children can go and get fucked.
Ok so it won’t be perfect. But, now that it’s happening, here are some tips as we roll out this evidence-free experiment on your kids:
One: look out for your young people, ‘cause some will need help. Like the kid being bullied at school, the kid in an abusive family, and the LGBTQ kid who found support online. All of whom are part of the 73 % of young people using social media for mental health support.
Two: kids who sneak-on to social media may not feel they can ask for help if they’re being bullied, shown harmful content, or groomed by some pedo. So talk to your kids!
And, three, for fucksake maybe spend less time on social media yourself?
Meanwhile, basically every politician in Australian is taking a huge victory lap on this, looking like complete buffoons. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, who has been pushing for this nonsensical, dangerous, backwards proposal is bursting with glee:
Grant said: “Technology companies are used to moving fast and breaking things. They can certainly move fast and improve things, and that means deactivating these under-16 accounts.”
She acknowledged some nerves over the ban – and the global attention on it. “I’ve aged in dog years,” she told Channel Nine.
But she added: “I’m trying to contain my excitement”.
Imagine being excited about cutting off tons of young people from their support networks while doing nothing about actual problems those kids are facing. But sure, “contain your excitement.”
“This is the day when Australian families are taking back power from these big tech companies and they’re asserting the right of kids to be kids and for parents to have greater peace of mind,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“This reform will change lives. For Australian kids … allowing them to just have their childhood. For Australian parents, enabling them to have greater peace of mind.”
None of which is happening. Parents don’t see why the government is making this decision for them:
“How about I raise my children, and you run the country.”
Rima, 14, says she and her friends are “pretty frustrated at first” by the ban and they also don’t think it will work.
“The verification techniques are not very accurate, and there are no penalties enforced on teenagers that get past the ban,” she says, adding that she has already verified herself on Snapchat and also made some new accounts.
She says social media is “not that important” to her but she does use it for “advice, studying and talking to my friends, which is quite integral to my everyday life”.
It took 13-year-old Isobel less than five minutes to outsmart Australia’s “world-leading” social media ban for children.
A notification from Snapchat, one of the ten platforms affected, had lit up her screen, warning she’d be booted off when the law kicked in this week – if she couldn’t prove she was over 16.
“I got a photo of my mum, and I stuck it in front of the camera and it just let me through. It said thanks for verifying your age,” Isobel claims. “I’ve heard someone used Beyoncé’s face,” she adds.
“I texted her,” she gestures to her mum Mel, “and I was like, ‘Hey Mummy, I got past the social media ban’ and she was just like, ‘Oh, you monkey’.”
Either way, Adams and her friends don’t plan to go quietly. When one app asked them to submit a selfie for an age verification system, they used a photo of a golden retriever they found on Google.
It worked, she said.
So let’s review what Australia’s politicians have actually accomplished here: They’ve alienated parents who don’t appreciate the government deciding how to raise their kids. They’ve taught an entire generation of young people that adults don’t trust them and that circumventing authority is both necessary and easy. They’ve cut off legitimate support networks for vulnerable kids while doing nothing about the actual harms that those same kids face. Indeed, they’ve actually pushed kids towards more dangerous places online while making it more difficult for them to learn to use the internet appropriately. And they’ve created a system so trivially easy to bypass that a golden retriever can pass age verification.
But beyond the immediate disaster, Australia has set a dangerous precedent that moral-panic-driven governments around the world are already eyeing. The message to other countries is clear: you can rush through deeply flawed legislation, ignore all expert advice, create real harms in pursuit of imaginary ones, and still declare victory while the whole thing collapses around you.
The kids, at least, have learned something valuable: when the people in charge respond to complex problems with simplistic bans, you work around them and stop trusting them. Not exactly the lesson Australian politicians were going for, but probably the one they deserve.
The administration that is busy erasing history from any federal entity tasked with preserving it has an additional ally in the burying-the-bad-news business: Donald Trump, the former president.
Yes, it’s all stupid and weird and incredibly dangerous, but the guy who used to be president has been sued by multiple litigants over his tacit involvement (and deliberate encouragement) of the attack on the Capitol building that was intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power to the winner of the 2020 election, Joe Biden.
Trump was out of office by the time he was sued, but he’s insisting documents and communications related to an undeniable act of insurrection are protected by his (now-recurring) executive privilege. Trump was sued five years ago by officers injured during the insurrection. The plaintiffs are asking for access to thousands of documents related to the Capitol raid on January 6, 2021. The slowly grinding wheels of the justice system have finally brought us to this point, reported last week by Kyle Cheney for Politico.
President Donald Trump has asserted executive privilege to prevent courtroom adversaries from accessing evidence in a long-running lawsuit that accuses him of stoking violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Justice Department disclosed Trump’s secrecy claim Wednesday in a hearing related to that five-year-old lawsuit, brought by police officers injured while attempting to repel the violent mob that day. The officers say Trump’s incendiary remarks to a crowd of supporters — and his direction that they march on the Capitol — fueled the riot that nearly derailed the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden and left 140 officers injured.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson claims there’s nothing to see here. It’s not a president trying to bury his legacy of violence. It’s just the normal response to a “overly broad request” by the injured cops who understandably would like to see a bit of justice done.
The records sought reside at the National Archives. The National Archives, in response to the request by the plaintiffs, has finally responded with more detail to the September 2024 subpoena, letting the public know that Trump aims to keep every requested document out of the public’s hands.
NARA’s two-page response [PDF] provides two lists of records. The first is the largest: the number of documents Trump says can’t be released at all due to alleged “executive privilege.”
NARA identified 7,397 records responsive to the request. In accordance with 36 C.F.R. § 1270.44(c), on February 3, 2025, the Archivist notified the President of his intent to disclose the records.
On December 1, 2025, the President notified the Acting Archivist that he had determined that 4,152 records are subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege.
So, that’s more than half the records. And Trump insists all of those are covered by his executive privilege. This litigation — combined with Trump’s assertions — has put NARA in a position it’s generally not familiar with, as it points out in its court filing:
The December 1, 2025 notification contains a list of each file the President asserted is subject to constitutionally based privilege. NARA generally does not otherwise log records that are subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege.
The log has also been submitted to the court. It means nothing to anyone since it includes nothing more than list items only identifiable by NARA archivists. The only thing anyone outside of NARA can discern from this 53-page filing is that some of the records Trump wishes to keep from being made public are text messages.
And while it’s insane to believe more than half of these documents are covered by executive privilege (a privilege that certainly shouldn’t seem to apply to documents dealing with an insurrection attempt by disgruntled Trump voters), Trump’s not simply satisfied to keep these 4,000+ documents from being handed over to the people suing him.
Trump is also insisting whatever does get handed over can’t be made public, either.
The remaining 3,245 records can be released to the litigants, subject to a protective order prohibiting their use or disclosure outside this litigation.
This means anything reluctantly and begrudgingly turned over to the plaintiffs will be immediately sealed, further separating the public from the facts surrounding Trump’s actions during this insurrection attempt committed by people who are now free to do whatever they want in support of Trump because they know Trump (and the MAGA-cooked GOP) will give them official forgiveness for any crimes they commit out of loyalty to America’s autocrat.
If Trump manages to make all of this happen, he can go right back to his daily gaslighting and conspiracy theorizing. For the moment, however, he needs the courts to agree it’s okay to bury anything that might make him look worse than he already does. And with the Supreme Court majority going all in all of the time for Trump, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to wish his support of insurrection into the legal cornfield and replace the facts with whatever narrative seems to be the most flattering.
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