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There are levels of corruption, and then there’s whatever the hell this is.
Donald Trump is demanding that American taxpayers pay him $230 million for being prosecuted. Which is like getting a speeding ticket and then billing the state for the cost of your traffic lawyer. Except in this case, the traffic lawyer is now the judge, and the judge gets to decide how much the state pays you and you get to approve it all, and somehow this is all legal because we’ve apparently given up on the concept of shame.
The New York Times reports that Trump has filed what’s known as administrative claims demanding approximately $230 million in compensation from the Department of Justice for two federal investigations, including one that led to indictments—investigations that only stopped because he won the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general,” meaning the person who oversees the agency’s civil division.
The current deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer andsaid at his confirmation hearingin February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr. Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr. Patel, in investigations related to Mr. Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
This is not normal. This has never been normal. This will never be normal. Although at this point, “normal” is doing a lot of work there, given that we’re living in a timeline where a business failure reality TV host became president, tried to overturn an election, got indicted for stealing classified documents, got re-elected, embraced every authoritarian instinct, and is now suing the government for having the audacity to notice.
According to the Times, Trump submitted two separate administrative claims through a standard government process that typically precedes lawsuits, but can also be used to “negotiate” a settlement. The first claim, filed in late 2023, seeks damages for the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller’s well-publicized (though often misrepresented) probe into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.
The second, filed in summer 2024, targets the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent prosecution for mishandling classified documents—you know, the prosecution where Trump was literally caught on tape discussing how he couldn’t declassify the documents he was showing people, and where there were famously boxes of sensitive documents stored in places like a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
The second claim accuses the government of “malicious prosecution” intended to sway the election:
Attorney General Garland FBI Director Wray and Special Counsel Smith’s targeting indictment and harassment of President Trump has always been malicious political prosecution aimed at affecting an electoral outcome to prevent President Trump from being re elected This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation
By this logic, every criminal defendant should be able to bill taxpayers for their legal fees. And the FBI Director supposedly orchestrating this “harassment”? Christopher Wray, whom Trump personally appointed after firing James Comey. Why would he want to go after Trump?
But let’s get back to the craziest part: Trump’s former personal lawyers, now in government positions specifically because Trump appointed them, get to decide whether the government should pay their former client (and current boss) hundreds of millions of dollars for prosecuting him.
As legal ethics professor Bennett Gershman told the Times:
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
This is amazing for multiple reasons, including that the NY Times did its usual “view from nowhere” cop-out of trying to find an expert to give them a quote because the NY Times house style is never to directly call out bullshit for being bullshit. And even that guy is like “dog, you don’t need an expert. Literally everyone can see this is the most corrupt bullshit imaginable.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump directly about the claims. His response is worth reading in full because he essentially admits everything:
COLLINS: The NYT is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own DOJ now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don't even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money. They rigged the election.
COLLINS: The NY Times is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own Justice Department now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?
TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don’t even know what the numbers… I don’t even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money, but I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something…. But look, they rigged the election.
“They rigged the election.” There it is. Trump’s entire justification for demanding a quarter billion dollars from taxpayers rests on his repeatedly debunked lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The same lie that led to January 6th. The same lie that has been rejected by every court that examined it, including judges Trump himself appointed. The same lie that even his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, said was “bullshit.”
Trump then tries to bolster his case by pointing to recent settlements:
As you know, in one case, 60 Minutes had to pay us a lot of money. George “Slopadopulous” had to pay us a lot of money and they already paid. You know, they paid me a lot of money.
Let’s be clear about those “settlements”: ABC and CBS didn’t settle because Trump’s claims had merit. They settled because fighting Trump—who controls the federal government and has repeatedly threatened to use that power against media companies—became too expensive and risky. And, in the case of 60 Minutes, it happened because Shari Redstone needed FCC chair Brendan Carr’s approval to sell Paramount, and everyone knew that wouldn’t be approved without paying Trump. Those settlements aren’t vindication; they’re protection money. They’re evidence of the exact kind of corrupt pressure campaign Trump is now trying to formalize by demanding payment from the government itself.
But then—and I want you to really appreciate this—he just admits the whole scam on camera:
Now, with the country, it’s interesting. Because I’m the one that makes the decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk.And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.[Turns to look over his shoulder]. Did you have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?
No, Donald. It’s not “interesting.” It’s a conflict of interest. “Interesting” is when you learn that octopuses have three hearts. This is just corrupt. It’s bad. You’re not supposed to be in a position where you’re both the plaintiff demanding money and the defendant deciding whether to pay it out of the coffers of the US Treasury.
And it’s even worse, though he never acknowledges this, because it’s him deciding how much of the taxpayers’ dollars he gets to transfer to his own bank account. By himself. It’s horrifically corrupt, as anyone can see.
He tries to salvage this with a throwaway line about charity:
But I was damaged very greatly and any money that I would get I would give to charity.
Sure you would. This is the same Donald Trump whose charitable foundation was shut down in 2018 after a lawsuit found it had engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality” including using charitable funds to settle business disputes, buy portraits of himself, and make illegal campaign contributions. The same Donald Trump who admitted in that case to misusing charitable funds and was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. The same Donald Trump who appears constitutionally incapable of doing anything that doesn’t personally enrich him.
But even if we believed him—even if he pinky-swore to give every penny to charity—the entire premise is corrupt. If the money should go to a good cause, how about leaving it in the federal treasury? You know, the one that’s currently empty because the government is shut down and can’t pay its bills?
Let’s zoom out for a moment, because the specific details of Trump’s grift can obscure just how unprecedented this is.
The government almost never pays compensation to people it prosecutes, even in cases of actual wrongful prosecution. When someone is exonerated after being wrongly convicted, many states don’t provide any compensation at all, and those that do typically cap it at levels far below what Trump is demanding. The idea that you deserve compensation simply for being prosecuted—when the prosecution was based on actual evidence of actual crimes you actually committed—is lunacy.
The Russia investigation that Trump claims he deserves compensation for resulted in 34 indictments, seven guilty pleas, and five people sentenced to prison. The special counsel’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, instead noting that if they had confidence Trump didn’t commit a crime, they would have said so. The investigation was not “malicious prosecution”—it was a legitimate investigation into serious matters of national security.
Did some people exaggerate the extent of what Mueller would find? Sure. But there remains no evidence that the investigation itself was improper. Indeed, the exact opposite is true. The investigation was done, it found some clear evidence of law breaking, and that resulted in some people going to prison.
The classified documents case was even more clear-cut. The FBI found over 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite Trump’s lawyers claiming they’d returned everything. The evidence included surveillance footage showing Trump’s employees moving boxes of documents around to hide them from investigators. Trump was literally recorded discussing how he couldn’t declassify documents but was showing them to people anyway. This wasn’t a witch hunt—it was an open-and-shut case that only ended because Trump won an election.
And now he wants taxpayers to pay him for it.
Perhaps most disturbing is what Trump’s own comments reveal about how thoroughly he’s corrupted the Justice Department. When asked about the claims, he said, “I don’t even talk to them about it”—implying that his subordinates are pursuing this on his behalf without his direct involvement. This is almost certainly false (Trump has never been shy about directing his personal legal affairs), but even if it were true, it would mean the Justice Department is so thoroughly captured that officials are proactively working to enrich the president without being asked.
The Times notes that “administrative claims are not technically lawsuits” and that “such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department… to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court.” In other words, this is all happening behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny, no judicial scrutiny, and the Justice Department has the discretion to simply cut Trump a check.
Oh, and also this:
The Justice Departmentdoes not specifically require a public announcement of settlementsmade for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.
Trump could pocket hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, approved by his own lawyers, and there might be no public record.
And if you think that there’s some sort of ethics rules in place to stop it, Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to have made sure nothing stands in the way here:
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department. Asked if either of those top officials would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr. Trump, a Justice Department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, said, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
In July, Ms. Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.
Mr. Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.
Trump seems to have taken the joke “no conflict, no interest!” to heart.
Look, we’ve become numb to Trump’s corruption. Every day it’s a new batshit thing, and honestly, I’m exhausted. But this one deserves to break through the noise because it’s not complicated.
The President is demanding the government pay him $230 million for investigating his crimes and prosecuting him. His own lawyers get to approve it. He’s justifying it with the Big Lie. The government is shut down and can’t pay its bills, but sure, let’s cut Trump a check. And he’s doing all of this while admitting on camera that it’s “interesting” he gets to decide how much to pay himself.
This is just theft. The president is looting the treasury, and the only people who can stop him are the Justice Department he controls, the Congress that won’t hold him accountable, and the Supreme Court that already gave him immunity for crimes.
So yeah, he’ll probably get away with it. Because we’ve built a system where the most powerful person in the country can openly steal from us and face no consequences. Trump didn’t break the system—he just realized it was already broken and decided to take advantage.
And honestly? The fact that he can admit all of this on camera and still expect to cash the check is perhaps the most depressing part of all.
I recognize that this is like the fourth impeachable thing he’s done in the past week alone, and with each new horror the old one slides off the front pages, but really, this one deserves extra attention. At a time when the government is shut down, prices everywhere are rising, and the economy is stalling, Donald Trump is looking to personally enrich himself with a quarter of a billion dollars from the US Treasury.
This is a shockingly brazen level of corruption, even for Donald Trump. And we shouldn’t let it just slide away.
If Elon Musk probably has a superpower, it isn’t his engineering or business savvy. It’s probably his rank opportunism. The latest case in point: this week saw a massive outage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that managed to take many of your favorite websites and services offline. The outage also hampered the workflows of countless online businesses. The impact was fairly universal.
And, ever the opportunist, Musk was quick to leverage the outage to unfairly smear a potential competitor and promote his own, shittier alternative.
Musk, however, took the opportunity to exploit the outage to criticize Signal over at his right wing propaganda and crypto grifter website:
Why would Musk do this? He’s trying to promote his own, shittier encrypted chat software beta, the creatively named X Chat. X Chat is part of Musk’s quest to turn what was once Twitter into an “everything app,” despite the fact he’s shown little real indication he’s innovative enough to actually make X useful for anything outside of sports chat and fighting with racist crypto grifter bots.
While Signal isn’t perfect and certainly has some dependencies on centralized infrastructure, the AWS outage didn’t create any specific risk issues related to encrypted Signal communications. Musk simply saw an opportunity to exploit the outage to market his barely-used beta software. Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk by noting that Signal was at least transparently open source:
But because every brain fart Elon Musk has somehow warrants its own clickbait news cycle, what’s left of the U.S. press couldn’t help but amplify Musk’s criticism of Signal and parrot his attacks mindlessly:
Much like Trump, Musk’s real skill set has absolutely nothing to do with engineering.
His real skill set revolves rank opportunism (like cozying up to talented engineers and taking singular credit for their work) and exploiting America’s very broken press for attention and marketing. In this case, trying to convince people to migrate from a trusted, open source, secure messaging app to a closed source app run by an erratic white supremacist ideologically aligned with the planet’s shittiest people.
Look, folks, I’m sorry, but RFK Jr. is going to force us to talk about sperm. And I’m very much going to try to keep the jokes at an absolute minimum, because, as per usual when Kennedy starts spouting off about something health-related, this isn’t actually funny.
At this point I don’t think it makes sense to write up an intro to the post about how batshit crazy RFK Jr. is, how awful it is that he is currently running HHS, and how dangerous his policies and ramblings are. I’ve said it all before many, many times. He sucks, you get it, let’s move on.
Kennedy is very interested in your teenager’s sperm. He’s been talking about it for nearly a year now, typically as it relates to his claims that today’s teenage boy has a lower sperm count than men in their sixties and seventies. He growled out this claim once again at a recent White House presser.
RFK Jr: "Today the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone of a 65 year old man. Our girls are hitting puberty 6 years early … our parents aren't having children."
Let’s focus in real hard on the claim about teenagers’ sperm count. You know, like putting it under a microscope, as you would do to analyze the sperm concentration in a sample! But not a teenage boy’s sperm count, because, like… why are you even collecting that in the sort of significant numbers that would be required for a proper sample size in a study?
Contrary to Kennedy’s claims, sperm counts decline with age, so young men have much higher counts than older men. And data about sperm counts in teen boys largely does not exist.
Well, of course it doesn’t exist. Why would it? Why in the absolute hell would the parent of a 15 year old be getting that child’s sperm concentration medically tested? Generally, this just isn’t a thing.
This is the hallmark of an RFK Jr. claim. You take outlier studies in unsettled science and declare the minority position conclusively right, so long as it aligns with some larger philosophy you have. In this case, two philosophies of Kennedy’s: a war against environmental chemicals like pesticides and a sort of man-dominated fascism in which hyper-masculinity is of high value.
And here is where I’d like to coin a term: masculofascism. Yes, hyper-masculinity has long been a tenant of fascism generally, but this is, I think, differently emphasized in America’s modern day version. Masculofascism isn’t a word currently — Hi, Webster’s Dictionary! Feel free to adopt this one! –, but I asked Google to tell me what it thinks it would mean on a lark
I mean, come on comrades and friends, I might as well have asked Google to describe RFK Jr. to me.
Anyway, back to sperm. Are sperm rates for teenagers falling? How about for young men, or even men generally? Is this even a thing?
Well, like all manner of health-related topics, it’s complicated.
“This is a very contentious issue in our field, and for every paper that you find that suggests a decline and raises an alarm for this issue, there’s another paper that says that the numbers aren’t changing, and that there’s no cause for concern,” said Dr. Scott Lundy, a reproductive urologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
In fact, this is a topic and debate that goes back decades. Studies have been coming out since the early 90s suggesting that sperm counts in men were in decline compared with their male counterparts in decades past. In fact, the 50% reduction line is just as old.
In 1993, scientist Louis Guillette shocked Congress when he testified at a hearing that “every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was.”
Guillette was referring to a generational decline in sperm count. A year before his testimony, a review of papers published from 1938 to 1991determined that the average sperm count had fallen around 50%.
As Dr. Lundy indicated earlier, there are other studies that show no decline, too. More of those, actually. Following that hearing, in follow up studies, 35 more studies were done on this topic analyzing historical data, and 27 of them either showed no change or an increase in sperm count (21), or had inconclusive data (6). Only eight of them showed any kind of decline in sperm count or semen quality, a minority position. It’s the minority position.
Oh, and that study’s methodology was heavily disputed.
“The paper was widely, wildly cited,” but “the statistics were not solid,” said Dolores Lamb, who researches male infertility at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
I’ll just add to all of that the simple fact that the American population in 1990 was 248.7 million people. In 2023 it was 336.8 million. Somehow, amidst all this drop in sperm count and fertility, the population grew 35% in 30 years.
But we’re not done. More recently, in 2021, Shanna Swan wrote the book Count Down. Swan is a reproductive epidemiologist and argued that sperm counts had fallen by 52% (man, that number keeps coming up) across several continents from 1973 to 2011. In that same book, she argued that the median sperm count would reach null in 25 years. That would essentially end the human race as we know it, of course, which sounds quite alarming. And Swan, to be clear, is well-credentialed.
But it’s very difficult to square her claims with the fact that the population in most if not all of the continents she studied over that same time period has increased, not decreased. Here’s the North American population chart since 1950. If you can spot any sort of real cause for concern, feel free to point it out.
But men’s groups lost their minds over her paper. They argued that something was going on that was causing men to lose their masculinity. That’s the theme here. No longer are men real men. We’re something less than that now and you can tell because we don’t produce as many DNA missiles as we used to.
Unfortunately for all this testicle-wringing, Swan’s methodology was also questioned. As was the analysis based on point in time sperm samples generally.
Lamb said the analyses from Swan and her co-authors had a major weakness in their methodology. They assumed that laboratories in different parts of the world were collecting and testing semen in the same way, she said, when in fact the methods likely varied.
Swan stood by her team’s results, saying in an email that they accounted for differences in methodologies across studies, as well as the challenges of getting accurate sperm counts.
Lundy, of the Cleveland Clinic, said measuring sperm counts can be hard to do consistently. The count itself can go up and down depending on the frequency of ejaculation, time of year, or whether someone is injured or has a fever.
His analysis last year found a subtle decline in sperm count among men in the U.S. from 1970 to 2018 but one that most likely wouldn’t affect fertility in real life.
And, of course, there are a ton of potential mitigating factors to account for that could also impact a point in time sperm sample. Smoking effects sperm vitality. While smoking is largely on the decline (probably also seen as a decline in masculinity), there’s no indication a smoking status was accounted for in the samples analyzed for these studies. Alcohol also lowers sperm count and I really hope we aren’t going to argue that America saw a steep decline in alcohol consumption from 1970 to the 2010s (yes, there is currently a trend in America for reduced alcohol consumption, but that’s too new to show up in this data).
And, hey, I’ll give Kennedy some credit: studying pesticide effects on human reproduction, as well as many other healthcare factors, is a worthy area of study. But he undermines his own position when he takes the minority view of a scientific endeavor or area of study and simply declares that view dispositive. And he does this all the time.
And it’s often hypocritical. You know what else vastly decreases sperm count?
Testosterone replacement therapy — a treatment that has exploded in popularity among young men looking to feel more energized or to increase their sex drive — can also shut off sperm production entirely.
“Men on testosterone are almost uniformly azoospermic and totally infertile, and sometimes that is only partially reversible if they’ve been on high-dose testosterone for many years,” Lundy said.
Kennedy himself told Newsmax in 2023 that he takes testosterone replacement as part of an “anti-aging protocol.”
And, of course, there is vastly more to human fertility, or even male fertility, than sperm count. Nuance is what is at play here, not simple answers to complex issues. Or non-issues, as is likely in this context.
But you won’t get that out of Kennedy. Instead, you get that fourth bullet in Google’s interpretation of masculofascism: a devaluation of critical thinking and a preference for quick and simple action in lieu of intellectual discourse.
A more perfect description of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I cannot find.
Just days after we wrote about the EU’s renewed push for chat control, Germany has delivered a very important “no” vote. During discussions with EU countries last Wednesday, Germany’s opposition was decisive enough to kill the proposal’s momentum and remove it from this week’s agenda for EU justice ministers.
But it wasn’t just a procedural objection—Germany’s Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig delivered a statement that drew a very clear and very important line regarding encryption:
“Private communication must never be under general suspicion,” she said, adding that “the state must also not force messengers to scan messages en-masse for suspicious content before sending them.”
This is exactly the kind of clear-eyed recognition of fundamental rights that’s been missing from much of the chat control debate. Hubig didn’t mince words about the broader principle at stake, calling chat control something that “must be a taboo in a state governed by the rule of law.”
The proposal that Germany torpedoed would have required messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to scan messages and check for images, videos, and URLs that might contain child abuse content—including scanning through end-to-end encrypted communications.
Basically: government mandated spyware. You can understand why a country like Germany, with its history, might be quick to push back on such a thing.
The Netherlands joined Germany in opposition, so it wasn’t just Germany standing up on its own:
The Dutch government said in a letter to parliament late September that the current proposal failed to address its concerns about the protection of fundamental rights at stake, “particularly in the areas of privacy and the confidentiality of correspondence and telecommunications, and the security of the digital domain.”
What’s encouraging here isn’t just that the proposal failed—it’s how it failed. Rather than getting bogged down in technical debates about implementation details or carved-out exceptions, Germany and other opponents focused on the core principle: mass surveillance of private communications is incompatible with fundamental rights, full stop.
This stands in sharp contrast to the usual policy dance where politicians try to thread impossible needles, claiming they can somehow protect both privacy and enable mass scanning. Germany’s position recognizes what anyone with any knowledge of how encryption works has been saying for years: you can’t have secure communications and government backdoors at the same time.
Hopefully, that means countries will continue to take a hard line against chat control and other similar proposals that attack encryption.
The proposal isn’t dead—Denmark could put forward a revised version, and supporters like Bulgaria, France, Hungary and Ireland haven’t given up (it’s kind of amazing how bad France tends to be on this stuff). But Germany’s principled stance, backed actually understanding what this would mean for privacy, makes it much harder for chat control advocates to claim they’re just fine-tuning the details.
Germany’s opposition sends a clear message: some lines shouldn’t be crossed, even with good intentions. Here’s hoping other EU countries are paying attention.
As you know, we talk a lot about decentralization and protocols over platforms. When it comes to decentralized social media in particular, one person who has been working on it since the earliest days is developer Rabble, who was around at the very beginning of what would become Twitter and has worked on many decentralized social media efforts, and recently proposed a new Social Media Bill of Rights in a post here on Techdirt. This week, Rabble joins the podcast to talk all about the history and present state of decentralized social media.
The Party of Free Speech Snowflakes is at it again. Despite Charlie Kirk not actually being a member of the administration or, indeed, a political leader of any sort, the Trump Administration continues to act as though one of its own has been assassinated, rather than just another podcaster who happened to be more popular (for all the wrong reasons) than most.
The State Department has made a big deal in recent months about refusing/stripping visas over what’s normally considered to be protected speech in the United States. That’s because it’s headed by DEI hire Marco Rubio, who is prized not only for his ability to follow orders but his willingness to sit and not speak unless spoken to during diplomatic summit meetings.
Rubio — and his deputy Christopher Landau — are the gatekeepers of the Nazi Bar that is America. And if you can’t be bothered to cry your eyes out for a guy who’d never shed a tear for you, you’re not allowed to hang out in a country where you’ll probably just end up arrested during another untargeted ICE sweep.
“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the state department said in a statement posted on X. “The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
The state department then listed six “examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the US” in a thread on the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the Trump donor who called himself “a free speech absolutist” before buying the site formerly known as Twitter.
If you can stomach it, the X thread contains a list of supposed offenders of this brand new rule about temporarily residing in the United States. As is to be expected, those singled out for their refusal to treat Kirk’s death with the respect it doesn’t deserve are from countries this bigoted administration considers to be unworthy of rights or basic human respect, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Paraguay. Somehow, a couple of social media posts from people in Germany and South Africa make it into the mix.
This is the end result of a witch hunt deliberately started by the deputy secretary of the State Department:
Last month, a deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, urged social media users to send him posts critical of Kirk, saying he was “disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action”.
And there it is: the party that thinks free speech should only protect their hatefulness towards others, but should never be extended to speech it doesn’t like. While Charlie Kirk may have occasionally provided advisor-esque input to the Trump administration, he was never a politician nor a member of Trump’s cabinet. To elevate him posthumously into Someone Who Cannot Be Criticized is fucking disgusting. He was just another white dude with a bunch of biases who was blessed enough to make a bunch of money by taking advantage of the Trump administration’s embrace of white Christian nationalism ideals.
A person’s temporary residency in another country should never be based on whether or not they agree with the current government’s ideals nor the internet randos the government has decided are more equal than the rest of us. America was built on dissent. Now, it’s being destroyed by someone who seems to think he’s the second coming of King George.
Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin’s dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of… sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them?
Well, actually, we could have. Because we’ve been doing this since 1997.
Here’s the thing that’s particularly amusing about the great newsletter “revolution” of the past few years: it’s being hailed as some brilliant innovation that will save media from the tyranny of social media algorithms and platform dependency. Meanwhile, we’ve been quietly proving that exact point for almost three decades.
Back when Techdirt started, it literally was a newsletter. Email was the primary way we distributed things for the first couple of years. But somewhere along the way, we kind of forgot to mention that we still send out a daily email with the full text of every single post. We just had a tiny email logo in the upper righthand corner, and many thousands of you actually subscribed to get those full text daily newsletters.
Not excerpts. Not teasers designed to drive clicks. The entire damn thing, delivered to your inbox every day.
While everyone else spent the last few years “discovering” that newsletters are the future of media (again), we just kept quietly sending ours out to all of you who had subscribed, but never once mentioning its existence in the past couple of decades.
We’ve finally updated the tools we use to manage and send the newsletter, which means we now have actual flexibility to do more interesting things with it. Previously, our newsletter was essentially “here’s today’s posts in email form”—which, to be clear, is still exactly what it is today. We made sure that step one was just recreating what we already had been sending, because why fix what isn’t broken?
But now we have the infrastructure to potentially experiment with different formats, frequencies, or focus areas if that’s what you want.
The core offering remains the same: subscribe, and every day you’ll get the full text of everything we published, delivered to your inbox.
Now that we have better tools, we’re curious about what else you might want to see from our newsletter. Weekly roundups? Deep dives into specific topics? Digest emails instead of full text?
We’ve got some ideas, but we’d rather hear from you. Drop a comment below and let us know what would make a Techdirt newsletter more valuable to you. Do you want more analysis, different formatting, or just more reminders of all the crazy stories we cover?
We’d like to hear from people who receive the current email with all our posts (are there other supplementary newsletters you’d want to sign up for as well?) and from those who aren’t interested in the current email (is there something else you would want to receive?)
For now, though, the main thing is this: if you want Techdirt delivered to your inbox every day, you can do that now, and it’s easier than before when you had to hunt around the site for that tiny email icon.
You can subscribe from this page, or by using the widget at the bottom of this post, or via the signup form in the right-hand navigation bar at the top of any page. It’s free, it’s daily, and it’s the full text of everything we publish.
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Two Trump-appointed federal judges just decided that facts don’t matter when the President wants to send the military into American cities.
Donald Trump declared Portland a “war-ravaged” city requiring military intervention based on a few anti-ICE protests and imagery from five years ago on Fox News that he apparently thought was happening now. The actual threat? Police reports from the days before his deployment order show “approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.” One officer noted the protesters had “low energy” and “minimal activity.”
So Trump ordered military deployment against people in lawn chairs based on old Fox News footage. A Trump-appointed district court judge quickly issued an injunction, calling out the absolute insanity of military deployment based on complete fiction. She noted that Trump’s legal justification—that he was “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”—was “simply untethered to the facts.”
But two judges on the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court just dissolved that injunction, effectively ruling that the President gets to define his own reality when deploying troops against American citizens. And a third judge, Susan Graber, is calling out her colleagues in scathing terms for abandoning core constitutional principles.
While the district court cited this highly deferential standard, Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *9, it erred by failing to apply it. Instead, the district court substituted its own assessment of the facts for the President’s assessment of the facts. This is the opposite of the significantly deferential standard of review that applies to the President’s decision to invoke § 12406(3) and federalize members of the National Guard.
The majority goes through a longer list of basically every time the small group of protesters got too loud or annoying for ICE, without bothering to explore if any of those protests violated the law, or actually got in the way of the execution of the law. It also dinged the (again, Trump-appointed) district court judge for actually paying attention to what Donald Trump was lying about on social media in making her determination:
Second, the district court erred by placing too much weight on statements the President made on social media. Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *11. The district court interpreted President Trump characterizing Portland as “War ravaged,” as the equivalent of the President “ignoring the facts on the ground.” Id. As such, the district court relied on these statements to disregard other facts that do “reflect[] a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment.”
The majority, made up of two Trump-appointed Ninth Circuit judges: Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, insist that Trump’s lies should simply outweigh what anyone can plainly see with their own two eyes. It’s somewhat ridiculous.
And the third judge on the panel, Susan Graber, calls out the bullshit of her colleagues, in pretty strong language, while suggesting the rest of her colleagues on the Ninth Circuit should do an en banc review as soon as possible:
In the weeks preceding the President’s September 27 social media post proclaiming that Portland was “War ravaged” and authorizing Secretary Hegseth to deploy federalized Oregon National Guard members, demonstrations in Portland were non-disruptive and small. Notwithstanding the turbulent events that had occurred several months earlier, the record contains no evidence whatsoever that, on September 27, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) was unable either to protect its Portland facility or to execute the immigration laws it is charged with enforcing. But, in the statute invoked here, Congress has authorized the President to call up the National Guard only to repel a foreign invasion, quell a rebellion, or overcome an inability to execute the laws. Consequently, no legal or factual justification supported the order to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard.Given Portland protesters’ well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods employed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd. But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions.
She’s exactly right. The ruling is an all-out attack on multiple things that have been considered settled US legal issues. The idea that the President gets to call out the National Guard to shut down some political protests is absolutely insane. The district court called it out, as does Judge Graber.
As she notes, it’s both obvious and important that there is no fucking “war zone” in Portland:
The district court’s factual findings, which the government does not challenge on appeal, and which are not clearly erroneous in any event, fully resolve this issue. In the two weeks leading up to the President’s September 27 social media post, there had not been a single incident of protesters’ disrupting the execution of the laws. Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *10. I repeat: not a single incident for two weeks. Here are summaries from police reports for the five days preceding the President’s social media post.
September 22: Approx. 7-10 people. No calls.
September 23: Few people. No activity.
September 24: Approx. 10 people. No calls.
September 25: Approx. 20 people. No calls.
September 26: Approx. 15 people. Energy low, minimal activity. No incidents.
A police officer’s report from September 26 stated: “Throughout the day we observed approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.”
It is hard to understand how a tiny protest causing no disruptions could possibly satisfy the standard that the President is unable to execute the laws. The facts at issue in Newsom—significant, violent protests by hundreds of people in several locations the day before and the day of the President’s invocation of the statute—could not be further from the facts here—small gatherings in one location with “no activity” or “minimal activity,” low energy, and no calls for assistance for weeks.
While the majority called out random incidents of one or two protestors getting rowdy, Judge Graber says (1) those happened months ago and (2) none of them appeared to get in the way of ICE continuing to do its job. As she notes:
The legal basis for this argument is unclear.The trigger for federalizing the National Guard is an inability to execute the laws, not staffing difficulties that fall short of demonstrably resulting in an inability to execute the laws. The government has not explained how its purported staffing troubles were causing an inability to execute the laws on September 27. As explained above, the protests themselves—small, uneventful, low-energy—were not preventing execution of the laws at that time.The most that can be said is that, because FPS officers were stretched thin, if protests were to flare up in the future and if staffing woes were to lead to insufficient staffing, then an inability to execute the laws might arise at some hypothetical future time. But, as also explained above, subsection three of the statute requires a present-day inability to execute the laws; fear of a future inability is not enough. Nor could staffing difficulties alone support an inability to execute the laws; otherwise, the President could direct scores of FPS officers to a location with minimal security issues and then claim authority to call up the National Guard because those officers are needed elsewhere. In assessing whether the President had a colorable basis for concluding that the statutory requirements were met, we must consider the actual situation being addressed by the FPS officers.
She also dings her colleagues in the majority for being so desperate to help out Donald Trump that they made up an argument the DOJ never actually made:
The majority’s order spells out an argument that the government does not make, presumably because the government recognizes the lack of factual support. The argument in the majority’s order proceeds as follows. FPS has 776 officers, but only 497 officers are trained to protect federal buildings. Robert Cantu, the regional FPS director, asserted that, from June through September, “115 FPS officers have had to deploy to Portland.” The majority’s order first assumes that all 115 officers—nearly a quarter of the agency’s officers with relevant training— were stationed in Portland in late September. The majority’s order next reasons that such a diversion supports an inference that Portland is a significant source of staffing woes.
But that argument impermissibly adds facts to Director Cantu’s vague, carefully worded assertion. Crediting his assertion, we know that a total of 115 officers from elsewhere were deployed in Portland during the preceding four months. The record contains no information about how many officers were in Portland at any given time. For all we know, FPS sent a different 8 officers to Portland every week for 14 or 15 weeks, meaning that Portland’s drain on FPS’s staff from elsewhere on any particular day was 8 people, not 115. Indeed, the only description in the record of a “[s]urge” in officers was the deployment of 8 officers. The fact that there were 26 FPS officers on duty on September 6, as the majority’s order emphasizes, Order at 27 n.13, says nothing about whether any or all of those individuals were from somewhere other than Portland. The record does not reveal the number of local FPS officers
Even if we assume that FPS deployed all 115 officers in June, it strains credulity to assume that all 115 of them remained in Portland for four months. What were they doing during the month of August, for example, when there was only a single incident at the ICE facility during the entire month? The record does not tell us. Indeed, the record does not shine light on the most pertinent information: in the days leading up to September 27, how many FPS officers from elsewhere were in Portland? The only hint in the record is a reference to some officers from elsewhere leaving Portland and returning to their home stations.
She also mocks the idea that the National Guard deployment can be justified in response to “a rebellion”—an argument the majority decision didn’t even grapple with, saying they didn’t need to, given Trump can win with or without rebellion by just pointing (without evidence) to his supposed inability to execute the laws. But the lying about the rebellion kinda matters:
As an initial matter, the record contains no evidence that the sporadic violent events occurring over a handful of days during four months of otherwise peaceful protests were in any way organized. For example, there is no evidence of leadership, organizational structure, premeditation, or an overarching plan.
Even putting aside that deficiency, nothing in the record suggests that, on September 27, there was a rebellion or a danger of one. The same reasons given in Part I-A-1, above, apply here. In the two weeks leading up to September 27, there was not a single incident of “force and arms” against ICE’s personnel or facility. And going back more than two months, the record contains only “evidence of sporadic violence against federal officers and property damage to a federal building.”
Even considering all four months, the events as a whole did not rise to the level of an “unusual and extreme exigenc[y]” constituting a “rebellion.” Newsom, 141 F.4th at 1051. On almost every day during the four months preceding September 27, the record discloses ordinary political protests in Portland. Ordinary protests—quintessential First Amendment activity—obviously do not constitute a rebellion. See Illinois, 2025 WL 2937065, at *6 (“Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.”)
And while the majority tried to suggest that small rebellions like the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion, or Fries’s Rebellion mean it’s fine to call the protests a rebellion, Judge Graber calls bullshit:
Those rebellions shared several salient characteristics, including a large number of participants relative to the population and to available law enforcement, a wide geographic scope, evident organization and leadership, widespread use of arms, intense ferocity, and the creation of extreme difficulty restoring control by means of ordinary law enforcement.
What occurred in Portland differed in every dimension. As already noted, there is no evidence of organization or leadership, widespread use of arms, ferocity, or difficulty exerting control by ordinary means. In addition, the population of the Portland metropolitan area exceeds two and a half million, spread across nearly 6,700 square miles. U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2024; U.S. Census Bureau, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book: 2010, at 110. At their height, the protests in Portland have involved 200 people, or about 0.008% of the population. And they have taken place exclusively around a single city block, or approximately 0.00002% of the Portland metro area. The few people who did commit sporadic acts of violence have been arrested, processed, and charged by regular law enforcement forces.
Finally, she points out that the government hasn’t shown what injury it will incur if its invasion is not stayed while the courts consider further evidence, while there is pretty fucking clear evidence that the people of Portland will be harmed by an invasion of the US military.
Plaintiff City of Portland has a strong interest in preserving the peace. As the district court found, the deployment of troops in Portland is likely (if not certain) to aggravate the situation at the ICE building. Id. Finally, nearby businesses have economic interests that are likely to be harmed by the deployment of troops.
Judge Graber, who is not someone prone to hyperbole, closes by calling out how fucking anti-American all of this is:
The Founders recognized the inherent dangers of allowing the federal executive to wrest command of the State militia from the States. Congress authorized the President to deploy the National Guard only in true emergencies— to repel an invasion, to suppress a rebellion, or to overcome an inability to execute the laws. 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Congress did not authorize deployment in merely inconvenient circumstances, and Congress unquestionably did not authorize deployment for political purposes. Article III commands that we enforce those limits. The majority’s order abdicates our judicial responsibility, permitting the President to invoke emergency authority in a situation far divorced from an enumerated emergency.
And she rightly calls on “partisans” to imagine how they would feel if a future President rolled out the National Guard over other issues. She knows, we know, and they all know, that the MAGA crowd would totally freak the fuck out if a Democratic President sought to federalize the National Guard and invade American cities and towns in any other circumstance.
Today’s President seeks to bring troops into one set of States to enforce one set of laws; a future President may seek to bring troops into a different set of States to enforce a different set of laws. Partisans who cheer this President’s use of troops to protect personnel who are enforcing federal immigration laws would do well to consider whether they would be equally pleased if a future President uses troops to protect personnel who are enforcing laws that they vehemently dislike. Cf. Greer v. Spock, 424 U.S. 828, 839 (1976) (noting “the American constitutional tradition of a politically neutral military establishment under civilian control”).
We don’t even have to speculate. For years, the MAGA world has spread a nonsense, debunked conspiracy theory about how a standard military training exercise was actually a plan to invade Texas and take away guns. Judge Graber is just pointing out that now that this is actually happening, it’s pretty fucking crazy that MAGA supports it.
Bunch of hypocrites.
Judge Graber calls on her colleagues to gather to overturn the majority’s ruling and issues a stark plea to those dismayed by this ridiculous result:
We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth. By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda. I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.
And it appears that at least one of her colleagues has already accepted the challenge. An unnamed judge on the Ninth Circuit has already requested a vote for an en banc rehearing before Portland or Oregon even asked for one. The court has already asked the parties to file briefs on this by tomorrow at midnight. (As a reminder, because the Ninth Circuit is ridiculously large and no one has the political will to break it up into multiple circuits, unlike other circuits where “en banc” means all the judges, in the Ninth it’s a random set of 10 judges, so it can be a bit of a crap shoot).
Either way, this is yet another fast-moving case in which the Trump administration and its DOJ are demanding crazy things, and (mostly Trump-appointed) judges are pretending it’s normal. Hopefully, the court agrees to do a quick en banc hearing and shuts this nonsense down.
