Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is one of the most controversial figures in the Trump administration, a gate crasher in the buttoned-up world of national security.
In a field where quiet professionalism is revered, Gorka is loud and mercurial. With a booming, British-accented voice, he describes U.S. operations turning suspected terrorists into “red mist” and stacking bodies “like cordwood.” He wears a lanyard inscribed with “WWFY & WWKY,” referencing a line from President Donald Trump: “We will find you and we will kill you.”
It is a testament to the frenzy of Trump’s first year back in office that even the colorful Gorka had faded into the background as the nation reeled from a mass deportation campaign and sweeping cuts to federal agencies. That changed this February with the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which heightened the risk of retaliatory attacks on American citizens and interests around the world. Overnight, there was renewed interest in who leads White House counterterrorism efforts.
My editors and I decided it was time to break out the Gorka files. For six months, I had monitored Gorka’s public remarks for clues about the status of his long-promised national counterterrorism strategy and updates on deadly U.S. strikes in Africa and the Middle East. It had started as old-fashioned beat reporting; I cover counterterrorism, and he’s the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
The trove of details I collected from months of Gorka’s public statements, along with interviews with more than two dozen current and former security officials, were woven into a ProPublica investigation published in April. It’s an in-depth look at Gorka and his role in the hollowed-out national security apparatus after a year of leadership turmoil and personnel loss as Trump shifted resources toward his immigration agenda.
ProPublica reached out to Gorka for comment in multiple ways. He never responded, instead lashing out at me via posts on X before the story published. He told his 1.8 million followers that I was anti-American and accused me of writing a “putrid piece of hackery.”
There went my hopes for a good-faith exchange. After discussion with my editors, ProPublica decided to note the insults in the story. It was another revealing layer to the combustible leader Trump had installed in a sensitive national security role. A former senior official noted the eruption was “Gorka being Gorka.”
Increasingly, journalists are pushing back against attacks on our credibility by “showing the work,” guiding readers through the reporting process to dispel myths and foster transparency. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to show how basic beat reporting — fact-checking the assertions of a powerful figure — led to a broader story about the state of the U.S. counterterrorism mission at a critical moment.
I’ve covered the post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus for more than two decades, so Gorka was a familiar presence, an academic known mainly for a well-documented hostility toward Islam, which he has portrayed as inherently violent. Gorka has dismissed criticism of this portrayal as “absurd,” saying his focus is “the war inside Islam” between radicals and Western-aligned Muslim leaders. He also served as an adviser under the first Trump administration but was ousted after just seven months amid White House infighting.
At the time, dozens of lawmakers had demanded his resignation, and investigative outlets detailed links — which Gorka denies — to the Hungarian far right. After the bruising exit, Gorka waited patiently as the Republican Party swung harder right in the Biden era and eventually returned Trump to office.
Gorka was appointed White House counterterrorism czar — he called it his dream job — in a new era without the “adults in the room,” as some officials referred to the more moderate advisers around Trump in the first term. Privately, national security personnel expressed alarm that intelligence about threats was in the hands of an official who reportedly struggled to get security clearance in the first Trump administration.
To me, Gorka was a weather vane for the administration’s national security thinking: Would his “war on terror” mindset clash with the more isolationist “America First” camp that wanted no more forever wars? How would a vast security apparatus built for the Islamist militant threat reorient toward a new focus on far-left “antifa” militants and Latin American drug cartels newly designated as terrorist organizations?
I was especially interested in the status of a national counterterrorism strategy Gorka had been promising since taking office; such documents typically lay out an administration’s approach to fighting the most urgent threats. Though Gorka had described his plan as “imminent” and “on the cusp” of release, months ticked by without any sign of it.
To glean clues about the strategy, I made it my mission to watch every news appearance, read every interview and listen to every podcast featuring Gorka since December 2024, the month before he entered the White House. It took some digging — he rails against the mainstream news media and prefers to appear (largely unchallenged) on niche pro-Trump news outlets and at conservative think tanks.
I developed a nightly ritual. After dinner with my family, I’d hole up to listen to Gorka, hunting for the scraps of news buried in his over-the-top vocabulary and graphic storytelling. Alongside my note categories for “Trump Anecdotes” and “Militant Death Tolls” was one for “Big Words.” For example, the president calls Joe Biden “sleepy”; Gorka prefers “somnambulant.”
Weeks into the reporting, in February 2026, I realized Gorka’s speech had burrowed into my brain when I watched a silly video and thought, in his voice, “Preposterous!” It was time for a break.
I reread my notes from hours of listening sessions. I interviewed counterterrorism analysts and national security watchdog groups about Gorka and his remit. Veteran national security personnel added context and analysis. Just as my editors and I were discussing how to turn the findings into a story, the Iran war began and the spotlight on Gorka grew brighter.
Much of the material on air strikes and the dismantling of guardrails was first incorporated into a story I reported about the Pentagon moving away from more robust civilian protections, a reversal highlighted by a deadly U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Iran. Other reporting ended up in the story about Gorka’s phoenixlike return to the White House and what it says about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine.
Gorka didn’t respond to requests for comment beyond the hostile posts on X. When I asked the White House for comment, spokesperson Anna Kelly praised Gorka’s “incredible job” but sidestepped questions about his approach. “Anyone attempting to smear him and the President’s national security team is only revealing that they haven’t been paying attention for the past year,” Kelly wrote, “as anyone with eyes can see that our homeland is more secure than ever.”
As of writing, exactly two months into the Iran war, Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy has yet to appear.
Not this again. For many years now there have been a series of ongoing lawsuits between E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump, involving a variety of issues, but mainly whether or not he sexually assaulted her back in the 1990s and, separately, whether he defamed her in claiming he’d never met her after she accused him of sexual assault. As I’ve explained previously, I think the defamation claim part of it is pretty weak, but back during the first Trump administration, he had sought to have the DOJ substitute in and take over for him in the defamation case, which would have immediately ended the case, as you can’t sue the government for defamation. Having the DOJ substitute in for a government employee is allowed under the Westfall Act, and is designed to allow the US government to become the party when a government employee is sued for doing something in the course of their job (the normal example is if a government driver hits someone with a vehicle).
Eventually the various cases made it to trial and the two juries that heard the cases awarded Carroll nearly $88.3 million across two verdicts. Since then Trump has continued to try to avoid ever having to pay.
The case has bounced around a bunch, and Trump had asked for a do-over in the Second Circuit in the latest round. In rejecting that, one of the judges, who had been a part of the panel for an earlier ruling, described how freaking exhausting all this is:
These are the third and fourth times our Court has voted to deny en banc rehearing of rulings in this case, which concerns defamation and sexual assault claims brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. The two per curiam decisions at issue in this round of en banc voting — the fifth and sixth opinions by our Court in this case — arise from two related suits. The first (“Carroll I”) asserted defamation claims based on statements made by Trump in June 2019 while he was President, and the second (“Carroll II”) asserted a sexual assault claim as well as defamation claims based on statements made by Trump in October 2022 after he left office. Although Carroll I was filed first, Carroll II was tried first; in May 2023, the jury in Carroll II found, following a nine-day trial, that Trump sexually abused Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 by digitally penetrating her and that he defamed her with comments he made in 2022 after he left office. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, and this Court affirmed, Carroll v. Trump, 124 F.4th 140 (2d Cir. 2024) (per curiam) (“Carroll 4”), and denied rehearing en banc, 141 F.4th 366 (2d Cir. 2025).
Carroll I was tried in January 2024. The jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages. On appeal of the judgment, the panel issued two decisions. First, in April 2025, while the appeal was pending and after it had been fully briefed, Trump moved before us to substitute the United States as the defendant under the Westfall Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2679. The panel denied the motion by order last June, and issued an opinion explaining our reasoning in August. Carroll v. Trump, 148 F.4th 110 (2d Cir. 2025) (per curiam) (“Carroll 5”). Second, in September, the panel rejected Trump’s attempt to reassert a defense based on presidential immunity, and affirmed the district court’s rulings and the jury’s damages award. Carroll v. Trump, 151 F.4th 50 (2d Cir. 2025) (per curiam) (“Carroll 6”). It is these two panel rulings — Carroll 5 and Carroll 6 — that are the subject of these en banc petitions.
Trump and the United States have petitioned for rehearing of Carroll 5, and Trump has petitioned for rehearing of Carroll 6. Neither petition identifies how our decisions conflict with precedent of this Circuit, another Circuit, or the Supreme Court, or pose a question of “exceptional importance” justifying en banc review.
Having lost yet again, Trump has now appealed to the Supreme Court — where he’s presumably hoping the Court that handed him sweeping presidential immunity will ride to the rescue again. After all the only two notable exceptions to the Court backing him were specifically economy-related: blocking the firing of Fed members and striking down the illegal tariffs. Protecting Donald from sexual assault and defamation claims doesn’t fit into that bucket.
And, on Tuesday, the DOJ filed a motion with the Supreme Court saying that it is planning to ask to (once again) substitute itself in for Trump as the party under the Westfall Act. If I’m reading all this correctly, in the same case the DOJ is asking to appeal the earlier failure to be able to substitute itself in under the Westfall Act, it’s also still asserting its intent to actually substitute itself in.
Either way, this is a stunningly egregious move by Trump’s DOJ — once again acting as his personal legal fixer rather than a defender of the Constitution and the rule of law. The appeals court has made clear multiple times that he can’t use the Westfall Act to effectively force the case into a position where it must be dismissed, in part because the government waived the argument years ago and it’s too late to try to bring it back. In its ruling last week it explained:
The typicality ended there, as the Westfall issues were then litigated in three courts over the course of four years. … The critical juncture for present purposes was when the Westfall Act issue was presented on remand before the district court in June and July 2023. At that time, the Attorney General expressly declined to issue a Westfall certification or to otherwise seek substitution, and Trump did not take any action with respect to certification or substitution. … see 28 U.S.C. § 2679(d)(3) (allowing the employee to petition for certification where the Attorney General has declined to certify). The Westfall issue lay settled until April 2025, when the Government and Trump revived their efforts to have the United States substituted as the defendant in the case by moving for that relief in this Court….
The Carroll 5 panel denied the Government’s post-trial motion to substitute for three separate reasons: (1) the Government and Trump had waived substitution by failing to request it before the district court prior to trial; (2) the 2025 request was untimely under the Westfall Act; and (3) as a matter of equity in light of the procedural posture of the case. … These rulings were correct as a matter of law and did not warrant en banc review.
Basically: the Attorney General explicitly declined to seek Westfall certification back in 2023, Trump didn’t push back at the time, and the case went to trial and verdict. The Trump DOJ’s obvious counterargument — that a different administration gets a fresh shot at this — isn’t how it works. The waiver belongs to the United States as a party, not to whoever happens to be sitting in the AG’s chair at any given moment. The courts have said so, repeatedly and clearly.
There’s so much craziness going on right now that this barely registers as a blip. A jury found the President of the United States liable for sexual assault and defaming his victim. He’s been trying to make that verdict disappear for years. Now he’s got the Justice Department helping him. And it’s not even among the five most alarming things involving Donald Trump that day.
Maybe this isn’t just another vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration. But we’re going to need a lot more evidence to the contrary to abandon this conjecture:
The FBI searched the Virginia state Senate leader’s hometown office and her neighboring cannabis shop Wednesday, bringing into public view what two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press was a corruption investigation.
One of the people said the investigation into Democratic Sen. L. Louise Lucas was opened during Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation.
While the probe apparently has spanned administrations of different political parties, Democrats viewed it against a backdrop of recent, politically charged inquiries during President Donald Trump’s tenure. Lucas, who has been a senator for 34 years, was a prominent voice in Virginia’s recent redistricting effort, a Democrat-led initiative to counter Republican redrawing pushed by Trump.
If you’re not familiar with why Trump might be targeting L. Louise Lucas, here comes some remedial instruction. In April, Virginia voters approved redrawn voting districts that could conceivably shift the Democratic Party’s Congressional majority from 6-5 to 10-1. This was done in response to the GOP’s unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering — something that’s usually done every 10 years or so as census data begins to trickle in.
The GOP has no problem with redrawing districts to disenfranchise voters, most of them minorities. And the Supreme Court recently gave its blessing to the Second Coming of Jim Crow, which has resulted in red states rushing to maintain GOP supremacy by excluding voters based on their racial makeup. Virginia just did what a lot of red states are already doing, but the party in power went blue. This worked, which made MAGA people angry, resulting in them arguing against the same gerrymandering they’re usually fond of.
Louise Lucas not only helped get this referendum passed, she’s perfectly happy to take shots at federal-level Trump doormats while doing so:
If you can’t see the X.com embed, it’s Louise Lucas responding to Senator Ted Cruz’s whining about Virginia’s “brazen abuse of power and insult to democracy” (keep in mind, Cruz is saying it’s “an insult to democracy” for voters to pass a referendum with a majority of the popular vote) with a splendidly saucy:
You all started it and we fucking finished it.
So, that’s Exhibit A (at minimum!) that suggests this raid wasn’t really about whatever may or may not have been under investigation prior to Trump’s return to office. Trump has already made it abundantly clear he won’t tolerate gerrymandering that doesn’t hand his party more seats in Congress. In the case of Virginia and L. Louise Lucas, this includes attacks on social media targeting the Virginia governor, as well as referring to the Virginia referendum vote as a “RIGGED ELECTION.”
Another point in favor of “vindictive prosecution” is this: it’s being spearheaded by the same DOJ office that has tried (and failed) to convict political enemies of Trump like former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Then there’s this: somehow Fox News reporter Alex Hogan just happened to be on the scene in Portsmouth, Virginia to cover the FBI’s raid. The coincidence looks even more unlikely when you take into consideration that Alex Hogan is (to quote Fox’s bio page) “a London-based correspondent.” Somehow, magically… she was suddenly an entire ocean away and right in front of the Portsmouth, VA offices being raided.
Fox News seems to know how bad this looks. Whoever’s doing damage control at Fox has hastily rewritten Hogan’s bio page to make it appear as though she was just handling the sort of stuff she’s been doing for an unknown length of time as, um, someone not so “London-based”?
Here’s how this page looked in February 2026, before anybody started asking questions about Fox’s Johnny-on-the-spot raid coverage:
There’s more anecdotal evidence out there, including a report that a former interim US Attorney for Eastern District of Virginia had been pushing this investigation because “it would help Trump in the mid-terms.”
Now, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this, other than what’s been said by a couple of anonymous sources. No court documents have been filed. No criminal charges have been brought. And no one at the FBI or DOJ seems willing to share any details with the rest of the nation.
But the odds of this being anything other than a politically motivated effort are next to zero. The DOJ and FBI have shed any pretense of being neutral parties solely interested in seeking justice. For the entirety of Trump’s second term, they’ve done nothing but demonstrate their willingness to do whatever’s demanded of them, even if it’s illegal, unconscionable, or absolutely unprecedented. This looks like more of the same. If this administration wants to prove us wrong, it’s going to have to have to clear the trust hurdles it has spent the last 18 months erecting.
Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans refuse to seat the second one) is calling for a rigorous review of Paramount and the Ellison family’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. As Paramount recently revealed, 49.5 percent of the deal’s funding comes from Middle East and Chinese government-linked sources; just the sort of thing Republicans pretend to get mad about when engaged in stuff like, say, offloading TikTok to the POTUS’s rich friends.
The FCC doesn’t have much of a role in the giant media merger approval process because public license transfers aren’t involved. But it does (in a theoretical country that respects the law) have a role to play in enforcing Communications Act restrictions that restrict foreign entities from holding more than a 25% indirect equity or voting interest in a U.S. company that holds broadcast licenses.
Carr and the Ellisons have spent months publicly insisting the law doesn’t matter because the countries won’t have a meaningful management and board presence. It doesn’t matter, it’s still technically illegal.
But Carr is eager to ignore the law because the merger is of benefit to a rich Republican looking to gift his nepobaby two major Hollywood studies and turn what’s left of corporate news media (both CNN and CBS News) into an even-friendlier safe space for rich Republicans and global autocrats.
While Gomez’ actual power here is negligible, her call for a meaningful review is a useful reminder of Trump-era Republican hypocrisy and the importance of functional media ownership regulation (which the U.S. hasn’t had in a very long time). From Gomez’ statement:
“The American public deserves to know who owns the airwaves that carry their news. I am alarmed by what appears to be an effort to rubber stamp a financial structure that places nearly half of one of America’s largest broadcast and media companies into the hands of foreign governments with documented records of press suppression and a troubling willingness to silence journalists.
There are serious, unresolved questions about how this foreign investment may jeopardize national security, and this Commission has a legal obligation to answer them before handing wealthy friends of this Administration yet another Billionaire Buddy Bypass on a transaction that strikes at the heart of American journalism.”
Again, recall how Chinese private ownership of a social media company doing business in the United States caused a four year embolism by FCC boss Brendan Carr and other Trump loyal Republicans. Here you have a billionaire right wing Trump friend ignoring the law and gobbling up whatever’s left of U.S. media with the help of several autocratic buddies and there’s curiously no problem.
It’s almost as if Trump Republicans don’t have any coherent ideology beyond propping up their own wealth and power. If only the United States had a diverse and healthy news media capable of explaining that.
A potential lawsuit by a coalition of state attorneys general remains the best path for blocking the deal, though their focus will obviously be on the inevitable mass layoffs, price hikes, and shittier overall service that arrive every single time giant media mergers (especially involving Warner Brothers) get rubber stamped by our pay-to-play federal government.
A key takeaway of the Trump II admin is that they came in declaring a whole bunch of things to be stupid and worth ripping apart, only to later realize how important and structurally necessary those things were, and then rush to recreate them in a much sloppier, worse version. Now they’re doing it with AI policy.
As you may recall, under Biden, there was a push to get the frontier AI model companies to agree to do some voluntary testing in association with the government, to make sure that at least someone was looking over how some of the most powerful models might do bad things. Eventually, the administration worked out an agreement with OpenAI and Anthropic to give the newly established U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (USAISI) (a part of NIST) early access to frontier models for some basic standardized testing. You can see an example of the testing results on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 released a few months after that model was already on the market.
Not really a huge deal, but there was some grumbling and concerns among some that the U.S. government really shouldn’t be in the business of reviewing AI models. But some folks completely lost their minds about this. Notably, some of the top VCs in Silicon Valley, such as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Andreessen suggested that the Biden approach to regulating AI (which, again, was incredibly light touch and the product of many, many months of negotiations between AI supporters and skeptics) “would impose tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.”
Around that time, both Andressen and Horowitz went all in for Donald Trump, citing Biden’s supposedly awful approach to AI (and cryptocurrency) as a key reason. To this day, if you hear either of them talk about this (as they seem to do on every podcast they can join), they repeatedly make extreme claims about how the Biden administration was out to destroy American AI innovation and (phew!) only Donald Trump has brought back sane policies.
Indeed, one of Trump’s first orders of business on Day 1 was to revoke Biden’s policy on AI safety reviews.
However, as we’ve been chronicling, it’s not as if the Trump administration has had any real coherent policy plan on AI. He sure claimed to have a plan, but much of it seemed to actually be focused on culture war bullshit about stopping “woke” AI from existing (which sure sounds like a suppression of speech, but alas). And then, when Pete Hegseth’s lackeys started throwing a shit fit that Anthropic wouldn’t let them use its tools to do mass surveillance on Americans, the admin declared Anthropic woke, and sought to destroy the company.
As we keep warning, the tech bros and VCs who embraced Trump’s version of MAGA fascism in the belief that through him they’d get the regulatory utopia they were hoping for were so obviously going to have the rug pulled out from under them.
And now we’re at that time for the latest rug pull. According to the NY Times, the Trump administration is planning to demand that they get to pre-vet all new AI models:
The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models.
Oh. A formal government review process for new AI models? That seems more stringent and compliance-oriented than the voluntary setup that the Biden admin had created.
Also, with the Biden admin, the process involved a lot of careful deliberation and building out the capabilities within USAISI within NIST (a widely-trusted agency involved in setting technical standards). It appears the Trump admin version will be… a bit different and less well thought out:
Officials said that if the administration moved ahead with vetting A.I. models, the working group would help determine the agencies that would help with that effort. With no federal agency responsible for all government cybersecurity work, some officials said having the N.S.A., the White House Office of the National Cyber Director and the director of national intelligence oversee the model review was the best way to proceed.
So, we went from a voluntary, fairly light touch program under the Biden admin, where a bunch of tech standards nerds do a pretty straightforward safety review of models, with no further enforcement mechanisms… to one in which potentially the NSA and the intelligence community now gets early access to AI models with some sort of ability to approve or reject them.
What could possibly go wrong?
For starters: everything.
Meanwhile, just recently Marc Andreessen was going on podcasts talking about how happy he is that Biden’s “ruinous” federal attacks on AI are now gone and unlikely to return. Want to try again, Marc?
Look, this was always going to be the result. This is not to say that Biden’s AI policies were good. They weren’t. In typical Biden fashion there were too many competing voices in the room and so the eventually policy outcome was kinda meh. It would not have been my preferred approach. But it was hardly ruinous, let alone a kind of “tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.”
But, as we’ve pointed out over and over again, even if you’re able to get on Trump’s good side, MAGA-style fascism is never good for you for very long. Sure you can try to cash out while the getting is good, but eventually that kind of fascism always fails. It’s simply unsustainable, and in the hands of a bunch of incompetent Trump courtiers, eventually it was always going to turn into some sort of effort to control and mold companies towards Trump and his cronies’ interests.
The end result here: we have a way worse version. Just as some of us have been warning about and predicting all along.
Amusingly, the author of Trump’s original AI policy, Dean Ball, wrote in his newsletter just before the NY Times released their article that:
the current trajectory of federal frontier AI governance is worse than the direction of AI policy under the Biden administration…
Gosh. Who could have possibly predicted that an administration full of incompetents, hangers-on, and power-hungry, mediocre, ignorant bros who want to pretend they’re the masters of the universe would fuck this one up?
Yeah, look, maybe next time, instead of embracing obvious fascism, just deal with the fact that sometimes within normal democratic structures you get bad policies you disagree with, rather than deciding we need to set fire to the constitutional order and the institutions that made American innovation so successful.
Hopefully, we can bring some of that back before it’s too late, so that next time, people like Marc Andreessen don’t set American innovation on fire just because the Biden admin hoped that people would check to make sure AI models were a bit safe.
The Trump administration’s war on science has been a furious one. Be it deep cuts to scientific research, policies that ignore scientific research, or the appointment of deeply unscientific people to lead scientific cabinet positions, it seems that Trump thinks that knowledge is the enemy.
You will recall how RFK Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP vaccination panel last summer. It became obvious in the aftermath why he did so, after installing a cadre of anti-vaxxers to replace them and moving to shift immunization policy away from vaccines at the federal level. Trump appears to have taken a page from Kennedy’s playbook, as he recently terminated the entire board of the National Science Foundation days ago.
All 22 members of the National Science Board were terminated by the Trump administration via a terse email on Friday. The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and acts as an independent advisory body for the president and Congress on scientific and engineering issues, providing reports throughout the year. The ousters represent another severe blow to the NSF and the overall scientific enterprise in America.
Members received a two-sentence email saying that, “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump,” their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.”
The post is filled with commentary from the board members and others pointing out that this leaves America with a gaping hole of leadership from a scientific advisory standpoint. The NSB advises both the Executive and Legislative branches. Trump has also nominated Jim O’Neill, an investor, to be the next Director of NSF. There is speculation that this move was done as a way to clear the field for O’Neill to replace them with hand-picked members that will further his tech bro agenda. He also already works for the federal government as Kennedy’s Deputy Secretary of HHS.
But maybe the explanation for the timing here is much more simple: Trump may have caught wind of a forthcoming NSB report about America falling behind in scientific research.
Multiple dismissed members believe the timing was deliberate, as the board was finalizing a report highlighting a widening U.S.–China gap in research and development spending. The report addresses areas central to Trump’s stated priorities, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the Moon race, but underscores lagging U.S. investment. Critics suggest the administration may seek a board more aligned with short-term political goals rather than long-term, exploratory research.
Now that sounds more like the Donald Trump I’ve come to know. This is less likely to be 4D chess at work then he simply didn’t want to be embarrassed by this report. There’s a simple test for whether that was part of the impetus here. If that same report does get finalized eventually and gets released, then it wasn’t. If we never get that report, it probably was. Simple.
But wasn’t isn’t simple is going to be digging ourselves out of the scientific debt that Trump is placing upon the country. If knowledge is power, as the saying goes, then America is less powerful today than it was before this administration.
In late 2024, Donald Trump sued CBS for $10 billion claiming “election interference” because 60 Minutes had the audacity to (*gasp*) edit a Kamala Harris interview down for broadcast. The lawsuit was, on its face, ridiculous — editing interviews is protected First Amendment activity, the kind of editorial discretion that has been the entire premise of magazine-format television since the format existed. But CBS’s owners at Paramount needed FCC approval for their Skydance merger, and Trump controlled the FCC, so they paid $16 million to make the lawsuit go away. We covered that institutional cave at the time and called it what it was: a bribe dressed up as a legal settlement.
Decoding Fox News did the tedious work of comparing what aired against the full transcript that CBS published, and the results are wild. When asked why so many people seem to want to kill him, Trump went on a meandering rant about transgender athletes and “men playing in women’s sports” — the kind of free-association nonsense that makes you wonder who’s actually running the country. CBS edited that out. You can read it here, though:
60 Minutes: Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you?
Trump: So, I’ve said it and I’ve said it numerous times, and I actually, because of the position I’m in, I’ve done quite a bit of research into the word assassination. Terrible word. And they go after consequential presidents. They go after presidents that, do things. If you look at what I’ve done, we’ve turned this country around. We’ve taken a country that was actually a dead country. It was dying very rapidly, and it’s the hottest country anywhere in the world. We had a skirmish, a war, whatever you want to call it. With Venezuela, we won that very decisively. And we now have a great relationship with Venezuela. And it’s been a very profitable relationship. And we’re in Iran right now. Other presidents should have done it, but they never chose to do it. They should have. They made a terrible mistake by not doing it. It’s tougher now than it would have been ten years ago or even five years ago because, you know, thousands and thousands of missiles and everything else. And we didn’t do the B-2 bomber attack. That alone was a big deal. The killing of Soleimani, which I did in my first term, was a big deal. But when you’re a consequential when you do things, a lot of things and things that work out very well for our country. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, McKinley was assassinated. McKinley made the country very rich. People don’t realize it. Then Teddy Roosevelt went out and spent the money that was made by McKinley. But it was very consequential, actually. But he was assassinated. So,
60 Minutes: You mentioned, Mr. President, consequential. And your policies are also controversial. Is that part of it?
Trump: Well, I don’t think that way. I don’t think in terms of what they are. I just think of what they are for the country. For instance, I inherited the worst border we’ve ever had in the history of a country where 25 million people came in, 25 million people at least, and many of them were from hardcore criminals, and they were drug dealers, and they were from prisons. They emptied our prisons into our country. They have, mental institutions, insane asylums into our country. And I don’t know if that’s controversial to say we have to move those people out, but we have and but it is from the standpoint you’re doing something and you’re doing something that’s good. Things like, men playing in women’s sports, I’m against it. Things like transgender for everyone. I’m against that. There’s so many things that I’m against. I don’t think they’re controversial. I think the other side is controversial, but I do a lot of things and I get things done. And, you know, we’re respected now as a country all over the world. And some people love that, but some people probably don’t.
That word salad that we’ve all become used to is mostly nonsense. It remains absolutely incredible that no one points out to the President of the United States that “migrants pleading asylum from violence” is not “coming from insane asylums.” He doesn’t seem to understand that.
60 Minutes… cut that entire segment out.
When asked about Cole Allen (who breached a first layer of security with weapons at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with the alleged intent to assassinate Trump) attending a “No Kings” protest, Trump’s actual answer included this gem:
Well the you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you. You know I’m not a king, I get it, I don’t laugh, I don’t, I, I see these No Kings which are funded just like the southern law was funded. You all that southern laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the southern law. That was a southern law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was, a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election. And that’s what you really should be doing. I mean, I hope one of your ‘60 Minute’ episodes, which really hasn’t changed very much for the last few years, I’m surprised. But one of those episodes should be on southern law, and the fact that they spent millions and millions of dollars on absolute far right and just bad, bad groups, and then they’d use those groups and they’d say, these are Republican groups, and we’re coming to your rescue, and they’re the ones that have funded it, and they’re the ones that kept them, keep them going. Pretty sad.
That’s the President of the United States repeatedly calling the Southern Poverty Law Center, against whom his DOJ has filed a highly questionable lawsuit, “southern law” and then just going pure word salad based on not even remotely understanding what SPLC did (or even what his own DOJ has accused them of doing). And, no, the bigoted “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville were not “funded by the southern law.”
This is a man who can’t understand basic concepts.
What part actually aired?
Well the, you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.
Crisp, almost witty. A real “zinger.”
The rest of that word salad clipped to the dustbin of history.
And, of course, immediately after that he starts whining about 60 Minutes again. He goes on like this (none of which airs):
Trump: Do you think it’s pretty sad Norah?
60 Minutes: The allegations and the indictment.
Trump: There’re not just allegations.
60 Minutes: But it’s an indictment.
Trump: These facts okay. These are facts. I mean, they have checks to the two Klux Klan and many others, and then they’re saying how bad they are and blaming the Republican Party and Republicans. These are not just allegations, but go ahead.
60 Minutes: Well as you know sir, you’ve been accused of things and were able to go to a court of law and adjudicate them.
Trump: So yeah, it’s after five years. It’s it’s it takes you about five years.
60 Minutes: I do want to talk about that also.
Trump: I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me. And not that I want to sue people because I don’t. But I bring lawsuits against the fake news and brought lawsuits against your network, and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening. And you paid me a lot of money, and you tried to pull one off. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing that you did. And you know, when you say, can we all get along? You can. But when people do things like that, or how about the BBC where the BBC has me? Actually, AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do. They’ve admitted they’re wrong. They just don’t know what to do. They actually have me making a major statement. And it wasn’t me. It was my face. It was my lips. My lips were perfectly in sync with the words I said. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. So
60 Minutes: I hear you Mr. President.
Trump: So then when you say, can you get along? I can get along with anybody. But if people are going to cheat, if people are going to be fake, you sort of don’t want to get along.
60 Minutes: On that. What do you say to people who are encouraging political violence or even cheering it on?
Trump: Well, I think the ones that are doing that are much more far left than far right, much more. When you see again, southern law, when you see some of the statements that are made there. So even when you say No Kings, that’s, that’s encouraging. You’re saying one of the things this guy said in his manifesto, what you didn’t read, you should have, is that he attended a No Kings rally along with not too many people, and probably it had an impact. You know, they get up and they say whatever they want. No, I’m against it. I think it’s terrible.
Did you get all that. It’s a bit confusing because everything he says is confusing, but when 60 Minutes’ Norah O’Donnell points out that the claims against SPLC (which, yes, Trump keeps calling “Southern Law”) are simply allegations, Trump insists they’re not. O’Donnell points out what Trump himself should recognize, given how often he’s been charged with crimes, that charges in a criminal case still have to be proven in a court, and Trump denies that (which is shocking on its own).
And then he shifts to the nonsense vexatious censorial SLAPP suits he files, including the one against CBS and 60 Minutes, and falsely claims that CBS paid him $38 million (it was $16 million) and says “because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening.”
Which, um, is literally the exact thing that 60 Minutes is doing here. In this interview. In not airing that part! The part that includes a demonstrably false claim about how much CBS paid.
Oh, and his claims about the BBC (also not aired!) are equally ridiculous and factually absurd. He is suing them, but nothing in the lawsuit is, as he claims, about AI. In the interview he says the following:
AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do.
But that’s not what the lawsuit says, and literally no one has accused the BBC of using AI. They simply showed two separate quotes, and the claim in the lawsuit was that doing so gave a false presumption that the two statements were said one after another when they were actually separated by many minutes.
In other words, it’s also a lawsuit about not liking the way a speech was edited. Not about AI. At all.
And 60 Minutes edited out him lying about it.
The editorial pattern is consistent throughout: 60 Minutes’ producers cut the parts where Trump sounded unhinged and kept the parts where he sounded like a slightly more normal politician answering questions.
This is, of course, exactly what 60 Minutes has always done with every politician they’ve ever interviewed. It’s the entire format. You sit someone down for 40 minutes or an hour, then you edit it down to ten to 15 minutes to fit the broadcast window, and you try to focus on the parts that actually make sense for television. This is television journalism, and it has worked this way since 60 Minutes premiered in 1968.
When CBS did this with Harris, plenty of people — including us — pointed out that this was just how the show works. The lawsuit was, as we noted at the time, a “blatant attack on free speech and the First Amendment, as editorial discretion is a protected right of news organizations.” Any first-year law student could tell you that. Hell anyone familiar with the First Amendment could tell you that. Trump’s own lawyers presumably knew it. The judge who would have eventually ruled on it would have known it.
But Trump didn’t need to win the lawsuit. He just needed CBS to care more about making the headache disappear than standing on principle. And because Paramount’s owners wanted their Skydance merger approved by Trump’s FCC and DOJ, they paid him $16 million to make it disappear.
60 Minutes edited Trump exactly the way they edited Harris — actually more aggressively, given how much rambling they had to compress — and they did it for exactly the same reason: because that’s what television journalism is. The full transcript exists. CBS published it themselves. Anyone can verify that the editing was extensive and that it consistently made Trump sound more coherent than he actually was.
So, it’s one of two things:
Either editing political interviews for broadcast is just part of how these shows work — protected by the First Amendment (in which case the Harris lawsuit was the frivolous nonsense we always said it was, and CBS paid $16 million to settle a baseless claim) — or it’s “election interference” worth $20 billion in damages (in which case CBS just committed it again, even more egregiously, and the DNC should be filing a similar suit).
You don’t get to have it both ways. Unless, of course, you’re Trump, MAGA media, or — apparently — CBS News itself.
What if [DNC boss] Ken Martin were to claim CBS News interfered in the 2026 election by editing down Trump’s interview, no less than it interfered in the 2024 election by editing down Harris’s? What if he filed an angry lawsuit, if only to hold up a mirror to the perversity of the status quo? What if he insisted that nominally neutral institutions treat the parties equally? Why not let CBS decide whether it wants to settle the score, or whether it wants to be known as the network that gives money to Republicans only?
Beutler’s broader point — that Democrats consistently refuse to impose costs on bad-faith actors and thereby teach those actors there are no consequences for bad faith — is largely correct. And yes, there’s something satisfying about the thought experiment.
But the actual lawsuit would be a total disaster — because it would lose. Badly. Easily. Obviously. Just like Trump’s lawsuit should have lost. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion. A judge would dismiss it, probably quickly, and Republicans would immediately spin that dismissal as proof that the original Trump lawsuit had merit. “See? When the Democrats tried it, the courts saw right through it. But Trump’s case was so strong, CBS settled for $16 million.” The fact that this framing would be exactly backwards — that Trump’s case was settled because of regulatory extortion, not legal merit — would be lost in the noise.
You can’t fight a bad-faith propaganda operation by feeding it more propaganda fuel. The DNC suing would hand the GOP a winning narrative for free.
What CBS should be doing — what any media organization with a spine would do — is loudly defend the editing of the Trump interview as exactly what it is: standard journalism. They should be pointing to the published transcript and saying “yes, we edited this, here’s why, this is what we do, this is what we have always done, and it’s what we did with the Harris interview too. This is what the First Amendment protects us in doing.”
They should be using this moment to show everyone just how ridiculous the Harris lawsuit really was, and to make clear that the $16 million payment was a business decision driven by merger pressures, not an admission of journalistic wrongdoing. Otherwise Trump is just going to keep insisting, to CBS’s own reporters, that he has proof that they somehow treated him unfairly.
But they won’t. Because CBS, under its new ownership, has thoroughly learned the coward’s lesson that resistance is costly and capitulation is cheap. Bari Weiss now runs CBS News. The network that paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit about editing a leading politician is now in the business of editing Trump’s interviews to make him sound presidential — and the total silence from everyone who pretended to care about journalistic integrity during the Harris episode is telling.
Where is the Free Press exposé on this clear-cut case of “news distortion”? Where is the Ted Cruz hearing demanding accountability? Where is FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening to revoke CBS’s licenses for “election interference” or “news distortion” ahead of the 2026 midterms? Where is the $20 billion lawsuit from anyone, anywhere, claiming that CBS is putting its thumb on the scale by making the president sound less like a man losing his grip on reality?
We all know where they are. The only “principle” at play here was always, transparently, about leverage. Trump had leverage over CBS via the FCC. CBS folded. Now CBS uses that same editorial discretion to flatter Trump, and suddenly editorial discretion is fine again, actually.
This is institutional capitulation under an authoritarian government. CBS has editorial discretion. It’s well within their First Amendment rights to edit 60 Minutes in ways that flatter the person they paid the bribe to. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t call out the rank hypocrisy.
The reality is that the editing of this interview was, on its own merits, fine. Editing a 40-minute interview down to 13 minutes is what 60 Minutes does, even though I would argue cutting out much of his rambling hid parts that were genuinely newsworthy in favor of sanewashing the president. But that’s CBS’s editorial discretion. Bari Weiss and 60 Minutes are free to trash their own reputation by burnishing the President’s.
What’s not defensible is doing this now, after paying $16 million on the premise that doing this for Harris was somehow corrupt. CBS has put itself in a position where it cannot honestly defend its own editorial choices without acknowledging the settlement for the cowardice it was. In both cases CBS had perfectly defensible arguments for its edits. But in one case it capitulated. CBS should be forced to explain why.
But they’ll just say nothing. And Trump will say nothing, because he knows the editing helps him. And MAGA media will say nothing, because they only care about “news distortion” when it’s politically useful. And the rest of us will watch yet another major American institution demonstrate that it has no principles, only prices.
The $16 million was a down payment on every future editorial decision CBS makes about Donald Trump. And we just saw what that buys.
A quick reminder: America has not had a confirmed Surgeon General at the federal level since January of 2025. Yes, that’s over a year ago. How we got here is a microcosm of the Trump administration generally: chaos, misfires, and the wrong people at the very top. Janette Nesheiwat was Trump’s first nominee. MAGA gremlin Laura Loomer complained about her very loudly, leading Trump to obediently pull back the nomination.
In her place, he then nominated Casey Means in May of 2025. Means has been described as RFK Jr.’s “favorite wellness influencer”, which is a more subtle way of saying that she’s not a licensed doctor. That fact generated a lot of pushback in Congress, not only from Democrats, but Republicans too. Then, during her confirmation hearing in March of this year, Means dodged questions about vaccines as much as she possibly could, leading Senators like Bill Cassidy and others to question what her actual belief structure on vaccines is, and how much it aligns with RFK Jr.’s. Ultimately, few people thought her nomination was in a good place when it comes to confirmation.
Trump finally woke up to that fact, angrily of course, and has now pulled the Means nomination as well. In her place, he has now nominated radiologist Nicole Saphier, who also moonlights as a health commentator for Fox News. In many ways, Saphier is merely Casey Means wearing sunglasses and a false mustache.
In some ways she’s different. For instance, she’s an actual practicing doctor. On the other hand, she’s caked in the same wellness industry nonsense as Casey Means.
Saphier got her medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados, according to her LinkedIn profile. She then completed a radiology residency through Creighton University School of Medicine. She joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2016 and has been a Fox News contributor since 2018. She is also the founder of Drop Rx, a herbal supplement business that develops “clean, thoughtfully crafted tinctures that support focus, calm, balance, and overall wellness.”
As for the topic of vaccines, her commentary rings as though she has a similar belief structure to Means, but knows how to hide it better.
On this front, she appears to walk a fine line—being skeptical of vaccines and critical of vaccination recommendations, while avoiding overt opposition to them. In 2022, she falsely claimed on social media that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren—something the CDC does not have the power to do; school vaccination requirements are set by the states. Despite being wrong, her claim sparked outrage among right-wing media.
In August, she posted a video criticizing the American Academy of Pediatrics for continuing to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for children—after Kennedy had unilaterally dropped the recommendation in line with his anti-vaccine views.
Oh, and she was more than a little careless when it came to COVID.
In Dec 2021, Nicole Saphier — a Fox contributor now tapped as Trump's surgeon general nominee — argued that "it is time to move forward and allow this mild infection to circulate so we can continue to build that hybrid immunity."250,000 Americans died of covid in 2022.
This administration keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. The dual facts that we’ve been without a confirmed AG for over a year into this administration and that we can’t get a vanilla nominee that can pass through to confirmation without generating headlines is both crazy and a complete failure of this administration.
Trump has been on a tirade blaming Cassidy for all of this. But Cassidy isn’t the problem here. Trump and Kennedy keep stepping on rake after rake by nominating the wrong people for important jobs. I doubt that anyone that was skeptical of Means won’t have the same concerns about Saphier, so we may be back at this all over again months from now.
As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city.
Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a fellow asylum-seeker, in New Orleans while reporting to immigration agents for check-ins as she awaited her day in court. Finally, the date was approaching, in late November 2025. Days later, the Trump administration would flood the region with federal officers in “Operation Swamp Sweep.”
Urbina, 35, began searching for a Spanish speaker who could help her, and said she stumbled on a Facebook post advertising the services of Catholic Charities, a prominent aid organization whose services include assisting immigrants. After a few clicks, she connected via WhatsApp with “Susan Millan,” who claimed to have a law degree. The woman’s photo looked professional, showing a small library in the blurry background, according to a screenshot Urbina shared with ProPublica. The asylum-seeker said she discussed her predicament with the woman she thought was an attorney.
Millan told Urbina the ordeal could be settled over a virtual hearing with U.S. immigration authorities. Millan sprinkled in details about her own life — a sick husband, two kids, a supportive church — so Urbina felt comfortable. In an interview, Urbina said she completed paperwork to be sent to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for a fee. Millan’s organization asked her for documentation, including five character references; for another fee, it would submit these up the line. Through the payment app Zelle, Urbina and her husband paid nearly $10,000, according to her financial records, money they had set aside to buy their first home.
On Nov. 21, Urbina made the case that a “credible fear” was keeping her from going home. In the virtual hearing, which lasted five minutes, she said she spoke to a man dressed in a green uniform, stitched with what looked like government insignia, seated in front of an American flag. A day later, via WhatsApp, Millan told her she “won residency.” Her documents would be in the mail.
In an instant, Urbina’s fears had been assuaged. She asked if she should still attend her court date, Nov. 24. “No, don’t worry,” she remembers the woman replying. “There’s no need.”
But when Urbina asked to speak with someone in a message to Millan’s phone number the next day, according to screenshots she shared with ProPublica, the WhatsApp chat fell silent. After two days, she suspected she’d been duped and wrote in anger: “God is with us and He fights for His children; today you messed with the wrong person and you will get your payment from the Most High, you cowards.”
There was no attorney named Susan Millan associated with Catholic Charities, and the deceit was just one example of hundreds that the group has become aware of when desperate immigrants eventually reach the real organization.
“There’s a reason why we have a good reputation,” said Chris Ross, vice president of migration and refugee resettlement services at Catholic Charities. “And so for someone to be trading on that goodwill with nefarious intent is very frustrating.”
Urbina had fallen prey to “notario fraud,” in which scammers provide legal advice, often by saying they’re public notaries or other legal professionals. In many Latin American countries, a public notary is the equivalent of a lawyer, and notario fraudsters rely on this mistranslation to fake credentials.
Urbina shared documents that detail how she was lured into the scam, and ProPublica corroborated her story with her husband and Catholic Charities. After Urbina told local and federal authorities she had been tricked out of her day in court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement switched her scheduled December virtual check-in to an in-person meeting. When she showed up, agents arrested her. In January, she said, officers shackled her hands and feet and loaded her on a plane to Nicaragua.
She’d been scammed, then deported.
A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about Urbina’s case but said, “Anyone caught impersonating a federal immigration agent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” New Orleans police did not answer ProPublica’s questions about a complaint she filed.
Scams like those that destroyed Urbina’s dreams are on the rise, federal data analyzed by ProPublica shows, as profiteers seize on the fear and confusion wrought by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Complaints of immigration scams have doubled since Trump was elected, ProPublica found in analyzing more than 6,200 complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission by victims and advocates over the last five years.
From the start of 2021 through the election in fall of 2024, the FTC — the nation’s top consumer protection agency — fielded about 960 immigration complaints per year, such as reports of fake attorneys offering services or people impersonating federal officers. In 2025, the commission received nearly 2,000 complaints.
In all, at least $94.4 million was reported stolen in complaints to the FTC over five years. That number is certainly an undercount, as not all immigrants report wrongdoing for fear of deportation, and not every report included dollar amounts.
The spike in complaints is so severe that many states and legal organizations have alerted the public about them. California’s and North Carolina’s attorneys general released statements in late 2025, as did the American Bar Association and AARP. In June 2025, the New York City Council passed legislation increasing notario fraud penalties, and a similar law passed in Florida.
“Immigration scammers contribute to a lawless environment, undermining our immigration system,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency Urbina falsely thought had awarded her residency. Online, the agency provides guides on how to spot immigration fraud and warns consumers that it does not use WhatsApp. The agency tells people who think they’ve been scammed to complain to the FTC.
Old Problem, New Sophistication
Scams targeting those mired in the U.S. immigration system are not new, but advocates say predators have become more sophisticated, using technologies like artificial intelligence and targeted ads. At the same time, immigrants have become increasingly anxious about speedy mass deportations, creating a bonanza for those looking to cash in.
“I believe AI is being utilized in these scams pretty effectively. People think they’re talking to a real person, or the logos and stuff look pretty professional to the untrained eye,” said Ross, of Catholic Charities.
Many victims say they were duped by scammers who had professional-looking photos, wore immigration uniforms and staged realistic virtual hearings.
A review of the image of the person named Millan who was supposedly helping Urbina suggests that it was AI-generated.
Ross added: “The biggest thing is the desperation — that’s really what’s driving this.”
In San Diego, attorneys working for the city have been impersonated by scammers. City Attorney Heather Ferbert told ProPublica her office has forwarded these cases to the FBI and warned residents to be on the lookout for advertisements that promise a government official or lawyer can help with immigration proceedings. The FBI declined to comment.
“When you add the title and you add the government weight behind it — the city attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office, for example — the targets are sort of lulled,” Ferbert said. “We’ve heard stories where they promise that they can solve their immigration problems for them. No real lawyer is ever going to promise an outcome to you.”
Other scams extend beyond impersonating lawyers. The FTC complaints include a case in which people posing as Department of Homeland Security immigration officers received more than $600,000 from a family by claiming one of the relatives’ identities had been stolen and they needed to pay to protect it. In West Virginia, a “federal agent” threatened to deport a college student who was close to graduating unless they paid nearly $4,000 in gift cards.
“They claimed that if I did not comply immediately, I would be arrested, detained or deported,” wrote the student, who was legally residing in the U.S. on a student visa. The student, whose name was not disclosed in federal data, used prepaid Dollar General gift cards and then went broke and turned to family for help.
Immigrants from India and Bangladesh were told they had failed to update a necessary form and would be arrested and deported immediately unless they shared their Social Security numbers. Other scammers claimed the government had intercepted packages full of money and drugs addressed to immigrants, who were told to make a payment or face arrest.
“Well-Oiled Machine”
Most victims find the fake attorneys advertising on Facebook or TikTok. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has pledged to delete scam accounts and announced new tools to track them.
Charity Anastasio, practice and ethics counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the ads are often pay-per-click and targeted at Spanish-speaking users.
“They’ve designed such a well-oiled machine,” Anastasio said.
The ads appealed to those in deportation proceedings, clinging to any means to stay in the U.S., but also those who may have wanted to get their paperwork in order ahead of Trump’s crackdown, said Adonia Simpson, an attorney with the American Bar Association.
“A lot of people are trying to preemptively get representation to see what their options are,” Simpson told ProPublica. “The enforcement has been a big driver. It’s caused a lot of people to be very fearful.”
The White House declined to comment.
In October 2024, 56-year-old José Aguilar, who had been granted temporary protected status under George W. Bush’s administration, was in just that position when he came upon a Facebook ad. The advertiser claimed to work for Jorge Rivera, a well-known Miami immigration attorney, and promised Aguilar they could get him permanent residency. It would take $15,000. ProPublica sought comment from the real Rivera, who is not accused of wrongdoing; he did not respond.
A leather factory worker in Minnesota who had fled El Salvador, Aguilar cobbled together the money in installments through loans from friends and that year’s tax refund. Over several months, he had four video calls with the fake attorney and two calls with immigration agent impersonators. He was initially skeptical but became convinced when they sent him videos of residency cards with the Citizenship and Immigration Services logo.
“Don’t try to deceive me, because I’m borrowing money, I’m a man of faith, and I’m a person who has had a heart transplant, so I can’t get angry because it hurts me,” Aguilar remembered saying.
“No, don’t worry, sir,” Aguilar said the scammer responded. “This is real. It’s super real.”
During one of their last conversations, Aguilar says the scammer appealed to their shared Christian faith, thanking God for approving the paperwork and earning him residency.
By February 2025, the scammers had stopped responding. A month later, Aguilar realized he was probably never going to get the residency cards and contacted an attorney who confirmed he had been duped. Aguilar, who has two young daughters, says his family is subsisting on food banks and relies on donations for rent.
“It’s unforgivable,” Aguilar said. “Even bringing God into it.”
Mother and Daughter Torn Apart
For Mariela, an undocumented Honduran mother of three, financial stress began long ago. In 2021, the father of her children headed for the U.S. along with one of their daughters, seeking construction work. Two years later, when she traveled 2,000 miles in blistering heat to join them, she broke her arm in three places after falling into the Rio Grande while crossing the border. ProPublica is withholding her last name because she fears being deported.
And then, in October 2025, immigration agents detained her 20-year-old daughter. Desperate, the mother reached out to what she thought was a Catholic Charities Facebook page.
She was pulled into a scheme involving a man who posed as a priest, another posing as an immigration judge, and another posing as Oscar Carrillo, an attorney licensed in Texas who practices tax law.
The real Carrillo told ProPublica he began getting calls from frustrated immigrants last spring, all of them Spanish speakers who claimed they had been referred by Catholic Charities. When he realized his name and photo were being misused, he alerted the FBI and FTC. The State Bar of Texas has posted a public warning on its webpage about Carrillo impersonators.
“Most of these clients, because of their immigration status, are afraid to report this to the police,” Carrillo said. “I feel sorry for these clients. We’re not talking about wealthy individuals.”
In January, after her daughter was deported, Mariela realized the fraudsters had cheated her out of more than $18,000 over three months.
She said she had borrowed $3,000 from an uncle in Honduras, another $1,500 from a cousin, a few thousand from her boss, and another $2,000 from a friend from her Honduran hometown who had also emigrated to the U.S. In addition, she burned through her savings and her daughter’s.
Public Alerts, Little Recourse
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, local law enforcement, advocacy groups, state attorneys general and law firms have published notices warning immigrants about an uptick in scams.
“Our best advice is to make direct contact, outside of social media channels, with the organization you’re seeking help from,” said Kevin Brennan, vice president for media relations at Catholic Charities. “Call the organization on the phone or visit an office in person.”
Scammers show no signs of retreat.
In April, three months after her deportation to Nicaragua, Urbina received a call from someone claiming to be a lawyer. He said that he’d been referred to her by a bishop with Catholic Charities and that he’d help her obtain immigration papers.
The stress of being scammed and separated from her husband, who remains in the U.S., had taken a toll. “I’ve been through a lot of things, one right after the other,” Urbina said. She’s living with her mother in a remote village, afraid to step outside in a country where the government has ramped up surveillance of those who previously moved to the U.S.
Desperate, she gave the “lawyer” her personal information.
After earlier saying his help would be free, he then asked for money, she said.
“Where did you get my number?” she asked.
Intrigued but skeptical, Urbina followed up with WhatsApp messages, hoping he might really be an immigration attorney.
James Comey is not exactly someone we’ve ever been a fan of on Techdirt. He was a terrible FBI director in so many ways. We’ve spent years criticizing the man — for his crusade against encryption, his supporting the FBI’s ridiculously aggressive impersonation of reporters, his embrace of the FBI’s program to coerce and entrap people down on their luck into fake terrorist plots, and much more. And, while the impact has been exaggerated, it is true that he took multiple actions violating DOJ procedures that likely helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016. So it’s not like I’m rushing to support the guy. He’s a bad cop and has been for some time.
But the indictment the Department of Justice handed down against James Comey on Tuesday is a truly embarrassing legal document, and everyone involved in producing it should be professionally radioactive for the rest of their careers. I would have said it’s one of the most embarrassing legal documents that this DOJ has produced, but remember, just a day earlier they filed a legal brief that was indistinguishable from a Truth Social post.
The charge, in its entirety, concerns this Instagram post from May 2025:
If you can’t see that, it’s an Instagram post from Comey showing some shells on some sand with the shells spelling out 8647 and the caption on the post saying:
Cool shell formation on my beach walk
For this — for posting a photo of arranged seashells in a slightly sassy pattern and posting it to Instagram — Comey has been charged with two federal felonies: threatening the President under 18 U.S.C. § 871, and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c). (For what it’s worth Comey has claimed he didn’t arrange the sea shells, but just found them. It’s unclear if that makes much of a difference, it’s protected speech either way).
Ken “Popehat” White, who has perhaps done more than any other lawyer in America to explain First Amendment doctrine to laypeople, didn’t mince words about what this is:
The charge is preposterous and no competent or honest prosecutor would bring it. It represents a betrayal of the professional and ethical obligations of every U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved, and reflects the complete collapse of the Department’s credibility and independence in favor of a cultish and cretinous devotion to Donald Trump.
He’s right, and the way to understand just how right he is requires understanding the path that brought us here.
Because this is the second time the Trump DOJ has tried to indict Comey. The first attempt collapsed in spectacular fashion last year, after Trump — in what was apparently supposed to be a private direct message but accidentally went out as a public Truth Social post — demanded that Pam Bondi install Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer with no relevant experience, as a U.S. Attorney specifically because she had promised to indict Comey. The problem: Halligan wasn’t legally appointed. The entire indictment got tossed before the court could dismiss it for being ridiculous (which would have happened) because the person who filed it wasn’t allowed to file it.
As we noted at the time, this pattern of procedural self-sabotage is a recurring feature of an administration that treats legal procedure as an inconvenience rather than the actual point of having a justice system.
So how did the DOJ respond to that humiliation? By coming back with something substantively even worse. In theory, they tried fixing the “wrong person filed it” problem by having an actually legally appointed person file something… even if that something has no legal basis whatsoever. Progress! Sort of?
The seashell indictment was filed by W. Ellis Boyle, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew R. Petracca listed as the prosecuting attorney. Remember those names. They put their signatures on this. Boyle is listed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, but he’s serving in an acting capacity — Trump has nominated him multiple times, yet the Senate has still refused to confirm him.
The legal problem with the indictment is pretty easy to spot: to convict someone under either of the threat statutes the DOJ is invoking, the government has to prove the communication constituted a “true threat.” Under controlling Fourth Circuit precedent (this case is in North Carolina), a true threat is something “an ordinary, reasonable recipient who is familiar with the context in which the statement is made would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm.”
As Ken White noted, the Supreme Court established this framework in Watts v. United States, a 1969 case involving an 18-year-old draft protester who said:
They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.
The Court found this was protected political hyperbole, not a true threat. An explicit statement about wanting a President in your rifle sights — protected.
If Watts isn’t damning enough, there’s United States v. Bagdasarian, a much more recent Ninth Circuit case where a man posted online statements about wanting to shoot then-candidate Barack Obama, including some genuinely vile racially explicit language about hoping Obama would be killed. The court held that even that did not constitute a true threat under the relevant statutes.
I’d be curious to hear from anyone defending this indictment whether they think Bagdasarian was wrongly decided. Or do we change the “true threat” standard when the target is Trump?
So the descending ladder of seriousness looks like this:
Explicit racial language about wanting a President shot: protected
Telling a crowd you want LBJ in your rifle sights: protected
Posting a photo of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47”: two federal felonies
Any first-year law student who’s taken a basic First Amendment course could tell you the seashell post is constitutionally protected. Any prosecutor with five minutes of research time would know that Bagdasarian and Watts exist. But, of course, as we’ve seen over and over and over again in the Trump era, the point is not to bring a good case or a winnable case. The point is just to punish Trump’s enemies with vexatious, vindictive prosecutions in hopes of creating a chilling effect among the populace and stopping them from criticizing the President with the thinnest skin possible.
Now, “86” has had various meanings over the years — to “86” something in restaurant slang means to remove it from the menu or get rid of it. The DOJ’s theory is apparently that when used about a person, it means to kill them. No one else believes that. This is the kind of motivated reading that requires ignoring both the dictionary and how actual humans use language.
But fine, let’s grant the absolute most uncharitable reading and say “86 47” means “get rid of the 47th President through killing.” Even granting that — even doing all the work for the prosecution — it’s still obviously protected political expression, and still obviously not a true threat under the controlling case law.
Which brings us to the part that genuinely cannot be explained by anything other than pure vindictiveness. Here is a tweet from Jack Posobiec, a prominent Trump loyalist/conspiracy theorist, posted in January 2022:
That tweet is still up. I just made that screenshot minutes ago. As of this writing, it has been online for nearly four years. No FBI investigation. No federal indictment. No felony counts. Literally no one thought that was an actual threat. Because it’s not. Apparently the DOJ’s theory of criminal threats has a loyalty-based expiration date — the same numerical expression is a felony when arranged in shells by a Trump critic and a perfectly fine tweet when posted by a Trump supporter about a different President.
Indeed, the fact that Posobiec seems to have no issue keeping this tweet up is itself a sign that the MAGA world knows it’s engaged in purely theatrical vindictive prosecution — and wants you to know they know. To them, once again, nothing here is about justice or the rule of law. It’s just “will this make the people I dislike upset.” That is their only motivating factor.
The DOJ has baked the selective prosecution argument directly into its own theory of the case. Comey’s lawyers will surely refresh the selective prosecution motion they filed in the first, dismissed indictment, and the facial absurdity of this one — combined with the existence of identical, ignored expression by Trump allies — makes that motion approximately as easy to support as such motions ever get.
There’s a specific kind of institutional rot in play here, driven entirely by Donald Trump and his minions. Competent authoritarianism is dangerous in obvious ways. Incompetent authoritarianism that keeps trying anyway is dangerous in different ways: it normalizes the use of state power for personal vengeance while demonstrating that the people wielding it will stop at nothing — even on the most facially ridiculous grounds. That’s a chilling effect doubled: a politicized DOJ, staffed by people who can’t pass a First Amendment quiz.
White is right that the indictment is unlikely to survive. Comey’s attorneys can challenge it on its face, arguing that even taking every allegation as true, seashells spelling “86 47” are protected by the First Amendment as a matter of law. The assigned judge was appointed by a Republican but is reportedly not a partisan hack, and the case law here is so clear that it would take extreme judicial bad faith to let this proceed. The selective prosecution motion is also stronger now than it was the first time, with Posobiec’s untouched tweet sitting there as Exhibit A.
But as White notes, surviving the motion to dismiss isn’t actually the point:
The point of the indictment is to demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice is wholly an instrument of Donald Trump’s senescent pique, no more independent of him than a boil on his ass. The point is to show that the administration can, and will, use the Department’s mechanisms to punish enemies. The point is to show that the Department can, and will, punish protected speech. The point is to show that the Department is staffed by committed fanatics willing to do anything, however unethical and unconstitutional, to promote Trump.
The point is to show that in the war between Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice, Trump has won. Now they’re on the field slitting the throats of the wounded and looting bodies.
W. Ellis Boyle and Matthew R. Petracca put their names on this indictment. They will, presumably, lose this case the way the previous Comey case was lost — embarrassingly, on grounds that any competent attorney not engaged in cult-like performative fealty to a wannabe authoritarian could have anticipated. And when this is all over, when there is some accounting for what was done to the Department of Justice in these years, the people who signed the seashell indictment should never be trusted with prosecutorial power, a bar membership, or any position requiring professional judgment ever again.
The shells, for what it’s worth, were on a beach. The tide has presumably long since rearranged them. The Instagram post was taken down fairly quickly when the MAGA world lost their minds over it. The federal felony charges, somehow, remain.
