CBS Hosting Dinner Praising Trump And His Love Of The First Amendment

from the lying-liars-and-the-lies-they-tell dept

Talk about pathetic.

CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed “The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

Truly banana republic type shit.

Oliver Darcy got a hold of the original invite for the dinner, and it’s everything you might expect:

Trump is, as regular Techdirt readers may recall, arguably the worst president in a century when it comes to trampling press freedom, free speech, and the First Amendment. When the administration isn’t trying to destroy comedians for telling jokes about the president, it’s busy crushing whatever was left of public media in the U.S., or threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that do basic journalism.

CBS management doesn’t care about any of that, of course, because it’s owned by billionaire right wing Trump ally, Larry Ellison. And Larry and David Ellison are desperate to have the government sign off on their job-destroying merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. The Warner Brothers board is voting to approve the deal on the same day as the dinner.

Despite some pretense that the Trump DOJ is doing its due diligence to review the deal, there’s little real doubt that the feds will rubber stamp the transaction. The real question mark rests with a likely antitrust lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general to block the transaction.

It’s worth noting that Larry Ellison’s son David couldn’t attend a hearing last week on the massive problems with the Paramount Warner merger due to a purported death in the family (nobody seems able to determine who died), but he was able to make an appearance at Cinemacon a day earlier to make all sorts of empty promises about how wonderful the merger will be:

“David Ellison…made a unexpected appearance at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theater owners. He took the stage to reassure exhibitors they have nothing to fear, whether it be the new regime at Paramount, or his pending acquisition of Warner Bros.”

They of course have everything to fear. The massive $108 billion in debt from the Warner Brothers deal will inevitably result in mass layoffs, price hikes, and sagging product quality due to the need to cut corners to service the debt. This is before we even talk about the layoffs already happening at CBS.

It’s simply not up for debate: this happens absolutely every single time folks like the Ellisons delude themselves into thinking mass consolidation does anything useful outside of generate tax breaks, drive short-lived stock boosts, and let guys like David Ellison pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”

Pre-merger promises about release windows (or anything else) are absolutely meaningless. But with just a handful of people at the top financially disincentivized from learning anything from history (including the three previous disastrous Warner Brothers mergers), the dysfunction just repeats itself indefinitely. We’ve seen merger dysfunction and chaos before, but this one has the potential to outdo them all.

Filed Under: consolidation, corruption, david ellison, dinner, donald trump, first amendment, free speech, journalism, larry ellision, media, mergers, regulators
Companies: cbs, paramount, warner bros. discovery

Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well.

from the a-very-bad-bet dept

Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit.

The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past couple weeks, though it’s still down on the year.

Welcome to patronage capitalism with a stock ticker attached.

Last year, we wrote about the disturbing trend of tech founders and VCs nodding along to the neoreactionary pitch that democracy is holding back innovation, and that what the industry really needs is a “tech-friendly” strongman to sweep away institutional guardrails. We argued this was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal, since real innovation requires exactly the kind of stable, open, competitive institutions that authoritarianism systematically destroys.

Palantir has apparently decided to volunteer as the case study. Palantir — the very company whose entire sales pitch is built around using technology to make better strategic decisions and predict how things will play out.

But now the company seems to be betting that Trumpist-flavored authoritarianism is a permanent feature of the American political landscape — and that going all-in on it will never, ever have any long-term consequences.

Over the weekend, the company’s official account posted what it called a “brief” 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, framed as an introduction to the “philosophy” behind Palantir’s work. Most of it is a reheated version of the familiar Thiel-adjacent playbook — Silicon Valley owes a debt to the country, we must build AI weapons before our adversaries do, the iPhone has made us soft — the kind of thing that gets nodded along to at certain conferences and immediately forgotten.

But a few points deserve to be called out. First, there is the quite telling series of bullet points effectively saying that famous people shouldn’t be subject to public criticism because it means they might not want to help save you piddling simpletons.

We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

[….]

The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

This is the same Harpers Letter-style nonsense where people who deem themselves to be great thinkers or great men of history find it horrifying that the public might call them on their bullshit. I mean, sure, we should show more grace in general to lots of people, but these fragile-minded billionaires keep acting like because some wacko on social media calls them on their bullshit pronouncements it’s the end of the world.

But it gets way worse from there. Buried near the end are points 21 and 22, which are insane, and should make anyone who continues to work with or for Palantir radioactive:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Strip away the corporate-academic language and you’re left with a very old, very problematic argument: certain cultures — and we all know which ones they are claiming are supposedly the “middling” and “regressive” ones — are inferior, and the pursuit of inclusivity has been a civilizational error. That framing — some cultures produce wonders, others are regressive and harmful, pluralism is a civilizational threat — has been used to justify exclusion, hierarchy, and far worse for over a century. And while internet fascists like to think of it as edge lord contrarianism today, to most people it just comes across as a shiny coat of paint on historical bigotries and ignorance.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, sarcastically pointed out that it was “extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.” In a much longer and more thoughtful thread on this, he made a key point:

It's also worth being clear about who's doing the arguing. Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating.

— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) 2026-04-19T10:26:27.958Z

This is the publicly endorsed worldview of a company that is rapidly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance and enforcement apparatus, and it contains arguments that would be at home in a white nationalist pamphlet.

Palantir has always been a bit creepy and cultlike in their worship of government power. Years back I debated one of its founders regarding Google employees convincing the company to drop out of a government AI surveillance effort, Project Maven. He insisted that those employees were naive and Google was weak for backing down. Of course, Google’s decision to leave Project Maven turned out to be a huge win for Palantir, who effectively took it over in Google’s place.

But back then, Palantir at least played the game of pretending to care about cultural diversity and pluralism. As Chris Person pointed out, until fairly recently, Palantir had employee resource groups called Palamigos, PalaNoir, PalanQueer, PalanGender Queer, the Palantir Interfaith Network, PalAPI, and PalNoir. The company celebrated exactly the kind of pluralism and multicultural identity that Karp’s manifesto now denounces as “shallow” and “vacant.”

Watching Palantir do Sephiroth posting about multiculturalism and I would like to remind everyone that they were doing corporate fake woke shit just like every other company.

— Chris Person (@papapishu.bsky.social) 2026-04-19T20:59:57.505Z

And yes, they even pretended they had a pro-DEI stance:

CONTRIBUTING. OUR. VOICES.

— Chris Person (@papapishu.bsky.social) 2026-04-19T21:01:30.474Z

At least now we see what happens when they feel they can go full mask off.

With Trump in power, Karp apparently feels free to discard the diversity framing the company used for years to recruit employees and just say the quiet part out loud.

The apparent hope is to use Trump’s support over the next few years to permanently weave themselves into the federal government’s tech stack. The NY Times last year talked about how Palantir’s Foundry is becoming the connective tissue for federal data:

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Palantir has made itself ideologically and technically indispensable to one specific administration’s political project — which happens to include mass deportation, data consolidation on citizens, and the kinds of enforcement actions that require exactly the ideological framework Karp just publicly endorsed.

Meanwhile, the even more recent $10 billion Army contract consolidates 75 separate contracts into a single decade-long enterprise deal.

Supporters of Palantir will likely argue that it sounds like this “embrace fascism” strategy is working great. The company is signing these rich contracts and getting its technology deep within the infrastructure of the federal government. And, yes, you could say that these are short term wins (even if the stock price is kinda lagging).

But these things cut both ways. When your value to the government is primarily ideological alignment with a specific political project, you become a clear and visible target the moment that project loses power.

One of the many problems with fascism as a business strategy is that it only works if the fascists stay in power indefinitely. It’s a woefully unpopular ideological position, especially in the US — betting on a temporarily ascendant horse that has no chance in a longer race.

But Karp and Palantir have bet the farm that either Trumpism will remain a powerful force within the government or that they will be so deeply buried in the systems that it would be effectively impossible to rip them out when more grounded leadership enters the picture.

That’s an incredibly risky bet, and one I doubt will pay off.

Karp has made sure that he and his company have become ideologically toxic to a non-fascist government. A future non-Trumpist administration will have tremendous reputational incentive to very visibly rip out Palantir, as a signal that the prior regime’s infrastructure is being dismantled.

This is exactly the trap we warned about last year when we wrote about Silicon Valley’s embrace of fascism for short-term gain. Contractual dependency you can unwind. But you’ve told everyone in public what you are, and you can’t walk that back when the winds shift.

And the winds do shift. Companies that tied themselves to nationalist or authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century tend not to have great long-term track records as independent entities. Some survive — though often in name only, most heavily restructured, with decades of reputational rehabilitation to follow. When you make yourself a load-bearing pillar of a specific regime’s specific project, your fate becomes tied to that regime’s fate.

Then there’s the talent question. The piece we wrote last year noted that authoritarianism drives brain drain — that foreign students, researchers, and the global talent pool that has always fed American innovation are already heading elsewhere. Palantir just published a document telling the world, in effect, that a diverse workforce is “shallow” and “vacant” and that some cultures are “regressive.” The engineers who have options — and the best ones always do — just got a very clear signal about whether they should take Palantir’s recruiter call.

There’s a version of Palantir’s business that doesn’t require publishing a white-nationalism-adjacent manifesto. You can sell analytical software to the federal government without announcing that pluralism is a mistake and that some cultures are regressive. Plenty of defense contractors manage it. The business didn’t force the decision to publish those 22 points. It was a choice to double down on ideological signaling, presumably because Karp and company have calculated that visible loyalty gets rewarded in the current environment.

And perhaps it earned some cheers from the remaining trolls on X, for whatever that’s worth.

But it’s a recipe for disaster over the long haul, which seems odd for a company whose entire sales pitch is based around the ability to use its tech to get great insights into how strategic decisions will play out.

This is exactly the warning we gave tech founders last year. The pitch that democracy is messy and slow, that innovation really needs someone who “gets it” cutting red tape, leads directly and predictably here: first you justify the pragmatism of cutting red tape, then you’re chasing the contracts, then drafting the manifestos, until your stock price depends on friendly presidential posts and your long-term viability depends on a political coalition never losing power.

Palantir has decided this is its business model. The rest of the industry should watch very carefully what happens next. Because the thing about tying yourself to a regime isn’t that it never works. It’s that when it stops working, it stops working all at once — and you’ve burned every other option on the way there.

Filed Under: alex karp, donald trump, fascism, silicon valley
Companies: palantir

Netgear Gets Mysterious Exemption To Trump FCC ‘Router Ban,’ Refuses To Say How

from the nice-router.-Shame-if-somethin'-was-to-happen-to-it. dept

Late last month we noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Netgear is the first out of the gate to announce they’ve struck a deal with the FCC, but they’re curiously refusing to say what exactly was required to get Trump FCC approval. Actual security improvements? Backdoors for domestic surveillance? Cash payouts? Nobody knows!

“Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”

The Netgear FAQ is equally ambiguous about what the company had to do to win the Trump administration’s favor. The email I received about the approval promises that this somehow improved consumer security, but there’s zero indication anywhere as to how:

“We’re pleased to share that NETGEAR is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a trusted consumer router company. We hope this recognition gives you added peace of mind — knowing that the network powering your home meets rigorous standards.”

As you’re probably aware by now, neither Trump nor Carr ever really do anything that’s just authentically in the public interest, even on cybersecurity. Everything is always transactional.

The vast majority of the duo’s actions to date have made the United States significantly less secure, whether it’s the firing of officials responsible for online election security, or their blanket and mindless “deregulation” of a U.S. telecom sector that was just the target of one of the worst cybersecurity incidents in U.S. history (in large part because it failed to change default router admin passwords).

The original Trump FCC “router ban” also included rhetoric claiming that foreign router manufacturers would have to provide “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States,” but there’s absolutely zero indication Netgear has done anything of the sort, either in their public statements or their required alerts sent to investors.

Great stuff! Super transparent and not at all dodgy.

If you look around the web, the vast majority of U.S. media outlets covering this “router ban” operate from the belief that this is a good faith effort to improve cybersecurity and that Trump regulators are reliable narrators, and every shred of evidence to date suggests that’s a terrible assumption for a journalist (or anyone else) to make.

Filed Under: brendan carr, donald trump, fcc, hacking, hardware, network, privacy, routers, security
Companies: netgear

Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked

from the robbing-us-blind dept

Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It’s also worth remembering that every major party presidential nominee since Nixon had voluntarily released their tax returns — Trump was the exception, not the rule, and the “harm” he suffered was exposure to the same transparency his predecessors embraced without incident.

The original piece laid out why the whole thing was a scam: Trump is the plaintiff, the IRS and Treasury are the defendants, and the DOJ defending those defendants is stocked with Trump’s former personal attorneys who have made clear they still consider themselves his personal attorneys — a problem that has only gotten worse with Todd Blanche now serving as acting AG. The fix was obviously in. The only real question was how brazenly the parties would go about it.

We now have an answer, and it turns out the answer is: extremely brazenly, and in writing, on the public docket.

Earlier today, the parties filed a consent motion for a 90-day extension explaining why they needed the Court to hit pause on the litigation:

Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation. This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.

[…]

The Parties are engaging in discussions and need time to work through how to ensure those discussions can take place productively to avoid protracted litigation. This brief period will allow the Parties to initiate and structure those discussions in a manner that best serves the interests of all Parties and the Court.

Read that the normal way you’d read any consent motion, and it’s mundane. Two adversarial parties are exploring settlement. Courts love this. Judicial economy! Everyone wins.

Now read it again with the actual parties in mind.

The plaintiff is the sitting President of the United States. The defendants are two agencies of the executive branch that the plaintiff (again, the President of the United States) runs. The lawyers representing those defendants report, through a chain of command, to Trump’s former personal lawyers. “The Parties are engaging in discussions” means Trump’s lawyers are negotiating with Trump’s other lawyers over how much of your money Trump gets to take home. The “interests of all Parties” reduces, functionally, to the interests of one guy. The phrase “avoid protracted litigation” means “skip the part where a judge or a jury or any actual adversarial process might interfere with the predetermined outcome.”

Real negotiations require two sides with opposing interests. This is just a man haggling with his own wallet over how much of your money to take.

The filing notes that there hasn’t even been an attempt at a defense from the government yet:

None of the Parties will suffer prejudice: the case is newly filed, no scheduling order has issued, and the Government has not yet answered or otherwise responded on the merits. An extension will conserve judicial and party resources and avoid piecemeal litigation that could arise if the Parties are forced to proceed without first exploring these discussions.

The consent motion even includes, with a straight face, the boilerplate certification that plaintiff’s counsel ‘conferred in good faith’ with the very people he effectively works for:

Pursuant to Southern District of Florida Local Rule 7.1(a)(3), Daniel Epstein, co-counsel for Plaintiffs, certifies that he conferred in good faith with counsel for Defendants on April 15, 2026 by telephone regarding the relief sought in this motion. Defendants consent to the requested extension.

The only party with an actual adverse interest here — the American public — has no seat at the table and no lawyer in the room.

The structure of the scam is clear. Step one, filed back in January: sue your own government that you control for $10 billion over something that wasn’t its fault, using a complaint so flimsy it quotes the leaker himself saying Trump suffered “little harm” — and demanding damages for being exposed to information that every other modern presidential candidate simply released voluntarily. Step two, filed this week: get the defendant you control to agree with you that litigation should pause so you can work out a deal. Step three, coming soon to a docket near you: announce a “settlement” in which the taxpayers cut a check to the president for some eye-watering sum, with the DOJ loudly proclaiming that this was the responsible outcome that avoided wasteful litigation.

At each step, the paperwork will look perfectly normal, indistinguishable from thousands of other consent motions on other dockets. The corruption lives entirely in the gap between what the documents say and who is actually on each side of them.

This is worth naming plainly: what’s happening here is exactly the kind of self-dealing abuse of public office that the impeachment clause was written to address. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, defined impeachable offenses as those:

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

If a sitting president negotiating a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded payout to himself — through agencies he controls and lawyers loyal to him personally, over damages he demonstrably did not suffer (he is richer than he has ever been and won re-election after the leak) — does not qualify as an abuse of public trust, then the phrase has no meaning.

But none of that matters, because the political machinery that would be required to act on any of this has been thoroughly captured or cowed. Congress has largely abdicated. The Supreme Court, as noted in January, has made it clear there’s not much the courts can do about presidential self-dealing. The DOJ is, for these purposes, Trump’s law firm. And so the scheme proceeds on schedule, in plain sight, with everyone involved politely pretending that “the Parties are engaging in discussions” describes something other than what it is.

We’ll almost certainly be back for part three when the inevitable settlement drops. You already know roughly what it will look like. The only real variables are the size of the number and how straight a face whoever is serving as Attorney General at that point manages to keep while announcing it.

Filed Under: corruption, doj, donald trump, irs, tax returns, todd blanche

Inside Trump’s Effort To “Take Over” The Midterm Elections

from the a-test-of-democracy dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden. 

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat. 

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job. 

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House. 

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms. 

“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.

But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found. 

ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.

Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr. 

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.

ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.

ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting. 

The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls. 

Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.   

“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”

The Dismantling

Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.

The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.

CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks. 

After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.

Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA. 

Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas. 

“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.

It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted. 

The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes. 

First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election. 

A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”

However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.

“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”

The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.

Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics. 

After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.

A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.

But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.

The Trump administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.

In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.

Team America

Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. 

The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported. 

They represented the new type of people running the show.

Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.

Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.” 

This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.

These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud. 

Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves. 

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings. 

Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure. 

Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them. 

Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. 

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them. 

While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”

As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness. 

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Red Flags

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden. 

In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation. 

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)

In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.

An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.” 

Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments. 

“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.  

The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” 

Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.  

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

“Dismantling the Brain”

The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference. 

They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.

The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.” 

This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government. 

On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t. 

Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said. 

A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”

The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.

Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.

“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”

An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner. 

Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.

“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”

Filed Under: democracy, donald trump, elections, midterms

Trump Still Pretending The Most Dangerous Domestic Terrorists Are People Who Don’t Like Fascism

from the his-own-people-are-still-the-worst dept

Just to be clear, when I refer to “Trump” in terms of his administration, I’m referring to the collective hive mind of dangerous enablers he employs. Trump, by himself, is incapable of closing an umbrella. It’s the people around him that are dangerous, since they’re able to convert his rants and brain stem impulses into action.

While it’s understandable that an aspiring autocrat like Trump would feel threatened by a movement dedicated to opposing fascists, it’s only now that he’s returned to office that he can do anything about it. Deliberately ignoring the fact that the most dangerous domestic terrorists are located on the far right of the political spectrum (including the hundreds of people he pardoned for assaulting police officers and raiding a federal building following his 2020 election loss), Trump’s administration is once again attempting to turn protected First Amendment activity into terroristic acts worthy of lengthy minimum federal sentences.

The United States was as concerned as always about Islamist terrorism, said the official, Monica A. Jacobsen, according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by The New York Times and three officials briefed on the meeting. But, she told her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia, the Trump administration also wanted more attention on what it believed was an insidious, underestimated threat: the far left.

Western governments must combat “antifa and far-left terrorism,” Ms. Jacobsen’s prepared remarks asserted, casting the effort as an evolution in counterterrorism following the “global war on terror.” Her prepared speech defined far-left terrorism to include threats from communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with “eco-extremist” and “other self-identified antifascist ideologies.”

“As always” is a nice touch. It’s always a good idea to keep an “Islamist” scapegoat in the yard, especially when you’re busy losing a war with Iran. Not only does it generate steady work for bored FBI agents, but it also allows Trump to continue pretending the mass deportation of hardworking, tax-paying non-whites is somehow contributing to the effort to root out an alleged “1,700 Iran sleeper cells” in the United States. (No “sleeper cell” has been broken up or deported despite Trump claiming the government already knows who these “sleepers” are and where they’re located.)

As evidence of the dangerousness of “far left” terrorists, Jacobsen pointed to a single protest in Milan, Italy, in which police and protesters “clashed” — the favorite euphemism deployed by people who wish readers to believe protesters were just as violent as law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, the administration can’t actually find any hard evidence to back up its assertions about the supposed violent threat posed by far left activists.

In November, the State Department took the first major step in the strategy by designating four leftist groups in Europe — two in Greece, one in Germany and another in Italy — as terrorist organizations. None of the groups has been known to have plotted attacks on Americans in the past decade, which is usually a criterion for such a designation.

All it can do — as it did late last year when Trump unilaterally declared “antifa” a terrorist organization — is disappear any evidence to the contrary — something it did less than 48 hours after Charlie Kirk was killed by gunman during a campus appearance.

Even if you were to decide that what’s being claimed about “far left terrorism” in Europe by this administration is somehow true, you can’t ignore the facts on the ground here in the United States:

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed 112 people across 152 terrorist attacks in the United States, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research institution. Over the same period, left-wing extremists killed 13 people over 35 attacks, according to the analysis, while jihadist attacks left 82 dead.

Even if Trump hadn’t spent his entire term so far routinely insulting and berating our European allies, it’s still unlikely he would have been able to convince them to ignore the reality of the situation for the sole purpose of future abuses of civil liberties and rights.

Trump has been pounding this table since late last year, but now he’s finding fewer world leaders willing to indulge his fantasies or nod politely as Trump’s emissaries literally make shit up about left-wing activist groups.

The State Department wants to bring foreign law enforcement officials from at least 17 countries to The Hague in May for a workshop on how to fight far-left groups like antifa.

[…]

Formal invitations had not been sent as of last week, in part because Congress had to approve funding. U.S. officials told The Times that foreign governments had expressed less interest in the events than the State Department had hoped.

Once again, let’s pause to reflect on these claims. “Antifa” simply stands for “anti-fascist.” You barely have to move left at all to oppose fascism. All you would have to do is move to the left just far enough to align with… I don’t know… Ronald Reagan? And yet this administration is so stupid and thuggish that it actually thinks it can portray people opposed to fascism as more dangerous than US citizens who actively support it.

Everything else on Trump’s list of “domestic threats” is just a lazy rip-off of McCarthyism. “Far left” supposedly covers Communists, Marxists, “anti-capitalists” (yet another tell), and “eco-extremists.” In other words, people who disagree with this particular president and his policies. Free speech is what it is. But Trump and his enablers want people to go away for decades by turning dissent into terrorism.

Meanwhile, the true terrorist threat that is the extremely foreseeable result of the war in Iran is being back-burnered in favor of locking up people who just want to see this country remain a democratic republic. Fortunately for us, the rest of the world is no longer interested (Israel, Hungary, and Russia aside) in pretending Trump poses less of a threat than the people he wants to punish.

Filed Under: antifa, domestic terrorists, donald trump, eu, far right extremists, fascism, free speech, insurrection, january 6, trump administration, white christian nationalists

Judge Tosses Trump’s Ridiculous $10 Billion Defamation Suit Against Rupert Murdoch

from the with-friends-like-this... dept

Back in January of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a leather-bound birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell had assembled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The book included letters from various associates, and one of them bore Donald Trump’s name. According to the article, it featured a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman with typewritten text inside. The page was signed with a recognizable squiggly “Donald” signature positioned to mimic pubic hair and closed with the ridiculously creepy line: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump denied writing the letter and called it “a fake thing” before suing the Journal, Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, and the two reporters for a mere $10 billion. Each count asked for at least $10 billion, because apparently that’s the going rate for Donald Trump’s hurt feelings these days.

On Monday, federal judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the lawsuit, finding that Trump hadn’t come anywhere close to adequately alleging “actual malice,” the standard required for a public figure to win a defamation claim. For those who follow this stuff, that’s about as unsurprising as it gets.

The actual malice standard, established in New York Times v. Sullivan decision, requires a public figure to show that the defendant either knew the story was false or published it with reckless disregard for the truth (which courts have interpreted to require that the publisher actually harbored serious doubts about whether the statement was true). It does not mean, as many people assume, the colloquial meaning of “malice”: that they just don’t like the person. Trump’s complaint was heavy on boilerplate language about malice and light on, well, anything resembling actual facts supporting it. Judge Gayles was blunt about the gap:

The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard. Quite the opposite.

The “quite the opposite” is the fun part. Trump’s own complaint described the reporters reaching out to him, as well as the FBI and the Justice Department, before publication. Trump gave them a denial, which they printed; the DOJ didn’t respond and the FBI declined to comment. Trump’s argument was essentially that since he told the Journal the letter was fake before publication, running the story anyway proved they had serious doubts about its truth and therefore acted with actual malice.

You hear this a lot from SLAPP defamation filers, pretending that a mere denial by them means that anyone printing what they’re accused of is actual malice. But that’s not how any of this works. Just because you deny something, doesn’t automatically mean the journalists have to believe it’s false. Their evidence can (and often does) reveal that the subjects of their reporting are lying in their denials. A denial is not proof of falsity. It’s just proof that you’re denying something. The court wasn’t buying any of it:

To establish actual malice, “a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth.”…

As the judge noted, printing Trump’s denial alongside their own journalistic findings demonstrated responsible reporting — the opposite of actual malice, which would require evidence that the reporters had serious doubts about the letter’s authenticity and deliberately avoided investigating further. Then printing the denial alongside the evidence, again, was the opposite of actual malice:

The Article also informed readers that President Trump decried the Letter as a fake and denied writing it. By “allowing readers to decide for themselves what to conclude from the [Article], any allegation of actual malice [is] less plausible.” Turner, 879 F.3d at 1274. See also Michel, 816 F.3d at 703 (holding that “reporting perspectives contrary to the publisher’s own should be interpreted as helping to rebut, not establish, the presence of actual malice.”)

The judge also, somewhat gently, reminded Trump’s lawyers that actual malice is an actual legal standard, not just ‘they don’t like me.’

President Trump’s allegation that Defendants acted with ill-will is insufficient to plead actual malice. Aside from being conclusory and without factual support, “ill-will, improper motive or personal animosity plays no role in determining whether a defendant acted with actual malice.”

Meanwhile, as this lawsuit wound through the courts, the very letter Trump claimed didn’t exist surfaced publicly. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate and obtained the birthday book. They released it publicly, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a page that matches the Journal’s description of the letter exactly:

The judge couldn’t consider the produced letter at this stage of the litigation because Trump disputes its authenticity, which is his right procedurally. And the judge has to treat the claims in the complaint as true. But the rest of us sure can look at it. And judge for ourselves.

The court gave Trump until April 27 to file an amended complaint, and a spokesman for his legal team promised he would “refile this powerhouse lawsuit.” I suppose if you squint hard enough at a complaint a federal judge said “comes nowhere close” to meeting basic legal standards, “powerhouse” is one word you could use for it — just probably not in the way they mean.

The Journal’s defense team also sought attorneys’ fees under Florida’s anti-SLAPP statute. The judge denied the fee request for now, since Trump gets a chance to amend. But that request can be renewed, which means if the amended complaint fares no better, Trump could end up paying for the privilege of having sued the Journal over a story that appears to be true.

This is also a reminder of why we need stronger anti-SLAPP laws in every state, as well as a federal anti-SLAPP law.

This case isn’t over yet, but the judge clearly sees it as just as weak as we said it was when it was filed last year. As always, Trump files these vexatious lawsuits knowing none of them have a real shot — the goal is to burn time and money for media organizations, and scare some of them into softening their coverage or thinking twice before calling out his behavior.

The guy who presents himself as a champion of free speech remains the most anti-free speech president we’ve had in any of our lifetimes, consistently abusing the judicial system as a way to punish those who make him look bad.

Filed Under: actual malice, darrin gayles, defamation, donald trump, jeffrey epstein, rupert murdoch, slapp
Companies: news corp., wsj

‘Trump Phone’ Sees Price Hike, But Still No Release Date (Or Actual Phone)

from the sucker-born-every-minute dept

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” was generous; it was a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, “MAGA-focused” mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resold T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy Trump brand partnership.

The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to be a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone that the Trump org claimed would be “proudly designed and built in the United States” and released sometime last August. Not only was the device never going to be made in the States (all mention of that was quickly stripped from press materials), the August launch date came and went with no Trump phone.

It’s now April of 2026, and while there’s still no phone (despite a long line of rubes having plunked down $100 deposits), there is a revamped Trump Mobile website and a renewed promise of a slightly different phone, according to The Verge. This includes a revamped and gaudy new mock up of what the gold Trump T1 phone is supposed to look like, should it ever actually be released:

You’ll notice that the phone looks suspiciously like the HTC U24 Pro, a phone released two years ago and available for as little as $460 on Amazon (even less on places like eBay):

While the original “Trump phone” was announced with a $500 price tag, the backers of Trump’s latest grift insist that price was “promotional,” and the full price tag will be closer to around $1000:

“The phone is now listed with a “promotional price” of $499, which used to simply be its standard price. The site is still accepting $100 deposits, with the promise that you can “lock in” the “promotional pricing.” When I spoke to executives Eric Thomas and Don Hendrickson in February, they declared that $499 had been an “introductory” price, which would be rising after the relaunch — though they promised that early buyers would still be charged $499 total, and that the new price would be “less than $1,000.”

So there’s no phone or release date, but there’s already been a price hike on a lazy rebrand of an existing phone they just needed to spray paint gold and slap a Trump logo on. There’s simply no reason that doing this very basic rebrand should have taken so long (assuming they do plan to eventually released a phone), but as a concept the whole thing remains very on brand.

Filed Under: branding, con, donald trump, mvno, smartphone, trump phone, wireless
Companies: trump mobile