Trump’s desire to punish, oust, and eject anyone who isn’t white and/or MAGA enough from this country means the preferred outlets for his aggression are running out of manpower.
Tons of federal officers have already been rerouted to immigration enforcement, leaving those left with the unenviable task of actually catching the kinds of criminals Trump claims to be concerned about understaffed and underfunded.
Meanwhile, ICE just can’t catch people fast enough, whether or not they’re dangerous criminals. (90% of the time, they aren’t.) This administration considers 3,000 arrests per day to be the minimum entry requirement to the Greatness that is the Making America Great Again psychosis.
To that end, the DHS has altered its age requirements, expanding the upper and lower levels of the age brackets. To be sure, the DHS isn’t interested in (nor is it going to attract) anyone in the 18-20 year age range. This move is aimed entirely at targeting those most likely to find this invitation attractive: aging bigots who have been forcibly retired by their former law enforcement employers, especially if they’ve been sent out to pasture for being old-school racist in a new-school world.
The masked marauders that make up most of ICE aren’t there for the glory. Maybe they’re just there for the paycheck. Whatever the case, there’s not enough of them. The get-off-my-lawn crowd can now be paid handsomely for converting their prejudices to action.
This federal law enforcement cannibalization also affects the FBI, which has plenty of its own work to do as the official extension of Trump’s political and personal animus. Understandably, the FBI is struggling to maintain staff levels now that it’s clear it’s either do the dirty work of aspiring fascists or get the fuck out. A lot of people have left. Those that remain are steadily finding themselves riding around in cars with ICE officers or wandering around the streets of Washington D.C. looking for some laws to enforce.
Those who haven’t been brainwormed by MAGA aren’t happy with the new status quo, as this New York Times report notes. It’s easier than ever to get into the FBI — a Trumpian move that isn’t exactly endearing itself with the rank-and-file:
Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.
The shift comes as the agency anticipates losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents, analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.
I think the NYT is being far too kind in its assessment of the situation. I don’t doubt thousands of FBI employees are planning to leave. But it’s not about budget cuts. It’s about no longer desiring to work for these pricks. And by pricks, I mean everyone from Kash Patel to Dan Bongino to Pam Bondi to the president himself.
When you’re leaking talent, you might be inclined to patch the leaks with whatever warm bodies you might find willing to be utilized as hole filler. But the FBI can’t reverse a brain drain by prioritizing quantity over quality. Of course, this administration — including the people currently running the FBI (into the ground) — isn’t competent enough to mitigate the consequences of its destructive actions, which means that the FBI is going to continue to bleed talent that will never be replaced during this administration.
Chris O’Leary, a former F.B.I. agent and senior counterterrorism official, called the plan the latest example of “generational destruction” at the agency.
If the bureau’s leaders “knew anything about leading organizations,” he said, “they would know that when you lower the standards, your mission effectiveness goes down with that, because not only does the capability of each individual agent decline, but your reputation, both domestically and globally, takes a hit.”
It’s quite obvious the current “leadership” doesn’t know a goddamn thing about “leading.” That much cannot be argued. Even the “leadership” is unwilling to argue this point, claiming the lowering of standards aligns with its dumbing down of the FBI, which is the kind of self-own we’ve come to expect from this administration.
The new plan, current and former agents say, seems to be part of a larger effort by Mr. Patel to have the bureau focus more on street crime, rather than on complicated cases touching on financial fraud, public corruption and national security.
So, we’re hiring feds to do the work of beat cops because that’s all the FBI can get at this point and that’s all Patel can hope to do given the number of self-inflicted wounds sustained by this administration.
Welcome aboard, G-men! Sharpen those pencils and grab those pads! You’ll be doing the federal equivalent of meter reading in no time, which will, fortunately, probably not expose your utter lack of investigative expertise!
If there’s any justice in this nation (is there? I’m asking seriously), courts are going to start rejecting every proclamation of “experience and expertise” in criminal complaints and warrants as literally unbelievable. And I wouldn’t put this stint in law enforcement on your resume. It’s hardly an achievement to collect a paycheck periodically from an employer headed by people even less qualified to do your job than you are.
Here’s how things are going in Washington D.C. ever since some former DOGE employee known as “Big Balls” got his ass handed to him by a couple of teenagers during an alleged failed carjacking:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has authorized National Guard troops deployed to Washington to bring their weapons with them on their mission. But it was not clear whether the troops would be armed as they walked through the city, or simply store their weapons in their vehicles, which would not be a significant change over their current status.
Trump’s claims about D.C. being a crime-ridden hellhole are undercut by stats released by none other than his own FBI. According to those numbers, the violent crime rate in D.C. has continued to plummet to historical lows, following an abnormal spike provoked by an abnormal situation: a worldwide pandemic Trump handled no better than he’s handling this current crime “crisis.”
The Justice Department is investigating whether Washington, D.C., police manipulated data to make crime rates appear lower, escalating tensions between the Trump administration and local officials who have repeatedly cited drops in violent crime to protest the need for a federal takeover of law enforcement.
[…]
“D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Monday night, confirming the existence of the probe.
It’s unclear what exactly Trump is referring to in his social media posts because… well… it’s usually up to everyone else to draw a line from his randomly capitalized Truth Social posts to anything that might be conceivably actionable and/or somewhat supported by actual facts.
In this case, it appears to be an ongoing investigation into claims that some crime reports may have been altered to falsely present a lower crime rate in the D.C. area. This was reported last month by NBC, which covered an investigation already in progress that was being performed by entities without an ulterior martial law motive.
A D.C. police commander is under investigation for allegedly making changes to crime statistics in his district.
The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint.
Not great, if true. But this isn’t an anomaly. Crime rates are manipulated all the time. The question to ask is why they were manipulated. If it’s time for budgets to be passed, cop shops may juice the numbers to make it appear as those they need more funding. If top officials are up for re-appointment or facing an election run, they may do what’s alleged here: turn alleged felonies into misdemeanors and misdemeanors into nothing.
The police union claims it’s the latter:
“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton said. “So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”
The union feels this is a slam-dunk statement. But who’s being dunked on? To follow this argument to its logical conclusion, the union is arguing that D.C. PD officers are terrible at their jobs and the only reason the public doesn’t know this is because someone been altering crime stats to make officers look better at deterring crime than they actually are.
To sum up, this is everything that’s given the president the excuse he needs to wield the DOJ vindictively against another political opponent — one that’s embodied by Trump’s villain du jour: the entire District of Columbia.
Cop official: fudge the numbers to make the PD look better
Union leader: no, my guys are terrible at preventing/investigating crime. it’s as bad as it ever was.
Trump: who cares, this is just performance
DOJ: we’re just hand puppets
Even if the numbers were manipulated, a competent president and a DOJ headed by people who swore to serve the country, rather than any particular president, would have waited to see if these allegations of crime rate manipulation were substantiated. What any normal president wouldn’t do is take control of local policing and add armed soldiers to the mix. So whatever’s being claimed here doesn’t really matter. Trump did it because he wanted to, not because he actually had a justifiable reason to do it.
There’s no reason to believe DC crime rates have been substantially fudged. It’s not an outlier in the midst of nationwide violent crime spikes. It’s just more of the same thing that’s been observed in pretty much every city in the nation, including those Trump continues to claim are so ridden with violent crime he has no choice but to send in the troops.
Crime statistics reported by the D.C. police were generally in line with trends seen nationally. The District’s violent crimes — which include homicide, aggravated assault, rape and robbery — fell 10 percent from 2023 to 2024. In that same time, FBI data showed, those crimes across the country decreased 13 percent.
This year, cities including Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles have seen steep declines in reported incidents. Homicides in Philadelphia, for example, are down 16 percent, while homicides in Atlanta are down 25 percent, police department data shows.
But this investigation will become part of the pattern and practice of this administration filled with aspiring fascists. Trump has already declared that other major cities (but only those headed by “liberal” mayors) are next in line for this treatment. The reality is that of the 23 cities with the biggest increase in homicides, a third of those are located in “red” states.
But the administration hasn’t stated any desire to flood the streets of those cities with federal officers and National Guard troops, which means all of this is nothing more than politically motivated vindictiveness. And since that’s all it is, it really doesn’t matter whether or not some crime stats were altered to show lower crime rates. Trump would have done this anyway. All he wants now is something that might plausibly justify actions he’s already put in motion.
This was the way it was always going to end: with Trump turning the Oval Office into the palace of a king. One need look no further than Trump’s attempt to invoke the vengeful spirits of the Overlook Hotel by adding a $200 million ballroom to the White House, as though this were the early 1900s and we, the people, would be easily impressed by gilded, ostentatious displays of excess.
Of course, Trump has never let reality intrude on his fantasies. While crime rates continue to drop around the nation, Trump continues to claim the crime problem has never been worse, especially in cities and states overseen by “liberal” politicians. This narrative always existed, even without Trump’s involvement. But anomalous crime rate spikes driven by a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope!) worldwide pandemic gave Trump and his fellow idiots all the ammunition they needed to shove their moral panic narrative into the general discourse. And these opportunists heaped the blame on migrants and “democrat” politicians equally, as though any politician was proactively trying to generate a violent crime surge in their own jurisdiction.
Most media agencies aren’t helping, at least not those on the local levels who know “if it bleeds, it leads” is instrumental to their ongoing existence. But the facts have never matched the outlandish claims, which have far outpaced the crime rate since the early 1990s. America and Americans have never been safer, even if no cop or cop-lover will tell you otherwise.
Because some white dude (one who apparently welcomed the nickname “Big Balls”) got punched in the nose by a couple of teens while (almost) being carjacked in DC, Trump is pretty much declaring war on a city that hasn’t been this safe since the days of liberal hero JFK.
An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year. An overwhelming majority of Americans are wrong.
On Tuesday, August 5, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its comprehensive report on crime in the United States for 2024. As crime data expert Jeff Asher noted, not only did the report reveal that overall crime was down substantially in 2024, but crime “fell in 2024 across every category and population group.” Specifically, it “was down in all seven categories of crime across all 10 population groups that the FBI measures.”
Moreover, the new FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s.
Here’s what property crime looks like when broken down over the past fifty years:
Other declines are evident in the FBI’s data, which shows an across-the-board decrease in violent crime rates from last year.
This chart may make you believe most Americans aren’t buying into the moral panic. But that’s simply not true. If you want to know who’s buying into Trump’s blatant lies about crime rates, it’s the usual suspects. It’s the same people who usually support, believe, and endorse whatever falls out of Trump’s mouth and/or splatters itself across Trump’s extremely captive marketplace of bigoted ideas, Truth Social:
It’s not just small town press outlets skewing the perception of small town residents. Some of the most-read newspapers in the United States (Washington Post, New York Times) are more than willing to give front-page space to factual reports about crime rate increases, like those that followed the pandemic shutdowns around the nation. But when crime rates return to historic lows, coverage is buried by press outlets, even they even bother to report on it at all.
Trump capitalizing on this massive gap between reality and reporting doesn’t make him any different than the thousands of politicians who have come before him. What does set him apart from his thousands of predecessors is his disturbing willingness to leverage public ignorance to lay the groundwork for a police state, if not actual martial law. If these authoritarian desires are ever manifested, the press will have blood on its hands because their willingness to act as the government’s stenographer apparently only manifests when top-level government officials have a narrative to push, rather than facts to report.
In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can’t demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to power?
Trump’s first term as president involved the same ridiculous demands for abject loyalty, as well as the ridiculous assumption that subjecting dozens, if not hundreds, of federal employees to (objectively unreliable) polygraph tests would somehow shut down the steady flow of embarrassing leaks.
It didn’t work last time. And since it didn’t, the new Trump administration does what it always does when it has bad ideas: doubles down. The eminently under-qualified head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is using federal money and resources to seek out insider threats. But these “threats” don’t actually put the FBI in any danger. The only thing possibly being threatened is Patel’s self-image.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.
It’s not just about Patel. Sources report being questioned about things they may have said about Patel’s even-more-unqualified deputy director, Dan Bongino. None of this has anything to do with preventing employees from leaking information that might undermine ongoing investigations. All of this serves a single purpose: the expelling of agents and officials who raise legitimate concerns about FBI directives, as well as the man sitting on top of this whole paranoid mess, Donald Trump.
The FBI is now bleeding talent thanks to Patel’s efforts and general lack of competent leadership.
Top agents in about 40 percent of the field offices have either retired, been ousted or moved into different jobs, according to people familiar with the matter and an estimate by The New York Times, which began tracking the turnover once the new administration arrived.
And, like Nixon himself, Patel has compiled an “enemies” list. Fortunately for Patel, nearly none of the people on his list are still employed by the federal government, which means he can focus on people who say mean stuff about him or Dan Bongino or otherwise undermine his authority by raising questions about his actions or directives.
Patel isn’t alone in his paranoiac behavior. Tulsi Gabbard, who’s even more unqualified for her position than Patel, is in the process of aiming the Intelligence Community’s surveillance tech at any IC employee who doesn’t appear to be an unquestioning drone who spends their free time going MAGA on main.
Gabbard, according to The Washington Post, has “expressed a desire to gain access to emails and chat logs of the largest U.S. spy agencies with the aim of using artificial intelligence tools to ferret out what the administration deems as efforts to undermine its agenda.” In other words, Gabbard is threatening to endanger the careers of loyal intelligence officers by asking an AI if any of them aren’t fully on board with the MAGA cause. She has created a team within her office with the anodyne name of the “Director’s Initiatives Group,” which will collect large amounts of data from across 18 different agencies and run them through AI tools to see whether anyone is engaging in “weaponization” of intelligence. This is a flatly ridiculous, and extremely dangerous, idea.
Even before you get to the point that AI is going to be given the job of spy hunting, you have to wonder why someone who holds the title of “Director of National Intelligence” would think tearing down silo walls and providing a cross-agency blend of internal communications for AI to trawl through would be a good idea. It’s certainly a self-serving idea, which is the sort of thing MAGA officials constantly conflate with “good.”
While this effort may eventually find some people to fire for not being loyal enough (including the false positives who will be considered acceptable collateral damage), it will create an extremely tempting and useful target for malicious state-sponsored hackers. Those who target foreign government agencies to exfiltrate useful information are always thrilled when someone does some of the compilation work for them.
And while Gabbard (and to a lesser extent, Patel) are making America less secure with their efforts, the stuff they should be paying attention to (actual insider threats, terrorists, criminal cartels, state-sponsored hackers) will be ignored… or, at the very least, starved of resources just to ensure this squad of Nixons won’t be kicked around by those in their employ.
Martial law? Police state? These are just things the alleged Leader of Free World wants, rather than things a nation founded on rejecting these options should be in the process of instituting. And yet, here we are, barely six months into Trump’s return to office, staring down the barrel of both of these related horrors.
If it looks like fascism, it’s probably not intentional. Trump simply isn’t smart enough to implement the real thing. But he does like authoritarianism, which looks a lot like fascism, because he’s always felt a president should be treated like a king — someone who answers to no one, not even his 340 million employers.
Trump tested the waters on martial law during his last term, threatening to send troops out to handle George Floyd protests. This time around, he’s amped everything up, openly hoping to turn every “Democrat” city into Kent State.
Legally, he’s not allowed to do this. But his administration is relying on some vagueness in the law to get around the long-standing prohibition of sending in the army (so to speak) to police the populace. So, we get the sort of thing we’ve seen recently, where a Los Angeles swap meet was treated like an open-air market in some Middle Eastern country we’re currently at (undeclared) war with.
When I tell you Los Angeles is an occupied city/county, this is what I mean…Yesterday, ICE agents showed up to a regular Saturday swap meet with armed Marines and a military helicopter overhead, like it’s a fucking war zone.
The National Guard troops sent to Los Angeles are presumably still working without pay and/or beds, but that isn’t stopping them from blending in with federal law enforcement to aid and abet actual law enforcement work. First reported by CBS, a combined force of more than 500 federal officers and National Guard troops walked away from the ICE raids and the protection of federal property to perform a bog standard drug bust. Nicholas Slayton has more details for Task and Purpose, a military-oriented publication:
California National Guard soldiers operating under federal orders helped the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal personnel carry out a raid on a large marijuana growth operation in the eastern Coachella Valley last week, 130 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
It’s unclear how many National Guard troops participated in the operation, but the force totalled roughly 500 people. According to the DEA, other agencies included Customs and Border Patrol, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Immigration and Custom Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
While this commandeering of California National Guard troops may have originally been for the unstated purpose of pushing back against anti-ICE protests, now that they’re here, the administration has decided to just use them for whatever. This raid of multiple marijuana farms occurred more than 100 miles away from the boundaries of Los Angeles County and even further away from the location these troops were originally sent: downtown Los Angeles.
According to Trump’s military, everything about this is good and fine and nothing to be concerned about. After all, the law says the military can help federal cops, even if it (supposedly) prevents them from doing actual cop work. That’s the Title 10 vagueness the military is relying on when it serves up statements like this”
“The catalyst of this order was related to events occurring in Los Angeles; however, the president’s order and NORTHCOM’s mission is not constrained by the geography of Southern California. Recently, Title 10 forces supported a Drug Enforcement Agency operation a few hours outside of Los Angeles. Title 10 forces protect federal personnel who are performing federal law enforcement functions…”
Hence the military-provided shots of alleged National Guard troops allegedly manning the perimeter of the places being raided. And, also hence, the narrative no one can definitively dispute because — despite the National Guard embedding with federal law enforcement agencies — no journalists are being allowed to embed with military-esque operations occurring within the borders of the United States.
Of course, we’ve already seen Marines detain people for the purpose of handing them over to law enforcement. And we’ve seen National Guard troops swarm a swap meet like they’re looking for terrorists in a foreign country, rather than just anyone looking kind of Hispanic who might not have the proper paperwork on them.
The more things like this occur, the more easily many people will just come to accept this is the way the United States operates now. Many of them will cheer on these efforts, failing to recognize the abuse of these powers may, at some point, target them. But for the rest of us, this shouldn’t be allowed to pass without notice. Trump may be a blowhard and an idiot, but he’s surrounded by people who truly desire an opportunity to perform a hard reset on democracy and its principles, replacing it with jackboot heels, racism, fascism, and — eventually — a return of the British Empire, this time wrapped in an American flag.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom.
According to a 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused of obstructing a U.S. agency and concealing an individual to prevent an arrest. The two charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine, but sentences in cases involving nonviolent offenses typically are much shorter.
Arresting a judge is an extremely rare occurrence. If it does happen, it usually follows months of investigation and massive amounts of evidence of criminal activity. In this case, it took less than a week and mostly hinges on the statements of a single court deputy and the allegations of federal officers who were free to assume the worst about the few things they did manage to witness first-hand. On top of that, the arrest was made at the courthouse, as though the judge posed some sort of a flight risk if she wasn’t apprehended in public at her place of government employment.
All very shitty. And all too familiar. There’s some precedent for this. Guess when that happened.
A Massachusetts judge who allegedly gave a “reasonable impression” that she was allowing an immigrant to evade federal custody was “less than fully candid” when asked about the incident, according to an ethics complaint filed Monday.
The judge, Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph of Massachusetts, is accused of willful misconduct in the ethics complaint.
[…]
Joseph had once faced federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice over the April 2018 incident in the Newton, Massachusetts, courthouse.
Prosecutors had alleged that Joseph allowed Medina-Perez to go downstairs to the lockup, supposedly to retrieve property. The immigrant was then allowed to leave through a back door by a court officer. The charges were dropped in September 2022 after Joseph agreed to report herself to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct.
[Strokes chin thoughtfully] What could be the details that connect these two anomalies? What indeed. Allegedly helping an immigrant avoid interloping federal officers looking to make their jobs easier by poaching people outside courtrooms following court appearances? Check. President Trump in office? Check.
As noted in the above report, the felony obstruction charges were dropped and replaced with an ethics complaint. We’ll have to wait and see how this one goes, but so far, Trump Administration officials are treating it like a law and order win. The head of the FBI, Kash Patel, tweeted, de-tweeted, and tweeted again about how proud he was his agency was right there to bring an obstructionist judge to heel. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed this report on xTwitter, pretending this was just good government business, rather than the KGB-esque removal of, shall we say, a competing viewpoint in the marketplace of mass deportation ideas.
There’s a 13-page charging document [PDF] written by FBI Special Agent Lindsay Schloemer that portrays this as some sort of criminal conspiracy, rather than just a sympathetic judge being unwilling to let federal agents use her court as some sort of temporary holding cell for immigration arrests. It’s all written in accordance with the FBI Charging Document Style Guide — something capable of portraying someone pointing someone to an alternate exit as the equivalent to being the driver in a bank robbery getaway car.
But before we dip into that a bit, I must highlight one of most hilarious “training and experience” assertions I’ve ever seen in a warrant affidavit:
I am a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and have been so employed since 2014. I am currently assigned to the Milwaukee Field Office. As such, I am an investigative or law enforcement agent of the United States authorized under Title 18, United States Code, Section 3052, that is, an officer of the United States who is empowered by law to conduct investigations, to make arrests, and to collect evidence for various violations of federal law. I am also a Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”) and worked as a CPA for seven years before my employment with the FBI.
Nice. Useless in this specific situation, but one should always have a fall-back career. Apparently, arresting judges is the agent’s fall-back career, because Schloemer goes on to point out their white collar crime bona fides before getting around to justifying the arrest of a county judge just because federal agents (including a DEA agent because that’s what we’re doing these days) were forced to run an extra 50-100 feet to apprehend Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, whose main evasive effort was (and this is all in the charging document!) using an elevator that was further away than the one federal agents assumed made more sense to use. I am not kidding.
After leaving the Chief Judge’s vestibule and returning to the public hallway, DEA Agent A reported that Flores-Ruiz and his attorney were in the public hallway. DEA Agent B also observed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney in the hallway near Courtroom 615 and noted that Flores. Ruiz was looking around the hallway. From different vantage points, both agents observed Flores- Ruiz and his counsel walk briskly towards the elevator bank on the south end of the sixth floor. | am familiar with the layout of the sixth floor of the courthouse and know that the south elevators are not the closest elevators to Courtroom 615, and therefore it appears that Flores-Ruiz and his counsel elected not to use the closest elevator bank to Courtroom 615.
Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. The allegations claim the judge diverted officers, ushered Flores-Ruiz out through the jury exit, and otherwise tried to impede this arrest. The chief judge also seemed a little concerned about the swarm of federal officers trying to poach exiting court attendees and expressed a desire to formalize where in the courthouse it was appropriate to make these arrests. In the end, the agents were momentarily inconvenienced.
Even if all of claims are factual, the FBI had several options to use, including the one that left it up to the DOJ to file an ethics complaint, rather than expedite a felony complaint against a judge — an action that’s just as inexcusable as it was back in 2018. But this administration is dead set on proving to everyone it will go after anyone and anything that even momentarily halts the progress of its fascist designs. And in doing so, it’s adding yet another black eye to US history, one it can only hope it remains in power long enough to retcon.
Be the “deep state” you want to see in the world. That’s the new FBI under conspiracy theorist/Trump acolyte Kash Patel’s “leadership.” Instead of being the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it will become the Federal Bureau of Investigating People Trump Doesn’t Like. I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear journalists are getting their phone records seized again, something that happened the last time Trump was in charge of the country.
The FBI has cut staffing in an office focused on domestic terrorism and has scrapped a tool used to track such investigations, in a shift that could undermine law enforcement’s ability to counter white supremacists and anti-government extremists, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The moves, sources said, are an indication that domestic terrorism investigations, which in recent years have largely involved violence fueled by right-wing ideologies, may be less of a priority under FBI Director Kash Patel, a prominent critic of the effort.
Well, you can strike the word “may” from that sentence and replace it with “will.” If Donald Trump thinks no one involved in the January 6, 2021 raid of the Capitol building should ever have been charged, much less jailed, it’s safe to assume he and Patel agree there’s no reason to go after terrorists who support Trump and his ideals.
Right now it’s a trickle, but it may become a flood if Trump and Patel can convince the rest of the FBI leadership that this is the way to go. (Or fire enough of the current leadership that there’s no longer any measurable objection.)
Two sources familiar with the changes said about 16 people had been reassigned from the section, which would have hundreds of employees if fully staffed. A different source said senior FBI officials have discussed disbanding it entirely, though a final decision has not yet been announced.
A department that was already likely understaffed (and definitely undermined by far too many Trump loyalists within the Bureau) is going to lose more resources. But those being reassigned have to go somewhere, so guess where they’re likely headed:
The Trump administration has separately directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which investigate domestic and international terrorist threats, to assist in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to a memo seen by Reuters.
I guess having the DHS, ICE, CBP, Border Patrol, US National Guard, and dozens of overly compliant local law enforcement agencies focused on border security and mass expulsions just isn’t enough. From now on, the FBI will also be helping Trump achieve his goal of converting bigotry into nice round numbers that will ensure steady salivation from the frothiest of his followers.
But Trump and Patel may have pulled the trigger on domestic terrorism cuts a bit too soon. After all, there’s a new brand of domestic terrorism Trump is particularly hot and bothered about: a nationwide wave of disdain targeting Elon Musk, Tesla owners, and Tesla dealerships. While most of the activity has been non-violent (even when it crosses the line into harassment), some of it has not. If nothing else, there are probably a few vandalism and arson cases to be pursued, but that’s not the sort of thing that usually involves the FBI.
However, Trump considers these acts to be “domestic terrorism,” and wants the full force of the law applied against people who vandalize Tesla dealerships — going so far as to suggest these specific criminals should be rerouted to El Salvadorian prisons. With this “threat” still present, it might make a bit more sense to keep the domestic terrorism group intact. I mean, unless Trump really doesn’t believe his own heated rhetoric about Tesla and terrorism, which is just as likely an explanation as anything.
Either way, the FBI will no longer be investigating the sort of terrorism that routinely involves Trump supporters. Kash Patel and Trump have deliberately created a bug and are touting it as a feature. And for all their blowharding about “politicizing the FBI” when complaining about Biden and Obama, they seem perfectly fine with weaponizing federal agencies against their political and ideological enemies when they’re holding the keys to the government Cabinet.
Look, there are different ways to manage people. You could, for instance, have regular performance reviews, set clear expectations, and provide constructive feedback. Or… you could send an email late on a Saturday to the entirety of the federal government workforce (even those outside the executive branch) demanding that everyone list five things they did last week, while simultaneously tweeting that anyone who doesn’t respond will be fired.
The latter is what happened this weekend when federal employees received this email:
What did you do last week?
Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.
Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.
Now, you might think this is just another story about Elon Musk’s catastrophically bad management style. (And it is!) But it’s actually much, much dumber than that.
It was sent on Saturday. And Elon Musk is taking credit for it, even though the Trump administration last week stated in court that Musk has no authority other than to advise the President, and has no official role with DOGE. Even more bizarre, Musk claimed on ExTwitter that anyone who failed to reply to the email by Monday night would have that failure to respond be taken as a resignation.
There are several problems here. Well, actually there are about fifty problems here, but let’s start with the obvious ones:
The email doesn’t mention anything about resignations. That part came in a separate tweet, because apparently that’s how the federal government works now. (If you’re a federal employee who doesn’t obsessively follow Elon Musk on ExTwitter, I guess you just… accidentally resign? Maybe?)
The federal government is, how do I put this, kind of big? Some federal employees are on maternity leave. Some are on vacation. Some are in submarines deep under the ocean where checking email would literally compromise national security. (I assume Musk would count “maintaining radio silence to avoid detection by foreign adversaries” as one of your five accomplishments for the week, but who knows?)
If this all feels familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this movie before: Musk pulled exactly the same stunt when he took over Twitter, right before destroying about 80% of that company’s value. (You would think he’d recognize how badly that has gone and think that maybe a different approach is needed, but not Elon Musk!)
Furthermore, the email went to all federal employees, including many who are not a part of the executive branch. There are multiple reports of clerks and judges in the judicial branch receiving it as well. And while we’re still waiting to see the courts sort out if Musk has authority over the executive branch (he likely does not), he absolutely does not have authority over the judicial branch.
Now, you might wonder what possible justification there could be for this bizarre demand. Well! According to Musk (who, remember, suffers from the most ridiculous level of troll-fueled confirmation bias we’ve ever seen) this is just a simple test to make sure federal employees are checking their email. Because apparently the biggest problem facing the federal government is… insufficient inbox monitoring?
There are a few problems with this theory:
Some federal employees literally can’t check email (see: aforementioned submarine crews)
Some federal employees shouldn’t check email (see: anyone handling classified information on secure systems)
Some federal employees don’t need to check email on weekends (see: basically everyone else)
But the real kicker is what Musk’s defenders are saying.
The argument goes something like this: “Actually, this is totally normal! Companies do this all the time!” Which… no? Look, I’ve worked in and around plenty of companies, and yes, you typically have regular performance reviews. You might even have weekly check-ins with your manager. But there’s a slight difference between “scheduled performance review with your direct supervisor” and “surprise email from someone who may or may not have authority over you demanding immediate justification for your existence.” (The difference is that one is management and the other is performative chaos.)
That’s just being an asshole with too much power.
Also, because these are federal government emails, they’re subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which means reporters are already lining up to request copies of all the responses. I suspect we’ll soon have a fascinating database of federal employees explaining their jobs to… well, to no one in particular, since Musk doesn’t actually have any actual authority here.
Not surprisingly to most people, but apparently surprising to Musk, it turns out that various federal agencies have opinions about their employees sending detailed work descriptions to random email addresses. And those opinions are mostly variations on “please don’t do that.”
The FBI, for instance, whose new director Kash Patel (in theory a Musk ally, mind you) seems particularly annoyed:
Then there’s Tulsi Gabbard, the new Director of National Intelligence (and, again, typically a Musk ally), who had to explain something that really shouldn’t need explaining: “Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email.” (Translation: “Please don’t send classified intelligence work details to a random email address, even if Elon Musk asks nicely.”)
The Defense Department, meanwhile, sent out what might be the most diplomatically worded “absolutely not” in recent memory. From their memo:
“DoD personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information. The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” Selnick wrote. “When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled, ‘What did you do last week.’”
The Administrative Office of the Courts, which is run by John Roberts, sent out a mealy-mouthed email to the judicial branch recommending not responding: “this email did not originate from the judiciary or the administrative office and we suggest that no action be taken.” Roberts could have taken a stand and noted that the executive branch has no authority whatsoever here, but I guess he’ll have an opportunity to do that in court before long.
The State Department and Homeland Security both also told employees not to respond. Though CISA, which is a part of Homeland Security, first told employees to obey the email. That kind of confusion is happening elsewhere as well:
Other departments gave conflicting guidance. The Department of Health and Human Services told its employees on Sunday morning to follow the directive. An hour later, an email from the Trump-appointed acting director of the National Institutes of Health, a subordinate agency, told employees to hold off on responding. Hours later, the health department told all employees to “pause” responses to the ultimatum.
One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to. And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” related to the request until noon on Monday.
“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities,I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by The Associated Press that acknowledged a broad sense of “uncertainty and stress” within the agency.
Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege: “I have received no assurances that there are appropriate protections in place to safeguard responses to this email.”
Look, even if you were somehow convinced this was a good idea (it’s not) and that demanding work summaries via surprise weekend email is totally normal corporate behavior (it really, really isn’t), you’d still have to marvel at the sheer incompetence of the implementation. All this is doing is generating a shit ton of confusion across the entirety of the federal government.
That doesn’t seem very useful for “efficiency.”
And then there’s Ed Martin, the US Attorney for DC (who, you might remember, we just last week discussed as spectacularly incompetent), who sent what might be the most confusing “clarification” email in federal government history:
“Let me clarify: We will comply with this OPM request whether by replying or deciding not to reply.”
Well! That certainly clears things up. (For those keeping score at home, Martin is saying they will comply by either… doing the thing or not doing the thing. Which is technically true and also technically useless.)
But wait, there’s more! Because Elon (who, remember, is supposedly just an advisor with no actual authority) didn’t take kindly to the Pentagon’s “please ignore this” memo. His response? To threaten to fire the person who wrote the Pentagon’s memo. Yes, the person with no authority is threatening to fire people at the Pentagon for not recognizing his non-existent authority. It’s like a fractal of nonsense.
Meanwhile, Musk has been gleefully mocking anyone pushing back on this demand, insisting that people are only upset because they can’t come up with five things they did last week. Which is… not the point. At all.
Let’s be clear about this (in “five bullets”):
Everyone can list five things they did last week
The issue isn’t the difficulty of the task
The issue is being asked to justify your existence via a pointless busywork exercise to someone with no authority over you
…via a weekend email
…that threatens termination in a separate tweet
But Musk wasn’t done yet. Because his solution to this manufactured crisis is… wait for it… to use his own proprietary AI chatbot to generate fake responses. Yes, you read that right. Musk sent Trump a screenshot of someone (possibly himself) asking Grok (his own AI) to make up fake accomplishments for such an email reply, which Trump then posted to Truth Social, which Musk then reposted to ExTwitter as proof of how “easy” this all is.
So to summarize: The person demanding accountability from federal workers is actively encouraging them to use AI bullshit generators to create fake responses. And not just any AI — his AI specifically. (Nothing says “government efficiency” quite like using a private company’s AI to generate fake work reports for that same private company’s CEO who has no actual government authority but pretends he does.)
It also suggests a disturbing comfort with using AI to generate artificial accountability rather than pursuing any kind of meaningful government oversight (in case you were one of the three rubes left in the country who still believes that’s what Musk is doing). The fact that neither Musk nor Trump seem concerned about the security implications of federal employees feeding their work details into private commercial AI systems is particularly alarming.
There are a whole host of problems with all of this, but mainly, it’s just fucking stupid.
Kelley said in the letter that the union has “received numerous reports from dedicated civil servants, including those who care for our veterans and safeguard our nation, expressing frustration over the email’s tone and intent. Rather than fostering professionalism and respect for their work, this hastily written email left many feeling undervalued and intimidated.”
And even Republicans are having trouble defending this one.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, also criticized Mr. Musk’s order.
“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform,” she wrote in a statement on social media. “The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”
The whole thing is an exercise in dickishness for the sake of dickishness. But beyond the obvious management failures, this episode raises serious concerns about data security and privacy. The combination of FOIA-able responses, encouraged use of commercial AI systems, and the broad scope of affected agencies creates a perfect storm of potential security risks. Federal employees’ work details could be exposed in ways that compromise ongoing operations, especially in sensitive areas like national security and law enforcement. It’s yet another example of how tech-bro solutions to imagined problems often create very real security vulnerabilities.
Of course, Musk fans will cheer it on, insisting that the federal workforce deserves to be treated like shit, even as this will impact many people who actually supported Trump and Musk. The entire attitude is “if you’re not part of the inner circle, you’re worthless.”
It’s obnoxious. And it’s designed to demoralize workers on purpose. The assumption that all federal employees are a waste is such a stupid, ignorant position. But it’s clearly how Musk is treating everyone who works for the government.
It’s not the first time. It certainly won’t be the last. But every time, we’re expected to hang back and assume the FBI is on the right side of history.
Something the FBI has tried a couple of times previously is back in the news: the remote access of thousands of computers containing foreign spyware for the purpose of dismantling botnets and/or thwarting foreign access to US-based devices.
The first attempt was made more than a half-decade ago, right after federal law (specifically Rule 41) was altered to allow the feds to ignore jurisdictional limitations when crafting warrants. This issue presented itself during the FBI’s “Playpen” investigation — one in which it took over a server hosting CSAM and kept it running while it deployed its remote access tool to visitors’ computers, forcing their devices to give up identifying info, including where these devices might be located (IP addresses, in other words).
A single warrant obtained in Virginia resulted in the FBI accessing computers all over the nation (and all over the world). While this raised constitutional questions, most courts were fine with this because, well, the defendants were just people facing CSAM-related charges. The Rule 41 alterations codified the FBI’s previous abuse of the legal process.
Now, with a single warrant, the FBI can access computers anywhere in the US. Which it has. Multiple times. The incidents the FBI actually wants to talk about publicly involve rooting out botnets and thwarting malware deployed by hostile state actors. In addition to nuking malware servers, the warrants also allowed FBI agents to pull identifying information from targeted users, including IP addresses and routing info, supposedly for the sole reason of confirming the infections had been removed and the targeted computers were no longer communicating with malware “administrators.”
The FBI hacked about 4,200 computers across the US as part of an operation to find and delete PlugX, a malware used by state-backed hackers in China to steal information from victims, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday.
In an unsealed affidavit, the FBI says the China-based hacking group known by the monikers “Mustang Panda” and “Twill Typhoon” used PlugX to infect thousands of Windows computers in the US, Asia, and Europe since at least 2012. The malware, which infects computers through their USB ports, operates in the background while allowing hackers to “remotely access and execute commands” on victims’ computers.
It worked like this. The FBI gained access to the command-and-control server, obtained a list of IP addresses of infected computers, and sent its own command to those devices to end the malware’s operation and delete the malware when the operation was finished. As in the earlier cases, users whose computers were accessed remotely by the FBI were not notified of this action.
All’s well that ends well, I guess. But we perhaps should offer only the most cautious of applause for this anti-malware action. While it’s nice to see power used for good, the underlying problem is that the FBI has both the power and permission to access an unlimited number of computers using a single warrant obtained in whatever jurisdiction the agency feels might be most receptive to its overtures. I’m not saying the FBI will abuse these powers. But I am saying that having these powers at your disposal, untethered from anything one might call rigorous oversight, is definitely an open invitation to abuse.
And while the DOJ is more than happy to talk about G-men performing virtual raids to rid citizens’ computers of unwanted spyware, it’s pretty much guaranteed the moment the FBI does something a bit more questionable, it will take a ton of litigation to force the DOJ to divulge details on operations that don’t reflexively lead to self-congratulatory press releases.
It’s a grind. But it’s been worth it. Last week, the court that’s been handling Agron Hasbajrami’s case for nearly a decade finally said what plenty of people have been saving for nearly as long: the FBI’s warrantless searches of NSA collections to target US persons’ communications and data violates the Constitution. Here’s Andrew Crocker and Matthew Guariglia of the EFF, detailing the lengthy background of this case (and this win) in a couple of concise paragraphs:
Better late than never: last night a federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed.
[…]
This decision sheds light on the government’s liberal use of what is essential a “finders keepers” rule regarding your communication data. As a legal authority, FISA Section 702 allows the intelligence community to collect a massive amount of communications data from overseas in the name of “national security.” But, in cases where one side of that conversation is a person on US soil, that data is still collected and retained in large databases searchable by federal law enforcement. Because the US-side of these communications is already collected and just sitting there, the government has claimed that law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to sift through them. EFF argued for over a decade that this is unconstitutional, and now a federal court agrees with us.
It’s been five years since the Second Circuit Appeals Court ruled — albeit not all that convincingly — that some backdoor searches of Section 702 collections might violate the Fourth Amendment. Five years later, the lower court has applied this limited guidance to arrive at the conclusion [PDF] the Appeals Court strongly hinted at: backdoor searches targeting US persons require the use of a warrant.
The court says none of the warrant exceptions apply to backdoor searches, at least not in this case. And the government cannot hope to dodge warrant requirements by claiming the search resulting in the NSA’s collection isn’t actually the FBI’s search, since all it searches is data and communications already obtained by another government agency.
[T]he Second Circuit acknowledged the unique nature of querying, compared to Section 702 surveillance because the information queried is already in the government’s possession. As the Second Circuit observed: “[s]torage has little significance in its own right.” In other words, the government cannot circumvent application of the warrant requirement simply because queried information is already collected and held by the government.
The FBI also cannot use built-in procedures meant to minimize interception of US persons’ communications as a justification for warrantless searches. That the NSA has to examine its collections to minimize stockpiles of US persons’ data doesn’t mean it’s ok for the FBI to do basically the same thing, but with the explicit intent of warrantlessly accessing US persons’ information.
By arguing that compulsory review of Section 702-acquired communications justifies later review of even a subset of those communications, the Government seeks to use minimization procedures to bootstrap access to communications of United States citizens for whom the procedures are designed to protect. This argument is akin to claiming that law enforcement can access privileged communications reviewed by a filter team because government employees laid eyes on the privileged communications at some point in the process. The argument makes no more sense in that context than it does here.
The minimization procedures are there to limit incidental collection of domestic communications. That alone strongly suggests the NSA cares more about the Fourth Amendment than the FBI does. That the FBI has decided to twist these protections into something it can use to avoid seeking warrants just makes it all the more obvious why warrants should be required for these searches.
While communications of U.S. persons may nonetheless be intercepted, incidentally or inadvertently, it would be paradoxical to permit warrantless searches of the same information that Section 702 is specifically designed to avoid collecting. To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it—a tool for law enforcement to run “backdoor searches” that circumvent the Fourth Amendment.
And if that’s not convincing enough, there’s this bit of bench-slapping:
If you can’t see the embed, it’s two fully redacted paragraphs that close with this sentence:
The Government’s opposition is rife with similarly vague and unsupported notions.
Yes, there’s a lot that’s been redacted but the end result is out there in plain English, free of redactions: the FBI needs warrants to search Section 702 collections. The good faith exception applies to this case, which means it won’t do much for the defendant, who was arrested in 2011 for alleged material support for terrorism. But it does apply going forward, for the time being. The government will certainly appeal this ruling. And it might take an act of Congress to actually make warrant requirements permanent. Even if this turns out to be temporary, it’s still significant. And hopefully the law laid down here will be utilized by others facing similar circumstances.
