Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. Among the more notable exchanges was when Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked some of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims who were in the audience to stand up and indicate whether Bondi’s DOJ had ever contacted them about their experiences. None of them had heard from the Justice Department. Bondi wouldn’t even look at the victims as she frantically flipped through her prepared notes.
And that’s when news organizations, including Reuters, caught something alarming: one of the pages Bondi held up clearly showed searches that Jayapal herself had done of the Epstein files:
A Reuters photographer captured this image of a page from Pam Bondi's "burn book," which she used to counter any questions from Democratic lawmakers during an unhinged hearing today.It looks like the DOJ monitored members of Congress’s searches of the unredacted Epstein files.Just wow.
The Department of Justice—led by an Attorney General who is supposed to serve the public but has made clear her only role is protecting Donald Trump’s personal interests—is actively surveilling what members of Congress are searching in the Epstein files. And then bringing that surveillance data to a congressional hearing to use as political ammunition.
This should be front-page news. It should be a major scandal. Honestly, it should be impeachable.
There is no legitimate investigative purpose here. No subpoena. Nothing at all. Just the executive branch tracking the oversight activities of the legislative branch, then weaponizing that information for political culture war point-scoring. The DOJ has no business whatsoever surveilling what members of Congress—who have oversight authority over the Justice Department—are searching.
Jayapal is rightly furious:
Pam Bondi brought a document to the Judiciary Committee today that had my search history of the Epstein files on it. The DOJ is spying on members of Congress. It’s a disgrace and I won’t stand for it.
We’ve been here before. Way back in 2014, the CIA illegally spied on searches by Senate staffers who were investigating the CIA’s torture program. It was considered a scandal at the time—because it was one. The executive branch surveilling congressional oversight is a fundamental violation of separation of powers. It’s the kind of thing that, when it happens, should trigger immediate consequences.
And yet.
Just a few days ago, Senator Lindsey Graham—who has been one of the foremost defenders of government surveillance for years—blew up at a Verizon executive for complying with a subpoena that revealed Graham’s call records (not the contents, just the metadata) from around January 6th, 2021.
“If the shoe were on the other foot, it’d be front-page news all over the world that Republicans went after sitting Democratic senators’ phone records,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was among the Republicans in Congress whose records were accessed by prosecutors as they examined contacts between the president and allies on Capitol Hill.
“I just want to let you know,” he added, “I don’t think I deserve what happened to me.”
This is the same Lindsey Graham who, over a decade ago, said he was “glad” that the NSA was collecting his phone records because it magically kept him safe from terrorists. But now he’s demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for being “spied” on (he wasn’t—a company complied with a valid subpoena in a legitimate investigation, which is how the legal system is supposed to work).
So here’s the contrast: Graham is demanding money and media attention because a company followed the law. Meanwhile, the Attorney General is actually surveilling a Democratic member of Congress’s oversight activities—with no legal basis whatsoever—and using that surveillance for political theater in a manner clearly designed as a warning shot to congressional reps investigating the Epstein Files. Pam Bondi wants you to know she’s watching you.
Graham claimed that if the shoe were on the other foot, it would be “front-page news all over the world.” Well, Senator, here’s your chance. The shoe is very much on the other foot. It’s worse than what happened to you, because what happened to you was legal and appropriate, and what’s happening to Jayapal is neither.
But we all know Graham won’t speak out against this administration. He’s had nearly a decade to show whether or not the version of Lindsey Graham who said “if we elected Donald Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it” still exists, and it’s clear that Lindsey Graham is long gone. This one only serves Donald Trump and himself, not the American people.
But this actually matters: if the DOJ can surveil what members of Congress search in oversight files—and then use that surveillance as a weapon in public hearings—congressional oversight of the executive branch is dead. That’s the whole point of separation of powers. The people who are supposed to watch the watchmen can’t do their jobs if the watchmen are surveilling them.
And remember: Bondi didn’t hide this. She brought it to the hearing. She held it up when she knew cameras would catch what was going on. She wanted Jayapal—and every other member of Congress—to see exactly what she’s doing.
This administration doesn’t fear consequences for this kind of vast abuse of power because there haven’t been any. And the longer that remains true, the worse it’s going to get.
Back in August, we wrote about the Department of Justice’s unprecedented decision to file a judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The complaint, which Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted about in what was itself likely a violation of the law governing such complaints, accused Boasberg of violating judicial ethics by… privately expressing concerns to other judges that the Trump administration might not comply with court orders.
Concerns that, as we noted at the time, turned out to beentirely justified.
Let’s back up and explain what happened. The DOJ’s complaint centered on comments Boasberg allegedly made at a private Judicial Conference meeting on March 11, 2025, where he supposedly “push[ed] a wholly unsolicited discussion about ‘concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.'” The complaint cited “Attachment A” as evidence of what Boasberg said.
There was just one small problem: the DOJ never actually provided Attachment A with the complaint. Actually, there were many, many problems, but we’ll get to those.
The complaint has now been fully resolved, and it went about as well for the DOJ as you might expect. Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, to whom Chief Justice Roberts transferred the complaint, dismissed it in a brusque seven-page ruling that reads like a judge who is deeply unimpressed with having his time wasted.
Chief Judge Sutton’s ruling is not just a tour de force in how a judicial ruling can persuasively give the back of its hand to a claim; it is, or at least ought to be, a humiliating smackdown for the Department of Justice—which bungled every single aspect of its misconduct complaint, from publicly announcing it to making spurious arguments about what the alleged misconduct actually was (the distinction between “public” and “private” really shouldn’t be hard, nor should the fact that March 11 is prior to March 15) to refusing to provide the very evidence on which the complaint purported to rest.
Vladeck also noted, in discussing how the DOJ never actually followed through on the steps it would obviously take if it were a legitimate complaint,that this proved how it was all political in the first place:
It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg’s behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ’s specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.
Besmirching a long-time judge… for the memes.
The problems with the DOJ’s complaint were numerous, but let’s start with the most embarrassing one mentioned above: the DOJ never actually provided the evidence it claimed supported its accusations.
The Department identified one source of evidence, Attachment A, for the judge’s statement and for the setting in which it occurred. The complaint, however, did not include the attachment. The D.C. Circuit contacted the Department about the missing attachment and explained that, if it failed to submit the attachment, the circuit would consider the complaint as submitted. The Department did not supply the attachment.
In the absence of the attachment, the complaint offers no source for what, if anything, the subject judge said during the Conference, when he said it, whether he said it in response to a question, whether he said it during the Conference or at another meeting, and whether he expressed these concerns as his own or as those of other judges.Later in the complaint, to be sure, the Department refers to a Fox News clip discussing the same allegation. But it does not identify any source, contain any specifics, or answer any of the above questions. A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them. And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint
So the DOJ filed an unprecedented misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge, made a huge public spectacle of it, and then when asked to actually produce the evidence supposedly supporting its claims… just didn’t. Vladeck’s assessment is appropriately blunt:
DOJ’s failure to produce Attachment A is, frankly, mind-boggling…
But even putting aside the DOJ’s failure to provide any actual evidence, Sutton methodically demolished every other theory in the complaint.
On the claim that Boasberg’s comments at the Judicial Conference were somehow improper, Sutton pointed out that this is literally what the Judicial Conference is for:
A key point of the Judicial Conference and the related meetings is to facilitate candid conversations about judicial administration among leaders of the federal judiciary about matters of common concern. In these settings, a judge’s expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct. Confirming the point, the Chief Justice’s 2024 year-end report raised general concerns about threats to judicial independence, security concerns for judges, and respect for court orders throughout American history
(For what it’s worth, as someone who had the privilege a couple years back of being invited to a judicial conference to give a talk, I can confirm firsthand that there were many fascinating informal conversations that occurred over the course of a few days among judges comparing notes and thinking through larger issues that might impact the judiciary).
On the DOJ’s claim that Boasberg’s comments constituted an improper “public comment” on a pending case, Sutton noted two rather obvious problems: the comments were private, not public, and the case the DOJ was concerned about hadn’t even been filed yet:
The alleged comment does not refer to a case, and the J.G.G. action was not filed until four days later: March 15, 2025. Because the judge did not refer to a case, that all but guarantees that his comments did not “violate[] Canon 3A(6), Canon 2A, or the Judicial–Conduct Rules.” In re Charges of Jud. Misconduct, 769 F.3d 762, 788 (D.C. Cir. 2014). The comment at any rate was not a “public” one, as it was made in a closed-door meeting in which the communications are off the record and confidential. The complaint, notably, does not claim that the judge made public what was said in private at the Conference or its related meetings.
As for the DOJ’s argument that Boasberg’s subsequent handling of the J.G.G. case (involving the shipping of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran concentration camp) somehow proved bias, Sutton wasn’t having that either. The complaint, he noted, “does not explain how a Supreme Court ruling about a prior action by the judge necessarily shows willful indifference when the judge addresses a distinct set of circumstances in a later ruling.”
Furthermore, Sutton points out that if the DOJ doesn’t like Boasberg’s rulings in a particular case, its remedy is… to appeal. Not claim misconduct:
When the executive branch’s deep convictions about the law meet the judicial branch’s deep convictions about the law in a trial court, the answer is to invoke the appellate process, not the misconduct process, to resolve the dispute.
And then, almost as an afterthought, Sutton reminded the DOJ that even if it had prevailed, the judicial misconduct process can’t do what the DOJ apparently wanted it to do:
To the extent the complaint asks that the underlying case be reassigned to another judge, that is not a form of relief available through the complaint process.
In other words:
the DOJ filed a complaint
that was based on misleading evidence
which it never produced
alleging misconduct that (even if true) wasn’t actually misconduct
propped up with claims of bias based on actions that occurred later
which could not be signs of bias, and finally
sought relief that wasn’t even available.
If the DOJ were capable of embarrassment, this would be the time for it.
In his initial post on the complaint last year when it was filed, Vladeck had noted that the entire complaint was supposed to be a warning to other judges to shut up about any concerns about the Trump admin. One hopes that this ruling by Judge Sutton will reverse that and embolden more judges to do what’s right.
But wait, there’s more.
Because we now have even more evidence of just how absurd this whole episode was, thanks to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the mysterious Attachment A that the DOJ never produced. And thanks to that lawsuit, we’ve learned something remarkable: neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can actually explain how the DOJ came to possess this document in the first place.
In a declaration filed in that case, DOJ Senior Counsel Vanessa Brinkmann reveals some truly remarkable details about this document that was supposedly central to the DOJ’s case against Boasberg. First, the DOJ confirms the document exists and describes what it is:
Upon initial review of the document identified in this action as “Attachment A,” OIP observed that the document is a memorandum that bears the markings of a United States Court, is authored by a Federal Judge, and discusses matters internal to the Judicial Conference of the United States.
So it’s a document created by the judiciary, for the judiciary, about internal judiciary matters. And what does the judiciary think about the DOJ having this document? They’re not happy:
AOUSC Counsel conveyed to OIP, in no uncertain terms, the Federal Judiciary’s strenuous objection to the Department’s release of “Attachment A.” AOUSC Counsel further articulated that “Attachment A” was created to be an internal Judiciary document, for a specific Judiciary audience, concerning confidential Judiciary matters and is not now, nor was it ever an Executive Branch document. In sum, AOUSC Counsel advised OIP that it is the position of the AOUSC that “Attachment A” remains under the control of the Judicial Branch, is confidential, and is not subject to disclosure pursuant to the FOIA.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. How did the DOJ get this internal judiciary document in the first place? Apparently, nobody knows:
AOUSC Counsel further stated that the Judiciary made efforts to identify how “Attachment A” ended up in the possession of the Department and has not been able to identify a source of transmission of “Attachment A” from within the Judiciary to the Department. AOUSC Counsel additionally articulated that the Judiciary did not officially transmit or authorize the transmission of “Attachment A” to the Department or any external recipient. Specifically, AOUSC Counsel explained that, given the privileged nature of the document, the Judicial Conference at large would be the only entity that could approve its official release, and that it is the view of the AOUSC that the document is not an Executive Branch record subject to FOIA disclosure, but rather, a judicial record that remains under the control of the Judicial Branch.
And the DOJ’s own investigation into how it acquired this document?
Searches conducted of DOJ leadership office officials’ Departmental email accounts using e-discovery software revealed no electronic trail indicating transmission of “Attachment A” into the Department, nor has OIP’s point of contact within OAG been able to identify how “Attachment A” was received by the Department.
So let’s recap again:
the DOJ filed an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge based on a document that
it never actually provided as evidence
was created by the judiciary for internal purposes
the judiciary never authorized to be shared with the DOJ, and
neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can explain how the DOJ obtained in the first place.
This is the same DOJ that Attorney General Bondi claimed was acting to protect “the integrity of the judiciary.”
All of this suggests that perhaps one of Vladeck’s theories for why the DOJ refused to hand over Attachment A may have some weight behind it. He theorized that either Attachment A doesn’t actually say what the DOJ claims or that they got it “through means that it’s unwilling to have to identify—even confidentially as part of the judicial misconduct process.” The declaration in the FOIA case would seem to bolster that last point.
As Vladeck notes, Sutton’s dismissal should be the final word on this matter:
The outcome here should be seen for what it is: how a sober-minded jurist actually views these charges, versus how they’re manipulated and broadcast by the Department of Justice and right-wing mouthpieces to serve partisan political ends.
As for the less sober-minded among the commentariat:
Anyone who continues to claim at this point that Chief Judge Boasberg has done anything worthy of further investigation and/or impeachment is telling on themselves.
But of course, that would require the people pushing this narrative to care about things like facts, evidence, and the rule of law. Based on the DOJ’s conduct in this case, that seems like a lot to ask.
Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated him, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as attorney general last year, she established a “Weaponization Working Group”…
We all know the DOJ is fully weaponized. It’s little more than a fight promoter for Trump’s grudge matches. The DOJ continues to bleed talent as prosecutors and investigators flee the kudzu-esque corruption springing up everywhere in DC.
But naming something exactly what it is — the weaponization of the DOJ to punish Trump’s enemies — wasn’t something I ever expected to see.
I didn’t see it, which fulfills my expectations, I guess. That’s because it isn’t what it says on the tin, even though it’s exactly the thing it says it isn’t. 1984 is apparently the blueprint. It’s called the “Weaponization Working Group,” but it’s supposedly the opposite: a de-weaponization working group. Here’s the second half of the paragraph we ellipsised out of earlier:
…[t]o review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as “politicized justice.”
The Ministry of Weaponization has always de-weaponized ministries. Or whatever. The memo that started this whole thing off — delivered the same day Trump returned to office — said it even more clearly:
ENDING THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Administration officials are idiots, but they’re not so stupid they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t actually want to end the weaponization. They just want to make sure all the weapons are pointing in one direction.
Trading in vindication hasn’t exactly worked well so far. Trump’s handpicked replacements for prosecutors that have either quit or been fired are a considerable downgrade from the previous office-holders. They have had their cases tossed and their careers as federal prosecutors come to an end because (1) Trump doesn’t care what the rules for political appointments are and (2) he’s pretty sure he can find other stooges to shove into the DOJ revolving door.
The lack of forward progress likely has Pam Bondi feeling more heat than she’s used to. So the deliberately misnamed working group is going to actually start grouping and working.
The Weaponization Working Group is now expected to start meeting daily with the goal of producing results in the next two months,according to the person familiar with the plan.
Nothing good will come from this. Given the haphazard nature of the DOJ’s vindictive prosecutions efforts, there’s still a chance nothing completely evil will come from this either. It’s been on the back burner for a year. Pam Bondi can’t keep this going on her own. And it’s hell trying to keep people focused on rubbing Don’s tummy when employee attrition is what the DOJ is best known for these days.
The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.
Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. Of course, they’ve always been cities overseen by members of the Democratic party, which actually makes this a lot worse, since it shows everyone — including local law enforcement — that this isn’t actually about enforcing laws.
This dates all the way back to Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles to assist with handling what the administration constantly referred to as “violent protests,” despite all evidence to the contrary. Law enforcement officials made it clear they could handle the protests that were happening and that adding National Guard units to the hundreds of federal officers would only make things worse.
And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. This has repeated itself in every city this regime has invaded. When local cops bristle at the incursion or officials make it clear they don’t feel obligated to finish the fights the fed’s roving gang of kidnappers pick, the administration claims the representatives of the cities it’s invaded just don’t love America enough.
None of that ultimately matters. The administration will continue to treat every complaint as sedition and every protester as a terrorist. Its officers will go far beyond what any pack of rogue cops would dare to do — past bending or breaking rules to simply acting as though there are no rules at all.
Some local and state law-enforcement leaders who have seen the agency’s tactics up close are voicing concerns that agents have strayed from the administration’s stated focus on public-safety threats.
In Maine, Sheriff Kevin Joyce was among the local law-enforcement officials who met with border czar Tom Homan nearly a year ago to hear the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priority: the removal of people with serious criminal records.
It was a mission the 39-year law-enforcement veteran could support.
But on Thursday, Joyce publicly issued blistering criticism of federal agents, accusing ICE of “bush-league policing” after he said they detained one of his corrections officers, a migrant authorized to work in the U.S., on a roadside in Portland, Maine.
In Minnesota, it’s even worse. Federal officers have executed two Minneapolis residents in broad daylight (and wounded another). In both cases, local law enforcement was told it was not allowed to investigate these shootings.
After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.
O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.
[…]
It was the first time Evans could recall state investigators with jurisdiction over a crime scene being denied access by federal officers.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
That’s fucked up. This isn’t any better:
Regular citizens aren’t the only ones complaining to police about ICE. On Tuesday, several police chiefs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area held an unusual press conference: They said federal agents had stopped, along with local residents, some off-duty police officers “for no cause” and asked them to prove their citizenship.
Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, said chiefs had received “endless complaints” and that off-duty police officers—all people of color—had experienced the same treatment. In one case, he said, one of his officers was stopped as she drove past ICE. The agents boxed her in, knocked her phone from her hand when she tried to record them, and had their guns drawn, he said.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said.
Even if the administration can see what’s happening, it’s fifty-fifty whether it recognizes the danger of what it is and just doesn’t care or is simply too brutish to see the future it’s creating.
The administration complains about sanctuary cities and demands every law enforcement agency serve its needs, no matter what nastiness it chooses to engage in. But not every law enforcement official (along with many of the people who work for them) is interested in damaging whatever long-term relationships they might have built with the communities they serve just because the federal government wants some fuck buddies while it’s in town.
And none of this is going to go away, no matter how many times violent stooges like (suddenly former) Border Patrol head Greg Bovino says blatantly untrue things during press conferences:
“Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.”
Not a single word of that is true. And the cops you expect to back you up when you engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical actions aren’t interested in helping you dig yourself out of your own holes. DHS components no longer engage in good faith with law enforcement when hunting down migrants. Nor do they cooperate with the locals when they have questions about agents’ actions.
Administration leaders think the country serves the federal government, rather than the other way around. And as often as cops can be just as awful as these federal interlopers, at least there’s a modicum of oversight still in operation that might occasionally deter, if not actually punish, wrongdoing by officers. None of that exists at the federal level. Federal officers aren’t expected to answer to anyone and they know it. That much is obvious from their everyday behavior.
But the federal government needs the support of local law enforcement, especially one that thinks it’s going to be able to oppress its way out of any situation it puts itself in. Losing the rank-and-file is something a lot of GOP legislators can’t afford, not with the midterms coming up. This party is poison and even those you’d expect to have the administration’s back are beginning to back away from America’s most toxic asset as quickly as possible.
If you want to understand how little the current administration cares about the First Amendment, look no further than a pre-dawn FBI raid on a journalist’s home—conducted in apparent violation of a federal law specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
Last week, FBI agents showed up at the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seized two phones, two laptops, a Garmin watch, a portable hard drive, and a recording device. Natanson has spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal workforce. She is not accused of any crime. She is not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her as much when they were busy carting away basically all of her devices.
The raid was ostensibly connected to an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor with top-secret clearance who was arrested and charged with illegally retaining classified documents—not leaking them. Again, because this seems to have gotten lost in much of the coverage: Perez-Lugones hasn’t been charged with leaking anything to anyone. Just retaining documents. The government isn’t even alleging—at least not yet—that he gave anything to Natanson or any other journalist. But the DOJ apparently decided that the best way to investigate this guy was to ransack a journalist’s home and vacuum up everything she’s ever worked on.
There’s a law that’s supposed to prevent this. It’s called the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, and it was passed specifically because Congress recognized that letting law enforcement raid journalists to fish for evidence of other people’s crimes has a catastrophic chilling effect on the press. The law bars searches and seizures of journalists’ work product when the journalist isn’t suspected of a crime, with very narrow exceptions that don’t appear to apply here.
Yes, some will argue the government has legitimate interests in protecting classified information—but that interest doesn’t override the Constitution, and it certainly doesn’t justify ignoring a federal statute specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of fishing expedition.
“This is an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.
Beyond the PPA, even the DOJ’s own internal guidelines—which Attorney General Pam Bondi already weakened from their Biden-era form back in April based on an outright lie—are supposed to treat searching a journalist’s materials as an absolute last resort, reserved for rare emergencies. Not as Plan A when you want to know who a reporter has been talking to.
There was also an obvious, less constitutionally catastrophic option available. On the same day as the raid, the DOJ issued a grand jury subpoena to the Washington Post seeking substantially the same records. As the Post’s attorneys noted in their court filing:
Nothing prevented the government from issuing a subpoena to Natanson instead of executing a search warrant, which is what, historically, would have been mandated by government policy
That’s how this is supposed to work. You issue a subpoena. The news organization gets the chance to challenge it, to assert privilege, to go to court if necessary. The process allows for the adversarial testing that protects both the government’s legitimate investigative interests and the constitutional rights of a free press. But that process takes time and might result in the government not getting everything it wants.
Also, it’s not as intimidating for journalists.
So instead, they just kicked in the door.
The Post didn’t mince words in its filing seeking the return of Natanson’s devices:
The federal government’s wholesale seizure of a reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials violates the Constitution’s protections for free speech and a free press and should not be allowed to stand. It is a prior restraint and a violation of the reporter’s privilege that flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists. The seizure chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on protected materials. The government cannot meet its heavy burden to justify this intrusion, and it has ignored narrower, lawful alternatives.
And:
The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle. The search warrant orders that the government’s search of the seized data “must be limited to all records and information . . . from the time period October 1, 2025, to the present, which constitute records received from or relating to Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones.” … Even the government cannot expect to find many records responsive to the warrant in this ocean of data because its criminal complaint alleges that Perez-Lugones possessed only a small number of documents potentially containing classified or secret information, which he only began collecting three months ago. Meanwhile, Natanson has thousands of communications across her more than 1,100 sources. … And her devices contain years of data about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished materials. … At best, the government has a legitimate interest in only an infinitesimal fraction of the data it has seized.
There is, at least for now, a small piece of good news. On Wednesday, Magistrate Judge William B. Porter granted the Post’s motion for a standstill order, blocking the DOJ from reviewing any of the seized materials until the court authorizes it:
“The government must preserve but must not review any of the materials that law enforcement seized… until the Court authorizes review of the materials by further order,” the magistrate judge wrote.
Oral arguments are scheduled for February 6. So for the moment, the administration shouldn’t be able to rifle through a journalist’s entire professional life looking for evidence against someone else. But the fact that this happened at all—that the FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on a reporter’s home, that a federal judge signed off on the warrant, that the DOJ thought this was an appropriate course of action—tells you everything you need to know about how this administration views the role of the press.
Attorney General Bondi, for her part, initially issued a statement that was, as we’ve now come to expect with this administration, almost comically tone-deaf to the actual concerns at play, while ridiculously belligerent:
The Trump Administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.
Except, again: it’s not illegal for a journalist to receive leaked information and report on it. That’s journalism. The person who leaks may face consequences, but the reporter doesn’t become a criminal by doing their job. The Supreme Court made this clear in the Pentagon Papers case over fifty years ago, when the government tried to stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing classified documents about Vietnam. The press won. The principle established then—that the government cannot criminalize the act of receiving and publishing information in the public interest—remains the law today, however inconvenient that might be for an administration that doesn’t like what reporters are writing about it.
What makes this particularly galling is the context. Natanson has been reporting on the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers—the very story the administration would prefer not be told. As CNN noted, she’s been called the Post’s “federal government whisperer” for her coverage of how DOGE-driven cuts have affected government agencies and the people who work in them.
If you wanted to send a message to journalists covering this administration that they should think twice about cultivating sources, you could hardly do better than raiding one of them at dawn and seizing every electronic device in her home.
This isn’t some abstract concern. Every source who has ever talked to Natanson—about anything—now has to wonder whether their communications are sitting in an FBI evidence locker. Every journalist covering this administration has to wonder if they’re next. That chilling effect is the point.
We’ll find out on February 6th whether the court orders the devices returned and tells the DOJ that the Privacy Protection Act means what it says—or whether we learn that the rules designed to protect press freedom don’t actually apply when the Trump administration really, really wants to know who’s been talking to reporters.
Either way, the damage is already done. The raid happened. The message was sent. And the MAGA world that spent years screaming about censorship and free speech has, once again, made clear that its commitment to those principles extends exactly as far as speech it likes.
We are being led by deeply unserious people. Not only that, but people who are manufacturing cruelty upon their very own constituents. That’s how bad this has gotten.
This week, the DOJ arrested three people in Minnesota for protesting ICE’s goonish activity in a local church, where the pastor there also heads up the local ICE field office. Among the three is Nekima Levy Armstrong, former NAACP chapter president and a local activist who the DOJ claims organized the protest and instigated the group going into the church during services. Just how true any of that is is anyone’s guess, since it’s become impossible to believe a single thing this government says about ICE protests. For example:
There was no attack. There was no violence. There were words and chants being voiced in a place of worship. You can find that repugnant, if you like. It’s still not an attack.
The law being cited for the arrest makes Armstrong’s detention dubious at best.
The law Bondi cited in her announcement — 18 U.S. Code § 241 — describes it pertaining to when “two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
While many in the faith community are obediently clutching their figurative pearls over all of this, I’m struggling to understand how walking into a church that’s open to the public and saying words, even interrupting services, violates that law. I don’t think it does, but then I also laughed out loud when I read Bondi’s claim that this was an “attack.” The plain meaning of words doesn’t appear to matter to these people all that much.
But here’s the thing: that picture has been altered by AI. Here is the unaltered picture of Armstrong’s arrest as circulated by the administration’s very own Kristi Noem.
Yes, the White House decided to take an image of law enforcement improperly arresting an American citizen, one of their own constituents, and have AI alter it to make it appear that she is in distress. Oh, and they made her skin tone slightly darker as well. Because they want her to have been in distress. It eats them up inside that she wasn’t crying. That want her to be “blacker” because they want all of their enemies to be people of color. They’re showing you want they want to visit upon American citizens.
And until they are put in check, they will continue to behave like a toddler with unfettered access to the internet and a permanently shitty attitude.
Asked whether the image had been digitally altered, the White House responded by sending a post on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director.
“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he said.
And thank you, Kaelan, for going outside and playing hide and go fuck yourself.
Again, deeply unserious people. Shitposters. Internet trolls. These are the people in charge of the government. The ones sending their goon squads into our cities. The ones threatening to use the military against its own citizens. The ones that believe they are beyond accountability for all they are currently doing.
I worry seriously that the president’s health is such that he won’t be available to stand trial whenever our government returns to sanity and the time for accountability arrives. But the same can’t be said for those beneath him. Bondi, Noem, Dorr, and many others will be held to account for what they are doing in this administration. The ledger will be kept and debts satisfied through the legal system, once actual justice is back on the menu.
For now, the fight against the toddlers continues.
The DOJ can’t indict a ham sandwich these days. That old saying doesn’t ring as true as it used to now that most of the DOJ’s work is just vindictive prosecutions.
It’s not just cases being tossed because DOJ prosecutors weren’t legally appointed to their positions. This dates back to the early parts of last year when the DOJ was trying to turn anti-ICE protesters into convicted felons. Most notoriously, the government failed to secure an assault indictment against Sean Dunn, a DC resident who famously “assaulted” an ICE officer by throwing a literal sandwich at them.
Former Trump personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan did manage to secure indictments (after multiple attempts) against former FBI director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those case are gone but not because the grand juries rebelled, but because the “rule of law” party ignored a lot of rules and laws.
In 2016, the most recent year for which the Justice Department has published data, federal prosecutors concluded more than 155,000 prosecutions and declined over 25,000 cases presented by investigators. In only six instances was a grand jury’s refusal to indict listed as the reason for dropping the matter.
Lindsey Halligan managed to rack up nearly half that amount in a single case:
A grand jury rejected one of three charges Halligan proposed against Comey. She initially secured an indictment against James, but after a judge threw that case out , two grand juries voted down new indictments.
She did this twice with the same proposed defendant. The DOJ surpassed this number of rejections less than halfway through 2025, as grand juries not only rejected the vindictive prosecution of the DC sandwich thrower, but dozens of other cases brought by prosecutors.
At one point earlier this year, [DOJ US Attorney Bill] Essayli’s office had managed to secure indictments in less than a quarter of the felony cases it brought in connection with protests or immigration raids, the Los Angeles Times reported.
We’ve spent plenty of time criticizing grand juries here at Techdirt. But something weird and quietly wonderful is happening all over the nation, which is returning grand juries back to their roots: a crucial part of the system of checks and balances.
They’re a carryover from the British Empire, but one the founding fathers felt actually had some merit, as former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason explained in post last year discussing the DOJ’s multiple failures:
The Constitution requires that every federal felony be indicted by a grand jury. This safeguard was inherited from the British legal system, where it dates back to the Magna Carta in the 13th century. To prevent the king from arbitrarily locking up people for improper reasons, British law required the Crown to present its evidence to a panel of residents of the local community to establish that criminal charges were justified. The case could only proceed if that group of citizens, the grand jury, approved the charges.
We’re dealing with a president who thinks he’s a king. And his DOJ is finding out that regular Americans not only don’t view him as a king, but aren’t willing to rubber stamp a bunch of vindictive prosecutions meant to remind citizens who’s in power.
Halligan went 1-for-3 in her attempted prosecution of James Comey. Former Fox commentator Jeanine Pirro did even worse when trying to prosecute an anti-ICE protester for assault.
Pirro’s office presented these facts to a D.C. federal grand jury and asked them to indict Reid for assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer, a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. When the grand jury refused, prosecutors tried again with a second grand jury. And then with a third. Each grand jury refused to return the indictment sought by prosecutors.
Now that this sort of thing is almost a daily occurrence, Trump loyalists like Pirro are blaming their inability to secure indictments on the public, rather than their own inability to read the room and discard felony charges jury members don’t seem to believe are warranted. That’s part of the reason why so many indictments are returned by grand juries: prosecutors who actually know what they’re doing (rather than the stunt casting that passes for federal agency appointments under Trump) will ditch cases that seem doomed to be rejected by grand jurors.
No one in the administration will learn anything from this. Bill Essayli will continue to scream at his underlings for failing to turn vindictive bullshit into prison sentences. Lindsey Halligan will continue to bumblefuck her way into an eventual firing for failing to fulfill Trump’s revenge fantasies. And other under-qualified former Fox b-listers will return to their former employer to complain their losses are just more evidence of a latent strain of liberalism that’s making America less great again.
“There are a lot of people who sit on juries and and they live in Georgetown or in Northwest or in some of these better areas, and they don’t see the reality of crime that is occurring,” Pirro said in August on “Fox News Sunday.”
Pirro also blamed that alleged indifference to crime for a grand jury’s refusal to indict Justice Department paralegal Sean Dunn for throwing a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent during a street confrontation earlier that month.
“The grand jurors don’t take it so seriously. They’re like, ‘Eh, you know, whatever.’ My job is to try to turn that around,” Pirro said.
Like many people in Trump’s orbit, Pirro is so divorced from reality she should be cutting it alimony checks every month. The grand juries are taking it seriously. It’s the DOJ prosecutors that are being glib, treating every ridiculous case like a foregone conclusion as they try to convert Trump’s desire for vengeance into criminal charges. Say what you will about grand juries, but it appears jurors aren’t willing to help the government strip people of their freedom just because it’s angry.
Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for five days, accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses.
The Utah plastic surgeon faced up to 35 years in prison if the jury found him guilty on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States. Testimony had paused for the weekend when Moore’s lawyer called him early one Saturday this July with what felt to him like unbelievable news.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had ordered Utah prosecutors to drop all charges, abruptly ending his two-and-a-half year court battle.
“I just literally collapsed to the floor, and tears rolling down my face,” Moore recalled in a recent interview.
Bondi’s announcement marked a striking reversal of how the federal government handled the prosecution of COVID-19-related fraud under President Joe Biden. It has since emboldened other medical professionals who were similarly charged to consider seeking reexaminations of their cases. And it signaled the increasing clout of doctors and politicians who champion what they call “medical freedom,” which rejects modern public health interventions such as vaccine requirements in favor of individual choice.
Dismissed by the medical establishment, this movement has nevertheless built momentum as distrust in government and medical systems grew after the coronavirus pandemic. It has also gained new influence in Washington, where longtime vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees the nation’s health agencies. As President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has replaced members of a federal vaccine advisory panel with his own picks and pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to restrict access to some vaccines, including the coronavirus shot. The Trump administration’s evisceration of long-standing federal vaccine guidelines and rejection of scientific evidence have alarmed the American Medical Association and other professional medical groups.
Just days before Bondi’s decision, a federal prosecutor from her department had stood before the jury in Moore’s case and accused him of enrolling in the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution program in order to “sabotage” it, according to a court transcript. She had asked jurors to convict him and to “find that no one is above the law, not even a plastic surgeon.”
Moore said he’d signed up for the program in May 2021 to receive more than 2,000 free vaccine doses and accompanying proof-of-vaccination cards after some businesses, nursing homes and the military began requiring such proof for visitors and employees. He said his plan was always to give vaccine cards without providing the shots because he wanted to offer patients a choice to circumvent vaccine mandates.
Bondi explained her decision to dismiss the charges on X later that morning, writing that “Dr. Moore gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so. He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing. It ends today.”
A spokesperson for Bondi declined to comment beyond what the attorney general posted on social media. The Utah federal attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Moore was one of at least 12 health care professionals charged after giving or selling fraudulent COVID-19 vaccine cards since 2021, according to cases identified by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica through government news releases and media clips. Those charged include midwives, nurses, pharmacists and another surgeon. Eight were charged in federal court by the Biden administration; prosecutors from California, New York and New Jersey brought state charges against four others.
Other than Moore, only one of these health care workers went to trial: a Chicago pharmacist whom a jury found guilty of selling on eBay blank vaccine cards that he had stolen from the Walgreens where he worked. The rest pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a mix of probation, home arrest and, in a few cases, prison. Many also were professionally disciplined with fines or suspension of their medical licenses.
Of those 11, the Chicago pharmacist appealed his conviction but the U.S. Supreme Court in November declined to hear his petition; his attorney told The Tribune and ProPublica that they are exploring a presidential pardon. One other health care worker said she, too, would like to be pardoned by Trump.
Some of these health care workers, along with those in other professions who were also convicted of vaccine card fraud, started a group called Covicted Patriot following the dismissal of Moore’s case.
“There are more of us than Dr. Moore,” they declared in July through an X account that bills itself as representing “Justified Felons & Persecuted Patriots who were victimized by a politically weaponized justice system for providing covid cards.”
“We celebrate his vindication as we pray for our own,” they wrote.
Moore said he supports their efforts: “I think anybody who took the same stance that I did, in large measures, should be pardoned.”
Brian Dean Abramson, an immunization law expert in Virginia who serves on the board of directors for the National Vaccine Law Conference, said that medical workers falsifying vaccination cards is “absolutely horrifying” from a public health perspective. Their actions, he said, fuel distrust of the medical profession and create blind spots in disease surveillance and response, increasing the likelihood and severity of outbreaks. (A simulation model published in JAMA in April predicts a reemergence of diseases that had been eliminated in the United States, such as measles, and accompanying deaths as a result of declining childhood vaccination.)
“This undermines every layer of the system that protects us from infectious disease,” Abramson said. “Vaccination policy relies on accurate records and honest medical participation.”
“Everybody Got What They Wanted”
Moore met with The Tribune and ProPublica in his clinic in the Salt Lake City suburb of Midvale. A neat row of clogs, his preferred footwear, lined one wall of his cluttered office. The 60-year-old physician wore black scrubs and a “Trump 2024” rubber bracelet stacked atop a gold chain.
Moore, a licensed physician in Utah since 2005, doesn’t deny the government’s claims: that he gave falsified vaccine cards to patients, that his staff threw away doses, and that, in some cases, he gave children saline shots instead of the COVID-19 vaccine at their parents’ request.
“All of that stuff is true,” he said.
In an interview that lasted nearly two hours, Moore said choosing whether to get vaccinated is deeply personal and the decision should be made between patients and their doctors — not mandated by government or businesses. The Trump administration has similarly framed vaccination as a personal choice in its dismissal of established public health guidance.
Moore referred to COVID-19 vaccines as “bioweapons” a dozen times and said he distrusts how quickly the government facilitated the vaccines’ rapid development and distribution. He said he concluded the vaccines were unsafe after conducting his own online research that he said cast doubt on the medical technology used in their development and the amount of testing before the first doses became available under emergency use authorization in December 2020.
The COVID-19 vaccine was developed in record time during Trump’s first term, less than a year after federal authorities declared a public health emergency — a feat Trump touted at the time as a “monumental national achievement.” This was made possible by a federal effort known as Operation Warp Speed that reduced bureaucracy and invested in clinical trials and manufacturing, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office — not due to any shortcuts in testing. The technological backbone of the vaccines, known as mRNA, has been in development for decades by scientists who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Moore said that the vaccines “failed in every animal test.” “All the animals died, and now all of a sudden, we’re going to use the human population as our guinea pigs,” he said. The Food and Drug Administration has previously told reporters that such claims, widely promoted among vaccine skeptics during the pandemic, are false.
The plastic surgeon said that he believes all vaccines are “poison” and that they have not been adequately tested — a view he says he has held for more than two decades.
Vaccines approved by the FDA and recommended by the CDC have been proven to protect public health by preventing disease, serious illness or death. Major health authorities like the World Health Organization have affirmed the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which researchers estimate prevented more than 14 million deaths worldwide in their first year.
Prior to signing up for the CDC’s vaccine distribution program, Moore did not provide vaccines in his business, the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah. The “bread and butter” of his practice, he said, is a method of “rapid recovery” breast augmentations that he says he developed, which allows patients to return to their routines with little downtime.
“They were looking for anybody and everybody to get these bioweapons out,” he said about joining the government program, which was open to all health care providers who agreed to comply with the CDC processes, such as storing the vaccines at a certain temperature and recording who had been vaccinated. “And so, it was a pretty simple process.”
In December 2021, a husband-and-wife couple who Moore had met through a mutual acquaintance came to his home for dinner, according to a prosecution trial brief. “While they were there, Dr. Moore personally handed them both pre-completed CDC COVID-19 vaccination record cards with their names and birth dates on them, falsely purporting to show that the couple had received COVID-19 vaccines from the Plastic Surgery Institute,” the brief said. “Dr. Moore did so knowing that neither of them had been vaccinated for COVID-19, and without administering a COVID-19 vaccine to either of them.”
Within weeks, prosecutors said, Moore had started handing out fake vaccine cards in his medical office to anyone who was referred to his business by people who had already received a falsified card.
As word spread, Moore’s employees suggested patients who wanted a card could donate $50 via Venmo to a local health freedom advocacy group called the Health Independence Alliance, according to Moore. The husband of the couple to whom Moore first gave the fake vaccine cards testified at the Utah Legislature in January on behalf of the Health Independence Alliance on a vaccine-related bill. Moore says that he supports the group but does not run it; the Health Independence Alliance declined to comment in response to a request sent to the email listed on its website. The couple, who were not charged, declined to comment.
When sending their donation, patients were told to include an emoji of an orange in the Venmo subject line, according to federal prosecutors, and they were also instructed to bring an orange with them to the waiting room of the clinic. “At one point, there was a large basket full of oranges” at Moore’s clinic, prosecutors said in their trial brief.
Moore confirmed this system in his interview with The Tribune and ProPublica, saying the piece of fruit was a quiet signal to his busy staff that the patient was there for a falsified vaccine card.
He said during this time he maintained his plastic surgery practice while distributing fake vaccine cards and treating COVID-19 patients with ivermectin and other methods. Ivermectin has not been authorized by the FDA or recommended by the CDC to treat COVID-19.
An undercover state licensor called Moore’s office in March 2022 and asked to make a vaccine appointment during the criminal investigation after someone complained to the state health department, according to the prosecutors. At his clinic, the licensor, posing as a patient, received a vaccine card attesting to her vaccination without ever being offered a shot, prosecutors said.
Federal prosecutors alleged in their trial brief that a portion of the donations for the advocacy group paid a part-time worker at the plastic surgery clinic $18 an hour to give out falsified vaccine cards and administer saline shots to children. The worker, who could not be reached for comment, testified against Moore as part of an agreement with prosecutors to dismiss her charges after the trial, according to prosecutors’ trial brief.
Moore said during an interview that he didn’t make any money himself and never directly charged patients for these cards. He added that every adult patient who got a fake card had wanted one.
“Nobody in my practice was ever tricked. Nobody came to me expecting a vaccine and didn’t get it,” he said. “Everybody got what they wanted.”
But some children who received saline shots at their parents’ request falsely believed they were being vaccinated against COVID-19, according to court filings and Moore. This was a breach of medical ethics because doctors have a duty to build trust between their community and the health care system, said Wendy Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law.
Moore said he gave kids the saline shots so they wouldn’t be bullied if their peers found out they got a vaccine card without getting a shot. “I did have some parents that didn’t want their kid to know that they were getting something fake,” he said.
He didn’t question the parents’ deception, Moore said, because he didn’t want to “intervene in their family dynamic.”
“You have to stand up for what you feel is right,” he said. “That’s the reason why I did what I did. I had no intention of defrauding the federal government.”
Emboldening a Movement
On the first day of Moore’s trial in July, about 60 supporters — including state lawmakers like House Speaker Mike Schultz — gathered on the stairs outside the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. They waved American flags and held signs protesting Moore’s charges at a busy intersection. The doctor tearfully thanked the crowd before walking into the courthouse where a jury would soon be selected.
The rally increased public and social media attention on Moore’s case, eventually reaching Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She sent a letter to Bondi, urging the U.S. attorney general to drop Moore’s charges.
“Dr. Michael Kirk Moore deserves to be celebrated, not prosecuted, for his bravery in standing up to a system that prioritized control over public health,” Greene wrote in her July 12 letter. Her office did not respond to requests for comment. (Greene, an early supporter of Trump’s, recently announced her resignation from Congress after falling out of the president’s favor.)
That same day, Bondi ordered the charges be dropped and thanked Greene and Utah Sen. Mike Lee in posts on X for bringing the case to her attention. Lee’s office did not respond to questions about his role in the dismissal of Moore’s case.
Utah prosecutors then dismissed the charges against Moore, his business and a neighbor who prosecutors alleged had organized the donations to the health freedom advocacy group. Prosecutors also dropped charges against his office manager — who had pleaded guilty — and the part-time worker. Both of these employees testified against Moore and his neighbor the day before Bondi’s announcement. Neither the neighbor nor the office manager responded to requests for comment.
Less than a week after his charges were dropped, Moore and his fiancée flew to Washington, D.C., at Bondi’s invitation to meet with her and Greene; Moore said he asked if Lee could join them. Moore said the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank founded by former Trump administration officials, paid for his travel. (The group did not respond to a request for comment.)
Moore described the meeting as low-key and genuine: “It was a handshake and a hug to both M.T.G. and Attorney General Bondi.”
Moore estimates that he lost about two-thirds of his plastic surgery business after his 2023 indictment because he had used his marketing budget to cover his legal expenses. As he’s tried rebuilding his practice in recent months, he rebranded as Freedom Surgical & Aesthetics. He said he started thinking about a new name during the 22 days he spent in jail in November 2024 after a judge determined he had violated pretrial rules by communicating with other co-defendants.
The new name “stands for freedom and for people’s ability to choose,” he said. Images of the American flag and bald eagles appear on his clinic’s new website among photos of svelte women.
Moore’s medical license is in good standing. A state licensing division spokesperson would not say whether the agency is considering taking action against his license.
The lack of consequences for medical workers who falsify records could encourage others to undermine public health guidance, said Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit, who served on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel from 1998 to 2003 and has clashed with Kennedy over vaccine policy, was kicked off a vaccine advisory committee for the FDA in August.
“The first two years of the pandemic turbocharged the medical freedom movement, which is a euphemism for basically saying that I don’t need experts. I will do my own Google searches and decide what’s right and what’s not,” Offit said. “Even if it goes against what is standard medical practice or medical wisdom, I’m going to decide for myself — and my neighbor be damned, in the case of vaccines.”
As Moore vows to “do everything I can to get COVID shots off the market,” others who faced similar legal battles say his turn of fortune has inspired them to fight their convictions.
Julie DeVuono, a former nurse in Long Island who also distributed fake vaccine cards to her patients, said she and two others created the CovictedPatriot X account after others who gave out fake cards reached out to her in response to her social media post celebrating Moore’s vindication.
New York state prosecutors had charged DeVuono with forgery and money laundering for using the proceeds from the fake vaccine cards to pay her mortgage. She pleaded guilty in 2023 and was sentenced to community service and probation. Her home was also seized as part of a $1.2 million forfeiture, and she lost her nursing license.
“Is there any chance for us to get some kind of restored justice?” she said in an interview.
DeVuono, 53, said she feels she and others who were convicted of similar crimes were treated unfairly, but she can’t ask for a presidential pardon because her charges were filed in state court. Instead, she’s advocating on behalf of others who can beseech Trump, such as Kathleen Breault, a recently retired midwife and nurse in New York.
Breault faced a possible five-year prison sentence after she and a co-defendant were indicted in federal court in 2023 for destroying thousands of vaccines and issuing falsified vaccine cards.
“I was terrified,” Breault, 68, told The Tribune and ProPublica. “But I also felt defiant, because I felt like what I did was right.”
She said if she had gone to trial, her defense would have been civil disobedience. But Breault has health issues and cares for her grandchildren. She said her children urged her to do whatever she needed to in order to avoid a prison sentence.
So she pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States — a felony — and was sentenced last December to three years probation. (Her co-defendant, who died in March, had also pleaded guilty.)
Breault said she was buoyed by news over the summer that similar charges against Moore were dropped at the behest of the Trump administration. The outcome of Moore’s case has motivated her to begin the process of asking for a presidential pardon.
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about whether Trump has received any pardon requests from health care workers indicted in connection with the pandemic or if he would pardon them. He has not pardoned anyone in that situation, according to a review of the clemency grants in his second term listed on the Department of Justice’s website.
Breault said she’d like to have her conviction erased so she’s not limited by her felon status. She’d like to own a gun again, but those with felony convictions are prohibited from possessing firearms in New York. She’d also like more freedom, including not having to report to her probation officer when she travels or how much is in her bank account.
“After seeing what happened with Kirk,” she said about Moore, “maybe if I didn’t take the plea, I wouldn’t have a felony conviction now.”
America continues to be made great again. Or so says the collective of fascist buffoons currently holding federal positions of power.
The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing the “rule of law” back to America — something that supposedly went missing during Biden’s term. The alleged lawlessness covers everything from rational immigration policies to whatever the fuck the word “woke” means to whatever White House mook is currently using that term in a disparaging way.
Trump’s return to office set in motion a whole lot of recklessness and lawlessness, starting with the wholesale dismissal of migrants’ constitutional rights and running all the way through several DOGE-gutted agencies until this regime reached its current nadir: straight up murdering people just because they happen to be in boats off the coast of Venezuela.
Anyone who actually respects the rule of law has either quit or been fired. They’ve been replaced by people Trump prefers, like former personal lawyers, Fox News commentators, and far-right podcasters.
We’ve already witnessed a lot of failure from the Trump DOJ, which can’t manage to secure indictments during revenge prosecutions ranging from anti-ICE protesters to high-profile names from Trump’s official enemies list, like NY Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. Everyone that failed upward due to their MAGA loyalty has made a mockery of half of the DOJ’s name: justice.
Fortunately, courts — for the most part — aren’t just rolling over for half-baked “unitary executive power” legal theories. As Reuters reports, the DOJ is in the midst of a historic losing streak that’s the direct result of Trump’s preference for loyalists.
As President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown got underway in Washington, D.C., in August, federal agents and police spotted a man named Torez Riley tugging at his backpack inside a Trader Joe’s store, searched it and recovered two firearms.
But federal prosecutors were forced to dismiss the charges after video surveillance revealed the search lacked probable cause and was unlawful.
In a subsequent legal opinion, a federal magistrate judge said the errors were part of a broader pattern of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21% dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office’s criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere 0.5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years.
It used to mean that getting prosecuted meant getting fucked. Judges tended to side with prosecutors and rogue cops, rejecting only a small amount of cases that contained violations too egregious to be granted a “good faith” mulligan.
At this point, the DOJ is struggling to secure grand jury indictments, which is a little like struggling to lift a feather over your head. Most indictments are considered slam dunks because they’re entirely one-sided presentations made by prosecutors to people who are just there to pencil-whip their way through the day’s prosecutorial offerings.
But with Trump running the DOJ (and handpicking people like his former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan to handle politically motivated prosecutions), the government’s fridge is now overstocked with unindicted ham sandwiches.
This is ontop of literally hundreds of court rulings declaring the administration’s deportation efforts are illegal — specifically, the jailing and indefinite detainment of alleged immigration law violators who don’t pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk.
The blustering continues, however, with no sign of respite in sight. The administration apparently feels that if it goes hard enough for long enough, everything will eventually work out in its favor. Meanwhile, its band of bigots and incompetents continues to undercut its ability to perform well in court, much less convince judges that the government is acting in good faith.
The errors have sometimes undermined the department on civil and criminal matters it cares about, from the prosecutions of Trump’s political foes, to cases about immigration, violent crime, gender-affirming care and voting rights. At times, they came about after senior officials made public statements about pending cases on social media or television that strayed from the allegations made in sworn court filings, violating department rules designed to ensure a fair trial.
These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct.
Reuters calls these “errors,” but they’re actually “failures.” The administration is very deliberate when it comes to its efforts to allow (and encourage!) Trump to rule like a king, bypassing the legislative process entirely with daily executive orders and Truth Social posts that are meant to be treated as executive orders.
Meanwhile, the DOJ is bragging that none of this — from the failure to secure indictments to the hundreds of adverse rulings it has generated since the beginning of the year — matters. Its statement to Reuters gives away the game: the administration believes (and not unreasonably!) that it has the Supreme Court in its pocket:
“This Department of Justice is winning in court on behalf of the Trump Administration and the American People with 24 successful rulings at the Supreme Court emergency docket so far and multiple prominent indictments of transnational terrorists, violent criminals, and even politicians who have allegedly engaged in corruption.”
That the Supreme Court has decided to handle most of its stuff completely off the record with its reliance on its shadow docket, it is aiding and abetting the administration’s autocracy speed run. But the DOJ can’t pretend it’s “winning.” To get “24 successful rulings” (which overstates things a bit), it first had to lose far more cases at lower levels just to get the MAGA majority of the Supreme Court to reject (or ignore) rulings against the DOJ and the administration’s routinely unlawful behavior.
We can hope that sooner or later the administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law and the US Constitution will catch up to it. But hope is only going to get us so far if the nation’s top court keeps ignoring cases that might generate precedent that works against the bigoted efforts of the administration. Maybe it will finally reach a tipping point and return the nation back to the stuff that actually made it great. Until it does, we can at least take solace in the fact that the rest of the federal court system isn’t just rolling over for Trump. It’s generating precedent almost daily.
More importantly, most federal judges no longer consider Trump’s DOJ to be a credible party in criminal cases or civil litigation. That means the government’s omnipresent threat (“your word against ours”) to people it’s trying to punish becomes less useful with each passing day. The lower courts know this government can’t be trusted. And as all of this continues, the Trump administration gives the courts more reasons to treat it as the most unreliable of narrators.
You generally don’t see criminal charges filed against judges at any level of the court system. If it does happen, it’s used to address egregious and constant criminal activity by sitting judges. The most common path towards discipline relies on the court system itself, which allows courts to punish judges for misbehavior and, in rare cases, have them removed via internal processes.
But this is no ordinary US. This is Trump’s United States, where anyone who displeases the man who wishes he could be king is subjected to vindictive prosecutions. What happened to New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey (prosecutions currently paused due to Trump administration fuckery/fuck ups) can happen to anyone.
So here’s what happened to Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan. After being made aware of the fact that DEA and ICE agents were hanging around outside of her courtroom in hopes of arresting migrants who were doing nothing more than reporting for their court-ordered check-ins, Dugan decided to let the migrant whose criminal case she was currently handling slip out a side door, rather than go out the main door and directly into the hands of loitering federal officers.
According to the criminal complaint filed by Kash Patel’s FBI — something he celebrated on X briefly before deleting his post — this meant agents had to move quickly across nearly an additional 50-100 feet to arrest this person. A sworn affidavit by FBI special agent made it clear this was way too much stuff for officers to be doing, especially one with [checks affidavit again] seven years experience as a CPA[??][!!].
The federal government said this added up to obstruction. And it chose to criminally charge Judge Hannah Dugan rather than allow the Wisconsin court system to handle this on its own. There’s precedent for this, of course. The last time a judge faced criminal charges for acts that would normally be handled by the court system’s internal disciplinary procedures was in 2019 during Trump’s first term as president.
Hannah C. Dugan, a Wisconsin state judge, was found guilty on Thursday of obstructing federal agents, a high-profile victory for the Justice Department in a prosecution of a judge who it said was illegally aiding an undocumented immigrant.
Judge Dugan faces up to five years in prison and, as a person who has been convicted of a felony, she is likely ineligible to continue to hold office as a judge in Wisconsin, according to the State Constitution.
This wasn’t the end result of a lengthy investigation or the culmination of numerous complaints against Judge Dugan. This is nothing more than some federal agents bitching that they were momentarily inconvenienced and getting all the vindictiveness they wanted from Trump’s DOJ and Kash Patel’s FBI.
This isn’t over. This conviction can be appealed. And it appears the court handling this thinks there’s a case to be made. Normally, jury guilty verdicts are accompanied by sentencing dates. That didn’t happen here, which seems to indicate the judge handling the case isn’t necessarily convinced Judge Dugan’s actions rise to the level of a federal felony. But no matter how this ends up playing out, everyone should be on notice that Trump thinks “justice” and “revenge” are the same word.
