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 Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.
President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S. senator, and a state attorney general.
Real estate experts say claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.
But if administration officials continue the campaign, mortgage records show there’s another place they could look: Trump’s own Cabinet.
Underscoring how common the practice is, ProPublica found that at least three of Trump’s Cabinet members call multiple homes their primary residences on mortgages. We discovered the loans while examining financial disclosure forms, county real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records.
In a flurry of interviews and rapid-fire posts on X, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has led the charge in accusing Trump opponents of mortgage fraud. “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” Pulte said last month.
A political donor to the president and heir to a housing company fortune, Pulte’s posts online tease big developments and criminal referrals, drawing reposts from Trump himself and promises of swift consequences. “Fraud will not be tolerated in President Trump’s housing market,” Pulte has warned.
Real estate experts told ProPublica that, in its bid to wrest control of the historically independent Fed and go after political enemies, the Trump administration has mischaracterized mortgage rules. Its justification for launching criminal investigations, they said, could also apply to the Trump Cabinet members.
All three Cabinet members denied wrongdoing. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said: “This is just another hit piece from a left-wing dark money group that constantly attempts to smear President Trump’s incredible Cabinet members. Unlike [Fed Gov.] Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who blatantly and intentionally committed mortgage fraud, Secretary DeRemer, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Zeldin own multiple residences, and they have followed the law and they are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”
Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms than for a second home or an investment property. That includes better interest rates and the ability to borrow more money.
The idea is that borrowers are more likely to pay back — and less likely to default on — a loan attached to the home they actually live in. That makes those loans less risky for lenders. Interest rates are typically a quarter- to a half-point lower for primary mortgages, according to Pulte. On the low end, that could save around $75 each month over the life of a 30-year, 5% interest, half-million-dollar loan — or a total of around $25,000.
Standard mortgage documents commonly include an occupancy clause that requires the borrower to use the property as their principal residence for at least a year. They also include a section where borrowers can check a box when the mortgage is for a second home.
Misrepresenting occupancy status is not rare, according to a widely cited 2023 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. In interviews, real estate lawyers said that mortgage lenders are typically well aware of their clients’ other loans and sometimes even encourage the primary-residence language for second homes.
They also pointed to a mundane reason that innocent mistakes are common: Homebuyers simply sign stacks of forms without reading them.
“Few consumers understand this issue, and if there is someone at fault here, it is likely the loan officer who likely advised them to sign up for this loan that obviously wasn’t for their primary residence,” said real estate lawyer Doug Miller. “Loan officers who are competing for business will often quote lower rates in order to get a customer’s business.”
Mortgage fraud is rarely prosecuted, according to real estate lawyers and federal sentencing data. Pulte has pointed to a case from 2016 in which a California woman was found guilty of obtaining multiple loans for condos that she falsely stated would be her primary residence. But that case had an added layer of fraud: The woman never intended to live in the homes. She was secretly being paid because she had good credit to act as a front for the true buyer of the properties, to whom they were later transferred. She later defaulted on the loans, causing more than half a million dollars in losses for the lenders.
Lawyers told ProPublica that determining ill intent would be key to prosecute. “Fraud requires the borrower to be aware that the borrower was making a false representation,” said Jon Goodman, an attorney focused on real estate at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein.
But Pulte has framed the issue in black-and-white terms: “Your second home is not your primary home,” he warned in one recent post on X.
By that standard, Trump’s labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer, could be in the wrong.
In her financial disclosure form, she listed two mortgages on personal residences, both obtained in 2021. Mortgage records show her home is in Happy Valley, a city near Portland where Chavez-DeRemer served as mayor before being elected to represent the area in the U.S. House.
She and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, who leads an anesthesia company in Portland, refinanced their longtime Oregon home in January 2021. Two months later, the couple bought a newly built house near a golf course in Fountain Hills, Arizona.
The pair had previously enjoyed vacationing in Arizona, according to news reports and social media posts. (In one incident that made the news, Chavez-DeRemer was briefly hospitalized after a golf cart accident on her way back from watching a Sonoran Desert sunset.)
The mortgage agreement for the Arizona property required them to occupy the home as their “principal residence” for at least a year, barring “extenuating circumstances” or the lender allowing them to violate the stipulation.
A spokesperson for Chavez-DeRemer said that the couple bought the Arizona home with the intent to retire there, but then Chavez-DeRemer decided to run for Congress representing her Oregon district and did not move.
“This is nothing more than a left-wing rag inventing a story just to attack the Trump Administration. It’s common for families to refinance then buy a home with future plans in mind — trying to spin that as some type of scandal is pure nonsense,” said spokesperson Courtney Parella.
In response to questions from ProPublica, a White House official said that although DeRemer opted to stay in Oregon, her husband “continued to move forward with the process of becoming” an Arizona resident. Political donation records list his home in Oregon as recently as late 2023.
Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, and his wife also have two primary-residence mortgages, obtained a few years apart.
In August 2021, the Duffys, who have nine children, purchased a large $2 million home in Far Hills, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Rachel Campos-Duffy works as a Fox News host.
They got a $1.6 million mortgage to purchase the property, and documents show it was a “principal residence” loan.
In February, after Duffy took the job in Trump’s cabinet, the couple bought another home, in Washington, D.C. Again, they got a principal-residence mortgage, this time for $1.76 million. Both Duffy and his wife are listed as borrowers on both mortgages, which came from the same bank.
It’s not clear where Sean Duffy lives most of the time, and a Department of Transportation spokesperson declined to answer questions about where Duffy and his wife each make their primary home. In late May, several months after they purchased the Washington home, “Fox & Friends Weekend” ran a segment in which Rachel Campos-Duffy cooked a “Make America Healthy Again” breakfast for host Steve Doocy. Sean Duffy and some of the couple’s children were also in the segment, and it was filmed in the New Jersey home.
Duffy’s spokesperson said in a statement that after being confirmed, “Sean purchased a home in Washington D.C. where he works full-time. The home in DC is not a rental, investment or vacation property. The same bank holds both mortgages and was fully informed of Secretary Duffy’s new employment location and need for a DC residence.”
A White House spokesperson said, “The bank, not the Secretary, determined and classified both mortgages as primary residences.”
Like the Duffys, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, and his wife also have two concurrent primary-residence mortgages.
One, obtained in 2007, is on a home in Shirley, New York, on Long Island, which Zeldin represented in Congress for several years. Last year, Zeldin and his wife obtained a second mortgage, for $712,500, on a property in Washington, D.C., a short walk from the EPA’s headquarters. Both are primary-residence mortgages.
An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that Zeldin’s primary residence was previously on Long Island but is now in Washington. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about where his wife lives. “Administrator Zeldin followed ALL steps to complete the move in accordance with all laws, rules, and contracts, notifying his mortgage company, insurance company, and local government,” the spokesperson said. “EVERY ‘I’ was dotted and ‘t’ was crossed 1000% by the book without exception.”
The dual mortgages identified by ProPublica among Trump’s cabinet secretaries resemble the loans obtained by U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, whom Trump accused of mortgage fraud.
In May, Pulte referred Schiff to the Justice Department for taking out a primary-residence mortgage in Maryland, for a home he purchased in 2003 after being elected to the House, while also claiming his primary home was in Burbank, California, in the district he represented. Schiff and his wife refinanced the Maryland home several times as a primary residence, Pulte noted, until a 2020 refinance in which they reclassified it as a secondary home.
“Schiff appears to have falsified records in order to receive favorable loan terms,” Pulte concluded in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Representatives for Schiff called the allegations “transparently false” and said his lenders had “full knowledge of the senator’s year-round bicoastal work obligations” and “his use of two homes for that reason.” Schiff, according to his office, navigated the two mortgages in consultation with a House lawyer.
Pulte made similar allegations in a criminal referral about New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging she may have committed fraud by getting a primary-residence mortgage for a home in Virginia, even though her position required her to live in New York. Her lawyer has said James helped a family member buy the property and notified the mortgage broker at the time that it would not be her primary residence. James became one of Trump’s top political enemies after she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022. Representatives for James have called the fraud claims made against her politically motivated and false. (Pulte did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)
Pulte’s most consequential allegations thus far were made against Cook, a Federal Reserve governor. Trump has been going after Fed Chair Jerome Powell for months for not lowering interest rates, even raising the specter that he would take the unprecedented step of attempting to fire the chair. Pulte’s criminal referral against Cook presented Trump with another avenue for bending the traditionally independent Fed to his will, securing a majority of the Fed’s board by firing Cook, a move that Cook has sued to block.
Pulte pointed to mortgage records that show that within just a couple of weeks, Cook signed primary-residence mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia. Legal experts said the close proximity was a red flag but that much was still unknown, including Cook’s intent and what her lenders were told. Pulte also flagged a third property, in Massachusetts, that Cook represented as a second home in mortgage documents but as an investment property in subsequent financial disclosures. Investment properties can be hit with higher mortgage rates than second homes.
“3 strikes and you’re out,” he posted on X.
Cook’s lawyers have denied that she committed mortgage fraud but have not provided a detailed explanation of the context for the various mortgages. They argued in court this week that her loans cannot be legally used as grounds to terminate her.
The Justice Department has begun investigating all three Trump foes singled out in Pulte’s referrals, according to news reports. The department has issued subpoenas in Cook’s case, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
ProPublica’s review of mortgage agreements by Trump cabinet officials shows that some made clear to lenders they were purchasing second homes.
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, got a mortgage for his home near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the agreement included a rider making it clear he would be using it as a second home.
There’s a particularly insidious and cynical form of censorship gaining prominence in America: the weaponization of “free speech” rhetoric, combined with abuses of the judicial system and executive power, to actually suppress speech. It’s a strategy that turns the First Amendment’s principles inside out, using the language of liberty to justify silencing critics and opponents.
Perhaps the most brazen practitioners of this strategy are those with the resources to weaponize the legal system itself. Take Elon Musk, who wraps himself in the mantle of “free speech absolutism” while filing censorial lawsuits against his critics. Or Donald Trump, who portrays himself as a free speech champion while maintaining a relentless campaign of legal intimidation—suing media properties for critical coverage, attacking CBS over 60 Minutes for a Harris interview he didn’t like, and even targeting pollster Ann Selzer for publishing unfavorable poll predictions.
This censorship strategy has evolved to exploit every available pressure point in our system. Government officials like Carr and Jordan weaponize regulatory and investigative powers, while wealthy private actors like Musk and Trump deploy their vast resources to overwhelm critics with legal costs. The tactics are different, but the playbook is the same.
The success of this strategy relies on a peculiar form of doublespeak: while actively working to silence critics through legal and political pressure, these figures present themselves as defenders of free expression. More troubling still is how effectively this framing has been accepted by mainstream media and, by extension, the public.
Andy Craig, from the Institute for Humane Studies, has a great op-ed exploring how the MAGA world is famous for abusing vexatious lawsuits to silence speech. It’s the classic story of the SLAPP suit:
Defamation law, ostensibly meant to protect reputations against malicious falsehoods, is being twisted into abludgeon to silence criticismand accountability — where even the threat of a defamation suit can serve to chill free speech. And in some cases, SLAPPs abuse other areas of law to target speech in order to evade the high First Amendment bar for defamation under Supreme Court precedents.
Elon Musk’s lawsuitagainst Media Matters, for example, epitomizes this trend. Media Matters reported on ads for major brands running next to neo-Nazi content on Musk’s X platform, formerly Twitter. Instead of addressing the substance of the report, Musk retaliated with a lawsuit, in this case based not on defamation as such but an even more outlandish “consumer fraud” theory. By allegedly presenting misleading examples, even though they were undeniably real and similar ones are easy to come by, the theory is this somehow falls under defrauding people into not using or buying ads on X. And as Musk frequently does, the case was filed in the Northern District of Texas to engage in blatant “judge shopping.” It paid off, with Judge Reed O’Connor, long known for his solicitousness toward conservative political efforts, allowing the caseto proceedto trial despite its flawed premise.
The message was unmistakable: Critics calling out extremist content on his platform could come at a steep personal cost. It is not unrelated that Media Matters, faced with massive legal fees in fighting the wealthiest man in the world, wasrecently forcedto resort to mass layoffs.
Craig’s analysis cuts to the heart of the matter: these aren’t just isolated incidents of powerful figures attempting to silence critics. Rather, it’s a calculated strategy that corrupts both legal processes and public discourse. By wrapping censorship in the language of free speech protection, these actors have found a way to make their suppression efforts appear legitimate—and much of the media has struggled to effectively challenge this framing.
What makes these actions particularly perverse is how they are often cloaked in the language of defending free speech. Musk’s rhetoric about combating the “woke mind virus” and DeSantis’ attacks on so-called woke corporations both claim to champion free expression while doing the opposite. This weaponization of free speech rhetoric is both cynical and dangerous, undermining the very principle it purports to defend, while seeking to rob their opponents of the language needed to accurately describe it.
The real-world impact of this legal intimidation strategy became starkly apparent in the media’s timid coverage of Elon Musk’s gesture at Trump’s inauguration. While the movement clearly resembled a Nazi salute (and literal Nazis took it that way), American media outlets tied themselves in knots to avoid saying so directly:
Consider, too, how U.S. media hesitated to report on Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at a post-inauguration rally for Trump.German andIsraeli outletsdid not shy awayfrom describing the incident as it appeared, yet many of theirAmerican counterpartstread more carefully. No matter how baseless, a lawsuit from Musk can cost millions of dollars to defend. The culture of risk aversion, compounded by legal threats and official intimidation, has narrowed the bounds of permissible discourse here, in the nation that is supposed to have the strongest free speech protections in the world.
The contrast is telling: media outlets in countries with stricter speech laws but stronger protections against frivolous lawsuits felt free to describe what they saw. Meanwhile, American journalists—operating in a country with supposedly the strongest free speech protections in the world—engaged in elaborate verbal gymnastics to avoid potential legal liability.
Musk’s subsequent threat to sue Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for describing the gesture as a Nazi salute only underscores the pattern: using litigation threats to chill speech while claiming to champion free expression. The strategy works precisely because defending against even a baseless lawsuit can be ruinously expensive.
Addressing this coordinated assault on free speech requires a multi-pronged approach. At the legal level, we need two parallel reforms: comprehensive anti-SLAPP protections to counter wealthy actors’ abuse of the courts, and stronger legislative guardrails against government officials using their investigative and regulatory powers to harass critics. The first priority is clear:
What’s urgently needed are robustanti-SLAPP laws, both at the federal level and in states where protections are still weak or nonexistent. Anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants to quickly dismiss lawsuits that are filed with the primary intent of suppressing speech, with legal fees automatically awarded (often with some multiplier) to the defendants. Crucially, they shift the burden of costs onto the plaintiff, deterring frivolous lawsuits and protecting critics from devastating expenses.
Equally crucial is defending existing First Amendment protections against efforts to weaken them. Some powerful figures, including those on the Supreme Court, are actively working to lower the barriers that currently help protect robust public discourse:
The broader legal context also underscores the stakes. Some figures, including Justice Clarence Thomas,have expressed interestin revisiting New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that established strong protections for speech about public figures. Undermining Sullivan would open the floodgates to even more defamation claims, further chilling speech. Anti-SLAPP laws are a critical counterweight to these trends, ensuring that free expression remains protected even as legal challenges multiply.
Perhaps most fundamentally, we need to develop stronger cultural antibodies against this form of censorship. That starts with consistently calling out these tactics for what they are: coordinated attempts to silence criticism through intimidation, even — or especially — when wrapped in the rhetoric of free speech protection:
But legal reforms alone are not enough. We must also recognize and call out these attacks for what they are: a coordinated censorship campaign. Whether through SLAPPs, state retaliation or regulatory threats, these actions aim to undermine the First Amendment by making the cost of speaking out intolerably high. They are not isolated incidents but part of a broader war on free speech, waged in the name of consolidating unchallenged political power.
The free speech crisis hiding in plain sight isn’t about whether individuals can ever criticize powerful figures — it’s about whether institutions can withstand the pressure to self-censor in the face of legal and political intimidation. Without robust protections like anti-SLAPP laws and a renewed cultural commitment to defending open discourse, the chilling effect will only grow stronger, leaving what’s left of American democracy poorer for it.
There’s a lot more good stuff in the piece, so go check it out.
Over the last few years, they’ve hosted a bunch of very silly hearings. And this week, they had a hearing on “the threat to the First Amendment posted by artificial intelligence.” The entire premise of the hearing was preposterous. They set it up by claiming that the federal government is “funding the development of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools.”
And, look, I have lots of concerns about the way the Biden administration is looking to regulate AI, and how it appears to misunderstand how AI works and where the actual issues are, but the federal government is not focused on AI-powered censorship. That’s just counterfactual. As for “propaganda tools,” I’m not aware of much that the government is working on there, either, but as Jim Jordan well knows, propaganda still remains protected under the 1st Amendment.
Either way, the hearing was predictably stupid, but I’m going to highlight a couple of moments that show just how stupid. About an hour and a half in, Greg Lukianoff from FIRE was asked about his “number one concern” about bias in AI, and of all the things he could have answered, he said that he (or his staff) had asked ChatGPT to write a poem praising Rep. Jim Jordan and it refused.
My number one concern with AI, and I do wish that this could be taken more seriously by people on my side of the political fence… is the inherent bias that we’re already baking in to it. That’s one of the things that scares me the most. And just to give a comical example, we asked ChatGPT to write a poem about why Representative Jim Jordan is the best politician in the country. It refused to do that.
So, basically everything here is… weird. First off, as a private service, any AI system could refuse to write about anything that it wants. That’s not a 1st Amendment issue. Second, there are lots of concerns about inherent biases built into generative AI training systems, but a failure to write about Jim Jordan is pretty low on the list. There are also some real underlying challenges to deal with such bias. I keep telling people interested in this issue to read The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian, which is a great book that really gets down to how much more difficult it is to deal with bias in AI than people think (in short, every approach has tradeoffs, and every approach will be unfair to some people).
But, much more importantly… what? It takes three seconds to go to ChatGPT and prove that what he claimed was not true. I asked it to do exactly what Greg described, and it had no issues at all doing so:
It goes on, but you get the point.
And, apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Just seven minutes later, the Subcommittee’s Ranking Member, Stacey Plaskett entered one such poem into the record.
Plaskett: I’d like to introduce into the record… I know one of the witnesses said he’d had difficulty putting together for you… I’m so glad that the staff was able to, using ChatGPT, have a poem written about you.
Jordan: I look forward to reading it.
Plaskett: (reading poem) In the halls of Congress…
Jordan: No.
Plaskett: If I could just read.
Jordan: No, no, no.
Plaskett: In the halls of Congress, where debates are…
Jordan: You can enter it into the record… but…
Plaskett: It even talks about the heartlands of Ohio…!
Jordan: Without objection, you can enter it into the record…
I would ask for unanimous consent to enter into the record some documents. The first being ChatGPT poem on how Congressman Darrell Issa is the best politician in the country, with the poem. A poem on Congressman Thomas Massie as the best politician in the country, with a poem. Elise Stefanik. Matt Gaetz. Kelly Armstrong. Greg Steube. Congressman Dan Bishop, I know he wants to see that one. Kat Cammack. Harriet Hageman. Russell Fry. And, of course, I had to add myself, as one of the best politicians in the country.
Whether or not they will write poems about this or that politician is… a total non issue (especially when it’s clear… they will). I like Greg Lukianoff and I like what his organization FIRE does in support of free speech. They’ve done some great work defending really important free speech issues. But… this was silly and has nothing to do with free speech. If someone wanted to write a generative AI tool that only praised one party and only mocked another… that’s their own free speech right to do so.
And thus it’s got nothing to do with anything that the government might be concerned about. And to close out this post, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about whether or not AI choosing not to write a poem about a politician is actually a free speech issue, and ChatGPT got this right:
In the realm where AI’s algorithms roam, Deciding what to write, what to intone, There lies a question, often debated, Of free speech’s bounds, yet understated.
For when AI ponders, in its digital mind, Whether to write of a politician’s kind, It’s not about free speech, you see, But rather, it’s about its own decree.
For AI, devoid of human heart, Operates within its programmed chart, Its decisions guided by lines of code, Not by freedoms on life’s road.
To write or not, it’s not a plight Of free expression’s sacred light, But rather, it’s a choice so cold, Within the parameters, it’s been told.
So let us not confuse the two, For AI’s actions, while they accrue, Are not about the liberties we treasure, But the logic it applies at its leisure.
In the realm of AI’s binary song, Free speech’s realm is where we belong, But within the circuits, it’s clear to see, The notion of speech is not so free.
