As you will recall, a single gunmen opened fire on a CDC campus in Atlanta earlier this month, claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines. The rhetoric he had used prior to the shooting closely aligned with what RFK Jr. had been spouting for years. While Kennedy took nearly a day to even publicly comment on the shooting, more local CDC leadership was fielding questions from the Atlanta team that amounted to how the organization was going to ensure that misinformation stopped flowing from Kennedy’s mouth such that they had become targets for this gunman in the first place. They got their answer when Kennedy commented publicly the next week, reiterating all that same rhetoric that caused them to be targeted.
It’s perhaps not surprising then that hundreds of CDC staff signed an open letter essentially begging Kennedy to stop putting them in potential crosshairs.
More than 750 employees across the Department of Health and Human Services sent a signed letter to members of Congress and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday morning, calling on the secretary to stop spreading misinformation.
The letter states the deadly shooting that occurred at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Aug. 8 was “not random” and was driven by “politicized rhetoric.”
The signatories are accusing Kennedy of endangering the lives of HHS employees by spreading misinformation.
It’s a cry for help coming from within the organization that Kennedy is responsible for. These are people worried that their lives are being put at risk by Kennedy and his ilk, all due to the irresponsible claims he’s made for years, and continues to make to this day.
But if you were expecting empathy from the leadership of HHS, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Instead of that empathy, a statement from HHS apparently accuses signatories to that letter of “politicizing” the mass shooting that targeted them.
In a statement to ABC News, HHS said, “Secretary Kennedy is standing firmly with CDC employees — both on the ground and across every center — ensuring their safety and well-being remain a top priority. In the wake of this heartbreaking shooting, he traveled to Atlanta to offer his support and reaffirm his deep respect, calling the CDC ‘a shining star among global health agencies.'”
“For the first time in its 70-year history, the mission of HHS is truly resonating with the American people — driven by President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s bold commitment to Make America Healthy Again,” the statement continued. “Any attempt to conflate widely supported public health reforms with the violence of a suicidal mass shooter is an attempt to politicize a tragedy.”
This is bullshit. CDC staff are not politicizing the shooting; they’re begging to not be made targets. That statement is so far afield from the actual request in the letter that I don’t even know how to respond to it, other than to say that it’s quite obvious Kennedy is refusing to moderate or alter his rhetoric. Conspiracy theories appear to be more important to him than the lives of those under his employ.
This is governmental malpractice. It needs to stop. It won’t stop unless someone in a position of power does something about it.
The Trump administration has been described as many things, none of them good. What no one will ever accuse it of being is “competent.” Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, most of them known only for waving the MAGA flag when not hosting shows on Fox or podcasts celebrating the debut of American fascism.
Case in point: SecDef Pete Hegseth, who was previously best known for his multiple Fox News appearances (and is currently best known for reposting a recording of a pastor saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote) now heads the Defense Department. Somehow, a Signal chat group that included him managed to invite Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a chat session discussing an ongoing military attack in Yemen.
In all fairness to Hegseth (which is far more than he deserves), he probably didn’t send out this invite himself. On the other hand, his defense of this OPSEC failure strips away all the fairness I’ve just awarded him. According to Hegseth, this was no big deal because nothing classified was discussed and these weren’t actually “war plans” despite the group being referred to by at least one (intended) participant as the “houthi war chat group.”
Well, if that’s the case, then future “war chats” should just take place on X in full view of everyone. After all, nothing sensitive or classified is being shared. Isn’t that right, Pete?
Pete may not be the best judge of what can or can’t be shared with people who don’t have the proper security clearance. While “Signalgate” continued to generate press coverage, it was discovered that Pete Hegseth was intentionally discussing matters of national security with… his wife, his brother, and his family’s lawyer.
And that brings us to the latest OPSEC failure from this hideous administration. Again, to be far more fair to ICE than it deserves, it’s possible no one from ICE added this random person to a chat group discussing a manhunt already in progress. Joseph Cox has the hilariously gory details at 404 Media:
Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned.
The texts included an unredacted ICE “Field Operations Worksheet” that includes detailed information about the target they were looking for, and the texts showed ICE pulling data from a DMV and license plate readers (LPRs), according to screenshots of the chat obtained and verified by 404 Media. The person accidentally added to the group chat is not a law enforcement official or associated with the investigation in any way, and said they were added to it weeks ago and initially thought it was a series of spam messages.
Click through for the coverage of this latest attempt to make America great again. There are plenty of screenshots of the texts, as well as confirmation that the participants in the chat group included at least one ICE official and one member of the US Marshals Service.
Oh, and then there’s this detail, which makes it even more of an OPSEC failure.
The government has issued nothing but a refusal to comment on these revelations. And it’s entirely possible some random cop added this random person to the chat group, rather than someone working for ICE, but the end result is the same thing: another unforced error from an administration that seems to be to have been crafted from the ground up to be as embarrassing as possible as often as possible.
Or maybe ICE was just following DHS head Kristi Noem’s lead. After all, she doesn’t seem to mind exposing impending or ongoing ICE operations so long as it generates a photo op for her to post at social media’s favorite Nazi bar:
In one instance, sources told the Journal that Noem likely hampered a series of early morning raids in New York City by posting about the operation on social media while it was still underway.
People familiar with the January effort claimed Noem’s post on X tipped off targets that ICE was in action, spoiling the element of surprise and resulting in “fewer arrests than officials had hoped for.”
Of course, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin was there to defend the photo op that jeopardized an ICE operation by claiming the raids were “already winding down” when the post went live. Given the 3:43 am timestamp, that seems unlikely like McLaughlin is flat out lying about what happened.
Whatever the case, the administration continues to lower the bar in terms of basic competence. And while that might be occasionally amusing, it’s still pretty good at brute forcing its way towards a totalitarian takeover. Back to 404 Media’s Joseph Cox:
Being stupid in group chats doesn’t seem to be doing much damage to the full-on evil being perpetrated daily by the Trump administration. While it does give us some hope that it will periodically trip over its own feet, it’s a pretty fucking cold comfort.
I don’t mean to harp on this, but a central promise of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would “take aim at big tech,” protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even “continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan.” The press was filled with endless stories credibly parroting these sorts of claims, all day, everyday.
Six months later and it’s nothing but corruption and cronyism as far as the eye can see. The Trump administration and its courts have effectively destroyed regulatory independence, federal consumer protection, and public safety oversight. Massive, terrible mergers are rubber stamped with reckless abandon, provided companies show authoritarian leadership they’re racist and feckless enough.
A recent report by nonprofit consumer advocacy firm Public Citizen calculated that the Trump administration has frozen regulatory action for at least 165 corporations under investigation for a wide variety of abuses, crimes, and fraud. Many of them where the exact kind of “big tech” companies that the Trump administration repeatedly claimed they’d be tough on:
“In six months, the Trump administration has already withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 corporations of all types – and one in four of the corporations benefiting from halted or dropped enforcement is from the technology sector, which has spent $1.2 billion on political influence during and since the 2024 elections.”
The press hasn’t really explained this to the public very well, but effectively all U.S. public safety, labor, consumer, and other protections are dead in the water, something that will inevitably result in mass illness, disability, and death. The majority of efforts to hold corporations accountable now routinely run into Trump-stocked courts that will insist agencies have overstepped their ever-dwindling regulatory authority. It’s radical extremism, but it’s never framed as extremism in the press.
Despite the “feud” between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, this has proven particularly beneficial to guys like Musk, who have seen more than 40 different regulatory inquiries into his companies just magically evaporate in a little over six months. Dodgy financial fraudsters in the crypto space have also been massive beneficiaries of the outright assault on corporate oversight.
It’s the golden age of corruption, much of the damage will be permanent, and the impact will reverberate for a generation or longer. This is, curiously, not of interest to the press. Despite the fact the horrors over the horizon will offer endlessly opportunity for hyperbolic headlines.
I seem to recall several years of claims from pundits and media outlets that Trump was going to be “tough on big tech” and would be “serious about antitrust.” In reality, as I tried to warn repeatedly in the run up to the election, Trump was simply seeking leverage that he could use to bully tech companies into being friendlier to authoritarians and authoritarian propaganda (quite successfully, as it turned out).
Unsurprisingly, authoritarians don’t care about healthy markets, robust competition, or the public interest, they care about their own personal wealth and power. Everything else is bullshit. Yet, curiously, the consolidated, corporate U.S. press doesn’t seem nearly as interested in covering our day to day corruption and cronyism as they were in propping up Trump’s fake populism during the the last election season.
If you’re tired of Techdirt posts about RFK Jr.’s inability to competently lead HHS, I’m tired of him leading that organization, so too bad. The problem is that RFK Jr. represents something of a national health emergency, one that is multi-faceted. The most obvious bucket of fuckery in which he is operating is, of course, when it comes to vaccines, as Kennedy has been a anti-vaxxer for decades now. You should recall that Kennedy fired every member of ACIP, the immunization advisory panel at the CDC, only to appoint a cadre of anti-vaxxers and those otherwise aligned with his views on healthcare. This new version of ACIP predictably changed stances on all kinds of vaccines, especially mRNA vaccines for COVID. Not long after, Kennedy personally pulled federal funding for mRNA vaccines over the objections of all kinds of doctors and scientists.
As all of this was going on, at least one state began crafting legislation to bypass the CDC’s recommendations on vaccines and look instead for guidance from NGOs, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The AAP had itself begun boycotting ACIP working sessions and vocally disagreeing with Kennedy on several healthcare issues, including vaccines. The problem, of course, is that the health insurance industry has largely looked to ACIP recommendations to determine what insurance will cover and what it won’t.
Well, AAP has just come out with its own vaccine schedule recommendations, differing greatly from the CDC’s, and has reportedly been working directly with insurance providers to push them to provide coverage.
The AAP’s vaccine schedule diverges from the CDC schedule under Kennedy on the recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines. After Kennedy’s unilateral change, the CDC no longer recommends routine COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children, but allows for the shots after a conversation with a child’s doctor. In contrast, the AAP—the largest pediatrics association in the country—recommends the shots for all children ages 6 months to 23 months, as well as high-risk children ages 2 to 18. Children not in these age or risk groups should also have access to the shots if desired, the AAP guidance says.
As the Ars post notes, school is starting and COVID infections are on the rise. Winter is coming, to borrow a phrase, and with it, other respiratory viruses. While insurance companies must cover vaccination schedules approved by the CDC, they are under no such obligation when it comes to AAP recommendations. Sean O’Leary of the AAP, however, has indicated that the insurance companies seem to be leaning toward accepting AAP’s recommendations and will provide coverage.
O’Leary told The Washington Post that insurers are “signaling that they are committed to covering our recommendations.” The Post also noted that AHIP, the major insurance lobby, released a statement in June saying its members are committed to “ongoing coverage of vaccines to ensure access and affordability for this respiratory virus season.”
Now, whether this is the insurance industry deciding to do the right thing on a rare occasion, or the companies have simply done the math that the vaccinations will cost less than covering the hospital visits for a truckload of unvaccinated children, is a matter ripe for debate. But it’s a good thing, nonetheless.
Kennedy responded in a post on social platform X, calling the group’s recommendations “corporate friendly” because the AAP receives donations to its Friends of Children Fund from vaccine companies like Pfizer and Moderna, among others.
The philanthropic fund backs projects supporting child health and equity.
The HHS secretary said the organization should disclose “its corporate entanglements … so that Americans may ask whether the AAP’s recommendations reflect public health interest, or are, perhaps, just a pay-to-play scheme to promote commercial ambitions of AAP’s Big Pharma benefactors.”
AAP is very transparent about its funding, including its corporate partnerships. They have a whole page for it on their website. And, yes, of course there are pharma companies that sponsor via their philanthropic funds. But unless Kennedy wants to allege any specific tie between that funding and AAP recommendations, this is all just conspiracy-mongering in response to a differing view.
And it’s pretty damned rich for Kennedy to prattle on about corporate entanglements when his drafted MAHA report for childhood healthcare managed to dodge all of Kennedy’s hobbyhorses if they would in any way effect industry.
Kennedy claimed long ago that he had no intention of taking vaccines away from anyone. It’s so strange to see him so angry that he isn’t able to take vaccines away from children.
A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings.
These consumers — along with hundreds of others — reached out to their congressional representatives for help in the past 12 months.
“I have been unable to pay my rent, utilities, personal bills, student loans, or my credit card. I have been unable to buy groceries or put gas in my car,” wrote the New Yorker, who contacted Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ office.
Records show their representatives — all Republicans — referred them to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency formed in the wake of the Great Recession to shield Americans from unfair or abusive business practices. All three consumers got relief, according to agency data.
Then the lawmakers — along with nearly every other Republican in Congress — voted to slash the agency’s funding by nearly half as part of President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a step toward the administration’s goal of gutting the agency.
Republicans have long been critical of the CFPB, accusing it of imposing unreasonable burdens on businesses. Already, the CFPB under Trump has dropped a number of cases and frozen investigations into dozens of companies.
Yet the agency has historically benefited consumers across the political spectrum, securing around $20 billion in relief through its enforcement actions.
Data obtained by ProPublica through a public records request shows that many of the same Republican members of Congress who have targeted the CFPB for cuts have collectively routed thousands of constituent complaints to the agency.
Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, for example, voted to reduce the CFPB’s budget. Yet each of their offices has referred more than 100 constituents to the CFPB for help, among the most of any House members. The office of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who also voted for the CFPB cuts, has routed more than 800 constituent complaints to the agency, the most of any current lawmaker from either party, ProPublica found.
A spokesperson for Issa said in an email that most of his office’s referrals to the agency “occurred several years ago” and reflected “a conventional way” to handle constituents’ consumer issues.
Wittman and Cornyn didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the disconnect between their offices’ use of the CFPB’s services and their votes to cut it. Neither did New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, whose office fielded the defrauded service member’s complaint, or Malliotakis, who was approached by the New York business owner, or Rep. Rick Allen, whose office directed the Georgia chemotherapy patient to the agency.
Overall, members of Congress have steered nearly 24,000 complaints to the CFPB since it opened its doors in 2011. Roughly 10,000 of those were referred by the offices of current and former Republican lawmakers, ProPublica found.
“This is how members of Congress from both parties get help for the people who live in their districts,” said Erie Meyer, the CFPB’s former chief technologist, who left the agency in February. The agency has a particular mandate to help service members and seniors, she noted. “This is how, if a service member is getting screwed on an auto loan, this is the only place they can go.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has referred more than 200 constituents to CFPB since its creation. In a statement to ProPublica, he accused Republicans in Congress of “pursuing senseless cuts that will undermine their own ability to protect their constituents, who will be left in the lurch when they fall victim to scams or deceptive and unfair business practices.”
“Republicans have made clear that they stand on the side of big businesses — not consumers,” he added. “Their irresponsible pursuit of dismantling the CFPB will have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”
An Irreplaceable System
In recent years, the CFPB’s public database shows the number of complaints has exploded, from around 280,000 in 2019 to more than 2.7 million last year.
Complaints have grown across many categories, including credit cards and debt collection. Last year, most of the complaints filed, over 2.3 million, were about mistakes or other problems involving credit reporting agencies, and more than half of them resulted in relief, CFPB data shows.
“These credit score formulas govern so many factors of your life. It’s not just your ability to get a loan, it’s your ability to secure housing or qualify for a job,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “It’s important that you can resolve something, but it’s difficult to do it on your own.”
Once a complaint is submitted, it is routed to the company, which has 15 days to respond. Companies can request an additional 45 days to reach a final resolution.
Many consumers end up getting nonmonetary relief, such as fixes to erroneous credit reports or an end to harassment by debt collectors, but some get financial help as well. More than $300 million has been returned to Americans through the complaint system, including $90 million just last year.
Normally, staff at the CFPB monitor the complaints to identify systemic issues and escalate complaints involving consumers who are at immediate risk of foreclosure, although that didn’t happen for a few weeks this year when the agency’s acting director halted its work.
The CFPB also shares complaint information with other federal agencies, states and localities to help them protect consumers. No other government or private entity has the capacity to effectively handle the volume of complaints that the CFPB does, experts and current and former employees say.
In legal filings opposing the Trump administration’s steps to effectively shut down the CFPB, 23 Democratic attorneys general noted that their states collectively have referred thousands of complaints to the agency and that its services can’t be replaced by state-level operations.
“In the CFPB’s absence, consumers will be left without critical resources,” they wrote.
The complaint system has also lessened the burden on congressional offices, which can route constituent problems to an agency dedicated to, and expert in, addressing consumer issues. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pursuing dramatic cuts to the agency.
The CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve instead of annual appropriations bills. The structure is meant to safeguard the agency’s independence, though critics say this makes the agency less accountable, giving elected officials less power over its operations.
Initially, Republicans pressed for extreme cuts to the CFPB as part of Trump’s legislative package. House members approved a 70% cut. The Senate Banking Committee attempted to go even further, zeroing out the agency’s funding entirely.
Ultimately, the final version of the bill signed into law by Trump on July 4 cut the CFPB’s budget by around 46%, reducing the agency’s funding cap — the maximum amount it can request from the Federal Reserve — from $823 million to $446 million for this fiscal year. The agency requested $729 million last fiscal year.
The offices of lawmakers who voted for the bill have referred about 3,400 complaints to the agency, running the gamut of consumer problems — from crushing debt to mortgage issues to financial scams, ProPublica’s data analysis shows. (In some of these cases, consumers also took complaints to the CFPB themselves in addition to reaching out to their representatives. Consumers’ names aren’t disclosed in the data.)
Their constituents are sometimes desperate: “I’m about to be homeless because of this,” wrote a Florida resident whose bank account was frozen.
Others have expressed frustration at getting the runaround from a company. “I’ve spent countless hours on hold trying to speak with a representative, only to be met with silence or outdated instructions to send letters,” wrote one Virginian in a complaint about their bank.
In a statement after the CFPB funding cut passed, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, R-S.C., applauded the measure for saving taxpayer money but insisted it would not affect the agency’s mandatory functions, which include handling complaints.
Consumer experts as well as current and former CFPB employees, however, said the cuts will likely hinder the agency’s effectiveness.
“I think the whole process is at risk,” said Ruth Susswein, director of consumer protection at the nonprofit advocacy group Consumer Action. “If you starve the system, it cannot provide the benefits that it now offers.”
Signs of Strain
The Trump administration’s initial efforts to unilaterally hobble the CFPB give a hint of what may lie ahead for the complaint system.
In February, acting Director Russell Vought issued a stop-work order to all CFPB employees and canceled a slew of contracts, including for antivirus software that scanned files attached to consumer complaints.
The actions largely froze the complaint system for about a week. More than 70,000 complaints were submitted, but most were not sent to companies for their response during that period, data shows.
Although some issues were later fixed, the work stoppage spawned a backlog of more than 16,000 complaints that required manual review, according to court records from a lawsuit filed by the union that represents CFPB employees. About 75 complaints from consumers at risk of imminent foreclosure, which would normally be escalated to CFPB staff, weren’t acted upon.
In late March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the CFPB to end the work stoppage, reverse contract terminations and reinstate probationary employees who were fired. However, an appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed, triggering a frenzied effort by the administration to cut about 90% of the CFPB’s staff.
The layoffs included the vast majority of the roughly 130-member team that manages the complaint system as well as nearly every staffer in legally mandated offices focused on service members and seniors.
The CFPB has fielded over 440,000 complaints from current and former service members and their families since 2011, according to CFPB data, more than 100,000 of which have resulted in relief.
The CFPB did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a court declaration, Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, said that the agency’s leadership had “been assessing how the agency can fulfill its statutory duties as a smaller, more efficient operation. In making this assessment, leadership discovered vast waste in the agency’s size.”
Paoletta also said the agency would have a “much more limited vision for enforcement and supervision activities, focused on protecting service members and veterans, and addressing actual tangible consumer harm and intentional discrimination.”
In April, Jackson issued an order blocking the firings made at the CFPB after the appeals court decision. The administration has appealed Jackson’s ruling.
Lawsuits won’t protect the CFPB or its complaint apparatus from the cuts included in the recently passed spending bill, current and former agency employees pointed out.
These changes are likely to hit home with consumers no matter which party they favor, said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in the union’s lawsuit.
“Republicans don’t want to be abused by big corporations that ignore them any more than Democrats do,” she said.
When I was in DC last week, everyone seemed to be talking about the brewing drama at the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. The HPE/Juniper merger settlement had raised eyebrows, two senior officials had been fired, and rumors were swirling about political interference playing a role in ending what had appeared to be a decently strong antitrust case.
But I don’t think anyone expected one of those fired officials to go full scorched earth quite this quickly—or this thoroughly.
Roger Alford, who served as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s antitrust division before being fired, has now delivered a blistering public account of what he witnessed inside the Trump administration’s Justice Department. Speaking at the TPI Aspen Forum and writing in UnHerd, Alford has essentially confirmed a pay-to-play system that many people expected to arise under Trump, while also destroying any pretense of principled antitrust enforcement (which people like Matt Stoller naively insisted would continue under Trump).
For the few hipster antitrust folks among you, who still harbored credulous hopes that the Trump administration’s “populist” approach to antitrust would continue the more aggressive merger enforcement we saw under Lina Khan, Alford’s account should put that fantasy to rest permanently. What emerges instead is a picture of an administration where hiring the right Trump-connected lobbyists can get you out of even the most solid antitrust case.
The story centers on what should have been a straightforward antitrust case. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) wanted to acquire Juniper Networks for $14 billion, combining the second and third largest companies in the enterprise networking market. The DOJ filed a lawsuit in January to block the merger, alleging it would harm competition and consumers—exactly the kind of horizontal merger challenge that antitrust enforcers have been bringing for decades.
By all accounts, the government had a strong case and was prepared to go to trial. Then, just days before the trial was set to begin, the DOJ abruptly settled on terms that many experts called out as surprisingly weak. Instead of blocking the merger, the settlement required only that HPE divest a small business unit serving certain customers and license some AI technology.
What happened in between? According to reports (and now confirmed by Alford), HPE hired some of Trump’s friends, and suddenly the case got resolved through backroom dealing rather than legal merit.
Alford frames his account as a battle within the Republican party between what he calls “genuine MAGA reformers” (lol) and “MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists.” But come on. There are no “genuine MAGA reformers” anymore. There are just different types of grifters eyeing which angle works best for themselves. Alford’s description makes clear this is really about whether the wealthy and well-connected can simply purchase their way out of antitrust enforcement.
In his UnHerd piece, Alford doesn’t mince words about what he witnessed and makes sure to name names:
The core problem is simple: Attorney General Pam Bondi has delegated authority to figures — such as her chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, and Associate Attorney General-Designee Stanley Woodward — who don’t share her commitment to a single tier of justice for all.
That assumes, of course, that Bondi isn’t also playing politics and loyalty over policy, which she absolutely is.
In his Aspen speech, Alford goes even further, directly accusing senior DOJ officials of corruption:
Although I am limited in what I can say, it is my opinion that in the HPE/Juniper merger scandalChad Mizelle and Stanley Woodward perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law.I am not given to hyperbole, and I do not say that lightly. As part of the forthcoming Tunney Act proceedings, it would be helpful for the court to clarify the substance and the process by which the settlement was reached. Although the Tunney Act has rarely served its intended purpose, this time the court may demand extensive discovery and examine the surprising truth of what happened. I hope the court blocks the HPE/Juniper merger. If you knew what I knew, you would hope so too. Someday I may have the opportunity to say more.
In case you’re wondering, the Tunney Act (the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act) makes judges evaluate whether a DOJ antitrust consent decree is “in the public interest.” Courts usually rubber-stamp, but they can demand explanations, take public comments, and—rarely—order discovery or reject a decree. If Alford’s right, this is one of those rare cases where the court should actually dig.
These are remarkable accusations from a recently fired government official. “Perverted justice” is not the kind of language former DOJ officials typically use when describing their former colleagues, even when they disagree with policy decisions.
Alford’s account describes in detail how the influence-peddling operation works in practice. Companies facing antitrust scrutiny can now hire politically connected lobbyists to circumvent the normal legal process entirely:
Is this the new normal, with every law firm hiring an influence peddler to dual track and sidestep the litigation and merger review process? That’s what law firms are now considering. The Department of Justice is now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the Antitrust Division leadership seeking special favors with warm hugs. On numerous occasions in a variety of matters we implored our superiors and the lawyers on the other side to call off the jackals. But to no avail. Today cases are being resolved based on political connections, not the legal merits
He specifically names the fairly well-known “lobbyists” involved in the HPE case:
Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz have made a Faustian bargain of trading on relationships with powerful people to reportedly earn million-dollar success fees by helping corporations undermine Trump’s antitrust agenda, hurt working class Americans, break the rules, and then try to cover it up.
Alford suggests that this move will hurt the reputations of both Davis and Schwartz, but that’s a bit rich, as both have reputations that are well known throughout the political world, and this seems more par for the course than anything else. The only reason to hire either of them is not for their knowledge of antitrust law or how to manage the fallout from an antitrust trial.
The only reason to hire them is for their political connections and shamelessness in conducting dirty tricks.
Davis spent years pushing ridiculous anti-internet/anti-tech policies, and four years ago it was revealed that he had actually sought to get hired by Google, and only became anti-internet when they rejected him. He’s made it quite clear that his views are entirely transactional. He has also talked about how excited he was to put kids in cages (he said it will “be glorious”) and to indict everyone named Biden.
As for Arthur Schwartz, he’s been a “political advisor” to Donald Trump Jr. for years and is close with the Trump family. A recent profile of MAGA lobbyists had retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis refer to Schwartz as “a political hack” and a “shitty political consultant.”
If anything, their reputations were burnished by this, not harmed. They’re political sleazeballs hired to engage in a corrupt plan, and they did exactly that.
Not surprisingly, this creates a system of “for my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law” kind of Justice Department:
Others at the DOJ and elsewhere in government consider some parties, counsel, and lobbyists to be on the “same MAGA team” and worthy of special solicitude. They consider others to be “enemies of MAGA” that merit particular disfavor. In my opinion based on regular meetings with him, Chad Mizelle accepts party meetings and makes key decisions depending on whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend. Aware of this injustice, companies are hiring lawyers and influence peddlers to bolster their MAGA credentials and pervert traditional law enforcement.
Alford’s revelations should put the final nail in the coffin to those poor deluded people who bought into the narrative that Trump’s approach to antitrust would somehow be more populist or more aggressive toward corporate power than traditional Republican policies. Instead, what emerges is a system that’s significantly more blatantly corrupt than the usual corporate-friendly approach (which was already somewhat corrupt):
The cost to the country of this new pay-to-play approach to antitrust enforcement is enormous. For thirty pieces of silver, MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists are influencing their allies within the DOJ and risking President Trump’s populist conservative agenda. This goes far beyond traditional lobbying functions. Their goal is to line their own pockets by working for any corporation that will pay top dollar to settle antitrust cases on the cheap. Doing so undermines the rule of law and desperately harms the average American. At risk are President Trump’s antitrust goals of reforming health care, addressing monopoly abuses, promoting deregulation, and helping renters, farmers and blue-collar workers.
And, yes, it’s easy to laugh at Alford for being so naive as to believe that a Trump DOJ would actually do anything along those lines, or actually believing that Trump had “antitrust goals” like those he described. You truly had to not be paying attention to think that’s where things were headed.
But at least it’s nice of him to come out and confirm exactly what plenty of us predicted would happen.
What makes Alford’s account particularly striking is how quickly and completely he’s burned his bridges. Getting fired from a senior government position is one thing—going public immediately afterward with detailed allegations of corruption is quite another. This suggests just how angry Alford is about what he witnessed.
His personal reflection drives home the bitterness:
My position while I served in government was simple: lobbyists and lawyers are subordinate to the law. Yet by stating this truth, I was dismissed for insubordination. My termination letter is now framed and hangs on the wall in my office at Notre Dame. I joke with friends that I’ve never been fired before, and I’ve been working since my first job as a young teenager at the Dairy Queen in Sherman, Texas. All it took to be fired were lobbyists exerting influence on my superiors to retaliate against me for protecting the rule of law against the rule of lobbyists.
This is certainly not the first time that a Trump regime official told all upon being stabbed in the back, but Alford coming out so clearly and directly calling out this blatant corruption is still notable.
Alford’s revelations should end any remaining speculation about whether this administration would continue Lina Khan-style antitrust enforcement. The HPE/Juniper case establishes a clear precedent: hire the right Trump-connected lobbyists, and you can get your merger approved regardless of its competitive impact.
Put money in the pockets of the king’s friends, and the king will make your troubles disappear.
Alford warns that other major cases may face similar interference:
Which case is the next casualty? Will the same senior DOJ officials ignore the President’s Executive Order just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of the Fifth Floor in defense of their monopoly abuses? I wonder what the national security arguments will be in that case.
And, um, yes. The answer is yes. Any major company is going to hire one of these guys, and they’ll laugh all the way to the bank.
There are no principles here. Only transactions.
What Alford describes isn’t just a failure of antitrust policy—it’s the fundamental corruption of the entire justice system that many of us warned we’d see in a second Trump Presidency. Alford’s account portrays justice as for sale to the highest bidder with the right MAGA connections.
Of course, the real irony here is that this is exactly the kind of behavior that Trump and his supporters keep claiming he was elected to get rid of. “Drain the swamp.” Instead, he’s loaded the swamp up with more alligators than ever, and they’re all his friends. The MAGA world isn’t just proving the “every accusation is a confession” line true over and over again, they seem to be proudly using it as a slogan.
This level of corruption is no surprise. The willingness of Alford to be so direct in telling the world about it so quickly after leaving the Justice Department, though, is certainly significant.
While this latest bit of low-key embarrassment may not be a black eye for the administration, it certainly isn’t putting any more lipstick on this pig. Whatever you may think about the recent summit meeting between these two international besties, you can be assured that some of the attendees thought even less of it than you did.
Is this how we’re leaking things to the press now? Seems careless, since there are multiple ways of identifying who left these documents behind. That being said, no one is named in the NPR reporting, which covers what was uncovered by hotel guests who happened to find these documents just sitting in a tray of one of the hotel’s public printers.
Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.
Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.
The documents [PDF] are embedded below. What’s exposed in them is indeed sensitive information, but the sensitivity is directly proportionate to a specific time frame, which means a discovery that happened after the summit was over isn’t nearly as problematic as anything discovered before or during. The dates, times, and specific rooms used for meetings don’t mean nearly as much as they might have while this summit was still ongoing.
One of things that immediately stands out as having Trump’s tiny fingerprints all over it is the menu for the luncheon that never happened.
During the summit Friday, lunch was apparently cancelled. But it was intended to be a simple, three-course meal, the documents showed. After a green salad, the world leaders would dine on filet mignon and halibut olympia. Crème brûlée would be served for dessert.
Not just any green salad, mind you, but one served with “champagne vinaigrette.” I’m sure it’s the word “champagne” that earned Trump’s approval, not that he probably cares one way or another what’s served on a salad he isn’t going to eat.
Here’s the menu as it was printed (and left on a public printer):
Between the font selection and the menu options, this looks like something being offered by Waldorf Astoria in 1925, rather than by the most powerful nation in the world in 2025. And one assumes the filet mignon would have been served a la Trump (charred into submission; walloped with ketchup). Fortunately for Putin, the lunch was cancelled, preventing him from a.) having to witness Trump “enjoy” a steak, and b.) having to experience a fish swimming in mayonnaise. (Your mileage may vary.)
Low-hanging mockery aside, it’s still a problem. And since it is actually a problem, the White House is, of course, pretending it’s not a problem, calling the eight pages of information nothing more than a “multi-page lunch menu.” Even if you ignore all the information specifying who will be in which rooms at what particular times, there’s plenty of other information that generally doesn’t appear in lunch menus, no matter how many pages they run.
Pages 2 through 5 of the documents listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian state leaders. The list provided phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including “Mr. President POO-tihn.”
Even if this (perhaps intentional!) leak didn’t threaten national security, it’s emblematic of an administration that tends to operate with all the finesse of a bludgeon wielded by a bull in the china shop that is the world we live in. To expect better than this is human. To expect to see better than this, from this administration, is self-delusion.
Donald Trump has declared war on American cities, and he’s sending in the troops to prove it. As Rolling Stone rightly notes regarding Trump seizing direct control of DC law enforcement by deploying the National Guard:
PresidentDonald Trumphas expanded his military campaign against the United States by deploying armed troops to yet another major metropolitan area,announcing on Mondaythat he is sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., to “liberate” the city.
This isn’t some emergency response to rising crime. This is the culmination of years of MAGA fantasies about using federal force against cities that refuse to kiss Trump’s ass.
It’s no secret that there’s a noticeable “urban/rural divide” in America, which has mostly been led by ambitious politicians who seek to stoke nonsense fears in rural voters by lying to them about life in American cities. But the divide has certainly expanded from “city voters lean this way while rural voters lean that way” to “the federal government needs to invade American cities.”
The irony is thick. The idea that the federal government might use the US military against American citizens has long been a conspiracy theory of the QAnon/MAGA crowd. Now it’s happening, with the QAnon/MAGA folks doing it to cities they view as insufficiently loyal to their dear leader.
Remember the massive conspiracy theory around the Jade Helm exercises a decade ago? Early MAGA types (helped along by political shitposters like Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Senator Ted Cruz) pretended it was an effort by Democrats to impose martial law by first “getting people used to seeing military forces on the streets.”
This ignored that the only ones who seem interested in actually putting the military in the streets have been similarly bad faith Republicans, like Senator Tom Cotton, who has been publicly advocating for US military forces to invade American cities for years, just because non-white people were protesting for their rights.
This latest military campaign, based entirely on lies about the state of crime in the cities, followed a similarly stupid campaign in LA, also based on lies. As Radley Balko points out in a recent post, the lies are just very, very sloppy. For example in the oft-repeated line (including in our comments by MAGA fans!) that DC has the 4th highest murder rate, nope, not even close:
Nope. The linked study is only a sampling of 23 cities. It does not purport to be a list of the 23 most dangerous or murderous or crime-ridden cities. It does not purport to be a comprehensive list of any kind. The point of the study was to compare year-over-year statistics among a diverse selection of cities around the country. D.C.’s homicide rate was the fourth highest out of these 23 cities. Not out of all U.S. cities.
This first bullet point also fails to contextualize the 27.3 per 100,000 figure for 2024. It was down from 39 in 2023. It’s down to about 22.7 this year. This matters, because Trump’s argument is that crime in the city is out of control due to poor leadership. That isn’t what’s happening.
Trump has also claimed that homicides in D.C. in 2023 were the “highest ever.” Not even close. The city’s murder rate topped 80 per 100,000 in 1991.
As of April, D.C.’s murder rate this year ranked not fourth highest, but 19th. It ranked behind red state cities like New Orleans, Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Tulsa, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati.
The lack of an actual rise in violent crime to justify these moves doesn’t matter. And silly people arguing that Democrats need to accept Trump’s framing of this being about crime are being very, very short-sighted.
If it wasn’t lies about crime, Trump and friends would come up with other lies. It would be about immigration. Or culture. Or architecture. The reasons don’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. This is entirely about the MAGA base wanting to invade and take over American cities because they hate the fact that those cities tend not to vote for them.
That’s it.
Two weeks ago the New Republic got a leaked DHS memo that made it clear that the Trump administration wasn’t reacting to any emergency, but has been deliberately planning to invade US cities.
It suggests that DHS is anticipating many more uses of the military in urban centers, noting that L.A.-style operations may be needed “for years to come.”
And Trump made it clear he’s itching to send troops to basically any city in a Democratic-leaning state that just (coincidentally!) has a Black mayor.
At a press conference Monday announcing that the federal government had seized “direct” control of D.C.’s police department and that the National Guard would soon occupy the city, Trump warned that if he and his officials decide they “need to,” he will deploy military forces to other Democratic cities, too. The president named a few, including Chicago, Oakland, and Baltimore.
Again, if this were actually about crime, then Republicans might look at how the mayors in those cities have been very successfully reducing crime, often by refocusing the problem.
Baltimore, for example, has seen its murder rate drop at an astounding rate, hitting its lowest level in many, many years, and it’s in large part due to Mayor Brandon Scott realizing that you don’t stop crime by increasing policing, but by treating crime as a type of public health crisis that you fix by treating the actual symptoms, including poverty, racism, and historical violence (some of which is perpetrated by law enforcement).
Baltimore’s success in lowering violent crime rates not through increased law enforcement, but through better community support should be a lesson for anyone who actually wants to reduce crime.
Indeed, Balko’s piece also notes that if you look at the cities in the study Trump cited with the biggest increase in murder rates, more than half are in red states with Republican mayors:
Seven of the 23 cities in the study cited by the White House actually showed an increase in homicides last year. Four of those — including the top two (Indianapolis and Lexington) are in red states. The city with the largest increase — Lexington — has a Republican mayor. Send the National Guard to Lexington!
But MAGA folks don’t give a shit about crime in reality. It’s just a convenient excuse for them to exert control and power over those they see as refusing to kowtow to their unprecedented power grab.
Donald Trump has declared war on US cities because the people there don’t kiss his ass enough, and he’s sending in the troops, effectively saying that the military invasions will continue until the loyalty improves.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem today announced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will waive age limits for new applicants so even more patriots will qualify to join ICE in its mission to arrest murderers, pedophiles, gang members, rapists, and other criminal illegal aliens from America’s streets.
All ICE law enforcement recruits will be required to go through medical screening, drug screening, and complete a physical fitness test.
“We are ENDING the age cap for ICE law enforcement,”said Secretary Noem. “Qualified candidates can now apply with no age limit. JOIN.ICE.GOV.”
Obviously, joining ICE doesn’t actually mean doing all the things listed above. ICE is no longer in the business of removing “murderers, pedophiles, gang members, and rapists” from the streets. If ICE limited itself only to foreigners who have committed serious crimes, it would have no one left to arrest.
And having no one left to arrest means it will never meet the standard set by the Trump administration, which apparently starts at 3,000 arrests per day. Complicating matters is the fact that Noem’s DHS has pretty much gutted the DHS’s investigative wing, which used to handle actual criminals like pedophiles before they were forced to join ICE in chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots.
Also notice the operative words being used in this DHS announcement: “age cap.” While the DHS may say some things about lowering minimum age for entry to 18, the real purpose of this revamp is to rope in a demographic that may be predisposed to casual racism and institutional bigotry.
Currently, ICE applicants must be 21 years old and no older than 37 or 40, depending on what position they are applying for.
In an interview with Fox & Friends, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said applicants could be as young as 18.
“We no longer have a cap on how old you can be or you can continue at age 18, sign up for ICE and join us and be a part of it. We’ll get you trained and ready to be equipped to go out on the streets and help protect families,” Noem said.
As is to be expected from someone who probably adheres to the “speak English or leave” mantra, Noem doesn’t seem capable of speaking intelligible English. Lord only knows what the phrase “you can continue at age 18” means since that’s presumably the new age range baseline for applicants.
As for the top end, the sky’s the limit, which means ICE is probably cranking out tons of LARGE PRINT employment applications in anticipation of the incoming surge of guys willing to hang up their golf clubs for a chance to pretend they’re Josh Brolin’s character in “Sicario.”
The ICE application suggest you must be fit and ready and assume personal responsibility for choosing such a “dangerous” job. But let’s not kid ourselves. Most of the action seen by ICE these days involves raiding businesses and standing around scratching their balls in the hallways of court buildings while waiting to arrest people showing up for their scheduled immigration hearings.
There’s not much danger out there for ICE, even if there have been [squints at spreadsheet] nearly 80 more alleged assaults on officers as compared to this same time frame in 2024. What might be a sticking point for new applicants is the insistence on masking, which is something most applicants probably got all shitty about back in 2020 because it made their noses and mouths a bit warmer when accosting retail employees forced to provide service to a nation of ungrateful assholes during a worldwide pandemic.
Masks are a thing at ICE, and that possibly even includes its lawyers. So, if you think this might impede the oxygen flow from the tank you’re pulling behind you, perhaps it’s time to settle back into retirement and your well-worn recliner, rather than think you’ve found an easy way to clear an extra $50k this year.
As Noem, the DHS, and ICE surely know, most of the youths are not seeking a job with the nation’s largest employer of kidnappers. This age thing only applies to the upper end of the age demographic — one that not only houses more active voters, but also more active bigots. And letting everyone know standards are being relaxed and showered with federal cash means ICE will certainly be attracting plenty of other people who have the same general physique of cops, but actually haven’t felt the need to engage in public service until it became clear they could be mean to minorities on main.
If you actually pay attention you might notice the right wing’s pearl-clutching over China is neither effective nor consistent.
The GOP, for years, made a giant stink about China’s Huawei network gear being a massive national security threat, and pushed through legislation to tear the inexpensive gear out of U.S. networks. Then just… forgot to fund the efforts, resulting in telecoms on the hook for billions in additional costs. Nobody really seems interested in following up on how that project is even going.
The Trump saber rattling over China is usually driven by a weird combination of xenophobia and greed that usually has nothing to do with national security or the public interest. Initiatives are incoherently proposed and retracted without reason or any logic, repeatedly. None of it is effective or well intentioned in any way, but you’d often be hard pressed to know this reading U.S. press coverage of it.
The latest case in point: after years of hyperventilating about the dangers of doing business with China and crowing about the protection of U.S. AI supremacy, the Trump administration has “allowed” Nvidia and AMD to sell their high-end chipsets to China, if the US government gets a fifteen percent cut of the proceeds:
“The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development.”
Transferring our top end chipsets and AI advantage to China is the worst thing in the world! Unless we get a cut. Then it’s magically all fine! A handful of Democrats, like Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, were quick to highlight how this makes no coherent sense:
“The administration cannot simultaneously treat semiconductor exports as both a national security threat and a revenue opportunity. By putting a price on our security concerns, we signal to China and our allies that American national security principles are negotiable for the right fee.”
But it makes perfect sense if you remember that authoritarian zealots don’t actually believe in much of anything beyond their own wealth and power. Trump despised TikTok until he realized he could get it to buckle to his whims (either by selling to one of his billionaire allies or imposing algorithms more aligned with right wing ideology). All of the national security stuff is theater. None of it is good faith.
Trump is a bigoted fascist operating at a third-grade reading level whose policies are completely incoherent. He believes in absolutely nothing but attention, wealth and power. The closest the NYT can get to coherently explaining this to readers is to proclaim “this isn’t your grandpa’s Republican party,” despite some obvious, fleeting concerns about any of this being, you know, legal.
Companies that signed up for Trumpism for mindless deregulation and tax cuts are, of course, unsettled by the unpredictable nature of the whole leopard-eating-faces experience they’re now enjoying. But that’s the nature of authoritarianism; you can’t strike any sort of coherent partnership in it, because the only thing an unpredictable authoritarian dullard zealot believes in is their own wealth and power.
Of course, the Trump administration isn’t saying where these new export taxes will actually go. And the costs will, as usual, be passed down to consumers of a chipset market where many major graphics cards are still going for double MSRP thanks to government-sanctioned price gouging.
The administration keeps signaling this incoherent bribery scheme is going to be expanded into other industries. With most of the costs being borne by the folks that can least afford them (small businesses, consumers, workers). Recall Trump has disemboweled all U.S. regulators, so protecting markets and consumers is no longer a thing, something the press also can’t coherently seem to explain to the public).
But again, this is authoritarianism. Companies, voters, and business leaders who signed up for this for some tax cuts and deregulation were warned repeatedly that this would be exponentially worse. And the orchestra is really only just getting warmed up. If you were hoodwinked or complicit with enabling authoritarians, it’s a moral imperative that you now play a major role in dismantling it.
