ICE Puts A Big Dent In The Los Angeles Economy

This story has been out for months, but Mayor Bass is still working it:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Wednesday blasted the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, saying the raids have put a huge dent in the city's economy.

Bass said businesses have seen a drastic reduction in immigrant customers. She's concerned some immigrant families whose breadwinners have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be on the brink of being left destitute.

A piece at Red State gives more background:

When federal immigration agents began raiding Home Depots and other businesses in the Los Angeles area recently, something strange happened:

Foot traffic vanished overnight.

Entire blocks shut down.

Sales plummeted.

And it wasn’t because customers were scared. It was because the workers were. Employees simply stopped showing up. Some owners shuttered their doors. Fear gripped the heart of L.A.’s commercial corridors.

The real story? That fear didn’t expose a broken immigration system — it exposed a network of lawbreaking employers who rely on illegal labor to line their pockets with profits.

A good example of this problem emerged just this past Friday:

Undocumented employees of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center near Burbank have reportedly been fired.

What we know: Employees told FOX11 as many as 40 employees who cared for the horses and stables were let go Friday morning.

Some who board their horses at the center were upset by the mass firing.

The city contracts private company ASM Global to run the facility.

The LA Equestrian Center says of itself,

The Los Angeles Equestrian Center offers complete boarding facilities with access from our property perimeter to over 50 miles of Griffith Park horse trails. We are also proud to host a variety of training programs for all levels of riders through its successful resident trainers.

In other words, its clientele is people who board their horses and participate in horse shows, dressage, and equivalent events. By and large, these are the very wealthy, the same people who hire illegals as domestic servants. They're upset!

Some who board their horses at the center were upset by the mass firing.

"It's terrible," said Susan Becker. "There's a lot of people whose life has been upended."

. . . "I'm devastated you know? This is a terrible situation for all these people who, a lot of these people have been working a long time and they've been working really hard," said Becker.

According to Mayor Bass,

"Apparently, I guess ICE asked for whether or not the employees had proper identification and through e-Verify, and that's all I know right now," said Bass. "But what's important to me, though is, is ICE changing their tactics? Are they changing their tactics?"

Just last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal judge's Temporary Restraining Order preventing ICE from stopping and questioning people about their immigration status without reasonable suspicion or a warrant.

It does not appear that today's events at the equestrian center violate that order, but still people are upset.

If I were Mayor Bass, I would be upset that a city contractor had been exploiting its workforce, quite possibly in breach of its agreements with the city over paying taxes and social security and such, but that's apparently not what bothers her or the people who board their horses. The liberals at The American Prospect also view the shortage of illegal labor with alarm:

Net immigration, which provides a steady supply of available workers in key fields, is way down this year. Employers are scrambling to find substitute workers and worrying about productivity losses. Remittance payments to Mexico have plummeted, suggesting a decline in these workers’ economic contributions, not only to their relatives, but to industries like home care, agriculture, and construction.

. . . The 2,800 arrests in Los Angeles since June, outside Home Depots and car washes and homeless shelters, massively understate the chilling effect of ICE raids on the largest city in the largest state in the union. A report from the University of California, Merced’s Community and Labor Center released last month found that 3.1 percent of the entire private-sector labor force in California didn’t show up for work between May 11 and June 8, just as ICE activity was ramping up in L.A. These numbers resemble the losses from the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, and if anything, they’ve grown as raids intensify.

A month ago, Mayor Bass said she was even going to send the illegals gift cards to make up for them not going to work, or something like that:

Bass said a plan is being worked out to provide cash assistance to those affected by the enforcement operations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Cash cards with a "couple hundred" dollars on them will be distributed by immigrants' rights groups in about a week, Bass said.

The money will not come from city coffers, but from philanthropic partners, she said.

This was four weeks ago, but as of today, nothing more has come out about the gift cards. Maybe the people who are upset about the firings at the Equestrian Center could pool together and buy some gift cards, but they'd still need to board their horses, so maybe that wouldn't work. I tried to find out how much it costs to board a horse there, but the Equestrian Center makes you register and wait for someobne to call you to find out. I did see this on reddit:

In terms of facilities, most places in LA will be 12x12 box stall with 15 minute turnout (that you pay for). "Affordable" is going to be relative, most places are $450-$700 [monthly?] for 12x12 box stall, alfalfa, and shavings but prices will skyrocket the moment you look for a larger stall & add grass hay.

The bigger problem is that if the Equestrian Center can no longer exploit illegals, the boarding fee is going to go up to cover market wages and benefits. Heck, I'd be upset, too! Mayor Bass, you go, girl!

On the other hand, I see a problem with the gift cards. How will the illegals qaulify? Will they go down to City Hall and present evidence that they're illegal to get a gift card? Otherwise, anyone could get one, and that wouldn't be good, right? But if they have to do something like that to qualify, what's to keep ICE from waiting outside City Hall to pick them up, or even tracking the cards to people once they're used?

I don't think Mayor Bass has thought this through.

"Under Color Of"

Lately I'm amazed at how much even "independent" journalists waste my time. A good exasmple is the Morning Meeting show on YouTube and 2WAY featuring Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine. Spicer in particular is represented as an expert on Trump -- "Can you take us into Trumpworld on this, Sean?" -- when he left the first Trump administration after only six months in July 2017, apparently because Trump lost patience with both Reince Priebus and his protege Spicer as "professional Repulicans".

Just the other day, Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine pontificated at length over where Trump and Putin might meet to resolve the Ukraine war -- maybe it would be Geneva. Maybe it would be Iceland or Greenland. Two days later, it turns out to be Alaska. In other words, they could blather on about Trumpworld or Putinworld, know absolutely nothing, and get away with it for days. Why shoud anyone waste time watching them?

The various commentators enumerating the potential charges that might be brought against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others in Russiagate, mostly just perjury, are in the same class. I'm having more and more of a feeling that the major cases will have little or nothing to do with perjury, and people like Jonathan Turley will have been clueless.

Two cases that came up yesterday give what I think is a much better idea of which way the Justice Deparment is more likely to go. The first is a Massachusetts county sheriff:

Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins was arrested Friday after a federal grand jury indicted him for allegedly extorting a cannabis company seeking to open a dispensary in Boston.

Tompkins, 67, is accused of extorting $50,000 from an executive with the unnamed national cannabis retailer by leveraging a key partnership between his office and the dispensary. Federal prosecutors allege Tompkins first pressured the executive into selling him equity interest in the company, then into refunding his buy-in when share prices dipped.

Tompkins was arrested in Florida Friday morning on two counts of extortion under color of official right, U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley’s office said in a news release.

According to the Justice Department,

[T]he Hobbs Act (18 U.S.C. § 1951) defines extortion in terms of "the obtaining of property from another, with his consent . . . under color of official right." In fact, the under color of official right aspect of the Hobbs Act derives from the common law meaning of extortion.

. . . In order to show a violation of the Hobbs Act under this provision, the Supreme Court recently held that "the Government need only show that a public official has obtained a payment to which he was not entitled, knowing that the payment was made in return for official acts."

In the Massachusetts case, according to the first link,

According to court documents, the cannabis company in question sought to open a retail dispensary in Boston in 2019[.]

. . . The state’s Cannabis Control Commission approved the company’s license to operate a dispensary in Boston in March 2021. But while the licensing process was still underway, federal prosecutors allege Tompkins began pressuring the executive to sell him stock before the company went public. According to court documents, Tompkins specifically told the executive he “wanted to get in on the stock so [he] could make some cannabis money.”

When the executive rebuffed Tompkins, the sheriff allegedly upped the ante with a reminder that the company still needed his help for future license renewals. Purportedly fearing Tompkins would use his position to jeopardize the company’s partnership with the sheriff’s office and imperil both the dispensary license and the company’s initial public offering, the executive relented.

. . . When the value of his shares later decreased and his stake dipped below his initial investment, Tompkins allegedly demanded — and received — a full refund of $50,000.

The second, much closer to the lawfare against Trump, is a federal grand jury inmvestigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James:

The US attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York issued two subpoenas seeking information about James’ investigations into the Trump Organization and National Rifle Association, the sources said.

A grand jury investigation into James has also convened in Albany, New York, according to a source familiar. The grand jury probe into James is said to be looking into deprivation of rights, which means violating someone’s constitutional rights, against Trump.

According to the Justice Department,

Section 242 of Title 18 makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. For the purpose of Section 242, acts under "color of law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within their lawful authority, but also acts done beyond the bounds of that official's lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.

Since the grand jury investigation is still under way, we don't know the precise acts Letitia James is alleged to have done to violate Trump's constitutional rights. If there's an indictment, we'll learn more. But it seems reasonable, as only a few people have suggested up to now, that the Mar-a-Lago search could also constitute a deprivation of Trump's Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure "under color of authority".

Since this took place under Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, this could make them vulnerable to charges connected with an overall conspiracy to deprive Trump of his civil rights, which would have covered serveillance under the FISA court in 2016-17 as well.

I'm convinced that the Justice Department action in the Russiagate cases will be much wider-ranging than just the perjury charges commentators have envisioned, and if they cover actions during the Biden administration at all, they will have to involve figures like Garland and Wray, who aren't on current lists of the usual suspects. But if the federal grand jury investigating Russiagate is empaneled in Miami, which it appears to be, that means the Mar-a-Lago raid is within its scope and is going to be treated as an act in furtherance of the whole conspiracy.

I think indictments will come faster than the conventional wisdom currently thinks, and they'll involve more people than just Brennan, Clapper, and Comey.

Let's Revisit Edward Feser

We've entered the anniversary period for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), but there's been little of the usual handwringing this year, at least in what I've seen. Edward Feser, the neo-Thomist philosopher who sometimes posts on how, at least in his view, just war doctrine makes these attacks intrinsically evil, hasn't posted directly on the subject this year. I've done more thinking about this in recent months, and I think this might neveretheless be a good time to revisit the questions he raises.

What may be the most succinct outline of his views, at least as far as I understand them, is at a post on his blog, Happy Consequentialism Day! on August 9, 2010. Although he provides a link to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy's definition of consequentialism, he himself has little to say about it other than it

is, as David Oderberg has put it, “downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine that should be avoided by all right-thinking people.” And the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, accordingly, as evil as consequentialism is.

Well, we've got that out of the way, huh? But with nothing else to do one recent afternoon, I went looking for a better definition, and I found at Wikipedia on one hand,

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".

But on the other, it goes on to say,

The term consequentialism was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958. However, the meaning of the word has changed over the time since Anscombe used it: in the sense she coined it, she had explicitly placed J. S. Mill in the nonconsequentialist and W. D. Ross in the consequentialist camp, whereas, in the contemporary sense of the word, they would be classified the other way round. This is due to changes in the meaning of the word, not due to changes in perceptions of W.D. Ross's and J.S. Mill's views.

So the whole idea of "consequentialism" dates only from 1958, and any effort to place earlier philosophers like Mill in any sort of "consequantialist" school is going to be dodgy. Certainly they never identified themselves as such, or indeed indicated that they in some way opposed it -- they never had any idea it existed. This is only the start of the problem. At the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy link Feser supplies above,

There is disagreement about how consequentialism can best be formulated as a precise theory, and so there are various versions of consequentialism.

. . . Consequentialism does not itself say what kinds of consequences are good. Hence people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing about what kind of outcome is good or bad.

So people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing on what it is, except that as David Oderberg has helpfully observed, it's downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine. I think this can be parsed as, "if you disagree with Edward Feser on the intrinsic evil of the atomic bombings, you're a consequentialist, case closed." But nobody can really define a consequentialist outside of that. If you say X, you agree with J S Mill, and you're a consequentialist, but nobody knows if Mill is a consequentialist or not.

But there are other problems. Feser mentions "natural law theory" four times in his post, but he never enumerates what it is. On the other hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does codify it in paragraph 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

Let's look at the language this statement uses. It prefaces the conditions with a reference to "the gravity of such a decision", viz, to go to war. This is an implicit recognition that, as General Sherman put it, "war is hell". It isn't just soldiers who suffer in any war; their families lose their fathers, brothers, husbands, and breadwinners. Civilian populations in the path of armies have suffered catastrophic depredations in all wars throughout history.

This is implicit before the Catechism even lists conditions. It assumes that "those who have responsibility for the common good" recognize that this is going to happen if they go to war at all. But the third and fourth conditions introduce a need to balance the factors: there must be serious prospects of success, and especially the evil to be eliminated must be greater than the evils that will inevitably result from going to war at all.

The catechism specifially calls for the "evaluation of these conditions". Isn't this a form of consequentialism? Feser says,

[I]t is never, never permissible to do what is intrinsically evil that good may come – not even if you’d feel much happier if you did it, not even if you’ve got some deeply ingrained tendency to want to do it, not even if it will shorten a war and save thousands of lives. Never.

It may be intrinsically evil deliberately to kill innocent civilians. The problem is "deliberate". For millennia, "those who have responsibility for the common good" must have recognized what happens to civilians in the path of an advancing army, even when there were no aircraft to drop bombs on cities. The scriptural accounts of sieges make it absolutely plain that when they end, women, children, and animals are slaughtered. Natural law theory in CCC 2309 is simply saying that civil and military authorities must factor this into their deliberations, and this is within their prudential judgment.

So, what is prudential judgment? The Catholic Answers site quotes the Catechism:

Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it. . . . With the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid (1806).

The site goes on,

Because prudence is concerned with choosing the good, a prudential judgment does not reflect a merely subjective preference. So we can be held morally accountable for the judgments we make in these matters.

But unlike principles of doctrine and morality, the Church has not definitively taught which specific answers the faithful should embrace when it comes to implementing moral principles—like justice or care for the poor—in the public sphere.

So for starters, the Catechism has presumably left the choice to use nuclear weapons to the US civil and military authorities, which is to say Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others. In the words of CCC 2309, they had "responsibility for the common good". Wait a momwnt. Isn't this impllicitly saying that Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others were tasked with providing a better outcome than the alternatives? The alternatives they saw in mid-1945 would have been:

• The likelihood that the Japanese would continue genocidal policies in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia for as long as the war would continue
• The recognition by the military authorities that continuation of the war past 1945, with expected high casualties in an invasion of Japan, would seriously reduce public support
• The likelihood that the Japanese would use suicide tactics and enlist elderly men and civilian women and children to sacrifice themselves to resist an invasion
• The Allied war aim was "unconditional surrender", which implied there would be no negotiations that might allow Japan to retain territories in China and Southeast Asia that it had invaded.

Aren't these the specific factors that the US civil and military authorites were tasked with balancing, whether the use of nuclear weapons would "produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated"? These were non-trivial decisions, made with the full underatanding of wartime exigencies. But let's go back to the Wikipedia definition of consequentialism:

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative.

Isn't this implicit in CCC 2309, which tasks the civil and military authorities with making the prudential judgment of whether the evils of, say, continuing the war after 1945 outweigh the evils of one or more nuclear attacks? I would go as far as saying that CCC 2309 is consequentialist!

I started out some years ago admiring Feser's arguments generally, but especially on the morality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, I've begun to see a sloppiness and lack of rigor that have troubled me about US academics since my days in graduate school. He refers to "natural law" or "just war theory", but he never ties himself to a specific definition of either. Nor does he define "consequentialism", a neologism that seems to resist any specific definition in any case. In fact, I would call it a hypostatization, an attempt to give a concrete existence to an abstraction. I've been there before in graduate-level classrooms, and I'm afraid I've come to think Feser is nothing special.

This also reminds me a little of Robert E Lee, who certainly in his lifetime heard many critiques of his generalship at Gettysburg. When one individual came up to him and said, "General, here's what you should have done," Lee answered, "Why didn't you tell me that before the battle?"

Home Rule For DC!

Just this past week, it looks like Trump has put another project on the front burner: he's going to reverse "home rule" for the District of Columbia. This was a major civil rights agenda item when I lived in Bethesda, just across the border in Maryland, with my family in the 1960s. The photo above speaks volumes: the only visible white figure marching with Dr King is Paul Moore Jr, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop of Washington, scion of one of the country's wealthiest families, later unmasked as a serial sexual predator. What on earth is going on here?

Even at the time, Moore fit the type of the Northern philanthropist "helping" Southern blacks depicted in Ralph Ellison's 1947 Invisible Man. What was in it for that rich white guy? We've come to understand this only very slowly, but it looks like Trump has had insight into this, among many other things.

President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to have the federal government take control of Washington, D.C., after an assault on a well-known original staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency in the nation's capital over the weekend.

Edward Coristine, also known by his online name, “Big Balls,” and a woman characterized in a police report as his significant other were the victims of an unarmed attempted carjacking early Sunday.

. . . “Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, saying minors as young as 14 should be tried as adults.

. . . “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he added.

At the time, Congressional oversight of the District of Columbia, often exercised via segregationist senior Southern Democrats, was thought to be a major civil rights injustice, which the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 was intended to remedy. It instituted a mayor and city council equivalent to other major cities, but with restrictions. Among other things, the municipal judges continued to be appointed by the president, but this seems to have done nothing to restrict the revolving-door justice system that's enabled the juvenile crime problem Trump mentions.

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. It was a key issue for Dr King, who's in the march at the far right in the photo above. Here we are 50 and 60 years later, and with almost every issue connected to the African-American community, we see the implicit questions: "Emmett Till died for this?" "Martin Luther King Jr marched for this?" It looks like Trump, who is gradually getting to be acknowledged as one of the most consequential presidents, is going to take this problem on:

End home rule and re-federalize D.C. immediately. It is long overdue, as D.C. is clearly incapable of governing itself. The days of D.C. holding the government and the country hostage need to be over. https://t.co/549EsUoebF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 5, 2025

Trump continued to telegraph his intentions yesterday:

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he may mobilize the National Guard in Washington, D.C., if the city is unable to crack down on violent crime.

The commander in chief, who deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year in response to anti-ICE riots, made the comment at the White House after a reporter asked if he was considering taking over the police in D.C.

“We’re considering it, yeah, because the crime is ridiculous,” Trump said, adding later that his plan may include “bringing in the National Guard, maybe, very quickly, too.”

But Trump also delegates these priorities, and it looks like Jeanine Pirro will be the face of remaking the District:

Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News co-host who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Saturday as the U.S. attorney for D.C., told "The Ingraham Angle" on Wednesday that she wants to help enact President Donald Trump’s vision of making the federal district "safe" and "beautiful."

"Youth violence is on the rise — not just in D.C., but across the country. And if you think that these kids need to be coddled and they need to be hugged — they need to have consequences, they need to understand that enough is enough, that we're going to put them in jail or some kind of youth rehabilitation detention facility and not allow the D.C. Council — one of whom I just recently indicted — to take cover for these kids," Pirro said.

"It's time to end it. That's what the president wants, that's what we're going to do."

I would just point out that the image of the wealthy plutocrat Paul Moore Jr marching with Dr King, on one hand a concrete illustration of Ralph Ellison's view of the world in Invisible Man, is also a manifestation of the populist Ferdinand Lundberg's understanding of the social order in America's Sixty Families and The Rich and the Super-Rich. His grandfather, William Henry Moore,

organized and promoted or sat as a director for several steel companies that were merged with among others the Carnegie Steel Company to create United States Steel. He and his brother James Hobart Moore helped create the Diamond Match Company, National Biscuit Company, First National Bank, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, the American Can Company, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, the Continental Fire Insurance Company, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the American Cotton Oil Company, and Bankers Trust.

The people who ran the country from the post-Civil War era through the Bushes and Obama were the people who were all in favor of the Washington, DC we see today, and a great deal else. What on earth is going on here?

Losing The Plot?

There's a segment of MAGA that thinks much of the Trump administration is just same old-same old, for instance at Conservative Treehouse:

Unfortunately, we have a long and painful history with the Trump-era Main Justice system, intentionally leaking information to satiate the MAGA base and tamp-down demands for reform and accountability. For seven years various Trump officials have claimed to be working to bring accountability. None has been delivered.

Also unfortunately, the pattern of bread and circuses is repeating. The Dept of Justice leaked a letter to The Federalist, in order to affirm their performance.

. . . The DOJ providing this letter directly to The Federalist, indicates the purpose of Pam Bondi’s DOJ action is performative; not substantive. If the DOJ does not want to compromise their grand jury case, then why are they leaking their letters? Simply, think about it.

. . . It’s likely the DOJ knows the challenge of the [Russiagate] case is a very high bar and they are unlikely to clear it. So, what they are doing is appeasing the ‘Russiagate’ crowd, with the performance of the investigation itself.

Certainly the Democrats and legacy media are claiming the Russiagate case is unlikely to clear a high legal bar, but the opinion isn't unanimous -- I've already linked to Jonathan Turley, who's said,

“It does appear a couple of these figures may have committed perjury. I think the most vulnerable may be Brennan, who is, like, a 30-point buck in the open,” Turley said. “This stuff goes directly to information that he gave to Congress and seems to be in contradiction, and so there are real questions here.”

In other words, there's substance here, at minimum with clear-cut perjury. Paul Sperry, who writes for Real Clear Investigations, reported a month ago,

Explosive new evidence suggests that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Obama-era CIA and FBI perjured themselves regarding their claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump secure his victory in 2016.

A newly released CIA review challenges their sworn denials to Congress that the Steele dossier – a discredited set of allegations about Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – was used as the basis for the years-long Russiagate probe that hamstrung President Trump’s first term.

. . . The CIA’s “lessons-learned” report contradicts Obama administration officials’ claims – most of which were made under oath – that they did not use the since-debunked dossier.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, for one, insisted in his sworn May 2017 testimony before Congress that the Steele dossier was not “in any way” used as a basis for the so-called ICA completed in late December 2016.

. . . Likewise, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in an official January 2017 statement that “we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions.” Several months later, he assured Congress the dossier was “not a formal part of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

More recently, Clapper also swore, "We didn't use [the dossier] in our Intelligence Community Assessment" and "We didn't use it for the Intelligence Community Assessment, we didn't draw on it." [Emphasis added.]

. . . While testifying in a December 2017 deposition, moreover, former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe asserted that although a written summary of the dossier was appended to the classified version of the ICA, it was never referred to “in the main body” of the intel report.

. . . McCabe’s boss, former FBI Director James B. Comey, swore the same thing during a September 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

The CIA review shows that the unverified and now-debunked dossier was used as support for the intelligence analysis, not just as a sidebar as Obama officials have maintained.

Sperry has also posted that other inquiries are in process:

NEW: The DOJ-FBI Strike Force investigating the Russiagate conspiracy of corruption is dusting off "a dozen" criminal referrals sent several yrs ago by the House Intelligence Committee to investigate Obama officials who potentially perjured themselves during closed-door hearings.

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) July 30, 2025

With the grand jury apparently empaneled in Miami, this would be an indication that the Mar-a-Lago raid will be used as an action in furtherance of an overall conspiracy:

The Mar-a-lago raid by the Biden (Obama) Administration was part of the ongoing Russiagate conspiracy.

This could open the door for a grand jury in Florida and not in the safety of DC.

Oops!pic.twitter.com/eVZucbwq2Z

— C3 (@C_3C_3) August 4, 2025

On top of that are the puzzling developments surrounding Ghislaine Maxwell's meeting with now-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in his 2024 criminal trial in New York City. Although Trump appears to keep his distance from any day-to-day developments in this and other cases, we may assume that this matter has a high priority with both Trump and the Justice Department.

Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell handed authorities documentation alleging that at least “100 different people” were within the late pedophile’s orbit, a bombshell disclosure that comes after two meetings with a top official from the U.S. Justice Department.

. . . By offering up the evidence, Maxwell has laid all her cards on the table, making good on a promise to deliver new information to the DOJ in exchange for consideration around a reduced sentence.

Within days of this meeting, she

was moved to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, prison officials said Friday.

Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in recruiting and trafficking minors for sex, was being held at a low-security facility in Tallahassee, Florida, that housed men and women.

The camp in Bryan, Texas, houses only women. A majority of its inmates are serving time for nonviolent offenses and white-collar crimes.

. . . Sex offenders must be in at least a low-level security prison like FCI Tallahassee, unless she received a waiver.

Only the administrator of [the Bureau of Prisons'] Designation and Sentence Computation Center can make that decision, according to the waiver policy.

Also subsequently,

The Trump administration is considering publicly releasing the transcript of a Justice Department official's two-day interview with Ghislaine Maxwell last month, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News on Tuesday.

“We’re leaning toward transparency,” the source said.

In what doesn't seem coincidental,

The House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas Tuesday to a slew of former attorneys general and FBI directors, as well as former President Bill Clinton, for testimony about the case involving convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The subpoenas seeking depositions from the former Justice Department officials were issued after Republicans and Democrats on a House Oversight subcommittee approved measures to authorize the demands last month as part of efforts by Congress to obtain more information about Epstein.

. . . The committee is seeking testimony from Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as from officials spanning the past four presidential administrations: former Attorneys General Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, and former FBI Directors James Comey and Robert Mueller. Sessions and Barr led the Justice Department during President Trump's first term. Lawmakers are seeking information from the Clintons because of the former president's past ties to Epstein and Maxwell in the early 2000s.

None of this strikes me as "performative". Instead, it looks like consistent progress toward a goal, moving at fairly high speed. In response to the Epstein controversy last month, Trump repeatedly said he thought Attorney General Bondi was doing a good job, and just looking at the evidence that's been coming out, I've got to conclude that she, Blanche, and Patel are doing exactly what's expected.

More Questions About The Strzok-Page Texts

There are several continuing questions about the text and e-mail messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that were exchanged on FBI computers as they conducted a torrid affair. For starters, the texts, which were sent over a period between August 2015 abd sometime in mid-2017, weren't released until the affair became public on December 13, 2017. In hindsight, this revelation, or series of revelations, appears to have been carefully managed.

A series of text messages exchanged between top FBI employees referring to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as an “idiot” and “d*uche,” while fearing his potential victory as “terrifying,” were released to lawmakers Tuesday evening on Capitol Hill amid increasing demands to see them, according to documents reviewed by CNN.

Earlier this month, reports surfaced that special counsel Robert Mueller had removed Peter Strzok, one of the FBI’s top Russian counterintelligence experts, from his team after an internal investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered politically tinged messages exchanged with FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

Throughout the primary season in 2016, Strzok and Page appeared to dread a Trump victory, according to the messages reviewed by CNN.

. . . Page was also briefly on Mueller’s team before returning to the FBI, but she completed her detail before the special counsel’s office was made aware of the texts.

The roughly 375 text messages disclosed Tuesday span from August 2015 through early December 2016, though the inspector general’s probe of the entire situation remains ongoing.

In addition, Strzok and Page exchanged an estimated 50,000 texts and e-mails over the entire course of their affair. This amounts to about 75 texts or e-mails per day, weekends and holidays included, over 22 months. Something's really out of kilter here, teen romance on steroids -- you've got to ask what was wrong with this pair down deep. In addition, of the roughly 50,000 total, far fewer have ever been released, most in a few tranches from December 2017 to early 20l8.

As I noted yesterday, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who had been aware of the affair by December 2016 but took no official action, did remove Strzok from the Mueller investigation in July 2017 once he learned of the texts and e-mails. However, this was not made public until the texts and e-mails were made public that December.

But that's not the end of this story. Once the FBI began dribbling out small excerpts from the enormous total, it emerged that five full months worth were missing entirely:

The FBI is missing five months of text messages between two senior officials who Republicans on Capitol Hill have accused of political bias, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed in a letter to the bureau made public on Sunday.

Republicans have been scrutinizing the text messages between senior counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page as part of their inquiry into whether bias infected the bureau’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state and into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

. . . Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a top House conservative who has been among the most aggressive critics of FBI leadership, pointed to the missing texts as a reason for a new special counsel to examine the FBI investigation.

Members of Congress were previously provided with hundreds of pages of their texts, but they learned last week that texts from Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 were missing. In a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Inspector General Michael Horowitz said Thursday that forensic tools have been able to recover some of those texts and efforts find others are still underway.

. . . Sen. Johnson released additional messages Wednesday, including some in which Strzok appears reticent to join Mueller’s team and doubtful that it will uncover anything. Johnson and others have also suggested a post-election text referring to forming a “secret society” was evidence of a plot against Trump, but Johnson acknowledged Thursday it may have just been a joke.

Much of the texts' content was both cryptic and banal, but a few, like the "insurance policy" text I discussed yesterday and another that referred to an apparent FBI "secret society", have consistently been dismissed as jokes:

Lawmakers have refused to publicly release the full text message, sent the day after Trump won the 2016 presidential election. But ABC News has obtained a copy of the one message that Republicans appear to be citing, and it's unclear if the message's reference to a “secret society” may have been made in jest.

"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society," FBI lawyer Lisa Page wrote to senior FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was working on the FBI’s probe of Russian meddling in the presidential election and would later join Page for a brief period on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team.

.. . On Friday, the Justice Department handed the Senate Homeland Security Committee and other committees a new batch of more than 1,000 messages sent between Strzok and Page. The messages newly obtained by ABC News were in that set.

Asked Wednesday whether he believes there’s a "secret society" inside the FBI to take down the president, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said, "That's Strzok and Page’s term."

"Everything I take with a grain of salt," he added. "[But] I've heard from an individual that ... there was a group of managers within the FBI that were holding meetings off site."

So "when Strzok and Page had described a secret society, that didn't surprise me because I had corroborating information," Johnson said.

It's worth pointing out that Justice Department Inpector General Michael Horowitz, who was responsible for finding the Strzok-Page texts, was notably not among those whom Trump fired when he returned to office.

Wikipedia has an entry for the FBI secret society conspiracy theory that concludes,

Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter summed up the situation as follows: Other than misusing their government-issued phones, neither Strzok or Page broke the law. Most likely they communicated on their work phones to hide their affair from their spouses and were not plotting against Trump. He said, "They’re making a big whoopty-do about nothing. . . . If they had been using their personal phones to talk about Trump, they would have been perfectly in their right to do so. . . . Congress shouldn’t be wasting our money looking through the texts of these bozos. The only people whose time it’s worth going through their texts are divorce attorneys on behalf of their spouses."

For starters, Strzok and Page weren't using their personal phones to talk about Trump, they used FBI phones to conduct their affair and sent an astonishing 50,000 messages to do it. This would be grounds for termination in just about any normal organization, government or private sector. It also raises serious questions about their mental balance, anti-Trump or no -- but this pair was in charge of extremely sensitive matters requiring a great deal of trust and judgment.

In additiion, how and why the e-mails between December 2016 and May 2017 -- a period that includes key Obama White House meetings, the Michael Flynn affair, and Trump's firing James Comey -- went missing is a question worth asking, and if anything deliberate was done to make them go missing, it raises the real possibility of obsruction of justice. These are issues that go well beyond divorce court, although Page and her then-husband did divorce in 2023, while Strzok appears to be still married to his wife.

What In Fact Was Strzok's "Insurance Policy"?

Perhaps the most intriguing text among the thousands of exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page was this one:

[I]n a text from August 15, 2016, Strzok tells Page: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office” – an apparent reference to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe – “that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 … . ” Page does not appear to have responded, according to records reviewed by CNN.

The standard interpretation of Strzok's language is this:

Lots of folks on the right are suggesting that “insurance policy” is some opaque and sinister Deep State code for black ops in the event of a Trump victory.

. . . Give me a break. Read the text again.

Strzok was reacting to the argument that there was no point getting worked up because Trump was bound to lose.

Except that August 15, 2016 was just two weeks after Strzok opened Operation Crossfire Hurricane into "whether individuals associated with Trump's presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election". This shifted the FBI's focus from Hillary's e-mail server, a legitimate concern that they ultimately minimized, to "Russian collusion", which was pure fabrication aimed at Trump.

The "insurance policy" wasn't just the confidence that Trump would lose in November, it was to put in place an active plan to remove him from office, via either impeachment for treason or removal via the 25th Amendment, based on the idea that he was a Russian agent. This isn't just me suddenly going all conspiracy-theory; CIA Director Ratclffe said the same thing last night:

During this week’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Night in America,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe offered remarks on the release of the Durham Annex, tied to the so-called Russia-gate “hoax.”

“Well, Trey, think about that, that there was Intelligence from foreign Intelligence services, that one U.S. presidential candidate was trying to frame another candidate for treason, claiming that he was an agent of a foreign power, an agent of Russia, and that Intelligence was never shared with you or I, as members of Congressional Oversight Committees on Intelligence. And you know, but for the good fortune of me being able to find John Brennan’s notes and declassify that, that secret may have been hidden forever, but I was able to provide that to John Durham, and you see some of that in his annex that was declassified this week.”

". . . So before all of this started, Trey, what we did know is this, that on July 31, 2016 the FBI did something as shocking as it was unprecedented,” he continued. “They opened a criminal investigation into a nominee for president, a candidate for president, . . . But what you learned in John Brennan’s annex this week was six days before that, Russian Intelligence predicted that’s exactly what would happen, that there was a Hillary Clinton plan, and that the FBI would pour oil on the fire of a firestorm that would consume the country for the next three years.”

Lert's take one example of how this plan was implemented. It's been tickling my spidey sense for a while, the plot to entrap National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn during the transition.

As part of the larger “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign and possible involvement by persons in the Trump campaign, . . . the FBI opened a specific counterintelligence investigation concerning Flynn (“Crossfire Razor”) on August 16, 2016. The Flynn investigation was based upon “an articulable factual basis that [he] may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security.” That, in turn, was predicated upon an assessment of “reliable” lead information, including that Flynn had been a foreign policy adviser to Trump since February 2016; that he “had ties to various state-affiliated entities of the Russian Federation”; that he traveled to Russia in December 2015; and that he had an active TS/SCI security clearance.

Considering the "Crossfire Razor" investigation was opened a day after "Crossfire Hurricane", it appears that Strzok et al thought Flynn was a major path to reach Trump himself. But they worked on it from August 2016 onward; Trump won the election, and it doesn't look like they could come up with anything. At the same link,

A draft memorandum dated January 4, 2017, apparently prepared for approval by FBI agent Joe Pientka, would have closed the Flynn investigation because it “did not yield any information on which to predicate further investigative efforts.” The memo added that the investigation would be subject to possible reopening if “new information” came to light.

However, on December 29, 2016, the outgoing Obama administration announced sanctions on Russia bssed on claims that Russia had hacked the election. These claims were spurious, as outlined in the Durham annex.

The Obama administration on Thursday announced its retaliation for Russian efforts to interfere with the US presidential election, ordering sweeping new sanctions that included the expulsion of 35 Russians.

. . . In Moscow, a Putin spokesman said Russia regretted the new sanctions and would consider retaliatory measures.

Diplomatic expulsions are normally met with exactly reciprocal action. In this case, however, Moscow may pause for thought. With Trump, who has spoken positively about Russia and Vladimir Putin, just three weeks away from the White House, Russia may feel it is inadvisable to kick out 35 US diplomats.

Flynn then discussed these actions in one of a series of phone calls with Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak, who was serving as an intermediary with Russian President Putin. It's worth noting that these calls were enitrely appropriate, as Flynn was the incoming National Security Adviser, even though he was technically a private citizen, but the Obama administration had disrupted ordinary Russia-US relations with its expulsions and sanctions just weeks before Trump's inauguration. Flynn's effort was clearly to head off a Russian overreaction.

Flynn was supposedly scrutinized at the time for potentially violating the Logan Act, an obscure law dealing with conversations with foreign adversaries.

But Flynn’s allies have long maintained that his conversations were legitimate and he was lured into a “perjury trap” by the FBI.

In fact, the FBI was investigating Flynn for violsting the Logan Act with these calls, although there has never been a successful prosecution under the Logan Act.

On January 22, 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that Flynn was under investigation by U.S. counterintelligence agents for his communications with Russian officials.

. . . In January 2017, then-FBI director James Comey decided to send FBI agents to interview Flynn. Knowing Flynn had asked ambassador Kislyak to ensure that Russia would not respond harshly to U.S. sanctions, and also that Flynn had told Mike Pence and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus he had not made this request, Comey decided that Flynn needed to be investigated to make sure he was not acting under Russian influence. Comey asked for Flynn to be called directly to arrange the meeting, instead of following the usual protocol of attempting to arrange a meeting with Flynn through the White House counsel's office. Comey would later state that the usual protocol would have been expected "in an administration where the rhythm of the context between the FBI and the White House was more established".

. . . Then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe called Flynn on January 24, asking him to meet two FBI counterintelligence agents; Flynn agreed. McCabe also asked if Flynn wanted a lawyer present, to which Flynn said no. The two agents, FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterespionage Division Peter Strzok and FBI agent Joe Pientka, met Flynn at his office later that day. Before the meeting, McCabe, Strzok and Pientka considered whether to remind Flynn beforehand that lying to the FBI during an interview was a crime, but decided against it because "they wanted Flynn to be relaxed, and they were concerned that giving warning might adversely affect the rapport," according to a statement later put out by Flynn's lawyers, based on internal FBI documents.

Flynn's replies to specific questions from the agents about his calls to Kislyak, according to the link, were vague, amounting to "Not really. I don't remember." However, the FBI group decided this amounted to lying to federal agents and sent this up the chain of command:

Based on the results of the FBI interview, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates made an "urgent" request to meet with newly-appointed White House Counsel Don McGahn. She met with him on January 26 and again on January 27. She informed McGahn that Flynn was "compromised" and possibly open to blackmail by the Russians. Yates told McGahn that Flynn had misled Pence and other administration officials about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador.

In the wake of this, Flynn was pushed out as National Security Adviser in February, with the public explanation that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the call. However, it isn't entirely clear that Flynn ever talked directly to Pence about this. Flynn's most recent version of events is this, as I laid out here on Juy 23:

Yeah. And if you read—yeah. And I lay this out in my book as well. Mike Pence—was he a dupe? Was he unwitting? Mike Pence was used. No doubt, no doubt. Because there’s another piece of evidence that I’m waiting to see come out. And I’ve asked, and I’ve basically demanded that it comes out. And we know this is a really critical piece of evidence.

Sally Yates and Mary McCord, who was head of the National Security Division for the Department of Justice—Sally Yates was the acting Attorney General—went over to the White House like two or three days prior to me having to be resigned and me being fired on the 13th of February. I think it was the date.

So Mike Pence, Reince Priebus are in the Situation Room in the White House, and Mary McCord, Andy McCabe is the other name, and Sally Yates was the third name that came and briefed Mike Pence on a document. And Mike Pence—he had Reince Priebus call me up while they were all together. And he said, “I just reviewed this document. The document shows that you talked about sanctions”—something I never talked about, ever.

It's worth pointing out that descriptions of this episode also involve roles by both Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, who had repeated assertions that Flynn hadn't discussed sanctions with Kislyak, but the actual circumstances seem to be uncertain at best. Sally Yates had apparently already resigned as Acting Attorney General prior to this meeting, for reasons never made completely clear, but was apparently still on the job. Sean Spicer resigned as Press Secretary on July 21; Priebus resigned as Chief of Staff on July 28. Oddly, on July 27, Peter Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigation, but this was kept quiet until December of that year.

It’s long been gospel in the Russia probe: When special counsel Robert Mueller learned of the inflammatory anti-Trump text messages FBI agent Peter Strzok sent, he immediately removed him from his team.

But in a newly released [May 2020] transcript of a December 2017 interview, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told lawmakers that he’s the one who made the call to oust Strzok from the probe, worrying that Strzok’s involvement could taint the special counsel’s work.

In a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, McCabe said he learned of Strzok’s text messages on July 27, 2017, and made a quick decision.

“I made the decision to remove him from the investigation that evening,” McCabe said at the time.

“That very day you decided to remove him?” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) asked.

“I came back from my meeting with the inspector general. I met with a very small group of my fellow leaders. We discussed Peter’s reassignment, and we discussed where we would place him,” McCabe replied.

He was apparenty placed in a job without duties in Human Resources. McCabe himself was fired by then-Attorney General Sessions on March 16, 2020, but his entire tenure as Deputy FBI Director and then Acting Director had been dogged by allegations of conflict of interest with the Clinton Foundation.

Here's what we know. There was a successful effort to push Michael Flynn out as National Security Adviser early in the Trump administration, but that really appears to have given Trump a heads-up, probably from people like Devin Nunes, on what was really going on, because Trump seems rather quickly to have begun to make changes, the first of which was made public when he fired James Comey on May 9, but this was followed by other terminations and reassignments in July. Yates, whether coincidentally or not, had already resigned before the February meeting with Pence.

What did Trump know about concrete plans to push him out, either for treason via impeachment, or via the 25th Amendment, in late winter and spring of 2016, using claims that he was a Russian agent? It's hard to avoid speculating that the meeting of McCabe, Yates, McCord, Pence, and Priebus on February 13 was at minimum an attempt to groom Priebus, as Trump's Chief of Staff, and Pence, as Vice President, for a try at a 25th Amendment removal based on the idea that Trump was a Russian agent. At least this failed, even if it succereded in pushing Flynn out, and it resulted in removal of what Trunp must already have known were key players. (Pence's position was unknown, but he could not have been fired, having been separately elected to constitutional office as vice president. Certainly Trump never considered him as a runniong mate in 2024.)

This says to me that the current Trump team in the FBI, CIA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence know a great deal more than they're letting on, because the Trump team has known a lot of this since his first term. In fact, it's no coincidence that people like Patel, Ratcliffe, and Nunes, who had been part of congressional investigations in the first term, are on the team now. It also suggests that they're a lot closer to prosecution than anyone on the outside now thinks.