John Solomon's Revelations

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News. I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary.

Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out:

I do have a crystal ball about what we probably will be talking about in the next 48 hours. After all the leak stuff that I've done in the last few days, you kind of see two buckets of leaks, you've got Adam Schiff, we'll talk about that, and you've got James Comey and his sort of personal media consigliere that he puts on the taxpayer's dime to sort of burnish his image. One of the other things that I've always wanted to get to, and I think we've found the holy grail documents now, is everybody is focused on Hillary Clinton and the e-mail server, and that's an inmportant story, because it involved classified information being moved through an insecure channel.

But I've always believed that the bigger threat to Hillary Clinton was what the FBI was trying to do to look at whether her foundation was basically a back door for corruption, a Hunter Biden laundered through a c(3) family foundation. In the next 48 hours or so, I think we're going to get to see for the first time just how much political interference FBI agents faced in multiple jurisdictions when they got predicated leads, meaning evidence that warranted criminal investigation. . . concerning the Clinton Foundation. [This is the story that came out yesterday.] We're probably going to be able to name the names of people who ordered these investigations shut down [Yates and McCabe], even though the FBI manual, the US Attorney's manual, suggested those investigations should proceed until determinations were made about criminality.

I think this is the big Hillary scandal that has sort of skated below the radar, and I think it's going to be in the next few weeks a very parallel story to what happened with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden, the FBI, the IRS, everybody knew he had a problem. and nobody could get the permission to go and do the case right until these whistleblowers came forward with us two years ago. I think similarly, you're going to see that there was a protection racket around Hillary Clinton, not just on the e-mail, we know what James Comey did with his magic FBI wand. . . . you're going to see who in government was providing that protection.

Solomon sees an overall pattern: a scandal threatens to emerge that could hurt Hillary badly, first the pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation, and then the offsite e-mail server, but in both cases, she's able to enlist the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to shut those invesgations down, and not only that, but to start phony investigations of Trump and his people to create a distraction. Solomon says later in the interview,

. . . Last week, Harmeet Dhillon came on the show, she's the civil rights chief for the [Justice Department], and she said, based on what she's seen, and she's not gonna talk about specific cases, but there's a very good chance that what the Justice Derpartment's gonna look at, is that this process, this "clear Hillary and put a fake scandal on the Trump people", may have been a deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties under color of authority.

It seems like nobody likes John Solomon. I did a web search on "disgraced journalist John Solomon" and got hits from the left like:

Fox News host Sean Hannity has welcomed disgraced conservative journalist and serial misinformer John Solomon back for regular appearances on his prime-time show to rail against the FBI search for classified government documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

In 2019, Solomon appeared over 50 times on Hannity’s show, where he regularly pushed Ukraine-linked conspiracy theories meant to undermine the validity of the Trump-Russia investigation that dominated headlines during the first years of the Trump presidency and was at the center of his first impeachment trial. Solomon was later fired from his position as a Fox News contributor for his role in coordinating a “disinformation campaign” to protect Trump, and his appearances on the network fell off.

But Sundance at Conservative Treehouse accuses Solomon of workng hand-in-glove with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to "leak" nothingburgers to create the appearance of active investigations. Just this past Wednesday:

Apparently, Kash Patel just discovered Daniel Richman, the guy who leaked information on behalf of James Comey; and along with that name from the past, someone in the Kash Patel office decided they wanted to highlight the 8-year-old FBI investigation about the FBI hunting for internal leakers.

Patel sends John Solomon the information on Daniel Richman. Solomon repackages the information and sells it as new bombshells. I’m not sure what these guys are doing, but Richman is a well known name from the past, when James Comey made the unsolicited announcement, a self-admission in 2017 about his use of Richman to leak to the New York Times.

The day before:

FBI Director Kash Patel sends John Solomon a declassified whistleblower report, showing how a prior House Intelligence Committee staffer blew the whistle on then HPSCI ranking member Adam Schiff, who was giving the staff instructions to leak fabricated intelligence reports on Trump-Russia to smear President Donald Trump in 2017 and 2018.

According to the release {SEE HERE}, the FBI eventually received and investigated the whistleblower claims; then in 2023, sent the information to the Merrick Garland/Lisa Monaco DOJ, who took no action because the claim was now beyond the statute of limitations.

. . . As Solomon now notes, … “The alleged leaks fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution on most legal theories, but the revelations nevertheless come at a sensitive time for Schiff“.. At the time of the Whistleblower report, the information to the FBI and DOJ would have been evidence that could have prosecuted Adam Schiff. However, now the information is limited to just providing I-told-you-so’s.

As best I can make out, Solomon's problem is that he was reporting favorably on Trump when that wasn't cool. Now, at least for Sundance, his problem seems to be that Trump people trust him and give him stories they don't give to Sundance, which is confirmation that they're secretly working against Trump, or something like that.

My sense is that Trump people trust Solomon and are giving him important stories, although within traditionally circumscribed guidelines. They won't comment on ongoing investigations and won't leak, but they'll point him to public information they think is important. That's all I can gather from the Spicer interview. But I also have a sense that Sundance is miffed that people like Patel and Dhillon don't trust him, either.

Sally Yates

Sally Yates so far has turned up just at the margins of the Russiagate saga. She's surfaced in this post largely as a stand-in for the departed Loretta Lynch during the last days of the Obama administration and the first days of Trump 45. According to Wikipedia,

In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days.

Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates stated the order was neither defensible in court nor consistent with the Constitution. Although large portions of the order were initially blocked by federal courts, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld a revised version.

However, her most visible role so far was in forcing Michael Flynn's removal as National Security Adviser during the brief period when she was Acting Attorney General. According to Wikipedia,

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. She added that Flynn's "underlying conduct", which she could not describe due to classification, "was problematic in and of itself", saying "it was a whole lot more than one White House official lying to another."

Yates's name has now reappeared in connection with internal divisions within the Obama Justice Department and Comey FBI over whether to investigate Hillary Clinton over a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation.

"Shut it down!" then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates is quoted as demanding in the detailed timeline of political impediments that agents in New York City, Little Rock, Ark., and Washington D.C. reported.

The agents tried to get the help of federal prosecutors to determine whether or what crimes occurred while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, most notably, because at that time, her family foundation solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign and U.S. interests with business before her department.

According to the link, an FBI investigation in Washington

was opened “as a preliminary investigation, because the Case Agent wanted to determine if he could develop additional information to corroborate the allegations in a recently-published book, Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, before seeking to convert the matter to a full investigation.”

. . . the FBI’s Little Rock and New York investigations “included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.”

Despite that evidence, the FBI timeline stated that DOJ “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation” on February 1, 2016.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the primary figure involved in limiting investigations day-to-day, although he was almost certainly doing the bidding of Yates and Comey.

[T]he FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division reiterated that “all overt investigative steps related to the CF investigation” would “require” McCabe’s approval, “with the exception of speaking to open CHSs” during a February 22, 2016 meeting. The inquiry was further hobbled during the meeting when the FBI offices were “directed not to open or recruit any new CHSs, and no additional overt investigative steps were authorized.”

. . . Paul Abbate, then the assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, described McCabe as "negative," "annoyed," and "angry" about the Clinton Foundation cases, with McCabe saying that "they [the DOJ] say there's nothing here" and with McCabe asking "why are we even doing this?"

The investigations cited at the link from Inspector General Horowitz and Special Counsel Durham seem to conclude that McCabe exceeded his authority, presumably from Comey and Yates, to whom he reportedL:

Horowitz’s report in 2018 detailed multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators, including while under oath, about his authorization to then leak sensitive information to The Wall Street Journal in late October 2016 that revealed the existence of the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation (while not revealing how McCabe had put the inquiry in leg-irons for nearly a year).

The Horowitz report concluded “the evidence is substantial” that McCabe misled investigators “knowingly and intentionally” about leaking to the media. Comey said he did not permit McCabe to tell the media, and Horowitz wrote that McCabe’s actions were “designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and “violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”

Nevertheless, the story is now emerging that Comey himself leaked classified information to the New York Times via his confidant Daniel Richman.

Richman, who became friends with Comey during their time working together in the Southern District of New York, admitted to speaking with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, in particular.

At one point in early 2017, Richman had a discussion with Schmidt, who mentioned unspecified classified information and “knew more about it than he did,” an FBI memo obtained by The Post said.

. . . While the memo, first reported by Just the News, didn’t specify the classified information discussed, it previously said Comey mentioned to Richman that the bureau had “weird classified material related” to then-US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch.

Lynch infamously met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in 2016, just over a week before Comey announced he wasn’t recommending charges against Hillary Clinton.

. . . “Richman understood the information about Lynch was highly classified and it should be protected.”

The FBI memo in question comes from the bureau’s “Arctic Haze” investigation, a probe into the leaking of classified information that began in August 2017 in response to the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information in eight articles published between April and June 2017.”

So whether Andrew McCabe was or wasn't exceeding his own authority, he appears on one hand to have been thwarting investigations consistent with the expressed or unexpressed wishes of both Yates and Comey, while Comey in particular was leaking independently of McCabe. It's hard for me to avoid thinking McCabe's role was to keep Comey's and Yates's fingerprints off the frammis.

Someone, maybe Strzok, maybe McCabe, maybe even Lisa Page, could get a really good deal if they were to flip for the prosecutors.

Who Is Jay Bratt?

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed.

BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents.

Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody.

Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025

I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces:

Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to one individual in this week’s disclosure of records in the FBI’s multi-faceted leak investigations once again demonstrate the double standard in how the establishment Department of Justice approached the mishandling of classified information: Jay Bratt.

While Bratt is not specifically mentioned by name in the latest 266-page document dump, the powerful office he ran for six years, the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES), is cited repeatedly.

Wait a moment. Who is Jay Bratt, and why isn't he mentioned? I had only a vague memory that he was a special prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago classified files case, but he faded from view after the judge dismissed it. Then he briefly popped into view again this past May:

The former special counsel prosecutor Jay Bratt asserted his fifth amendment right not to answer questions during a Wednesday deposition before a Republican-led House committee looking for evidence of politicization in the prosecutions of Donald Trump, a spokesman said.

So, why is he taking the fifth? Back at the link,

Top justice department officials have made clear that they plan to investigate prosecutors who brought charges against Trump during his four years out of office. Two years ago, after Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges related to tampering with its 2020 election result, the now-attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that justice department prosecutors “will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.”

So, even though he's hardly been mentioned, and he definitely hasn't been one of the usual suspects, his spidey sense is apparently telling him to be very, very careful. And his spidey sense has been active for some months. On January 6 of this year, just two weeks before Trump returned to office,

A lead prosecutor on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prosecution into President-elect Trump’s mishandling of documents at Mar-a-Lago has retired from the department.

Jay Bratt left the DOJ on Friday after 34 years of working for the department, a spokesperson confirmed.

Bratt was a senior national security prosecutor who worked on the Mar-a-Lago documents case in its earliest stages, later working on detail in special counsel Jack Smith’s office.

According to the Julie Kelly story, prior to the Mar-a-Lago business, Bratt was involved in FBI investigations -- "'Foggy Falls' into the Carter Page FISA leak and 'Genetic Christmas' into Russian election hacking claims" -- that now appear to have focused on then-House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff approving committee staff leaking classified information to the press to damage Trump. Bratt

—under his predecessor and then after he took the reins of the office in October 2018—stonewalled requests by the Washington FBI field office (WFO) for help in the Page FISA inquiry. “Since DOJ CES and [the DC US attorney’s office] were not willing to obtain [sentence redacted], WFO exhausted all logical investigative steps to move the case forward and requested DOJ CES and [DC US attorney’s office] to provide WFO with a declination memorandum,” one memo read.

Buit almost immediately after Trump 45 left office,

As the apparent conduit between the Biden White House and the DOJ in concocting the classified documents case, Bratt aggressively pursued the president and his associates starting in early 2021.

Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 along with three FBI agents on a reconnaissance mission disguised as a legit attempt to help Team Trump locate more classified papers to comply with a subpoena in the matter.

Following the visit, Bratt pushed hard to obtain a warrant to search the president’s residence, resulting in the nine-hour armed raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Bratt was then tasked to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and took the lead in prosecuting Trump following Smith’s June 2023 criminal indictment in the documents case.

Kelly doesn't mention any direct connection between the new disclosure that Adam Schiff approved leaks of classified information from the House Intelligence Committee to the press to damage Trump and Bratt's apparent actions to deny information about the leaks to the FBI's Washington Field Office and subsequent closure of those investigations. According to that link,

A career intelligence officer who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a decade repeatedly warned the FBI beginning in 2017 that then-Rep. Adam Schiff had approved leaking classified information to smear then-President Donald Trump over the now-debunked Russiagate scandal, according to bombshell FBI memos that Director Kash Patel has turned over to Congress.

The FBI 302 interview reports obtained by Just the News state the intelligence staffer — a Democrat by party affiliation who described himself as a friend to both Schiff, now a California senator, and former Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes — considered the classified leaking to be "unethical," "illegal," and “treasonous,” but was told not to worry about it because Schiff believed he would be spared prosecution under the Constitution's speech and debate clause.

. . . But officials told Just the News that DOJ officials showed little interest in pursuing Schiff when the allegations were brought to them years ago, citing the very same excuse the lawmaker had offered.

So, was Jay Bratt among the DOJ officials who "showed little interest in pursuing Schiff" when the whistleblower raised the alarm? Where were Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray, for that matter? It can't be much of a surprise, putting these recent developments in context, that Bratt would plead the fifth in an interview with the House Judiciary Committee. Garland and Wray may one day have to do the same.

At minimum, it seems peculiar that the same guy who may have played a role in protecting Adam Schiff from being investigated for leaking classified documents should suddenly develop such a strong interest in whether Trump might have mishandled the same that he wound up being seconded from a high-level DOJ job to being the line prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago case, at least nominally a demotion.

But it's hard not to think these are just small pieces of an intricate machine, and if Bratt found it first convenient to retire and then prudent to plead the fifth, this may in fact say things about Schiff, Wray, and Garland. I very much doubt this has escaped Bondi and Patel. Certainly Bratt's activities after 2020 could involve Schiff in a continuing conspiracy as well.

Jim Crow 2.0

Something occurred to me just this morning: the last summer of Trump's first term was marked by the George Floyd riots. Floyd was hyped for months as a paradigmatic hero-martyr, an implicit counterpoint to a racist Trump. Somehow this summer, the victim narrative has been turned upside-down: the most visible image is a law-abiding white guy, Edward Coristine, the former DOGE staffer who was badly beaten by a gang of black teens as he tried to defend his girlfriend from a carjacking.

In the aftermath, Trump launched a new administration agenda to clean up the District of Columbia. As I noted laast week, this was an implicit reversal of a major civil rights agenda item from the 1960s and 70s, Home Rule for DC, and the current civil rights establishment understands it for what it is:

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn has insited that President Trump’s cleanup of Washington D.C. amounts to Jim Crow 2.0.

. . . Meanwhile, the city’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser was slightly more diplomatic, describing the move as “unsettling and unprecedented.”

The Nation argued, with reference to the 1960s Home Rule issues:

Washington, DC, already lacks representation in Congress, has no control over its own budget, and cannot pass laws free from congressional interference. Now under the Trump administration, the city is moving toward bantustan status. By invoking bogus emergency powers under the DC Home Rule Act, President Donald Trump has effectively federalized law enforcement within the district, delegating supervision of DC Metro police to Attorney General Pam Bondi and authorizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to mobilize National Guard troops in Washington. Drug Enforcement Agency head Terry Cole will have operational control over Washington’s Metro Police Department as its interim federal commissioner.

On one hand, this is a retrospective acknowledgement that Home Rule for the District was a major civil rights agenda item back in the day, and it's also a recognition that Trump, as part of a new agenda, is going to dismantle the implicit 1960s civil rights settlement.

This settlement was effectively brought about by Martin Luther King's implied threat, conveyed through his advocacy of non-violence on one hand, but on the other counterpointed by the reality on the ground of race riots in major US cities throughout the decade. The actual message was surrender power to black brokers in the urban core or risk all-out race war, and the elites took the deal in city after city in subsequent years, especially in Washington.

As the Nation piece at the link makes clear, the deal waa incomplete, and as far as Washington went, it still left a lot to congress. But there was another unspoken carveout: in return for leniency toward the criminal underclass in the ghetto, the new urban elite would continue to keep the criminals out of the wealthy enclaves (in Washington, Georgetown and the strip up Wisconsin Avenue to Chevy Chase) and otherwise favor the existing upper class in policy decisions. The upper class would also look the other way over the urban elite's corruption, again in return for averting the Helter-Skelter race war.

The problem is that the 1960s deal has been falling apart. That deal was, as I've kept saying here, an alliance between the upper class and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the criminal underclass and its political brokers in the new urban elite, which left out the working class, who've been the group primarily victimized by the policy of leniency toward the criminal underclass. It's taken the working class 60 years to catch on, but they've finally caught on.

As far as the upper class goes, the new urban elites also haven't kept their part of the deal. A key issue has been homelessness; encampments have spread to affluent neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Mayor Bass has become the figurehead for the city's inability to protect Pacific Palisades and the neighboring unincorporated Malibu, two highly affluent areas, from destructive wildfires or enable the residents' desire to rebuild. Bass is acutely coknscious of what Trump has in mind in taking over Washington, DC law enforcement, as shown in a recent interview with Kasie Hunt on CNN:

KASIE HUNT: The president, Madam Mayor, suggested that this effort that he has undertaken to take over the DC police force to federalize the city may not be limited to Washington, DC. Did you take that as a threat?

KAREN BASS: Well, I mean, the threat was already enacted upon here and we all know that DC is in a very different situation because DC is not a state. . . You remember, we didn't just have 4,000 National Guard members, we also had about, I think it was about 700 U.S. Marines. Completely inappropriate, a political stunt and that was not needed and I believed then and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case and I think DC is a test case as well for the president to say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want and I'm the commander in chief and I can use the troops whenever we want.

Byron York, whom I've often characterized here as a spokesman for the conventional wisdom, sees things this way:

In opposing Trump, will Democrats end up defending crime in the district or defending its right to have a high crime rate? Some are already doing just that. It puts them on the wrong side of another lopsided issue, like they are with the border.

But here is the thing. Trump is imagining a Washington with a far lower crime rate than its residents have become accustomed to. Even though they stand to benefit enormously if he succeeds, many of those residents and their political representatives will oppose Trump for trying. In the process, they will become almost protective of their crime rate now that Trump is threatening it. That is crazy. But it might be where we are headed.

What York doesn't see is that the basic 1960s civil rights consensus has broken down. Whatever the brokers for the urban elite may try to say, they've failed to deliver on their implicit promise, leniency toward the criminal underclass, whose depredations would be aimed at the working class, while the privileges of the upper class would be quietly maintained. Trump, as he's doing with other aspects of the current polity, is insisting on renegotiating the deal.

Let's Take A Closer Look At The 2WAY Morning Meeting

Yesterday's 2WAY Morning Meeting show is an example of the current media dilemma. Let's start out by recognizing that the three co-hosts are simply unlikely: Mark Halperin is in the middle of a long-march rehabilitation campaign to come back from 2017 sexual harassment allegations:

According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign.

According to the link, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that for a 20-year period, Halperin had groped them and otherwise had unwanted bodily contact, and as a result,

On October 30, 2017, both NBC and MSNBC terminated Halperin's contract with the networks. On January 3, 2018, Showtime replaced Halperin on The Circus with then-CBS News anchor Alex Wagner.

Sean Spicer, as i've already noted, had been a "professional Republican" for years before joining the first Trump administration as Trump's first press secretary. Within six months, Trump had recognized that professional Republicans weren't what he needed, and both Spicer and Reince Priebus were edged out.

Dan Turrentine had been an also-ran professional Democrat who worked for Hillary Clinton and Jared Polis, but he mostly just has an exaggerated permanent nervous-guy grin as he utters standard Democrat talking points, as we see in the example below, which begins at 12:41 in the video embedded at the top of this post:

Halperin: I'd just like one short thought from each of you on whether this is a serious thing that the president will see through and to what extent this is some bullshit 72-hour I'm-for-law-enforcement-against-a-black-run city political ploy. Dan?

Turrentine: You said it better than I could. The latter. Hahahaha!

Halperin: Sean, is this real>

Spicer: It's absolutely real. I mean, this is all stuff that has bothered him since the first term. . .

I don't think any of these guys understands what Trump has in mind with the DC crime-and-homeless issue -- heck, I covered it better here last week. Spicer goes on after the exchange above to display his basic obtuseness at 13:50:

I will say this, in the spirit of looking forward. . . this is the opportunity for Republicans. DC was created in 1789 as a perfect square, 10 miles by 10. It was supposed to be a federal district, so that no state would have a stake in it, part of it from Maryland, part of it from Virginia. In 1846, they gave back the Virginia piece, which is now Alexandria and Arlingnton. The real solve for DC is give back everything but the National Mall from the White House to the Supreme Court, create a new federal district, and give the rest back to Maryland.

The problem is that this is exactly what Trump doesn't have in mind, which is just another indication of why Spicer went back to being just a professional Republican after six unsatisfactory months in the White House. If most of DC is given back to Maryland, that just takes its voter base and gives it to the same Baltimore urban machine that runs the state now, which changes exactly nothing. If you redefine Washington as just a narrow strip of monuments and museums where almost nobody lives, you just redefine the problem out of existence, although you make Maryland even worse.

As I said in last week's post,

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. . . . 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[.]

Trump doesn't want to redefine the problem, he wants to fix it at the root. He singled out one of the causes in yesteday's press conference:

Trump announced on Monday that he will be working to revoke no-cash bail in cities across the country, coming as Trump has honed in on cracking down on crime in the nation’s capital.

"This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership. The radical left city council adopted no cash bail," Trump said, noting cities that have adopted such policies like Chicago and New York City. "Somebody murders somebody, and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out."

"But we're going to change no cash bail. We're going to change the statute and get rid of some of the other things, and we'll count on the Republicans in Congress and Senate to vote. We have the majority, so we'll vote."

You can't fix Washington unless you fix the urban machines that have created the problems that are also in New York and Chicago. As I notd n last week's post, Trump delegates to highly visible point figures to take on his major agenda items, like Tom Homan with the border or Pete Hegseth with the Defense Department. In the case of Washington and the urban machines generally, it's Jeanine Pirro:

🚨 U.S. Attorney Pirro is absolutely COOKING the DC government, which allows vioIent young thugs to run the streets

“I can't prosecute them. They go to family court. And they get to do yoga and arts and crafts.

“ENOUGH. IT CHANGES TODAY!” 🔥 pic.twitter.com/l1pjivBMm1

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 11, 2025

On one hand, Mark Halperin is savvy enough to recognize that the public isn't satisfied with the prepackaged legacy media consensus. On the other, what he offers only pretends to be different. Dan Turrentine at the end of the day is a smug conventional Democrat, offering the same old talking points and cackling with laughter at it. Sean Spicer is a nice guy, I guess, good looking, but he just isn't terribly bright, and he doesn't understand Trump, who is a genius.

So far, after six years of his rehabilitaion tour, Halperin has managed to get himself in with Megyn Kelly, herself a has-been. Anyhow, not much for even Halperin to grope there, if you ask me. She's safe.

The Strange Patrícia Lélis Bolin Story

Last week, Project Veritas broke a two-part story (here and here) in which a Brazilian woman, Patrícia Lélis Bolin, alleges that "she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients". At the first link above,

Lélis further claims former Attorney General William P. Barr knew of the fraud and used burner phones to communicate and conceal the scheme.

. . . Lélis reported the visa fraud scheme to the FBI, which she claims triggered her prosecution while others involved remain uncharged.

Indicted in January 2024, Lélis faces 19 charges, including wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions, and aggravated identity theft. She is accused of defrauding immigrants by posing as a lawyer and soliciting payments for fraudulent E-2 and EB-5 visa services.

Project Veritas reviewed hundreds of text messages, emails, and documents, confirming a September 2022 text from Attorney Clyde Vanel to Patrícia Lélis. In it, Vanel directs her to finalize the business plan for [a Peter and Vivienne Reis' E-2 visa application] as a “back-up” measure, instructing her to act as his “paralegal” assistant without credentials. Vanel claims the visa scheme is foolproof, stating that former Attorney General William P. Barr bypasses standard government processes to expedite and “automatically approve” visas for their “business partners.”

A January 12, 2024 Justice Department press release confirming the indictment is here. The circumstances it outlines are these:

Patricia De Oliveira Souza Lelis Bolin, 29, a resident of Arlington [Virginia], posed as an immigration lawyer able to help foreign clients obtain E-2 and EB-5 visas to the United States. The EB-5 program provides lawful permanent residency, and possible citizenship, if a foreign national invests substantial funds—typically, a minimum of $1 million—in qualifying job-creating enterprises in the United States.

According to the indictment, on September 22, 2021, Lelis Bolin sent a legal retainer agreement to a victim for help in obtaining EB-5 visas for the victim’s parents. The victim made two initial payments totaling over $135,000 based on Lelis Bolin’s representation that the money was going into a Texas real estate development project that qualified for the EB-5 program. Instead, the victim’s money is alleged to have gone into Lelis Bolin’s personal bank account. Rather than investing the money as promised, Lelis Bolin allegedly used it for a downpayment on her Arlington townhouse, bathroom renovations, and paying other personal expenses, such as credit card debt.

According to the indictment, to cover up the scheme and to obtain more money, Lelis Bolin allegedly provided a victim with a fabricated U.S. District Court pleading with a false case number showing her as the litigating attorney. Lelis Bolin is not a licensed attorney. She is also alleged to have falsified U.S. immigration forms, forged multiple signatures, and created fake receipts from the Texas investment project, all of which she emailed to a victim. Lelis Bolin also allegedly created false personas associated with the Texas investment fund and sent emails from those individuals to try to obtain even more money.

According to the first Project Veritas link,

Lélis alleges she’s being set up as the fall-guy in an ongoing DOJ cover-up to protect the powerful ‘deep state’ individuals involved.

. . . hired in 2021 by Armstrong Williams’ media company, Howard Stirk Holdings, [she] claims she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients, including the parents of Superordinary CEO Julian Reis, a former JP Morgan trader and hedge fund founder. Lélis alleges that Williams and his legal counsel, NY Assemblyman Clyde Vanel, instructed her to craft business plans for fake companies, like “Reis Cosmetics,” to obtain E2 Investor Visas, which allow foreign nationals to work in the U.S. by investing in a business.

. . . Lélis further stated, “Bill Barr knows the companies that they launched for the visa was not real companies.” She revealed a suspiciously swift visa approval process, including a mere 10-minute interview in Singapore for Julian Reis’ parents, expedited through Barr’s connections. “After they got their visas, I discovered they do not have any plan to open and operate the company. So, it’s basically like they create a fake company that I helped to create with them,” she said.

Projexct Veritas then alleges that Pam Bondi is trying to cover this up:

Project Veritas sought to present evidence of this visa scheme to U.S. Department of Justice officials, who took no action. An anonymous government source has informed us of an ongoing cover-up within the Department of Justice, including by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

This is hard to believe; I'm simply not in the camp that thinks Bondi and Patel are trying to pull punches or slow-walk investigations. However, the second link above contains allegations that may not be entirely connected to those in the first link:

A whistleblower, currently under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice and granted political asylum in an undisclosed foreign country, has provided Project Veritas with explosive evidence alleging secret meetings orchestrated by former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, media figure Armstrong Williams, and other prominent Washington, D.C., insiders to plan the prosecution of President Donald Trump, his allies, and January 6 defendants.

. . . Project Veritas examined photos dated March 15, 2022, of Armstrong Williams and Bill Barr, alongside Lélis’ corresponding notes from a meeting at Sinclair Broadcast Group. The notes detail discussions revealing Barr was in talks with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Jack Smith about planning prosecutions in Florida, Georgia, and New York. Lélis recorded that Barr predicted an FBI raid on Trump’s home would occur “soon.” Five months later, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

Project Veritas also verified a January 19, 2023, text from Williams to Lélis confirming a planned meeting between Bill Barr and Fani Willis. Notes from February 27, 2023, confirm the meeting took place, with Barr advising Willis to pursue RICO charges against Donald Trump. Lelis stated, “Bill Barr was like, we should bring RICO because it's a very difficult type of charge to defend,” noting Barr described the charge as broad and challenging to counter under U.S. law.

. . . Lélis reported Armstrong Williams and Bill Barr to the FBI in June 2023 for their secret meetings and the visa fraud scheme exposed in Project Veritas’ Part 1. Text messages reveal panic from Williams and his associates upon learning of the FBI report. Lélis faced a barrage of threats and demands to return meeting notes and other documents she recorded during her employment, suggesting their authenticity and a frantic effort to conceal these covert meetings.

It’s critical to highlight that Project Veritas was first tipped off to this story by Department of Justice officials troubled by an apparent DOJ cover-up to pin Barr’s actions on Lélis. A Trump DOJ official stated, “Barr has put the entire FBI after this woman to get the documents she has.”

There can be no question that William Barr turned against Trump in the final days of his first administration. He submitted an early resignation effective December 23, 2020, and began a process of distancing himself from Trump. According to Wikipedia,

Barr testified to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack behind closed doors on June 2, 2022. Portions of his videotaped testimony were presented during the committee's public hearings days later. Barr testified that before resigning as attorney general, he had told President Trump that allegations of election fraud were "bullshit." At times during his testimony he could not control his laughter at the absurdity of some fraud allegations. . . . Barr testified Trump never gave "an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," adding the president had "become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff."

Acccording to The Guardian,

Former attorney general William Barr came to the defense of the FBI and the justice department’s (DoJ) judicial request to search Donald Trump’s Florida home and country club compound last month, saying Friday that documents seized in the search appeared to support the department’s claims of a national security risk.

“As more information comes out, the actions of the department look more understandable,” Barr told the New York Times in an interview.

“It seems to me they were driven by concern about highly sensitive information being strewn all over a country club, and it was taking them almost two years to get it back,” he said.

The former attorney general, who resigned in December 2020 as Trump ramped up his claims that the election has been rigged, also dismissed Trump’s call for an independent review of materials confiscated from Mar-a-Lago by a “special master”.

“I think it’s a crock of shit,” Barr said. “I don’t think a special master is called for.”

This blog has never been a friend of William Barr. In 2022, I wrote,

Why is this man not smiling? Based on all the images I find on the web, William P Barr has got to be one of the saddest, angriest men in current public life. . . . The man is rich. He's respected. He's in demand as a talking head. No doubt his mere stroke of the pen will get any candidate into Dalton, Horace Mann, Hackley, whichever, not to mention Columbia. I think it's because of Trump. I think it's because Trump hasn't gone away. Trump is the wrong kind of Republican, not like, say, Jeb Bush. And that has him awfully, awfully angry. Why did he ever agree to become Trump's attorney general? That's a good question, wouldn't you say?

I don't think there's any question that after he left as Trump's Attorney General, Barr went to meetings trying to forestall Trump's return. On the other hand, if the meetings were with the likes of Armstrong Williams, they would have been exercises in fecklessness, not really conspiracy. But then, Lélis Bolin says he also helped plan the Mar-a-Lago raid with Jack Smith, which would be a different matter altogether. Still, he was 70 when he quit the Trump administration, a bitter old man, his law career effectively over no matter how hard he tried to rehabilitate himself with the establishment, so I suspect he can't be taken seriously as an active conspirator.

So this is probably little more than an interesting footnote and mostly for me an indication that he was never especially bright. But I could also be wrong.

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.