AOC Bows To Nancy Pelosi, But It Doesn't Make Much Difference

On Tuesday, AOC said,

". . . I saw some Republican members of Congress saying, ‘Oh, well, if we have this shutdown, it’s because of AOC,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, if that’s the case, my office is open and you are free to walk in and negotiate with me directly, because what I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance. That’s what’s not going to happen.”

I read this as saying, in effect, "Yes, I'm driving the shutdown, and Republicans may as well negotiate with me directly." One person who was not amused at this was Nancy Pelosi:

.@SpeakerPelosi suggests @AOC lacks 'experience' to be Democratic leader in government shutdown. https://t.co/NhbhkYQFqQ pic.twitter.com/cv9jJ4LrUY

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 1, 2025

Her reply to the reporter's question about AOC's remarks was barely suppressed rage. "Why are you saying such a ridiculous thing?"

"She’s wonderful, she’s a real team player, and the rest of that," she told the reporter. "You started by saying Republicans say that she’s directing this. She is not, Hakeem Jeffries is, and this takes a lot of experience, a lot of unity from the caucus in terms of the point of view, and that’s what this is."

AOC implicitly walked the remarks back by yesterday evening:

Ocasio-Cortez made it clear in an interview with NBC News that Democratic leadership is driving the party’s strategy.

“They’re saying this stuff about me in the press, and the fact of the matter is I can tell you, in the seven years that I’ve been here, they [Republican leaders] have never given me a single phone call, because they know what the truth is,” she said. “They know that the people that they need to be negotiating with, and who they are negotiating with, are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer,” the House and Senate Democratic leaders, both of New York.

But this doesn't change the situation on the ground, which even Chris Cilizza, formerly of CNN and the Washington Post, who now claims to be "independent" on YouTube, understands:

He says,

I think Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may be the thing, the codex that explains why we are where we are in a government shutdown. To go forward, we need to go back, back to March. In March, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, from New York, announces that he is going to vote to keep the government open. He doesn't want to run the risk of allowing Elon Musk and his DOGE people to have a chance to cut even more federal workers by closing down the government, so he's gonna keep it open, he's not gonna get any concessions from the Trump administration.

. . . Now, Schumer probably figured he was gonna take some flak for that, but I do not think he thought he was gonna take the amount of flak from the left that he took. . . . And one of the voices that was most promenent in speaking out against that was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . Chuck Schumer, . . . who is up for reelection in 2028 to a fifth term, looks at the landscape, and he says, "All right, well, we need to get something from Republicans this time around and Donald Trump. So I'm going to say we need to get the extension to these health care subsidies for Obamacare."

I think Schumer knows it's very unlikely he's going to get that. Trump is in control, Trump thinks a shutdown is fine for him. . . . Chuck Schumer has been in the Senate since 1998. . . . He is currently 74 years old. He'll be 76ish in 2028. . . . Schumer hasn't said whether he wants to run for another term or not, but I think he absolutely wants to keep that possibility open. . . . He doesn't want the narrative to be in 2028 that he retired to run away from certain defeat in a Democratic primary. He wants there to be a credible, plausible opening for him to run for another term.

. . . He looks at the situation, he looks at the outrage from the left. . . and he says, "If I don't get something big and deliverable for Democrats out of this showdown, I'm screwed politically, I will lose this race. So I am going to go forward with this shutdown, and I'm going to keep my Democratic caucus in line, and I'm going to make sure we don't give the Republicans the seven votes they need to keep the government open." He does all of this in large part because of the worry about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . But the thing is, AOC is 35 years old. She is 40 years Chuck Schumer's junior.

In the end, although Cilizza doesn't go that far, Schumer's problem is the clock, and what is true of Schumer is even more true of Pelosi. What Cilizza has said here is that Schumer is letting AOC set his priorities, but she's forced him into a game he's bound to lose. Whatever he holds out for from Trump, anything he could potentially point to as an important deliverable, Cilizza thinks he won't get it -- but Schumer's the one who's going to lose, not just to Trump, but to any primary oppenent in 2028.

Meanwhile, AOC is 35. This is just as much Pelosi's problem, or even more so. We must assume Pelosi threw a behind-the-scenes tantrum and forced AOC to walk back her implicit announcment that she was running the shutdown, but that doesn't change the fact that Schumer is at the end of his career, and although Pelosi has formally retired as Speaker, she's continuing to run the House through Jeffries, who is little more than a ventriloquist's dummy. I asked Chrome AI mode about this, and it answered,

A narcissist's refusal to acknowledge the passage of time is a defense mechanism rooted in a fear of losing their inflated sense of self. To a narcissist, the physical decline and diminishing social influence that come with aging are existential threats to their core identity, which is built on a fantasy of superiority. They may use a range of tactics to deny reality and cling to a distorted, timeless past where they felt most powerful.

But if we're talking about refusal to acknowledge the passage of time, we're right back to where we were with Joe Biden. Somehow all the senior Democrats are living in a fantasy world where they're still powerful, and they're refusing to acknowledge that things have changed.

I Think Bp Barron Was About To Get Involved

Via The Pillar:

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin declined on Tuesday a lifetime achievement award he was scheduled to receive from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s office of human dignity and solidarity.

Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich issued an announcement on the subject at the same time senior leaders at the U.S. bishops’ conference were confidentially preparing to release a statement on the Durbin award, and had already informed the Vatican’s U.S. representative of their plans, according to several sources close to the process.

The President of the USCCB is Abp Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, who I'm confident is a wise, capable, and holy man, but neither his name nor his position is well known, probably not even to rank and file US Catholics. On the other hand, Bp Robert Barron is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman since Abp Fulton J Sheen. While as many as ten current Catholic bishops had already spoken out publicly agaionst Cdl Cupich's move, most appear to have waited for clearer guidance, whether from the USCCB or the Almighty Himself, and Bp Barron was probably more aware than any of the gravity of such a move.

But clearly something was in the works. From the link,

Conference spokesperson Chieko Noguchi declined to comment Tuesday afternoon, but several senior U.S. sources told The Pillar that some conference leaders were confidentially preparing a statement on the subject, which they expected to issue in coming days, presumably from the president’s office, or from the conference’s administrative committee.

And Vatican and senior U.S. sources told The Pillar that conference leaders had notified the apostolic nunciature in Washington that a statement related to the Durbin award was expected to be issued by the bishops’ conference.

It is not clear what prompted Durbin’s withdrawal or Cupich’s Tuesday afternoon announcement. Some bishops suggested to The Pillar Tuesday that a pending USCCB statement catalyzed the move, with Cupich not eager to be seen as opposed by the body of U.S. bishops, or that the U.S. apostolic nuncio urged Cupich to shut down the award before public division among the bishops intensified.

Bishop of Springfield, IL Thomas Paprocki was among the first to speak out against Cupich, and he appears also to have been the architect of the solution:

In an interview on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on Sept. 25, Paprocki called on the Chicago cardinal to either withdraw the award or Durbin himself to decline it.

A spokesperson for Durbin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Durbin appears eventually to have recognized this would be the best path:

Durbin told NBC News he was surprised by "the level of controversy" and had withdrawn from accepting the award "because the reaction has been so controversial against the Cardinal who proposed it, and I see no point in going forward with that.”

The Catholic News Agency reported that US bishops were "grateful" and "relieved" at Durbin's decision:

Arlington, Virginia, Bishop Michael Burbidge, meanwhile — who previously served as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pro-life committee — said on Oct. 1 that he was “relieved” at Durbin’s decision.

. . . Numerous other U.S. bishops had previously expressed disapproval over the proposed award, including Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska; Bishop James Wall of Gallup, New Mexico; and San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

In a statement on X on Oct. 1, Cordileone extended Durbin “complements” for withdrawing from the award, which the prelate described as a “great display of magnanimity.”

“In such a contentious issue that threatens even greater division, Sen. Durbin chose to take the higher moral ground,” the prelate said. “Such an act required tremendous humility on his part. We need more humility in our country.”

So what we seem to be hearing is this: Cdl Cupich's intent to give Sen Durbin an award had become unexpectedly controversial, we might speculate in particular in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination on September 10, since Kirk, although not Catholic himself, advocated for positions on reproduction, marriage, and sexuality that Catholics also support. It appears that neither Cdl Cupich nor Sen Durbin recognized the strength of such support among Catholics.

Neither, I suspect, did all but a dozen or so US bishops, at least at first.

Durbin’s backing down from receiving the award came following a CatholicVote petition on its online CatholicVote Action Center, where users could directly message Cardinal Cupich’s office, asking him not to honor Durbin for his support of immigrants. As of Monday, more than 20,000 had signed; by Wednesday morning, signatures had surpassed 40,000.

It sounds as though, by last weekend, the US bishops felt the need to get ahead of the problem. If more bishops began to speak out against Cupich, this would at minimum be an embarrassment, but pressure from rank-and-file Catholics was apparently rising, enough for the USCCB to report to the papal nuncio that there could be an issue, and they might be forced to make a statement. And if the USCCB made a statement, this could well provide cover for Bp Barron to make an observation of his own, however cautiously worded.

This would amount to an enormous loss of face, principally for Cdl Cupich, who simply doesn't have the prestige of Bp Barron, and any statement Barron could make short of unwavering support for Cupich would detract from Cupich further. But then, Cupich was a clear Francis favorite, and this would be a blow to the Francis faction in the Church, when Leo, at least at this point, wants to avoid schism and keep the Francis faction more or less on the reservation.

So Leo issues an official on one hand, on the other hand, dialogue, blah blah blah, Durbin declines the award, Cupich saves face, and schism is avoided. But I think the real driving factor was the threat that Bp Barron would get involved. Even Leo understands about Bp Barron. Barron understands his position, too, and has been handling it mostly quite well.

The Naval Academy Acts Like An Ivy

Welp, that's a race. https://t.co/0ADfjmlvk0

— Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) September 30, 2025

It turns out that the US Naval Academy's admissions and disciplinary policies have become an issue in the New Jersey governor's race:

New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill is facing fresh scrutiny following the revelation that her two children were accepted into the highly competitive Naval Academy — days after her campaign was rocked by news of her involvement in a notorious cheating scandal as a midshipman.

The Democratic congresswoman’s office announced in June that her two kids, Lincoln and Margaret Hedberg, were among nine students from her district to land spots in the Naval Academy, whichacademy Academy recordsd weerre unblemi9shed.

. . . Netizens, such as the Libs of TikTok, questioned how two of her children managed to get in at the same time in light of the highly selective process.

“What are the chances?” the popular right-wing social media account wrote on X.

Sherrill insists that everything was done aboveboard.

“In order to remove even the appearance of a conflict of interest, my children did not compete in my office’s service academy nomination process,” Sherrill said in a statement to The Post.

“Instead, they applied to the offices of the US senators from New Jersey, who also run academy nomination processes each year, and I am proud that they each earned nominations on their own.”

It is unclear whether Booker or Helmy made either of Sherrill’s children their principal nominee or if the congresswoman played any role in trying to lobby on their behalf.

Both Sherrill and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are graduates of the Naval Academy, which would make their children "legacies" in Ivy parlance. But neither mom's nor dad's academy records were unblemished.

For days, the Sherrill campaign has been rocked by questions regarding her role in a cheating scandal that kept her from walking with her graduating class in 1994.

. . . When confronted with questions from reporters last week, Sherrill admitted she was punished in 1994, but not for cheating.

"I didn't turn in some of my classmates," Sherrill said, "So I didn't walk."

Sherrill seemed to change her story on Friday while campaigning in Plainfield.

During that event, she offered this explanation: "There was a test at the school that was stolen. I did not realize it was stolen. I took the test."

Sherrill then explained that after the test was completed, she heard the rumors of it being stolen. She said she was punished because "I didn't come forward with that information."

Via the New York Post,

A source close to a rival campaign questioned that statement.

“Nobody, including Mikie Sherrill, was barred from graduation ceremonies for covering for their friends,” claimed this person, who has reviewed the documents. “That’s a bunch of bulls—. Midshipmen were, however, punished for lying to Naval investigators.”

While no evidence has surfaced that the future congresswoman was punished for being untruthful to school officials, there are also indications that she has not been up front about what transpired.

Multiple midshipmen acquired and shared answers to a Dec. 14, 1992, exam for Electrical Engineering 311, a mandatory class for all non-engineering majors. The test was administered to 663 students, according to the lawsuit that involved Hedberg.

In a 2002 episode of CBS News’ “48 Hours” that reported on the scandal, one of the students involved estimated that “probably 80% of the people who took that test had knowledge and had seen it the night before.”

The day after the test was administered, academy officials caught wind of the cheating and went on to open a series of investigations — including by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), multiple Honor Boards (disciplinary panels), and the Office of the Naval Inspector General.

Ultimately, 88 were found guilty of participation in the dissemination of the exam, the Washington Post reported at the time, with two dozen expelled and 64 receiving lesser penalties such as late graduation.

At the same link,

Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial hopeful Mikie Sherrill’s husband was also caught up in the Naval Academy cheating scandal that has rocked her campaign, court documents exclusively obtained by The Post show.

Jason Hedberg was one of about four dozen midshipmen who sued top officials at the Naval Academy, Navy and Pentagon in 1994 in a desperate bid to block an Honor Board at Annapolis from deciding whether they should be dismissed from the school.

“In compliance with the orders of their superior military officers, each named plaintiff was compelled to make inculpatory statements to Navy Inspector General investigators,” read the complaint, which charged that the students were denied due process.

The details of any “inculpatory statements” by Hedberg are unclear. However, his name is included in the 1994 commencement program, suggesting that he — unlike Sherrill — was cleared to take part in exercises some three months after the suit was filed.

This follows allegations from her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, that she has tripled her net worth since being elected to Congress in 2018.

The question of how certain applicants are able to beat the odds in the selective college admissions process has interested me since before I started blogging. On one hand, there's clearly a Navy old-boy network that extends to the Academy -- take the example of Sen John McCain, himself an Academy graduate, largely because his father and grandfather were both four-star admirals and Academy graduates themselves. He was a legacy as much as any Ivy applicant following his own dad and granddad. His pedigree apparently compensated for his poor early performance as a Naval aviator:

McCain began as a sub-par flier who was at times careless and reckless; during the early to mid-1960s, two of his flight missions crashed, and a third mission collided with power lines, but he received no major injuries.

It looks like there have always been ways to play the angles in the Navy, and Mikie Sherrill and her husband have just found the latest version -- just like in the Ivy League. But a bigger, and much less examined, question is cheating. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at the Naval Academy?" It answered,

At least three large-scale cheating scandals have occurred at the U.S. Naval Academy in recent decades, impacting midshipmen in 1974, 1992, and 2020. Most recently, renewed attention has been drawn to the 1992 incident due to a political campaign.

In the 1992 scandal that affected Sherrill and her husband, the Navy's inspector general implicated more than 130 midshipmen in the theft and distribution of the exam. Approximately 80 midshipmen admitted to cheating, and 29 were recommended for expulsion. However, the numbers at one link above suggest far more were involved -- the test was administered to 663 students, and "probably 80%" had seen it the night before. That comes out to 530 students who saw the exam before they took it.

So, why were only 130 "implicated" and only 29 recommended for expulsion? I think it's because if the true size of the cheating problem were to become known, it would be beyond embarrassing to the Naval Academy and the Navy, so it had to be minimized. It would lead to serious questions about the competence of Naval officers and the value of an Academy degree. But the mere fact that cheating scandals reoccur at places like the Naval Academy is an indication that the problem hasn't been addressed.

But why should it be limited to the Naval Academy, or even the other US military academies? I asked Chrome AI mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at Harvard?" It answered,

Multiple cheating scandals have been reported at Harvard, with several major cases involving large numbers of students having occurred in recent decades. It's impossible to know the exact total number of cheating incidents, as many go unreported, but publicly known scandals highlight periods of high academic dishonesty.

These included the 2012 Government 1310 scandal, in which approximately half of the 279 students were investigated for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam; The 2017 Computer Science 50 scandal, in which about 10% of the course's enrollment during the fall semester were referred to the Honor Council; and the 2020–2021 Honor Code violations, a surge in academic dishonesty cases during the COVID pandemic, when the Honor Council reviewed 138 cases that academic year, with 27 students required to withdraw.

My own teaching experience in the 1970s was that plagiarism was extremedly common, and my graduate assistant colleagues recognized that plagiarism was so rife in freshman comp classes that it simply wasn't worth mentioning. But it was also understood that if the English Department, say, were to undertake serious enforcement of the honor code, first, nobody would have time to do anything else, and second, nobody would sign up to take English courses, so life simply went on.

The upshot is that truthtellers like Mike Rowe are slowly beginning to emerge who are questioning the value of a four-year degree, and cases like Mikie Sherrill are beginning to emerge who illustrate the corruption endemic in higher education, if not in public life overall.

What Do We Still Not Know About January 6?

Legacy media has immediately pooh-poohed the release of FBI documents placing 274 FBI agents in the crowd at the January 6, 2021 Capitol incursion. From Newsday:

TRUMP: “As it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials.’”

THE FACTS: This is false. The alleged FBI documents to which Trump is referring state on page 46 that 274 agents from the FBI's Washington Field Office “responded to” to the U.S. Capitol and other nearby locations on Jan. 6. They do not contain any credible evidence to suggest that federal agents were acting as agitators or insurrectionists.

“This number includes agents that responded to the Capitol grounds as well as inside the Capitol, the pipe bombs, and the red truck that was believed to contain explosive devices as well as CDC/ADCs,” the documents read.

The mention of “pipe bombs” refers to the devices planted outside offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on the eve of the attack, while “the red truck” refers to a pickup truck filled with weapons and Molotov cocktail components that was parked near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

But what is indisputably new is the information that something like 274 employees of the FBI's Washington Field Office were dispatched to the US Capitol that day, and for whatever reason, the FBI had not previously released this information. How it might be interpreted depends in part on what the meaning of "agents" is. CNN also disputes Trump's version:

As CNN previously reported, no undercover FBI agents were at the Capitol during the January 6 riot, according to a Justice Department watchdog. However, the DOJ inspector general said that 26 paid FBI informants were in Washington, DC, that day.

Well, OK, but the information we've just received is that 274 FBI employees were also purposely sent there. So far, we don't know what their job classifications were, or what they were supposed to be doing, and Trump is asking good questions:

“I want to know who each and every one of these so-called ‘Agents’ are, and what they were up to on that now ‘Historic’ Day. Many Great American Patriots were made to pay a very big price only for the love of their Country. I owe this investigation of ‘Dirty Cops and Crooked Politicians’ to them!” Trump continued.

In fact, the information that was released over the weekend simply expands the set of unknowns connected with January 6. The legacy media interpretation of the 274 "agents" (if that's what they were, we aren't really sure) is that they were sent in at the last minute for crowd control, because they were in offices just down the street, or something like that. But let's look at the situation from the testimony of Steven Sund, Capitol Police Chief on January 6, to the US Senate:

We [the Capitol Police] were monitoring the actions and demeanor of the crowd, which at the time did not raise any concerns, when we received word at 12:52 p.m. that a pipe bomb had been located at the Republican National Committee Headquarters, immediately adjacent to Capitol Grounds. . . . We also dispatched resources to look for other explosive devices, suspects, and vehicles. At almost the exactly same time, we observed a large group of individuals approaching the West Front of the Capitol. When the group arrived at the perimeter, they did not act like any group of protestors I had ever seen. Unlike other heated protests, these protesters did not simply congregate to angrily voice their grievances. As soon as this group arrived at our perimeter, they immediately began to fight violently with the officers and to tear apart the steel crowd control barriers, using them to assault the officers. . . . This mob was like nothing I have seen in my law enforcement career. The group consisted of thousands of well-coordinated, well-equipped violent criminals. They had weapons, chemical munitions, protective equipment, explosives, and climbing gear. A number of them were wearing radio ear pieces indicating a high level of coordination.

This is a little puzzling. "Violent criminals" would normally be street thugs, who aren't well-coordinated. These were apparently both well-trained and well-equipped, and frankly, this doesn't sound like Mr and Mrs MAGA. Earpieces? Climbing gear? Chemical munitions? Sund sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi and other parties on February 6, after the riot:

"Having previously handled two major post-election demonstrations successfully utilizing an action plan that was based on intelligence assessments that had proven to be credible, reliable, and accurate, we reasonably assumed the intelligence assessment for Jan. 6, 2021, was also correct."

On Jan. 4, the Capitol Police Intelligence and Inter-Agency Coordination Division "assessed "the level of probability of acts of civil disobedience/arrests occurring based on current intelligence information," as "Remote" to "Improbable" for all of the groups expected to demonstrate on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021," according to Sund.

But the Justice Department's pursuit of charges against the rioters appears to be at variance with Sund's description of "thousands of well-coordinated, well-equipped violent criminals" who were somehow able to keep their detailed plans from intelligence assessment teams. For instance,

By the end of 2021, 725 people had been charged with federal crimes. That number rose to 1,000 by the second anniversary of the attack, to 1,200 by the third anniversary (three-quarters of whom had by then been found guilty) and to 1,500 before the fourth anniversary.

. . . Early on, the majority of charges filed against the rioters were for disorderly conduct and unlawful entry. Ultimately, about one-third of the defendants were charged with assault on or interference with law enforcement officers. Other charges included trespassing; disrupting Congress; theft or other property crimes; weapons offenses; making threats; and conspiracy, including seditious conspiracy.

All these might apply to Jacob Chansly, the "QAnon Shaman", not disciplined, well-organized brown shirts wearing earpieces:

Chansley, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding, was among the first rioters to enter the building. He has acknowledged using a bullhorn to rile up the mob, offering thanks in a prayer while in the Senate for having the chance to get rid of traitors and scratching out a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence saying, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”

Though he isn’t accused of violence, prosecutors say Chansley, of Arizona, was the “public face of the Capitol riot” who went into the attack with a weapon, ignored repeated police orders to leave the building and gloated about his actions in the days immediately after the attack.

The "weapon" was a stage spear, and Chansly was pretty clearly a harmless nut. The scenes from inside the Capitol were in fact farcical. But we have Sund's testimony in several forums that there were well-coordinated, well-equipped forces involved -- so who were they? Where were they, precisely? Frankly, earpieces are the sort of thing federal agents wear, not wackos in costumes, or indeed just Mr and Mrs MAGA.

Sund also brings up the pipe bombs and a truck loaded with explosives. We've heard almost nothing about these. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino has announced that the bureau is revisiting the case.

On the night of Jan. 5, 2021, someone carrying a backpack and wearing a grey-hooded sweatshirt, mask, gloves, glasses, and a pair of Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers dropped two pipe bombs outside Republican and Democratic headquarters in the nation’s capital.

While the explosives did not detonate, the FBI assessed that they were “viable.”

Then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris visited the Democratic National Committee headquarters the next day, shortly before the Capitol riot began, and was evacuated after the pipe bombs were identified by a passerby.

. . . While the explosives did not detonate, the FBI assessed that they were “viable.”

. . . In a House GOP report released in early 2025, lawmakers claimed initial inquiries “yielded a promising array of data and revealed numerous persons of interest” — but “little meaningful progress” has been made since.

Sund suggests that the timing of the pipe bomb discoveries may have been intended to distract the Capitol Police from the incursion on the Capitol grounds, and this would suggest a fairly intricate conspiracy -- so it's intriguing that while there were 1500 people prosecuted for things like trespassing or interfering with law enforcement, there have been no prosecutions, as far as we can tell, of trained, well-equipped, well-financed professionals with climbing gear that Sund testified were on the Capitol grounds.

In other words, we still know almost nothing about January 6.

How Is This Not A Revolution At The FBI?

Just in the past few days, we've had this development:

The FBI has fired 15 agents associated with a 2020 incident in which agents were photographed kneeling with demonstrators at the height of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to the agents association.

The latest round of dismissals at the bureau came at the end of a monthslong review targeting 15 agents who were associated with the kneeling incident, according to one person briefed on the matter. Some agents who were present at the incident but didn’t kneel were not fired, the source said.

Followed by this one, which strikes me as even bigger:

The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to "wokeness" and allowed its employees to become “pawns in a political war,” according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years.

Scores of FBI agents and personnel – many from the bureau’s premier Washington field office (WFO) – sent anonymous complaints to the after-action team detailing how agents were sent into an unsafe scenario without proper safety equipment or the ability to identify themselves readily as armed officers to other police agencies, the report obtained by Just the News shows.

But it doesn't end there:

Three senior FBI officials who were abruptly fired last month by Kash Patel, the FBI director, are claiming in a new lawsuit against the Trump administration that they were illegally terminated at the direction of the White House for purely political reasons.

. . . The three fired agents who brought the case were decorated veterans of the agency who had served in senior roles. One of them, [Brian] Driscoll, had briefly been acting FBI director while Patel was going through the Senate confirmation process. Steven Jensen served as assistant director in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office. Spencer Evans had once led the Las Vegas field office, but by the time he was fired he had been removed from that position and was being relocated to the Huntsville, Alabama, office.

But Sundance's take at Conservative Treehouse is hard to square with reports like those above:

FBI Director Kash Patel once again rises to defend the integrity of the institution he leads.

While Tweeting a link to a Fox News story quoting him, the FBI director says, “274 FBI agents were thrown into crowd control on Jan 6 against FBI standards. That failure was on corrupt leadership. Thanks to agents stepping up, the truth is coming out. Transparency. Justice. Accountability.”

Which begs the questions: 274 FBI plainclothes agents were going to do what, exactly?… How did the FBI know to have 274 agents “on hand” prepared to intervene? And where exactly is “on hand” located?

He links to a Fox News story that he seems to think proves his case:

The FBI responded on Saturday to a report that 274 plainclothes agents were at the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, clarifying the role of bureau personnel while still blasting former Director Christopher Wray.

While the agents were on hand, they were sent in after the riot had begun to try to control the unruly crowd, officials told Fox News Digital. That is not the proper role of FBI agents, and Wray was not forthcoming about what happened when he testified numerous times on Capitol Hill, Director Kash Patel said.

“Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened.”

He added, “Thanks to agents coming forward, we are now uncovering the truth. We are fully committed to transparency, and justice and accountability continues with this FBI.”

As best I can read this, the FBI has released files on the January 6, 2021 episode that it had suppressed for four years. Director Patel attributed this to "corrupt leadership" (viz, Christopher Wray), and he announced, "we are now uncovering the truth". This may be defending "the integrity of the institution he leads", but that's only if you see it in the light of former agents like the late James Kallstrom, who led the TWA 800 investigation but said in later years that he "did not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to".

If anything, it seems to me that Patel is trying to restore the integrity of an FBI that Kallstrom would recognize, not the FBI of Comey and Wray, or for that matter, Mueller. The second link above continues,

The most persistent complaint [from agents themselves] was that the bureau during the James Comey and Chris Wray era had become infected with political biases and liberal ideology that treated the protesters from the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots far differently than those arrested in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 episode.

“The FBI should make clear to its personnel and the public that, despite its obvious political bias, it ultimately still takes its mission and priorities seriously,” one employee wrote in a stinging review. “It should equally and aggressively investigate criminal activity regardless of the offenders' perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations; and it should equally and aggressively protect all Americans regardless of perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations.”

Just yesterday, other news confirmed that Patel is continuing a serious agenda of transparency:

The unsolved case of two pipe bombs planted at the major political parties' headquarters in Washington D.C. before the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot is facing new mystery after FBI Director Kash Patel transmitted to Congress the lab analysis and interviews with a key witness who is challenging the official timeline of events.

. . . The mystifying evidence now has congressional investigators exploring stunning new theories, including whether the bombs were made to look real but not to explode to create a diversion during the Jan. 6 protest or whether someone came back and set the timers later on one or both of the devices.

"The single greatest action that facilitated the protester's ease of entry into the Capitol on January 6 was the placing of the pipe bombs, and the diversionary effect that had on security resources which would have otherwise been at the Capitol," said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee that is investigating the law enforcement response to Jan. 6.

"After that day, the FBI was zealous in pursuing those trespassing at the Capitol, but quite lacking in their pursuit of whomever placed the pipe bombs," he added. "One focus of this Committee will be highlighting the bizarre facts surrounding the pipe bomb case, hoping to bring much needed clarity on this subject to the American people.”

The allegation that Sundance and others at the conspracy-theory right seem to make is that Patel, Bongino, and Bondi are creating a smokescreen of frenzied but feckless activity that somehow just serves as a distraction from the real conspiracies that are still taking place. So, what are they covering up? January 6? The FBI has just confirmed that 250-plus agents were in the crowd, something it had previously denied, a central issue of the MAGA theory of recent history, and Trump is now demanding that this be fully explained.

The pipe bombs planted at the DNC-RNC before the riot? Ditto, Patel has just released genuine new information. This was another major MAGA question. Well, then, is Patel shielding high-level people who were complicit in all this skulduggery? Apparently not, he's actually firing them left and right.

Wait just one moment, though. What's the one name we aren't hearing in all this phony activity? That's right! Jeffrey Epstein! They're covering up for Trump, Epstein, Dershowitz -- probably Netanyahu! It's all gonna fall out about Epstein! Just you wait!

Has Trump Been A Rational Actor All Along?

Yesterday I floated the idea that we've been fed a legacy media consensus that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic, when in fact evidence shows he's a rational actor. This certainly got started as early as his June 16, 2015 escalator ride at Trump Tower during his campaign announcement, which was almost universally treated as a vanity project that would soon fade from view. But I think it's important to start assessing Trump's statements, his postures, and his actions through a filter that gives him credit for being a rational actor.

James Comey is a key example. Since before Trump's 2017 inauguration, Comey has sought to control the narrative over his case by feeding the very perception that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic. In fact, I'd say Comey has been one of the chief exponents of this perception in public life -- but this is hardly a disinterested position; Comey has been flirting with indictments over this whole period, and the idea that Trump could be acting vindictively has largely protected him, at least up to now.

Comey lasted less than four months under Trump before he was fired on May 9, 2017. Comey has largely controlled the legacy media narrative ever since. For instance, pretty much everything we know about the January 6, 2017 meeting in which Comey along with James Clapper, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers met with Trump, comes from either Comey himself or his special assistant Josh Campbell (the photo above shows the two together). Campbell in a tell-all book wrote,

The four intelligence chiefs decided Comey should brief the incoming president on the [Steele dossier] one-on-one, both because the FBI had originally received the information and because Comey was the only one in the group who was guaranteed to remain on the job when the new administration came in. (Unlike the heads of the other intelligence agencies, the director of the FBI serves a statutorily mandated ten-year term, and Comey was in year three.) Conscious of the personal embarrassment this sensitive brief might cause the president-elect, the FBI director opted to discuss it with Trump separately at the end of the larger briefing on Russian interference.

. . . Aware of the unprecedented nature of an FBI director confronting a newly elected president with explosive material about his personal life, coupled with the fact that the president’s campaign was secretly under investigation for its possible ties to Russia, Comey wanted to make certain that he fully documented the interaction in writing. He would later tell me he knew it was possible the president-elect might one day lie about the exchange if it ever came to light.

. . . When Comey got to the tawdry details contained in the dossier, Trump became defensive, cutting him off and denying the allegations. “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” Trump asked. He then went on to recount, unprompted, a number of allegations against him by various women, which he claimed were all false. Comey indicated that the intelligence community was aware that the claims in the dossier were unsubstantiated, but that he nevertheless wanted Trump to be aware the information was circulating through government and media circles. Trump thanked Comey for the information, signaling the end of the short one-on-one meeting.

Let's consider this: in a one-on-one encounter with Trump, their first ever, Comey shows his hand, which is the Steele pee allegtions. Trump must certainly have been aware that these were false; at minimum, those closest to Trump say he's a germophobe, and such antics would be wildly improbable. But Trump's alleged reply, “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” doesn't sit right with me, either.

Comey has just accused Trump of something both improbable and, by his own admission, unsubstantiated, thereby establishing in Trump's mind that he's completely unreliable and unserious. Trump wouldn't even want to be around someone like that. I believe the part about Trump cutting Comey off and thanking him, but not much else.

On June 8, 2017, after Trump fired him, Comey testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.

I suspect that in that first Trump Tower meeting, Comey realized he'd gotten off on the wrong foot with Trump, and that was putting it mildly. Thus he felt the need immediately to create self-serving versions of each subsequent encounter, because he was a short-timer, and he knew it. He went on in the testimony,

The President and I had dinner on Friday, January 27 at 6:30 pm in the Green Room at the White House.

. . ,. The President began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI Director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse I had taken during the previous year, he would understand if I wanted to walk away.

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.

I replied that I loved my work and intended to stay and serve out my ten-year term as Director. And then, because the set-up made me uneasy, I added that I was not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but he could always count on me to tell him the truth. I added that I was not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, a stance I said was in his best interest as the President.

My reading of this account of the conversation is that, three weeks after Comey had given Trump a highly unfavorable impression at Trump Tower, Trump was giving Comey a chance to reset things. Not "an effort to have me ask for my job", but under the circumstances a very generous opportunity for Comey to admit that he'd blundered by bringing up the pee dossier and, in effect, set things right. Instead, Comey doubled down and made it plain that he would continue to work against Trump, and he seems to have put it in almost as many words. Next:

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President.

. . . The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone.

When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President.

. . . The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share.

. . . The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President.

I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership.

It's very hard not to read this as Comey being remarkably obtuse. Trump announces that he wants to talk about Mike Flynn, who had been accused of lying to the FBI in circumstances Trump must already have recognized were questionable, but what he really wanted to talk about was leaks. Let's fast forward to late September 2025:

The two-page indictment is short on detail, but it says Mr Comey has been charged with one count of making false statements and another of obstruction of justice.

. . . The first count relates to Mr Comey telling the congressional committee he had not authorised someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about an FBI investigation into what the indictment describes as "PERSON 1", believed to be Clinton.

I take Trump's subtext in this meeting to mean that he's fully aware that Comey had been leaking, and that he made a regular practice of it. This was an implicit warning of grounds for termination. I would take this from any supervisor of mine that this was precisely that, and whatever I was doing in that direction, I should immediately stop. In fact, again, in a normal working context, I would take this as remarkably generous, since it effectively means that the boss already has grounds to show you the door but is giving you one more chance.

Comey's attitude seems to have been that he's in year three of his ten-year term, and he can't be fired. On May 9, Trump disabused Comey of any such assumption. In fact, the actual circumstances of Comey's firing struck me as consistent with a corporate firing for misconduct: Trump did it while Comey was out of the office in Los Angeles, and his electronic access and physical access to his office were terminated immediately at the same time. He would have had no way to spirit any files out before he was barred.

This isn't the usual case of a senior official being eased out "to spend more time with my family". In fact, given termination circumstances like those, I would have expected indictment for something like fraud or embezzlement to happen quickly in an ordinary business environmnent.

The more I look at Comey's accounts of his brief relationship with Trump, the more I get the impression that Trump was working with a great deal of insight into human nature, and insight into Comey in particular; and I have a sense that he almost immediately recognized that Comey wasn't just unreliable, he was completely untrustworthy and should never have been at the FBI. Under those circumstances, I think we're justified in recognizing that Trump was a rationial actor from the start of his first administration.

Trump Decides to Own the Shutdown

This was yesterday's headline by Daviud Dayen at the far-left American Prospect, and it promoted the legacy stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic:

In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president agreed to a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise. . .

But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a rambling denunciation on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways.

Hmm, how could someone like that be elected dogcatcher, much less win two presidential elections? The answer is that the conventional wisdom seriously underestimates the guy. Even MSNBC has a smarter take:

The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu famously wrote, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

Congressional Democrats would be wise to keep this maxim in mind. Under pressure from their loudest supporters to stand up to President Donald Trump, they are laying the groundwork to shut down the government at the end of this month. But while there are reasonable arguments in support of a shutdown, it’s a fight that Democrats would most likely lose, and they should do everything to avoid it.

This piece, from earlier in the week, simply takes the posiition that government shutdowns heretofore have been a Republican strategy, but it's never worked for them, and there's no reason to expect it will work any better for Democrats this time. But now it looks like circumstances have given Trump a new twist.

Dayen in the first link above accuses Trump of lying about the Democrat demands, but it simply isn't clear what they wanted. He says below that he reviewed the details, and I see no reason to doubt him: Instead, it looks like Jeffries and Schumer, both from New York and thus acutely aware of the Mamdani phenomenon, whereby tired machine Democrats are losing primaries to fresh parlor leftist faces, are being forced into hard left positions to look like they're standing up to Trump -- except this is exactly what Trunp wants them to do:

The White House has instructed U.S. federal agencies to brace for mass firings as a government shutdown looms next week. This directive originated from a memo by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Unlike previous shutdowns, the Trump administration plans to go beyond temporary furloughs. Agencies have been told to target programs that are not legally mandated to continue, as outlined in the memo sent to media on Wednesday.

The memo emphasized that programs lacking mandatory appropriations will face significant impacts. Agencies must submit their staff reduction plans and notify employees accordingly.

Even the NeverTrump Wall Street Journal sees what's happening:

Democrats will give the Trump team exactly what it’s been wanting—a shutdown—in return for Democrats’ continuing to demand something they will never get. What a deal. Even Faust got some worldly pleasure in exchange for a soul. This is trading hellfire for brimstone.

. . . The true scope of this losing proposition came clear with a memo Mr. Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued Wednesday night, explaining how a shutdown will roll. Shutdowns usually mean furloughed federal employees, who suffer temporary inconvenience before resuming their jobs. Not this time.

The Vought memo orders agencies to identify all programs that depend on discretionary funding (which lapses next week) and don’t align with the president’s priorities. Employees who administer those disfavored programs or projects won’t be furloughed. They will be fired.

According to The Hill,

Cracks are starting to form in the Senate Democratic caucus over whether to hold the line against a seven-week clean government funding stopgap passed by the House, according to Democratic sources who say a threat by President Trump to lay off thousands of federal workers is changing the Democratic political calculus on a shutdown.

. . . Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who plans to retire from the Senate at the end of 2026, has been “putting out feelers” to Republican senators about reaching some sort of deal or mutual understanding to avoid a government shutdown next week, according to a source familiar with her conversations with Senate colleagues.

Shaheen told Semafor in an interview Wednesday that she sees “a number of ways” to avoid a government shutdown “that should satisfy both sides” and opened the door to voting for the House-passed stopgap next week when Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) brings it back to the Senate floor.

I keep thinking back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style that I last referred to in March:

An analysis of Trump’s negotiation behavior reveals how he embodies each of these four roles. His first preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options, giving him both immediate maximum leverage (controller) as well as the opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between the other party’s eagerness to negotiate and his magnanimity in doing so given his many purportedly superior options (performer). If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

It's time for legacy media to scrap the stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, boorish, impulsive, and vindictive.