You generally don’t see criminal charges filed against judges at any level of the court system. If it does happen, it’s used to address egregious and constant criminal activity by sitting judges. The most common path towards discipline relies on the court system itself, which allows courts to punish judges for misbehavior and, in rare cases, have them removed via internal processes.
But this is no ordinary US. This is Trump’s United States, where anyone who displeases the man who wishes he could be king is subjected to vindictive prosecutions. What happened to New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey (prosecutions currently paused due to Trump administration fuckery/fuck ups) can happen to anyone.
So here’s what happened to Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan. After being made aware of the fact that DEA and ICE agents were hanging around outside of her courtroom in hopes of arresting migrants who were doing nothing more than reporting for their court-ordered check-ins, Dugan decided to let the migrant whose criminal case she was currently handling slip out a side door, rather than go out the main door and directly into the hands of loitering federal officers.
According to the criminal complaint filed by Kash Patel’s FBI — something he celebrated on X briefly before deleting his post — this meant agents had to move quickly across nearly an additional 50-100 feet to arrest this person. A sworn affidavit by FBI special agent made it clear this was way too much stuff for officers to be doing, especially one with [checks affidavit again] seven years experience as a CPA[??][!!].
The federal government said this added up to obstruction. And it chose to criminally charge Judge Hannah Dugan rather than allow the Wisconsin court system to handle this on its own. There’s precedent for this, of course. The last time a judge faced criminal charges for acts that would normally be handled by the court system’s internal disciplinary procedures was in 2019 during Trump’s first term as president.
Hannah C. Dugan, a Wisconsin state judge, was found guilty on Thursday of obstructing federal agents, a high-profile victory for the Justice Department in a prosecution of a judge who it said was illegally aiding an undocumented immigrant.
Judge Dugan faces up to five years in prison and, as a person who has been convicted of a felony, she is likely ineligible to continue to hold office as a judge in Wisconsin, according to the State Constitution.
This wasn’t the end result of a lengthy investigation or the culmination of numerous complaints against Judge Dugan. This is nothing more than some federal agents bitching that they were momentarily inconvenienced and getting all the vindictiveness they wanted from Trump’s DOJ and Kash Patel’s FBI.
This isn’t over. This conviction can be appealed. And it appears the court handling this thinks there’s a case to be made. Normally, jury guilty verdicts are accompanied by sentencing dates. That didn’t happen here, which seems to indicate the judge handling the case isn’t necessarily convinced Judge Dugan’s actions rise to the level of a federal felony. But no matter how this ends up playing out, everyone should be on notice that Trump thinks “justice” and “revenge” are the same word.
Yes, as I already wrote about, the indictment against James Comey was already thrown out due to Halligan’s improper appointment, but it’s also worth covering how badly she fucked up even if she had been appointed legally. These cases were destined for the dustbin no matter what, because Halligan had no idea what she was doing. Late last week just one example of that insanity came out in court.
The whole case hasn’t gone well with Halligan handling the prosecution. The indictment delivered to a federal judge contained noticeable errors, the most notable being a discrepancy between the number of criminal counts presented to the grand jury. The one Halligan delivered contained two different Count Two’s in the charges, with supposedly one of the three charges (even though only two are listed) approved for prosecution by the grand jury.
Halligan told the judge she had only seen and signed the less fucked up version of the grand jury indictment but the judge pointed out both versions given to her had been signed by Trump’s recently installed DOJ prosecutor.
A federal magistrate judge said on Monday that the criminal case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, could be in trouble because of a series of apparent errors committed in front of the grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced prosecutor picked by President Trump to oversee the matter.
[…]
In his ruling, Judge Fitzpatrick said that when Ms. Halligan appeared — by herself — in front of the grand jury in September to seek an indictment accusing Mr. Comey of lying to and obstructing Congress in 2020 testimony, she made at least two “fundamental and highly prejudicial” misstatements of the law. He also pointed out that the grand jury materials he ordered her to turn over to him for his review this month appeared to be incomplete and “likely do not reflect the full proceedings.”
There’s more in the ruling [PDF] handed down by Judge Fitzpatrick, but nothing in there suggests Halligan didn’t fuck up repeatedly while (mis)handling this case. It also points out that Trump’s DOJ and FBI engaged in some possible misconduct when conducting searches of devices seized from Comey’s personal lawyer, Daniel Richman.
Not only did the DOJ not take steps to separate anything that might have been privileged communications between the attorney and his client, it is now (five years later) trying to use information obtained then to support the current case against Comey.
Here, the government was permitted to search all of the Richman materials but authorized to seize only evidence related to violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 (Theft and Conversion of Stolen Government Property) and 18 U.S.C. § 793 (Unlawful Gathering or Transmission of National Defense Information), both markedly different offenses than those with which Mr. Comey is currently charged.
[…]
The government appears to have conflated its obligation to protect privileged information–an obligation it approached casually at best in this case–with its duty to seize only those materials authorized by the Court. This cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment and multiple court orders left the government unchecked to rummage through all of the information seized from Mr. Richman, and apparently, in the government’s eyes, to do so again anytime they chose. The Arctic Haze investigation was closed in September 2021, with no charges filed. The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again.
While none of that is necessarily Halligan’s fault, if she were a seasoned prosecutor rather than just another Trump loyalist, she might have realized this evidence was possibly unusable and withheld it from her (and her alone) grand jury presentation.
But the rest of it is definitely her fault. As Anna Bower points out in her extremely informative Bluesky thread, Halligan tried to salvage an apparent mistake by the grand jury foreperson — a misplaced signature that made it look like no criminal charges were being forwarded — by getting a signature on replacement paperwork which would reflect the grand jury’s decision to indict Comey on Count Two (removing the original Count One rejected by the grand jury). This explains the new paperwork with two Count Two’s, but it certainly doesn’t explain why Halligan thought she could slide the edited paperwork past the court.
And that all adds up to a judge who was clearly fed up:
The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted. However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding. Therefore, in this case, “the Court has before it a rare example of a criminal defendant who can actually make a ‘particularized and factually based’ showing that grounds exist to support the proposition that irregularities may have occurred in the grand jury proceedings and may justify the dismissal of one or more counts of the indictment.”
Now, a rational president who desires to be represented by competent professionals would have already acted to replace this prosecutor and demanded answers from the FBI. This is not a rational president nor is it a normal presidency. The administration that has turned the concept of executive power into an absolute monster will sweep this loss under the rug with the rest of its losses while claiming the system it controls is somehow stacked against it. And it will, of course play well, with the GOP voting base, which loves nothing more than being told that everyone else but themselves are to blame for their personal failures.
The problem with shedding this much talent is that you need to replace it with someone capable of fogging a mirror while also being a MAGA loyalist. When attrition outpaces the appointment process, things get sloppy. They also get illegal, which is something Trump and his administration are being reminded of constantly as they pitch competent people overboard and hastily replace them with people Trump likes… or at least has heard of.
Lindsey Halligan — best known for being Trump’s insurance law specialist before being gifted with an entirely unearned US Attorney position — is now making a play for being the worst Lindsey in Trump’s orbit. (Lindsey Graham has his work cut out for him.)
The DOJ continues to exit grand juries with ham sandwiches deemed unfit for judicial consumption. Halligan beat the odds by managing to secure an extremely questionable indictment of the FBI director Trump fired nearly five years ago for not being loyal enough, as well as some risible bullshit about alleged mortgage fraud supposedly committed by New York district attorney Letitia James, who has angered Trump on multiple occasions for refusing to expose her underside every time Trump starts barking incoherently.
There are multiple problems with both cases, but especially with the Comey indictment, which has already been botched repeatedly by insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan. While we have discussed some of that, those discussions may not ultimately matter. The most recent ruling handed down by a judge overseeing the judicial district in which Halligan is repeatedly fucking things up says we don’t even need to discuss the merits of the criminal cases being brought by Trump’s vindictive DOJ.
The only thing we need to discuss is whether or not Halligan actually has the legal power to serve as a DOJ prosecutor. As Chris Geidner points out on Bluesky, the answer is “no.” And that goes for both cases.
Here’s the operative phrase from the ruling on the Comey indictment:
As explained below, I agree with Mr. Comey that the Attorney General’s attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid. And because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Mr. Comey’s motion and dismiss the indictment without prejudice.
History rhymes, even when it’s being made on the same day. Here’s the point that ultimately matters in the Letitia James prosecution:
As explained below, I agree with Ms. James that the Attorney General’s attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid. And because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Ms. James’s motion and dismiss the indictment without prejudice.
The problem with both cases is Lindsey Halligan. The law does give the executive branch an opportunity to generate a steady stream of nominees for open positions. But if the Senate doesn’t actually approve a replacement within 120 days, the approval process is turned over to the district courts, who can place their own nominees into vacant positions. The clock doesn’t reset just because Trump decided the best way to handle this was to jump from nominee to nominee for months in a row. The 120-day clock begins with the first appointee. And if that person isn’t confirmed by the Senate, the courts get their chance to fill the void.
None of that happened here. Trump kept bypassing the legal process, shoving successive loyalists into this vacancy in hopes of staying a step ahead of this eventual failure. It’s now caught up with the administration, which now sees (for the time being) two of its most high-profile revenge efforts kicked to the curb by the district court.
Obviously, the administration will be asking both the appellate court and the Supreme Court (if needed) to pretend the only thing that matters is that Trump gets what he wants, no matter what actions he takes to achieve these goals.
Also, the dismissals are both “without prejudice,” which means the DOJ can get back to Trump’s dirty revenge business at any point in the future if it can manage to get one of its loyalists approved for public sector employment.
But the clock continues to run. While Trump may have another three years of Oval Office occupation ahead of him, the 2020 testimony the DOJ claims was filled with legally actionable lies by James Comey is on the cusp of its expiration date. The statute of limitations has a pretty good chance of tolling before Trump can resume his vindictive prosecution of the former FBI director.
If the administration is smart, it will understand its Hail Mary prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies have been batted down in the end zone by the system of checks and balances. But it isn’t, so it’s safe to assume efforts even more stupid and incompetent than those currently being mismanaged into the judicial graveyard by AUSA Bratz doll Lindsey Halligan will continue as long as Trump or any successive member of this MAGA-cooked version of the GOP still hold power.
Another “fuck you” has been delivered to federal courts by the Trump administration. This time, the extended middle finger is embodied by (extremely recently now-former) US Attorney Bill Essayli.
Essayli has made headlines here before, mainly for yelling ineffectively at prosecutors who were unable to convert bullshit cases against anti-ICE protesters into federal indictments. Essayli is angry, the papers said. Trump, however, seems to like him. In fact, he seems to like him so much he didn’t even bother to get Essayli legally appointed.
Bill Essayli, Trump’s pick in April to temporarily lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, should have departed the post by July 31 under a 120-day limit imposed by federal law, U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright concluded.
An unusual maneuver by Attorney General Pam Bondi to extend Essayli’s tenure into 2026 violated federal appointment laws, the Hawaii-based George W. Bush appointee ruled.
“Simply stated: Essayli unlawfully assumed the role of Acting United States Attorney for the Central District of California,” Seabright concluded. “Essayli may not perform the functions and duties of the United States Attorney … He is disqualified from serving in that role.”
OK, there’s a reason rules like this are in place. And Bill Essayli, along with Pam Bondi and the rest of the Trump administration, are demonstrating why rules like these are in place. These rules normally — NORMALLY — discourage purges and the installation of loyalists. This is especially important in entities like the Department of Justice which, like all federal agencies, is supposed to serve the public, rather than the vengeful whims of an aspiring autocrat.
When these get ignored, Bill Essayli happens. You get a Trump puppet engaging in vengeful prosecutions of Trump’s personal enemies, along with tons of bullshit prosecutions of people engaged in their First Amendment protected right to complain about the government.
Now, we’d normally expect someone to step down for the time being and cede power to another, more legally qualified person until everything gets back in line, legally speaking. But, of course, that isn’t the case here. Essayli has gone far beyond the expected “you can’t fire me, I refuse to be fired” response common to Trump administration officials. Instead, he’s telling the court that telling him he had no legally derived prosecution power has only made him a more powerful prosecutor.
“We’re actually quite relieved,” Essayli said in an interview. “The judge has made it clear that regardless of my title I’m cleared to keep running the office, I’m very happy with the outcome.”
Yeah, that’s not actually what the court said. And it still has the power to appoint someone to take Essayli’s place until someone actually confirmed by the Senate ascends to his office. But since this hasn’t happened yet, Essayli assumes it won’t happen for… the next three years, I guess.
And that’s part and parcel of this administration’s incessant shitbirdery. Whenever someone tells them they can’t do something, they just pretend no one has said anything. And if they can be bothered to pay attention to the words used by federal judges in rulings against them, they head to The Nazi Bar to rant about liberal activist judges and insist no law is capable of constraining the leader of the Law and Order party.
If there’s any justice in the world (and there’s hardly any of that), Essayli, Bondi, and everyone else associated with this stillbirth of an administration will become terminally unemployable. But for now, we’re just going to have to suffer through a bunch of people who refuse to cede power, no matter what any other branch of the government says.
There are levels of corruption, and then there’s whatever the hell this is.
Donald Trump is demanding that American taxpayers pay him $230 million for being prosecuted. Which is like getting a speeding ticket and then billing the state for the cost of your traffic lawyer. Except in this case, the traffic lawyer is now the judge, and the judge gets to decide how much the state pays you and you get to approve it all, and somehow this is all legal because we’ve apparently given up on the concept of shame.
The New York Times reports that Trump has filed what’s known as administrative claims demanding approximately $230 million in compensation from the Department of Justice for two federal investigations, including one that led to indictments—investigations that only stopped because he won the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general,” meaning the person who oversees the agency’s civil division.
The current deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer andsaid at his confirmation hearingin February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr. Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr. Patel, in investigations related to Mr. Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
This is not normal. This has never been normal. This will never be normal. Although at this point, “normal” is doing a lot of work there, given that we’re living in a timeline where a business failure reality TV host became president, tried to overturn an election, got indicted for stealing classified documents, got re-elected, embraced every authoritarian instinct, and is now suing the government for having the audacity to notice.
According to the Times, Trump submitted two separate administrative claims through a standard government process that typically precedes lawsuits, but can also be used to “negotiate” a settlement. The first claim, filed in late 2023, seeks damages for the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller’s well-publicized (though often misrepresented) probe into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.
The second, filed in summer 2024, targets the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent prosecution for mishandling classified documents—you know, the prosecution where Trump was literally caught on tape discussing how he couldn’t declassify the documents he was showing people, and where there were famously boxes of sensitive documents stored in places like a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
The second claim accuses the government of “malicious prosecution” intended to sway the election:
Attorney General Garland FBI Director Wray and Special Counsel Smith’s targeting indictment and harassment of President Trump has always been malicious political prosecution aimed at affecting an electoral outcome to prevent President Trump from being re elected This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation
By this logic, every criminal defendant should be able to bill taxpayers for their legal fees. And the FBI Director supposedly orchestrating this “harassment”? Christopher Wray, whom Trump personally appointed after firing James Comey. Why would he want to go after Trump?
But let’s get back to the craziest part: Trump’s former personal lawyers, now in government positions specifically because Trump appointed them, get to decide whether the government should pay their former client (and current boss) hundreds of millions of dollars for prosecuting him.
As legal ethics professor Bennett Gershman told the Times:
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
This is amazing for multiple reasons, including that the NY Times did its usual “view from nowhere” cop-out of trying to find an expert to give them a quote because the NY Times house style is never to directly call out bullshit for being bullshit. And even that guy is like “dog, you don’t need an expert. Literally everyone can see this is the most corrupt bullshit imaginable.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump directly about the claims. His response is worth reading in full because he essentially admits everything:
COLLINS: The NYT is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own DOJ now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don't even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money. They rigged the election.
COLLINS: The NY Times is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own Justice Department now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?
TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don’t even know what the numbers… I don’t even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money, but I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something…. But look, they rigged the election.
“They rigged the election.” There it is. Trump’s entire justification for demanding a quarter billion dollars from taxpayers rests on his repeatedly debunked lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The same lie that led to January 6th. The same lie that has been rejected by every court that examined it, including judges Trump himself appointed. The same lie that even his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, said was “bullshit.”
Trump then tries to bolster his case by pointing to recent settlements:
As you know, in one case, 60 Minutes had to pay us a lot of money. George “Slopadopulous” had to pay us a lot of money and they already paid. You know, they paid me a lot of money.
Let’s be clear about those “settlements”: ABC and CBS didn’t settle because Trump’s claims had merit. They settled because fighting Trump—who controls the federal government and has repeatedly threatened to use that power against media companies—became too expensive and risky. And, in the case of 60 Minutes, it happened because Shari Redstone needed FCC chair Brendan Carr’s approval to sell Paramount, and everyone knew that wouldn’t be approved without paying Trump. Those settlements aren’t vindication; they’re protection money. They’re evidence of the exact kind of corrupt pressure campaign Trump is now trying to formalize by demanding payment from the government itself.
But then—and I want you to really appreciate this—he just admits the whole scam on camera:
Now, with the country, it’s interesting. Because I’m the one that makes the decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk.And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.[Turns to look over his shoulder]. Did you have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?
No, Donald. It’s not “interesting.” It’s a conflict of interest. “Interesting” is when you learn that octopuses have three hearts. This is just corrupt. It’s bad. You’re not supposed to be in a position where you’re both the plaintiff demanding money and the defendant deciding whether to pay it out of the coffers of the US Treasury.
And it’s even worse, though he never acknowledges this, because it’s him deciding how much of the taxpayers’ dollars he gets to transfer to his own bank account. By himself. It’s horrifically corrupt, as anyone can see.
He tries to salvage this with a throwaway line about charity:
But I was damaged very greatly and any money that I would get I would give to charity.
Sure you would. This is the same Donald Trump whose charitable foundation was shut down in 2018 after a lawsuit found it had engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality” including using charitable funds to settle business disputes, buy portraits of himself, and make illegal campaign contributions. The same Donald Trump who admitted in that case to misusing charitable funds and was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. The same Donald Trump who appears constitutionally incapable of doing anything that doesn’t personally enrich him.
But even if we believed him—even if he pinky-swore to give every penny to charity—the entire premise is corrupt. If the money should go to a good cause, how about leaving it in the federal treasury? You know, the one that’s currently empty because the government is shut down and can’t pay its bills?
Let’s zoom out for a moment, because the specific details of Trump’s grift can obscure just how unprecedented this is.
The government almost never pays compensation to people it prosecutes, even in cases of actual wrongful prosecution. When someone is exonerated after being wrongly convicted, many states don’t provide any compensation at all, and those that do typically cap it at levels far below what Trump is demanding. The idea that you deserve compensation simply for being prosecuted—when the prosecution was based on actual evidence of actual crimes you actually committed—is lunacy.
The Russia investigation that Trump claims he deserves compensation for resulted in 34 indictments, seven guilty pleas, and five people sentenced to prison. The special counsel’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, instead noting that if they had confidence Trump didn’t commit a crime, they would have said so. The investigation was not “malicious prosecution”—it was a legitimate investigation into serious matters of national security.
Did some people exaggerate the extent of what Mueller would find? Sure. But there remains no evidence that the investigation itself was improper. Indeed, the exact opposite is true. The investigation was done, it found some clear evidence of law breaking, and that resulted in some people going to prison.
The classified documents case was even more clear-cut. The FBI found over 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite Trump’s lawyers claiming they’d returned everything. The evidence included surveillance footage showing Trump’s employees moving boxes of documents around to hide them from investigators. Trump was literally recorded discussing how he couldn’t declassify documents but was showing them to people anyway. This wasn’t a witch hunt—it was an open-and-shut case that only ended because Trump won an election.
And now he wants taxpayers to pay him for it.
Perhaps most disturbing is what Trump’s own comments reveal about how thoroughly he’s corrupted the Justice Department. When asked about the claims, he said, “I don’t even talk to them about it”—implying that his subordinates are pursuing this on his behalf without his direct involvement. This is almost certainly false (Trump has never been shy about directing his personal legal affairs), but even if it were true, it would mean the Justice Department is so thoroughly captured that officials are proactively working to enrich the president without being asked.
The Times notes that “administrative claims are not technically lawsuits” and that “such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department… to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court.” In other words, this is all happening behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny, no judicial scrutiny, and the Justice Department has the discretion to simply cut Trump a check.
Oh, and also this:
The Justice Departmentdoes not specifically require a public announcement of settlementsmade for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.
Trump could pocket hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, approved by his own lawyers, and there might be no public record.
And if you think that there’s some sort of ethics rules in place to stop it, Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to have made sure nothing stands in the way here:
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department. Asked if either of those top officials would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr. Trump, a Justice Department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, said, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
In July, Ms. Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.
Mr. Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.
Trump seems to have taken the joke “no conflict, no interest!” to heart.
Look, we’ve become numb to Trump’s corruption. Every day it’s a new batshit thing, and honestly, I’m exhausted. But this one deserves to break through the noise because it’s not complicated.
The President is demanding the government pay him $230 million for investigating his crimes and prosecuting him. His own lawyers get to approve it. He’s justifying it with the Big Lie. The government is shut down and can’t pay its bills, but sure, let’s cut Trump a check. And he’s doing all of this while admitting on camera that it’s “interesting” he gets to decide how much to pay himself.
This is just theft. The president is looting the treasury, and the only people who can stop him are the Justice Department he controls, the Congress that won’t hold him accountable, and the Supreme Court that already gave him immunity for crimes.
So yeah, he’ll probably get away with it. Because we’ve built a system where the most powerful person in the country can openly steal from us and face no consequences. Trump didn’t break the system—he just realized it was already broken and decided to take advantage.
And honestly? The fact that he can admit all of this on camera and still expect to cash the check is perhaps the most depressing part of all.
I recognize that this is like the fourth impeachable thing he’s done in the past week alone, and with each new horror the old one slides off the front pages, but really, this one deserves extra attention. At a time when the government is shut down, prices everywhere are rising, and the economy is stalling, Donald Trump is looking to personally enrich himself with a quarter of a billion dollars from the US Treasury.
This is a shockingly brazen level of corruption, even for Donald Trump. And we shouldn’t let it just slide away.
You may recall a year or so ago, when Mark Zuckerberg whined to Jim Jordan about how the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain… content.” Or maybe you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and whined some more about Biden pressure on moderation, even though he admitted there that he rejected their requests:
And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true. Right, I mean they they basically pushed us and and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.
And I was just like,well we’re not going to do that. Like,we’re clearly not going to do that.
Zuckerberg also made a pledge that they were supposedly going to stop being pushed around. From now on, he swore, there was a new Meta that wouldn’t bow at all to government officials demanding content be removed.
He was a new Zuck. A Zuck who would stand up to oppressive government demands.
So, about that.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly bragged about the Trump administration doing exactly what Mark Zuckerberg falsely claimed the Biden administration did to him. She bragged about how the Justice Department successfully pressured Facebook into removing First Amendment-protected speech:
If you can’t see that, it’s Bondi tweeting:
Today following outreach from the Justice Department, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target ICE agents in Chicago. The wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs. The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.
This is actual government censorship—direct pressure from the DOJ to remove constitutionally protected speech. And unlike the Biden administration’s communications that Zuck admitted he easily refused, in this case, Facebook immediately complied.
The content in question? Tracking the public movements of law enforcement officials. This is classic protected First Amendment activity, with well-established case law protecting the right to record and monitor police in public. It’s nowhere close to meeting the Brandenburg standard for “inciting imminent lawless action” that Bondi misquotes in her tweet.
So, once again, let’s take a step back and look at this. When it was the Biden administration asking Facebook about COVID misinfo, Zuck had no problem saying “well, we’re not going to do that.” And as it became clear Trump had a decent chance of winning the election, it gave Zuck an opportunity to throw the Biden admin under the bus, while insisting that they’d changed and would stop being pressured by governments.
But then, as soon as Bondi calls Zuck and says “jump,” he asks “how high?”
And, of course, it’s not just Zuckerberg who is being a cowardly hypocrite here.
Remember how Judge Terry Doughty, in the Missouri v. Biden case, took similar anecdotes of supposed pressure (which the Supreme Court later rejected, noting that Doughty’s findings were “clearly erroneous” and based on “no evidence”) and claimed that any sign of governments merely communicating with social media companies about moderation practices clearly represented an epic violation of the First Amendment. He said that “the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Of course, the Supreme Court eventually laughed that off, because it was based on him both fabricating evidence (including quotes that were not said) and misunderstanding other evidence. But where are the people who cheered on Doughty’s ruling about Bondi’s “massive attack against free speech?”
Or, perhaps, you remember the “Twitter Files” gang of Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and new CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, claiming that a few misrepresented stories of government officials asking platforms about their content moderation practices represented the “censorship industrial complex” and were huge attacks on free speech. Matt Taibbi insisted that any suppression of “true speech that undermined confidence in government policies” was “precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.”
Shellenberger touted a supposed whistleblower “proving” that the government “pressured” social media, such as Facebook, to take down content (the actual evidence he presented said no such thing). He’s spent years since then laughably presenting himself as an expert on government and social media “censorship”, even getting a “professorship” at Bari Weiss’s fake university on the subject.
Weiss herself wrote a typically self-congratulating article about how Elon Musk bought Twitter to “save the world” from “censorship” and whined about how government-induced content moderation “curtailed public debate.”
Where are they on this? I see nothing from Taibbi, Shellenberger, or Weiss. Not a single story about this on the CBS-owned The Free Press. Nothing on X from any of them. Nothing on their various Substacks. Just… silence as the Trump administration does the very thing, loudly and proudly, that they spent years falsely accusing Biden of, while claiming it was an attack on the very foundations of democracy. How odd.
Or how about this: top Trump confidant and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went around taking credit for the DOJ getting the page removed from Facebook, just a week after her own lawsuit, which tried to argue that Facebook (and Twitter) did the RICO in banning her, got rejected by the Supreme Court.
That shows Laura Loomer first tweeting about “ICE tracking pages” on Facebook and complaining that Facebook shouldn’t allow them, followed by her breaking the news that the DOJ told her they contacted Facebook to remove them:
Fantastic news. DOJ source tells me they have seen my report and they have contacted Facebook and their executives at META to tell them they need to remove these ICE tracking pages from the platform.
We will see if they comply. There are DOZENS of pages like the one below that endanger the lives of ICE agents.
It’s further evidence Big Tech is continuing to subvert and undermine President Trump and his agenda.
The hypocrisy level here is off the charts. She’s literally spent years suing Facebook for banning her account, claiming it was an attack on her speech… and now she’s demanding that the government tell Facebook to suppress speech, and celebrating when they do so.
The only consistency is “speech I like should be allowed, speech I don’t like shouldn’t be.”
(a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen
Bondi clearly violated that.
Will anyone point that out?
Now, because we have enough MAGA trolls around here, I can already predict the reply: “this is different,” they will say, “because this is ‘doxxing’ and a threat to ICE.”
Hell, Bondi even hints at that in her tweet, as well as pretending this fits under the Brandenburg standard of “inciting imminent lawless action” which she misquotes in her tweet. Except that’s bullshit. Simply tracking the location of law enforcement officials in public is not anywhere close to crossing the Brandenburg line. It’s also not “doxxing” in any meaningful manner, which is about revealing private info about someone (and, in most cases, is also not against the law).
So what we’re left with is yet another example of the extreme hypocrisy of the MAGA cult. They claimed, falsely, that Biden was “censoring” social media (a lie debunked by even the conservatives on the Supreme Court) and then as soon as they got into power, they not only did exactly what they falsely accused Biden of doing, but they did so openly, publicly, and proudly.
And where are all those “free speech warriors”? Where are Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Weiss? They were soooooooo concerned that what Biden didn’t actually do was the end of free speech in America. Yet, when Trump does way worse than even what they pretended Biden did… it’s crickets.
How odd.
Or how about Joe Rogan? He spent hours with Zuck, helping him spin a blatantly misleading tale of “censorship” from Biden (which again, even Zuck admitted to Rogan didn’t lead to any speech being taken down). But here, Zuck folded like a cheap card table… and what? Silence?
These grifters spent years telling us that free speech was under attack, but they never had the actual goods. Yet now it’s actually happening, but by the guy they supported, and they’re all off hiding somewhere?
How pathetic.
But this isn’t just about individual hypocrisy—it reveals something more troubling about the entire “free speech” discourse we’ve been subjected to for the past several years. The people who positioned themselves as champions of free speech never actually cared about the principle. They cared about weaponizing the concept to attack their political opponents while laying groundwork for their own censorship regime.
The supposed champions of free speech who spent years manufacturing outrage over nonexistent government censorship are now silent in the face of actual government censorship. Their hypocrisy is complete, and they should never, ever, be seen as credible sources on the subject of free speech.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has revealed himself as exactly what critics always said he was: a coward who bends to whoever holds power. His theatrical resistance to Biden was performative. His instant capitulation to Trump is revealing.
The real lesson here isn’t just that these people are frauds—though they obviously are. It’s that we now have a crystal-clear example of what actual government pressure on speech looks like, versus the manufactured controversies of the past few years. When Bondi tweets about successful DOJ pressure campaigns, when Facebook immediately complies, when demands result in immediate content removal—that’s the difference between real government coercion and the communications that resulted in no platform action, which the Supreme Court found insufficient to establish standing because plaintiffs couldn’t show they were actually harmed.
The free speech grifters won’t learn from this, of course. But the rest of us should.
For years now, the MAGA crowd has been absolutely convinced that the Biden administration engaged in the most egregious censorship campaign in American history. They’ve waved around the Murthy v. Missouri case as proof that Biden officials illegally pressured tech companies to remove content (even as the Supreme Court concluded there wasn’t even enough evidence of any coercion to give any of the plaintiffs standing). Just last week, Rep. Jim Jordan was wildly celebrating what heclaimedwas Google’s admission that the Biden administration forced YouTube to censor people (which wasn’t actually what Google said at all, but reading comprehension has never been Jordan’s strong suit).
But now we have an actual, crystal-clear example of government officials using direct threats to pressure a tech company into removing disfavored speech—and suddenly, the free speech warriors have gone mysteriously quiet.
404 Media has the story of Apple removing the ICEBlock app from its App Store on Thursday after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. The app, which allows people to crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, was pulled following what Fox News described as the DOJ “reaching out” to Apple and “demanding” the removal.
Aaron provided 404 Media with a copy of the email he received from Apple regarding the removal. It says “Upon re-evaluation, we found that your app is not in compliance with the App Review Guidelines.” It then points to parts of those guidelines around “Objectionable Content,” and specifically “Defamatory discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.”
The email then says “Information provided to Apple by law enforcementshows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
And Bondi herself was quite explicit about the government’s role in this censorship:
Bondi told Fox “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe.”
“We reached out to Apple today demanding they removethe ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Bondi added according to the Fox report.
Now, some will inevitably argue that Apple made an independent decision based on its own guidelines. But the MAGA crowd refused to accept that exact same argument when it was made in defense of what happened during the Biden administration. When companies explained that their content moderation decisions were based on their own policies, not government pressure, the MAGA crowd dismissed those explanations as irrelevant. They’ve spent years refusing to acknowledge the difference between government persuasion and government coercion.
In all of the communications from the Biden administration that were revealed in Murthy v. Missouri, officials never demanded removal of content. They did request reviews against existing policies (which is why companies rejected over 60% of flagged content) and occasionally suggested policy changes (which were mostly ignored). Even when companies did take action, they consistently maintained it was based on their own policy determinations.
But here? Bondi explicitly states she demanded Apple remove the app. There’s no ambiguity, no gentle suggestion, no “request for review.” It’s a direct government demand for censorship that was immediately complied with.
So let’s be clear about what happened here: A government official made a demand to a private tech company to remove an app based on the content of that app, and the company complied. This is exactly—and I mean exactly—what Jordan, Trump, and the entire MAGA ecosystem have been claiming (falsely) was the greatest violation of the First Amendment in modern history when they imagined Biden officials did it.
But somehow, I doubt we’ll see Jordan holding hearings about this. I doubt we’ll see breathless segments about government censorship. I doubt we’ll see any of the usual suspects who spent years screaming about the Biden administration’s supposed “jawboning” saying a single word about this actual, documented case of government officials pressuring a tech company to remove content.
Now, to be fair, ICEBlock has legitimate issues that have been well-documented. Security researcher Micah Lee has written extensively about how the app is “activism theater” that wasn’t developed with input from actual immigrant defense groups and spreads unverified information that can cause panic rather than provide useful protection. He also documented serious security vulnerabilities in the app’s infrastructure that the developer ignored for weeks. These are legitimate concerns about the app’s effectiveness and security.
But here’s the thing: the quality or effectiveness of the app is irrelevant to the First Amendment question. The government cannot pressure private companies to remove apps based on the content of those apps, regardless of whether that content is high-quality, low-quality, effective, or ineffective. As we documented earlier this year, ICEBlock and similar apps serve a purpose that many people find valuable—providing early warning systems for ICE activities in local communities at a time when people (for good reasons!) are quite concerned about ICE’s abusive tactics.
The Supreme Court made this distinction crystal clear in both the Murthy and Vullo cases. In Vullo, the Court explicitly stated:
A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead. In doing so, she can rely on the merits and force of her ideas, the strength of her convictions, and her ability to inspire others.What she cannot do, however, is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression….
Bondi didn’t just share her views or criticize the app. She explicitly used the power of the state by “demanding” Apple remove it, and Apple complied within hours. This is textbook government coercion of the type that the Supreme Court has repeatedly said violates the First Amendment.
Just last week, we had Trump supporters lying about Biden “censorship” to justify FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s explicit threats against Disney over Jimmy Kimmel’s speech. They keep pointing to Murthy v. Missouri as if it blessed government pressure on tech companies, when it actually said the opposite—that such pressure would violate the First Amendment if there was evidence it occurred.
But, as we discussed, in Murthy, the Supreme Court made it clear that explicit threats would, in fact, cross the First Amendment line. The problem in Murthy was the lack of evidence of “coercion” or “significant encouragement” to suppress speech—the Court specifically looked for explicit demands or threats and found none (while it did find such explicit demands in the Vullo case, which they heard the same day). The majority ruling states that the conduct needs to involve coercion and “not mere communication.”
Well, here’s your coercion. Here’s your “significant encouragement.” Here’s your smoking gun in the form of the Attorney General literally telling the media she demanded the removal of an app.
Here’s the actual government censorship that Jordan and company have been claiming to fight against for years.
Where are they now?
The silence reveals something fundamental about the entire “censorship” crusade: It was never about protecting free speech or preventing government overreach. It was about creating a permission structure for their own authoritarian impulses while weaponizing victimhood narratives against their political opponents.
When faced with actual, explicit, documented government censorship—the kind they’ve been breathlessly warning about for years—they have nothing to say. Because this censorship serves their agenda, targets their enemies, and advances their political goals.
The mask has slipped completely. The “free speech” warriors have shown themselves to be exactly what critics always said they were: not principled defenders of civil liberties, but partisan actors who only care about speech when it benefits them.
Pretty much everyone who was willing to put justice ahead of Trump is long gone from the DOJ, either having been fired or resigning ahead of an expected firing. Trump has stocked the DOJ with incredibly under-qualified loyalists, overseen by the under-qualified loyalist holding the top spot in the Department, AG Pam Bondi.
Bondi has been told to do only what Trump wants her to do, which basically means turning the Department of Justice into the personification of Trump’s politically motivated vengeance. Bondi, like pretty much every Cabinet official, was informed of this via a Truth Social post — one that first looked like it should have been a direct message rather than a blast on main.
Whatever the means, the ends are the same: Trump’s punishment of anyone Democratic/disloyal enough to have earned the always-angry manchild’s ire. Bondi’s DOJ has earned plenty of ire from Trump with its inability to convince grand juries to convict anti-ICE protesters. This time, Trump is going after people who somehow allegedly prevented him from claiming the Oval Office in 2020, despite (in this case) the person in question last holding office in early 2017.
That means it’s James Comey being charged with federal crimes by Trump’s DOJ, more than eight years after the fact. According to the fully compromised DOJ, Comey violated the law by lying to the Senate during testimony given in 2020. The three-count indictment was presented to a grand jury by newly appointed US District Attorney Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer who’s best known for litigating on behalf of Donald Trump in several cases and who apparently has no conflict of interest when representing the United States in Trump’s revenge prosecution of the former FBI director who was fired by Trump after he refused to pledge sole allegiance to the semi-successful property owner now infesting the White House.
Here’s the indictment that was signed by the grand jury, which only forwarded one of the charges for prosecution. The indictment [PDF], signed by DA Halligan, contains three counts and her signature. It also, for reasons Halligan certainly can’t explain, claims two different charges are “Count Two.” (The first is a different form of lying to Congress. The second “Count Two” is an obstruction charge.) Considering the document runs three pages and likely contains fewer than 300 words, it’s inexplicable how this double-heading managed to avoid being corrected before being handed to a grand jury, much less a judge.
But that’s only the beginning of the bad news for Trump’s hand-picked, fully compromised, mostly incompetent US DA for the Eastern District of Virginia. Here’s how the charging presentation hearing went for DA Halligan, as reported by CBS News:
“So this has never happened before. I’ve been handed two documents that are in the Mr. Comey case that are inconsistent with one another,” [Judge Lindsey] Vaala said to Halligan. “There seems to be a discrepancy. They’re both signed by the (grand jury) foreperson.”
And she noted that one document did not clearly indicate what the grand jury had decided.
“The one that says it’s a failure to concur in an indictment, it doesn’t say with respect to one count,” Vaala said. “It looks like they failed to concur across all three counts, so I’m a little confused as to why I was handed two things with the same case number that are inconsistent.”
Halligan initially responded that she hadn’t seen that version of the indictment.
“So I only reviewed the one with the two counts that our office redrafted when we found out about the two — two counts that were true billed, and I signed that one. I did not see the other one. I don’t know where that came from,” Halligan told the judge.
Yeah, not a great way to make your debut, especially when Trump is heavily breathing down your neck while splashing his revenge fantasies across Truth Social every few hours. If you’re wondering about the bold print, well… that’s not the end of the embarrassment for the new DA. And it’s apparently just the beginning of her inability to lie effectively enough to avoid being unceremoniously shit-canned when this abomination gets laughed out of court once it goes to trial:
Vaala responded, “You didn’t see it?” And Halligan again told her, “I did not see that one.”
Vaala seemed surprised: “So your office didn’t prepare the indictment that they —”
Halligan then replied, “No, no, no — I — no, I prepared three counts. I only signed the one — the two-count (indictment). I don’t know which one with three counts you have in your hands.”
“Okay. It has your signature on it,” Vaala told Halligan, who responded, “Okay. Well.”
“Okay. Well.” Touché… I guess? Halligan fits right in with the Trump administration. It moves fast and breaks things — not because it’s trying to innovate, but because it’s big, brutish, and dangerously stupid. Halligan took a promotion and a case without being qualified to do either thing and showed her entire ass on her first day in federal court as a prosecutor.
The DOJ’s statement is a bit more legible and cleanly edited, but it says almost nothing while using fewer words:
The indictment alleges that Comey obstructed a congressional investigation into the disclosure of sensitive information in violation of 18 USC 1505.
The indictment also alleges that Comey made a false statement in violation of 18 USC 1001. Comey stated that he did not authorize someone at the FBI to be an anonymous source. According to the indictment that statement was false.
This is followed by some dumb stuff about no one being above the law (LOL) from AG Pam Bondi and long, rambling statement from Kash Patel about how federal law enforcement has been “weaponized” to engage in political attacks in the past and that it will definitely not be happening under his watch (however long that lasts with Captain Moody helming the USS United States of America) even as it definitely is happening under what could graciously be referred to as his “watch.”
Meanwhile, the Gray Lady is doing whatever it can to make someone dangerously unqualified to be a regular US District Attorney (much less one completely obliged to be the attack surface for politically motivated prosecutions) feel better about being absolutely as bad at her new job as any reasonable person would expect her to be, given her dearth of relevant experience:
The first few days in any new job are always hard, but Thursday was especially tough for Lindsey Halligan, the newly installed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
She had to navigate an unfamiliar courthouse, make her first-ever appearance in a criminal case and, on top of all that, indict one of President Trump’s enemies.
Don’t do this. Don’t humanize people who have done nothing but dehumanize a vast majority of the US population, starting with immigrants and continuing on through [checks list] women, anyone who isn’t a member of the GOP, public employees, LGBTQ+ people, non-whites, journalists, judges who rule against the administration, medical professionals, scientists, protesters, former political allies, entire states and their entire governments, victims of natural disasters, college students, teachers… the list gets longer the longer Trump remains in power.
This is what being willing to appease Trump’s desires gets you: a sympathetic pat on the head from a press outfit that should have led off with this, rather than the “you did your best” lead-in it chose to use:
Ms. Halligan, who took over on Monday after her predecessor quit rather than prosecute James B. Comey with what he believed was insufficient evidence, had a little trouble with the first two tasks. At one point, she entered the wrong courtroom. When she found the right one, she stood on the wrong side of the judge, then appeared confused about the paperwork she just had signed.
This is the lede. The stuff above it is unearned empathy. This person would probably be thrilled if the New York Times suddenly ceased to exist, despite it having plenty of experience in its field. A rookie elevated solely for their perceived loyalty should be made to feel every bit of the shame accepting an unearned position should generate. And when you suck during your debut, you should be reminded incessantly that you’re not here because you’re good at your job. You’re here because the president knows you’ll never push back against his demands. You should be made to feel that failure and that willingness to choose sycophancy over any sense of professionalism or personal pride.
I don’t think this prosecution will go anywhere. There’s no one competent enough left in the DOJ to guide this manufactured case against Comey to completion. We’ll at least get to enjoy another round of firings and resignations, which will no doubt be accompanied by randomly capitalized rage on Truth Social. But even if this falls apart, the DOJ has made it clear it’s here to engage in political prosecutions, rather than serve the nation and the ideals of justice. It’s now just another part of the Trump legal team, which will certainly make Lindsey Halligan feel more welcome, but will never turn any of the DOJ’s fully compromised prosecutors into anything more than the rudimentary tools they’ve chosen to be.
To suggest that Donald Trump simply doesn’t care about constitutional rights, political norms, or anyone other than himself is to suggest that he actually understands any of these concepts. That’s giving him far too much credit. What Trump does is pure id, completely unaffected by anything someone his age should have learned long before entering their eighth decade on earth.
Any usual administration would have seen cabinet members wrestling the phone from grandpa after witnessing a few late night bursts of getting angry on main. But this is an administration that is filled with people handpicked by Trump for their obsequiousness, which leads to the sort of thing seen here:
Trump criticizes Pam Bondi for not charging his adversaries quickly enough, in a Truth Social post that looks a lot like a DM. truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT…
As Kyle Cheney points out, this looks a whole lot like Trump accidentally posting a DM meant for Attorney General Pam Bondi to his public Truth Social account.
Here’s what the now-deleted (and since re-posted), presumably accidental public post by Donald Trump said:
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Shiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” Then we almost put in a Democrat supported U.S. Attorney, in Virginia, with a really bad Republican past. A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job. That’s why two of the worst Dem Senators PUSHED him so hard. He even lied to the media and said he quit, and that we had no case. No, I fired him, and there is a GREAT CASE, and many layers, and legal pundits, say so. Lindsey is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot. We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT
Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this rambling. But all the signs are there (random capitalization, misspellings, nicknames, commas everyfuckingwhere) that would indicate this was composed by resident brain genius Donald Trump. And then there’s the missing phrase which would suggest this was actually meant for public consumption: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
The other thing that suggests this was an inadvertently published DM is the fact that it was deleted shortly after people paid attention to this matter by reposting it everywhere, including at Trump’s own social media site.
Perhaps someone managed to pry the abused phone from grandpa’s hands long enough to delete this post, since it clearly places pressure on AG Bondi to not only investigate some of Trump’s favorite political foes (former FBI director James Comey, Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Leticia James) but pretty much demand Bondi elevate Lindsey Halligan to the position of US Attorney in the eastern district of Virginia.
Trump calls Halligan a “really good lawyer.” Maybe she is. But I wouldn’t assume that from her CV, which involves a stint in insurance law before becoming one of the few attorneys willing to represent Trump during his Mar-a-Lago classified material case. That’s pretty much all she’s ever done. Other than look like the kind of woman Trump likes to surround himself with, she has no other qualifications for the job Trump wants Bondi to give her.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether or not you can wrestle the phone away from grandpa long enough to delete an accidentally posted-to-main DM if he’s just going to keep wandering around letting whatever briefly flits through his brain immediately fall out of his mouth:
Trump amplified his post in a brief gaggle with reporters on Saturday night, saying the post was not meant as a criticism of Bondi but that “we have to act fast.”
“One way or the other. They’re guilty, they’re not guilty. We have to act fast,” Trump said. “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty, or if they should be judged, they should be judged. And we have to do it now.”
There it is: a man on a mission to exact vengeance on everyone he thinks has ever wronged him. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t even look good on private citizens. It looks absolutely abhorrent dribbling from the lips of someone who clearly believes to be president is to be king. Trump thinks the Oval Office is a throne room and that his main job is to inflict pain on his enemies, no matter the cost to the nation. And he has the unmitigated gall to wrap himself with the flag of a nation known mostly for its independence while doing it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi just provided a masterclass in how to completely misunderstand the First Amendment while threatening to abuse government power to silence critics. In response to online criticism of Charlie Kirk following his assassination, Bondi declared: “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society… We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi: "There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."
This is constitutional nonsense of the highest order, and it’s particularly galling given the source.
The Supreme Court has been crystal clear on this issue for decades, over and over again, that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. In Matal v. Tam in 2017, the majority opinion written by Justice Alito reminded us that:
And, as we have explained, that idea strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”
A few years earlier, in 2010, in Snyder vs. Phelps (the case about the Westboro Baptist Church picketing funerals with extremely hateful signs) the court again made it clear that hate speech is protected speech, with Chief Justice John Roberts stating:
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.
These rulings follow a long line of precedent stretching back to Brandenburg v. Ohio, which established that the government cannot punish speech unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Offensive, hateful, or even vile speech that doesn’t meet this extremely narrow standard remains protected.
But here’s the kicker that makes Bondi’s threat even more hypocritical: Charlie Kirk himself understood this basic constitutional principle better than the current Attorney General. Kirk once tweeted out exactly this point:
That’s Charlie Kirk tweeting out just last year:
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech.
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free.
So we have an Attorney General threatening to prosecute people for speech that the very person she’s supposedly defending explicitly said (correctly) was constitutionally protected.
It’s also worth noting the broader political context here. For years, it was primarily those on the political left who would incorrectly claim that “hate speech is not free speech” when trying to shut down speakers they disagreed with. Conservatives, including Kirk himself, would rightfully push back against these claims and defend robust First Amendment protections. Now we have the MAGA right adopting the exact same constitutionally illiterate position when it serves their political purposes.
It sure seems like their prior defenses of hate speech weren’t so much about free speech principles, but about their own ability to spew hate speech without consequence.
The whiplash here is instructive. This isn’t just hypocrisy—it’s a preview of how authoritarians operate. They’ll champion free speech principles when they benefit them, then abandon those same principles the moment they become inconvenient. Bondi’s threat reveals the MAGA movement’s willingness to weaponize Kirk’s assassination as an excuse to suppress criticism and dissent.
It’s been almost exactly a decade since we warned that hate speech laws were just another way for governments to punish people they don’t like, and here is Pam Bondi putting an exclamation point on that argument for us.
When government officials claim the power to define and prosecute “hate speech,” they’re essentially claiming the power to criminalize dissent. History shows us exactly how this plays out: those in power inevitably define “hate speech” as “speech that challenges or criticizes us.”
This is precisely what we’re seeing here. Kirk was a polarizing political figure who said plenty of controversial things during his lifetime. Some people are now saying unflattering things about his legacy online. Rather than accepting this as part of the rough-and-tumble of democratic discourse, Bondi wants to use the power of the federal government to silence these critics by threatening them with prosecution.
It’s got nothing to do with actual hate speech—which, again, isn’t even a legal category in the US. It’s clearly the excuse the MAGA crowd has been waiting for to suppress and silence anyone they deem insufficiently loyal and supportive.
The limited exceptions to First Amendment protection are well-established and narrow: true threats, incitement to imminent lawless action, defamation, and a handful of other carefully circumscribed categories. Notably absent from this list is “saying mean things about dead podcasters” or “hate speech” more generally.
The First Amendment doesn’t protect speech because it’s nice, polite, or inoffensive. It protects speech precisely because allowing the government to decide which ideas are acceptable inevitably leads to the suppression of dissent. Bondi’s threat to prosecute undefined “hate speech” is exactly the kind of government overreach the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
But let’s be real about what’s happening here. Kirk’s assassination is just providing convenient cover for what the MAGA movement has wanted to do all along: weaponize government power to silence critics and dissent. The fact that they’re doing it while abandoning the very constitutional principles their supposed martyr championed? That’s not irony—that’s the point. Authoritarians don’t care about principles; they care about power. And right now, they think they have enough of it to drop the mask.
