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What Is DOJ Really After in Raiding Hannah Natanson?

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I shuddered when I read this article from Hannah Natanson in real time, in December, which was the first I really took notice of the name behind a flood of important reporting on Trump’s attack on the government. A chronicle of the hell Trump had subjected government workers to, it was a great article.

Signal message sent Feb. 23

I think about jumping off a bridge a couple times a day.

Signal message sent March 21

I want to die. It’s never been like this.

Signal message sent May 21

I have been looking at how much I am worth alive, as opposed to dead.

But in telling that story, Natanson told how she protected the anonymity of her sources.

Colleagues told me to join our internal tip-sharing Slack channel #federal-workers, then talk to Washington economics editor Mike Madden, who was coordinating our DOGE coverage. I started copying and pasting tips there as fast as I could, scraping out identifying details. Then, phone buzzing every few seconds, I speed-walked around the building until I found Mike. Skipping with grace over the fact we’d never met (and I didn’t work for him), he ferried me to every corner of the seventh floor: Meet the team covering technology. The team covering national security. The White House editors. Eventually, The Washington Post created a beat for me covering Trump’s transformation of government, and fielding Signal tips became nearly my whole working life.

[snip]

After consulting Post lawyers, I developed what we felt was the safest possible sourcing system. If I planned to use someone in a story, I asked them to send me a picture of their government ID, then tried to forget it. I kept notes from reporting conversations in an encrypted drive, never writing down anyone’s name. To Google-check facts and identities, I used a private browser with no search history. I retitled every Signal chat by agency — “Transportation Employee,” “FDA Reviewer,” “EPA Scientist” — until the app, unable to keep up, stopped accepting new nicknames. (Then I started moving contacts into two-person group chats, which I could still rename.)

Three weeks later, FBI seized the phone on which all those contacts were labeled with aliases. When they searched her home, she was logged into the Slack on which she had shared all those leads with colleagues. They seized the encrypted drive on which she had her notes.

In short, she publicly revealed where to look for everything else, and three weeks later, Trump agents came and took it all.

(For the record, this is not the only time I’ve shuddered about publicly disclosed operational security lately; far too many profiles on anti-ICE activism describe how their Signal trees are structured and what tools the central dispatcher uses to keep everything flowing.)

And that’s one of many reasons the unusual openness of the indictment against Aurelio Perez-Lugones — the pretext FBI used for raiding Natanson — terrifies me.

As I laid out here, I find it exceedingly unusual that DOJ laid out precisely what information got leaked and its classification level, described to be the following stories to which Natanson contributed.

Even as a legal issue, identifying the specific information that got leaked and how sensitive it is only serves to further compromise the information. It undermines prosecutors’ ability to prove that DOD (which is obscured in the indictment but which Pam Bondi freely identified) was trying to protect this information, a necessary element of the offense.

Seizing two MacBook Pros, an iPhone, a portable hard drive, her Garmin running watch, and a voice recorder from a journalist (while also sending WaPo a subpoena) when you already had proof that Perez-Lugones sent her classified information is more than overkill.

It’s the Garmin that really gets me. According to the declaration Natanson submitted in a bid to get her stuff back, she only communicated with Perez-Lugones via Signal or phone. The FBI is trying to obtain evidence about other people she met with, face-to-face.

So I want to consider what else DOJ might be looking for.

Did Perez-Lugones obtain proof of what Trump is really pursuing in Venezuela?

First, Garmin watch aside, it’s possible that Perez-Lugones took things that did not show up in Natanson’s reporting, yet, that DOJ is attempting to remove from her custody. The only thing classified at TS/SCI that Perez-Lugones is accused of leaking is a report based on an intercept of a letter Nicolás Maduro sent to Putin.

In mid-October, [Ramón Celestino] Velásquez, the transportation minister, traveled to Moscow for a meeting with his Russian counterpart, according to Russia’s Transport Ministry. According to documents obtained by The Post, he was also meant to deliver the letter from Maduro to Putin.

In the letter, Maduro requested that the Russians help boost his country’s air defenses, including restoring several Russian Sukhoi Su-30MK2 aircraft previously purchased by Venezuela. Maduro also asked for assistance overhauling eight engines and five radars in Russia, acquiring 14 sets of what were believed to be Russian missiles, as well as unspecified “logistical support,” according to the documents.

Maduro emphasized that Russian-made Sukhoi fighters “represented the most important deterrent the Venezuelan National Government had when facing the threat of war,” according to the U.S. records.

Maduro asked Russia for a “medium-term financing plan of three years” through Rostec, the Russian state-owned defense conglomerate. The documents did not specify an amount.

The documents also indicate that Velásquez was slated to meet with and deliver a second letter to Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov. They do not state whether or how the Russian government responded to Maduro’s outreach or whether the trip took place.

Nevertheless, DOJ successfully defeated an initial release order by citing all the TS/SCI information in Perez-Lugones’ brain.

Perez-Lugones is similarly positioned as the defendants in these cases: he has had decades of access to TS/SCI systems and, like these other defendants, what he knows is not erased simply because his access to the information ended. Further, like these defendants, because Perez-Lugones has “transcribed” and “photographed” highly classified information, it is likely he can recall it. Therefore, as the Government argued at the detention hearing, Perez-Lugones will be able to disseminate this information if released.

There is one document, classified Secret/Rel to NATO and identified as Document E, which Perez-Lugones allegedly photographed and sent to Natanson, that the indictment does not describe to be incorporated in this story including an account of an effort by the Pope to arrange an off-ramp for Maduro, the last of Natanson’s stories before his arrest.

On Christmas Eve, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, second-in-command to the pope and a longtime diplomatic mediator, urgently summoned Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, to press for details on America’s plans in Venezuela, according to government documents obtained by The Washington Post.

[snip]

For days, the influential Italian cardinal had been seeking access to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the documents show, desperate to head off bloodshed and destabilization in Venezuela. In his conversation with Burch, a Trump ally, Parolin said Russia was ready to grant asylum to Maduro and pleaded with the Americans for patience in nudging the strongman toward that offer.

[snip]

In his Dec. 24 meeting with Burch, according to the documents obtained by The Post, Parolin said Russia was prepared to receive Maduro. He also shared what is described in the documents as a “rumor”: that Venezuela had become a “set piece” in Russia-Ukraine negotiations, and that “Moscow would give up Venezuela if it were satisfied on Ukraine.”

The materials Perez-Lugones shared are consistent with Trump having a quid pro quo with Russia, a swap of Venezuela for Ukraine. If he had obtained proof that he may or may not have shared, it might explain the need to seize any shred that he shared; but if so, the raid has nothing to do with national security, but instead with covering up Trump’s secret alliance with Russia.

A potentially related story describes that State was going to blow $50 million protecting Greenland’s polar bears, basically slush in support of Trump’s bid to conquer the entire hemisphere.

Is DOJ targeting specific whistleblowers, including Chuck Borges?

Remember how I noted that the new disclosures about DOGE’s unlawful access to Social Security data referenced an ongoing investigation?

“SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.”

WaPo was not the first outlet to report on Borges’ allegations of grave compromise of Social Security data, allegations that were partly confirmed by these recent disclosures; NYT was.

But WaPo, including Natanson, was the first outlet to interview Borges after he quit in October.

“Prove me wrong,” Borges told The Washington Post last week in his first media interview since his disclosure. “The only way I feel like we’re going to get to that point is with continued public interest, continued public pressure, and I’m willing to lend my name.”

Although he had until now avoided talking to the media, Borges told Post reporters that he had decided to go public to draw attention to his concerns about the safety of Americans’ data and his hope that the agency will share documentation to prove that the data wasn’t put at risk. At his Maryland home — decorated with photos of his family, his prolific board game collection and Navy paraphernalia — the self-described “data geek” said his fears while working at Social Security had kept him up at night.

And that interview linked several earlier WaPo articles, including an earlier Natanson one.

At the same time, the agency was exploring plans to lay off workers, and others were getting reassigned to jobs they were unfamiliar with or choosing to voluntarily leave. In those especially taxing days, Borges said, he saw co-workers breaking down in meetings or while sitting at their desks.

“I cannot count how many employees I saw cry, and that is at all levels of the agency, from executives downward,” Borges said.

In the summer, Borges first heard from colleagues that DOGE had transferred sensitive data to a cloud environment. He began to ask questions but got little information in response.

In Natanson’s Christmas Eve piece, she cited both a Social Security employee (the interview with Borges cites multiple others who back Borges’ claims, one of whom is Leland Dudek) and an IRS official who sent data to DOGE.

A Social Security employee: “Every piece of our data may be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.”

An IRS staffer: There is “a team figuring out how to get … data sent to Doge,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.

In short, DOJ may have raided Natanson in attempt to target a different whistleblower, one who went through formal channels to reveal an unprecedented assault on US person privacy.

Natanson’s sustained reporting of Trump’s dragnet

But it’s not just the Social Security data.

An earlier Natanson story described DOGE’s effort to effectively merge a bunch of massive government databases.

The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.

The team overseen by Elon Musk is collecting data from across the government, sometimes at the urging of low-level aides, according to multiple federal employees and a former DOGE staffer, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The intensifying effort to unify systems into one central hub aims to advance multiple Trump administration priorities, including finding and deporting undocumented immigrants and rooting out fraud in government payments. And it follows a March executive order to eliminate “information silos” as DOGE tries to streamline operations and cut spending.

At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” Davis did not respond to a request for comment.

Natanson was part of a story revealing the Postal Service is involved in the migrant dragnet.

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has quietly begun cooperating with federal immigration officials to locate people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to two people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The Washington Post — dramatically broadening the scope of the Trump administration’s government-wide mass deportation campaign.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a little-known police and investigative force for the mail agency, recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force geared toward finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.

She revealed the effort to use Medicare data to target immigrants.

Trump immigration officials and the U.S. DOGE Service are seeking to use a sensitive Medicare database as part of their crackdown on undocumented immigrants, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Washington Post.

And another describing how DOGE was using HUD data for a similar purpose.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

These are some of Trump’s most egregious privacy violations, potentially the cornerstone of vast new data mining on Americans, including both immigrants (the ostensible focus) and citizens (clearly implicated in Borges’ allegations). If the Trump Administration believes Natanson has details about the real purpose of these data grabs, it might explain their raid of her devices: to prevent her from building on this reporting.

Relatedly, a Natanson story that should have generated more attention described how Trump is effectively trying to usurp DC’s policing sovereignty by boosting the numbers of Park Police.

The U.S. Park Police is seeking to double its ranks in D.C. over the next six months, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post detailing plans of an expansion that would bolster the federal agency’s role in the Trump administration’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.

[snip]

The Park Police website now boasts of a $70,000 hiring bonus, promotion potential and a “streamlined, virtual hiring process with quick turnaround.”

This was a one-off story. But it felt to me when I read it like a parallel to Stephen Miller’s creation of a national paramilitary force at ICE (the expansion of which has also been featured in Natanson reporting).

Like Natanson’s reporting on Trump’s data violations, this could reveal underlying plans for authoritarian power grabs.

Elon Musk’s corruption

Or maybe DOJ is after Natanson’s more general reporting on DOGE.

A number of her stories last year described how DOGE served to benefit Elon Musk and implant Musk’s businesses even more centrally in the Federal government.

One story last year (also relying on court filings and interviews) described all the agencies that Musk gained access while overseeing DOGE.

The Post reviewed court documents and interviewed dozens of current and former U.S. government officials to determine which records DOGE aides were able to examine while Musk led the unit. Reporters also spoke with experts and business competitors about how that information, if improperly shared with Musk’s companies, could give them a competitive advantage.

DOGE aides, for example, were given near-blanket access to records at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, court records show. The agency holds proprietary information about algorithms used by payment apps similar to ones that Musk has said he wants to incorporate into his social media platform, X.

NASA employees told The Post that DOGE aides were able to review internal assessments of thousands of contracts, including those awarded to rivals of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, which has already won billions of dollars of government work and is competing for more. (Among SpaceX’s competitors is Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Blue Origin and its executives did not respond to requests for comment.)

And Labor Department employees said in court filings that DOGE aides were allowed to examine any record at the agency, which holds files detailing dozens of sensitive workplace investigations into Tesla and other Musk companies as well as their competitors.

Another broke the story of how State was pushing foreign countries to adopt Starlink (which would put Musk at the center of a global surveillance network).

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho, the country’s communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink.

The satellite business, owned by billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk’s firm the nation’s first-ever satellite internet service license, slated to last for 10 years.

[snip]

A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents do not show that the Trump team has explicitly demanded favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs. But they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.

She was part of a series of stories on Starlink’s bid to replace an existing FAA contract.

So some of her many sources on DOGE last year exposed the corruption at the core of DOGE.

Obviously, DOJ could have targeted Natanson for no other reason than they want to go after all 1200 Signal contacts she had.

But whatever the reason, or reasons, the Aurelio Perez-Lugones seems like a pretext, a convenient national security case DOJ can invoke to try to identify thousands of whistleblowers, including whistleblowers who have firsthand evidence about the increasing authoritarianism of the Trump power grab.

The Storytelling We Need to Rebuild Belief in Government

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After Trump spent a year destroying government, there have been several attempts in recent days to tell the story of what Trump took away with his assault on government. This is a story we need to tell, and tell far better, in the new year if we want to hold Trump accountable and not just reverse the damage he did, but use his destruction as a way to rebuild better.

Consider this WaPo story, “The year Trump broke the federal government.”

It tells the stories of hundreds of Federal workers, including those who left and those who stayed through the DOGE and Russ Vought massacres. It is great! But it also only mirrors the full story (and potentially buried in a holiday weekend).

It very poignantly captures the cruelty of Trump’s firings, such as this anecdote about a woman killing herself just after Elon Musk’s Five Things emails started.

In Virginia, the family of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services worker Caitlin Cross-Barnet checked her into a mental health facility. She was struggling with despair after a difficult hysterectomy, and because she felt Trump was unraveling the government. In daily calls to her husband, she asked about changes to the federal workforce. Six days after the “What did you do” email, she killed herself.

While it describes many benefits shuttered, it doesn’t describe what happened to the people affected by these losses.

What happened, for example, when those working a suicide prevention line could no longer offer their clients privacy?

Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background.

What happened when LGBTQ+ veterans stopped showing up for counseling appointments?

The psychologist’s LGBTQ+ patients stopped showing up to their appointments.

What is the impact of rising rates of mental illnesses among service members, now left neglected in the wake of another firing?

Another morning gone with no chance to turn to his studies of rising rates of mental illness among service members. Or his proposals, languishing for almost a year now, on how the government could drive those down.

What happened when the government fired a bunch of people focusing on educational access for Native Americans (even while moving health experts to Indian Health Services)?

Her job was helping administer grants to support Native American students. Then she remembered. She’d once served as president of an affinity group for Native Americans and Alaskans at the department.

You might ask what happened to the people Erica Hagen might be harmed in advance of her firing.

She thought about all the frozen programs she had helped oversee: One treating and preventing HIV. Another educating children in rural areas. A third reducing plastic in the oceans.

But a number of people have told the story of what happened with Marco Rubio cut USAID, both in sheer terms — the hundreds of thousands who’ve already died and the 14 million who may one day die, but also the children dying of hunger in Kenya or the cholera outbreak in South Sudan.

What happened to those who might benefit from sustainable energy programs that got cut?

At the Energy Department, one worker prepared memos arguing that his projects would cut costs for American homes and businesses. Someone decided to cancel many anyway. So he, like other employees, began deleting: Any mention of “carbon.” “Sustainability.” The word “green.”

What about FDA inspections that didn’t happen? Who got sick?

A Food and Drug Administration staffer couldn’t purchase dry ice or environmental swabs, nor pay the highway tolls that safety inspectors incurred driving for work.

One I’m self-interested in, as a former Great Lakes resident, what happened when they cut the carp program?

In the Midwest, union leader Colin Smalley watched his Army Corps of Engineers unit dwindle. Among the departed: An employee so knowledgeable about rock blasting that the government brought him back the first time he tried to retire. A staffer who was spearheading a novel project to stun invasive carp with electric shocks. How, Smalley asked his wife, could they ever replace someone who knew how to electrify rivers?

The answer, I think, is that this is one of the few things Gretchen Whitmer won by normalizing Trump.

The story describes how Trump’s cuts delayed efforts to prepare Colorado  for fire season — ostensibly something Trump cares about. But did it exacerbate fires or did we get lucky?

In a Colorado branch of the Forest Service, one man was designated purchaser for the entire office. Anyone who wanted to buy horse fodder or irrigation pipes had to wait until the man returned from weeks-long firefighting trips. The new system meant staff were a week late buying chainsaw fuel, delaying the thinning of flammable forest brush. “In 15 years, I have never seen us so unprepared for fire season,” the local fire management officer told staff at a meeting, according to one worker in attendance.

The nation’s parks and forests are rotting from neglect. What does that look like?

In Lander, Wyoming, three Forest Service retirees noticed fences tilting over, docks slipping into lakes, mountain roads caving inward from water pressure.

Like the USAID cuts, this is story that is already getting told elsewhere; it is a story that is generating a lot of localized anger.

This great video from Molly Jong-Fast, which includes a bunch of great regulators — like Lina Khan, Alvaro Bedoya, Doha Mekki, and Elizabeth Wilkins — who got fired addresses many of these impact questions.

I’m a big fan of all these people and Khan (who’ll have a platform working for Mayor Mamdani) can explain the import of regulation to anyone. All of these fired experts are exceptional at explaining how overturning regulation harms people, like construction workers or taxi drivers or renters or chicken farmers.

But imagine a video that started from one or another harm that mentioned repeatedly — such as the harms, including encouraging suicide, caused by bots and AI. That’s a story that would resonate with mothers, as opposed to primarily Democrats who want to strategize how to reverse Trump’s destruction.

To be sure: at 39:00, Wilkins talks about how important story telling is. She describes that we need to explain all this in terms of villains. “Tell the story of who is the bad guy in this story, who is the hero of this story.” But we also need to invite every American into the story, because they’ve lost something from Trump’s assault on government.

One (very) simple example really resonated with me, at least. In a piece explaining the value  of NCAR to Americans in advance of Trump’s assault on it, It’s just a list of eight things that are not (as Russ Vought targeted) “climate alarmism.”

In accessibly wonky terms, it translates some of the things NCAR does — like making flights safer — into things people care about.

As a child, I remember hearing news stories about commercial airplanes crashing due to wind shear. Microbursts, which are localized downburst of sinking air associated with thunderstorms, were often the culprit. The Low-Level Wind Shear Alert System developed by NCAR researchers has helped to virtually eliminate microburst-related wind shear crashes. Such advances, along with Terminal Doppler Radar, are examples of the R&D machine at work for our benefit even as you may not realize it as your plane takes off or lands safely. Additionally, many of the computer algorithms used to alert pilots and airline managers about turbulence were developed at NCAR. Likewise, NCAR’s aircraft icing products have been a staple in the aviation industry and distributed by NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center.

Regular fliers are already outraged by the continued enshittification of air travel, including Crash Sean Duffy’s reversal of consumer protection rules imposed by Pete Buttigieg.

Here’s one aspect, turbulence, that Trump is actively planning to make worse.

Again, I think all of these are really good stories. I’m just looking ahead — not to elections, or even to what Khan will do as a key aide to the Mayor of New York — but to ways we can better tell stories about what Trump took away, about what Trump stole from the American people, so we can hold him accountable.

When Right Wing Governors Put the Safety of “Big Balls” Over Their Own Constituents

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The list of Republican governors who will uproot Guardsmen from their home, family, and (for many of them) regular jobs to go to DC continues to grow:

  • Ohio Governor Mike DeWine
  • South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster
  • West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey
  • Tennessee Governor Bill Lee
  • Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
  • Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry

All of these men believe protecting Big Balls is a higher priority than protecting their own constituents.

How soon we forget that the entire reason why Trump invaded DC is that Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the DOGE boys hired by the richest man in the world to snoop through the private heath and social security data of Americans, got beat up by unarmed teenagers?

Big Balls, whose Daddy runs Lesser Evil snack company, graduated from the elite private school, Rye Country Day. Then, in addition to starting Tesla fan sites, Big Balls worked for a an anti-DDOS company that employed reformed criminal hackers, until he was fired for leaking company secrets.

After that, Elon Musk thought it’d be a good idea to give him access to government data, including at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and, more recently, at Social Security Administration. In spite of the fact that he has neither relevant experience nor a college degree, after DOGE broke up, Big Balls got hired at a GS-15 level, meaning he may make over $150,000 a year.

The DOGE efforts implemented by such inexperienced young men were riddled with problems. At various times, they shut down nuclear weapon protection, Ebola prevention, pediatric cancer treatment. Food sent from American farmers to starving children overseas got incinerated after it was left rotting in warehouses too long. DOGE boys chasing conspiracy theories about Social Security put earned benefits at risk, even purging still-living Americans from the rolls.

All this was purportedly done to hunt waste, fraud, and abuse. But from the start, DOGE made false and often embarrassingly erroneous claims about their savings — even claiming credit for savings made under Joe Biden. Per a recent Politico review, just 4% of the claimed savings were real, a 96% overstatement of their claimed savings.

And so this 19-year old, brought to DC to fiddle with government data, was out past 3AM one night in August. According to stories based on the police report, his girlfriend walked towards her car close to Logan Square, when a group of teenagers demanded the vehicle. They allegedly assaulted Coristine, who suffered a bloody face and a concussion. But cops arrived on the scene during the assault and the perpetrators fled. Two suspects, a 15-year old girl and a 15-year old boy, both unarmed, were arrested that night and have been charged with attempted carjacking.

And this is why the President has taken FBI officers off the crimes which they uniquely hunt — chasing terrorists, spies, and hackers — and had them patrol the streets of DC where they’ve been making DUI arrests.

And this is why six Republican governors are uprooting their own citizens to send to DC.

The claims Trump made about crime in DC to justify all this are false: while violent crime definitely spiked during COVID, it has been falling.

Even Trump’s own appointees agree. Trump’s then US Attorney for DC, Ed Martin, bragged about a 25% drop in crime during the first 100 days of Trump’s term. FBI Director Kash Patel even predicted that the murder rate was on track to be the “lowest in recorded history.”

But the decision by most of these governors — DeWine and McMaster and Lee and Reeves and Landry — to send their state’s National Guard to DC to hunt crime is especially reckless given that, with the exception of West Virginia, all the states have more serious violent crime problems than DC.

The most dangerous city in the US is in Lee’s Tennessee, three are in DeWine’s Ohio, three are in Landry’s Louisiana. Tennessee and Louisiana rank third and fifth worst for violent crime. Jackson, MS was called America’s murder capital last year and Mississippi the state with the highest murder rate (Louisiana was second). And as maps from Phil Bump show, in both Louisiana and South Carolina there are a bunch of places that are more dangerous than DC.

In short, it’s not just that these right wing governors are sending their constituents away from their homes, their families, and often their jobs, but they’re sending their Guard away to a safer place than their own state, all to avenge a privileged kid with criminal hacker ties whom DC cops helped as the crime was happening.

I’m sorry for Big Balls’ plight. I was mugged at knife point — in a Republican-led state — when I was just slightly older than him and it left me shaken. Unlike Big Balls, the cops never found the perpetrators, as far as I know.

But I’m even sorrier for the men and women that are being sent away from home by their governors as a political stunt, when — if Guard patrols really help to address violent crime — they could be addressing the problem closer to home, in their own states. Those men and women have to leave their homes because a kid who hangs out with the richest man in the world got assaulted, not because DC has the kinds of crime that require a six-state invasion to fix.

Update: I forgot to mention that Ashley St. Clair, who bred an Elon Musk child and claims she’s broke, slammed Big Balls in her first podcast “Bad Advice,” episode.

I have it on good authority Big Balls is dining out on this. … This is how empires die, guys, not with foreign invasion, but with government troops to protect the testicular reputation of a guy whose primary skill is shitposting. Rome had bread and circuses. We’ve got medals for getting your ass kicked.

She also coins, “non-committal breeding vessels.” Not at all bitter.

 

The Sound of Teeth on Bone: Leopard Eating Leopards [UPDATE]

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. Update at bottom of this post. /~Rayne]

You knew eventually there would be intraparty autophagy given the conflict that emerged between Trump and his DOGE leader.

The leopard that bought a social media platform to ensure Trump and his party were elected is ready to gnaw on their faces. They were uncritical of Musk’s use of his Nazi bar X to aid their party, wholly accepting the wretchedness published alongside right-wing propaganda bolstering their position.

Now they’re going to have to face the fact the richest man in the world — the one person who could buy the lot of them with the change he can earn in a single day — is utterly enraged with them all.

I can’t blame him for feeling this way, either. I can’t stand Musk but I can understand his point of view.

Imagine burning up hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions, of personal capital by personally taking on Trump’s Project 2025 government elimination measures as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Tesla Takedown movement was in no small part a response to Musk slashing away at government without restraint.

Then the party he supported with his $44 billion dollar acquisition of Twitter completely trashed that sacrifice by increasing the budget deficit while trying to hide the $3.3 trillion increase from the public, extending the debt ceiling to pay for their bullshit including the massive expansion of ICE.

Gnaw away, Musk. You bought it, you broke it, you own it. Bon appetit!

The last time Musk threatened to launch a new political party in opposition to the GOP, Trump got pissy and made a counterthreat.

This time I would watch for more than an exchange of words. Tells about Musk’s seriousness would include:

• Establishment of one or more national PACs to fund the new party;
• Establishment of one or more state and/or national PACs to run campaigns against incumbent GOP congress members;
• Co-option of existing libertarian/GOP/conservative PACs for the same (think Russia’s dark money co-option of the National Rifle Association from 2012-2016);
• Creation of an umbrella organization and subset entities across all 50 states and the territories launching the new party presence;
• Recruitment of candidates who are willing to run under the new party banner.

Meanwhile, Musk could continue to use the dead bird app to support his efforts, this time against the GOP. It worked to get them elected, it could work against them as well. Not a lot of additional investment required, especially since Trump’s big fugly bill is so damned unpopular making weaponization of the bill against the GOP a piece of cake.

Musk was worth $363 billion dollars today, even after losing $4.38 billion since Friday. That’s $100 billion more than the next richest man, Jeff Bezos. This is the kind of money which can buy small nations — it’s already bought an American general election. A single good day’s gain in the stock market could easily yield more cash for campaign contributions than the contributions made in 2024:

Between January 2023 and April 2024, US political campaigns collected around $8.6 billion for the 2024 House, Senate, and presidential elections. Over 65% of that money, about $5.6 billion, came from political action committees (PACs).

(source: USA Facts)

The danger to the left should Musk make good his threat: a new political party aiming at taking out the GOP in thrall to their mob boss Trump may peel away some part of the Democratic Party.

Could be centrists (including the not-well-closeted racists, misogynists, and bigots) who feel threatened by the inclusiveness of those left of them.

Could be the gerontocracy within the Democratic Party who feel their death grip on power and relevance weakening.

Could be the horseshoe left which shares fewer ideals with progressives and centrists than the far right.

Whatever the case, the Democratic Party needs to stay clear of the leopards as they claw at each other; they need to offer a strong, clear vision of the future while working on the vulnerable states and districts.

North Carolina, for example, is now in play given Sen. Thom Tillis’s principled stance on the big fugly bill, choosing not to run for re-election instead of kowtowing to the GOP’s mob boss.

Let the leopards gnaw on each other. Stay clear, get busy.

~ ~ ~

Action Items:

• Check out Indivisible’s Stop The Cuts page, especially the Take Action Now section near the bottom of the page.

• Weak on federal budget terminology? See the federal budget glossary at National Priorities Project.

• Or simply keep up the pressure and contact your senators to tell them to vote NO on H.R. 1 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, recruit others to do the same. Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121 or use Resist.bot or 5Calls.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE — 8:30 AM ET —

Far more predictable than the weather. Somebody’s Depends are twisted about Musk’s threat.

Trump threatens to re-examine government support for Elon Musk’s companies as mogul trashes megabill
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-threatens-re-examine-government-support-elon-musks-companies-tra-rcna216156

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump threatened to sic the Department of Government Efficiency on Elon Musk’s businesses, saying in a Truth Social post shortly after midnight that there was “big money to be saved.”

“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump said in the post. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE.”

“Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this?” the president added.

A spokesperson for the Musk-backed America PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the hours after Trump’s post, Musk reposted several graphics on X depicting a climbing national debt, which currently sits at more than $36 trillion, according to government data.

Emphasis mine. I am thinking of the aphorism, “I never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel,” antique in the digital age.

Musk can spill a lot more bits and pixels using X than Trump can with his personal social media platform.

Still amazing even after all of Trump’s previous tantrums that he believes it’s acceptable to weaponize government against an individual exercising their First Amendment rights, to benefit his personal and partisan agenda. Is this an official act? Debatable.

Whatever the case I’m buying popcorn futures this morning ahead of Round 3.

The Golden Teapot Dome: Mark Kelly Warns “This Is a Very Hard Physics Problem”

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX had an even more spectacular failure than his last spectacular failure last night.

Whoa!! Not only did his latest Starship blow up, but fuel tanks nearby caught fire as well.

I was already going to point to this exchange from yesterday, in which astronaut and Senator Mark Kelly quizzed Whiskey Pete Hegeseth about plans for a Golden Dome. But Elon’s continued spectacular failures raise the stakes of it, because SpaceX and Elon’s other fascist buddies are poised to win a lot of the contract to build a Golden Dome.

Elon can’t do what he’s already being paid to do. But Republicans are poised to provide billions more, probably to him, to take on a far more complex problem.

And Mark Kelly, a guy who (even Whiskey Pete recognizes) would know, seems to suspect that Hegseth just fired the people who would tell him that this boondoggle is physically impossible to pull off.

The exchange starts with Senator Kelly trying to understand the goals of Golden Dome. He then tries to get Whiskey Pete to understand the difficulty of the physics behind it.

Kelly: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I want to talk about the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system. There’s a request to spend $25 billion in this year alone. First of all, is this system designed to intercept a full salvo attack?

Hegseth: Senator, it’s a multi-layer system, that would include different types of salvos–

Kelly: So it’s not just rogue nation. Okay.

Hegseth: Yeah, it’s not meant to be just one nation. It could be utilized —

Kelly: Against Russia, China. Full salvo. So what kind of reliability are you aiming to build into this system? Are we looking for something like four-9s on intercept success?

[Hegseth pauses.]

Kelly explains: 99.99% reliability.

[Hegseth makes hand gesture, seemingly assuring Kelly he’s not that dumb.]

Hegseth: Obviously you seek the highest possible. You begin with what you have in integrating those C-2 networks and sensors. Building up capabilities that are existing with a eye toward future capabilities that can come online as quickly as possible. Not just ground-based but space-based.

Kelly: So against future capability too. So do you believe that we can build a system that can intercept all incoming threats? Do you think we could build that system? This is a very hard physics problem.

Hegseth: You are [points emphatically] You would know as well as anybody, Sir, how difficult this problem is and that’s why we put our best people on it. We think the American people deserve it.

Kelly: So let me tell you what I think we’re facing here.

[Hegseth continues to babble.]

Kelly: You’re talking about hundreds of ICBMs running simultaneously, varying trajectories, MIRVs, so multiple re-entry vehicles. Thousands of decoys. Hypersonic glide vehicles, all at once. And considering what the future threat might be, might even be more complicated than that. And you’re proposing spending not just $25 billion, but upwards of — I think CBO estimated this at at least half a trillion. Other estimates, a trillion dollars. I am all for having a system that would work. I am not sure that the physics can get there on this. It’s incredibly complicated.

This video explains some of the difficulties. [Link fixed.]

Then Senator Kelly shifts to concerns about whether the impossibility of the Golden Dome project was behind Whiskey Pete’s recent decision to eliminate most of the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the office that validates weapons and platforms for DOD.

Kelly: So I want to get to another issue that is — that you’re facing here. How much of the staff of the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation did you cut?

Hegesth: After collaboration, Sir, with the Service — Department of Joint Staff and others, we identified that as a place where there were redundancies and multiple additional layers —

Kelly: I’ll tell you what you cut. You cut 74%

Hegseth: Most of it.

Kelly: Most of it.

Kelly: And was your decision to cut more than half of the Pentagon’s testing and evaluation oval office staff driven in part by concerns about the Office’s plan to oversee testing of Golden Dome?

Hegseth: Uh, the concerns were not specific to Golden Dome, Sir. It was years and years of delays, unnecessarily, based on redundancies in the decision-making process that the Services, COCOMs, and the Joint Staff, together with OSD, identified a logjam that was not–

So Kelly sums up the problem. Trump is demanding $25 billion to pay off the guy who got him elected, and as he’s doing that, Hegseth fired the people who can test whether the whole boondoggle would work.

Kelly: Mr. Secretary, to get the reliability we would need, you need something that’s at four-9s, 99. 99% reliability, with all these challenges. And you cut the staff of the people who are going to make sure this thing works before we make it operational, before we give it to the war fighters. You got to go back and take look at this but I also strongly encourage you to put together some — before we spend $25 billion or $175 billion or $563 billion or a trillion dollars, put together a group of people to figure out if the physics will work. You could go down a road here and spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars with the taxpayer money, get to the end and we have a system that is not functional. That very well could happen. And you’re doing this just because the President — I understand your role is the Secretary of Defense. You got to execute what the president says. But this idea, you know, might not be fully baked. And you could get in front of it now and figure out and, and find out if you put the right physicist on this and I’m not saying go to the big defense contractors. Going to scientists and I know there’s a questionable relationship with this administration and scientists but go to some scientist. Figure out what we would have to do to build a system. And then make smart decisions before we spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Hegseth: Senator, we are doing that. Leveraging existing technologies and not premising the project on aspirational technologies, what we can actually do.

Kelly: Well, $25 billion in the first year is a lot of money. That’s more than just finding out if we have the ability if we can build a system that can handle a full salvo threat,  hypersonic glide vehicles, MIRVs, thousands of decoys. Thank you.

There’s some important background here.

A constant theme between the four appropriations hearings Whiskey Pete survived in the last week is the way Trump has bifurcated DOD’s budget next year.

Much of it is in the budget itself — the budget that Whiskey Pete has not yet filled out and is weeks behind deadline on.

But this part of it — the Golden Dome that spends $25 billion with Elon’s company on a physics problem that Senator Kelly says is very difficult to solve — is in reconciliation, the bill that needs only Republicans to pass.

The same bill in which Republicans will raise the debt ceiling by five trillion dollars.

Donald Trump is trying to push a $25 billion slush fund to his fascist tech bro backers on a promise that Mark Kelly thinks won’t work.

And yesterday, Elon just reminded us of how those billions could go — are likely to go — up in flames.

Update: Corrected MIRVs.

The Tax Elon Solution and Other Actual Reporting Not Included in the Frenzy

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Politico’s Dasha Burns reports something that isn’t making headlines elsewhere: the fun of the Trump-Musk fight may be short-lived.

White House aides are trying to broker a peace.

White House aides, after working to persuade the president to temper his public criticism of Musk to avoid escalation, scheduled a call Friday with the billionaire CEO of Tesla to broker a peace.

“Oh it’s okay,” Trump told POLITICO in a brief telephone call when asked about the very public breakup with his onetime megabacker. “It’s going very well, never done better.” Trump went on to tout his favorability ratings saying, “The numbers are through the roof, the highest polls I’ve ever had and I have to go.”

Update, 1:30 ET: One after another access journalist has spoken to Trump and are now reporting that Trump thinks Elon has a problem. One after another access journalist has left unanswered — if Elon is nuts, why did Trump let him run unfettered through government for four months and what will Trump do to make sure Elon didn’t damage the government?

Aside from that actual news report, much of the rest of the reporting is no better — and often worse — than what we can do from the comfort of our own EU perch.

The same Politico lists seven right wingers who could get caught between the two narcissists. But only JD Vance — whose endorsement of Trump in the wake of Elon’s seeming endorsement of impeaching Trump was rather mild — is really stuck between the Silicon billionaires and Trump.

I’m really not worried, for example, about the Millers (though agree Stephen is the most likely peace broker, since he had a big role in recruiting Elon in the first place). And while David Sacks was one of Elon’s entrees into the Trump world, Trump’s increasing addiction to cryptocorruption guarantees Sacks some protection inside the White House.

Meanwhile, NYT has an inane post about eight ways Trump and Musk might damage each other. It doesn’t seem to realize that Musk could not just use Xitter as an irritant (which is what it reports), but could also rejigger Xitter to undercut the way it favors right wing discourse and disinformation generally. NYT simply doesn’t understand how important Xitter is to the far right project, not even with Charlie Kirk’s slavering tribute to it amid the worst of the blowup, not even with the way Elon destroyed Xitter’s gateway function to real journalism, in the process damaging outlets like NYT.

Worse still, NYT doesn’t seem to understand the ways Trump has used the presidency to pay off his election debt to Elon; it even calls DOGE a “pet project.”

Wield the power of the presidency against him. Mr. Trump has a tremendous array of powers at his disposal, with the ability to sign executive orders punishing political adversaries and to direct agencies like the Justice Department to initiate investigations. He could end some of Mr. Musk’s pet projects, such as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as well as his embrace of white South Africans, a priority of Mr. Musk’s.

As I noted, Elizabeth Warren made a list of 130 ways Elon exploited his access to Trump, many of them involving short-circuiting regulation of his businesses (this is an entirely different set of benefits to Elon than I included in this post).

34. Musk has direct business interests before over 70% of agencies and departments targeted by DOGE.

35. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was a top target. Musk called for “delet[ing]” the agency and DOGE attempted to fire up to 90% of CFPB staff, who would regulate X Money.

36. President Trump fired the CFPB Director and the new head of CFPB forbade the agency from doing work — after CFPB had received over 300 consumer complaints about Tesla.

37. X also deleted CFPB’s official account on the social media platform, limiting the public communications of an agency that regulates Musk companies.

38. X deleted the account of Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. after he posted about President Trump’s allegedly illegal firings of Democratic CPSC commissioners.

39. The Trump Administration fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) commissioners after EEOC investigated Tesla for alleged racial harassment and retaliation at the company’s Fremont Facility.

40. The Trump Administration plans to cut potentially thousands of EPA employees, after the EPA found that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act, investigated Tesla’s actions at its Austin Facility, and investigated an xAI facility in Tennessee for air pollution.

41. The Trump Administration began requiring any EPA spending greater than $50,000 to obtain DOGE approval, potentially allowing Musk to slow down environmental enforcement actions, like past investigations into Tesla and SpaceX for hazardous waste dumping and other alleged activity.

42. The Trump Administration attempted to fire hundreds of FAA employees, including some who directly contribute to air safety, after the FAA required SpaceX to abide by environmental requirements.

And NYT’s treatment of DOGE as a “pet project” ignores one of the real risks exacerbated by this blowup. Elon’s DOGE boys remain burrowed into government agencies, rewarded for their lack of experience and ties to criminal hackers with GS-14 and GS-15 salaries.

Although Elon Musk has said that he is largely exiting his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at least three of his early operatives and key lieutenants throughout his government takeover have recently become full-time government employees.

Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Ethan Shaotran’s employment designations at the General Services Administration (GSA) have been officially converted to full-time from the restricted special government employee classification that limited their time in government to a period of 130 days, according to documentation viewed by WIRED.

Coristine, who has gone by “Big Balls” online and previously worked for a telecommunications firm known for hiring former blackhat hackers, was converted to full time on May 31, along with Farritor. Shaotran became full time on April 10.

[snip]

Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran, according to documentation viewed by WIRED, each maintain their “senior adviser” titles. Coristine and Farritor are drawing some of the largest salaries possible for government employees through the “General Schedule” employee rankings. They have a salary grade of GS-15, one of the highest grades, and Shaotran is one step below at GS-14. When they were special government employees, Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran did not appear to be drawing salaries at all through GSA, WIRED reported in March.

These boys have access to our data! We still haven’t learned who was exfiltrating data from NLRB — as reported by whistleblower Dan Berulis — or why entities using a Russian address seemed to know the new login accounts created by DOGE boys.

18. I started tracking what appeared to be sensitive data leaving the secured location it is meant to be stored. I initially saw gigabytes exiting the NxGen case management system “nucleus,” within the NLRB system, and I later witnessed a similar large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself. From what I could see the data that was being exfiltrated added up to around 10 gigabytes– in the case that the data was almost all text files it would be the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard-copy documents. It is unclear which files were copied and removed, and I’ve tried multiple routes to prove this was not an exfiltration event but none have yielded fruit and some have been stopped outright. I also don’t know if the data was only 10gb in total or whether or not they were consolidated and compressed prior. This opens up the possibility that even more data was exfiltrated. Regardless, that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.

[snip]

21. On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.

Whether the fight between Elon and Trump is real and ongoing or whether it’ll be patched up, the blowup should lead people from both parties to demand that these DOGE boys be removed from government systems and agencies and a thorough audit of their work be done systemwide. Yes, Elon’s meltdown is cause to revisit his security clearances (with a consequent review of the SpaceX relationship), but the national security and privacy risk posed by Elon’s infiltration of government is actually far broader than that.

Finally, I’m not seeing any outlets point out that making one small change to the Big Ugly bill at the center of this dispute — the huge tax cuts for people like Elon — would not only limit the damage it does to the deficit (Elon’s claimed complaint with it) but also call Elon’s bluff (since he very much wants to eat his tax cut too).

Let’s tax Elon. That’ll make this blowup go someplace productive!!

The narcissistic explosions of last night really aren’t just fun and games, as they’re largely being treated by the press.

They’re a visible reminder of the problem with access, the problem with wealth inequality, the problem with campaign finance failures,  the problem with Trump’s unbound corruption.

To pay off a campaign debt, Donald Trump let an unstable man — allegedly abusing drugs — with no understanding of government bureaucracy unleash a tribe of DOGE boys throughout government for four months, countering the will of Congress based on his whims and conspiracy theories. And now that man has threatened vengeance on Trump.

This may get papered over because Trump needs to paper it over.

But it’s high time the political press caught up to Wired and ProPublica in unpacking the grave risk of all this.

Trump Muskmageddon Open Thread

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The year of our lord 2025 started with a rabid Musk-Trump supporter self-immolating himself in a Cybertruck parked in front of a Trump casino, trying to send us all a message.

The most interesting development in the burgeoning Civil War between two historical narcissists is that Elon unfollowed both Stephen Miller and Charlie Kirk (the latter whom drooled a bit about how wonderful it was Elon decided to platform Nazis after he bought Twitter).

But that’s just one girl’s opinion. Feel free to share yours below!

Could Elon’s Disgusting Abomination Create Opportunities for Other Migrants?

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It’s fashionable to focus reporting about Elon Musk’s attacks on Trump’s Big Awful on the spat within the Republican party.

Politico has separate stories on how “hard-liners” like Tom Massie and Rand Paul are “rejoic[ing]” over Elon’s tweets and parroting White House excuses for Musk’s comments, which both repeat four claims Marc Caputo first aired (half of which are dubious or dated) and demand that journalists view Elon’s comments as exclusively about the effect on his own business.

“When businessmen criticize legislation, journalists don’t take them at their word, they look at how the legislation would impact their business interests,” said a Republican close to the White House. “They should be doing that in this case.”

I wonder if this anonymous Republican close to the White House raised similar concerns about Elon’s business interests driving his decisions as he shredded regulators overseeing his own businesses? In a brilliant summary of 130 shitty things Elon did in his 130 days in government, Elizabeth Warren cited 29 Federal contracts and 34 instances where Elon fiddled with his regulators, of which this is just a selection:

55. Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the auto safety agency investigating Tesla for crashes stemming from its “full self-driving” and remote control features.

56. The Trump Administration first shut down NLRB altogether — which had cases against multiple Musk companies (including SpaceX, Tesla, and X).

57. Then President Trump removed independent NLRB members.

58. DOGE is gutting NOAA while Musk eyes privatization of NOAA weather satellites, which could present a business opportunity for Starlink.

59. President Trump signed an executive order halting operations of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which had Tesla on its list of contractors scheduled for audits.

60. OSHA has 27 cases against Tesla for workers rights violations and investigated SpaceX for workplace injuries — and now DOGE is limiting the agency’s work.

61. President Trump tried to fire over 90% of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which put two Musk companies — Boring and Tesla — on its “dirty dozen” list of worst workplace safety offenders.

All that drama is amusing. All the tweets from House members like Scott Perry and Marjorie Taylor Greene disavowing their votes could become more interesting once this bill returns to the House, but probably won’t

I’m more focused in the extent to which Elon’s comments will unsettle the dynamic that otherwise would permit (as Politico also reported was the plan) John Thune to ram through changes and Mike Johnson in turn to ram through the changed bill.

Elon’s comments unsettle things. Who knows what could happen as a result.

Consider the several instances where local communities have stood up against Stephen Miller’s authoritarian dragnet. There was the backlash to a heavy-handed raid in San Diego where ICE agents deployed flash bangs before bystanders chased them off, chanting, “Shame, shame.” Then there was the spontaneous protest yesterday in response to a restaurant raid in Minneapolis.

A more controversial case involves Carol Hui, whose plight mobilized a conservative Missouri town, with a number of Trump voters claiming they didn’t vote to deport their sweet neighbor.

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

She paused. “This is Carol.”

Whatever you think of such disavowals — Never Trumper JV Last is unimpressed; Greg Sargent did a great interview that conveys why she’s the kind of person non-liberals might rally behind — G Elliot Morris made a compelling argument that these Trump voters are precisely the kind of people you’d need to combat these policies.

The other way to say that — and the way Carol’s friends put it — is that millions of Americans voted for Trump, but they didn’t vote for this.

[snip]

If you are a Democrat, I know it is tempting to do schadenfreude and voter-bashing toward regretful Trump voters, who you see as enabling authoritarianism. But it is very important right now to make the point that people who voted for Trump did not support all of his policy agenda (the vast majority of which is unpopular) for four reasons.

First, internalizing that voting for someone is not an endorsement of their future policy agenda gives people data to fight the worst excesses of Trump’s agenda, especially on trade and immigration. Data can be a very powerful rhetorical tool in catalyzing opposition to unpopular policies.

In Trump’s first administration, for example, polling on his separation of families crossing the border was almost 50 points underwater. That data and related protests convinced the administration to change course.

The alternative to this is assuming that moderate Trump supporters actually support deporting non-criminal parents, which we know (given the data above) to be false. If you assume that, then there is a much smaller landscape of opinion on which to do battle about politics. You have to believe these people are persuadable to move them.

You will not defeat fascism with just the people who voted for Kamala Harris, or even just the people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. You need some of Carol Hui’s neighbors to stand up for what is decent.

All the better if the process of standing up leads them to rethink their support for MAGAt.

The point being, we’re beginning to see real activism against Trump’s immigration dragnet, the same kind of activism that (Morris notes) led Trump to temper his plans in the first term.

And we’re seeing it before it’s too late to, one way or another, defeat (or at least impose a cost for) the vast expansion of Stephen Miller’s dragnet in the Big Ugly.

Yesterday, Miller listed the immigration provisions first among the reasons he likes the bill — ahead of giving Elon a tax cut, ahead of taking food from poor children.

There’s a reason Miller is so excited about the bill. It would dramatically expand ICE, ICE detention centers, and ICE’s ability to deputize cops, making ICE — rather than the FBI — the biggest federal law “enforcement” agency.

The House GOP-crafted bill includes some $45 billion that would go toward detaining immigrants until 2029.

That’s roughly $9 billion per year — an amount that far surpasses a previous record-high of $3.4 billion Congress appropriated for ICE detention a little over a year ago, under the Biden administration.

ICE currently has capacity to detain roughly 41,000 people. Under the GOP bill, that number would increase to some 100,000.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, says there’s not currently enough space to detain that many people.

“ICE would be forced to use this funding to build new detention centers, new soft-sided detention camps, where tents would be thrown up by detention contractors, where immigrants would be held, potentially en masse,” he said.

The bill includes over $150 billion for various components of immigration enforcement, including detention, border wall construction and deportation transportation.

“Taken together, this funding would make ICE the best funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history, with more detention bed funding that the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons and potentially more agents on board than the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

He says the new bill also includes additional funds for ICE to hire new agents and increase collaboration initiatives with local law enforcement agencies — like 287-g agreements. But, no funding for DHS oversight.

ICE is the leading edge of Miller’s assault on the Constitution. His goons are already struggling to find as many migrants as he demands be arrested, leading to screaming sessions and threats (first reported in the Washington Examiner!!).

“They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals,” the first official said. “That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.”

ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.

ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.

One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.

“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.

The (un)intended consequences of this vast expansion, with Stephen Miller screaming that ICE has to go search places for people who are definitely not the criminal aliens he lied about during the election, are pretty obvious.

Now is the time for the people shaming ICE’s invasions of their neighborhood to make a stink about this bill.

To be clear: it won’t kill the bill. The only way the bill will die is if the conflict between hardliners and those who want to preserve health care reaches an impasse which, so far, it has not.

But it would be useful if the localized mobilization raised the cost of this bill going forward, especially if the bill happens to die via other means.