As we await more details about CBP’s latest murder in Minneapolis, I wanted to point to an attempt by DOJ to get a writ of mandamus because Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko denied five of eight arrest affidavits they asked for, targeting Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen and others who protested at a church led by the local ICE commander.
As MN Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz explained in a letter to the 8th Circuit’s Chief Judge, Steven Colloton, minutes after Micko refused warrants for five of the people DOJ targeted, the US Attorney came to him, asking for a District Judge to issue the warrants. After Schiltz was assigned on the case, he asked the other District Judges if they had ever heard of DOJ asking a District Judge to override a Magistrate’s decision; none had. He told DOJ he would not issue arrest warrants until after speaking with the other judges at a bench meeting scheduled for Thursday. That meeting got delayed to January 27 because of security concerns arising from the presence of Pam Bondi and JD Vance at the Federal building.
So DOJ filed for an an emergency writ of mandamus, claiming there was an emergency requiring the arrests of the other protesters immediately.
As Schiltz describes DOJ’s claim of emergency:
The five people whom the government seeks to arrest are accused of entering a church, and the worst behavior alleged about any of them is yelling horrible things at the members of the church. None committed any acts of violence. The learders of the group have been arrested, and their arrests have received widespread publicity. There is absolutely no emergency. The government could have sought indictments from a grand jury on Tuesday, January 20, Wednesday, January 21, or Thursday, January 22, but chose not to do so.The government can still take its case to a grand jury any time it wishes. Instead, the government is insisting that I do something that, as best as I can tell, no district judge in the history of the Eighth Circuit has done.
In a follow-up email, Schiltz accuses DOJ of saying things that are true of only some of the people DOJ has targeted, clearly describing that Don Lemon and his producer did not commit any crime.
The government lumps all eight protestors together and says things that are true of some but not all of them. Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.
More importantly, Schiltz described other more pressing emergencies, including ICE defying multiple orders, including regarding a two year old girl.
I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old). And I have been given a little over an hour to submit this additional response
A panel of the Eighth Circuit denied the writ (though one fo them, Trump appointee Steven Grasz, declared there was probable cause against all five others, including Lemon and his producer).
Schiltz is a two-time Antonin Scalia clerk and a George W. Bush appointee. This is who is getting impatient with Pam Bondi’s theatrics.
The big question is why DOJ simply didn’t go to the grand jury. Are they so sure they’d get no-billed, or do they simply not have any local AUSAs who are willing to present this case?
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-24-at-18.57.29.png578498emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2026-01-24 14:01:402026-01-26 17:07:51Minneapolis Chief Judge Attacks Pam Bondi’s False Claims about Don Lemon
I’ve been struggling all morning (in truth, for the last several days) to describe the kaleidoscope of ways Trump is destroying rule of law.
It perhaps is best conveyed by a contrast between all the shit going on in Minnesota and what happened in Chicago yesterday.
Pam Bondi personally went to Minnesota to secure arrests of people who protested the Southern Baptist Church whose minister, David Easterwood, also runs the local ICE department. When the FBI went to arrest one of them, Nekima Levy Armstrong, they arrested the wrong Black woman at first. Then the White House posted a meme of her, slopped up to make it look like she was crying, and falsely accusing her of rioting.
The AI slop will make it far easier for Levy to argue this is vindictive.
DOJ had tried to charge Don Lemon, but a Magistrate Judge refused to charge someone who was legitimately covering a protest. And now Lemon, who is represented by the omnipresent Abbe Lowell, is taunting Bondi.
The Magistrate also refused to approve FACE charges against those already arrested.
The arrest of the wrong Black woman was not the only case of mistaken identity in Trump’s invasion of Minnesota this week. It turns out that the out-of-state ICE goon who shot Venezuelan Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis thought he was chasing one guy, Joffre Barrera, who is 5’2″ and 128 pounds, but was instead chasing Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, who is 5’7″ and 172 pounds.
Both have short brown hair.
Sosa-Celis and Aljorna might have a decent argument that they had no way of being sure the ICE goon they’re accused of assaulting was actually ICE. According to the arrest affidavit, the ICE goon who shot Sosa-Celis was not wearing anything that identified him as Police — his badge and gun were on a tactical belt. His buddy, who was wearing a tactical vest identifying him as police, was not yet present when the assault and shooting happened. And they were driving an unmarked vehicle. Except both defendants talked to the cops without an attorney and confessed to knowing the goons were ICE.
Meanwhile, the backlash surrounding the snatching and use as bait of five year old Liam Conejo Ramos has gotten so bad that Stephen Miller is openly defensive.
The problem for Miller is that, at least according to the attorney for Ramos’ family, they are in the US legally, seeking asylum.
Marc Prokosch, the family’s attorney, said they came to the U.S. in 2024 from Ecuador, had an active asylum case and the preschooler should never have been detained. He said the family was properly following immigration rules and [his father, Adrian] Conejo Arias had no criminal history.
The Ramoses are not the only ones. The local Fox affiliate describes that there have been more habeas petitions filed this year than the entirety of last year.
Immigration attorneys say they are filing habeas corpus petitions to secure the release of detainees at a “dizzying pace.”
The petitions are constitutionally protected challenges to the government’s arrest of an individual. However, the Trump Administration previously suggested suspending those rights.
In the context of immigration enforcement operations, the petitions ask federal judges to either release individuals from custody or grant them a bond hearing in immigration court.
By the numbers: According to case data reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators, 312 immigrant detainees had sought habeas relief through Jan. 21.
The number of petitions filed in the district court of Minnesota in the first three weeks of the year has already surpassed the 260 filed in the entirety of 2025.
Meanwhile, Minnesota Public Radio tracked down the people on one of DHS’ “worst of the worst” lists — the people DHS falsely claimed to have snatched during this invasion. Most had been released into ICE custody before the recent invasion.
[M]ost of the people on the list had been immediately transferred to ICE custody at the end of time served in Minnesota prisons.
All of those transfers happened before ICE began its surge of operations in Minnesota on Dec. 1, 2025, with some even happening years before.
[snip]
[F]ive of those individuals were transferred from prison custody to ICE custody between August and late November. Three others were handed over to ICE custody by DOC during previous presidential administrations.
And one person was offered to be released to ICE custody more than a decade ago and ICE declined, according to the DOC.
[snip]
[O]ne was put on probation for 30 years and was never in DOC custody, and two were only ever in the custody of county jails and never in DOC custody.
One person on the list was convicted of crimes in Ohio, where it is unclear if they had an ICE detainer, which is a request to hold a prisoner for another agency. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction did not respond for a request for information on the matter.
Relatedly, Bulwark and a local ABC affiliate reports that the guy DHS claimed they were looking for when they snatched a senior Hmong-American in his underwear was already in prison.
Sometimes, the “worst of the worst” — the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s catchphrase for undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records — are exactly where one would expect: prison.
That was the case for Lue Moua, a 52-year-old Laotian man who DHS officials say they were looking for when they instead arrested an elderly U.S. citizen last weekend.
The images of ChongLy Thao’s arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in St. Paul sparked outrage in Minnesota and across the internet.
Several videos show Thao, a U.S. citizen, led out of his home in freezing weather, wearing nothing but his boxers, sandals and a blanket draped around him. Thao’s family alleges the agents did not present a warrant, nor did they ask Thao for identification. He was released shortly afterward.
In a statement explaining Thao’s detention, ICE officials say they were looking for two undocumented Laotian men with criminal records, Moua and Kongmeng Vang, who they say lived with Thao. They also said Thao matched the description of those men.
Family members said they had no knowledge of either and that Thao lived with his son, daughter-in-law and his young grandson.
So where are these men?
Moua, who has felony convictions dating back to 1992 of fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping, and violating a parental custody order, has been incarcerated at Minnesota Corrections Facility-Faribault since Sept. 4, 2024. His expected release date is Jan. 7, 2027.
It’s all bullshit, all the way down.
Contrast that effort to criminalize dissent in Minnesota and claim five year old boys are scary criminals with the most spectacular faceplant yet in Trump’s attempt to gin up criminal cases to justify Stephen Miller’s dragnet, the acquittal of Juan Espinoza Martinez, who was accused of attempting to pay for a hit on Greg Bovino. Jon Seidel describes how the case collapsed after DOJ conceded they could not prove that Martinez had ties to the Latin Kings.
The original criminal complaint cited a “source of information,” now known to be 44-year-old Adrian Jimenez, who called Espinoza Martinez a “ranking member of the Latin Kings.” A Homeland Security press release also called Espinoza Martinez a “Latin Kings gang member.”
But earlier this month, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Yonan and Assistant U.S. Attorney Minje Shin acknowledged they would not try to prove Espinoza Martinez’s gang membership at trial.
That prompted Lefkow to bar gang evidence from the case. She wrote in an order that, “without evidence showing that [Espinoza Martinez] is a member of the Latin Kings or that the Latin Kings instructed [Espinoza Martinez] to send the alleged murder-for-hire information, the prejudicial nature of such testimony outweighs any probative value.”
In an emergency hearing hours after that ruling last week, Yonan told [Judge Joan] Lefkow that “nearly every piece of evidence in this case touches, in some fashion, on the Latin Kings.”
But the trial still kicked off. The feds called only three witnesses Wednesday, who testified over the course of nearly three hours, combined. Then, in closing arguments Thursday, Yonan told jurors that Espinoza Martinez was “angry” about immigration enforcement last fall in Little Village, where he lived.
“He was fixated, and obsessed, with Gregory Bovino,” Yonan told the jury.
Prosecutors told jurors about a message Espinoza Martinez sent over Snapchat to Jimenez in early October. It followed a picture of Bovino and read, “2k on info cuando lo agarren,” “10k if u take him down,” and “LK … on him.”
Jimenez testified that he understood that to mean “$2,000 when they grab him … $10,000 if you kill him … Latin Kings are on him.”
Martinez’ brother explained one piece of evidence DOJ attempted to use against him: a gun that the brother (who has a concealed carry permit) was seeking for himself. And his attorneys emphasized that there was no evidence of an actual hit.
[Dena] Singer told the jury, “the government has failed to prove their case. You know it.”
No money exchanged hands, she said. No weapons were purchased. Social media, she said, “is riddled with things that aren’t true. … with people sending and sharing things.” There was no evidence that Espinoza Martinez intended for the murder to happen, or that he took a “substantial step,” she said.
Ultimately, live coverage of the trial made it sound like Martinez was passing on the chatter from his neighborhood, not plotting a hit himself (and it probably helped frame the case that the informant was seeking immigration protection himself).
As Seidel notes, this marks the 15th case, of 31, that have collapsed in Chicago since the invasion (I tracked the collapse of all the cases from just one day, September 27, here).
Espinoza Martinez is one of 31 known defendants charged in Chicago’s federal court with non-immigration crimes tied to the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign last fall. With Thursday’s acquittal of Espinoza Martinez, 15 of them have now been cleared.
DOJ has pointed to this case, over and over, to claim there’s a real threat against Stephen Miller’s goons, including in their failed bid to get SCOTUS to bless Miller’s deployment of the National Guard to invade Chicago.
An alleged leader of the Latin Kings gang in Chicago is being prosecuted for placing a bounty of $10,000 on the murder of a Border Patrol Chief. Hott Decl. ¶¶ 24; Parra Decl. ¶ 17. These activities substantially interfere with DHS’s ability to enforce federal immigration laws in the Chicago area. See, e.g., Hott Decl. ¶¶ 43-47, 63. And it was clearly erroneous for the district court to discredit or minimize the unrebutted sworn testimony that those acts of violence and threats of violence in fact occurred.
There may well be; the actual Latin Kings may well be seeking to target Bovino (one of the people arrested for ransacking an FBI vehicle in Minnesota is more credibly claimed to be a Latin King). But if they are, then FBI wouldn’t learn of it because they are doing showboat arrests, not investigations.
Which is one of the many points in this compilation of quotes about how Kash Patel is destroying the FBI. Many of these anecdotes have been told anonymously in past reporting, but they are more powerful laid out like this; set aside some time to read this in full. FBI is not chasing complex crime anymore; they’re creating photo ops that please Donald Trump.
Patel directed the F.B.I., which has no immigration-enforcement authority, to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement in conducting raids and making arrests. Field offices began assigning F.B.I. agents and analysts to work immigration shifts, pulling them away from other priorities like counterterrorism, public corruption and white-collar crime.
John Sullivan, former section chief in the intelligence division: We’d been told that when Trump watched footage or saw a picture of a raid, he got mad that he didn’t see F.B.I. raid jackets.
ICE was saying they wanted their teams to commingle with our teams. Tactically, you don’t commingle units that haven’t trained together. My bosses said, If we work on immigration, we use our teams and our case info. They put together a list of people already in F.B.I. files we had concerns about, so we’re not just targeting people over their citizenship status.
They also had to juggle Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who wanted to ride in our tactical vehicle to do her TV stuff. That makes all the operators uneasy, and it makes them less safe.
And that makes it harder for FBI to do the complex investigations only they can do.
Midwest case agent: I was a grunt agent. I enjoyed trying to take apart large criminal organizations piece by piece.
They relabeled task forces from drugs to immigration and pushed us toward focusing on deportation versus convictions for actual drug offenses.
Unfortunately, what used to be our focus, long-term investigations, are now short-term hits. You hit the guy carrying the bag, not the guy who made the call, because that’s how you drive up the arrest and prosecution numbers. But the guy carrying the bag, you can’t flip anymore, because he’s getting deported.
Because F.B.I. agents are posting up with Homeland Security, citizens think we’re part of ICE, which disrupts other investigations. It used to be that you could sit in front of a house, watching another house, and a lot of the time, people were OK with that. They might help you. Now they’re scared.
All this was unrolling against the background of Jack Smith’s testimony. While there were moments of interest — Smith forcefully explained why Stan Woodward’s attack on Jay Bratt was bullshit, for example — mostly I feel the same way Phil Bump does. Everyone was just performing for the cameras.
There wasn’t much use to the hearing. There’s no actual question to adjudicate. No serious and unbiased observer questions Smith’s objectivity or credibility and no serious observer questions that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, triggering the riot that overwhelmed the building on Jan. 6, 2021. In effect, then, the existence of the hearing necessarily served to reinforce the falsehood that there was a debate in the first place.
Smith summarized the importance of recognizing reality in his opening remarks.
“The rule of law is not self-executing,” he said. That is, the bounds of the law are real only to the extent that they are respected. Smith, better than most, understands what it looks like when that respect evaporates.
The product of the hearing wasn’t a studious consideration of the validity of his work since, as stipulated above, there was nothing serious to mull over. Instead, the primary output of the hearing was probably a tidy stream of social-media-friendly video snippets. Members of the House (nearly all of whom will soon face primaries or reelection) saw an opportunity to make news and most of them tried.
What this means, in effect, is that the hearing not only didn’t resolve any tension between reality and surreality, it simply dug each side in a little deeper.
Perhaps the most effective moment in the hearing was Jared Moskowitz’ soliloquy, which combined a reminder of all the times the very same Republicans who performed Donald Trump’s assault on Smith’s investigation expressed terror during January 6 itself.
The AI slop the White House released yesterday really embodies what Pam Bondi’s DOJ has become.
A week ago, on January 8, Donald Trump bitched out his US Attorneys (as well as those play-acting as US Attorney) — some, apparently, by name — because they are not focusing enough on prosecuting his perceived adversaries.
Dozens of U.S. attorneys, who lead prosecutors’ offices around the country, went to the White House Thursday for what was supposed to be a ceremonial photo shoot. After Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced the group of prosecutors, Trump criticized them as ineffective, saying the group was making it difficult for Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to do their jobs, the people said.
[snip]
Among his grievances with prosecutors, Trump complained that the Justice Department hadn’t yet brought a case against one of his most prominent Democratic adversaries, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, the people said.
The department has been investigating whether Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud. The senator has called the probe a bogus attempt at political retribution.
The president criticized some specific prosecutors by jurisdiction and said he felt betrayed, the people said.
[snip]
Trump’s blowup at Justice Department prosecutors comes as the president ramps up pressure on the agency to more aggressively pursue his priorities. He has complained repeatedly in recent weeks about Bondi, calling her an ineffective enforcer of his agenda.
As WSJ noted in its story on this, the day after Trump’s tantrum, Jeanine Pirro sent a subpoena to Jerome Powell, setting off a crisis for Trump.
Also in the wake of that attack, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office decided to investigate Renee Good’s network rather than the guy who shot her, Jonathan Ross, leading to the resignation of six AUSAs in MN and possibly some in the Civil Rights Division in DC, though Pam Bondi — who looked stunning for a 59 year old a year ago but now looks like shit — now claims she fired those MN AUSAs and Harmeet Dhillon claims the Civil Rights attorneys left for other reasons.
Donald Trump has made it the top focus of his DOJ to prosecute his enemies, and as a result, DOJ has been hemorrhaging experience for a year now.
That’s on top of the singular focus on Stephen Miller’s jihad against immigrants, which has led DOJ to reassign lawyers from national security cases to immigration cases (indeed, that’s one of the stated reasons why Bondi fired Robert McBride, because the First AUSA for one of the key national security divisions in the country didn’t sufficiently chase immigration cases).
But there’s another staffing choice that became public in recent weeks.
As multiple outlets have covered and as Jay Clayton detailed in two letters (January 5; January 15) to Judges Richard Berman (who presided over the Epstein case) and Paul Engelmayer (who picked up the Ghislaine Maxwell case after Alison Nathan moved to the 2nd Circuit) — DOJ has dedicated up to 580 people (the 500 reported last week, plus another 80 added this week) to replicating the review that over a thousand FBI personnel did a year ago, this time accounting for victim privacy and “independent privileges” not permitted under the act.
To date, the Department has employed over five hundred reviewers to review and redact millions of pages of materials from the investigations into Epstein and his convicted coconspirator, Maxwell.2 The SDNY alone, in conjunction with the Department, has dedicated significant resources (including AUSAs as well as other SDNY personnel), which this week has been supplemented by approximately 80 attorneys from the Department’s Criminal Division, who will coordinate and work with SDNY during the review of documents identified as likely to contain victim information. As part of that review, the Department is identifying not only those materials the publication of which are required under the Act, but also those that carry independent privileges as well as the need to redact victim-identifying information, among other things. Act, § 2(c).3
3 Any materials withheld on this basis of course will be disclosed in a report to Congress. Act § 3.
We still have no explanation for what the hell Bondi did in the last review, such that she has to dedicate 580 attorneys to replicate the review (though the explanation probably lies in the matters DOJ plans to claim privilege over).
But not only is the need to replicate the work that taxpayers already paid for drawing from national security cases, but it is drawing from other high profile sex trafficking cases.
On Tuesday, another federal judge in the Southern District of New York told prosecutors to hold off of the Epstein assignment to focus on another marquee sex crime prosecution: the case of Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander — a trio of wealthy brothers in real estate accused of using their status to rape and traffic dozens of women.
With that case set to head to trial later this month, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni told prosecutors that they need to focus on expeditiously sending over discovery materials.
“A few people can be strung from the Epstein case given that these people are on trial,” said the Obama appointee. “Epstein is dead.”
That’s not good enough, Trump said last week. He needs the hollowed out DOJ to pursue his enemies faster.
Meanwhile, Pam Bondi is so incompetent or corrupt, she has to replicate work she already did, reviewing the Epstein files. 1,000 FBI personnel last March, 580 attorneys now. As a result, she’s neglecting current sex trafficking prosecutions.
And we have yet to tally what the impact of the reassignment of attorneys who focus on real national security issues. Many of them are chasing Stephen Miller’s fever dreams.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-16-at-1.11.15-PM.png556718emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2026-01-16 09:06:092026-01-16 19:06:23“Epstein Is Dead:” Pam Bondi Is Neglecting Live Sex Trafficking Prosecutions to Criminalize Democrats
On Sunday, the politically astute Fed Chair Jerome Powell posted a video describing subpoenas he received on Friday, which he claimed (credibly) were part of an effort to attack the independence of the Fed.
This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
The statement (and what has since been reported as a good deal of political maneuvering) set off a number of counterreactions that could prove really costly to Trump — and the United States as a whole.
While financial markets recovered from their initial shock by the end of the day (but not before gold hit a new record price), that may only continue as the political pushback continues.
Not all the markets were impervious to Powell’s harassment by DOJ goons. The dollar, which is down 8.3 percent over the past year—that is, more or less since Trump took office—dropped steeply Monday morning before rising a bit in the afternoon. The yield on 30-year Treasury bonds, which has been rising since October, spiked Monday morning. That’s a sign that fewer people wish to buy them. Why purchase dollars or Treasury bonds when the president is so determined to lower their value that he’s willing to throw the Fed chair, who’s been lowering interest rates lately but not fast enough to suit Trump, in jail? Over the course of the afternoon, however, bond yields fell, leaving them about where they closed Friday.
Gold, meanwhile, jumped nearly 3 percent. As I’ve explained previously, the rising price of gold is the surest sign that the United States economy is headed in a terrible direction. It’s a vote of no-confidence in the dollar. As I explained in October, investors call rising gold prices “debasement trade,” which means money is fleeing from assets in which the market is losing faith—in this case, the dollar and Treasury bonds. The higher the price of gold rises, the more debased our currency and our nation’s debt become.
More problematic for Trump, a number of Republican members of Congress — starting with some of the usual rebels, like Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski (who described in a Tweet that she had spoken with Powell)…
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Sunday he will block any Trump appointees to the central bank, including for the new chair, in light of revelations over the weekend that the Justice Department is investigating Powell for potential perjury charges.
“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” Tillis said in a statement.
“I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed — including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy — until this legal matter is fully resolved,” he added.
… But extending t0 loyalists like French Hill, John Thune, and John Kennedy — complained about the disruption caused by the news, including to a crypto bill Congress has long been chasing.
inancial Services Chair French Hill, who called Powell a “man of integrity” and said the investigation threatened “sound monetary policy decisions.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, meanwhile, called for the probe to be “resolved quickly.”
“I want to see [the Fed] operate in an independent way free of politics,” he added.
[snip]
While Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) called Powell a “bad” Fed chair, he added, “I do not believe, however, that he is a criminal.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a Banking Committee member, said if administration officials thought Powell had committed perjury, then they needed to back up the accusations. He added, “I would be stunned if he had done anything wrong.”
“We need this like we need a hole to the head,” Kennedy said, warning of a possible spike in interest rates as markets lose faith in Fed independence.
Meanwhile, Scott Bessent — who has managed to stave off a great deal of stupidity worse than his own in the last year — worried not just about the effect this would have on the markets, but on his ability to stack the Fed with people who wouldn’t be independent.
A perturbed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told President Trump late Sunday that the federal investigation into the Federal Reserve chair “made a mess” and could be bad for financial markets, two sources familiar with the call told Axios.
Why it matters: Bessent’s worries about the financial fallout were somewhat realized Monday, when the dollar dropped as bond yields and the price of gold rose amid worries about political interference in the Fed.
“The secretary isn’t happy, and he let the president know,” one source familiar with Bessent’s call to Trump told Axios.
That is, Pirro’s investigation of Powell may threaten precisely the purpose that she — or whoever’s brilliant idea all this was — thought she’d serve, giving Trump more power over the Fed.
As I keep saying, Donald J. Trump has done a piss-poor job in choosing his political martyrs this term.
And all that’s before you consider how Powell’s statement will add to Lisa Cook’s credibility before the Supreme Court next week, when she claims her purported firing was an attempt to destroy the independence of the Fed. The entire exception for the Fed SCOTUS created served to protect Powell, and now he’s under the same threat Cook is.
Privately, some White House officials see the episode as radioactive, with aides and allies eager to distance themselves from a probe they believe could do more damage to the White House than to Powell. One of the five people familiar said some inside and close to the White House are “freaked out” that a further threat to the Fed chief’s job security could spook the bond market.
How this happened deserves closer attention.
WaPo describes that Bill Pulte — who has had it in for Powell for months (in part because Pulte is not very good at his own job running FHFA, and so imagines low interest rates will make his own failures less acute) — wanted to precipitate such an investigation, but did not.
Housing finance regulator Bill Pulte met recently with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and shared a prop resembling a “wanted poster” he had made up featuring Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.
Pulte laid out scenarios that included investigating Powell and Trump liked the idea, the person said.
It’s not clear how the inquiry into Powell was approved, but an official with the Justice Department said it launched a criminal probe into Powell in November and Pulte was not a factor in the inquiry. The extraordinary investigation of a sitting Fed chairman was disclosed by Powell himself late Sunday.
[snip]
By the time Pulte met with Trump, the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. had already launched an investigation, according to a person briefed on the situation.
Jeanine Pirro posted a defensive tweet yesterday, attacking Powell because he didn’t respond to prosecutors’ bullshit questions without a subpoena, which is within his right.
Someone at DOJ threw Pirro under the bus to Marc Caputo.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office in D.C. launched the probe without giving a heads-up to Treasury, top White House officials or the main Justice Department, sources told Axios.
[snip]
A DOJ spokesperson said the department doesn’t comment on investigations, but an administration source said Pirro “went rogue.”
The effort to blame Pirro for this tremendous own goal comes in the wake of a WSJ article describing that Trump is bitching about his Attorney General, though his complaints suggest he might well support the criminal investigation of Powell, especially given that he doubled down on his complaints against the Fed Chair yesteday.
President Trump has complained to aides repeatedly in recent weeks about Attorney General Pam Bondi, describing her as weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda, administration officials and other people familiar with his complaints said.
The criticisms appear to be part of an intense campaign by Trump to pressure the Justice Department to more aggressively pursue his priorities, some of the officials said. Trump has previously criticized Bondi at times but his vocal concerns about his attorney general have grown more frequent in recent months, officials said.
A clusterfuck, the White House needs someone to blame, and they’re pointing to DOJ.
And yet, this clusterfuck is a clusterfuck of Pam Bondi’s own making.
In a normal DOJ, there’s an established non-political body that would vet an investigation like this one, Public Integrity. At the very least they would ensure the integrity of the inquiry and flag the investigation for necessary approvals. If we can believe those accusing Pirro of free-lancing, that didn’t happen.
To protect against politically motivated abuses, the DOJ’s Justice Manual has long required prosecutors in local U.S. attorneys’ offices to consult with the Public Integrity Section on any “federal criminal matter that involves alleged or suspected violations of federal or state campaign financing laws, federal patronage crimes, or corruption of the election process.”
But Trump’s DOJ reversed that policy in June. “Department leadership is currently revising this section,” this part of the Justice Manual now says. “The consultation requirement is suspended while revisions are ongoing.”
Several former Justice Department employees expressed extreme concern that the change in the Justice Manual, coupled with the flattening of the Public Integrity Section, opens the door for the Trump administration to engage in partisan prosecutions of Democrats by assigning the job to prosecutors working for U.S. attorneys — political appointees nominated by the president.
[snip]
But with so few lawyers left to consult, former members of the team say those consultation requirements are essentially meaningless.
“In a stripped-down office, the consulting function becomes nominal, if it exists at all. It sort of exists on paper so the government can say it exists and claim to be complying with the law,” said Michael Romano, a former prosecutor on the team. “But if you want people to provide legitimate oversight, guidance and expertise, you can’t do that with a team of two. In reality, the advising function becomes a box-checking exercise.”
Sure, they destroyed PIN precisely so they could predicate investigations into Trump’s enemies more easily.
This was entirely the point.
And now the entire Trump Administration is panicking about the results.
Ms. Pirro also did not share information with her bosses at the main headquarters of the Justice Department — including Attorney General Pam Bondi and her top deputy, Todd Blanche — citing the discretion granted local U.S. attorneys’ offices to investigate the head of the most powerful monetary policy body on earth, according to several officials with knowledge of her actions.
Senior officials at the department were stunned, and annoyed, that Ms. Pirro did not consult them on an investigation of such international importance, the officials with knowledge of her actions said.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-13-at-12.16.55-PM.png758874emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2026-01-13 12:20:352026-01-13 17:06:11The Jerome Powell Clusterfuck Is a Clusterfuck of Pam Bondi’s Own Making
In the wake of Judge Cameron Currie’s order dismissing the Jim Comey and Letitia James’ indictments, right wing Trump supporters have contorted themselves into knots trying to claim that Comey and James got special treatment, rather than simply the application of clear precedent to their case.
A technicality!!!!!!
The funniest wail from these MAGAts is their claim that Comey and James only got off on a “technicality,” so we can go ahead and consider them guilty.
In point of fact, Comey pointed out in a filing last week that the Loaner AUSAs have yet to point to any instance that fits the terms of their claimed alleged lie.
Here, the government has repeatedly failed to provide a coherent factual basis for its theory that Mr. Comey authorized Mr. Richman to be an “anonymous source” in news reports regarding the Midyear Exam investigation while Mr. Richman was “at the FBI.” Of the communications following Mr. Comey’s October 28, 2016 letter that the government cites in both briefs, none reflect Mr. Comey authorizing Mr. Richman to be an anonymous source. For instance, the communications show Mr. Richman discussed materials that were already public, like Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress. See, e.g., Opp. at 3 (“Wittes and I are spending a lot of time saying your letter means exactly, and only what it says.” (emphasis added)); id. at 3-4 (quoting the defendant as telling Mr. Richman that Richman’s contributing to a New York Times Opinion piece “would [be] shouting into the wind,” and “that they would ‘figure it out’” without Richman’s contributions). And even where the government alleges that Mr. Comey encouraged Mr. Richman to speak to the press in late October and early November 2016, there is no indication that Mr. Richman did so anonymously; to the contrary, one of the exhibits the government cites references Mr. Richman’s televised interview with Anderson Cooper. Opp. at 4 (citing ECF No. 138-6, 138- 7). The remaining communications cited by the government in its Opposition to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss Indictment Based on Vindictive and Selective Prosecution suffer from numerous defects, but most critically, all occurred after February 7, 2017, when Mr. Richman left the FBI. This alone makes the government’s theory that Mr. Richman was “at the FBI” when these communications occurred incomprehensible.
And exhibits another Loaner AUSA submitted in the government’s response to James’ vindictive prosecution claim show that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer was gaslighting Anna Bower when she was stalking her.
More astonishing, though, is that these indictments were dismissed on the very same “technicality” — that the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed — that Judge Aileen Cannon invoked to dismiss Trump’s far better substantiated stolen document case (though Cannon was a newbie judge departing from decades of precedent, while Currie is a senior judge simply following existing precedent).
Indeed, Judge Currie even citesCannon’s opinion dismissing Trump’s indictment for the principle that everything had to be unwound.
In such a case, “the proper remedy is invalidation of the ultra vires action[s]” taken by the actor. United States v. Trump, 740 F. Supp. 3d 1245, 1302 (S.D. Fla. 2024). “Invalidation ‘follows directly from the government actor’s lack of authority to take the challenged action in the first place. That is, winning the merits of the constitutional challenge is enough.’” Id. (quoting Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau v. All Am. Check Cashing, Inc., 33 F.4th 218, 241 (5th Cir. 2022) (Jones, J., concurring)).
To make things more awkward, in the hearing on this, Judge Currie asked Pam Bondi’s Counselor, Henry Whitaker, about that precedent and he partly disavowed it, and in doing so, noted that Bondi had other means she could have put Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer in place to indict Comey and James, means she did not take.
THE COURT: Mr. Whitaker, let me ask you one last question. Do you believe that U.S. v. Trump, decided by Judge Cannon, in, I believe, 2021, was wrongly decided?
MR. WHITAKER: Well, I think it’s certainly not controlling here, Your Honor, because in United States v. Trump, Judge Cannon held that various statutes that existed, some of which I’ve cited here today, did not authorize the appointment of a special counsel. But here, in a very important distinction between this case and Trump, is that we have available to us a number of statutes that the United States did not have available in making those arguments. For example, you know, you couldn’t have appointed Jack Smith as an AUSA under 542. I mean, we could have — we certainly could have done that with Ms. Halligan. You couldn’t have appointed Jack Smith as an assistant to a United States attorney under 543. We certainly could have done that with regard to Ms. Halligan.
But, I mean, look, to the extent that — and I do think that mostly what was driving Judge Cannon’s decision in that case was sort of the unique and broad authority that the special counsel possessed sort of free of supervision, which, of course, is an element that we do not have here. But I will say this: Like, look, to the extent you can read Judge Cannon’s decision as suggesting that the Department of Justice does not have authority under, for example, 28 U.S.C. Section 510 to appoint Main Justice attorneys, which would basically knock out most of the Department of Justice as it existed for the past, like, 50 years, yes, we certainly do disagree with that, and we agree that the attorney general has full authority to make appointments under statutes like 28 U.S.C. Section 510 and 509, and that source of authority would fully support Ms. Halligan being an authorized attorney to the government even though there may have been a paperwork error, a citation error in her appointment order.
A Clinton appointee swooping in to steal the case
Which brings us to the second complaint: that it was somehow improper for Currie, a Clinton appointed senior judge from South Carolina, to swoop into EDVA and end the case.
But that is precisely the process used in the three other districts where judges have ruled similar interim appointments unlawful, with a fourth (also involving Tish James) still in process.
When Julien Giraud, father and son, and Cesar Humberto Pino challenged Alina Habba the Parking Garage Lawyer’s involvement in their cases, the Chief Judge from the Third Circuit appointed an out of District judge to preside, Matthew Brann, a Republican appointed by Obama.
Shortly thereafter, the Honorable Michael A. Chagares, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, designated me for service in the District of New Jersey pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 292(b) and reassigned this matter “and all related cases” to me.36
When a bunch of defendants in Nevada challenged Sigal Chattah the election denier lawyer’s involvement in their cases, the Chief Judge from the Ninth Circuit appointed an out of District judge to preside, David Campbell, a George W Bush appointee.
The Nevada District Court Judges recused from hearing these motions to dismiss, presumably because the motions implicate their own power to appoint an Acting U.S. Attorney. See 28 U.S.C. § 546(d). Exercising her authority under 28 U.S.C. § 292(b), Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Mary Murguia designated the undersigned judge to hear and decide these motions. Doc. 21.
When some Los Angeles defendants challenged liar for ICE goons Bill Essayli’s involvement in their cases, the Chief Judge from the Ninth Circuit appointed a different out of District judge, Michael Seabright, another George W Bush appointee, to preside over their challenges.
ORDER (U.S.C. § 292(b)) by Chief Circuit Judge Mary H. Murguia as to Defendant Jaime Hector Ramirez: Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 292(b), I hereby designate the Honorable Michael Seabright, United States Senior District Judge for the District of Hawaii, to temporarily perform the duties of United States District Judge on an as-needed basis for the Central District of California beginning on 9/8/2025, and ending on 12/31/2025, and for such additional time required in advance to prepare or thereafter to complete unfinished business.
And when Letitia James challenged subpoenas issued by John Sarcone after he falsely claimed NDNY judges had named him as US Attorney, the Chief Judge from the Second Circuit appointed an out of District judge to preside over that challenge, Lorna Schofield, another Obama appointee.
Of note, all these challenges to Pam Bondi’s playacting US Attorneys had started before Bondi installed Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer on September 22, and Judge Brann had already ruled Alina Habba’s appointment to be unlawful.
Bondi was on notice that what she was doing with Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer was going to be challenged and had been successfully challenged. And she didn’t even attempt any of the gimmicks she is using elsewhere to keep Trump hacks in place, those means cited by her own Counselor in court — in part because she couldn’t. She had already used one of those tricks, installing Maggie Cleary as First AUSA, when Trump insisted it had to be Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer.
These cases might have been dismissed on other grounds. But the unlawful appointment dismissals are entirely of Bondi’s doing.
Stop blaming judges appointed by whichever President when Bondi is 100% to blame.
The Blue Slip gaslight special
Finally, there are even right wing dumbasses claiming that this is about Blue Slips, the Senate tradition that US Attorneys and Judges must have the support of both Senators before being confirmed.
To be fair, Todd Blanche did go on Fox News and falsely claim that is what this is about.
The way you know Blanche is lying is because Trump told us himself, when he ordered Bondi to install Halligan.
“[W]e almost put in a Democrat [sic] supported U.S. Attorney, in Virginia, with a really bad Republican past. A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job.”
Siebert was someone everyone agreed on — Trump installed him, EDVA’s judges reinstalled him, Trump nominated him — until Siebert concluded, apparently with Blanche’s concurrence, that there was not probable cause to indict Jim Comey.
All this whining is nothing other than cope.
If you complain that Democrats aren’t supporting qualified nominees, you should be outraged that Trump pulled Siebert.
If you complain that unconflicted judges decide these issues, you’ve got one.
If you really had a problem with appointments clause dismissals, you should be demanding that Trump stand trial for stealing nuclear documents and stashing them in a bathroom.
But what you shouldn’t do is blame anyone other than the person responsible, Attorney General Pam Bondi.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-25-at-10.41.43.png790884emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-11-25 06:33:502025-11-25 06:45:17MAGAts Outraged Comey Indictment Dismissed on Same “Technicality” Trump’s Was!
“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,” 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.
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.”
The government’s position is that disclosure of grand jury materials is not warranted under the facts presented to the Magistrate Judge. Indeed, the government believes the Magistrate Judge may have misinterpreted some facts he found when issuing the latest order to release the grand jury materials to the defendant. For instance, (1) whether the defendant has any standing to challenge the Richman materials, (2) the full context of the statements made by the prosecutor to the grand jury, (3) that Agent-3 was exposed to potentially privileged material, and (4) that two indictments were presented to the grand jury. Additionally, the Magistrate Judge acknowledges he “did not immediately recognize any overtly privileged communications.” Dkt. No. 192 at 14. The possible exposure of privileged materials to the grand jury was the primary focus of the Magistrate Judge’s inquiry. Having seemingly settled that issue, the Magistrate Judge turns to premature issues such as suppression that have not even been briefed by the parties.
Literally items (2), (3), and (4) came from the government!
But now, in a desperate bid to buy a week of time to try to find a way to delay Jim Comey’s discovery that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer and the Attorney General of the United States think he’s not entitled to Fifth Amendment rights.
If two indictments weren’t presented, then Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer has submitted a fabrication to the court and we should start criminal contempt proceedings.
Judge Fitzpatrick rattled off eleven problems with this indictment. And you want to stall for time?
All the evidence suggests there is no indictment, because the foreperson no-billed the only one presented to the grand jury.
And they want to stall for time?
Update: From Comey’s response. Holy hell these people are way more moderated than I would be.
Moreover, with respect to the presentment, the affidavit Ms. Halligan voluntarily presented raised significant concerns about whether the operative indictment was actually presented to the grand jury, and if so, by whom. The logical conclusion from Ms. Halligan’s declaration is that no one from the government presented a new indictment to the grand jury after it issued a no bill. Ms. Halligan’s declaration attests that she did not reappear before the grand jury upon learning of the grand jury’s vote to no bill the indictment she presented between 2:18PM and 4:28PM. See ECF No. 188-1 at 2 (“During the intermediary time, between concluding my presentation and being notified of the grand jury’s return, I had no interaction whatsoever with any members of the grand jury.”). And, importantly, she asserts that “the transcript accurately reflects the entirety of the government’s presentation and presence in front of the grand jury. There was no additional presentation, interaction, or discussion with the grand jury outside of what is reflected in the transcript.” ECF No. 188-1 at 1 (emphasis added). If no one from the government presented the operative indictment, as logically follows from Ms. Halligan’s own assertions and her ultimate handing up of a purported indictment that differs from the one partially no true billed, then the grand jury did not vote on it. See ECF No. 193 at 17-18.
Update: Here’s the colloquy between Magistrate Judge Lindsey Vaala and the Foreperson.
THE FOREPERSON: So the three counts should be just one count. It was the very first count that we did not agree on, and the Count Two and Three were then put in a different package, which we agreed on.
THE COURT: So you —
THE FOREPERSON: So they separated it.
THE COURT: Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. So you voted on the one that has the two counts?
THE FOREPERSON: Yes.
THE COURT: Okay. And you’re just giving me the other one for what reason?
THE FOREPERSON: That we could not agree on.
THE COURT: Okay. But just for one count?
Update: Judge Nachmanoff has given the government two days to bitch. Comey has a reply due on his broader grand jury request on Thursday, so Comey might file early.
ORDERED that the Motion (ECF 195) is GRANTED IN PART; and it is further ORDERED that the government will file any objections to Judge Fitzpatrick’s Order by 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 19, 2025. Thereafter, the defense will file any response to any objection by the government by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, November 21, 2025; and it is further ORDERED that Judge Fitzpatrick’s Order (ECF 193) is STAYED pending the resolution of any objections filed by the government, which this Court will consider on the papers as to James B. Comey Jr. Signed by District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff on 11/17/2025.
There’s also a hearing on Comey’s vindictive and selective prosecution on Wednesday.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Screenshot-2025-11-11-at-6.13.15-PM.png11581442emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-11-17 15:59:062025-11-17 18:50:39Loaner AUSA Gabriel Diaz: Why Do You Think There Are Two Indictments Signed by Lindsey Halligan?
The media’s response to this exchange (remember, timezone reflects Irish time) between Donald Trump and Pam Bondi has been procedural.
At the NYT yesterday, for example, first Erica Green, Glenn Thrush, and Alan Feuer described it (competently) in procedural terms. It was a tired Trump strategy of projection, it might stall release of files to Congress, gosh it’ll make things hard for Jay Clayton. 30-some ¶¶ in, it briefly turned to politics, in the form of quotes from Robert Garcia (Ranking Member of Oversight) and Don Bacon. Tom Massie, Ro Khanna, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are not quoted, to say nothing of Epstein’s victims.
Then the NYT today turned to its SDNY reporters — Jonah Bromwich, Benjamin Weiser and William Rashbaum — to focus more closely on just how much trouble this could cause SDNY US Attorney Jay Clayton. That story mentions Maurene Comey’s firing in passing twice, but days ago, Bromwich and Rashbaum described how everyone in the New York Metro area dodged defending Ms. Comey’s wrongful termination lawsuit which, after some delay, NDNY, led by a corrupt Trump flunkie, will now take on.
Both stories make Trump the agent of the narrative. He made an order and as Bondi executes it, this is what will happen.
As I suggested in this video, I look at Bondi’s public haste to bow to Trump’s demands differently.
Pam Bondi doubled down on ratifying Lindsey Halligan’s indictment of Jim Comey, after having been caught in failing to exercise the least due diligence the last time she tried to do so. One reason she did so, no doubt, is that DOJ literally told Judge Currie that the unlawful means Bondi used to turn Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer into US Attorney was a mere “paperwork error,” Pam Bondi’s fuck-up. And so, in an attempt to salvage the fuck-up DOJ is attributing to the Attorney General, she may have inserted herself into what appear to be serious Fourth Amendment violations, among other things.
And, that very same day, she publicly bowed to the President’s demand that she pursue clearly political prosecutions just months after DOJ had publicly issued an (unsigned) declination decision in the same investigation (after reportedly having shut down an ongoing investigation into Epstein co-conspirators, presumably led by Jim Comey’s daughter, months earlier).
Then Bondi made things worse when she told Fox News that Epstein’s client file was on her desk for review. She made things worse when she orchestrated the re-release of the already-released files to a select group of right wing propagandists, all packaged up to look special, a spectacle that stoked divisions among MAGAts but also raised concerns that she was covering stuff up. She made things still worse when — responding to James Comer’s role in making things worse, when he claimed the Epstein files had been disappeared — she said there were tens of thousands of videos involving Epstein.
By the end of that week, Todd Blanche would announce he’d spend some quiet time with Ghislaine Maxwell, which I imagine he thought was clever but has resulted in further questions, starting with why he’s not charging Maxwell for the lies she told to his face and why the sexual predator got a puppy.
Pam Bondi has been trying to make the Epstein problem she made worse go away. It hasn’t worked. Nothing has worked. All the pressure she and Blanche and Kash Patel could apply failed to force Lauren Boebert to make it go away. And having failed so far, she very publicly and very quickly agreed to do something stupid, reopen an investigation that she already said could not be pursued.
She did so the week before Judge Michael Nachmanoff (on Wednesday) will preside over Jim Comey’s vindictive and selective prosecution claim, which will be followed by Letitia James’ motion in a few weeks, assuming one or both of those prosecutions are not preempted by some other dismissal before then. (Comey Motion; DOJ Response; Comey Reply; James Motion; there are a slew of Amici filing in both)
In Comey’s reply, he responded to Lindsey Halligan and her Loaner AUSAs’ attempt to claim only Halligan’s motive can be scrutinized in this prosecutorial decision by citing one of the most troubling passages in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. USA:
Imputation of President Trump’s vindictive motive to Ms. Halligan is particularly warranted because the President has “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.” Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 621 (2024). As the government itself describes, U.S. Attorneys are subordinate aides to the President, “help[ing the President] discharge” his “responsibility” to prosecute crimes. ECF No. 138 at 17. And President Trump’s authority is not merely formal or abstract: he has exercised an unprecedented and extraordinary degree of control over the DOJ, installing his personal allies to key positions and inserting himself into prosecutorial decisions that, in previous Administrations, would have been left to the DOJ’s independent judgment. See ECF No. 59 at 8-11. [my emphasis]
That’s the language John Roberts used to excuse Trump’s efforts, via Jeffrey Clark, to use DOJ to steal the election.
The Government does not dispute that the indictment’s allegations regarding the Justice Department involve Trump’s use of official power. The allegations in fact plainly implicate Trump’s “conclusive and preclusive” authority. The Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime. Nixon, 418 U. S., at 693. And the President’s “management of the Executive Branch” requires him to have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates”—such as the Attorney General—“in their most important duties.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 750. The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials. Pp. 19–21.
Trump seemed to echo this license when asked about ordering Bondi to investigate Democrats on Friday.
Reporter: Do you believe a President should be able to order investigations?
Trump: Sure. I’m the chief law enforcement officer of the country. Not that I want to use that. But I am considered the chief law enforcement agent in the country. And I’m allowed to do it.
Effectively, Comey argued that because of the monstrosity Roberts created, his vindictive prosecution claim must be judged according to different rules. And then Trump just reaffirmed his responsiblity.
If these things happened in a vacuum, I’d say that Bondi’s quick and public acquiescence to Trump’s demand that she investigate his enemies as a way to avoid scrutiny himself would be nothing more than a truly epic Constitutional confrontation.
A display of what happens when, as John Roberts did, you give the President literal immunity to hunt down his enemies for unrelated reasons, such as that the President’s one-time best friend “stole” his former spa girl and turned her into a sex slave a quarter century ago.
But it’s not happening in a vacuum.
The week before Trump’s defense attorney will sit mutely in a court room as Loaner AUSAs try to put lipstick on the pig of this prosecution, Trump made his abuse even more plain than he did when he accidentally ordered up this very investigation (and that of James) in September, a tweet prosecutors have already had to invent bullshit excuses for.
How interesting, Judge Nachmanoff might think, that Pam Bondi just performed her utter obeisance to Trump, just the thing prosecutors insist didn’t happen with Comey. How interesting, that the lady who claimed to ratify this prosecution did that.
As I said in the video, there are up to ten ways that the Comey prosecution might go away, and I’m already greedily hoping that those ten things things not just fall into place, but fall into place in an order that will result in far more trouble for DOJ.
Certainly, the fact that Judge Cameron Currie started her hearing last week on the most obvious thing that might make this prosecution go away, Halligan’s unlawful appointment, by raising another, the declination memos reported in the press, makes me hope I might get a pony.
THE COURT: Mr. [Ephraim] McDowell, are you aware of any evidence of whether there was a declination memo prepared in the Comey matter?
MR. MCDOWELL: We are not aware of that at the moment. I think, you know, that would be something that could potentially come out in discovery, but we don’t have that as of yet.
Another thing we’ve been promised this week is Jim Comey’s explanation of the multiple ways Kash Patel’s FBI violated his Fourth Amendment rights by sniffing through everything Bill Barr’s hyper-aggressive DOJ seized four years ago. Then there are the parallel requests Comey has made for grand jury transcripts that Judge Currie certainly seems to think are improper — but Pam Bondi claimed, both the first time, and the second time — are not.
Bondi demonstrated her willingness to conduct political prosecutions the week before the wheels may start to come off the Comey prosecution.
And if they don’t, Maurene Comey may get to force the issue. Attorney General James may get to force the issue.
That’s all legal though, and the law never works as quickly or decisively as you’d like, particularly not with Donald Trump.
But it happens in the very same week that — reportedly — up to a hundred Republicans are prepared to vote to release the Epstein files to stave off lasting damage from Trump’s sex trafficker scandal, something that — if it happens — will make this referral to Jay Clayton a problem, not a solution.
One reason Pam Bondi was so quick to bow to Trump’s demands, sacrificing her very last shreds of credibility with courts, was because she’s in real political trouble, and has been since she thought she’d get cute by handing out binders of already-released Epstein files.
Trump’s effort, Bondi’s effort, to make all this go away by handing it to Jay Clayton on a steaming-shit platter reflect desperation, not the agency NYT portrays it as.
Sure, it’s certainly possible all this will go away, as it always does for Trump. Maybe the dog that didn’t bark can wag one in Venezuela to make his troubles go away.
It’s still a good bet that Ghislaine will be the only one who gets a puppy.
But both Trump and Bondi are operating reactively. And in a desperate attempt to reclaim agency over the Epstein scandal — something Trump has been struggling to do since July — he may well have handed Jim Comey a gift pony.
Update: After I wrote this Todd Blanche made an appearance on Fox to lie about both these issues and Trump claimed that he had encouraged “House Republicans” (but not Republicans generally) to vote to release the files. There are a number of caveats built into that — the focus on the House (when Bondi could release these files herself), the attendant call to investigate Democrats, and the focus on giving “the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to,” which they’ve already gotten. Whether this works depends both on the willful stupidity of the GOP (Tom Massie has already pointed out holes in this proposal) and Bondi’s ability to sustain the illusion of an investigation. In his comment, Trump explicitly spoke, as he has from the start, in terms of attention, and his demand that he control it. But the last time he tried this, it turned into a welcome-watch for Adelita Grijalva.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Screenshot-2025-11-16-at-5.16.28-PM.png846798emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-11-16 14:54:312025-11-19 13:15:11Might Pam Bondi’s Latest Prosecutorial Abuse Give Us Ponies and Puppies?
When Judge Cameron Currie surprised Pam Bondi’s Counselor, Henry Whitaker, on Thursday with a question about whether DOJ believes Aileen Cannon wrongly dismissed Trump’s stolen documents case, Whitaker claimed what distinguished Jack Smith from Lindsey Halligan is that Halligan is closely supervised.
I do think that mostly what was driving Judge Cannon’s decision in that case was sort of the unique and broad authority that the special counsel possessed sort of free of supervision, which, of course, is an element that we do not have here.
He said that, mind you, even while conceding that Pam Bondi had claimed to ratify the Comey indictment even though the transcripts didn’t show how Halligan instructed the grand jury, yet.
MR. WHITAKER: Well, it’s true that — it is true, Your Honor, you’re right, that we didn’t have the intro and back end of the grand jury transcripts when we presented that.
Between that day, on October 31, when Pam Bondi claimed to ratify Lindsey’s work without noticing she couldn’t see that work, and yesterday, several things have happened.
We’ve gotten a lot more details about the suspected Fourth Amendment and Attorney-Client privilege violations Jim Comey’s investigators committed. First, Rebekah Donaleski told Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick that Jim Comey’s team believed investigators had worked off material seized from Dan Richman that was not responsive to the four warrants used to investigate him. Effectively, a general warrant.
[D]id the agents preserve nonresponsive copies or nonresponsive materials for five years? Because the Fourth Circuit has said that’s not reasonable. Did that happen? Because the prolonged retention of nonresponsive electronic data can render an initially lawful search unconstitutional. The Fourth Circuit has said that. That’s what appears to have happened here.
[snip]
We need to know was this a narrowly tailored responsive set or did they just mark the entire iCloud responsive, thus rendering it a general warrant. We don’t know the answers to those questions.
Then, the FBI agent who realized he was reading privileged material described that he had been given the “full Cellebrite extraction” of Dan Richman’s phone to review, precisely that general warrant Donaleski feared. His supervisor said that the original agent had prepped the grand jury team with “a two-page document containing limited text message content only from May 11, 2017,” designed to avoid any taint. But Miles Starr appears to have presented eight pages of those texts to the grand jury; the Bates stamp for those texts include only a number, nothing to indicate they post-dated a privilege review by Richman.
After that, the Loaner AUSAs confessed that they had no fucking clue whether the material used to investigate Jim Comey had been scoped for responsiveness (though Comey’s team described that it looked like these were “raw returns for the search warrants at issue, unscoped for responsiveness and filtered for Mr. Richman’s privileges”).
The Order also required the government to provide, in writing, by the same deadline: “Confirmation of whether the Government has divided the materials searched pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 warrants at issue into materials that are responsive and non-responsive to those warrants, and, if so, a detailed explanation of the methodology used to make that determination; A detailed explanation of whether, and for what period of time, the Government has preserved any materials identified as non-responsive to the four search warrants; A description identifying which materials have been identified as responsive, if any; and A description identifying which materials have previously been designated as privileged.” ECF No. 161 at 1-2.
Despite certifying on November 6 that it had complied with the Court’s Order, ECF No. 163, the government did not provide this information until the evening of November 9, 2025, in response to a defense inquiry. The government told the defense that it “does not know” whether there are responsive sets for the first, third, and fourth warrants, or whether it has produced those to the defense, and said that in that regard, “we are still pulling prior emails” and the “agent reviewed the filtered material through relativity but there appears to be a loss of data that we are currently trying to restore.”
Then, in one of their response briefs, the government effectively threw out half their evidence, including all the texts from Richman’s phone.
At the earlier hearing, Fitzpatrick warned the government not to use any violative material.
THE COURT: The Court authorized you to search and to seize, or to seize primarily, a very specific subset of information; that’s it. It’s the government’s burden to comply with that court order. You need to confidently explain to me how you have done that. You need to confidently explain how you have complied strictly with the Court’s order. If you can do that, then I suspect that that narrow window of time, you probably still can review, at least pending the outcome of the other motions.
He even ordered them not to review any materials seized from those search warrants until further order of the Court.
ORDERED that the Government, including any of its agents or employees, shall not review any of the materials seized pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 search warrants at issue until further order of the Court;
In the middle of this, Comey argued that if Halligan presented unlawfully seized material to the grand jury, then Pam Bondi’s review of the grand jury materials — the first one, on October 31 — might also constitute a violation of Comey’s Fourth Amendment.
2 Concerns about taint arising from the improper use of potentially privileged and unconstitutionally-obtained materials are heightened because of the government’s continued use of the materials obtained pursuant to the warrants and grand jury transcripts. On October 31, 2025, the Attorney General purported to ratify the indictment based on her review of the grand jury proceedings. ECF No. 137-1 at 2-3. If that review entailed further improper use of privileged or unconstitutionally-obtained materials insofar as they were presented to the grand jury, it casts further doubt on the propriety of the government’s conduct of this case. The government produced the grand jury materials on November 5, 2025 to Judge Currie for in camera review, and thus could quickly produce the same materials to the defense. See ECF No. 158.
So to sum up so far: Jim Comey said, you violated my Attorney-Client privilege and my Fourth Amendment rights. And it’s likely that when Pam Bondi reviewed that transcript where unlawfully seized materials were presented, she did too.
The ones that likely rely on unlawfully seized materials.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Screenshot-2025-11-11-at-12.26.48-PM.png252460emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-11-15 12:40:532025-11-15 15:00:07Pam Bondi Replaces Her Embarrassing Reading Comprehension Failure with a 4A Violation
In an attempt to unfuck Pam Bondi’s Halloween attempt to ratify Lindsey Halligan’s attempt to indict Jim Comey, the blondes from Florida have fucked things worse.
Bondi submitted a declaration effectively saying, never mind that the last time I claimed to ratify Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s work, I didn’t read closely enough to notice that the transcripts were incomplete. This time, I have read “the entirety of the record now available to the government” and I re-ratify what Lindsey did almost two months ago.
The district court has subsequently raised questions about the completeness of the record of the grand jury proceedings presented to me at the time of the initial ratification. For the avoidance of doubt, I have reviewed the entirety of the record now available to the government and confirm my knowledge of the material facts associated with the grand jury proceedings.
Lindsey, for her part, claims there was no gap and confessed she did not re-present the charges after getting no-billed. There was only one presentment.
1. Accordingly, I, Lindsey Halligan, submit this declaration to clarify the precise sequence of events on September 25, 2025, to confirm that the grand jury transcript accurately reflects the full extent of my appearance before the grand jury, and to explain that the period in question consisted solely of the grand jury’s private deliberations, during which no prosecutor, court reporter, or other person may be present pursuant to Rule 6(d) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. There are no missing minutes, contrary to the suggestion raised by the court.
2. On September 25, 2025, I presented the case of the United States v. James B. Comey, Jr., to a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division. I have reviewed the full transcript of the grand jury proceedings, and the transcript accurately reflects the entirety of the government’s presentation and presence in front of the grand jury. There was no additional presentation, interaction, or discussion with the grand jury outside of what is reflected in the transcript. Below is a brief timeline of the events that day.
3. On September 25, 2025, I appeared before the grand jury. After introducing myself and the case proposed for indictment, the case was presented through testimony. At the conclusion of the presentment, I provided a brief summation to the grand jury and then departed along with the court reporter. The process of presenting the indictment took place from approximately 02:18 PM to 04:28 PM.
4. Approximately two hours later, at 06:40 PM, I was notified by then-First Assistant United States Attorney Maggie Cleary that the grand jury had returned a true bill as to the presented Count Two and Count Three of the indictment and that the grand jury had not returned a true bill as to the presented Count One. I then proceeded to the courtroom for the return of the indictment in front of the magistrate judge.
There are a slew of problems with that.
First, there are two indictments — or rather, three:
The no-billed indictment as Lindsey first presented it, with the signature page from the real indictment, which starts in blue ink and ends in black.
The no-billed indictment as it subsequently got corrected, with both a (claimed) signature from herself and the foreperson, all in blue ink.
The indictment purportedly supported by the grand jury, signed in black.
Lindsey now claims she only presented the case once, yet there are — or purport to be — two indictments.
For what it’s worth, when Amicus12 first pointed this out, I called the clerk to find out WTF, but have gotten no response.
Also of interest, right wing propagandist Julie Kelly (who is quite chummy with Pam Bondi’s corrupt DOJ) claims that yesterday morning, the Chief Judge in EDVA, Leonie Brinkema, restricted Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s US Marshal detail from the courthouse.
But even if there’s not the colossal paperwork error there appears to be, there’s another problem.
The Loaner AUSAs confirmed … yesterday, that they plan to include Comey’s “Clinton Plan” statements — the stuff no-billed in original Count One — in the obstruction charge.
But, as provided in discovery and via the indictment, the government intends to seek the admission of evidence at trial on this count regarding the defendant’s statements to senators during the September 30, 2020, committee hearing. For instance, the defendant’s statements to Senators Grassley and Cruz regarding his use of Richman as an anonymous source concerning the Clinton email investigation and his statements to Senators Graham and Hawley regarding his alleged lack of memory concerning the so-called Clinton plan to “tie Trump” to Russia.
Comey attorney Pat Fitzgerald had already promised some challenge to this, in the halcyon days when everyone believed there were two presentments.
I think there’s another motion coming from us, in light of some disclosures that were made Monday, where we think that the government is expanding its case, we believe, to include the conduct that was no true billed in Count One as part of its proof of Count Two, which raises serious issues for us. So we’ll do everything we can, but to do all that while getting Mr. Comey access to materials…
But now Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer is claiming that she can rely on Count One even though grand jurors in the very same vote she’s claiming to rely on rejected that claim.
And Pam Bondi is signing on willingly to that claim.
Whatever else has happened, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer has guaranteed that Comey will get to review what went down. The only remaining question, I suspect, is when he gets that — whether it is soon enough to help him throw out the evidence against him. But it seems like Judge Currie is not the only one alarmed by what she saw in these transcripts.
Update: I should add, given my continued obsession with the authors who have not noticed their appearance, Gabriel Diaz authored the document submitted today.
Meanwhile, Gabriel Cohen is the author of the digitally signed but unsworn declaration from Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer.
Someone named lheim authored Pam Bondi’s signed but unsworn declaration.
Update: Holy hell.
Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer appears to have resubmitted the entire package, not to fix her stupid story, but instead to fix her signature line (which Josh Gerstein first noted).
Update: Here’s the specific exchange about the missing stuff.
THE COURT: Let me ask you this. I was involved in receiving in camera provisions of the grand jury transcripts and tapes, and it became obvious to me that the attorney general could not have reviewed those portions of the transcript of the Comey presentation by Ms. Halligan which preceded and came after her presentation of the witness testimony in the case. There also is a missing section of what occurred between 4:28 and the return of the grand jury indictment, and it appears to me that there was no court reporter present, or if he or she was present, did not take down what happened during that time period.
So how does the attorney general ratify and say that she has reviewed the grand jury transcripts when they did not exist in the records of the Justice Department at that time?
MR. WHITAKER: Well, it’s true that — it is true, Your Honor, you’re right, that we didn’t have the intro and back end of the grand jury transcripts when we presented that.
https://empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Screenshot-2025-11-11-at-6.13.15-PM.png11581442emptywheelhttps://www.empty.runengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-11-14 16:42:222025-11-15 11:15:38Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s Story Gets Stupider
