One of the oddest occurrences in the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio was the trip that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, took in July to Tallahassee, Florida, to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for procuring underage girls, some as young as 14, for Epstein to sexually abuse. Prior to being nominated by Trump to the No. 2 position in the Justice Department, Blanche was Trump’s criminal attorney in the porn-star-hush-money-forged-business-records case in New York, in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts. Blanche never provided a compelling explanation for this unprecedented act. Why was Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official meeting with a sex offender whom the US government had previously assailed for her “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct”? Legal observers scratched their heads over this. Months later, Blanche said, “The point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.” That didn’t make much sense. How often does the deputy attorney general fly 900 miles to afford a convicted sex offender a chance to chat? It was as if Blanche was trying to create fodder for conspiracy theorists. What made all this even stranger is that after their tete-a-tete, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security, women-only, federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that houses mainly nonviolent offenders and white collar crooks. This facility—home to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and fraduster Jen Shah—is a much cushier facility than the co-ed Tallahassee prison. When the transfer was first reported in August, the Bureau of Prisons refused to explain the reason for the move, which Epstein abuse survivors protested. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the BOP asking for information related to this relocation. Specifically: > all records mentioning or referencing Maxwell’s transfer to Federal Prison > Camp Byran. This includes emails, memoranda, transfer orders, phone messages, > texts, electronic chats, and any other communications, whether internal to BOP > or between BOP personnel and any other governmental or nongovernmental > personnel Guess what? The BOP did not jump to and provide the information. After a months-long delay, the agency noted it would take up to nine months to fulfill this request. We are suing. That is, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to journalists, today filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC, on behalf of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones), to compel the BOP to provide the relevant records. The filing notes that the BOP violated the Freedom of Information Act by initially failing to respond in a timely manner. We’re not the only ones after this information. In August, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a letter to William Marshall III, the BOP director, requesting similar material. “Against the backdrop of the political scandal arising from President Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Ms.Maxwell’s abrupt transfer raises questions about whether she has been given special treatment in exchange for political favors,” he wrote. Whitehouse asked for a response within three weeks. He received no reply—and, along with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), filed a FOIA request. In November, a whistleblower notified Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that at Camp Bryan Maxwell was receiving preferential treatment that included customized meals brought to her cell, private meetings with visitors (who were permitted to bring in computers), email services through the warden’s office, after-hours use of the prison gym, and access to a puppy (that was being trained as a service dog). That month, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the committee, wrote Trump requesting that Blanche appear before the committee to answer questions about Maxwell’s treatment. That has not happened. Given the intense public interest in the Epstein case—and the scrutiny it deserves—there ought to be no need to go to court to obtain this information about Maxwell. But with Trump’s Justice Department brazenly violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated a release of the federal government’s Epstein records by December 19 (by which time only 1 percent of the cache had been made public), it’s no shocker that the Bureau of Prisons has not been more forthcoming regarding Maxwell’s prison upgrade. Our in-house counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, says, “At a time when public trust in institutions is fragile, FOIA remains essential. Our lawsuit seeks to enforce the public’s right to know and to ensure that the government lives up to its obligation of transparency.” And Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for RCFP notes, “We’re proud to represent CIR and look forward to enforcing FOIA’s transparency mandate with respect to the actions of law enforcement in this matter.” When might we get anything out of BOP? No idea. But we’ll keep you posted, and you can keep track of the case at this page.

On Friday, the Trump-controlled Justice Department was mandated by a nearly unanimous act of Congress to release all government files related to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. > “What are they protecting?” But the government has made just a portion of its holdings publically available, and among the 13,000 documents released, some are extensively or virtually totally redacted. While the law permits withholding information to protect victims, obscured portions include the names and faces of numerous Epstein associates, despite the law’s dictate that nothing be withheld “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity…to any government official [or] public figure.” According to Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke with his party to champion the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what the government has so far provided “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.” Epstein’s victims have similar complaints. “They are proving everything we have been saying about corruption and delayed justice,” Jess Michaels told the New York Times. “What are they protecting? The coverup continues.”   The release is being overseen by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal defense attorney, who represented him in the criminal case related to Trump’s attempt to coverup his affair with Stormy Daniels, the adult film star. Blanche has said that the Justice Department remains at work preparing more files for disclosure in the “coming weeks,” in apparent violation of Friday’s deadline. The law requires the department to prepare a report to Congress justifying any documents or names it may withhold, and submit it with 15 days of the “completion of the release.” But Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley Democrat who moved the bill forward with the help of a handful of GOP colleagues, aren’t waiting to begin discussing how to bring about legal consequences for Trump officials who have or may still be violating their law requiring disclosure.  “The Justice Department’s document dump,” Khanna said in an online video, “does not comply… Pam Bondi has obfuscated for months.” He suggested that Congress consider impeaching officials or holding them in inherent contempt. “Attorney General Pam Bondi is withholding specific documents that the law required her to release by today,” Massie posted, pointedly adding that prosecutors in a future administration could eventually “convict the current AG” for breaking their law. Friday’s release included many photos of Bill Clinton, a former president, but little new information on the current one. While Trump has variously claimed that he and Epstein “did not socialize together,” that “there was no relationship” between them, and that he “was not a fan of his,” this week a Times investigation found that “the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend.”

It was National Voter Registration Day, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college for a voter registration event. That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list. While the DOJ appearing as the official plaintiff was new, what the federal government sought through the lawsuit—access to Maine’s complete, unredacted voter roll file—was not. Bellows, a spunky, no-nonsense 50-year-old who grew up in a log cabin without running water, already had received a litany of demand letters, public records requests, and lawsuits throughout her five years serving as the top election integrity official in Maine. Citing the National Voter Registration Act, most of the requests for the state’s voter data had the ostensible aim of ensuring Maine was adequately removing the names of individuals who should not be on the voter roll. But this lawsuit was the first of its kind from the government itself. The September legal complaint was an escalation of a yearslong coordinated effort by conservatives to obtain voter roll data from numerous states, compare it to incomplete datasets they’d found on the commercial market, then attest that mismatches between the two are clear evidence of people illegally voting. The apparent goal: buttressing decadeslong, though still unproven, claims of rampant voter fraud and removing allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, with potentially dire consequences for future elections. In the past, these sorts of legal gambits came from right-wing groups like the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank co-founded by Brooke Rollins, now the secretary of agriculture; the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ; and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group whose former counsel, Maureen Riordan, now leads the DOJ’s voting section. Riordan and Dhillon remain in the same line of business, citing familiar statutes in their barrage of new lawsuits against state election officials like Bellows; the key difference now is that they are promoting their routinely debunked theories from within the US government. Specifically, from the highest law enforcement agency in the country. > “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government.” “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government,” says Bellows, who spent eight years as the executive director of the Maine ACLU before assuming her current post. “These requests are not unlike the requests that the organizations they used to be affiliated with have asked for years.” But unlike conservative legal organizations, she adds, “the Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.” Riordan and Dhillon have been pursuing Maine’s voter information since July, when the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sent Bellows a letter requesting the state’s unredacted registration list. Bellows wrote a careful response referencing federal court opinions and state statutes that preclude her from sharing the voter roll without appropriate redactions. In return, the DOJ sent her another threatening letter, followed by the ironically timed lawsuit on National Voter Registration Day. Maine isn’t the only state the DOJ contacted. Over the last six months, it has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics. The DOJ has formally sued 14 states for the data so far, 12 of which are led by Democrats. (The sole exceptions are Vermont, which has a Republican governor but is otherwise deeply blue, and New Hampshire, where Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has publicly disagreed with President Donald Trump’s plan to redraw congressional maps in advance of the midterms to give Republicans more seats.) Bellows believes Maine was among the first two states to be sued “because of animus”—also known as old-fashioned retribution. The Justice Department already has tried to retaliate against Trump’s political enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over allegations that he inflated the value of his real estate holdings. (A federal judge recently dismissed both indictments, ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ is reportedly weighing whether to re-indict them.) Bellows, though lesser known, is likely on the administration’s radar for other reasons, too. Citing the 14th Amendment’s clause barring officials who “engage in” insurrection from holding future office, she attempted to remove Trump from Maine’s 2024 presidential ballot based on his connection to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. But Bellows, who is now running for governor, may not be the only one harmed by the DOJ data grab and the spurious claims supporting it. In 2024, crude analyses of voter roll data by right wingers led election officials in Waterford Township, Michigan, and Virginia to remove duly registered voters from the rolls. So far, challenges like these have taken place on a much smaller scale: state by state or even county by county. The DOJ’s current effort to assemble every state’s voter data poses an exponentially larger threat to voting rights. More than a dozen state election officials, former DOJ staff, and election experts told Mother Jones that a national database of voter registration information could lead to massive data breaches of Americans’ private information and reinforce false narratives about the frequency of voter fraud—narratives Trump and his allies could weaponize to challenge election outcomes. Worse yet, the bad data could give Republican-led states cover to illegally cull eligible voters from their rolls, stopping certain people from voting at all. “These unprecedented demands for vast amounts of voter data are part of a larger pattern of actions indicating a reckless grab for power over American elections,” Bellows says. It could also lead to a vast expansion of the number of citizens who appear on Trump’s hit list—one that, depending on your personal data, may soon include you. The right-wing campaign to weaponize the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which former Attorney General Eric Holder once called the “crown jewel” of the department, dates back more than two decades. After the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, National Review called for a radical restructuring of the division. “There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched,” wrote national correspondent John J. Miller. “Republicans should work to gain more control over the civil rights division and its renegade lawyers.” > “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of > the section.” And a year later, that’s precisely what they did. Attorney General John Ashcroft tapped Brad Schlozman, a Kansas-based lawyer with no prior civil rights litigation experience, as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. His responsibilities included overseeing hiring and supervision for the division’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws. Schlozman did little to hide his disdain for the section he now led. “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” he wrote to a former colleague in July 2003. Schlozman embarked on a hiring spree of what he called “RTAs,” short for “right-thinking Americans,” recruiting lawyers from the Federalist Society, the National Republican Lawyers Association, and the Bush-Cheney campaign. A joint investigation by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility found that “virtually all of the attorneys (97 percent) hired by Schlozman whose political and ideological affiliations were evident in the hiring process were Republican or conservative.” Veteran civil rights lawyers with decades of experience began leaving in droves, including the well-respected chief of the voting section, Joe Rich. Schlozman made Hans von Spakovsky, who had been among the first major figures in the GOP to push the myth of widespread voter fraud, de facto head of the section. Soon, the department’s political appointees overruled career lawyers to approve GOP-backed laws that were regarded as racially discriminatory, including a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan in Texas that eliminated two majority-minority districts and a Georgia voter ID law that disproportionately harmed Black voters. David Plunkert “You take an oath to uphold the laws of the United States,” Robert Kengle, the deputy chief of the voting section from 1999 to 2005, told Mother Jones’ Ari Berman in his 2015 book, Give Us the Ballot. “These guys didn’t believe in the laws of the United States. They came in to work for an institution for which they had the utmost contempt.” One of the attorneys hired by Schlozman was J. Christian Adams, a solo practitioner in Virginia who had served as a Bush-Cheney poll watcher in Florida. Rich described him as “Exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman.” Adams helped bring the DOJ’s first-ever Voting Rights Act case on behalf of white voters, who claimed they were discriminated against by the Black head of the local Democratic Party in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Career lawyers viewed it as a perversion of the law, which was intended to protect Black voters who were disenfranchised by segregationist whites in states like Mississippi. By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the DOJ’s inspector general found that Schlozman had violated federal law and committed misconduct by “improperly [considering] political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.” But the anti-voting positions of the likes of von Spakovsky and Adams had already become institutionalized and were spreading within the GOP. A couple of years later, in 2010, Adams loudly accused the Obama administration of anti-white bias when the DOJ dropped a case he spearheaded alleging that white voters were intimidated at the polls in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party. An internal review found no evidence of improper political interference, but by this point, Adams had resigned in protest. He would go on to become head of the right-wing legal group PILF in 2015. In addition to filing lawsuits against local jurisdictions to force them to remove voters from their rolls, PILF published two reports in 2016 and 2017, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” that sought to validate Trump and his allies’ claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The reports, which included names, addresses, and private information like Social Security numbers, claimed that more than 5,500 noncitizens had registered to vote in Virginia and 1,852 people had cast nearly 7,500 illegal ballots since the late 1980s. “This is the real foreign influence on American elections,” Adams told Fox News. “Foreigners are getting on American voter rolls and, as we documented, casting ballots by the thousands.” PILF called on the Justice Department to bring felony charges against the voters it identified. Republican political activists drew up plans to post signs at polling places warning of voter fraud, which Adams said should be “in Spanish” to be “effective.” It soon became clear, however, that PILF had relied on faulty methodology. As Mother Jones previously reported, “Alien Invasion II” spotlighted the “astonishing” example of one voter, Maureen Erickson, who listed a Guatemalan address on her registration form. “Ms. Erickson voted in 14 different elections—most recently in 2008—before her registration was canceled,” the report stated. But it turned out that Erickson was a US citizen living in Guatemala as a missionary. “I think it is odd that they chose ‘Maureen Erickson’ as their poster child for voter fraud,” her husband, Todd Erickson, wrote in a letter to the Washington Times after it picked up the story. “There was obviously not much additional research done on the person that they held up as an example of this illegal activity.” When Virginia election officials warned PILF that it was using unreliable data—such as targeting individuals who did not check a citizenship box at the DMV—to identify “suspected aliens,” PILF staffer Logan Churchwell agreed in an email to Adams that their concerns could “be true.” But this was an opportunity, Churchwell said, to “convert pushback into official confusion to justify our call for a top-down overhaul.” “The fog of war favors the aggressor here,” added Churchwell, who remains research director at PILF. In 2018, four Virginia voters whom PILF falsely accused of voting illegally filed a lawsuit against Adams and PILF, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act—which empowers individuals to sue when vigilante groups threaten their 14th Amendment rights—through “a modern, covert, and particularly insidious method of voter intimidation.” PILF settled the case before it went to trial, with Adams agreeing to apologize to the plaintiffs and PILF pledging to redact sensitive personal information. The reports should have been a cautionary tale about the dangers of overhyped fraud claims and the misuse of sensitive voter information, but Trump and his allies were undeterred and determined to spread such misinformation to a much bigger audience. After claiming with no proof that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million people voted illegally, Trump brought back veterans of the Bush Justice Department, including Adams and von Spakovsky, as members of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Von Spakovsky advised the commission to reprise the Schlozman-era playbook and exclude Democrats and “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” from serving on it. He and Adams secretly advised Vice Chair Kris Kobach, then–Kansas secretary of state, on the commission’s first major action: a sweeping request for sensitive voter data from all 50 states, including party affiliation, voter history, and Social Security numbers. Kobach wrote that it would be “very helpful in the Commission’s work identifying fraudulent registrations and other forms of voter fraud.” But the request, made in June 2017, infamously backfired. The Republican secretary of state of Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” His GOP counterpart in Louisiana said the “President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release.” Even Kobach, in his position as the top election official in Kansas, was unable to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers because they couldn’t be divulged by state law, nor could secretaries of state from Indiana, Maine, and New Hampshire, who also served on the commission. In the end, 21 states refused to provide any data, while the rest only partially complied. The commission had tried to validate Trump’s fraud claims, but it disbanded after less than a year while facing at least eight lawsuits. A draft staff report of its findings included a section on “Evidence of Election Integrity and Voter Fraud Issues” that was, tellingly, left blank. The commission’s failure should have put to bed the myth of widespread voter fraud once and for all—and prevented the federal government from ever again asking for such extensive information on voters. But Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election convinced more of his supporters that elections were rigged, emboldening groups like PILF to turbocharge their efforts to restrict access to the ballot. In the runup to the 2024 election, Trump and his allies filed scores of lawsuits designed to make it harder to vote and easier to question election outcomes. PILF, along with the RNC and Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, were at the forefront of this legal onslaught. When Trump returned to the White House, an emboldened MAGA movement once again set its sights on transforming the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and its voting section from a place that is entrusted with protecting people’s right to vote to one that jeopardizes it. “This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as a high-ranking official in the Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.” A week after the 2024 election, Cleta Mitchell, a recent chair of PILF’s board (von Spakovsky is the current chair) and an attorney involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, called on the administration to fire “every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning.” The now-reinvigorated wolves were back in the henhouse. Two days after the inauguration, the department’s political appointees ordered the Civil Rights Division to freeze work on all new cases. Shortly thereafter, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had traveled to Pennsylvania in 2020 to amplify Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was confirmed as US attorney general. The department put Mac Warner, a former West Virginia secretary of state who claimed that the CIA stole the 2020 election, in charge of the Civil Rights Division on an interim basis. Over the winter and spring, the Trump DOJ began systematically withdrawing from voting rights cases filed under the Biden administration, refusing in nearly every instance to meet with the career attorneys who worked on them. “There was an utter lack of interest in what the day-to-day work of the voting section entailed,” says one former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division. On March 31, when the department dropped a case challenging voting restrictions passed in Georgia in 2021, Bondi alleged that the Biden administration had “fabricated claims of false voter suppression.” “The press release from the Georgia case was insulting to all the career lawyers who worked on it,” says another former DOJ lawyer. “To call something fraudulent from the institution you now lead was deeply troubling.” Days later, the Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally whose law firm had filed several lawsuits attacking voting rights, as head of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon had amplified Trump’s false claims of fraud as a legal adviser to his 2020 campaign, calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. Dhillon removed the division’s longtime mandate of stopping racial discrimination in voting from the section’s mission statement and instead pledged to address Trump-inspired priorities that included “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.” By the end of April, Trump’s appointees had dismissed every active case in the voting section and reassigned the section’s chief and five top managers to the obscure complaint adjudication office, the DOJ’s version of Siberia. Career attorneys who’d stayed during Trump’s first administration and thought they could survive Trump 2.0 decided to leave en masse. Just a few months in, more than 250 attorneys had departed the Civil Rights Division, 70 percent of the total staff, and the number of career attorneys in the voting section had shrunk from 30 to just three. At the end of May, Maureen Riordan, who had been litigation counsel at PILF during the Biden years, took over as acting head of the voting section. A 20-year veteran of the DOJ who spent much of her career in the voting section, Riordan had resigned when Biden took office. At PILF, she had focused on filing lawsuits against various states, aimed at obtaining their voter roll information for the purpose of analyzing it for purported fraud. When she returned to the DOJ under Trump, the department’s work had effectively become inseparable from the mission of the right-wing “election integrity” organizations whose leaders now staffed the new administration. With the MAGA takeover complete, the voting section launched its most audacious scheme yet, reprising the Trump administration’s demand for sensitive voter data from all 50 states. And this time, it would retaliate against those who refused to comply. A couple of weeks before the DOJ began demanding Maine’s voter rolls, PILF, Riordan’s old employer, sent its own letter to Bellows, alleging that its assessment of commercially available data and newspaper obituaries suggested there were more than 18,000 “apparently deceased” people on Maine’s voter rolls. Responding to that previously unreported accusation, Bellows called its claim a “damned lie from an organization that cares more about conspiracy theories than election integrity.” Churchwell, from PILF, says their data collection methods have evolved since 2017 to prioritize credit data over other “cheap” commercial options: “We’ve raised the standard. Your experts are in the wailing and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness stage of their activism, and my heart goes out to them.” For starters, every month, Maine’s 487 municipal election clerks review death records from the state’s vital records bureau and cancel the registrations of individuals who have died. As a fail-safe, Maine also compares its voter roll to the Social Security Administration’s Limited Access Death Master File at least once annually. Moreover, even if a deceased person’s name did appear on the voter roll for a short time, that does not mean a vote was illegally cast in their name. This wasn’t the first time PILF made such a claim. The group sued Michigan in 2021, alleging that its assessment of publicly attainable data showed there were 25,000 dead voters on Michigan’s rolls. A federal judge dismissed the claim in March 2024. In May, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected PILF’s argument a second time, concluding that Michigan makes an “inherently rational, sensible attempt at maintaining accurate voter registration lists.” (In November, PILF asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the lower court’s decision.) But PILF succeeded in advancing the voting fraud narrative—even if its lawsuit has so far failed. As is often the case, the rulings on the Michigan lawsuit didn’t get nearly as much attention as the claims that precipitated it. “Usually, sensational allegations of crimes go viral,” Bellows says, “and the less sensational finding that people are innocent often doesn’t have the same reach.” Most of the lawsuits—whether from groups like PILF or the mightier Justice Department—allege violations of the National Voter Registration Act. Congress passed the 1993 bipartisan law with the intention of making it easier to register to vote. Dubbed the “Motor Voter Act,” the law simplified voter registration by making the process accessible at DMVs and other public agencies across the country. The law also included a provision to ensure that state voter rolls, which were anticipated to add new voters, were properly maintained. The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of managing elections to the states, and consequently, the act doesn’t tell states how exactly they should maintain their rolls; it merely says they should “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters.” Bellows attests that Maine is doing just that. In February 2025, the state’s election division canceled 180,584 inactive voter registrations—the largest bulk removal in nearly 20 years. But the act’s open-ended language has provided an opening for election denialism crusaders, including the ones who now run the DOJ. > “Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration > wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and > intimidate individual citizens.” “These groups are trying to weaponize the law in a way that’s contrary to the purposes of the statute,” says Bains, the former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Most of these lawsuits that we’re talking about are aimed at pursuing mass purges of exactly the nature that the statute was written to prevent.” At least 40 states have received written requests from the Justice Department for their voter files, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. DOJ officials have said they eventually want the data from every state. So far, only two—Indiana and Wyoming—have complied, though the administration has adopted a harder stance in recent weeks. As of early December, the department has filed lawsuits against 14 states, beginning with Maine and Oregon. “On the surface, it may seem like regular oversight, but it’s not,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar argued during a September press briefing with the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “The DOJ has the backing of the federal government. They’re trying to use the immense power to intimidate states into complying.” At the same briefing, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson outlined multiple ways the data demanded by the department could be used vindictively. “Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and intimidate individual citizens, political adversaries, and potentially deter entire communities from voting,” Benson said. “It could also be used to pressure states to remove otherwise eligible citizens from the rolls based on pernicious or suspect information.” Administration officials have yet to explain their reasons for trying to create a national voter roll, but the DOJ confirmed to States Newsroom that the data was “being screened for ineligible voter entries.” The agency is working with the Department of Homeland Security to run voter information through Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, an online platform that provides access to various government databases in one place. Since its inception in 1987, the tool has been used to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits by checking alien identification numbers assigned to them by DHS. The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the tool in recent months, adding Social Security numbers and passport information to the system. As Mother Jones reported last month, DHS is also trying to connect every state’s driver’s license database to SAVE, so states can run their entire voter rolls through the database at one time. (A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers SAVE, says states will need to ensure they are using the platform lawfully.) The allegation that noncitizens are flooding state voter rolls is not supported by any data. One 2016 survey of 42 voting jurisdictions by the Brennan Center found just 30 cases of possible noncitizen voting out of nearly 24 million votes. Statistically, that’s one ten-thousandth of 1 percent. Further, voter registration forms require Americans to affirm they are citizens, under penalty of perjury. The same form warns that those who lie could be fined, imprisoned, or deported. They’d also risk their future eligibility for citizenship. “To jeopardize that opportunity by voting just doesn’t make sense,” Nevada’s Aguilar says. While using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents (for example, a man whose license says Nick but whose passport says Nicholas). A lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in September warned that DHS and the DOJ are “encouraging and enabling” states to search their voter rolls against SAVE, which the lawsuit alleges may culminate in some states “purging voter rolls.” In November, a federal judge agreed that the new use of SAVE was concerning: “The Court is troubled by the recent changes to SAVE and doubts the lawfulness of the Government’s actions,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan. However, she declined to block the administration from using it because the plaintiffs hadn’t yet identified someone who had been directly harmed. Even if the DOJ doesn’t find any legitimate evidence of noncitizen voting, false matches would produce sensational headlines across the MAGA-verse, giving the administration more ammunition to undermine trust in elections. “My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files, and we know there are X or Y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers.” The DOJ declined to comment for this story. Beyond the possibility of voters being disenfranchised, the League of Women Voters and EPIC argue that every person’s federal right to privacy would be encroached by the DOJ and DHS sharing data among themselves and state governments. Congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974 specifically to prevent the federal government from creating “formal or de facto national data banks” or “centralized Federal information systems” that would integrate the personal data of Americans stored at separate agencies, the lawsuit points out. Add to all this the fact that a national voter file could also be a gold mine for hackers, especially as the Trump administration dismantles efforts to combat foreign and domestic election interference. “The danger is once you compile all this information, then hackers only have to go to one place instead of going to all 50-plus jurisdictions that run elections,” says Eileen O’Connor, who worked in the DOJ’s voting section for nearly a decade, including during Trump’s first term. “It’s just a hacker’s dream to have all of this private, sensitive information collected somewhere.” In its efforts to inspect state voter rolls, the DOJ is also, evidently, considering sharing Americans’ personal data with outside election denial groups. Rick Richards, a retired physician from Georgia with no experience as an election official, has met with Riordan and marketed his mass voter registration challenge system called EagleAI, which he helped develop with Cleta Mitchell’s support, to the DOJ. “We demonstrated the software to the DOJ. They like it. They would like to use it. Apparently, we can get data they can’t,” he said during a meeting hosted by Mitchell’s group, the Election Integrity Network, according to a transcript obtained by Mother Jones. “I am in conversation with them about letting us have a task, a federal task, to bring their data into what we’re doing and then be able to use the federal data, SAVE data, Social Security data, other data in here as well.” Despite its name, EagleAI uses no artificial intelligence. Like PILF, EagleAI relies on incomplete information, such as self-reported address changes registered with the US Postal Service and datasets purchased from private entities like utilities, credit card companies, or magazine publishers. Richards boasted on the same call that EagleAI flagged more than 50 percent of Fulton County, Georgia, voter registrations as “potential problems”—an indication of the system’s dubious accuracy. Had the right-wing election integrity skeptics behind EagleAI actually believed the county’s voter roll was teeming with fraudulently registered voters, they likely would have presented these concerns to local officials. But according to Nadine Williams, Fulton County’s director of registration and elections, that hasn’t happened; her voter roll is audited monthly using verified data sources, and she’s never heard from EagleAI, which she called an “unverified third-party group.” In response to questions from Mother Jones, Richards claimed that “the EagleAI Network program no longer exists,” even though his email signature still includes that affiliation and the group’s data was used to challenge more than 900 voters in New Jersey as recently as a month ago. If the DOJ takes up Richards on his offer to use EagleAI on state voter rolls the department is suing to collect, it wouldn’t be the first time Riordan has worked at a place that relies on faulty data to spread questionable conclusions about voter fraud. Normally, the DOJ’s voting section would work to prevent these kinds of efforts from affecting Americans’ ability to vote. Now, the voting section itself is in on the effort. “The main activity the section seems to be engaged in at this point,” says Levitt, the former deputy assistant attorney general, “is something illegal.”

This story was originally published by The Watch, Radley Balko’s substack publication, to which you can subscribe here. In the 15 years from 2010 through 2024, 375 people in Texas were exonerated after being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Of those, 97 received some form of compensation or settlement from the state. Collectively, those 97 people spent more than 1,200 years in prison. The state paid them just under $156 million, or an average of about $130,000 per person per year behind bars. Last year, New York City paid out $205 million to settle 956 lawsuits alleging police abuse. That figure includes about $16 million each to two men who served three decades in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. It also includes people who were wrongly raided and beaten by police, and people who were outright framed by law enforcement. I bring up these figures because, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is about to order the government to pay him “damages” for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion and for special prosecutor Jack Smith’s two investigations of him—one for stealing, hoarding, and improperly sharing classified documents, and the other for Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He’s going to pay himself $230 million. So Trump—who didn’t spend a minute behind bars—about to swindle about 50 percent more than the total amount of money paid to the 97 innocent people who were incarcerated for more than 1,200 years in Texas. Or about 12 percent more than the total paid last year to 957 victims of police brutality in New York City. > One key difference between the raid on Trump’s resort and other disputed > police raids I’ve covered: Trump is still alive. I’ve written at length about both police abuse and wrongful convictions. I’ve seen and interviewed and known the people hurt by bad cops and prosecutors. Trump’s payout isn’t just corrupt and cynical, it’s among the most outrageous and infuriating of his many abuses of power. It’s the biggest payout ever for allegations of misconduct by either police or prosecutors. This would be true even if you divided it in half to separate the raid from the investigations. The same man who was immunized from his crimes by the US Supreme Court, was reelected to the most powerful office on the planet, and has openly used the office to enrich himself and his family by billions would now be further abusing his power to declare himself the biggest victim of injustice in American history. It’s just a brazen, stubby, vulgar middle finger at rule of law. Trump originally filed his lawsuit last summer, before he was reelected. Back then, he was asking for a mere $100 million. Two things happened to embolden him. First, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Trump the green light to weaponize the Justice Department for his own benefit. Second, Trump took full advantage of Roberts’s hall pass and filled the top slots at the department with the same attorneys who represented him in both his civil and criminal cases. Let’s first look at how the raid on Mar-a-Lago compares to actually botched police raids. I made a little chart comparing the insane amount of money Trump wants to pay himself to the settlements and jury awards won by real victims. Here are a few things to keep in mind: First, the raid on Mar-a-Lago went down a bit differently than these other raids. In most of the other raids, the police battered down a door during a high-risk, “dynamic entry” operation, then unjustly shot someone inside the home. At Mar-a-Lago, the FBI notified Trump’s security detail to let them know they were coming. In fact, Trump himself was given a warning months ahead of time. They also deliberately conducted the raid when Trump would be out of town to save him any embarrassment. But it gets worse. (Note: I’ll be using this phrase frequently.) Most of those other raids were conducted on little to no evidence—typically on dirty, uncorroborated information from drug informants or random calls to police. In most cases, the police found no evidence of a crime, often because they raided the wrong house. The raid on Mar-a-Lago came after an extensive investigation, and after federal authorities gave Trump multiple opportunities to return the classified documents he had taken. He refused. There’s one other key difference between the raid on Trump’s mansion/golf club/event space and all of these other raids: Trump is still alive. The other people listed below are dead, because they were killed in these raids. The only tangible injury Trump has claimed from the Mar-a-Lago raid is that FBI agents tracked some dirt into his bedroom when they didn’t take off their shoes. Settlements Resulting From Law Enforcement Raids But this is just the harm that Trump claims from the FBI raid. He also claims to have suffered injury from being accused of federal crimes. So let’s also compare the damages Trump is seeking to the damages awarded to people who were wrongly convicted. This, too, won’t be a perfect comparison. But the incongruence only makes the money Trump is demanding all the more obscene. First and foremost, whereas exonerated people have been proven innocent, the evidence against Trump is persuasive. He was never exonerated. Instead, his money, power, and position allowed him avoid a trial. He escaped election charges because the US Supreme Court cloaked him in immunity. And he only escaped trial in the classified documents case by getting himself reelected. No court, prosecutor, or investigative body has declared Trump innocent in either case. And while we like to say that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty, we definitely do not say that you’re entitled to a massive payout if a criminal investigation fails to result in a conviction. > If the $50,000 the typical exoneree gets were the width of a typical city > block, the amount Trump is claiming would be the width of Texas. Currently, about 40 states have laws to compensate the wrongly convicted. These laws vary in how they’re structured, but most pay a predetermined amount of money for each year of incarceration. These annuities ranges from a low of about $18,000 per year in Iowa, to a high of $200,000 per year in Washington, DC. But the most common figure is $50,000. Some states don’t pay the money in a lump sum, and in many the annual payout isn’t heritable. So if the government spent 10 years fighting your exoneration, that’s 10 years of payments neither you nor your family will ever see. Some states also require the wrongly convicted to waive their right to sue in order to collect compensation. So while some exonerees in those states have sued and received multimillion dollar payouts, they took a risk in doing so. They could just as easily have ended up like, say, John Thompson of Louisiana—a man who was wrongly convicted two separate times, spent 14 years on death row, and was nearly executed seven times. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million. Then the Supreme Court threw out the award. Lawsuits also usually take years—sometimes more than a decade—to resolve. If you just got out of prison and are struggling, you’ll get no compensation while your case slogs its way through the courts. Trump will get all of his money at once. He’ll be able to pass it on to his heirs (or just have it buried with him). And he won’t have to wait for a lawsuit to wind through the courts. I also don’t know of any exonerees who were in a position to exploit their charges to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from their supporters, or who wore their charges like a crown to get their old job back. But it gets worse. Trump isn’t stopping with himself. He wants his criminal friends to be paid, too. He has reportedly ordered the DOJ to pay his former national security advisor Michael Flynn $50 million as compensation for the investigation and criminal charges against him. I suspect that if he doesn’t get pushback, we can expect him to pay others, too. I believe the word for this is chutzpah. Flynn is a dangerous QAnon nut who initially pled guilty to lying to the FBI about meeting with members of the Russian government during the 2017 transition. The guilty plea itself was the product of a plea bargain in which the government agreed not to charge Flynn for the other shady things he’d done. For example, Flynn failed to register as a foreign agent while on the payroll of a businessman with close ties to the Turkish government. While advising the incoming Trump administration, Flynn reportedly recommended kidnapping a pro-democracy dissident legally residing in the US and extraditing him to Türkiye at the behest of its authoritarian leader, Recep Erdoğan. Trump had been warned by the Obama administration that Flynn was a national security threat. Yet Trump promptly appointed Flynn to the most sensitive national security position in all of US government. Now Flynn and Trump plan to make you, me, and the rest of the country pay Flynn $50 million. So let’s compare what Trump and Flynn endured—and what they’re paying themselves as compensation—to what people actually wrongly convicted of crimes get in compensation. > So far, no investigative body has determined that Jack Smith’s case against > Trump was political or malicious. But that may not matter. The average person exonerated in 2024 spent 13.5 years behind bars. Prison is obviously psychologically destructive. But it also breaks bodies, and the health care is typically dreadful. People leaving prison have a 50 percent shorter life expectancy than people of similar demographics who never served time. Again, neither Trump nor Flynn were ever incarcerated. Flynn initially pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, then retracted his plea. There was then some extended and complicated litigation before Trump ultimately pardoned him. Trump himself was never tried, convicted, or punished for any of the federal charges for which he now wants $230 million. That means both are seeking to be compensated, not for the harm of incarceration, but for damage to their reputations. Again, Trump (a) wore his criminal charges like a badge, (b) exploited the charges to raise a ton of money, and (c) as the charges were pending, was reelected to the most powerful position on the planet. I’m not seeing the harm. If both reported payouts happen, Flynn will be getting $6.25 million per year since he was indicted. Trump will be getting about $100 million per year. Again, the low end of annual compensation for an exoneree is $18,000 per year—of incarceration, not since indictment. The average is $50,000, and the high is $200,000. Here are some ways to visualize these numbers: * If the $50,000 a typical exoneree gets per year were the height of a basketball, what Trump is demanding would be the height of the Empire State Building. * If the $50,000 the typical exoneree gets were the width of a typical city block, the amount Trump is claiming would be the width of the state of Texas. * If the $18,000 the typical exoneree gets in Iowa were the average height of a human being, the amount Trump is claiming would be about the height of Mt. Everest. There actually is a federal law that allows some people who have been acquitted or cleared of federal charges to be compensated. It’s called the Hyde Amendment, and it was passed in 1997. But the Hyde Amendment limits compensation to court and attorney fees. And few people have been able to use it. That’s because merely being acquitted or cleared isn’t enough. You also need to demonstrate that the federal officials investigating or prosecuting were doing so maliciously. A 2010 USA Today report looked at 201 cases in which a federal judge cited prosecutorial misconduct in dismissing criminal charges. Just 13 of those people were able to get compensation under the Hyde Amendment. There isn’t much reason to think it’s any different now. So far, no investigative body has determined that Jack Smith’s case against Trump was political or malicious. No investigative body has found that Smith violated Trump’s constitutional rights. > Trump’s attorneys initially asked for $100 million in punitive damages under > the FTCA—a law that does not allow for punitive damages. But it gets worse! Thanks to immunity policies created by the Supreme Court, even people unambiguously hurt by police or unjustly prosecuted are unlikely to get relief through the courts. The odds of success in such lawsuits are so long and the litigation so costly that, except in absolute slam-dunk cases with sympathetic victims, few attorneys are willing to take them on. This is especially true in cases involving the federal government. It’s all but impossible to sue federal police or prosecutors for constitutional violations. In 1971, the Supreme Court created a path to court in the case Webster Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics. But the court has consistently narrowed its scope. (It’s gotten so bad that civil rights attorneys sometimes joke that the only way to get these cases in front of a jury is if your client is named Webster Bivens.) The court all but overturned the precedent in the 2022 case Egbert v. Boulet. To understand how this jurisprudence plays out in the real world, consider the case of Hamdi Mohamud. She’s a Minnesota woman who, along with dozens of other people, was framed by a St. Paul police officer. She spent 25 months in custody. The officer was working with a federal human trafficking task force. She framed Mohamud and the others on witness tampering charges in order to protect an informant. There’s no dispute about Mohamud’s innocence. But the federal courts have ruled that state and local police who work on federal task forces get the same protection as federal law enforcement. And so, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Egbert, the Eighth Circuit has dismissed Mohamud’s lawsuit, ruling that the officer who framed her was protected not by the already-generous qualified immunity afforded to state and local police, but the broader near-absolute immunity given to federal officers. Mohamud is a far much more sympathetic victim of government overreach than Trump. She has suffered much more harm, and did nothing wrong. Yet not only did her case never get to a jury, she couldn’t even get discovery. The courts ruled that because the officer had immunity, nothing Mohamud’s lawyers might have found, no matter how damning, would have made a difference. There is one other way to sue federal officials: the Federal Tort Claims Act. This law allows plaintiffs to sue the agency that employs the offending officers under federal torts law. But the FTCA is incredibly complicated. It also requires plaintiffs to exhaust all other legal options first. FTCA trials are decided by judges, not juries, and judges tend to be more deferential to law enforcement. But the biggest problem with the FTCA is that it prohibits punitive damages. Civil rights cases are exorbitantly expensive. Attorneys take them knowing that most will be thrown out before they ever get in front of a jury. They put in the considerable investment to investigate and litigate hoping they’ll get one of the handful of cases that results in a large award. Punitive damages are what bump these cases into the millions. Without them, only public interest firms like the ACLU, NAACP, or Institute for Justice would be in a position to take these cases. Had he not been elected president, Trump’s lawsuit against the FBI and DOJ would have been laughed out of court. And as I’ve argued here in the past, not only was Trump not treated poorly, he was given an almost embarrassing amount of deference. The judges in these cases bent over backwards to accommodate him. And given that there’s no evidence his rights were violated, his claim of $230 million in damages would have been scoffed at by the courts and likely brought a reprimand for his attorneys. In his original lawsuit, for example, Trump’s attorneys asked for $100 million in punitive damages under the FTCA—which, again, does not allow for punitive damages. If anyone else tried to claim punitive damages under that law, their attorneys would have been embarrassed by the first judge to read the case. But because Trump now presides over the DOJ, he gets to bypass the courts. That his attorneys badly misstated the law may not matter. The law itself is now irrelevant. > Some January 6ers are now demanding “reparations” similar to the compensation > paid out to exonerees. Some interest groups have hinted at lawsuits asking federal courts to stop any payouts to Trump or Flynn. We’re obviously in uncharted territory here, so who knows how those lawsuits will go. But my hunch is that no matter who brings a lawsuit, the current Supreme Court will rule that they lack standing to sue. The most galling part of all this is that Trump is an enthusiastic supporter of the very laws that make it so difficult for other victims of government abuse to recover damages. During the 2024 campaign he promised over and over that he would confer “immunity” on police officers from criminal and civil liability and any other form of accountability. He has also said that police should be “unshackled” and “unleashed” to “do their jobs.” Trump doesn’t understand the laws and policies that govern police misconduct. But the people around him do. And sure enough, his administration has made clear that they will provide zero oversight and will conduct no civil rights investigations into police abuse. Well, almost no oversight. Trump did fire the FBI agents and federal prosecutors who worked on the cases against him, the cases against his allies, and the cases against the January 6 rioters. In June, Trump also ordered the DOJ to pay just under $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed by a Capitol police officer during the January 6 riots. Babbitt was part of the mob attempting to enter the Speaker’s Lobby. She and the mob ignored multiple warnings from police. The officer who shot her has been cleared of any wrongdoing. So had Trump not ordered the payout, the lawsuit by Babbitt’s family almost certainly would have been thrown out of court. Administration officials have also suggested that they might target progressive prosecutors who do try to hold abusive cops accountable, arguing that their investigations are violating the police officers’ civil rights. Trump was campaigning on a promise to make law enforcement immune from any form of liability at the same time his lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI was pending in federal court. He wanted to make it harder to do precisely what his lawsuit sought to do. Yet because he was reelected, he and his allies get to swerve around those laws and accelerate directly to a payout. Ah, but it gets worse. Trump, of course, also pardoned the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists soon after he was inaugurated. So far, at least 22 of those he pardoned have been convicted of unrelated crimes, including home invasion, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, possession of child pornography, sexual assault of a minor, manslaughter, burglary, grand theft, and reckless homicide. One was arrested for surreptitiously filming women at his father’s tanning salon. Another was recently sentenced to life for plotting to murder FBI agents. Yet another was arrested for threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. It probably goes without saying, but if the people Joe Biden or Barack Obama pardoned went on to commit as many new crimes as the January 6ers have, Republicans would be setting the Constitution on fire to strip future presidents of the pardon power. Here’s the fun part: Many of those January 6ers are now seeking refunds for the restitution they were required to pay. Some have been successful, in part because the DOJ hasn’t put up any opposition. In fact, according to my sources, the federal government is encouraging them to seek reimbursement—at the direction of insurrectionist attorney-turned-senior DOJ official Ed Martin. Those sources also tell me some at DOJ are also encouraging January 6ers to seek reimbursement of attorney’s fees under the Hyde Amendment. Many of the rioters hired private attorneys with funding from MAGA nonprofits. This raises the possibility that, if successful, these taxpayer-funded reimbursements could go back to MAGA advocacy groups. And it apparently won’t end with attorneys fees. Some January 6ers are now demanding “reparations” similar to the compensation paid out to exonerees. While there’s some evidence that some of these people may have been overcharged, none were treated differently than anyone else in the federal system. And most of them were, in fact, guilty. Rather famously, many of them documented their own crimes. An attorney for several insurrectionists has pushed for the DOJ to establish a “reparations fund” and a panel to determine which of them should be eligible for damages above and beyond attorney fees. The same lawyer said he believes that Martin is championing this idea within DOJ. But they may not even need Martin. Trump himself has also said he’s open to the idea of a reparations fund for January 6ers. If any January 6er cited Trump’s pardon as proof of their innocence in a claim seeking damages—despite having documented their crimes on social media—they’d be laughed out of court. But they may not need to go to court. If the DOJ decides to support the idea of reparations, I’m not sure there’s much to be done about it. The most innocuous explanation for all of this is that Trump wants to reward his supporters for their loyalty. The more sinister explanation is that he wants to keep them grateful in case he needs them again. On November 17, journalist Amanda Moore broke a story for The Intercept that somehow manages to capture all of this madness in a single headline: Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say But it gets worse. (I promise, that’s the last one.) This brings me to the Republicans’ most recent example of shameless, nakedly corrupt self-dealing: Republican senators tucked a provision into the bill to reopen the government that would allow any senator whose phone records were obtained by Jack Smith to sue the federal government—for $1 million per phone. It appears that eight senators would be authorized to sue. To be clear, Smith did not bug these senators’ phones. With a judge’s authorization, he obtained a record of their ingoing and outgoing calls around January 6, 2021. That’s not only perfectly legal, it’s routine in criminal investigations. Incredibly, the language in the bill applies only to these eight senators. It doesn’t even apply to House members whose records Smith also obtained. At root, the bill seeks to authorize eight of the most powerful people in the world to pay themselves $1 million or more from the US Treasury. The senators snuck this provision into the funding bill because it opens courthouse doors that would be closed to anyone else. Even if Jack Smith had, say, illegally broken into these senators’ homes and held their families at gunpoint, it is, again, almost impossible to sue a federal prosecutor. In short, these are very special boys and girls who want very special rules for themselves. Here’s the thing: If Smith had truly violated their constitutional rights there might be a wisp of a chance that these senators might empathize with others who have been wronged and change the law. (I know, I know. But I wrote a wisp of a chance—and by “wisp” I mean ethereal and vaporous, like Tommy Tuberville’s intellect, or Josh Hawley’s courage.) But these senators know that what Smith did was perfectly legal. So they changed the federal law only to benefit the eight of them—and only for this specific reason. Oh, and one other thing: Most people only get a year to file their civil rights lawsuits. The senators made their special law retroactive to 2022. After public backlash, including from some of their House colleagues who were presumably angry that they weren’t cut in on the action, a few of the eight senators have since publicly stated that they don’t plan to take advantage of the provision. That’s great, I guess. Sorry you got caught! But if they hadn’t intended to help themselves to $1 million in taxpayer funding, they wouldn’t have stuck in the provision and voted for it in the first place. (Note: Some coverage claims the amount is $500,000, but the language allows them to sue for damages at two stages in the charging process.) Only Sen. Lindsey Graham said he definitely plans to sue. Which is extremely Lindsey Graham of him. This week, the House passed a bill to repeal the authorization. But because the original bill containing the authorization is now law, the bill to repeal it must pass the Senate as well. And as we all know, a single senator can block legislation. And sure enough, a single senator is now blocking the body from voting on a bill that would keep him from helping himself to at least $1 million in free money from taxpayers.  Want to guess who he is? Maya Alleruzzo/AP As we continue to see the barrage of videos showing Border Patrol and ICE agents brutalizing undocumented people and US citizens alike, someone inevitably responds that they can’t wait for the victims to sue the agents for everything they have. Those lawsuits just aren’t going to happen. Those cops have been “unleashed” to terrorize as they please. And just in case any of them mistakenly believe that they should show some restraint, Stephen Miller has assured them that they have “immunity.” Meanwhile, if you’re Donald Trump or one of his supporters, you get to crime with impunity knowing that anyone who attempts to hold you accountable for your criming will be punished. As with most things MAGA, it’s tempting to say this is all baldly hypocritical. But it really isn’t. Hypocrisy would mean that Republicans are willing to violate their core principles when convenient. But the party really only has one core principle now: Everything the government does must either benefit Donald Trump and his allies or punish his enemies. And Republicans are more devoted to this single principle than either major party has been devoted to anything in my lifetime. That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a cult of personality—and the cult leader happens to be the president of the United States.

In a wide-ranging Sunday night interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” President Donald Trump put his desire for unchecked power on full display. He bragged to correspondent Norah O’Donnell that, thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1792, he can invade your city whenever he wants. He said immigration raids—including acts of police violence such as using tear gas in residential neighborhoods, throwing people to the ground, and breaking car windows—”haven’t gone far enough.” And he said the government shutdown will last until Democrats in Congress bend to his will—or until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agrees to eliminate the filibuster, which Thune, so far, has rejected. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Trump’s comments on domestic policy: Trump blamed the shutdown on the Democrats As the federal government shutdown enters its fifth week—on pace to be the second-longest in history after the one that stretched from December 2018 into January 2019—O’Donnell had a straightforward question for Trump: “What are you doing as president to end the shutdown?” His answer? Blaming the Democrats. “The Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end it, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” Trump said. “They’ve lost their way,” he added. “They become crazed lunatics.” Senate Democrats have said they will vote to reopen the government if the legislation includes an extension of Obamacare subsidies; without those, the health policy think tank KFF has estimated, average monthly premiums on people who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace would more than double. Trump also claimed Obamacare is “terrible,” adding, “We can make it much less expensive for people and give them much better health care.” But, yet again, he failed to outline his alternative. (Remember his “concepts of a plan“?) > What is President Trump doing to end the government shutdown? > > “What we're doing is we keep voting. I mean, the Republicans are voting almost > unanimously to end, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” says > Trump. pic.twitter.com/f6smwqi8Jn > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 He defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent tactics Citing videos of ICE officers tackling a mother in court, using tear gas in a residential neighborhood in Chicago, and smashing car windows, O’Donnell asked Trump if some of the raids have “gone too far?” Trump gave what may have been his most direct answer of the interview: “No, I think they haven’t gone far enough,” he said. “We’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in [the federal courts] by Biden and by Obama.” “You’re okay with those tactics?” O’Donnell pressed. “Yeah, because you have to get the people out,” he replied. > "I think they haven't gone far enough," says President Trump, defending ICE > raids. In one case, ICE tackled a young mother and in another tear gas was > used in a residential neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/b7tEYqWyUv > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025 He bragged that he can send the military into any city, at any time O’Donnell asked Trump what he meant when, at a speech in Japan last week, he said: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.” Trump has already sent guard troops into Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Memphis, Tenn. Trump seemed delighted to remind O’Donnell and viewers of what he sees as his vast power: “Well, if you had to send in the Army, or if you had to send in the Marines, I’d do that in a heartbeat. You know you have a thing called the Insurrection Act. You know that, right? Do you know that I could use that immediately, and no judge can even challenge you on that. But I haven’t chosen to do it because I haven’t felt we need it.” > “If you had to send in the Army or if you had to send in the Marines, I'd do > that in a heartbeat,” says President Trump. He has ordered the National Guard > to five major U.S. cities. https://t.co/GAtK4KJNAf pic.twitter.com/Yx0SoiGDFQ > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 This is not the first time Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to override federal law that prohibits the military from acting as law enforcement, in order to “suppress rebellion.” But the law has not been used in more than three decades and is widely seen by legal experts as having a frightening potential for abuse. “So you’re going to send the military into American cities?” O’Donnell pressed. “Well, if I wanted to, I could, if I want to use the Insurrection Act,” Trump responded. “The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents, and if I needed it, that would mean I could bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want, but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.” He claimed he has been “mild-mannered” when it comes to political retribution In only nine months, Trump has made good on his long-running promise to prosecute his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “There’s a pattern to these names. They’re all public figures who have publicly denounced you. Is it political retribution?” O’Donnell asked. Trump promptly played the victim: “You know who got indicted? The man you’re looking at,” he replied. “I got indicted and I was innocent, and here I am, because I was able to beat all of the nonsense that was thrown at me.” (He was, indeed, found guilty in New York last year on 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.) > “I think I've been very mild-mannered. You're looking at a man who was > indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap,” says President Trump after > the recent indictments of high-profile figures who have publicly denounced > him. https://t.co/XHoIr77Eh1 pic.twitter.com/tLH0fxW2wI > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 Despite posting a Truth Social message in September demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi speed up the prosecutions, just days before Comey was indicted and a couple weeks before Bolton and James were, Trump insisted he did not instruct the Department of Justice to pursue them. “No, you don’t have to instruct them, because they were so dirty, they were so crooked, they were so corrupt,” he said, proceeding to praise the work of Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. “I think I’ve been very mild-mannered,” Trump continued. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap, otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.” He think he’s “better looking” than Zohran Mamdani Trump insisted that the frontrunner in New York City’s Tuesday mayoral election, 34-year-old self-described Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, is a “Communist.” When O’Donnell asked Trump what he makes of comparisons between himself and Mamdani—”charismatic, breaking the old rules,” as O’Donnell put it—Trump replied: “I think I’m a much better-looking person than him.” He then reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from his home city if Mamdani wins over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “It’s going to be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said. He claimed that he is “not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other,” but added, “If it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a Communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.” > Some have called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist front-runner for New > York City mayor, a left-wing version of President Trump. > > "I think I'm a much better looking person than him," says Trump, after calling > Mamdani a "communist." pic.twitter.com/p9FDWNcoGs > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025

On Tuesday, shortly after the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump is demanding $230 million from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reimburse him for legal costs related to earlier federal investigations against him, the president claimed he would donate any such funds to charity. “I’m not looking for money,” he told reporters. “I’d give it to charity or something. I would give it to charity, any money.” Trump, almost as if unable to resist, then framed the demand as satisfying a personal grudge. “But look what they did,” he said, referring to the federal investigations against him. “They rigged the election.” Does Trump grasp the impropriety at play? His bid to appear magnanimous suggests that he knows it doesn’t look good for a president to shake down the Justice Department for taxpayer money, particularly amid a shutdown, and especially as his administration slashes Medicaid and food stamps. His effort to put a generous spin on this blatant grift—there is no compelling evidence that the DOJ’s investigations were launched improperly—belies Trump’s long, sordid history of stiffing contractors, and, even more notoriously, the court-ordered dissolution of his namesake charitable arm over a “shocking pattern of illegality.” Let’s revisit some of that history, starting with the Trump Foundation, his tax-exempt nonprofit. In 2019, a New York judge ordered the foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then shut itself down—after determining that Trump, along his children Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, misused the foundation to further their political and business interests. That ruling came after various indications that Trump was misusing the organization. In January 2016, while running for president, he claimed during a fundraiser for veterans’ causes that he had personally donated $1 million via the foundation. After reporters revealed that no record of such a donation existed, Trump belatedly ponied up that amount to a foundation supporting fallen Marines and police officers. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that Trump had pledged more than $8.5 million to various charities over the previous 15 years, but had only delivered on a third of it. In 2022, Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, another nonprofit controlled by the president, along with his business, the Trump Organization, agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” his companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.” Trump’s latest nonprofit, a foundation supposedly set up to oversee his planned presidential library, is already flashing warning signs. Trump and his aides have claimed that various donations he has received while president—including funds left over from the record $250 million his 2025 inaugural committee raised from corporations; proceeds from $1 million-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million one-on-one meetings with the president; and the large settlements that Meta, Disney, and Paramount have paid to settle seemingly extortionary Trump lawsuits—will go to the library. Trump even claimed the $400 million plane that Qatar gifted him, and which the Air Force is spending heavily to upgrade, will go to the library when he leaves office. But it isn’t clear as yet which, if any, funds or other valuables have been transferred to the library foundation. The organization was incorporated in May with the president’s son Eric; Michael Boulos, the husband of Trump’s daughter Tiffany; and a lawyer who works for the president in New York serving as trustees. This suggest the foundation will be controlled by Trump’s family, not independent outsiders. Already, the State of Florida has attempted to transfer valuable property in Miami to the foundation for a library site that also could host a hotel, condos, or other commercial ventures that could benefit the president and his family financially. (A judge temporarily halted the transfer last week in response to a lawsuit challenging its legality. ) Any assets that do make it into the foundation’s coffers can be used, legally in most cases, to pay salaries to Trump family members, provide them with free office space, and fund certain travel, experts told Mother Jones. Trump’s abysmal track record extends to his commercial activities as well. In 2016, hundreds of contractors—from carpenters, painters, and plumbers to corporate law firms—accused the then-presidential candidate of failing to pay bills he owed. Even his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has publicly complained that the president barely paid him for his legal work. If Trump does manage to coerce a settlement out of his loyal DOJ appointees—a prospect made more likely by the fact that one of them, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, uset to be his personal lawyer—there’s nothing to indicate it’ll be used to pay anyone but himself.

President Donald Trump is demanding that the Justice Department transfer $230 million in taxpayer dollars into his own personal bank account. He can do this, because thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the executive branch could accurately be described by King Louis XIV—L’état, c’est Trump. > When Trump says this is his decision to make, he’s probably right. At first you might think, ‘Can he do that? Can he just shakedown the DOJ for roughly a quarter of a billion dollars?’ And then you think about the Supreme Court opinions under Chief Justice John Roberts, in which the court has shifted the fundamental structure of American government such that federal agencies, including the Justice Department, are mere extensions of the president’s will. Trump, always on the lookout for the next grift, understands the immense power this bestows on him. The colossal cash transfer he is demanding is being described as compensation for investigations the department launched into Russia’s interventions in the 2016 election and Trump’s absconding with classified documents after his first term. Now that he’s back in the White House, Trump plans to make the government pay for its appropriate use of its ability to investigate and prosecute to safeguard our democracy. And he grasps the fact that he has the absolute power to do that. “With the country, it’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes the decision,” Trump said Tuesday, responding to news of the impending payments. “That decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” > Trump: "It's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. But I > was damaged very greatly and any money I would get I would give to charity." > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-21T21:17:21.012Z Strange indeed—especially since, technically, it is senior Justice Department officials who would officially sign off on the payments, not the president: Breaking the story on Tuesday, the New York Times framed the ethical conflict around the fact that several of the DOJ officials who could sign off on the payments were formerly Trump’s personal lawyers. That’s corruption, of course, but in the old school way of putting cronies in a position to help you. But we’re in a new world now, and Trump himself gets this: He decides, because he effectively controls every decision made at every agency (with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve). If he doesn’t like a decision, he can fire the person responsible. Their desk is now his desk. Don’t just take it from him: the Supreme Court said so. In a series of opinions, Chief Justice John Roberts has reinterpreted the Constitution to give Trump this power. This warping of our constitutional order is known as the unitary executive theory, and it posits that the framers gave the president complete control over the executive branch. Last summer, Roberts authored the infamous immunity decision, Trump’s forever Get Out of Jail Free card, which protected presidents from virtually all prosecution for official acts. That decision not only permitted Trump to break the law, it also gave him unfettered control over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the DOJ—which presumably includes issuing payments to those he claims should be compensated for investigations gone awry. Which all is to say that when Trump says this is his decision to make, he’s probably right. As Roberts has handed the presidency more and more power over every inch of the government, he has never copped to the fact that he was enabling corruption, theft, or autocracy. Absurdly, he claimed to be increasing democratic accountability. “The framers made the president the most democratic and politically accountable official in government,” he wrote in a 2020 decision, because “only the president (along with the vice president) is elected by the entire nation.” It’s hard to take this with a straight face; the electoral college allows a president to win fewer votes and still assume office, and a president in his second term will not face voters again. (Although Trump may try.) Undeterred by these facts, Roberts wrote in a 2021 case that all executive branch decisions are ultimately the president’s to make: The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote.” The absurdity of Roberts’ decision was laid bare Tuesday: The president gets to pay himself hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, because he controls all executive branch personnel and all of their decisions, and there’s probably nothing anyone can do about it. It sure doesn’t feel like our democratic accountability has increased. Of course, Congress could and should pass a law prohibiting such payments, and dare the Supreme Court to strike it down—but this Congress is unlikely to do even that bare minimum in response. What’s to stop Trump from paying allies the same way? Have them file a complaint with DOJ over some legal skirmish, and then order the department to pay them their reward. If Trump gains control of the Federal Reserve—as he is asking the Supreme Court to give him—he could similarly transform the country’s central bank into his own “bottomless slush fund,” as the Atlantic’s Rogé Karma reported last month. He could use the Fed to pay his businesses, his friends, and his donors. He could even keep ICE’s operations active by hiring private contractors during a government shutdown, Karma points out, circumventing Congress’ power of the purse. If Trump will transfer a quarter billion dollars from the taxpayers to himself, it’s clear that he wouldn’t shy away from any of these uses—and probably find more ways to profit that we haven’t even dreamt. Roberts can claim that he’s expanding democratic accountability. But at this point, we can all see the mess he’s created. A man who takes from the voters to line his pockets is not feeling all that accountable to anyone.

Earlier this year, Mother Jones published an article headlined “10 Ways to Enrich the Trumps and the MAGA Movement.” Examples included buying crypto with the proceeds filling Trump family pockets, paying up to a million dollars to a Trump PAC for access to the president, shelling out excessive settlements to end dubious lawsuits filed by the president, paying Melania Trump $40 million for a film about her—and ponying up funds, or a plane, supposedly for Trump’s presidential library, that could benefit Trump himself. We failed, though, to consider that the president might simply force the US government, i.e. us taxpayers, to straight-up pay him hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the offense of investigating him for crimes. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump “is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him.” Those are DOJ probes into connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence activities intended to help him win that election, and Trump’s alleged violation of the Espionage Act, and other laws, by evading Justice Department efforts to recover highly classified documents that Trump lifted from the White House when he left office in 2021, some of which he apparently stored in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The Mar-a-Lago case, which included a 2022 FBI raid of that property that Trump takes particular exception to, resulted in Trump’s 2023 indictment on dozens of counts. The case was later thrown out on a technicality by infamously pro-Trump Judge Aileen Cannon, a ruling that DOJ was appealing when Trump’s election effectively ended the case. Whether Trump will get his payout is officially up to DOJ’s Deputy Attorney General, or the Associate Attorney General who oversees the agency’s civil division. Those jobs are held respectively by Todd Blanche, a former Trump lawyer who represented Trump on the Mar-a-Lago case, and Stanley Woodward, who represented a Trump co-defendant in that case, along with various current Trump aides. The Times story needs little elaboration. It quotes an ethics professor, Bennett Gershman, of Pace University, who said, “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.” But it’s worth noting that Trump is reportedly demanding a massive personal payment from the government he oversees after enacting legislation that slashed funding for Medicaid benefits and food stamps that benefit the poorest Americans. Meanwhile his administration is imposing legally questionable reductions in congressionally-approved funding for medical research and various other federal programs. This year, amid a steady stream of reports on Trump and his family’s efforts to profit from his presidency, the White House has affected indignation, asserting that the presidency is actually costing Trump money. “I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a May 9 media briefing. “He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service, not just once but twice.”    Asked Tuesday if Leavitt stood by that statement, the White House press office referred questions to the Justice Department and Trump’s personal attorneys, adding: “This is not a request for the WH.”

Ghislaine Maxwell has delighted MAGA loyalists by asserting that she never saw the man she is hoping will spring her from a 20-year prison sentence “in any inappropriate setting” throughout the years he spent hanging out with the late convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. But Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy, among other charges, whom Trump has already rewarded with a move to a minimum-security prison camp, went further than that, according to transcripts of her interviews with Justice Department officials released Friday. “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age,” she said, referring to her years of interactions with men who socialized with Epstein, her former companion. “I never saw inappropriate habits.” “That would be a flat no to any man,” she added. Maxwell was interviewed over two days by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose past work as Trump’s personal attorney appears to create a sizeable conflict of interest. The former socialite continues to deny her own guilt in lining up sexual partners for Epstein, many of them underage, and is appealing her conviction. In her sessions with Blanche, conducted in July, she offered similarly worded exonerations of many of the prominent men whose relationships with Epstein have prompted accusations of wrongdoing. Nor, she said, was there any kind of a client list or instances of Epstein recording the men for whom he arranged sexual encounters. Maxwell was bipartisan with her exonerations, claiming former president Bill Clinton, contrary to widespread speculation, was not close to Epstein, and did not visit Epstein’s notorious private island in the Caribbean. “Absolutely never went,” she said. “And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would’ve gone—I don’t believe there’s any way that he would’ve gone to the island, had I not been there. Because I don’t believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein.” “President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” Maxwell said. Maxwell disputed claims by Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre—who died by suicide in 2025—that Prince Andrew, the brother of Britain’s King Charles, raped Giuffre during visits to an Epstein property, claiming the two never even met. (Andrew settled a lawsuit filed by Giuffre without admitting liability.) What about the famous defense attorney and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein? Giuffre had leveled and then later retracted accusations against him that involved massages and a bathrobe. Did he, Blanche asked, ever do “anything inappropriate?” “Absolutely not,” Maxwell said. “I don’t remember anything about him ever getting massaged. I don’t ever have any recall, I don’t believe I ever even saw him in a bathrobe. I have no knowledge of that.” Nor did Maxwell recall if former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who socialized with Epstein while Summers was the president of Harvard University and Epstein was a donor, traveled on Epstein’s plane. Blanche pressed Maxwell on a host of other famous men, including brothers Andrew and Chris Cuomo, the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, and former Secretary of State John Kerry. Despite speculation, Maxwell said Epstein knew none of them. Blanche even asked about George Soros, the billionaire financier, who features in a variety of far-right, antisemitic conspiracy theories, including some involving Epstein. “I don’t think [Epstein] knew him,” Maxwell said. One exception, however, is Robert Kennedy Jr., now the Health and Human Services Secretary. Maxwell said that Kennedy had joined Epstein on a “dinosaur bone hunting trip in the Dakotas in the 1980s. But, as with all the others: “I never saw anything inappropriate with Mr. Kennedy.” Maxwell also said that she does not recall a suggestive birthday note that the Wall Street Journal reported Trump sent Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. Trump denies sending the letter and has sued the paper over its report. Maxwell does remember creating the “birthday book” for Epstein, which was reportedly filled with notes and testimonials from such luminaries as Clinton, Dershowitz, and financier Leon Black. The idea, Maxwell said, came from her mother. But she asserted that she could not remember whether Trump, or anyone specific, contributed. “It’s been so long,” Maxwell said when asked to recall the names of contributors to the book. “I want to tell you, but I don’t remember.” The trade here is obvious. Memory lapses that assist the pardon-happy president try to move past speculation about his own involvement with late pedophile is Maxwell’s best bet for getting out of prison. Indeed, federal prosecutors said Maxwell lied “brazenly” under oath during her 2021 trial, has every reason to fib about Trump now. But laying it on so thick, in such a nakedly transactional exchange, may have the opposite of its intended outcome.

The Trump administration’s campaign of vengeance against perceived political enemies escalated Friday morning when the FBI raided the home and office of former national security adviser John Bolton, a vocal Trump critic. That search follows Attorney General Pam Bondi directing federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into whether former President Barack Obama and his aides concocted evidence about Russia’s efforts to help Trump in the 2016 election. Last month, the Justice Department said it was separately investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, without specifying the allegations. Meanwhile, loyal Trump underlings— including DOJ official Ed Martin and Bill Pulte, a real estate heir running the Federal Housing Finance Agency—are using government power, along with social media gimmickry, to allege wrongdoing by frequent Trump foils. The various investigations may differ in their legitimacy. But they are all the manifestation of Trump’s promises to use the White House to prosecute his enemies. The threat of an authoritarian president using his office and control of federal law enforcement to try to imprison critics is not hypothetical. It is happening, as Trump advisers race to please him by launching probes aimed at his foes. These efforts are predicated on concocted claims that it was the administration’s Democratic predecessors who misused federal agencies for politics. The Trump administration is politicizing intelligence, law enforcement, and other government functions while pretending to be punishing politicization, as with the ironically named “Weaponization Working Group” that Martin now leads. That can feel a bit confusing, but it is more easily understood as a string of efforts by individual Trump advisers to their please boss by helping him crack down on dissent and deliver retribution. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s report on “Russiagate” was widely derided, but it came following reports that suggested Trump was considering firing her after she contradicted his claims about the danger of Iran’s nuclear program. The former Democratic representative appears to have protected her job by handing Trump a report that helped him try to shift attention amid scrutiny of his relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bondi, too, has faced withering attacks from within MAGA over her botched handling the Epstein scandal. Her quickly launched investigation aimed at Obama may never meet the standards of federal judges, but it made her boss happy. The search of Bolton’s home required a judge to find probable cause to issue a warrant. The FBI is reportedly looking into accusations that Bolton, who was investigated during the first Trump administration for revealing sensitive information in a book, had leaked national security information more recently. Trump on Friday claimed he was not aware beforehand of the Bolton raid. But that claim, true or not, overlooks the reality that various Trump advisers appear to be using attacks on his enemies to win or keep the mercurial president’s favor. Vice President J.D. Vance even weighed in on Bolton Friday. “If we think Ambassador Bolton committed a crime, of course eventually prosecutions will come,” Vance told NBC’s Meet the Press. Vance added that “classified documents are certainly part of it, but I think that there’s a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton.” FBI director Kash Patel—who attacked Bolton in a 2024 book, complaining at length that Bolton had dragged his feet on hiring him during the first Trump administration—tweeted about the raid at the time it occurred, writing: “NO ONE is above the law…@FBI agents on mission.” Bondi then reposted Patel, adding, in part: “Justice will be pursued. Always.” Such public pronouncements were once unusual for DOJ officials. But they are increasingly standard under Trump. Martin, who got his current position after the Senate declined to confirm him as US attorney for DC, is seeking presidential favor through highly public, if legally dubious, campaigns. He said in a May press conference that he planned to use publicity to attack Trump foes. “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” he declared. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” Earlier this week, Martin appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letita James, where—clad in the trench coat he has attempted to make his signature—he posed for pictures taken by the New York Post, all part of an effort to call attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings. In a letter to James’ lawyer, Martin said he would consider it “an act of good faith” if James resigned. The New York Times recently noted that Martin’s actions violate a slew of DOJ rules and norms: “Prosecutors are barred from making investigative decisions based on politics; they are asked not to comment on specific cases; and they are supposed to avoid turning their investigations into public spectacles.” But Martin took a similar tack this week in a letter he reportedly sent Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell urging him to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board member, over allegations that Cook had improperly claimed a property she owns in Atlanta as her residence. “Do it today before it is too late!” Martin wrote. The allegations against Cook came from Pulte, the 37-year-old head of an agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has used his post to highlight unproven mortgage fraud accusations against James, Cook, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and has issued letters asking the DOJ to investigate. (All three have denied breaking the law.) Martin reportedly met with Pulte early this month. Pulte, who has 3 million followers on X, posted recently that he had “obtained” a document submitted to the government that he claims shows Cook committed fraud. Pulte’s accusation was quickly taken up by Trump, who is attempting to gain control of the Federal Reserve and oust Powell before his term ends, in effort to push for lower interest rates. Bloomberg reported Friday that Pulte, who has been “struggling” to maintain influence with the White House” amid irritation by some officials there over his bombastic online behavior—including his habit of announcing significant policy changes via tweet—had returned to favor with the president through his attacks on Cook. Trump’s efforts to target his critics also got help earlier this month from the Office of Special Counsel, or OSC, a small independent agency charged with enforcing federal rules. The office, which is not part of DOJ, announced that it was investigating whether Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who twice indicted Trump, had violated a law barring federal workers from using their government jobs to engage in political activity. Since the strongest sanction OSC can apply is to urge the firing of a federal employee, it cannot impose any real penalty on Smith, who resigned from his post in January. But the agency—whose previous head Trump fired earlier this year, and where Trump has tried to install a far-right loyalist—appears eager to ingratiate itself with the president. Such efforts show how a president can attack officials he wants to oust—and how the vast powers of a sprawling federal government can be wielded against his critics. These attacks certainly reflect Trump’s own pathology. But they would be impossible without the collaboration of influence-seeking enablers using public positions to enact Trump’s vengeance agenda.