Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.  “At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.  This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.

In 2023, Marlena Arjo adopted a one-eyed kitten with a penchant for destruction. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality. “ He’s laying on houseplants, he’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall…I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home,” Arjo joked. Within months, Otto got sick and stopped eating. Arjo rushed him to a vet and learned he had feline infectious peritonitis, better known as FIP, a disease that kills nearly all cats that contract it.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. The vet said there was nothing the clinic could do. But there was something Arjo could do. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” Arjo recalled the vet telling her. “But by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.” This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Hyperfixed podcast, we tell the story of the cat drug black market, why it was even necessary, and how cat lovers fought for big changes to make the black market obsolete.

In the mid-’90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another–works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by authorities.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Our second story revisits an investigation into a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. More than half a century later, a journalist helped track it down through the Panama Papers.  This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2020.

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida has ordered the public release of grand jury transcripts from the first federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, which took place during the mid-2000s.  That investigation ended without any charges. In 2007, however, federal prosecutors in Florida did indict Epstein, who managed to obtain a plea deal, copping to relatively minor charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He was given an 18-month sentence in the Palm Beach County Jail—with daytime work release—and served about 13 months. Back in July, a different judge, at the request of the Trump administration, had declined to demand release of the records from the earlier investigation. On Friday, however, US District Judge Rodney Smith, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2018, stated that the Epstein Files Transparency Act that President Donald Trump signed into law on November 19, “overrides” rules that prohibit the public disclosure of “unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials”—including grand jury transcripts. This same law compels the Department of Justice, federal prosecutors, and the FBI to release, by mid-December, materials they collected during their investigations into Epstein going back at least as far as the mid-2000s Florida case. The DOJ has not yet announced a timeline for making the information publicly available.  Earlier this year, three federal judges denied DOJ requests to unseal the federal grand jury transcripts. US District Judge Richard Berman framed the effort as a “diversion” strategy to distract from the agency’s slow-rolling of its own Epstein files: “The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice,” he wrote. DOJ officials are now attempting to unseal materials from three different Epstein investigations. The Trump administration has asked two New York judges for grand jury transcripts from Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case and Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2021 trial.  The state courts are now weighing privacy concerns from survivors and witnesses. The Epstein Files Transparency Act lists exemptions that may allow the DOJ to redact records that could result in personal identification.  The New York judges are expected to issue their decisions next week. 

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.

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.

“Good afternoon,” is how Magistrate Judge Heide Herrmann welcomed detainees into DC Superior Court room C-10 when it was their turn to stand in front of the bench on Monday. But at 8:37 p.m., it was hardly “afternoon” anymore. Nor was it a good day for most of the inmates. They had been brought over from DC’s central cellblock, where accommodations consist of metal “beds” without mattresses. Some of the detainees were still in the pajamas they were wearing when they were first arrested. All were shackled at the wrists and ankles.  > “MPD knows how to do this. The other law enforcement mentioned who are out > making arrests apparently do not.” Judge Herrmann was responsible for deciding whether they would continue to be held or released on the promise to appear at their next court date. The constitution requires defendants see a judge within 48 hours of arrest, but because superior court is closed on Sundays, Mondays consist of two days’ worth of criminal misdemeanor arraignments and felony presentments. It’s often the courtroom’s busiest day. Several of the 105 cases Herrmann considered involved serious allegations: one defendant allegedly shot someone, requiring the victim to undergo bladder surgery, and there were also a litany of domestic violence charges. But since President Donald Trump has unleashed scores of federal law enforcement officers to help police DC’s modest population of 702,000, the caseload has been especially long—and often frivolous. Just a couple Mondays ago, it took a judge until almost 1:30 a.m. to get through what lawyers call the “lock-up list.” (A lawyer who sometimes represents defendants in C-10 says that before Trump’s crackdown, ending between 7-8 p.m. would have been considered an especially late Monday. ) The recent liveliness of C-10 should concern DC locals as well as the residents of blue cities that Trump has alluded to targeting next. But not because the room’s fullness proves Trump’s bold thesis that the entire city has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” Rather, experts say, the surging volume of charges and the allegations therein indicates a different problem: overzealous and ineffectual prosecuting. “We are in the in the DC Superior Court pretty much every day and have seen enormous changes under Trump,” says Abbe Smith, the director of a Georgetown Law School clinic that provides criminal defense assistance to people who can’t afford other representation. “None of them good.” The aggressive posturing is no doubt putting a tremendous strain on judges and public defenders. “Aye yai yai,” grumbled one of about five public defenders in the room on Monday when she learned she had more than a dozen clients left to represent after 6 p.m. At one point, even the stoic judge bemoaned the contents of some of the arrest affidavits. She attributed this to federal agents who, unlike members of the Metropolitan Police Department, are not accustomed to street patrol duty. In this case, federal agents had helped apprehend a young man arrested for smoking weed in a park. Possession of marijuana is legal in DC, but public consumption of it is not (though it’s rarely prosecuted). After he was arrested, MPD and federal agents performed a subsequent search that led them to conclude the young man was storing THC wax—a more concentrated form of weed that isn’t legal in DC—in a backpack. Law enforcement tacked on a possession charge, but the affidavit said nothing about how agents knew the backpack (and the THC wax) belonged to the defendant. “MPD knows how to do this,” the magistrate judge said of the incomplete affidavit. “The other law enforcement mentioned who are out making arrests apparently do not.” In early September, another man was approached by law enforcement because DEA agents “observed a bulge consistent with a bag of marijuana coming from the pants pocket” of the individual, the affidavit says. He willingly showed the agents the bag of marijuana (which, again, is legal in DC). They then patted him down and noticed an “abnormal bulge” in his sock. It was a small bag containing what the agents described as five Oxycodone pills. They arrested the man for possession of a controlled substance. This case was recently dismissed, but normally, such cases wouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place. Instead, they are usually “no-papered,” meaning the prosecutor would opt against filing formal charges after the arrest. Smith says it was previously common for as many as a quarter or a third of cases to be no-papered misdemeanors because the allegations lack sufficient evidence to convict, or because there are questions about whether the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated. But now in DC, she says, “nearly every single misdemeanor is being papered.” Anecdotally, law enforcement seem to be more aggressively pursuing searches that may not be legally justified. In one instance, federal agents approached a man in a lawn chair merely for being close to a miniature bottle of wine—the kind you can buy on an airplane. Moments later, he was thoroughly searched and then charged for drug possession and for carrying a handgun without a permit. Less that two blocks from the superior court sits DC’s federal district court. Here, convictions are generally accompanied by stricter sentences. Yet, the federal charges defendants have faced in recent weeks haven’t necessarily been any more serious than those judged in local court. In between a sprinkling of serious child pornography and narcotics hearings were more negligible matters, such as shoving and vague threats. A man who allegedly shoulder-checked a National Guard member and said “I’ll kill you” was initially charged with assault and threatening to kidnap or injure a person, which carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. (On Tuesday, a grand jury declined to indict him. Subsequently, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office charged him with two misdemeanor counts instead.) There was also a woman arrested for assault while protesting ICE agents in July. Amid efforts to restrain her, an FBI agent’s hand was allegedly scraped against a cement wall. Extraordinarily, a grand jury opted against indicting her for felony assault three times. She’s since been charged with a misdemeanor and awaits from home a trial in October. Pirro’s office also won’t give up on convicting the the infamous former Justice Department paralegal, Sean Dunn, accused of assault for tossing a wrapped Subway sandwich at the chest of a Customs and Border Patrol agent in August. A grand jury opted against indicting him, too. (He’s since been charged with misdemeanor assault; jury selection for the trial is slated to begin November 3.) Shootings have continued amid the crime crackdown, but Trump and Pirro can count at least one win: Nobody in DC has thrown a sandwich at an officer since prosecutors tried to throw the book at Dunn. Our long national nightmare is over.

Wednesday’s fatal shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was greeted with widespread grief, horror, and shock by many MAGA and right-wing figures, some of whom counted Kirk as a friend or cited him as an inspiration for their own work. But while many simply expressed their grief for Kirk and his family, and politicians on both sides of the aisle condemned the killing, some public figures used the moment to make incendiary claims.  On Wednesday evening, FBI Director Kash Patel said a “subject” was in custody, although the identity and potential motivations of this “person of interest” remain unknown. (By that point, far-fetched conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death were already emerging, including claims that Kirk was assassinated by the Israeli government.)  But that did not stop some figures from stoking outrage, particularly against “the left,” whom—despite lacking any evidence as to the shooter’s identity—they blamed for the killing. Former DOGE head and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted to his 225 million followers, “The Left is the party of murder.” > “The goal for Republicans in the next ten years shouldn’t just be to win > elections, but to destroy the Democrat Party entirely and salt the earth > underneath it.” Conservative activist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer sent a barrage of posts to her 1.7 million followers. In one, she called for the Trump administration to “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” adding, “The Left is a national security threat.” After Kirk’s death was confirmed, she wrote: “They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that said 47.” It is unclear which “they” she was referring to.  “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state,” Loomer added. Former White House staffer and current podcast host Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, wrote on X that liberals “have blood on your hands.” And Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) went so far as to blame the killing on the Democrats. > Nancy Mace's very first words to reporters on Charlie Kirk was "democrats own > what happened today" > > When @ryanobles followed up about if that means Republicans "own" the shooting > of Minnesota lawmakers she says "are you kidding me?" > > From moments ago on the House steps pic.twitter.com/H6RXJITtTv > > — Leah V. (@LeahVredenbregt) September 10, 2025 Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the Federalist, an influential conservative publication, posted on X: “I hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade.” In a separate post, Davis wrote, “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.”  The knee-jerk arguments that the killing was somehow orchestrated by the left called to mind the baseless blaming of Democrats following the attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump last summer. As our colleague Mark Follman noted at the time, allies of Trump, including his sons, repeatedly and falsely blamed Democrats for the attempts—claims that threat assessment and law enforcement experts warned could give rise to more political violence.  Others blamed Kirk’s killing on an unnamed group of opponents. On Fox News, host Jesse Watters claimed: “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote, “They just shot Charlie Kirk.” (It was unclear whom Watters and Greene were referring to.)  > Jesse Watters goes full bloodlust in response to Charlie Kirk's death: > "Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we > going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? … > This is a turning point. And we know which direction we are going." > > — Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2025-09-10T21:16:53.583Z Andrew Tate, the British-American masculinity influencer turned far-right culture warrior, kept his message simple: “Civil war,” he wrote. Anti-abortion activist and president of Students for Life Kristan Hawkins also invoked civil war and seemed to imply that Kirk’s killing was a result of his opposition to abortion. “We all know the work we do to protect Life comes at a cost,” Hawkins said. In another X post, she wrote: “This is a new civil war. One that we must fight with love to restore a Culture of Life.” Chaya Raichik, the creator of the far-right Libs of TikTok Twitter account, quickly began sharing posts that were meant to show left-wing and progressive people, including many who aren’t public figures, celebrating Kirk’s killing. In her own post on X, she wrote: “THIS IS WAR.”  Some commenters claimed the killing was proof that “the left” could not be stopped. Darryl Cooper, a far-right activist who posts and podcasts under the name “Martyr Made,” told his 350,000 X followers, “Fascism is just the word used by freaks and degenerates when normal people realize that the Left won’t stop unless it’s forced to.” Texas firebrand pastor Joel Webbon, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, told his 51,000 followers, “The Left will not stop until they are forced to. The Right must gain power, keep power, and wield power righteously. @realDonaldTrump, you have been appointed by Providence. You are commanded by Scripture to be a TERROR to those who do evil. Give them hell.” William Wolfe, another Christian nationalist and a former Trump administration official, posted a video of the shooting with the comment: “The. Left. Must. Be. Destroyed.” In a separate tweet, he wrote, “The Democrats and the Left must be crushed. The goal for Republicans in the next ten years shouldn’t just be to win elections, but to destroy the Democrat Party entirely and salt the earth underneath it.” Many of the most incendiary tweets called for the Trump administration to use every available tool for legal and political retribution. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who made a name for himself opposing critical race theory, called for swift action. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” he posted to his 832,000 followers on X. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.” Without directly calling for retribution, other MAGA figures made it clear Kirk’s killing would forever change their own political trajectory. “Congratulations,” wrote conservative activist Ryan Fournier, a co-founder of the group Students for Trump. “You have now made a radical out of me. You fuckers deserve it.”

Speaking at the Museum of the Bible on Monday, President Donald Trump repeated one of his favorite falsehoods as of late: That his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC has virtually eliminated crime in the nation’s capital. That is, of course, not true. But if that outright falsehood was not egregious enough, consider that Trump also complained that reports of domestic violence are inflating crime statistics and implied they should not be considered “crimes” at all. “Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump said. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent.” > Trump minimizes domestic abuse during a talk at the Museum of the Bible: > "Things that take place in the home, they call crime … If a man has a little > fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?" > > — Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T15:44:26.977Z Dawn Dalton, executive director of the DC Coalition of Domestic Violence, told me on Monday: “We don’t agree with what the president is saying.” Nearly half of women in DC, and more than 40 percent of men, have experienced intimate partner violence or stalking in their lifetimes, according to statistics the coalition compiled last year. Nationwide, an average of two dozen people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “There have been federal and local statutes in place for decades that does name domestic violence as a crime,” Dalton added, “and we know that domestic violence is often a precursor to other crimes, including domestic violence homicides as well as mass shootings.” Indeed, research has found that in nearly 70 percent of mass shootings, perpetrators had a history of domestic violence or had killed at least one partner or family member. “The frequency and the harm [of domestic violence] is not paid enough attention to, and remarks such as the president’s certainly underscore that truth,” Dalton added. Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “Of course the President wasn’t talking about or downplaying domestic violence—and any Fake News hacks trying to use this as a political cudgel against the President are doing a great service to actual domestic abusers and criminals around the country.” In fact, Trump has not only downplayed domestic violence through his speech, but also through his actions: His administration has cut millions of dollars in grants earmarked for victims of crime, including domestic violence, and has tried to force domestic violence service providers to agree to hand crime victims over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to receive federal dollars. A statement like the one Trump made is also not surprising when you consider the man that uttered it has himself been accused of rape by his ex-wife, Ivana Trump. She later claimed she did not mean it “in a literal or criminal sense,” adding that she “felt violated.” (Trump denied the allegation.) Trump has also stacked his cabinet and surrounded himself with men who have faced similar accusations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women,” in a 2018 email, though she told the New York Times last year that she subsequently recanted and apologized for it. Hegseth has also been accused of rape and sexually inappropriate behavior, charges which he denies. (Hegseth paid the woman who made the rape accusation, the Washington Post reported, but he alleges the interaction was consensual.) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was accused of groping a babysitter in the late 1990s. While running for president last year, he texted her to apologize and said he had no memory of the incident. Ex-Department of Government Efficiency head and Trump frenemy Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016, but he denied the claim—after Business Insider reported that the company paid her $250,000 in 2018 to keep her from filing a lawsuit. And Rob Porter, a top White House aide, abruptly resigned during Trump’s first term after two of his ex-wives came forward with domestic abuse allegations, which Trump himself cast doubt on. While there is ample evidence that the police do not always protect domestic violence victims or respond adequately to domestic abuse, it seems very unlikely that this is what Trump was referring to. The man is, after all, about the furthest thing from an abolitionist: His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill allocated more than $100 billion to ICE—the same agency that has created a chilling effect for immigrant survivors of domestic violence seeking help, as I previously reported. And the president has repeatedly threatened to send the National Guard to take over other cities after doing so in DC and Los Angeles. Instead, his latest comments are a throwback to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Trump seems to believe that, if you’re a man, “you can do anything” to women—and that you deserve to get away with it.

President Trump is planning to ramp up his federal reach into local enforcement after first flooding the streets of DC with National Guard troops, and this week he promised to send troops to more cities—including Baltimore. Despite a federal judge ruling that Trump broke the law when deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer, Trump insisted during a press conference on Tuesday that his administration had “a right to do it because I have an obligation to do it to protect this country… and that includes Baltimore.” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been speaking out in defense of his city, including in a sit-down interview this week with me. Scott pushed back against Trump’s claims, saying that this year, his city has witnessed “the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s a 50-year low, and that’s still not good enough for me.” The Washington Post recently reported that homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted nearly 23 percent compared with the first half of 2024, while non-fatal shootings fell by nearly 20 percent. Scott also decried federal cuts to the very programs he says have been instrumental in reducing crime in Baltimore. “Community violence intervention, victim services, all of those kinds of services that have been cut,” he said. “What we want from the president is very simple — reinstating all the cuts that they’ve made to federal grants to programs that have been working to reduce violence.” Watch the full video here: