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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

“Alexa, change the president.”

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

People are weird.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

“They all knew.”

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

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You are here: Home / Archives for Justice / Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

Lawn Order Open Thread: Look, Over There! An Anarchist Pipe Bomber!

by Anne Laurie|  December 4, 20255:23 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: Jan 6: Insurrection, Open Threads, Shitty Cops

Authorities have made an arrest in connection with the placement of two pipe bombs outside RNC and DNC headquarters the night before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
abc7ny.com/post/suspect…
via ABC7NY App

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— But did you Skeet? (@thepassionittwists.bsky.social) December 4, 2025 at 12:38 PM

Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom… Per Reuters, “FBI charges man with planting pipe bombs on eve of January 6, 2021 Capitol riot”:

The FBI arrested a 30-year-old Virginia man and charged him with planting a pair of pipe bombs in Washington the night before the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, officials said on Thursday.

The suspect, Brian Cole Jr., of Woodbridge, was charged with use of an explosive device and attempted malicious destruction by means of explosive materials, Attorney General Pam Bondi and other federal officials told a Washington press conference. Bondi and other officials did not say what motivated the alleged bomber to plant devices outside the Republican and Democratic Party buildings near the Capitol, or reveal what new break in the case led to the arrest nearly five years after the incident…

Police deactivated the bombs the day Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory. Thousands of rioters stormed the Capitol that day, assaulting about 140 officers and causing more than $2.8 million in damage.

It was unclear if Cole had an attorney. He lives with his parents in Woodbridge, a suburb about 20 miles (32 kilometers) outside Washington, and works for a bail bond company, according to a court filing, which capped a lengthy investigation in which the FBI had long struggled to identify a suspect…

Trump pardoned nearly everyone criminally charged for participating in the riot, some 1,500 people, when he returned to office in January.

The pipe bomb probe was one of a few cases that had drawn significant attention from Trump’s political base, which the FBI’s top two officials, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, vowed to re-examine…

FBI Says DC Pipe Bomb Suspect Brian Cole Kept Buying Bomb Parts After January 6
Federal agents on Thursday announced the arrest of a suspect charged with planting the two pipe bombs discovered near the US Capitol complex on the eve of January 6, 2021. Authorities identified the man as Brian J.…

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— Toolcome (@toolcome.bsky.social) December 4, 2025 at 3:13 PM

Wired, “FBI Says DC Pipe Bomb Suspect Brian Cole Kept Buying Bomb Parts After January 6”:

… Cole, 30, is charged with transporting an explosive device across state lines with the intent to kill, injure, intimidate, or destroy property and with attempting to damage and destroy the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees by means of an explosive device. If convicted, he would face the prospect of decades in prison.

According to an affidavit, investigators linked Cole to the bombs through a combination of surveillance footage, historical cell-site data, and years of purchase records showing he bought each major component used to construct the devices. Agents allege Cole acquired the same model of galvanized pipe, matching end caps, and nine-volt connectors, among other items, across multiple hardware stores in northern Virginia in 2019 and 2020.

Cole continued buying components used in bomb-making after his bombs in the Capitol were discovered, agents allege, listing the purchase of a white kitchen timer and two nine-volt batteries from a Walmart on January 21, as well as galvanized pipes from Home Depot the following day.

Senior Trump administration officials quickly cast the arrest as a vindication of their own leadership, claiming the case had gone cold. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she hoped the arrest would restore public trust following what she characterized as a “total lack of movement” on a case that had “languished for four years.” In their telling, the breakthrough was proof that the case only advanced once they were empowered to “go get the bad guys” and stop “focusing on other extraneous things,” as FBI deputy director Dan Bongino put it…

Identifying the January 6 pipe-bomber became an obsession in large swaths of Trump’s MAGA base in recent years. Indeed, Bongino played a significant role in his previous life as a right-wing influencer in criticizing the agency he now helps lead over its perceived lack of process in the case…

Despite little being known about the suspected bomber, far-right figures online were already speculating on Thursday morning before he was officially named that he was a member of “antifa.” Others simply didn’t believe that the FBI had arrested the right guy: “Let’s see what they’ve got,” Republican congressman Thomas Massie wrote on X, adding, ”I’m not buying it.”

ETA: Just yesterday…

Trump asserts executive privilege to thwart Jan. 6 lawsuit

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— Alex Plitsas (@alexplitsas.bsky.social) December 4, 2025 at 1:21 AM

Lawn Order Open Thread: <em>Look, Over There! An Anarchist Pipe Bomber!</em>Post + Comments (67)

Late Night Open Thread: Little Man Greg Bovino Flourishes His Mighty Weapon

by Anne Laurie|  November 20, 20251:18 am| 136 Comments

This post is in: Immigration, Open Threads, Shitty Cops, Trump Crime Cartel

Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino has brought his hype videoing to Charlotte. With the surely unlicensed use of the song Raise Up by Petey Pablo.

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— Trump Watch (@trumpwat.ch) November 17, 2025 at 12:27 PM

At the 10second mark in the video, you can see that Bovino is very short. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (he’s stil taller than me), but many people are saying it’s amazing his subordinates found an even *shorter* ‘criminal’ for Bovino to be filmed arresting. (There’s rumors the victim is 15 years old, which would track.)

An endless amount of deranged details in this interview with Greg Bovino’s sister, but most notably that his uncle produced the Jack Nicholson movie The Border and the depiction of the agent as corrupt radicalized him as a 12-yr-old.
“Since then, he was like, ‘Dude, I want to do Border Patrol.'”

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 3:33 PM

The Daily Mail wrote up a long read-between-the-lines hagiography of Bovino, as told by his baby sister. “How a tragic family secret turned Greg Bovino from a quiet country boy into the force of Trump’s unflinching border patrol crackdown”:

… A visit to the town where the Border Patrol commander-at-large grew up, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, reveals the secret: that his father killed a young woman in a drunken crash, decades-old court records obtained by the Daily Mail show…

‘Yes, it was difficult,’ Natalie Bovino, a 51-year-old nurse practitioner, said during the interview in her home just a few miles from where they grew up in Blowing Rock, ‘but as our dad would say – ‘What are you going to do to overcome it?’

The unfortunate accident occurred on June 6, 1981: Michael Bovino, owner of a thriving bar in town called the Library Club, left work intoxicated and smashed into a car…

The victim’s family told the Daily Mail that she was driving into town with her husband that night when Bovino, a stranger driving in a car with empty bottles of alcohol, smashed into them.

Records show that the 37-year-old father was charged with manslaughter and pleaded guilty to death by motor vehicle, was sentenced to a year in jail and forced to receive treatment for alcoholism.

His previously well-to-do family had to sell the bar and struggled financially. The parents divorced three years later.

‘He was hard,’ Natalie Bovino shared of her late father. ‘Toughness, hard work, that was drilled in and baked in.’

The dad bought his son boxing gloves and sparred with him, teaching him to take a punch and get up after being knocked down…

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So, Bovino was raised by a violent drunk who taught him all about ‘toughness’ before committing manslaughter. (One year seems like a light sentence, but maybe there were extenuating circumstances? Perhaps the elder Bovino had good friends in local law enforcement?)

These days, Bovino continues to psych himself up for big Border Patrol assignments by watching a YouTube video showing Rocky Marciano, the late heavyweight champion and legendary bruiser, pound opponents into submission.

‘Greg loves Rocky Marciano,’ Natalie told the Daily Mail. ‘When he gets ready to do something difficult, he’ll watch the video ‘Rocky Marciano was a Savage.’ He goes and goes and goes and doesn’t stop. And Greg gets motivated to not stop, to never give up, never quit.’

Greg Bovino was born in 1970 in San Bernardino County, California, where his father served on a military base after being drafted during the Vietnam War.

[PTSD?]

Two years later, his parents Michael and Betty Bovino moved across the country to Blowing Rock, where the mom’s family goes back eight generations. The couple had two more children: Natalie, born in 1974, and Nicholas in 1979.

Natalie Bovino described their early childhood as Rockwellian, growing up in a town of about 1,000 people in the High Country of Western North Carolina.

‘It was literally perfect,’ she told the Daily Mail, describing the closeness of their community and family, which included their ‘Paw Paw’, ‘Granny’, aunts, uncles and cousins.

In those early years, the family was living the good life thanks largely to the success of the Library Club.

‘The bouncers would drop huge bags of money off, stacks and stacks,’ Natalie said. ‘He did incredibly well.’

The family was able to buy their house and a boat they’d ride on Watauga Lake, and membership to a country club where they ran a side business, a drink stand, on the ninth hole…

[Making allowances for the gauzy nostalgia of a young child: how much money could a man make selling alcohol in a ‘rural’ North Carolinian area?]

Greg also enjoyed flipping through hunting magazines, which is how Bovino was first introduced to the subject that would come to define his adult life – immigration enforcement.

The hunting publications featured columns written by ‘old time’ Border Control agents such as Skeeter Skelton and Charles Askins. The young boy had found his calling.

‘He thought it was the Wild West,’ Natalie Bovino told the Daily Mail. ‘It was like a true frontier. And it was those old timers that inspired that in him.’…

Bovino became a voracious reader in high school, devouring books by everyone from historian Robert Service to the frontier stories of Louis L’Amour, the sister said.

[Robert Service, Bard of the Yukon.]
 
He grew obsessed with one title in particular, Starship Troopers, a military Sci-Fi novel by Robert Heinlein from 1959 imagining an interstellar war between humanity and alien bugs.

‘Now he reads Starship Troopers once a year,’ his sister told the Daily Mail.

[Starship Trooper, a coming-of-age novel where a young recruit learns to slaughter faceless monsters, eventually reconciling with his father… who has become his military subordinate.]

‘Early in his career, Greg would run into cartels and be the first one in the door because he had the best marksmanship,’ Natalie said. ‘A lot of times, it was drug cartel based, which he said now has infiltrated every major city with the crime and corruption.

Bovino led the El Centro district in California during the final year of Trump’s first term in 2020.

He was furious to see what he saw as progress come undone when President Joe Biden relaxed border security, allowing millions of illegal immigrants to cross into the country.

[Much as Heinlein was inspired to write Starship Troopers when that soft patsy President Eisenhower stopped U.S. nuclear testing — unilaterally!]

He was relieved of his command after testifying critically about border conditions in August 2023.

He was then promoted earlier this year under President Donald Trump, appointed in June to lead the administration’s first sustained blitz of a major city – Los Angeles. He then moved on to to spearhead ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ in Chicago.

‘We talk about Trump and he’s like, finally I can do my job and not be handheld and watched as horrific things happened,’ Natalie Bovino said.

She spoke for hours about the man she said feels passionate about his job protecting the homeland, how he watched President George W. Bush’s speech on the one-year anniversary of 9/11 talking about the need to defend the country from danger while referencing the ideals of the nation’s Founding Fathers…

One video shows Bovino throwing a gas canister into a crowd without giving a verbal warning this fall in Chicago, standing barefaced with a determined stare.

‘We all got really upset by that, at least we did at first,’ the sister said. ‘But you know what he says? He goes: “I will not show fear. It’s a demonstration that I am not going to cower and hide. I have a job to do and it’s going to get done”…

[Well, as long as he had a good reason, such as not being mistaken for a ‘coward’… ]

‘He tells people he’s out there defending ‘Ma and Pa America,’ she said. ‘That’s the very fiber of his being. It’s everything he stands for as far as his upbringing to his love of history to his honor with his job, which is the safety and security of American citizens.’…

Bovino has spoken about his desire to return to North Carolina, saying he plans to harvest apples there after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 57, less than two years from now.

‘We daydream about going on mega sledding adventures,’ his sister told the Daily Mail. ‘His roots are still here. This is his home, and it runs deep.’

A veritable Hallmark movie. Assuming he’s not in jail. Or dead — quite possibly by his own hand.

He should know the criminal record of those landscapers. And if he doesn’t, then he’s clearly racial profiling. Fuck Bovino.

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— Joe Walsh (@walshfreedom.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 5:02 PM


(Those aren’t Citizens, Martha! Those so-called landscapers are just… Bugs!)

Dude forgets that he lives in a country where policemen like him WORK FOR elected leaders, not the other way around.

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) November 18, 2025 at 1:54 PM

Late Night Open Thread: Little Man Greg Bovino Flourishes His Mighty WeaponPost + Comments (136)

Late Night Open Thread: Worse Than K(r)ash Patel’s Challenge Coin

by Anne Laurie|  October 4, 202510:32 pm| 47 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Popular Culture, Republican Stupidity, Shitty Cops, Trump Crime Cartel

Only cops and dudes who never deployed like this type of shit.

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— Jack Murphy (@jackmurphyrgr.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 1:57 PM

Tom Nichols, at the Atlantic — “Kash Patel’s Challenge Coin Is Perfect for Him” [gift link]:

Members of the U.S. military have long had a tradition of giving or exchanging “challenge coins.” The medallions have no monetary value; they come in various shapes and sizes, but most are about the size of a silver dollar, and they carry the symbols and names of military units or commands. Members of those units carry them to give to others as tokens of esteem. (They are called challenge coins because they can be used to prove that you are a member of the unit; sometimes they are called “commander’s coins” when they’re given out by a senior officer.)…

FBI Director Kash Patel has created such a coin for himself that he’s now handing out, and Americans can only wish that he’d take them all and lock them in his desk, never to be seen again.

The coins are, to put it gently, ridiculous. On one side, they have what appears to be the symbol of the Punisher, a Marvel character. The Punisher is a vigilante who does … well, vigilante stuff, killing evildoers at will as revenge for the death of his family. The symbol is popular with a lot of people, including criminals, law-enforcement officers, soldiers, and some extremist groups such as the anti-government Three Percenters. None of this is good, especially because the character’s creator long ago admitted that the symbol was partly inspired by the Nazi SS’s Totenkopf, or “Death’s Head,” uniform insignia. (The author of the series also notes that the Punisher hates cops, something the police officers wearing the mark don’t seem to get.)

If you’re not a comic-book fan, the front of the coin looks more like a depiction of a space alien, or maybe a skull—or maybe a space alien’s skull—with spiders in the eye sockets and K$H on the forehead. (“Kash.” Get it? So edgy.) The face has a Greek or Roman helmet under the nose, and a pistol on each side, and together, it looks like a key or maybe a bottle opener. The other side carries Patel’s signature, the FBI seal, and a depiction of a tommy gun, perhaps as a romantic reminder of the days of J. Edgar Hoover hunting down John Dillinger or something.

This is not a challenge coin: It is something kids use to pop the caps off beer bottles at a gaming meetup or a cosplay convention. If someone pressed one of these into my hand at an official function, I’d think I was being pranked (or maybe being given a discount token to a local Halloween house). It is as unserious as the director himself, a metal symbol of the hollowness of Patel’s leadership. The FBI, prone to rogue operations under Hoover, has for decades been the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency. It is run and staffed by agents—serious men and women—who once struck fear into the hearts of bank robbers, kidnappers, and enemy spies. After Hoover, the agency’s directors were always drawn from the ranks of people with backgrounds in law enforcement or justice, people of significant accomplishment.

Patel’s coin does not convey this kind of gravitas. Instead, it says: “I am a grown man who has spent way too much time on the internet.” It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to get from someone with a lot of hardware hanging from their face and tattoos on their neck. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we might expect a bit more formality from a G-man.) Then again, maybe it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who noted the death of Charlie Kirk by saying that he and Kirk would meet again in “Valhalla.” It’s sort of a Goth-horror movie-gamer coin that will never scare a bad guy or inspire respect in a colleague or a fellow law enforcer, but that might elicit a “Cool, dude” from an easily impressed middle schooler…

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Like letting an 8-year old build his own sundae bsky.app/profile/muns…

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— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 12:21 PM

I keep coming back to this but this coin would still be embarrassing if Patel was Chesty fuckin Puller. He's a podcasting mediocrity lawyer who has never worn any uniform but says shit like 'til Valhalla brotherrrrrrr'

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 12:31 PM

Just pure distillation of the notion that being MAGA makes you a Troop.

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 12:32 PM

===

Man I wish gerry conway was on here

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— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 12:26 PM

Feel like I buried the lede with that screenshot. Anyway gerry conway is a cool dude

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— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 12:27 PM

***********

Still not the worst trinket to come out of the Oval Office this week, though:

"In God We Trust", and then they put an image of their god right there.

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 8:32 PM

How does @politico.com publish an entire story about images on currency and not even bother to ask about the law?

— Anthony Michael Kreis (@anthonymkreis.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 2:11 PM

*Someone pays with Trump dollars*
“This isn’t legal tender. Try again.”

— Anthony Michael Kreis (@anthonymkreis.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 3:23 PM

===

Will he be tossing them into the crowds gathered to watch the cage-fight matches on the White House lawn?

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 8:11 PM

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Weeks before his death, you say?

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 4:32 PM

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honestly I think this is another minor piece of evidence for “he’s dying”

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— ghost malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 2:14 PM

===

Possibility: this whole year is Make a Wish for a deeply awful person with a terminal illness.

— Stephen Nuñez (@socio-steve.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 2:30 PM

Late Night Open Thread: Worse Than K(r)ash Patel’s Challenge CoinPost + Comments (47)

GOP Venality Open Thread: They Can’t Make Me Feel Sorry for James Comey

by Anne Laurie|  October 4, 20253:55 pm| 173 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, Shitty Cops, Trump Crime Cartel, Schadenfreude

FBI agent relieved of duty over refusing Comey perp walk, four people familiar say reut.rs/46AfymJ

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— Reuters (@reuters.com) October 3, 2025 at 7:25 PM

… But apparently they *can* make me despise his tormentors even more than I already did.

I want the beefiest agents you got. Hard. Tight. Muscular.
Preferably wearing tight pants.

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— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 11:43 PM

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It's killing them that Comey is like 6'8"

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— The Book of the Void (@eddyrobinson.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 11:47 PM

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“i thought the guardrails would save us” dude you were the guardrails

— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) October 4, 2025 at 1:48 AM

the comey shit is atrocious and an affront to all that is justice but yet again he’s a dude that thought he could tame a gorilla and didn’t realize a gorilla could rip your fucking face off in five seconds and go back to jacking off in a forest.
miscalculation imo

— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) October 4, 2025 at 1:46 AM

sorry it didn’t work out for you, dude

— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) October 4, 2025 at 1:47 AM

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Reupping, how it's more likely we'll find proof that Kash kommitted a krime in the Jim Comey prosecution than that Comey did.
www.emptywheel.net/2025/09/28/w…

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— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) October 4, 2025 at 12:26 PM

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Confirmation, as if it were needed:

As soon as I read the words “ass clown factory” I had to double check it was the real FBI director’s account and not some parody.

It’s real.

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) October 4, 2025 at 11:00 AM

GOP Venality Open Thread: They Can’t Make Me Feel Sorry for James ComeyPost + Comments (173)

Open Thread: Pointless Resource Diversion

by Anne Laurie|  October 3, 20256:03 pm| 148 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Shitty Cops, Trump Crime Cartel

In Trump 1, this would lead to Noem getting fired. Not because of some idealogical reason, but Trump when his brain wasn't vanilla pudding absolutely hated the vision that anyone but him was the boss.
Now? Eh, not clear he cares.

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— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 2:26 PM

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The unitary executive theory puts all the power of the executive branch in the hands of one person. That is a problem when he is unaware of some pretty big decisions being made by his underlings.

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— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 12:32 PM


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Also, critically missing here is that a Judge ordered this, not Trump.

— robertswartz.bsky.social (@robertswartz.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 1:13 PM

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NEW: A 20-year federal prosecutor, fired abruptly this week even as he lead case against Abbey Gate bomber, warns his colleagues: the Trump administration is sacrificing national security to purge Trump's perceived adversaries.
w/ @dnlbrns
www.politico.com/news/2025/10…

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— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 2:28 PM

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I bet we find out in 10-15 years that serial killers flourished again during this time because the feds put most of the Mindhunter-type agents in unmarked vans to wait for hairdressers to get home. bsky.app/profile/bart…

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— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 11:41 AM

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Tough on crime! Winning!

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— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 11:34 AM

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The FBI, DHS, ATF and every other federal agency positioned to prevent assassinations and mass shootings has been put on full-time arrest-roofers-and-march-down-mainstreet duty and feels like we're seeing the results of that mismanagement.

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 28, 2025 at 6:30 PM

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Even stuff like the Comey indictment. That's in the Eastern District of Virginia which handles a big share of the DOJ's terrorism and espionage case load. Now it's run by a blonde millennial with no trial experience and orders to run show trials of people who exposed Trump's own criminality.

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 28, 2025 at 6:37 PM

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People are going to notice that every week there's a video of 40 armored up feds haplessly chasing a random guy who says "I smell bacon" interspersed with fresh news about 10 people getting shot by the most obviously deranged and preventable gunman you've ever read about. bsky.app/profile/phil…

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— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 9:29 AM

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Uvalde on a national scale.

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 9:30 AM

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We're going to find out a lot of awful crime done by individuals dressing up as vaguely federal-looking agents in the confusion

— The Antifa Tallest (@spooknine.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 11:46 AM

Open Thread: Pointless Resource DiversionPost + Comments (148)

Late Night Open Thread: Starship Troupe-ers

by Anne Laurie|  August 28, 202511:36 pm| 37 Comments

This post is in: Criminal Justice, Excellent Links, Immigration, Justice

In a very quiet way, this article is quite terrifying.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc…

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— Molly McKew (@mollymckew.bsky.social) August 28, 2025 at 10:14 PM



But they all meant so well!
… Gift link, “Who Wants to Work for ICE? They Do”:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement held a hiring expo this week outside Dallas at a place called the Esports Stadium. Set between the Texas Rangers ballpark and the roller coasters of Six Flags, the arena was built for video-game competitions, and a wall of bright-blue screens welcomed job candidates at the entrance. “With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland and our values,” one message read. “Start your journey towards a meaningful career in law enforcement.”

ICE’s pitch for meaning and purpose seemed to draw in many of the applicants I met. Some were military veterans with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who told me they longed for the camaraderie and sense of belonging they once had. Others said they were bored, or wanted to serve the country, or fill a hole in their life left by a failed marriage or the creeping regrets they felt in middle age after screwing up in their 20s.

Chris Freese, 34, who works in elevator repair, told me he wished he had joined the military after high school like his brother, who became an explosives expert in the Army. “I’ll do anything to help secure the country,” said Freese, who wore a T-shirt and cap emblazoned with the American flag, but had forgotten to bring his résumé. “If I don’t make it this time, I’ll keep trying,” he told me.

The Trump administration plans to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 new ICE officers by the beginning of next year, a frantic pace that would nearly triple the current workforce. The Department of Homeland Security is set to spend more than $40 million in the next several months on ICE recruitment, even as the department says it’s already received 130,000 applications. ICE had advertised same-day offers to qualified candidates, especially those with prior military service or law-enforcement experience, and a $50,000 bonus to sweeten the pot. In the parking lot were license plates from New Mexico, Tennessee, and as far away as New Jersey. Hundreds of applicants began lining up before the doors opened at 8 a.m., many in suits, with résumés and diplomas in hand…

The job-fair attendees I spoke with said the defend-the-homeland message and Donald Trump’s presidency were big draws. “I want to stand up for my beliefs and protect America from foreign invaders,” Brennan Sheets, 30, told me. “I’d like to be there for others who can’t defend themselves. God is pushing me down this path.”

Sheets, an Army veteran who has been working for a carpet-cleaning company, said he and his wife are expecting their first child, a daughter. The February 2024 murder of Laken Riley in Georgia by a Venezuelan man who was illegally in the country—which became a rallying cry among Trump supporters—“hurt my heart,” he told me. He was offered a job that afternoon…

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Trump’s funding bill set a goal of 1 million deportations a year. Despite a fourfold increase in immigration arrests in U.S. cities and communities, ICE is not on pace to meet that goal, with the latest data showing the agency on track for about 300,000 deportations during the 2025 fiscal year, which ends in September. The hiring surge will put Trump in position next year to deploy teams in far more Democratic-led “sanctuary” cities that limit police cooperation with ICE.

ICE has about 5,700 deportation officers nationwide. New entry-level jobs will pay roughly $70,000 to $90,000 a year, including overtime and cost-of-living adjustments, officials told me. Within Department of Homeland Security agencies, mass-hiring binges are viewed warily, and the rapid expansion of the U.S. Border Patrol a generation ago is still regarded as a cautionary tale. The Border Patrol lowered its hiring standards and ended up with more cases of employee misconduct and corruption.

Trump officials insist that won’t happen. They have slashed ICE’s 18-to-20-week training course to eight weeks (six days a week), waiving Spanish-language requirements, vehicle-pursuit courses, and other instruction. McLaughlin said new recruits will get the training they need on the job. Senior officials in each office will “mentor, coach and train agents and officers every step of the way,” she promised…

Financial incentives, though, were a powerful pull for many of the applicants I met. Kalvin Bayona, a barrel-chested 29-year-old who drove to the expo from his home in rural Louisiana, explained that he had been recently laid off from his job as a military police officer in the Army, after nine years. He and his wife had just purchased a home, and Bayona said he didn’t want to uproot his daughters. “I built this life up to where we are now,” he told me. “I don’t intend to lose it.”

Bayona grew up in Guam and joined the Army after high school, and said his job was eliminated as part of a new reorganization-and-job-reduction plan directed by the Pentagon. He could apply to be a police officer in Louisiana, but an ICE position would pay much more. (Bayona got an offer the next day.)…

David Recio, 48, was one of several attendees who were a little jarred by the anger. A former Marine, Recio had spent his career working as a welding inspector for the oil industry in South Texas. “I want to clean up the country from bad guys, the criminals, the cartels, the rapists,” he told me, somewhat defensively. “I’d do my job without cruelty, without hate toward any race or any ethnicity. I’d do my job with compassion. I wouldn’t throw women or children to the ground.”…

ICE officials said 2,500 applicants registered for the expo, and applicants streamed into the main hall throughout the day. Katherine, 33, had dropped out of the Marine Corps more than a decade ago due to a health emergency and recovered. Her daughter was a teenager now, and needed her less. Her job at a chiropractic clinic was dull. She shrugged at the protesters outside. “Some people don’t understand, but I fully support what President Trump is doing with ICE,” Katherine told me. “With what’s going on in the world, it’s necessary,” she said. “The U.S. needs to close the border and to be as safe as can be.”

Katherine hadn’t told her mother, who is from Lebanon, that she might join ICE, and wasn’t sure if she’d approve. Her mother was recently yelled at by a man furious at hearing her speak Arabic in public. Katherine said that it was not the first time her mother had been mistreated for being a foreigner. “I see both sides,” Katherine said. “I think I’ll be able to explain it to her.”…

Paul, 30, who was born and raised in Ukraine, serves in the National Guard. He said he would tell people back home in Chicago that he works “in homeland security.” Chicago is “one of the bluest cities,” he said, but he wants to stay in the city, to fight crime and “keep giving back” to his adopted country…

There were other naturalized citizens among the applicants. Farzana Pramanik, 38, who was born in Bangladesh and wore a head covering, told me she had no law-enforcement background, but speaks Bengali, and some Hindi, and said she thought she could help people in ICE custody who know only those languages. “I want to do something for this country and do something meaningful,” Pramanik told me. Even if it meant deporting people she thought she could help? “If I can help, at the end of the day, I can say I did something,” she said…

Late Night Open Thread: Starship Troupe-ersPost + Comments (37)

Excellent Read: On the GOP Occupation of DC

by Anne Laurie|  August 26, 20255:48 pm| 51 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Shitty Cops, Trump Crime Cartel

Trump unleashes show and awe on Washington — creating his own Potemkin police state in the nation’s capital.
It’s not going well

[image or embed]

— Rolling Stone (@rollingstone.com) August 20, 2025 at 1:45 PM

Figured I’d share this while we wait for the Blogmaster’s nightly update. (Does anyone still read Armies of the Night, outside of college classrooms?) Stephen Rodrick, for Rolling Stone, on “Fake Armies of the Night”:

A quarter mile from the White House, the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington was once Abraham Lincoln’s place of worship. A black hitching pole where he would tie up the family carriage is still here. Lincoln would come here most Sundays during the Civil War, burying his face in his hands and praying for guidance.

Donald Trump has never been seen here, but the dozen or so homeless people around the church are about to endure his presidential reality. It’s just after 10 a.m. on Friday. A woman is stone asleep on the blazing cement while a couple of men in T-shirts share a cigarette. There are exactly two tents, some shopping bags and a couple of carts. A volunteer’s phone blares out an inspirational sermon from a Christian station…

… A volunteer with long braids named Jakia works the half-asleep crowd and approaches an old man. The church has a center that offers showers for the poor and Jakia urges the man to clean himself.

“Don’t make me go Jackie Chan on your ass. Get in there and wash your booty.”

The man mumbles to himself but doesn’t move. He looks up in time to see and hear the sirens of six police cars bursting the dope-sick silence. The operation is part of a series of raids on D.C.’s homeless encampments overseen by federal law enforcement as part of Trump’s edict to reclaim a city that he already rules with a dictator’s prerogative.

Trump said one of his desires was to take back the city from “drugged out maniacs and homeless people.” There are no maniacs here, just American citizens who have lost their way. Jakia walks around telling the homeless to store any belongings they want to keep inside the church. Some comprehend, and Temitope Ibijemdou, a 35-year-old man, deftly takes down his tent in seconds. (“I’ve had some practice,” he tells me.) Ibijemdou then helps a sick friend into the church. Meanwhile, the old man mumbles to Jakia that the police are just doing their job. She shoots him a look.

“It’s not their job. They took an oath to protect and serve. You can’t protect and serve by preying on other people, especially poor people.” …

DONALD TRUMP’S D.C. TAKEOVER IS the usual Trumpian blend of idiocy, cruelty, and bullshit. Just look at its creation myth. In the early hours of August 3, a 19-year-old was attacked by a group of D.C. teenagers near Washington D.C.’s U Street bar scene as he tried to prevent a friend’s car from being stolen. Beyond that, the details were murky and the lamentable event — I’ve been mugged in D.C., it’s not a life highlight — would have been quickly forgotten except for one thing. The beat-up kid was Edward Coristine, aka “Big Balls,” an Elon Musk hire for his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Coristine is too young to legally drink, but is old enough to wipe out a federal employee’s career with a key stroke.

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A week later, Trump vowed to avenge Big Balls by launching a hostile takeover of the capitol in order to “take our capital back from violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” He wasn’t referring to his Cabinet.

I arrived in Washington two days after Trump’s announcement. I make contact with housing activists who send me texts as federal law enforcement hover while the local police clear out homeless encampments. “They’re at MLK Library.” “Police are at Washington Circle Park.” “Cops are tearing down tents near the Kennedy Center.”

At first it seems like I am being pranked. I get to the hot spot and there are two tents. At the MLK Library, there is just a News Nation crew and two confused men stepping into a homeless shelter van. In two days, I see maybe a dozen tents total at four different spots. As context, I was in Los Angeles in June for the protests against raids and arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There are more tents on Silver Lake Boulevard under the 101 than I see in all of Trump’s Washington.

“Mayor Bowser has been clearing them out for years,” activist Jesse Rabinowitz tells me on a bench in Washington Circle Park. He’s with the National Homelessness Law Center. He points to his right and then to his left…

Russia had its Potemkin Village, now the United States has a Potemkin police state. Washington, D.C. has chronically dealt with crime issues — the city says violent crime is currently down after a post-pandemic spike, the Trump administration is suing the city claiming they cooked the books — but the Trump Surge isn’t concerned about murders and knifings in poor and desperate D.C. wards, no matter what the administration proclaims. No, this is a pretend thug’s idea of a takeover. Armored vehicles appear and then vanish around Union Station. There are night club patrols where U.S. Marshals film journalists filming them.

It is all optics. Unless you are brown-skinned. Then you can be slung off your scooter in affluent Foggy Bottom on a Sunday morning and bashed to the ground by anonymous Feds in masks and riot gear…

The protesters eventually reach Constitution Avenue and come across a solitary National Guard vehicle with four soldiers loitering about. The protesters and the media see them simultaneously. The soldiers and their ride are instantly engulfed by cameras and bullhorns screaming, “Go home!”

For a moment, I can see one of the soldiers and his eyes are full of fear. In a role reversal, the National Guard are rescued by D.C. police who form a protective ring around them. The situation doesn’t escalate, but I wonder what would have happened if someone threw a water bottle. And then I remember a conversation I had with an activist the day before about why there were not more public protests.

“I don’t want to be the guy known for organizing the rally where people got their heads bashed in or killed,” he said. “We don’t know how they would react.” The man grimaced. “And that means Trump has already won.”…

ON A USUAL SUNDAY MORNING, the Salvadoran vendors outside of the Target in the immigrant heavy neighborhood of Columbia Heights are out hawking fruit and T-shirts. But not today. Instead, black SUVs creep by.

For Salvadorans of a certain vintage, it brings back memories of Archbishop Óscar Romero. The bishop gave a sermon in 1980 urging soldiers to obey God’s law and not the commands of the government’s right-wing death squads. The next day, Romero was shot dead by his own government while saying Mass in San Salvador. A shrine to the now venerated Romero is near the altar in The Shrine Of The Sacred Heart, a Catholic church a few blocks away…

After Mass, I talk to an older woman holding hands with her husband. They tell me that church attendance has actually increased because of Trump’s return.

“We need this now, more than ever,” says the woman.

We chat for a minute and then say goodbye. A young man in a green shirt adroitly picks up that I’m a reporter, my vulture eyes scanning the parishioners for someone else to talk with.

“I know you mean well, but people are scared. Let them leave in peace.”

Of course he is right. I kneel, cross myself, and head for my car…

Excellent Read: On the GOP Occupation of DCPost + Comments (51)

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