The Numbers

A watchdog group called Fix the Court keeps a running tally of every gift and free perk handed to the people who sit on the Supreme Court, and the newest version of that tally counts 515 gifts and complimentary benefits worth an estimated $3.62 million from 2004 forward, pieced together from the justices’ own financial disclosure forms, investigative reporting, public records requests and a Senate investigation. Stretch the count across every year the database touches, including older records that are patchy and incomplete, and the total climbs to 735 gifts worth roughly $4.69 million.1

That figure covers 17 people. Nine of them are the justices deciding cases right now. Eight are recent former justices who have left the bench. That distinction is the single most important thing on this page, and I will show you why in about sixty seconds.

Now get this. One justice accounts for almost all of it

Clarence Thomas alone accounts for roughly $3.064 million of the $3.616 million total. Do the division. That comes to 84.7 percent of everything the group tallied for all seventeen justices across more than twenty years.

Narrow the lens to the nine justices on the bench today and the picture gets sharper still. Their tally since 2004 is 307 gifts worth about $3.231 million, and Thomas accounts for roughly 94.8 percent of that dollar figure, which means that if you set one man aside, the entire gift controversy at the current Supreme Court shrinks down to something around $166,412 spread across his eight colleagues over two decades.

Every other justice in the database, sitting and retired, adds up to about $551,425 combined.

What the Money Bought

The benefits credited to Thomas were not gift cards. Reporting has described private jet flights, cruises on a superyacht, resort vacations and lodging supplied mostly by Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor, along with other wealthy businessmen. Crow paid private school tuition for a grandnephew Thomas was raising as his own son. Crow also bought Georgia property that Thomas owned together with his mother and other relatives. That deal came to $133,363. It was a sale, and a sale like that belongs on a disclosure form. He left it off. He acknowledged the omission later.

Fix the Court attributes 130 gifts to Thomas after 2004 and treats 120 of the gifts he received through 2025 as reportable under its own reading of the disclosure rules, and by its count he reported 14 of them, which works out to 11.7 percent, a number that generously includes items he disclosed late and items he tucked into the reimbursement section of the form.

Across all the years the database reaches, Thomas is credited with 206 gifts worth about $4.023 million. Note that the records before 2004 have holes in them and a large share of the values are estimates.

When it comes to Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, he sits a distant second by dollar value, with 61 gifts after 2004 worth roughly $181,756. And Samuel Alito drew his own criticism for an Alaska fishing vacation he took without reporting the private jet seat that carried him there, a seat supplied by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, whose fund later had a case land in front of the Supreme Court. Alito has maintained that the guidance in effect at the time did not require him to report the flight or the hospitality. Democratic staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote in a majority staff report that he misused the personal hospitality exemption and violated disclosure law. That is a congressional staff finding. No court has said it.

The list, as it applies to all justices, goes on and includes artwork, the robes and hoods that come with an honorary degree, trophies, clothing, concert tickets and free travel. A $200 ceremonial hood counts as one gift. A single leg on a private jet counts as one gift, so a round trip shows up in the tally as two, and the meals and the lodging on that same trip might be counted as their own separate line items on top of the flights.

When a group supplied no value, the tally sometimes assigns $249 to a trophy or statuette and around $200 to honorary degree regalia. Travel gets valued by looking at the aircraft or the yacht involved and comparing market prices. Take the $3.62 million figure for exactly what it is. An advocacy organization built it in good faith, corrected its own double counting and date errors along the way, and keeps updating it. Nobody audited it. No agency certified it. But the group isn’t under the microscope, the court is so let’s stay focused.

The Rules are Messier Than a Slogan

You have heard someone say that Supreme Court justices are never allowed to take gifts. The real rule is messier. Federal disclosure law generally requires a justice to report gifts from someone who is not a relative once the qualifying gifts from that same source pass a dollar threshold for the year. Small individual gifts might drop out of that adding up entirely. The law treats gifts from relatives differently, and it carves out certain food and drink along with hospitality such as meals and lodging offered at a private home.

Current guidance from the federal judiciary shuts a door that used to sit open. Transportation that stands in for a commercial flight, including a seat on a billionaire’s private plane, does not count as personal hospitality under the guidance the judiciary has now spelled out, and it generally has to be reported once the threshold rules are met. The meals and the lodging on that same trip might qualify for the exception. The plane ride is its own thing and it belongs on the form. The judiciary called this a clarification of what the rules always meant. Thomas, Alito and others have disputed how the earlier guidance should have been read.

Now look at the second rulebook. A gift might have to appear on a form without being forbidden. Federal law separately limits officers and employees from accepting things of value from people seeking official action from them, people doing business with the courts, people whose activities the courts regulate and people whose interests their official work would substantially affect, subject to exceptions written into the regulations. Whether any particular yacht cruise or plane ride crossed that second line depends on facts and legal readings that a spreadsheet does not settle. A spreadsheet is not a verdict.

We Need a Better Way

The Court adopted its first formal written ethics code in late 2023. The code tells justices to avoid impropriety and the appearance of it, and to follow the Judicial Conference restrictions on accepting and requesting gifts. Read the whole thing and you will notice what is missing from it. There is no independent body anywhere with authority to investigate a complaint against a justice and impose a consequence for breaking that code, which leaves the justices policing themselves on the conduct the code alone governs, a setup that should bother you no matter which president put the person under scrutiny on the bench. That gap is the whole ballgame. Their disclosure duties under statute do run through review processes that sit outside the code.

Fix the Court identified 37 gifts worth about $16,588 from 2024 into 2026, the years after the code came out, and for the 2024 and 2025 gifts covered by reports already public, the group says every identified gift above the disclosure threshold made it onto the forms. The recent list leans heavily toward awards, artwork and concert tickets. The superyachts are gone from it.

That might mean behavior changed. That might mean reporting got better. Two years is a thin sample, Alito’s 2025 disclosure was still outstanding under an extension, and the disclosures covering 2026 do not come due until 2027, so anyone declaring this problem solved is reading the tea leaves awfully early.

What to do with all of this

The $3.62 million figure is real and it belongs to 17 justices, current and former, going back to 2004. One justice drives about 85 percent of it. Among the nine sitting today, that same justice drives close to 95 percent.

The deeper problem sits underneath the dollar signs. It is the extraordinary value of some of these benefits, the exceptions in the rules broad enough to fly a private jet through, the long list of benefits that never made it onto a disclosure form for the years they belonged in, and an ethics code with nobody assigned to enforce it. A posted sign that no one enforces is a suggestion.

My fix for this mess is simple. Congress passes a law. Ban Supreme Court justices from accepting gifts of any kind from any source, and bar them from owning stock or holding any investment in a company with a stake in litigation that reaches their courtroom, whether that stake runs directly or through a parent company, a subsidiary, a trade group or a fund bankrolling the case. The standard gets written in plain words. Avoid every conflict of interest and every appearance of impropriety. Then hand oversight to a congressional committee built with Democrats and Republicans in equal number, with real authority to investigate a justice who breaks the rule and discipline the ones who do.

Congress holds the authority to set real gift limits for the highest court in this country, the same kind of limits that already bind members of Congress and the people working at every federal agency in America, and that authority gets used when enough of us make enough noise to make ignoring it uncomfortable.

Call your senators and your representative. Send this to the person in your life who assumes the Court sits above all of it, then keep your eyes on what shows up on next year’s disclosure forms, because sunlight only does its work when somebody is standing there looking.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Sunlight only works when somebody stays at the window, and Uncensored Objection is me at that window, week after week, digging through the disclosure forms and the fine print so you get the facts before the spin arrives. Subscribe, and bring a friend who still assumes somebody else is watching.

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Seventy-seven days from today, you find out what the next two years of your life look like. You’ll also have a better idea about what the future of democracy looks like.

Republicans currently control the House. Democrats won 215 seats in 2024 and need a net gain of three to reach the 218-seat majority threshold. The present roster, temporarily reduced by vacancies and altered by a party switch, stands at 218 Republicans, 212 Democrats, one independent who caucuses with Republicans, and four vacancies.

In the Senate, Republicans hold 53 seats to the Democratic-aligned caucus’s 47. Thirty-five Senate elections are scheduled for November 3, 33 regular elections plus special elections in Florida and Ohio. Twenty-two of those seats are currently Republican-held. Democrats need a net gain of four for a 51-seat majority.

Three net seats. Four net seats. Those are the electoral thresholds for Democratic control of Congress. That is the entire distance between the Republican Congress you have and a Democrat Congress that works.

Back in 2022, the last midterm, Pew’s analysis of certified returns found that 45.1 percent of the voting eligible population cast a ballot in House races. CIRCLE at Tufts, using voter file data, put final turnout among Americans 18 to 29 at 23 percent, down from 28 percent in 2018. Pew also found that only 37 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in all three federal elections held from 2018 through 2022.

What this tells me is that more than half the country sat out the last midterm, and the margin of control in the House right now is four seats. You have heard your whole life that one vote disappears into an ocean. You are the ocean, and the ocean stayed home.

Well, I’m here to tell you that the midterms in 2026 will look nothing like 2022 or even 2024. People are tired. People have wised up. People are going to come out in historic numbers and take back control.

What The Gavel Buys You

I have spent nearly forty years in courtrooms. Let me explain congressional power the way I would explain it to a jury, because the civics class version misses what is at stake here.

The subpoena is discovery. Right now, a Congress in the president’s party asks the executive branch for documents. Asking has no teeth in it. A subpoena compels. It carries a return date, and defiance carries consequences that go on the public record for good. A letter goes in a drawer. Service of process starts a clock.

Oversight is the deposition. A committee chair sets the hearing calendar, picks the witnesses, and puts them under oath on camera. In April of this year, House Oversight Democrats told The Hill that Republicans were replacing formal hearings with roundtables. A roundtable is not a formal proceeding of the House. Nobody moves for a subpoena at a roundtable, and nobody moves for contempt. The witnesses sit there unsworn. That architecture is deliberate, and it collapses the moment the gavel changes hands.

The purse is the leverage. Article I, Section 9 says no money comes out of the Treasury except by appropriation made by law. Every dollar ICE spends, every dollar the Pentagon spends in the Iran War, every dollar that goes to a contractor, and every dollar that pays for a detention bed passes through a bill the House writes first. A majority writes the bill. A majority attaches the conditions.

Separation of powers is the judge. The Framers did not build three branches so that two of them would take orders from the third. When Congress declines to check the executive, nobody else is positioned to do it at scale. Courts move case by case and take years. The press has no subpoena power. Congress is the body designed for this job, and for two years it has refused to do the job.

Ten Things That Change In January

Your health insurance bill gets a vote

The enhanced ACA premium tax credits expired on December 31, 2025. KFF calculated that the average subsidized enrollee saw premium payments rise 114 percent, roughly $1,016 a year. Overall marketplace premiums rose about 26 percent in 2026, the sharpest single year jump since the exchanges opened. Twenty million people felt it. Urban Institute and Commonwealth Fund researchers projected 4.8 million Americans would drop coverage this year.

Now look at the calendar, because the calendar is where this turns ugly. Under the Republican and Trump administration 2025 reconciliation law, states must put Medicaid work reporting requirements in place by December 31, 2026. Eligibility redeterminations for expansion enrollees move from every twelve months to every six starting in December. Federal expansion funding steps down beginning October 1, 2026. CBO estimated 11.8 million people losing Medicaid coverage, with several million more losing marketplace coverage on top of that.

The Chartis 2026 Rural Health State of the State report, published in July, found 417 rural hospitals vulnerable to closure, with more than 40 percent of rural hospitals already operating at a loss and 36 percent of rural hospitals in states that never expanded Medicaid sitting inside that vulnerable group. The $50 billion Rural Health Transformation program was built to soften the blow, and Chartis concluded it will not offset roughly $140 billion in expected Medicaid related losses. The Commonwealth Fund separately estimated that rural hospitals will lose about $1.6 billion in additional patient revenue from the expiration of the premium credits alone.

What Happens Next: The new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, exactly as those provisions land. A House majority passes an extension of the enhanced credits, delays the work requirement deadline, and forces a floor vote that every member has to own in front of the people who elected them. The Senate fight comes after. The signature fight comes after that. You win the scheduling fight in November.

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He executed his own uncle, killed his half-brother with a nerve agent in a public airport terminal, and his hackers have stolen $6.75 billion in crypto from victims here and around the world. Despite all of this, and more, this past weekend Donald Trump called Kim “unthreatening and respectful”, then cut our joint military drills with South Korea.

I spent four decades taking cases apart in front of juries and so after Trump referred to our military drills with South Korea as being “totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea and after referring to Kim Jong Un in this misguided, uninformed and inappropriate way, I couldn’t stay silent.

Watch the video and see what the record actually shows.

Also, let me know what you think. Am I way off base, or will you be joining me in calling your representative to share your disgust with what’s happening?

The number is (202) 224-3121.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

PS- I’ll be joining on the (Meidas Defense) this Thursday to talk about Trump and national security. Look for the link and join us with your comments and questions.

Free readers get the verdict. Paid subscribers get the cross-examination — the filings, the language, and what it actually means. If this newsletter has ever kept you from being misled, that’s what your upgrade funds.

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The Justice Department has lost 23 straight federal cases trying to force states and Washington, D.C., to hand over complete, unredacted voter-registration files. Not close losses. Twenty-three merits rulings, twenty-three defeats, judges appointed by presidents of both parties.

You probably have not heard about it. A win for your privacy does not get the coverage a scandal does, so the story disappears while the litigation keeps going.

Here is what it means. Right now, lawyers and federal judges are the only thing standing between this administration and a federal file containing your date of birth, your driver’s license number, and your Social Security digits.

What’s happening is important to appreciate because apparently, after losing the first five cases, the DOJ decided the judges misunderstood the law. After ten losses, it maintained that the judges still misunderstood the law. After twenty, a reasonable institution might have reconsidered its legal theory. But not the DOJ, it kept on litigating.

Here’s the thing. The requests at issue were not ordinary demands for voter information already available under state law. States frequently offered the DOJ the public versions of their voter files. In these cases the DOJ wanted the unredacted versions, which generally included sensitive fields such as complete dates of birth, driver’s-license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

In other words, the federal government wanted confidential identifying information belonging to millions of Americans, without first establishing that Congress had authorized such sweeping access.

A federal data sweep with your identity attached

DOJ said it needed the information to determine whether states were properly maintaining accurate voter rolls and complying with federal election laws. Then came the more revealing admission.

During the Rhode Island litigation, a DOJ attorney acknowledged that the department intended to share voter information with the Department of Homeland Security so it could be checked through DHS’s SAVE citizenship-verification system. In follow-up interviews and court documents, the DOJ denied that it is building an unlawful national voter database. However, voting-rights organizations contend that collecting state files and running them through one federal system effectively creates the machinery for centralized voter surveillance and potentially broad voter-removal efforts.

Whatever label one chooses, the government’s admitted plan should concern every American.

SAVE is not infallible. Citizens have reportedly been inaccurately flagged by the system. Outdated records, common names, incomplete information and data-entry errors can create false matches. Naturalized citizens may face particular risks when government records do not accurately reflect their current status. This is why handing over millions of confidential records without transparent safeguards presents a serious risk.

DOJ tried to extract a power Congress never clearly granted

Across these substantially parallel lawsuits, DOJ relied on different combinations of three federal laws: Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. None expressly says that the attorney general may demand every state’s complete confidential voter database.

Title III requires election officials to preserve certain voting records for 22 months and permits the attorney general to inspect covered records when enforcing federal election laws.

The provision arose from Congress’s effort to preserve evidence of racial discrimination in voting. DOJ attempted to use it for a very different purpose: investigating whether people appearing on voter rolls might be ineligible.

That change in purpose does not automatically make DOJ’s position unlawful. Statutes can apply beyond the precise evil that led Congress to enact them. The decisive problem was textual: courts repeatedly found that DOJ was attempting to obtain records beyond those covered by the language Congress actually adopted.

In Michigan, for example, the Sixth Circuit held 2–1 that the statewide electronic file was not a record that “came into” election officials’ possession within Title III’s meaning. It was a database the state created from underlying information.

Minnesota reached the same conclusion. Judge Katherine Menendez also held that HAVA requires states to maintain accurate computerized voter lists but contains no provision requiring them to disclose those databases to DOJ. The court ruled that preserving records does not necessarily mean surrendering an entire database. Along the same lines, requiring a state to maintain a database does not necessarily mean giving the executive branch a copy.

DOJ tried to bridge those statutory gaps with litigation. Twenty-three district courts refused to let it.

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Courts do not authorize fishing expeditions merely because DOJ brings them

Another recurring problem involved the basis for DOJ’s demands.

Title III requires the attorney general to state the demand’s basis and purpose. DOJ maintained that investigating possible violations of federal voting laws was sufficient. Courts in several cases concluded that its explanations were inadequate or that it had failed to state a viable claim.

Minnesota illustrates the necessary nuance. DOJ initially made broad demands concerning list maintenance. After the lawsuit began, it cited a reported case in which one alleged noncitizen had been charged with registering and voting. DOJ claimed that incident justified examining whether other ineligible people remained registered.

The court still dismissed the case, not because a single suspected illegal vote could never be investigated, but because Minnesota’s statewide database was not a covered record under Title III and HAVA did not provide the disclosure authority DOJ claimed.

That distinction matters.

The government possesses legitimate authority to investigate actual violations of federal election law. What it cannot do is expand that authority beyond the boundaries Congress imposed merely because a larger database would make its investigation easier.

In Rhode Island, the court characterized DOJ’s proposed data search as the kind of fishing expedition the governing statutes did not authorize. The DOJ wanted access first and planned to determine what the data might reveal afterward.

In all these cases the Federal judges kept asking the same essential question: Where, exactly, did Congress authorize that? In response, the DOJ never produced an answer that persuaded a court deciding the merits.

Twenty-three merits decisions. Twenty-three defeats.

Federal district courts rejected DOJ’s attempt to compel unredacted voter information in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, D.C., West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Those courts did not all write identical opinions. They relied on overlapping grounds involving statutory language, DOJ’s stated basis and purpose, the absence of a HAVA disclosure provision and the limited reach of the NVRA. But every merits result reached the same disposition:

The DOJ could not compel the jurisdiction to surrender the unredacted database under the legal theory presented.

A separate Georgia lawsuit was dismissed because DOJ filed it in the wrong federal district (of course it did). The DOJ has since refiled it, so that procedural ruling is not included in the 23 merits losses.

Washington state’s case also remained pending when Minnesota was decided and is not part of the 23.

I believe the distinction is important because the facts are damaging enough without inflating them.

DOJ’s answer: The courts keep getting it wrong

DOJ has appealed many of these dismissals. Its position remains that the courts have interpreted Title III too narrowly.

So far, the only federal appellate court to decide the merits has rejected that argument. The Sixth Circuit affirmed Michigan’s dismissal in a divided 2–1 decision and later denied panel and full-court rehearing. Additional appeals remain pending, and Supreme Court review remains possible.

That means “0–23” is an accurate description of DOJ’s district-court merits record as of Minnesota’s dismissal, not a final pronouncement that every legal question has been settled nationwide. But any way you slice or dice it, it’s still an extraordinary record.

This is especially true when you consider all the different jurisdictions and judges appointed by presidents of both parties. Add to that the different formulations of the same general theory and what you have is the law saying to the DOJ, talk to the hand.

Here’s what I’m seeing. The government has yet to persuade one trial court deciding the merits to order the requested production. The DOJ has one explanation for twenty-three defeats: every judge in the country misread the law. That explanation is not a legal argument. It is an excuse for filing the twenty-fourth case.

Marc Elias’s firm helped stop it

My understanding is that the Elias Law Group intervened for voters and organizations including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and groups representing older Americans.

The firm’s clients had interests distinct from those of the state governments. They were the people whose information DOJ sought and whose rights could be affected if unreliable database comparisons generated erroneous eligibility challenges.

ELG helped force DOJ to answer the central statutory question:

Where did Congress authorize this?

Not where DOJ believed the authority ought to exist. Not where an executive-branch memorandum concluded it could be found. Where does the enacted language permit the federal government to compel complete voter databases containing confidential identifiers?

Twenty-three courts found DOJ’s answer insufficient.

To be precise, the states and their attorneys general were the principal defendants, and other civil-rights lawyers also contributed to these victories. “ELG is undefeated” is ’ triumphant shorthand, not a claim that his firm acted alone. He doesn’t make the claim and I’m not making it here. But I am grateful and thankful for his hard work on all of these cases. Marc’s Democracy Docket is worth supporting and reading.

Why every American should take this personally

This is not merely a contest between Democratic state officials and a Republican administration. It concerns federal power, personal privacy and the government’s obligation to operate within authority granted by Congress.

I wrote the book Privacy in America because most Americans don’t have a clue how much of their personal information is being obtained and used on a daily basis. In my opinion, all of us should be offended that DOJ demanded confidential identifying information belonging to millions of voters without first establishing a clear statutory right to possess it. Especially after the first or second loss.

We should be offended that laws enacted to protect voting rights were stretched to support a data-collection effort that could place lawful voters under mistaken suspicion.

We should be offended that the department continued pursuing substantially parallel claims after judges across the country repeatedly rejected its interpretation.

We should be offended by the idea that the federal government may gather our information first and settle the boundaries of its authority later.

And we should demand more than assurances that the information will be used responsibly. Sensitive data should be collected only pursuant to clear legal authority, defined purposes, meaningful security protections and public accountability.

The Justice Department is supposed to protect Americans from unlawful government action. It should never ask Americans to accept federal overreach simply because the agency seeking the power has the word “Justice” above its door.

After 23 losses, DOJ has not proved that resistant states were violating federal voter-list laws. It has demonstrated something else: how quickly “election integrity” can become a justification for collecting private information and expanding executive authority. And in my view, that threatens privacy, federalism and the rule of law.

Americans should not have to surrender one to prove they care about the others.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Most Americans never find out what their government is doing with their personal information until it is already gone. I watch the news and read the filings, the statutes, and the rulings, then I write about the issues in plain English so you can see it while you can still do something about it. Subscribe free to Uncensored Objection, or go paid and help me keep the work coming.

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What took more than one hundred years to build and perfect was torn down in less than 72 hours. The East Wing of the White House no longer exists.

He even promised the project wouldn’t touch the East Wing.

Let’s assume that the Supreme Court does not rescue the ballroom project. Let’s also assume that Congress does not approve it because Republicans doesn’t have the votes and as a result, it also does not authorize the spending. Nobody comes along and cleans up the legal problem by giving Trump permission after the fact.

Can the government make him pay to restore what was destroyed? Can he be held responsible for federal money that was improperly spent? Could he face civil damages, restitution, disgorgement, or criminal liability? And does presidential immunity still protect him if the courts have already determined that he had no authority to do any of it?

The lawyer in me won’t let this go. Trump created this mess. He didn’t have to. And I wanted to know if he’s actually on the hook for any of it.

So my team and I dug in. Here’s what we found.

The Short Version (but keep reading because much can change with a new Congress after the midterms)

Under the hypothetical, and I don’t like the answer, Donald Trump would more than likely not be personally responsible for the cost of the demolition or restoration.

The strongest barrier is presidential immunity. But the answer is more nuanced than simply “Trump is immune.”

A final Supreme Court ruling saying that Congress possesses exclusive authority over this federal property could potentially make the official-versus-unofficial classification unusually important. If the Court merely says Trump misread his statutory authority, Nixon v. Fitzgerald (see below) gives him a formidable defense to personal civil damages. At the same time, if the Court goes further and holds that destruction of the East Wing was manifestly or palpably outside any legitimate presidential function, the case for personal liability becomes materially stronger.

There is presently no Supreme Court precedent answering that exact question and so I thought it’d be a good idea to dive in and take a look at all the issues.

What the D.C. Circuit Actually Said

The August 7 majority didn’t just disagree with Trump’s reading of a messy housekeeping statute. They went bigger.

They said the Property Clause gives Congress complete control over the White House and the land around it. The President has no constitutional authority over that federal property. None.

They said 40 U.S.C. §8106 is not optional. If you want to put up a building on federal public grounds in D.C., you need express authority from Congress. And they said §105(d) probably does not give the President his own green light to build a $400 million ballroom with privately donated money.

That’s the court telling him this is not his house to gut. Section 8106 itself is unusually direct:

“A building or structure shall not be erected” on covered federal grounds in D.C. “without express authority of Congress.” U.S. Code

The D.C. Circuit didn’t leave much room to hide. They said §105(d) does one thing. It lets Congress appropriate money for care, repair, alteration, and improvement. That’s it.

And the only current §105(d) appropriation the court could find was about $2.475 million. For maintenance. For safety. For health issues. For preventative upkeep. Not a $400 million ballroom. [read here]

Could the United States Sue Trump and Make Him Rebuild The East Wing?

As a property-law question? Possibly. As a presidential-immunity question? That’s a lot less clear. This would make a hell of a bar exam question. Sorry, law students. I couldn’t help myself.

Here’s my quick take. The United States can sue to protect its own property. That is not a theory. That is settled. The Supreme Court has recognized federal trespass suits since Cotton v. United States. And DOJ still brings cases right now seeking injunctions, restoration, and damages when someone injures federal property without authority.

If this were an ordinary federal official, or a private contractor who knowingly bulldozed a federal building without permission, the government could come after them for trespass, waste, or other injury to federal property. They could ask a court to make them put it back. They could ask for money.

Here’s the problem. Donald Trump was President when it happened.

Nixon v. Fitzgerald is the central civil-liability problem

In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court drew a hard line. A former President is absolutely immune from civil damages for anything that falls inside the “outer perimeter” of his official responsibilities. That protection does not vanish just because someone alleges the act broke federal law.

The Court said it again in Trump v. United States. When a court is separating official from unofficial conduct, it cannot call an act unofficial just because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law. Immunity reaches the outer perimeter of the job, as long as the conduct is not “manifestly or palpably beyond” presidential authority. And that is the fight. Everything else is noise until you win that one.

Trump’s Argument

Management, alteration, security, and day-to-day decisions about the Executive Residence have historically run through the President and the Executive Branch. Congress itself appropriates money for the care, repair, alteration, and improvement of that house.

So Trump would say this (actually he’d be told to say this because he’d never come up with it on his own):

“Even if I exceeded the authority Congress gave me, I did it while performing a presidential function involving the Executive Residence. Fitzgerald therefore bars personal damages.”

That argument is not a bluff. It’s substantial.

The Government’s Possible Response

Keep this in mind. The current Congress and this administration are never going to sue Trump over this. But after the midterms, if Democrats take back a majority in Congress, that can change and here’s what could happen.

The government’s answer could be unusually powerful. I don’t see this DOJ doing this in a million years, especially with Todd Blanche in change, but just imagine:

“The Supreme Court has already held that Congress alone possessed authority to authorize destruction and replacement of this federal structure, that the President possessed no independent constitutional property power, and that no statute authorized what he did. This was not merely an erroneous exercise of presidential power; it was conduct outside the power of the office.”

If the Supreme Court’s ballroom opinion expressly used language such as “manifestly or palpably beyond” presidential authority, that could be decisive. Do I think it will? No, I don’t. But it’s worth pointing out just in case SCOTUS surprises us.

So in summary, the civil-immunity question would depend heavily upon how the Supreme Court describes the scope, not merely the illegality, of Trump’s conduct.

A suit by the United States Itself Presents an Additional Unresolved Question

There’s another wrinkle. Fitzgerald came out of a private damages suit. The Court’s reasoning keeps coming back to the danger of private people suing Presidents. But the holding itself is broader. It talks about immunity from “damages liability predicated on his official acts.”

I found no Supreme Court decision that answers this question head-on:

Can the United States itself sue a former President to recover for physical injury he caused to United States property while performing, or claiming to perform, an official presidential function?

The United States has the power to sue to protect its own property. That part is not in doubt. What nobody has settled is whether Fitzgerald’s immunity kills that kind of sovereign recovery case.

That distinction matters. A lawsuit by the United States to recover its own property loss is not the same thing as a private plaintiff chasing damages over a presidential policy call.

I would call this a plausible untested path. It’s not established liability so please don’t let anyone tell you it’s more than that.

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18 U.S.C. §1361: Destruction or Depredation of Government Property

Section 1361 is the most obvious criminal statute. It says you cannot willfully injure or commit depredation against property of the United States. If the damage exceeds $1,000, you are looking at up to ten years in prison plus a fine under Title 18.

Physically demolishing the federally owned East Wing easily raises the actus reus question. The act is not the hard part. Willfulness is.

DOJ says §1361 is a specific-intent crime. You have to mean it. And you have to know the conduct violates the law. Unless, of course, you’re an Olympic athlete sticking your hand in the water at the Lincoln reflection pool, but that’s a prior post from another time. So with that requirement, and as Jeanine Pirro found out, that makes a prosecution for these kinds of crimes much harder than it looks.

A future Supreme Court decision saying Trump’s legal theory was wrong would prove he lacked authority. It would not prove that, months earlier, he personally knew that legal theory was wrong. The government would need evidence of his state of mind at the time. Warnings from government lawyers. Notices from Congress. Agency objections. Memoranda. Communications. Something that shows he knew he did not have lawful authority and did it anyway.

Then comes the separate constitutional fight. Under Trump v. United States, a former President gets absolute criminal immunity for core exclusive constitutional acts, at least presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no presidential immunity for unofficial conduct.

The D.C. Circuit says control of White House property belongs to Congress, not to some core exclusive Article II power. So absolute core-power immunity looks like a steep climb. But Trump could still claim presumptive immunity if the demolition is treated as an official act. And then the government has the burden of overcoming that standard.

So a §1361 case is two wars, not one. Mens rea. And presidential immunity. You have to win both.

Conduct after a Definitive Supreme Court Ruling Would Be Legally Different

This is where Trump’s risk could materially increase. Suppose the Supreme Court says:

You have no authority to continue this project without Congress.

Now let’s say that Congress continues to refuse to approve the construction and funding. Despite all of this, the executive branch nevertheless orders additional above-ground destruction or construction.

What happens?

Well, my take is that a later §1361 prosecution involving new damage would have a much stronger mens rea case because a defendant would have actual notice of the governing legal rule. It would still be necessary to determine whose acts caused the damage and whether presidential immunity applies. But the defense: “I reasonably believed I possessed legal authority” becomes substantially weaker after the Supreme Court itself has made it clear the law says otherwise.

Criminal Restitution Could Create Personal Financial Exposure

If Trump were validly prosecuted and convicted under a qualifying Title 18 property offense, the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act could require him to pay restitution to the United States. Federal law specifically contemplates the United States as a restitution victim.

For destroyed property, though, §3663A looks at the greater of the property’s value on the date it was destroyed or its value at sentencing, subject to statutory adjustments. That is where the fight gets interesting. After all, how much was the East Wing worth?

Ordinary real-estate market value is almost useless here. The White House is never going on the market. Historic significance. Architectural uniqueness. Replacement evidence. Restoration costs. Those are the numbers that could actually matter.

But I will not tell you this: “Trump could automatically be ordered to reimburse the United States for every dollar it takes to rebuild the East Wing.” My reading of the restitution statute does not say that, so don’t let anyone tell you it does.

Civil Restoration Damages Could Potentially be Broader if a Viable Civil Cause Survives Immunity

Separate from criminal restitution, the United States already sues for this kind of damage. In federal-property trespass cases, DOJ regularly seeks actual damages and restoration, including the cost of putting damaged public land and cultural resources back to the condition they were in before the injury.

If the United States beat presidential immunity and proved a real civil property claim, the relief could include reasonable restoration costs, tearing out or remediating unauthorized construction, damage to government fixtures or other property, and other losses actually caused by the conduct.

But there is no ballroom-specific federal statute that says: “An unauthorized President owes reconstruction costs.” Why would there be, right?

The cause of action, the immunity question and the right measure of damages would all have to be fought in court. None of it is automatic.

Appropriations Violations Create Another Track—But Not an Automatic Personal Debt

Congress’s power of the purse opens a second set of problems. The Purpose Statute is simple. Appropriations can be used only for the things Congress authorized.

The Antideficiency Act is simpler. Covered officers and employees cannot spend more than Congress gave them, and they cannot obligate money before an appropriation exists unless a statute says they can. A knowing and willful violation of this Act can be a crime. And GAO has already said those constraints apply to White House spending under §105(d).

None of that means this: “Trump ordered an unlawful project, therefore Trump personally owes Treasury $351.6 million.” That conclusion does not follow. Don’t let anyone sell it to you like it does.

Investigators would need the actual obligation and payment records. They would need to know who obligated each dollar. They would need the statutory source of each appropriation. They would need to know whether the security work was actually inside the appropriation’s permitted purposes. And for a criminal case, they would still need evidence that it was knowing and willful.

Certifying Officials are Where Direct Fiscal Repayment Liability Becomes Particularly Concrete

Section 3528 is the closest the law comes to a personal bill. It’s a statute that states that a certifying official who signs off on a government voucher is responsible for the legality of that payment. If the payment is illegal, improper, or prohibited, that official can be required to put the money back.

Think about what that actually means. The government does not just hand out cash because a President wants a project. Someone has to certify the voucher. Someone has to look at the payment and say, yes, this is lawful. That signature is not ceremonial. It is the moment the law attaches personal responsibility to a real human being.

If federal money was unlawfully disbursed on this project, that is the door investigators walk through. Not a speech. Not a ribbon-cutting. The voucher. The certification. The person who said this payment was legal.

But keep this in mind. The person on the hook is ordinarily the certifying official who signed the payment. Not automatically the President who demanded the project. Wanting it, announcing it, even ordering it is not the same thing as occupying the statutory role that §3528 cares about.

That distinction is the whole game. A lot of people are going to want a cleaner story. Trump tore it down, so Trump writes the check. I get why that feels right. The statute does not work that way.

Right now, there is not enough evidence to say Trump personally directed and authorized that certifying role for these expenditures. I’m guessing he probably did but proving this in court is entirely another thing. We do not have the payment records in front of us. We do not have the names on the vouchers. We do not have the paper that shows who said each dollar was legal.

Until we do, anyone telling you he is automatically personally liable under §3528 is selling you a conclusion the file does not support.

Private Donations Do Not Solve the Authority Problem

Mainstream news keeps skipping past this part, and it shouldn’t because this part of the story is important.

The D.C. Circuit recognizes that the National Park Service has statutory gift authority. Fine. They can take a donation. What the court rejected is the idea that donated money can be used as a workaround for Congress’s control over the project.

The majority’s logic is simple. Money is not authority. The government cannot do with privately collected money what the agency or the President has no legal authority to do in the first place. And that make sense, right? At the same time, §8106 separately requires express congressional authority to put up a building on the covered federal grounds.

So even if this thing were 100% privately financed (which it’s not), that would not fix the structural separation-of-powers problem. Not under the majority’s reasoning. You can raise every dollar on earth. You still need Congress.

Personal Enrichment Would Dramatically Change the Case

If the evidence ever showed Trump personally took kickbacks, secret contractor profits, undisclosed financial interests, or other benefits from the ballroom deals, we would be in a different body of law.

In United States v. Carter, the Supreme Court said a public official cannot secretly profit from transactions entrusted to him. The United States can force an accounting and make him disgorge the illicit profits, even without proving a matching dollar-for-dollar loss.

In theory, that could support disgorgement, tracing, and constructive-trust-type relief. Depending on the facts and on presidential immunity. Separate federal corruption statutes could come into play too, if the evidence is there.

But hear this line and do not blur it. Donating to the ballroom does not establish a bribe. Getting a government contract does not, by itself, establish a quid pro quo.

Without evidence connecting the two, alleging personal corruption is premature. But I will go on record saying if it turns out Trump, his family members or their companies were enriched by any of this, I wouldn’t be surprised.

The National Trust Cannot Recover the Value of the East Wing for Itself

The National Trust case is not a money case. That is the first thing to understand.

It is principally an APA and ultra-vires case. They are asking a court to declare what the law is and to stop the conduct. The APA itself waives sovereign immunity for actions seeking “relief other than money damages.” And the National Trust does not own the White House.

So even if the Trust wins on the merits, it does not walk out of court with a personal judgment against Trump for hundreds of millions of dollars in government property loss. That is not what this lawsuit is. That is not who this plaintiff is.

If anyone wants to recover the government’s own loss, that case ordinarily has to be brought by the United States itself, on a theory that actually fits. The Trust winning is not that lawsuit. Don’t confuse the two.

The Present Injunction is Not Personally Directed at Trump

This part has to be especially clear. The current injunction does not reach President Trump personally. It says so. It binds the agencies, the entities, the officers, and the agents carrying out the project. Not him.

Those officials are the ones immediately exposed if the injunction becomes operative and they violate it. They are the ones a court can actually enforce against.

Section 401 gives federal courts the power to punish disobedience of lawful orders. That part is real. But saying today that “Trump could be jailed for contempt if he keeps building” is legally irresponsible. The existing injunction deliberately leaves him out.

A future order that expressly names the Trump would be a different case. And a constitutionally extraordinary one. We are not there.

What Happens With All of This While Trump Remains President?

Under normal circumstances, and there’s nothing normal about this presidency, administration and Department of Justice, the DOJ has a longstanding Office of Legal Counsel position: indicting or criminally prosecuting a sitting President would unconstitutionally interfere with the Executive Branch.

That is an executive-branch legal position. It is not a Supreme Court holding. The Court has never itself said a sitting President categorically cannot be prosecuted. So even if prosecutors believed a §1361 case or an appropriations crime was there, a federal prosecution during Trump’s presidency would run into DOJ’s own OLC rule. And with Todd Blanche is control, I wouldn’t be surprised if Todd wants to compensate Trump aka his “I love you” guy, with money from the Trump/Blanche anti-weaponization fund, for the stress Donald’s probably going through over all of us.

All joking aside, once Trump leaves office, that particular obstacle disappears. The Trump v. United States immunity does not. I’m sorry to report that a former President can still invoke official-act immunity for what he did while he was President. Leaving the building does not leave that behind.

The practical Sequence Under My Hypothetical

If the Supreme Court ultimately says Trump lacked authority, and Congress refuses to approve this, the immediate legal consequence is almost certainly this: the unauthorized above-ground work stops.

Not a $400 million personal judgment against Trump. Don’t skip to that ending. The law doesn’t.

Then Congress decides what happens to the hole in the ground. Whether anything is eventually authorized. Whether the site is restored. Whether public money gets appropriated for restoration or for lawful security work.

Next comes the accounting. Investigators, GAO, and Congress can go through every federal dollar. The source and legal terms of the private donations. The contracts. The officials who obligated the money and the officials who certified it. The communications that show what the decision-makers knew about their legal authority.

Only after that record exists can anyone intelligently assess Trump’s genuine personal exposure. And the most important evidence will not be: “The Supreme Court said he was wrong.” It will be the answers to these questions.

What did Trump know? When did he know it? What exactly did he personally order? What money did he personally authorize or certify? Did he keep going after definitive notice that it was unlawful? Did he personally take any financial benefit?

Those questions decide whether this stays an unlawful exercise of government power, or becomes personal civil, criminal, or restitution liability. Until you can answer them, you do not have a case against the man. You have a case against the project. Those are not the same thing.

Final wrap up

If the Supreme Court ultimately holds that Donald Trump had no authority to demolish the East Wing and build the ballroom, and Congress refuses to ratify or fund the project, that judgment would establish one thing. The project lacked lawful authority. It would not, by itself, put a personal financial judgment on Trump.

His most important shield against ordinary civil damages is Nixon v. Fitzgerald. Whether that shield holds depends on whether this conduct stays inside the outer perimeter of presidential responsibility, even though Congress has exclusive authority over the property. The Supreme Court’s exact language could decide that fight.

A federal-property prosecution under §1361 is legally conceivable. It is also harder than it looks. Prosecutors would have to prove willfulness, meaning knowledge of unlawfulness. And they would have to beat Trump v. United States immunity.

A successful criminal case could open the door to restitution. But restitution is governed by statutory property-value rules. It does not automatically equal whatever it later costs the government to rebuild. Appropriations violations could expose the officials who actually obligated, certified, or disbursed illegal payments. Federal fiscal law does not automatically turn an unauthorized presidential construction decision into Trump’s personal debt to the Treasury.

And I am taking personal contempt off the front of the list. The existing injunction expressly does not bind President Trump himself.

So the strongest path to truly substantial personal liability requires something more than the Supreme Court saying the project was unauthorized. It requires evidence that puts the conduct outside protected presidential functions. It requires proof of knowing criminality after the authority was unmistakably shut down or possibly even a personal tie to unlawful fiscal acts. Find personal enrichment and it’s game on. By the way, this Congress and DOJ would never lift a finger. But maybe the future will bring different decisions.

When all is said and done, an unlawful presidency-level decision is not the same thing as a personally collectible judgment against the President who made it.

I know most of us wish it was. That is not the law.

If this analysis helped you, tell me. If there is another story you want taken apart the same way, tell me that too. If I am not in court or in a mediation, and time allows, we will do it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Headlines told you Trump tore down the East Wing to build his ballroom. This post told you who can actually be made to pay for it, and your paid subscription to Uncensored Objection is what keeps this level of legal analysis landing in your inbox.

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Federal regulators granted preliminary approval Friday for World Liberty Trust Company to operate as a national trust bank. The agency is headed by a Trump appointee, the family entity behind the venture is fronted by Eric Trump, and the president reported more than $590 million from World Liberty last year alone.

Overnight, the paperwork went through

You went to sleep on an ordinary Thursday night, and by Friday morning a federal agency inside the Treasury Department had granted preliminary approval for a national bank charter to a company sponsored by the Trump family’s crypto venture, with Eric Trump’s signature sitting on an attached commitment letter about a family entity’s stake in the new bank’s parent company. Nobody hid any of it. The agency posted the decision letter on its own website with a case number on top. The company called the moment a milestone in a statement from Zach Witkoff, son of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who serves as the bank’s president.

The regulator is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, headed by Jonathan Gould, a Trump appointee. World Liberty Trust Company filed its application on January 7. Seven months later the answer came back yes, with conditions attached.

What a trust charter buys

A national trust bank is a narrow creature. It writes no mortgages. It holds none of the federally insured deposits sitting in your checking account. Picture a licensed vault with a federal seal bolted above the door. The seal is the product.

Once the bank clears its remaining hurdles, it takes over issuing and redeeming the USD1 stablecoin from BitGo and holds the dollars and government assets backing every token. It keeps digital assets in custody as a fiduciary for large clients, and does all of it nationwide under a single federal supervisor. A stablecoin is a digital token that promises to always be worth exactly one dollar. That promise holds only when the money behind it is real and available the moment somebody asks. Federal supervision buys something no marketing budget buys, which is the public assumption that a government examiner is checking the math.

Follow the ownership

An entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, tied to Trump and his family, owns roughly 38 percent of the holding company that controls World Liberty Financial, according to the company’s own website, and the family side holds 22.5 billion governance tokens. A related entity, DT Marks SC LLC, signed a passivity commitment with the regulator promising it will seek no board seat, no officer role, and no influence over the bank’s management. Eric Trump signed that document as president of the entity. Two other investors signed the same promises, including an Emirati controlled company and a firm run by a World Liberty co-founder.1

Trump reported more than $590 million in 2025 income from World Liberty token and equity sales, one part of at least $1.4 billion in crypto income that also included about $635 million in memecoin royalties. The White House position is that the president has no operational role and that his children handle his money. Every one of those statements walks a wide circle around the only question that matters, which is whether the president’s household grows richer because an agency he staffs at the top said yes to his family’s business.

The money flows one direction. I say this because the governance token that ordinary buyers were sold at a high dollar amount, now trades around a nickel this month, far below its peak, meaning regular people who believed the promotion are underwater at the same time insiders booked hundreds of millions.2

The law Congress already wrote

None of this happened in a legal vacuum, and pretending otherwise would let the wrong people off the hook, because the decision letter leans over and over on the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin statute in which Congress expressly recognized uninsured national banks as qualified stablecoin issuers and confirmed that these tokens are neither deposits nor federally insured. This MAGA Republican Congress built the door. This administration walked the president’s family through it.

The referee kept his whistle

Democrats asked Trump friend and appointee, Gould, to pause the review and to step aside from a decision touching his boss’s family fortune. They also asked for the full unredacted application so the public would see what World Liberty promised on paper. He turned down every request. In February he told lawmakers his agency handles applications in a fair and evenhanded manner. Warren called the review a sham back in January.

I have spent my career in courtrooms, and here is what any trial lawyer will tell you about an answer like that. A judge with a financial interest in one side of a case steps off that case without waiting to be asked, and the reason has nothing to do with proving the judge would cheat, because the entire purpose of stepping aside is that the losing party and every stranger in the gallery walks out believing the result was honest. In this case, the man holding the whistle has a jersey hanging in the family closet.

Why your gut barely twitches

Your brain is built to shield you from alarm that has nowhere to go. Psychologists call it habituation, and it runs on autopilot without asking your permission. The first scandal spikes your pulse. The fortieth gets a shrug and a scroll. Flood a country with enough daily outrages and the outrages stop registering as outrages at all, which is the oldest trick in authoritarian politics, the cheapest one to run, and the reason this story will be gone from your feed by the end of this weekend.

Corruption at this altitude looks dull on purpose. It arrives as a document with footnotes about Regulation W. There is no duffel bag of cash on video and no dramatic confession under oath. There is a five member board, a chief trust officer, a capital condition, and a polished sentence about reserve management. Boredom is the armor.

Warren’s bill and the calendar that decides everything

Warren’s charge is that Trump became the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank, and she described the approval as the most brazen act of self dealing this financial system has ever seen. She and Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Ruben Gallego introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act, which would bar senior officials from owning or controlling a bank. Donald Sherman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called the approval the worst example yet of the president’s businesses cashing in on his government job. Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund argued the agency reached past its legal authority. A Senate aide said the Banking Committee would likely investigate next year if Democrats retake Congress.3

Consider what I just wrote. An investigation happens if voters hand Congress to people willing to hold one. That is the whole ballgame. Bills from the minority party die quietly, and the broader crypto market structure legislation has already stalled in the Senate over Democratic demands that the president divest.

This charter also sits inside a wave. Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and Coinbase all collected conditional trust charters from this same agency between December and April. One crypto adviser described such a charter as regulatory wrapping paper, the legal packaging a firm needs before serious money will do business with it.

Your move

Here is the version you use at the dinner table when someone tells you this is overblown. The president appointed the man who runs the agency that approved his family’s business, and the family keeps the money. Say it out loud. Watch how fast the room goes quiet, because there is no clever comeback to a sentence that simple and that documented.

Then do the two things that carry weight. Call both of your senators and your House member, ask on the record whether they support barring presidents and their families from owning federally chartered banks, and tell your friends exactly what the staffer said. Show up in November like your children’s country depends on the makeup of the next Congress, because the power to subpoena, to hold hearings, and to force a president’s finances into daylight belongs entirely to whichever party holds the majority.

Democracies get sold off quietly, one signature and one corporate decision number at a time, and the only force that has ever stopped that sale is a country full of ordinary people who refuse to look away, refuse to get bored, and keep talking until their neighbors understand exactly what was taken from them.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Did you know about the details of this story before reading it here?

Look, here’s the deal. Governments do not announce what they are doing. They file it. They bury it in a procurement notice, in a sentence a lawyer was paid to make sure you would never finish reading. Somebody has to sit with those documents and translate them back into English. That is the work your upgrade funds.

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Ask your city council what agreements your local police have with ICE, and get the answer in writing. Then tell every official on that list, from your council members to your representatives in Congress, that they will never get your vote so long as they support this kind of un-American policing.

ICE just told us it’s spending up to $20 million on shock gloves. These gloves deliver a painful electrical charge designed to subdue a human being in three seconds or less. According to the manufacturer’s own warnings, do not use the device longer than 15 seconds. Do not put more than one pair on the same person at the same time. Touch arms or legs only, and stay off the head, face, throat, chest, and groin.

The warnings keep going, and they get worse. Do not use these gloves on the elderly, on children, on pregnant women, or on people with severe disabilities. Do not use them to stop someone from talking back. Do not use them as punishment. Do not use them to torture. A company writes that last line for one reason. It knows what happens to a pain device once it leaves the warehouse and lands on the hands of an agent standing in someone’s driveway at 6 a.m.

Now connect it to what you already see on your street. Black-masked agents swarming neighborhoods, arresting moms, teachers and local construction workers. The masks hide faces. They also erase the paper trail that accountability runs on, because you cannot file a complaint against a man you cannot identify. Add a $20 million supply of hand-worn pain compliance tools to that same anonymous force and you get the real message: comply, stay quiet, and understand that no one is coming to check the receipts. I wrote about the original issues last May, 2025, in Why Are ICE Agents Hiding Their Faces?

I still believe you have leverage. Call your congressional representative and your senators this week (contact info) and demand the written use-of-force policy governing this purchase. Ask your city council what agreements your local police have with ICE, and get the answer in writing. Then tell every official on that list, from your council members to your representatives in Congress, that they will never get your vote so long as they support this kind of un-American policing.

Keep your phone charged and record what happens in your neighborhood. Anonymity is the whole strategy, so take it away from them.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Governments do not announce what they are doing. They file it. They bury it in a procurement notice, in a sentence a lawyer was paid to make sure you would never finish reading. Somebody has to sit with those documents and translate them back into English. That is the work your upgrade funds.

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The library. Know your rights when ICE knocks. How to sue a federal official. What a contempt referral actually means. Plain English, written by a trial lawyer, permanently available, updated as the law changes. No expiration date. Updated weekly and all here.

This week I’m giving you talking points to use the next time someone tries to tell you we have an election fraud problem.

Thirty-one.

That is the number a law professor named Justin Levitt landed on after years of hunting for the thing you keep hearing about at family dinners. Levitt teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and he went looking for voter impersonation and fraud, the specific crimes where a person walks into a polling place and pretends to be somebody else, because that is the crime nearly every voter ID law in this country claims to stop. He tracked every credible allegation he was able to find from 2000 through 2014, across general elections, primaries, special elections, and city races. In general and primary elections alone, more than a billion ballots were cast in that window. He found 31 incidents.

Thirty-one out of a billion.

That works out to roughly one incident for every 32 million ballots. You have better odds of being struck by lightning.

The number nobody wants to talk about

Levitt is one researcher with one methodology. The Associated Press came at the same question from a completely different direction after 2020, and the result should have ended this argument permanently. Reporters spent months contacting more than 300 local election offices in the six states Donald Trump and his allies claimed the most fraud in. These were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They asked for every potential case of fraud, every disputed ballot, every referral sent to a prosecutor. They found fewer than 475 across all six states combined.

Joe Biden carried those states by 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million cast, so the disputed ballots amounted to fifteen hundredths of one percent of his margin. Most of them were never counted at all, because poll workers pulled them for inspection before those ballots ever reached a tally, which is the system doing precisely the work it was designed to do, and virtually every one of those cases involved a single person acting alone with no coordination behind them.

The cases ran in both political directions, and one of the most publicized involved a Nevada man who went on television claiming somebody had voted in his dead wife’s name and later pleaded guilty to doing it himself.

Trump’s own attorney general said it out loud in December of 2020. Bill Barr told the country there was no evidence of fraud at a scale that would change the outcome. He resigned weeks later.

Even Utah went looking, and here is what they found. It’s a deep red state. It has no Democratic machine anybody is able to blame. It has a Republican governor with a Republican legislature and a Republican chief election officer.

On April 17, 2025, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson opened a full citizenship review of the state’s voter rolls, and her office spent more than a year running 2,069,640 voter records, active and inactive, against Utah Driver License Division data, the federal SAVE immigration database, and a hand review of registration forms by her own staff. The final report came out on May 27, 2026.

Her office confirmed 27 noncitizens on the rolls and flagged another 25 as probable, which means 99.72 percent of Utah’s registered voters were verified as American citizens. Thirteen of the 27 had cast a ballot in some election. Nine of the probable group had voted at some point since 2016, and those nine still have 30 days to produce documents before any clerk removes them.

Twenty-two people, over roughly a decade, in a state that counts millions of votes.

Why repetition beats evidence

Here is the piece that has nothing to do with law and everything to do with the machinery inside your head. Psychologists have a name for it. The illusory truth effect.

Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino documented it in 1977, and Lisa Fazio and colleagues sharpened it in 2015. Repeat a statement often enough and people start rating it as true, and this holds even for people who knew the correct answer before the repetition began, because familiarity registers in the mind as accuracy and that feeling of ease gets mistaken for a considered judgment.

Levitt noticed something else during his research that explains more than any statistic will. People living in states with strict ID laws do not feel better about their elections than people living in states with loose ones. The single strongest predictor of whether an American believes an election was fair is whether their candidate won. That is the whole engine. Losing feels like theft to a brain that has spent years being told theft is what the other side does.

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Put it in a courtroom

I have tried a lot of cases. More than most lawyers. What I’ve learned is that a claim survives a courtroom by producing sworn witnesses and documents that hold up under cross examination. With respect to the election fraud claims, they all went into courtrooms across this country and died there, in front of judges appointed by Republicans, in front of judges appointed by Democrats, in front of judges Trump himself put on the bench. Most of those cases never even reached a jury, because they collapsed on the pleadings and the complete lack of evidence long before anyone was sworn in.

Then the voting machine companies sued, and the receipts came due. Fox News was sued for defamation by Dominion and paid $787.5 million dollars in April of 2023, with the settlement landing moments before opening statements and with Rupert Murdoch expected on the stand. Newsmax paid Dominion $67 million dollars in 2025 also for defamation and had already handed Smartmatic $40 million. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled the claims about Dominion were false before either case ever reached a jury. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion dollar case against Fox is still pending. Ask for the receipt and watch what happens.

Unfortunately, the fraud story is a permission slip for everything you see Republicans crying about each day on the news. It’s a waste of time, a waste of money, and it reduces the public’s confidence in validity of our elections. Even on Wednesday, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell is refusing to concede losing the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary. State House Speaker, Lisa Demuth, won with 43.6% of the 93% of the votes counted and Lindell, who was of course, backed by Trump, came a distant second with 32.3%% of the votes.

What you do with this

I’m sorry to say that you are going to hear the stolen election line over and over between now and November. After the democrats take back a majority in Congress, you’re going to hear it again from Trump and podcast hosts, from a cousin at your barbecue, from a candidate lining up an excuse before a single vote is counted, and from an ad you never asked to watch.

Interesting how election fraud didn’t seem to be an issue in 2024 when Republicans won the House, Senate and Oval Office but you can bet your lucky stars that it’s going to be a huge problem in November. Remind me again who the snowflakes really are?

Moving forward, remember that you do not need to shout. All you need is a number and a question. The number is thirty-one out of a billion. The question is the one I put to any witness who makes a big claim with nothing behind it, and it is four words long. Show me the case. Show me the county, the docket number, the ruling, and the name of the judge who signed it. That request has been sitting on the counter since 2020, and on the specific claim that fraud changed a federal outcome, not one person has come back with the paperwork.

Check your own registration this month, because four states added a documents requirement in the last two years and more are lined up behind them. Then take thirty-one out of a billion, put it in front of the next person who tells you your vote was stolen, and watch how quickly the conversation runs out of road.

And while they’re still trying to figure out the truth, grab your friends and vote.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Free readers get the verdict. Paid subscribers get the cross-examination — the filings, the language, and what it actually means. If this newsletter has ever kept you from being misled, that’s what your upgrade funds.

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We got into Section 230 and the FCC’s ownership rules. We did a deep dive on who actually controls what you see, hear, and read on your phone every day, and what the latest developments mean for all of us between now and the November midterms.

We talked about policy, who shapes the information you receive, and why you need to pay attention.

Meredith brings 25 years of reporting from war zones to boardrooms, and she knows how to ask the questions that matter. We talked, shared contrary views, and laughed. I’m so glad I joined her!

If you missed it, the replay is worth your time.

Thank you , , , , , and so many others for tuning into our live video!

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Free readers get the verdict. Paid subscribers get the cross-examination — the filings, the language, and what it actually means. If this newsletter has ever kept you from being misled, that’s what your upgrade funds.

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It Starts With Twenty Six Words

Twenty six words run the American internet. That is the length of the main sentence inside Section 230, a law written in 1996, back when getting online meant a modem screeching through the wall of somebody’s bedroom. The sentence says a website will not be treated as the publisher or the speaker of something a user posted. A second part of the law protects a website that takes down garbage in good faith. Two ideas on one page, and thirty years of fallout.1

Congress wrote it because of one court ruling, and the story behind that ruling is wild. In May 1995, a judge in Nassau County, New York decided that an early online service called Prodigy counted as the publisher of a post written by an anonymous user, and the judge pointed to four things Prodigy had done: it posted rules for users, it ran software that screened out dirty words, it paid volunteers to clean up its message boards, and it advertised itself as a family friendly place. Look at who filed that lawsuit.

The company suing Prodigy was Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island brokerage run by Jordan Belfort, the firm Martin Scorsese later turned into The Wolf of Wall Street. An anonymous user on a Prodigy message board had accused that firm and its president of criminal fraud. The firm sued Prodigy for two hundred million dollars over the post. In December 1996, securities regulators threw Stratton Oakmont out of the industry for running the kind of scheme that user had described.

The case settled in October 1995. Prodigy apologized publicly, and no money changed hands. The ruling still stood long enough to teach every website in America a lesson, and it was the wrong lesson: leave the sewage alone and you stay safe. Four years earlier, a federal judge in Manhattan had let a different service, CompuServe, walk away from a similar lawsuit for the opposite reason, because CompuServe never looked at user posts before they went up.

Congress said no.

The official report that came with the new law said the goal in plain writing, which was to wipe out the Prodigy decision.

What The Shield Protects For You

Most people hear about this law only when a politician is yelling about Big Tech. The shield reaches further than that. It is why your neighborhood Facebook group runs without a lawyer reading every post first. It is why a restaurant has no case against Yelp over your one star review, and that restaurant stays free to sue you personally for what you wrote. It is why a small town paper keeps its comment section open and a nonprofit runs a support forum on almost no money. The shield covers the giants. It also covers a woman running a knitting forum out of her spare bedroom. And the shield has never been total, because federal crimes, copyright and trademark claims, federal wiretap law, and a 2018 change aimed at sex trafficking all sit outside it.

That last part matters. Congress has already cut into this law once and the internet survived.

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What controls what you see, hear, and read on your phone every day?

Today, independent journalist is hosting me on Substack Live for a conversation about Section 230, the FCC, and what the latest developments already mean for all of us between now and the midterm elections in November.

With a 25-year career spanning war zones to boardrooms, Meredith knows how to ask the questions that matter. With my 40 years of practicing law, I know how to answer them in a way that makes it easy to understand.

This isn’t just about policy. It’s about who shapes the information you receive, and why you need to pay attention.

Join us live today (Wednesday) at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT

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The Wires Started Making Choices

The original internet platforms you used were static. They gave you a place where you could share your thoughts and information. They were like the electrical wires in your house providing energy and lights. You would not sue the electrician who wired your house over the fight that broke out at your dinner table. He ran the cable, hung the outlets, went home before dessert. The words in that room belonged to the people in that room. Section 230 was built on that same common sense.

Here is what changed.

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Every Tuesday I take one thing everyone is talking about and break it down the way I would for a jury. What it actually means, where the story falls apart, and how to talk about it at your own kitchen table or barbecue. Read it, study the 10 talking points at the end, then send it to someone who needs it.

What is Communism and Socialism?

You are standing in a driveway on a warm Sunday afternoon, a paper plate in one hand and a cold drink in the other. A neighbor works the grill. Kids tear across the grass in the little park at the end of the block, the one the whole street pays to keep mowed. A phone leans against the cooler playing the news, and the man on the screen jabs his finger at half the country and says the word one more time. Communist. Your uncle nods along. The guy who helped you move your couch last spring says yeah, sounds about right. Then everybody looks at you.

You feel the answer climb up into your chest. Nothing comes out. The moment slides past, and the lie pulls up a chair at your table like a guest nobody asked to stay.

I have spent my career taking weak arguments apart in front of juries. This one comes apart faster than most. Let me hand you the words, so the next time the room goes quiet, you are the one who fills the silence.

Start with this. One word hides two very different ideas. Communism is the command version, the one with the body count. Democratic socialism is the everyday version, the one already stitched into your Tuesday. Keep the two apart in your head and the whole insult collapses.1

What Communism Actually Means

Communism hands the government the keys to everything a country makes. The farms. The factories. The corner stores. The newspapers and the printing presses. You own none of it. A family living under communism does not pass a hardware store down to a daughter, because the state holds the deed, stocks the shelves, sets every price, and picks who stands behind the counter.

One party runs the whole operation. Elections become a stage play with the ending written in advance. Speak against the men in charge and you lose your job, then your freedom, and sometimes far more than that. Stalin took the farms by force and starved millions in the taking. Cuba shut down tens of thousands of small private shops in a single sweep in 1968 and called it a victory.

Communism is a locked house with an armed guard at the door. He owns the house, the food inside it, and the only key. That’s not your world. Hold onto that picture.

What Democratic Socialism Actually Means

Democratic socialism is simple. We pool our money through taxes and use it to run the things everyone depends on, like roads, schools, and fire departments. It allows you to keep your home, your car, your business, your paycheck, your savings and your future. The country pools a slice of what everyone earns and buys something no single family buys alone. As mentioned in the footnote above, scholars separate social democracy from democratic socialism, and the version on your ballot this fall, whatever you choose to call it, keeps private business, private property, and free elections fully intact, and only asks the public to own or fund the shared basics we all use.

Norway shows the ownership side of this idea living happily inside a thriving market democracy. The Norwegian state owns 67 percent of Equinor, its largest energy company, and the money from that stake flows back to the public through the government and a national savings fund that belongs to every citizen. Denmark shows the safety net side. Its own prime minister stood on a stage at Harvard, looked out at a room full of Americans, and called his country a market economy with one of the strongest public safety nets on earth. He was right on both counts. A market economy that carries strong public programs is the thing your uninformed neighbor keeps calling communism, and the word does not fit.

Democratic socialism looks like a barn raising. The whole town turns out, everybody lifts together, and by sundown one family has a barn standing and every other family knows the same hands will show up when the storm comes for their place.

Some folks hear the word and picture empty shelves and bread lines. Look at the actual thing on the table. A big city recently decided to build five publicly run grocery stores that will sell a basket of staples at a thirty percent discount, opening over the next couple of years, one in each borough. Those handful of stores are opening alongside thousands of privately owned bodegas and supermarkets, every one of them still setting its own prices and keeping its own profits. A handful of shared stores is a long way from a locked house with a guard at the door. Nobody is taking your business. You are free to call an idea a poor one and still know exactly what it is.

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Five Places Democratic Socialism Already Lives In Your Life

Now walk through your own day, because this is where the whole scare campaign falls to pieces.

One. The road under your tires. You drove somewhere this morning on a road you did not build and do not own. No company billed you at the on ramp and no gate charged you by the mile. Your taxes and your neighbor’s taxes laid that asphalt, and now it carries the delivery van, the yellow school bus, the ambulance running lights, and the worker headed to a double shift, all of them, all day, no charge at the point of use. We pooled our money and we bought ourselves the freedom to move. Adam Smith, the father of the free market himself, argued for publicly built roads and bridges back in 1776. Nobody has pinned a red star on him yet.

Two. The school at the end of the street. A child walks into a public school on the first morning of kindergarten and the door opens whether the family is rich, broke, or somewhere in the middle. There is no tuition bill or credit check. The town decided generations ago that an educated kid grows into a stronger neighbor and a steadier citizen, so the town pays for the teacher, the books, and the lights together. That is democratic socialism in one sentence, the public paying together for the thing that builds our future. We call it school and we send our kids through those doors every single morning.

Three. The fire truck. A fire breaks out at two in the morning. You dial three numbers and a truck full of trained people comes screaming to your curb, and not one of them stops on the lawn to ask for your credit card or check whether you paid a subscription this month. Everybody on the block chips in through taxes so the truck rolls for anyone, the banker and the bartender the same. You never think of it as a shared thing you all own together. It is one of the fairest deals we have.

Four. The cards in your wallet. Reach into your wallet and find the Social Security card, then picture the Medicare card your parents carry. Social Security became law in 1935. Medicare followed in 1965. The loudest voices of both eras screamed socialism at the top of their lungs. They were describing the good part. Today your mother cashes those checks and sees a doctor with that card and never gives the old insult a second thought. A whole country agreed to guard its elders together so no grandmother spends her last years choosing between heat and food. We built that on purpose, and it holds.

Five. The farm that grows your dinner. Drive out past the last stoplight into the reddest farm country in America and you land in one of the most heavily supported corners of our whole economy. Farm subsidies and crop insurance carry family farms through a drought year and a crash in prices, so the barns stay in the family and the country keeps eating through the lean seasons. The public steadies the harvest on purpose. Half the folks living out there would spit at the word socialism. They farm inside it every single season, and it keeps their land in their name.

Who This Economy Actually Works For

Here is the part they work hardest to keep you from noticing. The pieces of American life that shield regular families are the shared ones, the roads, the schools, the fire trucks, the retirement checks. The pieces squeezing you are the ones tilted hard toward the people at the very top.

Your rent climbs. Your grocery bill climbs. Your premium climbs again. The tax cuts sail to the top one percent, the medicine stays priced out of reach, and the same crowd calling you a communist has done nothing to bring the cost of your life back down to earth. A man in the top one percent loves this arrangement, because every dollar the rest of us pays lands somewhere near his account. The word communist is a magic trick. He says it loud so you look at your neighbor and stop looking at his hand in your pocket.

Why A Man Teaches You To Fear A Word

Seventy six years ago a senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy held up a sheet of paper and claimed it listed communists hidden inside the government. He never showed the list. He never had to. The accusation did all the damage on its own. Teachers lost their classrooms. Writers wrote under fake names for a decade. Neighbors turned in neighbors over gossip at a card table, and families broke apart and never healed. His own Senate condemned him in 1954, and the wreckage took a generation to clear.

The young lawyer at McCarthy’s elbow through those hearings was Roy Cohn. Two decades later Cohn became Donald Trump’s lawyer and his teacher, and he drilled one method into him. Attack first. Admit nothing. Pin an ugly name on the other person and repeat it until the crowd forgets to ask for proof. A frightened voter, sure his neighbor is the enemy, stops asking why his paycheck buys less every month. Fear moves votes and suspicion holds power. A country busy fighting itself has no attention left over for the man running the show.

The Words You Carry

Load these into your pocket and pull one out the next time the word lands at your table.

When he says the Democrats are communists and everyone knows it, you say, show me the factory the government seized, and I will wait right here.

When he says they want to make America socialist, you say, the highway you drove in on and the fire truck down the block already run on that shared model you are afraid of, so either you have been cheering for it your whole life or the word does not mean what he told you it means.

When he says give them power and they take everything you own, you say, communism is a locked house with an armed guard, democratic socialism is the shared driveway we salt together every winter, and nobody in Washington is coming for my home.

When he says somebody finally has the guts to call out the communists, you say, the last man who talked like this was Joe McCarthy, and his own party condemned him for the lives he ruined.

Say your line once. Then stop talking. The quiet after it does more work than anything you pile on top.

Your Move

The lie only survives in the quiet. So break the quiet. The next time somebody at the cookout, in the group chat, or on the job site parrots that word at you, answer with one clean line and a steady smile, and watch the whole room shift the second one person refuses to let a slur stand in for an argument.

Copy these lines into your phone. Send this to the person you love who keeps swallowing whatever the television feeds him. Then show up and vote in every election on your calendar, down to the smallest local race, because the people counting on your confusion are counting even harder on your empty seat.

The word is the weapon. You are holding the shield now. Raise it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Uncensored Objection hands you the words to stop letting a slur stand in for an argument. Subscribe free for every Tuesday breakdown, go paid to fund the work, then meet us in the comments and tell us how it landed at your next barbecue.

Bonus Talking Points: Ten Lies You Will Hear Before The Midterms, And The Line That Ends Each One

Every one of these does the same job. It dresses up democratic socialism as communism and dares you to flinch. Here are the ten you will hear between now and November, and the answer that puts each one to bed. Say your line once and let the silence do the rest.

One. They say, “Socialism and communism are the same thing.”

You say, “Communism hands the government every farm, every factory, every store, and every newspaper, and leaves you owning nothing. Democratic socialism keeps your house, your car, your business, and your paycheck, and asks everyone to chip in for the roads and schools we all use. Calling those two the same thing is like calling a neighborhood potluck the same as a stranger cleaning out your refrigerator at gunpoint.”

Two. They say, “Democratic socialism is a gateway to communism.”

You say, “Denmark, Norway, Canada, and Germany have run strong public programs for generations, and not one of them woke up as the Soviet Union. The slope they keep warning you about has a fire station at the bottom of it. Democratic socialism comes with an off switch called an election, and voters throw it every few years.”

Three. They say, “Socialism killed a hundred million people.”

You say, “That number comes straight out of the communist dictatorships of Stalin and Mao, men who owned their entire countries and shot anyone who spoke up. Social Security never killed a soul. A public library has never run a firing squad.”

Four. They say, “Just look at Venezuela.”

You say, “Venezuela is an oil dictatorship that jailed its opponents and printed money until the currency died. Norway sits on the same oil wealth, runs it through a democracy, and built the richest national savings fund on the planet for its people. The thing that destroyed Venezuela was the missing ballot box and the crushed free press, the two things democratic socialism guards.”

Five. They say, “They will take your house, your business, and your savings.”

You say, “Point to the one member of Congress who has filed a bill to seize your home. That bill does not exist, and it never has. Higher taxes on billion dollar fortunes and a public option for health care leave your house, your car, and your retirement account exactly where they sit.”

Six. They say, “Socialism always fails. It has never worked anywhere.”

You say, “It works every morning you drive on a public road and drop your kid at a school that costs nothing at the door. It works in the checks your grandparents earned and the national parks your family walks on a Sunday. The parts of this country you love the most are the parts you keep calling failures.”

Seven. They say, “The government cannot run anything right.”

You say, “The same government you mock put astronauts on the moon and laid the highway running under your tires. Medicare covers your grandmother for a fraction of the overhead an insurance company burns denying your claim. You lean on a government that works before you finish your first cup of coffee.”

Eight. They say, “Socialism is un-American.”

You say, “The Founders wrote the post office into the Constitution, and George Washington signed the roads that carried the mail. Eisenhower, a Republican general, built the interstate system with your tax dollars. Shared public goods are as American as the flag hanging on your porch.”

Nine. They say, “It is a handout for people too lazy to work.”

You say, “The folks living on Social Security and Medicare worked forty and fifty years for those checks, and they earned every dollar. The nurses and firefighters running the services you call handouts outwork most of the country. Democratic socialism rewards the work and refuses to let one bad year erase a whole good life.”

Ten. They say, “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

You say, “Norway has managed this model for fifty years and sits on a savings account worth more than a trillion dollars, so the math runs the other direction. The billionaire class often pays a smaller share of its real income than the nurse setting grandma’s IV. Ask for a fair share from the top and watch how fast the people crying poverty turn out to be the ones sitting on the fortune.”

Now go back to that driveway. The burgers on the grill, the phone propped against the cooler, the word landing on the table while everyone waits to see what you do. These ten lines carry you through the arguments that follow, the ones running from this Sunday until the day you vote.

Monday. The Docket.

Here is the week ahead. What I expect from this administration. What the courts decide. What Congress votes on. What Trump says. And which slice of all of it lands on your kitchen table.

The Docket usually runs short and fast. Today it runs long, because of two men. The soon to be Attorney General, Todd Blanche. And the man Blanche once told, out loud, “I love you.” Donald Trump. Stay with me to the end.

Everything you file under normal is about to change.

I am telling you this the same way I open a trial. Before the first witness takes the stand, I tell the jury exactly what is coming and why. I tell them what the evidence will show. By the end of the case, I ask them to make sure I kept my promise and if so, to deliver justice to my client.

Consider this my opening statement to you. What follows lands over the next seven days and keeps landing through New Year’s Eve.

Brace yourself. Read every word, because at the end I hand you a job.

Four Thirty in the Morning

Picture the Senate floor at four thirty on a Saturday morning. Lights humming. Air thick with cold coffee and old carpet. A clerk reads names into a microphone and the sound bounces off the marble because almost no one is left in the room to catch the words. Fifty yes. Forty nine no. Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, stood with every Democrat and voted no.

The gavel dropped in the dark. And Todd Blanche, the lawyer who sat at Donald Trump’s elbow while a New York jury convicted Trump of thirty four felonies, became the next Attorney General of the United States.

Ask yourself when you last did something honest at four thirty in the morning. Then ask why the Senate booked this one vote for the middle of the night, in the dark, with the whole country asleep.

They picked that hour on purpose. Hold onto that.

The Man They Handed the Keys To

You know the résumé. Blanche defended Trump in the hush money trial. He served as Deputy Attorney General under Pam Bondi. Trump fired Bondi in April, slid Blanche into the acting seat, and spent the summer leaning on the Senate to make the job permanent.

Look at what he did with a temporary badge.

He built a fund holding close to one point eight billion of your tax dollars, stamped it anti weaponization, and aimed it at paying people who claim the government came after them. Some of those people were charged over January 6. He signed a deal permanently blocking the IRS from chasing tax claims against Trump, his oldest sons, and the family businesses.

A federal judge named Kathleen Williams read the lawsuit behind that deal and found an improper purpose sitting inside it. Former judges looked at the same arrangement and reached for two words. Collusion. Fraud on the court. Judge Williams mailed her order to the New York bar and to the District of Columbia bar, where Blanche and his colleague hold their law licenses, and asked those bars to decide whether the two of them deserve discipline.

I have practiced law for four decades. Reading that stops me cold. A sitting judge refers the nominee for Attorney General to two bar associations for possible discipline, during the same weeks the Senate weighs whether to confirm him. This does not happen to lawyers. This does not happen to judges. Folks, nowhere close to normal.

He then rescinded the fund in a signed memo, the kind of memo carrying zero legal force, timed to lock down Republican votes right before the count.

Then there is James Comey. Charged with threatening the president over a photograph of seashells lined up on a North Carolina beach to read 8647. Posted, then deleted. Two federal counts. Over shells in the sand.

Then there is Epstein. Blanche flew to Florida, sat with Ghislaine Maxwell across two days, generated more than three hundred pages of transcript, and never once pressed her on the lies a jury already rejected. Congress passed a law ordering the Epstein files released. Blanche is sitting on three million of them and handing Congress and the courts a raised middle finger. The survivors are furious. Most of the country stands with them.

What This Monday Morning Looks Like

The confirmation is finished. The swearing in follows. Once Blanche takes the oath, the temporary label falls away and he owns the title, the seal, the budget, and every federal prosecutor in the country reporting up to his desk.

Watch the file cabinet. The rest of the year already sits on the calendar. Here is the docket, case by case.

Comey, track one. September 15.

A federal appeals court in Richmond hears this one on September 15. One question sits on the table. Did Lindsey Halligan hold the legal power to charge James Comey and Letitia James in the first place.

Halligan got installed to run the federal prosecutor’s office covering northern Virginia, Richmond, and Norfolk. Senior Judge Cameron Currie, a Clinton appointee, ruled she never held the job lawfully.

The judge assignment tells its own story. Currie normally sits in South Carolina. The chief judge of the appeals court brought her in from out of state because the Virginia federal judges have an official role in filling that prosecutor post, and he wanted to protect public confidence in fair administration of justice. Translation. The local judges had skin in the game, so an outsider took the case. Three appeals judges decide, and their names stay sealed until the morning of argument.

Understand what a win actually buys the Department. No do over. The original charges against Comey come back and nothing else. Prosecutors filed against him days before the deadline expired, and Currie signaled they hold no power to bring fresh ones, because that clock ran out at the end of September 2025.

Every crime carries a filing deadline. Miss it and the case dies, no matter how strong the evidence looks. The government cut this one to the wire.

On the Letitia James side, the Department already handed the question to ordinary citizens and lost. Before charges move forward, a grand jury of regular people has to agree the evidence is there. Those panels almost always say yes. Grand juries in Norfolk and Alexandria each refused to charge her. Two panels. Two rejections. Not enough evidence.

Stack up every one of these failures and you would expect the light to come on. You would expect Blanche and his DOJ to turn their time and resources toward the Jeffrey Epstein cases. Toward justice for the survivors. Toward hunting down real predators.

Wrong.

I wish I were kidding.

Real criminals hold no interest for this crew. Blanche and his DOJ are doubling down on charging Trump’s enemies with more invented crimes. They plan to reshape your world between now and the midterm elections.

The name for this is political retribution. It gets uglier every week between now and the end of the year.

Back to the crystal ball.

Halligan left the Virginia office in late January. In February the Virginia federal judges unanimously picked James Hundley, a veteran trial lawyer, and Chief Judge M. Hannah Lauck swore him in on a Friday evening in Richmond. Two hours later Blanche fired him in a social media post. Blanche ran the Department as its number two at the time. He wrote that Virginia judges do not pick the U.S. Attorney, the President does. Somebody handed Blanche those marching orders. You already know the name.

Theo Stamos runs the office now, twice elected as Arlington’s top local prosecutor. Some reporting calls her the first assistant serving as chief prosecutor. Other reporting calls her acting U.S. Attorney. Still no Senate confirmed leader.

So here we stand. A federal chief judge swore a man in, and the Justice Department fired him before dinner. The man who sent that post now runs the whole Department. The instinct rode in with him.

Comey, track two. August 18

The seashell case is a separate prosecution, in a different state, on its own clock. Federal court in eastern North Carolina, Judge Louise Flanagan, a George W. Bush appointee.

The charge. Threatening the president with a photo of seashells on a beach arranged to read 8647.

Comey’s lawyers want it thrown out. Dictionaries, context, prior rulings, and plain common sense knock the legs out from under the claim that a beach photo carried a real threat. Anyone who has worked a shift in a bar or a restaurant knows what 8647 means. The Department’s written answer comes due August 18. Mark your first date.

A second motion goes straight at the government’s motives. His lawyers allege vindictive and selective prosecution, the legal way of saying the government built this case to punish him. They claim Trump pushed the Secret Service to tail Comey and his wife on their drive back to Washington, including a stop at their deceased son’s grave. Other motions ask for the grand jury audio over claimed irregularities and move to block certain evidence.

Survive all of it, and Comey enters his plea September 30 with trial opening October 21 in New Bern.

Here is what should keep Blanche awake, and I say this as a lawyer who has argued these motions in front of live judges.

A vindictive prosecution motion pries open the government’s own files. The defense gets to ask who ordered this case, when, and why. Emails, notes, internal decisions normally locked in a drawer become fair game. The prosecutors end up on the wrong side of the questions.

Now add the timeline already sitting in front of the judge. Comey’s lawyers told the court Matthew Petracca became an assistant U.S. attorney on April 26. The case got filed April 28. By late May he was gone from it.

Read that twice. A brand new federal prosecutor, two days on the job, files one of the most explosive cases in the country, then vanishes from it inside a month.

That timeline goes in front of a federal judge this fall. The Attorney General owns every piece of it.

Anthony Fauci. Weeks, not months.

Rand Paul’s committee voted eight to five on August 6 to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress and hand delivered the referral to the Justice Department the same day, to the Attorney General and to the top federal prosecutor in Washington. The Department confirmed receipt and said it will work with the Senate accordingly.

Contempt of Congress means refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation. Congress prosecutes no one. Congress hands the file to the Justice Department and asks.

This one moves fastest on the board.

Give the other side its best shot, because a lawyer who ducks the strongest argument against him loses.

Fauci took the Fifth. That right protects you from being forced to say something used to convict you later. Republicans say he faced no such risk. Biden already pardoned him for that period, and Senator Hawley cited Brown v. Walker, an 1896 Supreme Court decision holding a pardoned witness loses the power to refuse to answer.

Real case. Real argument. Nobody gets to wave it off.

Here is the answer. Biden’s pardon covers federal offenses from January 1, 2014 through January 19, 2025. Nothing after. I wrote about this in detail here.1

That gap decides everything. The hearing happened in July 2026, seventeen months past the cutoff. Every word Fauci spoke in that room sits outside the shield. Prosecutors could turn around and charge him with lying under oath at the hearing itself, a fresh crime the pardon never reaches. A presidential pardon only stops federal charges. It does nothing to state prosecutors. Attorneys general in Florida, West Virginia, and Louisiana say they are subpoenaing him right now.

Sit in that chair for a second. Three states circling. Every sentence you speak turns into a possible federal perjury count. Silence there is not evasion. Silence there is exactly what any competent lawyer tells you to do.

Then there is the paperwork problem. Senate rules normally route a contempt resolution through a full Senate vote before it lands with prosecutors. A former senior counsel to that committee’s ranking Democrat says skipping the vote creates a defect weakening the Department’s power to prosecute at all. Paul skipped it. That shortcut might have broken the case before it started.

My call. Blanche opens a file and lets it sit.

Think about what a trial here demands. Put an eighty five year old infectious disease scientist in the dock for a misdemeanor because he invoked a constitutional right. Then talk a Washington grand jury into signing off first, in the same city where a grand jury recently refused to charge six Democratic members of Congress and delivered one more rebuke to the campaign to prosecute the president’s foes.

Filing this buys a public loss with the Attorney General’s fingerprints all over it. Watch for a quiet non decision. A file nobody closes and nobody moves, stretching past November.

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Jack Smith. The referral with the longest fuse.

Start with who these people are. Jack Smith is the prosecutor who once brought two federal cases against Trump. Jim Jordan chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Smith sat for questioning by that committee in December 2025.

On July 22, Jordan sent Blanche a formal letter accusing Smith of making willfully and intentionally false statements during that December questioning. The Department confirmed it received the letter and said it will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct.

Understand what the letter is. A criminal referral is a request. Any member of Congress sends one. It carries no legal force and obligates no one to file a single charge. It amounts to a formal note reading, please look at this person.

The signal came earlier, at Blanche’s job interview. Senator Hawley asked whether he had thought about investigating Smith for perjury. Blanche answered that the Department takes testimony before that body seriously.

Read that as a yes.

Smith’s lawyers call the referral meritless. I agree. Their point is precise and it decides the case. The accusation is not that Smith said something false. The accusation is that he failed to volunteer that his team had obtained text messages belonging to members of Congress.

Sit with the distinction.

Lying under oath means saying something untrue. Leaving out something nobody asked about is a different animal. A prosecutor who fails to point to one sentence and call it false has no case. He has a complaint about the impression a listener walked away with.

I have cross examined witnesses for forty years. You win a false statement charge by putting the transcript in front of the jury and reading the lie out loud. Nothing substitutes for that moment. A prosecutor forced to explain what a witness supposedly implied has lost the jury before he finishes the sentence.

Now the clock. Federal law generally gives prosecutors five years to bring this kind of charge. The testimony happened in December 2025, so the deadline runs to 2030. Blanche feels zero time pressure.

Expect him to open an investigation. Expect stories about the investigation to leak. Expect no actual charges before the snow melts.

Brennan. Two tracks, and only one sits on friendly ground.

Two separate investigations aim at John Brennan, the former CIA director. Most coverage mashes them into one. Pull them apart and the real picture snaps into focus.

Track one. The grand conspiracy case. The sweeping theory that Obama era officials secretly coordinated for years to damage Trump.

Joe diGenova, eighty one, a former Trump campaign lawyer who backed the effort to overturn the 2020 election, was named counsel to the Attorney General and put in charge of the investigation. He works from a grand jury seated in Fort Pierce, Florida, in a courthouse run by Judge Aileen Cannon. Axios reported in March the effort had already generated more than one hundred thirty subpoenas, sweeping in Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and James Clapper.

Pay attention to the address. Fort Pierce is a small courthouse where Cannon is the only federal judge sitting. She is the same judge who handled Trump’s classified documents case and drew heavy criticism for how favorably she treated him. Prosecutors normally file where the alleged crime happened. Choosing this courthouse guarantees which judge you draw. The choice is the tell.

Track two. The perjury theory. Narrower target. What Brennan told Congress in 2023 about a 2017 intelligence report on Russian election interference. This one moved to Washington, because South Florida holds no legal connection to it.

Courts require a link between the crime and the location. Brennan testified in Washington, so prosecutors issued subpoenas for grand jury testimony there in April, signaling any case gets filed where he spoke.

That detail matters more than it sounds. It pulls the case out of Cannon’s friendly courthouse and drops it in front of a D.C. grand jury.

Now the part that got buried. The career prosecutor handling the Brennan file in Miami, national security section chief Maria Medetis Long, told her boss the evidence was not there. She was removed from the case.

Understand why the theory shifted at all. The events at the center of this happened in 2016 and 2017, far past the deadline for charging anyone. Prosecutors hold no way to reach that far back. So the theory changed shape. They stopped chasing what he did in 2016 and started chasing what he said about 2016 when he testified in 2023. Newer statements, newer clock.

My call. Florida produces the headlines, the subpoenas, and the drama, and Cannon gives that room to run. The perjury case has to clear a D.C. grand jury, and that panel keeps telling this Department no. Expect noise out of Florida sooner rather than later. Expect an actual Brennan indictment to take far longer than the people promising it want you to believe.

Adam Schiff. The investigation that turned around.

Be honest about the calendar. Public reporting stops last December, and no charges have followed.

The accusation held that Senator Adam Schiff lied on mortgage paperwork. Federal prosecutors in Maryland worked it for months and never found enough to charge him.

Then it flipped.

The Maryland U.S. Attorney’s office and the FHFA inspector general opened a new investigation into whether people impersonated federal agents while working the mortgage cases against prominent Democrats.

Read that again. The government started investigating its own investigation.

A subpoena asked one witness about anyone claiming to work for the Justice Department, for Ed Martin, or for housing agency director Bill Pulte. Prosecutors are weighing whether Martin improperly pulled in two outsiders to help investigate Schiff.

Here sits the problem. Federal investigations run on rules about who holds the authority to carry a badge and ask questions. Bring in people who lack that authority, and the evidence gets tossed while the people who brought them face charges of their own.

Prosecutors are also examining whether secret grand jury material from the Letitia James case got shared illegally. Schiff has denied wrongdoing and has never been charged.

That reversal is the tell. Once the evidence against the target dries up, the record of how the case got built becomes the evidence. And that record points straight back at the builders.

Blanche controls both halves of the file. He decides whether the second half ever sees daylight.

The Comstock Problem and a Woman’s Right to Choose.

Todd Blanche has already told you where he wants to take abortion medication.

Start with the law. The Comstock Act passed in 1873, an anti obscenity statute from the era of horse drawn mail. It bans sending certain items through the mail, including items connected to abortion. It never came off the books. It sat there for a century while courts and Congress left it alone.

Now it is back.

At his July 15 confirmation hearing, Ted Cruz pressed him. Blanche said he would take a fresh look at the 2022 Justice Department opinion permitting physicians to mail abortion pills, and he agreed to commit to enforcing the Comstock Act. John Cornyn got the same promise. Asked about the government’s position in the Louisiana suit against the FDA, Blanche said the Department is in no way defending what Biden did.

Then came the part nobody planned to make public. On July 30, on a White House Faith Office call with thousands of religious leaders, Blanche told the Christian group Intercessors for America the Department is putting practices and policies in place so other states and organizations cannot do things like mail order drugs. The work is taking longer than they want, he said, and the victory would be permanent. Someone posted the audio. It came down days later.

On August 4 the Department pushed back, saying critics had twisted the remarks into a call for federal control over state abortion policy, when Blanche was describing an effort to stop mail order abortion drugs from reaching states that ban them. Hold onto that framing. It is the line the Department will stand behind in court.

For everyone who supports a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, and I do, here is what should worry you.

The opinion Blanche wants to revisit is no invention of a Biden lawyer’s imagination. I read it. It concludes the statute does not bar mailing abortion medication when the sender holds no intent for the drugs to be used unlawfully, and it rests on a judicial reading Congress ratified and the Postal Service accepted.

Look how far back that runs. Federal appeals courts started narrowing this law in 1915 and kept narrowing it into the 1940s. Congress amended the Act in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994, and never touched the language those courts construed. A 1945 House report put those decisions directly in front of Congress.

Silence like that carries weight. When lawmakers watch courts read a statute the same way for generations and decline to rewrite it, they are signaling agreement.

Be fair about what an Attorney General gets to do. He gets to revisit a prior administration’s legal position. He gets to advance a President’s lawful policies. None of that counts as a scandal.

The line runs somewhere else. An Attorney General should never pick the destination first, then bend the Department’s legal analysis and prosecuting power until it arrives. Lawyering points you toward the honest answer. Errand running points you toward the boss’s answer. The Department’s own standards say its Office of Legal Counsel must give candid, independent, and principled advice even on the days that advice cuts against what policymakers want. That standard exists because everyone knew the temptation would come.

Watch where the pressure originates. Cornyn and Tillis sent Blanche a letter the day of his hearing urging him to settle the Louisiana case, now before the Fifth Circuit with a September hearing, where Senator Hawley’s wife Erin helps represent Louisiana. Hawley also sent the Department a criminal referral aimed at Plan C, a group that publishes information about how to obtain abortion medication.

Read that last one twice. The referral targets an organization whose main work is telling people what the law allows.

Here is how the system is supposed to run. If Congress wants to change abortion law nationwide, Congress debates it in the open, casts recorded votes, and answers to voters. Every member owns that vote at the next election.

The other path skips all of it. The executive branch takes a criminal statute courts narrowed for a hundred years, reinterprets it, and lands in the same place without a single vote. No debate. No roll call. Nobody on a ballot.

An Attorney General’s obligation is to follow the law wherever it leads. That obligation counts most on the days it leads somewhere the White House hates. Watch which path this one takes.

Election Integrity, or the Setup for November.

Blanche told you his plans back in spring.

At CPAC in Texas on March 26, he asked why anyone would object to sending ICE officers to polling places. He also told that crowd his Department has charged twenty times more election fraud cases in a year than were charged under Biden. In April, on Steve Bannon’s show, he described investigations into the 2020 results in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Fulton County. At his July hearing, Senator Klobuchar asked him to promise not to send armed agents to polling places. He would only say he would follow the law.

Now the machinery. Pam Bondi started the voter roll campaign in September 2025 by suing six states. It grew to roughly thirty states plus Washington, D.C., all sued for refusing to hand over voter files with driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers. Seventeen states handed theirs over without a fight.

Here is what most coverage buries. Not one court at any level has ruled for the Justice Department. On June 24 a federal appeals court threw out the Michigan case, and the Department is asking for a rehearing.

On July 7 the Department announced monitors for fifteen places in six states, promised a bigger program for November, and mailed every state a letter warning election officials they could face criminal charges over noncitizen voting. Officials called the monitoring routine, noting nine places in 2022 and twenty seven in 2024. NOTUS reported in June, citing three sources, that the Department canceled election crime training for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted its 281 page prosecution guide, fired most of its Public Integrity Section, left the Election Crimes Branch without a director, and never set up its usual Election Day command center.

My read as a lawyer. Forget about agents storming a precinct. If it happens at all it will be a rare exception. Do not misread me. Even one such stunt is wrong. The real danger sits somewhere quieter.

The real danger is the paperwork. Watch the paperwork.

The Department told a court that without the voter data there is no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.

That line was not written to win a case. It has not won any. It was written to be quoted on November 4.

Here is why the tactic works. A lawsuit builds a public court record even when it fails, and sworn government filings sit in that record forever. Come November, the administration points at them and argues that results in specific states cannot be trusted. Losing does not break the plan. Losing is the plan.

Add the threat letters and the squeeze lands on county clerks and secretaries of state, who now weigh federal prosecution against their own state privacy laws.

The monitors are the wrong thing to fear. Michigan’s August primary ran smoothly with no interference reported. That program is decades old and both parties have used it.

Four things actually matter between now and Election Day. First, whether the bigger November monitoring program stays inside its legal limits. Second, whether federal agents show up at polls, testing the statute that bars sending armed men to polling places except to repel armed enemies. Nobody has settled whether that law reaches ICE, which is exactly why the question keeps getting dodged. Third, whether ICE ever produces the thousands of documents its own lawyers admitted might exist about poll deployment plans. Fourth, whether the Department drops a wave of noncitizen voting charges in October.

Blanche told the Senate he will follow the law. He would not say what he thinks the law is or what it forbids. Perhaps he plans to ask Trump or Stephen Miller for guidance.

The Pattern Under the Pattern

Six of the matters above put a name in the crosshairs. Two more point the same instinct at policy. Different courts. Different statutes. Different theories. One sequence every single time. Pick the person first, then go hunting for the charge.

That sequence loses in front of judges who read a docket in order, and the record already proves it. Erik Siebert declined to charge Comey and James after career prosecutors found insufficient evidence in both cases, and Trump forced him out. His replacement was a former White House aide who had never prosecuted a case. The Department later admitted the operative indictment against Comey never went in front of the full grand jury. Two grand juries then refused to indict James. A D.C. grand jury refused to indict six sitting members of Congress.

Now watch what happens to the people who say no.

Siebert said the evidence was not there. Gone. James Hundley took the oath from a federal chief judge on a Friday evening and got fired by social media post two hours later. Maria Medetis Long told her boss the Brennan case could not be made and got removed from it. Matthew Petracca filed the seashell indictment two days into the job and disappeared from the case within weeks.

A prosecutor’s most important job is hearing the words we do not have it and stopping. Every institution built to deliver that answer has delivered it to this Department. Career prosecutors delivered it. Grand juries delivered it twice on James and again on six members of Congress. Federal judges delivered it in writing. This Department’s answer has been to replace the messenger and file again.

The machine also keeps widening past politicians. On April 21 the Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on an eleven count federal fraud case over its paid informant program, announced by Blanche himself. During his acting tenure the DOJ issued subpoenas seeking to identify journalists’ sources. Grand jury subpoenas went out in Georgia and Michigan in the Lisa Cook investigation, though she has not been charged. A civil rights organization. Reporters and their sources. A sitting Federal Reserve governor. The retribution list grows longer with each passing day.

Watch the anti weaponization fund, too. Blanche issued an order days before his committee vote stating there is no Fund. Durbin correctly argued the order does not prevent revival after confirmation and does not stop the administration from compensating Trump allies through an existing claims process. A promise that unlocks votes expires the moment it stops being needed.

So run the résumé one more time. A nominee sitting under a federal judge’s referral to two state bars for possible fraud on the court, during the same weeks the Senate weighed his fitness. A record of removing every official who told him no. A department that has lost in front of career prosecutors, grand juries, and federal judges, and has answered by trying again with different people.

Fifty senators looked at all of that and voted yes anyway.

The system has been returning the same verdict since last September. This Department is not listening. It now holds a confirmed Attorney General in place of an acting one, and Election Day sits eighty six days out.

The Cross Examination

He told senators he would keep the Department independent.

Now put him on the stand and walk the record.

He built the fund. He signed the tax deal. He sat across from Ghislaine Maxwell for two days and asked soft questions. He charged a man over seashells on a beach. A federal judge sent his name to two state bars over a possible fraud on the court.

Folks, sit with how far this has fallen.

Now ask the second question, and ask it out loud where somebody can hear you. When a prosecutor picks the person first and hunts for the crime second, nothing stops that same machine from turning toward your union hall, your church, your school board, the business you spent thirty years building, or the post you wrote last Tuesday.

Nothing stops it. No statute. No memo. No promise made under oath at a confirmation hearing, because you already watched what those promises are worth.

But remember this. The DOJ/Blanche machine has already been stopped, four separate times, and not once by a politician. Career prosecutors stopped it. Grand jurors stopped it, ordinary people who took a day off work and said the evidence was not there. Federal judges stopped it in writing. Every one of them was a regular American doing an unglamorous job and refusing to look away.

That is the whole defense. That is all of it. Regular people, paying attention, refusing to stay quiet.

So be one of them today.

You are reading this because something made your stomach turn. Do not let that feeling drain out by dinner. Feelings that go nowhere are exactly what an empty Senate chamber at four thirty in the morning is counting on.

Forward this to five people who have no idea any of it happened. Leave a comment below with the name of your state and the one thing here that made you angriest, because other readers need to see they are not alone. Say it at work tomorrow. Say it at church. Say it at the school board meeting where everyone assumes nobody is watching.

Then keep reading, because the next section tells you exactly who to call and what to ask.

The Closing Argument

A courthouse is a public road. Every American pays for the pavement, and every American holds the same right to drive on it. Todd Blanche has spent his time at the Justice Department turning that road into his boss’s private driveway. A gate. A guard. A list of who gets through.

You did not authorize that. Nobody asked you. And you need nobody’s permission to say so out loud.

That last part matters more than you think. Most people stay quiet about this because they are waiting for someone with a title to go first. A lawyer. A senator. A cable anchor. Somebody official.

Here is what forty years in courtrooms taught me. The people with titles move last. Grand jurors moved before the senators did. Career prosecutors moved before the pundits did. Ordinary people with no platform and no protection looked at the evidence and said no, and they are the only reason any of this has been stopped so far.

You already hold everything you need. You pay for that courthouse. That makes it yours.

So carry this line and repeat it word for word. This Justice Department now has one client, and you are not him.

And carry this story, because a story travels where an argument cannot. A man walks on a beach. He finds shells in the sand, snaps a photo, posts it, deletes it. Federal agents build a case. A grand jury returns two counts. He now faces prison over shells and sand.

Remind everyone at dinner tonight about the shell case. Watch the table go quiet.

Then watch what happens next. Somebody at that table asks a question. Somebody else pulls out a phone. That is how this actually moves, one quiet table at a time, and it does not start until a regular person decides to open their mouth.

Be the one who opens their mouth.

What You Do Now

Call both of your United States senators this week. Not an email. A phone call, with your name and your town, and one question. Reach them through the Capitol switchboard at 202 224 3121. Ask each of them to say publicly where their line sits, and ask what they will do the first time this Attorney General indicts an American over a photo, a vote, or a lawsuit against the president.

Democracy does not die at noon in front of witnesses. Democracy dies at four thirty in the morning, in an empty room, while good people sleep.

Wake up your neighbors. Time to stand tall and be loud.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Every week I take the stories that get buried in legalese and walk you through what they actually mean, the way I would walk a jury through the evidence: what happened, what it costs you, and what to do about it. Subscribe free to get it in your inbox, or go paid for the deep case files, the live interviews, and Sidebar AI, my legal analyst built on the same method I use in trial.

I owe you an honest sentence before anything else.

I’ve been sending you two posts a day. Sometimes three. I told myself that was dedication.

Even as this community kept growing, and even though almost every comment, reply, and interaction was positive, I knew there was simply too much noise. And it buried the pieces I worked hardest on under whatever I published six hours later.

That stops Monday.

Here’s what’s new

Going forward, there’s a schedule: five days, five different things. You’ll know what’s coming, when it’s coming, and roughly how long it will take to read.

The fast, down-and-dirty breaking news updates will happen in Notes for everyone and Chat for paid subscribers.

The longer, more researched pieces described below will publish at 8:00 a.m. Pacific, with our Friday live video at 10:00 a.m. Pacific.

Less noise. Better work. And a much better way for all of us to stay focused on what actually matters.

Monday — The Docket. The week ahead. What courts are deciding, what Congress is voting on, what actually matters.

Tuesday — Objection. The flagship. One story, one legal breakdown, start to finish.

Wednesday — Cross-Examination. The deep one. Original investigations and the calls I’ll be held to. This one’s for paid subscribers.

Thursday — Exhibit A. The library. Know your rights. Plain English. Permanent.

Friday — Chambers. Live on camera, 10 am PT every week. You bring the questions. I answer them.

If something genuinely breaks, I’ll break format. That’s rare on purpose. When an email shows up off-schedule now, it means something.

And one more thing.

Once a month I’m publishing a piece called The Other Side. I’ll take the strongest argument against a position most of us here hold, including one of mine, and make it as well as I know how. No strawmen. The real version.

Some of you are going to hate those. Read them anyway.

Forty years in courtrooms taught me that a conclusion you can trust is one that could have come out the other way. If I only ever tell you what you want to hear, I’m not a lawyer. I’m a cheerleader.

Free and Paid

Now, the money question, straight up: three of the five stay free forever. The Docket, Objection, and the entire Exhibit A library. No wall, ever. Know-your-rights work is useless if it’s locked up.

Wednesday’s investigations and Friday’s live sessions are what paid subscribers make possible. That’s the trade, and I’d rather say it plainly than let you find out on Wednesday.

You’ll get more value than ever. I wrote it all up on the new About Page. Give it five minutes.

Final Thoughts

One final thing before I head out for a Sunday afternoon run.

More than 17,000 of you are here, and enough of you decided this work was worth supporting that Substack gave this publication an orange bestseller badge.

That badge isn’t really about me. It’s about you deciding this work matters enough to support.

So it belongs to you.

And as grateful as I am for it, that’s not what means the most to me.

What means the most is watching you get to know each other. You recognize names. You respond. You disagree. You encourage each other. You show up for one another.

Because that was always the point.

Not that you found me. Not that you found this publication.

That you found each other.

One thing before Monday: hit reply and tell me what you want me to look at this week. I read every one, and Monday’s thread starts with your questions.

See you Monday.

Quick Summary

The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted 8-5 along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions related to COVID-19, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights during a hearing.

Chairman Rand Paul directed that the contempt resolution bypass the full Senate and be sent directly to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for possible prosecution.

Here’s what you need to know.

Background (This Isn’t Normal)

Understand what this hearing was actually for. It was not an investigation. It was theater, staged by people who figured out years ago that Dr. Fauci’s name raises money and fires up a base, and who have been promising their audience a prosecution ever since. Senator Paul said out loud in December 2021 that Fauci should serve five years in prison. That was the destination. Everything since has been the drive there.

Now walk back to where this started. In early 2020, a virus was killing Americans and the President of the United States was denying COVID was a serious problem and even telling the country it would vanish like a miracle and you’d be fine.

Dr. Fauci was in that building trying to give people accurate information while Trump insisted there was no problem to solve. Dr. Fauci was one of the most experienced infectious disease officials on the planet, working an emergency in real time, and he was doing it while his own administration undercut him publicly.1

Well, despite Trump’s promises that like a miracle, COVID will disappear, it didn’t. Millions of people around the United States and world died.2

President Biden read the warning signs the same way Dr. Fauci’s lawyers and frankly, the rest of normal Americans did. Trump had spent the 2024 campaign promising his MAGA base retribution against a public enemies list. Republicans in Congress had already fired off criminal referrals aimed at Dr. Fauci and kept floating prison time. Biden understood where this was headed. So in his final hours in office, he signed a preemptive pardon, and he put his reasoning in writing. He said the pardon carried no admission of guilt and no acknowledgment of any wrongdoing. Speaking of Dr. Fauci and several others, Biden said these public servants did not deserve to be targets of unjustified, politically motivated prosecution, the kind built to punish people for doing their jobs through the worst health emergency in a century.

Read the pardon. It’s not a confession. It’s a shield. Biden looked at the target already painted on Dr. Fauci’s back, praised a career spanning decades that helped steer the country through HIV, Ebola, Zika, and Covid, and moved to protect one of his most decorated public servants from people determined to make an example of him.

So with all that context before you, ask yourself what Dr. Fauci gains by misleading America during a time in crisis. Also yourself what Dr. Fauci gains by sitting down and answering questions from a man who has spent five years promising to imprison him, who published his private diary the week before the hearing, and whose party has built a fundraising operation around his face. There is nothing. Not one thing.

Every answer he gives becomes raw material for the perjury charge they have already announced they are hunting for. He knows it. His lawyers know it. Anyone who has practiced law for more than a week knows it. That is not a man hiding something. That is a man who, along with his lawyers, understands exactly what room he is sitting in.

The General Law

Here’s the setting. Dr. Fauci is sitting at a witness table. Across from him is the chairman, Senator Paul, who has spent years telling the public Dr. Fauci belongs in prison, who asked the Attorney General to investigate him, who published Dr. Fauci’s private diary the week before the hearing. Then that chairman starts asking questions under oath.

If the Fifth Amendment does not apply in that room, it does not apply anywhere. This is not a loophole. This is the exact situation the framers had in mind when they wrote it. You do not have to help the government build a case against you, and you especially do not have to help a man who has already announced what the case will be.

The pardon does not change the analysis. It narrows one slice of the danger. It leaves the rest sitting right there. State prosecutors are untouched by it. Lying to Congress is a new crime committed the moment he speaks, and no pardon can forgive something that has not happened yet. The pardon’s own text stops at January 19, 2025, and has a subject-matter limit written into it. And nobody knows if a preemptive pardon this broad even holds up, because no court has ever ruled on one and President Trump himself declared it void in a post.

Any single one of those is enough. He does not need all of them. He needs one.

I. The Privilege Turns on Reasonable Apprehension of Danger, and the Chairman Supplied the Apprehension Himself

The rule comes from a 1951 Supreme Court case, Hoffman v. United States. You can take the Fifth when your answer might become one link in a chain that leads to a prosecution. Not proof of guilt. A link. And here is the part people skip over: the tribunal has to accept the claim unless it is perfectly clear, after looking at every circumstance surrounding the hearing, that the witness is wrong and no answer he gives could possibly hurt him.

Every circumstance. That is what the Court said. So look at the circumstances in this room.

In 2021, Senator Paul falsely accused Dr. Fauci of lying to Congress and asked the Attorney General to investigate whether his testimony violated the federal false-statements law. In December of that year, he said Dr. Fauci should serve five years in prison. In June 2026, after Dr. Fauci declined to appear voluntarily, and I would say he had every reason to decline given that history, Senator Paul subpoenaed him. Days before the hearing, Senator Paul released more than a thousand pages of Dr. Fauci’s private diaries and inaccurately described them as proof of deception (they weren’t, and it wasn’t even close). The Secretary of Health and Human Services then announced that his department had spent eight months searching its own files for evidence to use against Dr. Fauci.

Then listen to the people who would actually bring the charges. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s own criminal defense lawyer, has said publicly that some ongoing federal investigations involve people Trump believes should be investigated, and that steering those matters is within Trump’s rights and duties.

Now put yourself in that chair. You did not volunteer. You were subpoenaed. The man questioning you has promised for five years to imprison you, published your diary, and told the country what he is looking for. In forty years of practice, I have never had a client who would walk into that room and start talking. Not one. Any reasonable person and any competent lawyer recognizes that setup for what it is. You are the lamb, and the slaughter is scheduled for the cameras.

Someone will say that an innocent man has nothing to fear. The Supreme Court answered that in 2001 in Ohio v. Reiner. The Court held that the Fifth Amendment protects the innocent, precisely because innocent people get tangled up in ambiguous circumstances. Circumstances exactly like the ones I just described. Innocence does not weaken this claim. It is the reason the protection exists.

And the privilege applies in a congressional hearing with the same force it has in a courtroom. The Court settled that in 1955 in Quinn v. United States. There are no magic words a witness has to recite. If the committee can reasonably understand that he is invoking the Fifth, the committee has to honor it. Fauci stated his grounds on the record and repeated them every time he was asked. [to read arguments 2-9, become a paid subscriber]

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Quick Summary

Minutes ago the Federal Communications Commission voted to scrap the rule that stops any single broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of American homes. It’s a big deal.

The Trump administration holds the approval switch on every merger, license, and lawsuit these media companies need to survive, and it has not been shy about reaching for it. ABC paid $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million and got its merger cleared three weeks later, and the FCC waived a congressional ownership cap so one company could take 265 local stations, with a vote today to erase that cap for good. What gets said in the private calls and the closed-door meetings is not on the public record, and nobody involved is going to volunteer it. What is on the record is the pattern, and the pattern is consistent: pressure applied, coverage adjusted, deal approved.

A CEO with a merger pending and a presidential lawsuit on the calendar knows exactly what is expected. So the country hears about socialism and communism while the actual numbers go unreported: two-thirds of Republican voters back federal child care funding, health care costs now outrank every other economic worry, and families are absorbing tariffs the Supreme Court already ruled unlawful. Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House, so that record belongs to them, and it reaches you only if you go find it yourself before November 3.

The Rules Just Changed

Today, August 6, the Federal Communications Commission voted to scrap the rule that stops any single broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of American homes and replace it with case-by-case review by the chairman. Congress wrote that number into federal law in 2004, on purpose, after the FCC tried to raise it to 45% and got overruled.

This is despite the fact that right now, more than 1,200 television stations, 855 radio stations, thousands of syndicated affiliates, the highest rated cable news network in America, and the largest conservative podcasting machine in the country are concentrated in the hands of a tight circle of corporate right wing Republican players.1

Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner, called it an “unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, who is no liberal, said the plan violates federal law and objected that Carr will now decide which groups get to exceed the limit.

I’m sharing today’s post with you because the new rule just passed a few minutes ago.

You need to know that when you remove that cap, you give these TV companies the green light to play a bigger game and stop leaving money on the table. By snapping up more local stations across the country, they instantly gain massive leverage to demand higher fees from cable and satellite companies, stand toe-to-toe with national networks to keep more of their profits, and pitch huge, multi-market ad packages that compete with giants like Google and Meta. Add in the fact that scaling up lets them eliminate duplicate overhead and share content across hundreds of markets, and suddenly they aren’t just expanding their reach, they are fundamentally boosting their bottom line.

Lifting the ownership cap also enables large, conservative-leaning media groups favored by this administration (and its regulatory oversight) to acquire stations in major new markets, allowing them to replace traditional local reporting with centralized, nationally right-wing slanted political commentary. Furthermore, shifting to a subjective, case-by-case review process gives right-wing MAGA political appointees regulatory leverage to favor ideologically aligned media conglomerates over independent voices.

The Leverage Machine

Right now, the federal government through the Trump administration controls the approval switch on the deals these companies need, and it has made the price of approval visible to every executive watching.

Since December 2024, two networks have paid a combined $31 million to settle the president’s personal lawsuits, one of them three weeks before the FCC cleared its merger, and a late-night host was pulled off the air within hours of the FCC chairman telling broadcasters they could do it the easy way or the hard way. The agency then waived a congressional ownership cap so one company could take 265 local stations, cleared a $111 billion deal that carries CNN with it, and opened a license review of every ABC station after Disney stopped cooperating. Federal judges have since frozen both mergers at the request of attorneys general, while the president continues to sue the Times, the Journal, and the BBC for $35 billion combined without ever having won such a case.2

Now here’s the reality. Let’s say you run one of these media companies with a merger pending, a license renewal docket open, and a personal lawsuit from the president on your calendar. You owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders. A transaction worth tens of billions turns on one signature from a regulator in the Trump administration. You do not need an instruction to take a certain action about your programming and what’s reported. You need an incentive, and you have several.

That is how a news story gets softened and managed. Segments get shelved. Coverage of a Democratic candidate becomes a debate about socialism instead of a debate about rent, the Republican record since Trump’s second term, and the Iran war. Carr said it plainly on Fox News, describing seismic changes across the media landscape and tracing them to President Trump. Here’s what most Americans are saying…

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You feel it before you can put it into words. It’s like sensing a storm coming when the sky still looks clear. It’s like feeling bad news in your gut before it even shows up. That feeling is what brought you to this platform. That feeling is why you’re here, writing and posting and saying things out loud when it would be a lot easier to stay quiet.

So let me tell you what this is really about.

We’re here because we’re fighting back. We keep our heads clear and our conscience awake. We don’t let it turn into anger or waste it yelling into thin air. We use that clear thinking to do everything we can to stop him from grabbing more power. And when that isn’t enough, we keep standing against everything he stands for.

We don’t break, and we don’t give up. We won’t twist our values around just to make room for stuff that’s wrong, even when the people around us do.

We won’t act like any of this is okay.

You can’t wake up one day and pretend that being cruel is just part of someone’s personality. You can’t pretend that honesty is up for grabs the second there’s power to gain. You can’t treat lying, bigotry, and the slow tearing down of our democracy like they’re things we should put up with.

We don’t stand behind him. He doesn’t speak for us. He doesn’t deserve the job he keeps grabbing and using for himself. And yes, we’re sad about it. We’re sad about what he’s doing to this country. We’re sad watching people we used to respect make excuses and fall in line.

But being sad isn’t enough. So we push back. And we keep pushing back.

We’re against all of it. The way he puts women down. The way he blames people who are already struggling. The way he can’t stand anyone who challenges him. The way he goes after honesty and fairness. And it’s not just his terrible policies or the awful things he says. It’s the way he twists the truth on purpose.

We’re against the way he shuts down anyone who disagrees and the way he ignores the law. We’re against the way he attacks the whole idea that facts still matter.

When his worst stuff becomes impossible to ignore, we don’t look away. He stirred up violence against his own country. He tried to overturn an election he lost. He buddies up to dictators and cheers on the bad guys out in the open. We call all of it out. We don’t go quiet just to make our own lives easier. We don’t chalk it up to politics. We don’t trade what we believe for a little comfort.

Plenty of people do. Some are just worn out. Some are scared. Some have talked themselves into thinking it won’t make a difference. Some will tell you it’s complicated. It isn’t.

When survivors speak up about what he’s done, we believe them. When he makes fun of people who can’t fight back, it makes us sick. When he splits families apart and uses kids as bargaining chips, we’re furious. When he gives cover to extremists, we say so plainly. When his lies spread fast, we refuse to help them along.

You’ve heard that history belongs to the winners. That’s not the whole story. The rest of it belongs to the people who won’t let it get rewritten. That’s the job you sign up for every time you hit publish here. You won’t let the past get cleaned up and softened. You won’t smooth out the ugly parts so they go down easier. You know where you stand, and you’re standing there.

Someday someone reading this will be right where you are now, stuck between what’s easy and what’s right. Give them something to hold onto. Show them you didn’t cave. You didn’t quit. You didn’t make excuses for stuff that never should’ve been excused.

That’s why we’re here. That’s why we keep supporting each other and keep writing.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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The Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act would empower ordinary citizens and state attorneys general to sue in the name of the United States to recover funds obtained through corruption by covered officials, including the President and Vice President. It was introduced July 30.

Stop for a second and think about the last time you felt powerless watching someone in power get away with something. If you’re like me, this thought happens daily and it usually involves Donald Trump and others in his administration wasting our tax dollars.

That feeling has a fix now. On July 30, 2026, Senator Alex Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act, landmark new legislation in the wake of the unprecedented corruption of the second Trump Administration. And buried inside the legalese is something that changes the game for regular people like you.1

If passed, you can finally sue. And you can do it on behalf of the entire country.

Here’s what that means. The bill would establish a private right of action for the public and state Attorneys General to sue for recoveries and forfeitures from certain federal officials, including the President and Vice President. The idea is to recover money belong to Americans that’s been taken by corruption.

This isn’t a committee. It’s not a task force that meets behind closed doors. This gives you the right. It gives a state attorney general the right to stand up in court to take back stolen public money.

This isn’t a wild new idea pulled out of thin air. The bill creates a private right of action that mirrors the False Claims Act, a federal law that prevents companies and individuals from making illegal financial claims against the government.

The False Claims Act has worked since the Civil War. It lets ordinary people file suit in the name of the United States and rewards them for recovering public funds. This legislation takes that proven tool and points it straight at the highest offices in the land. It empowers American citizens and attorneys general to sue in the name of the United States to recover money obtained through corruption by presidents, senior officials, key campaign figures and major government contractors.

And before you assume this opens the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits, the sponsors already closed that door. Schumer built in provisions that give priority to state attorneys general and to larger, more severe cases of corruption to ensure that frivolous suits don’t get in the way of justice. I’ve been litigating cases for four decades and took the time to read the proposed bill. It’s good and with a few minor changes, I believe it would finally give the average American the ability to hold wrongdoers in Washington DC accountable.

Now here’s where most reform bills fall apart. They create a watchdog, and then the person being watched simply defunds it, fires its leaders, or starves it into silence. The people who wrote this bill saw that coming.

So they built armor around it.

The Bureau would be led by a seven-member, Senate-confirmed board with fixed terms, strict independence protections and partisan-balance requirements. No party gets to stack it. The board would be capped at three members from each party, with the seventh being nonpartisan.

Then comes the funding armor. The bill would create the Freedom From Influence Fund as a dedicated, self-financing source of revenue, preventing a president from using the budget process to starve the Bureau into submission. It funds itself, similar to the Federal Reserve. A president cannot cut off its oxygen. And if one tries to disable it by leaving seats empty, a special three-judge division of the DC Circuit is empowered to appoint temporary board members, so the bureau never loses its quorum.

That is what accountability with teeth looks like.

The bill also cleans up the mess we already have. Right now, oversight is scattered across agencies that trip over each other. This legislation would consolidate the Federal Election Commission, Office of Government Ethics and Office of Special Counsel within the new Bureau. One roof. One mission. Sweeping investigative, subpoena, and enforcement power aimed at executive branch self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and the kind of crypto and foreign-money entanglements that have dominated headlines.

The public is on board with this. A Brennan Center for Justice poll earlier this year found that 92% of all voters, including Republicans, Democrats and independents, believe corruption is a problem in government and politics. And 81% of voters support the creation of a new federal ethics enforcer. This is nearly everyone.

With Republicans holding the Senate majority, the Act has little realistic chance of reaching the floor this Congress. Schumer said it plainly: “I’m not going to pretend this legislation’s a panacea. It’s not. But it’s a big, important first step.” The sponsors have framed it as groundwork for future oversight, and it will be part of the Democrats’ agenda when they reclaim the majority after the midterms.

Learn what this bill does. Read and talk about it (the link is below). Call the people who represent you and tell them where you stand. Corruption thrives on your silence and your assumption that nothing can change. This bill is proof that it can.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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Picture a courtroom in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. A sitting congressman sits at the table, watching his former wife, Emily Moreno, across the room. His own attorney, Larry Zukerman, stands to address the judge. And in a sworn filing days later, Emily swears the room heard Zukerman say the quiet part about his own client out loud. Max Miller “just can’t control himself.”

Read those words again. His own lawyer said them, by Emily’s sworn account. Not a reporter. Not an opponent running against him. The man hired to defend him, describing the person paying his bills.

What the record shows

Emily Moreno told police her husband held a gun to her head. She said he threw hot water on her on the morning she planned to leave. She said their two year old came to her carrying the words “Daddy kill you.” Their little girl turned up with a fractured collarbone and a bruise a police report described as shaped like a handprint.

Then Miller posted a pile of documents online to clear his name, and buried in the pile sat a photo of his own daughter so disturbing her mother’s lawyer called the image possible child sexual abuse material and demanded answers. The House Ethics Committee now says it is reviewing whether Miller committed domestic abuse and used illegal drugs.

Today Miller was interviewed by Jake Tapper:

This is the record. And this is the man expecting to be voted back to Congress.

Emily Moreno’s father is Bernie Moreno, a sitting Republican senator from Ohio. On Tuesday he broke his silence to call his former son-in-law a danger who needs serious psychological help and belongs nowhere near the House of Representatives.

Almost every Republican in Congress is looking the other way.

Here’s my take.

I believe the victims. I’ve handled too many abuse cases over the years.

I believe that guys like Miller belong in jail, not in Congress. And while we’re here, that goes for Trump too, but that’s another post for another time.

When a Republican senator says a Republican congressman should not hold office, and the party looks away, you are watching something rot in real time. Asked on Sunday whether Miller should resign, Donald Trump told reporters…

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This article is commentary on matters of public concern. It is not legal advice. Consult licensed counsel about specific situations.

Today’s Vote

Today’s Senate Judiciary Committee vote advancing Todd Blanche was not the finish line, it was the handoff. That vote advanced Todd Blanche and handed his nomination to the next stage.

Here is what happens now.

Once the committee formally reports the nomination, it goes onto the Senate’s Executive Calendar. At that point the full Senate can vote on it. Senate leadership controls the timing. Current reporting says a vote could come later this week, and no date is guaranteed.

Watch the procedure, because that is where people get tripped up. If Democrats withhold unanimous consent, Republicans may need to file cloture and work through the Senate’s procedural clock. Understand what that clock actually requires. Ending debate on this nomination takes a simple majority. Confirming him takes a simple majority. Sixty votes never enter the picture.

Now look at the count. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis held out, and both now support him. That puts confirmation on track. Nothing becomes final until the full Senate votes.

Confirmation still leaves two steps. The president must formally appoint him, and that usually means signing his commission. Blanche must then take the oath. Only after that does he hold the permanent office.

Here is your bottom line. The committee hurdle is behind him. The full Senate comes next. This process wraps up in days or weeks rather than months, unless Senate leadership sits on the vote or Republican support shifts.

That is the public record.

What follows is a trial lawyer’s analysis of what all of this actually means inside a courtroom and where it goes from here. It’s more than 35 pages long. I have not seen a more detailed or exhaustive overview of this situation anywhere, and it explains exactly why Blanche and Trump will keep pushing the anti-weaponization fund and the Trump related tax immunity. It also shows you and every other American why you need to be concerned.

Paid subscribers, keep reading.

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