Too Ridiculous For Words

President Trump’s abiding desire for a retributive prosecution of former President Joe Biden for a MAGA fever dream — White House staff’s alleged use of the autopen to issue pardons when Biden was too demented to sign them himself — has apparently run up against an intractable problem: “Investigators were never quite clear what crime, if any, had been committed by the Biden administration’s use of the autopen,” the NYT reports in characteristically understated style.

It wasn’t for lack of trying.

After Trump publicly demanded that Biden be investigated, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office gave it a go, which is a scandal in its own right. The effort was abandoned, according to the NYT, right around the time Pirro was rebuffed by a grand jury when she tried to indict six Democratic lawmakers for a video reminding service members of their duty to not follow illegal orders.

“In both the autopen and lawmakers’ video cases, veteran prosecutors were skeptical from the outset that there was anything close to sufficient evidence to justify criminal charges, according to people familiar with the matter,” the NYT reported.

The case of the alleged Biden misuse of the autopen — which in the MAGA cinematic universe would have invalidated all of his pardons and commutations — was flogged by Ed Martin, the interim D.C. U.S. attorney who later became the U.S. Pardon Attorney. But we need not over-focus on clownish underlings when President Trump himself issued an official memorandum articulating his wild theory of the case:

The vast majority of Biden’s executive actions were signed using a mechanical signature pen, often called an autopen, as opposed to Biden’s own hand.  This was especially true of actions taken during the second half of his Presidency, when his cognitive decline had apparently become even more clear to those working most closely with him.

Unlike the video by Democratic lawmakers, this autopen investigation never made it as far as grand jury.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Epstein Files: The GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about her handling of the DOJ’s Jeffrey Epstein files. Five Republicans joined with committee Democrats to vote for the subpoena: Reps. Tim Burchett (TN), Lauren Boebert (CO), Michael Cloud (TX), Scott Perry (PA), and Nancy Mace (R-SC), who proposed the subpoena.
• Bar Investigations: The Trump administration is proposing a new federal regulation that purports to subordinate state bar investigations of DOJ attorneys to the attorney general’s own investigation.
• No-Knock Warrants: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche rescinded the Biden DOJ policy that tightly restricted no-knock warrants in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville.

Quote of the Day

“It’s far easier to lose institutional trust than to rebuild it. Once courts and the public begin to suspect selective enforcement or strategic defiance, credibility does not snap back with a few corrected briefs. It returns only through consistent, disciplined adherence to the law—shown case after case, year after year. It’s unclear if the Department [of Justice] will ever be able to rebound fully from the damage Bondi and company have inflicted in barely over a year.”—former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman

Backlash Against Polis in Colorado

In Colorado, the state prosecutor, state attorney general, secretary of state, and a U.S. senator all reacted vehemently against Democratic Gov. Jared Polis’ signal that he will commute the sentence of election denier Tina Peters.

Latest from the Middle East …

• Azerbaijan: In a widening of the conflict, Azerbaijan promised to respond to what it said were Iranian drone strikes in its territory. Iran denied responsibility for the strikes and blamed Israel.
• Watch: The WSJ visualizes the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz after the U.S-Israeli campaign against Iran began.
• ‘Quiet Death’: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cheerleaded as “quiet death” the U.S. sinking of an Iranian navy destroyer, the first launch of a torpedo in combat by a U.S. submarine since World War II.

On the Home Front …

• The Senate voted largely along party lines not to reign in Trump’s misadventure in Iran. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and John Fetterman (D-PA) were the only two senators to cross party lines.
• The strident tone of a bully who thinks he’s a victim, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has wholeheartedly adopted, first emerged in American culture to my mind in 1980s action movies in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. To see it reach the highest echelons of the Pentagon are a 40-year nightmare in the making. Note this Hegseth quote in particular from the clip below: “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

• An example of what Don Moynihan calls the “Clicktatorship,” where everything is content in a miasma of propaganda, misinformation, and AI-generated imagery that intentionally makes it hard to know what’s real:

Real Talk

WSJ: Russia Is Big Winner as Iran War Drains Supplies That Ukraine Needs

DOJ Appeals Again In AEA Case

The Trump DOJ, as expected, has appealed U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s Feb. 12 order directing the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return from third countries of those former Alien Enemies Act detainees who wish to receive the due process they were denied when deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison one year ago this month. Last week, the ACLU notified Boasberg that 19 former detainees either “wish to travel independently to a U.S. port of entry or who wish to be flown from a third country to the United States for their court proceedings, understanding that in both scenarios they will be detained upon arrival.”

IMPORTANT

In a new ruling, U.S. Judge Mark E. Walker of Tallahassee issued a preliminary injunction blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis’ executive order declaring the Council on American-Islamic Relations to be a foreign terrorist organization. DeSantis also purported to deny government benefits to “any person known to have provided material support or resources” to CAIR.

“The First Amendment bars the governor from continuing the troubling trend of using an executive office to make a political statement at the expense of others’ constitutional rights,” Walker wrote.

2026 Ephemera

• TX-Sen: President Trump announced on social media that he plans to endorse in the GOP primary runoff for U.S. Senate and expects the other candidate “to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE!”
• MT-Sen: In a surprise move, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) withdrew his filing papers to run for re-election moments before the filing deadline. Nearly simultaneously, Montana U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme (R) filed to run for Daines’ seat. The trickery left Alme as the only GOP candidate in the primary, and gave Democrats no time to field a major challenger in the general election. Daines and Trump immediately endorsed Alme.
• TX-23: The House Ethics Committee belatedly launched an investigation of Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) the day after he was forced into a runoff in the GOP primary in Texas. Within hours of the committee’s announcement, Gonzales admitted to the affair with a former staffer (who later committee suicide) that is the subject of the ethics probe and said that god had forgiven him for his “mistake.”

Trumpian Grotesqueness

An excellent 3D model of the White House complex shows the asymmetry in scale and in design of Trump’s vanity ballroom project, whose footprint “will dwarf both the Executive Residence and the West Wing,” the NYT reports.

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