LOL Wut?

Poised to lose a House vote this week calling for the Justice Department to release its Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump snookered a good chunk of political media by declaring in a social media post last evening that the House should vote to release the files.

Knowing he’s going to lose the vote — and knowing that the vote itself won’t be enough to pry the files loose unless the Senate agrees and he doesn’t veto it — Trump tried to redefine the setback by withdrawing his opposition to the vote, but not actually releasing the Epstein files.

But who in the world would be fooled by this?

The whole reason the House is voting is because the Trump DOJ — run out of the White House — won’t cough up the files. That is to say: Trump won’t release the files.

It’s not an about-face or a reversal. It’s a sham.

But It Gets Worse … It Always Gets Worse

Trump’s inane new position — that he wants House Republicans to vote to demand that he release the Epstein files that he refuses to release — comes after the president on Friday ordered the Justice Department to re-investigate everyone’s contacts with Jeffrey Epstein except his own.

While Trump has already broken the Justice Department — robbing it of its independence, capacity, and reputation — the demand to weaponize the Epstein case against Democrats will require a new level of Orwellian reality-denial by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

What’s groundbreaking about the new and improved Epstein investigation is that it wasn’t just career prosecutors but Bondi and Patel who said only a few months ago that there was nothing more to investigate. Trump is making them reverse and contort themselves in a degrading display of cult devotion that exceeds anything we’ve seen from them up to now. At this point, the only thing more cravenly loyal they could do is to investigate and indict themselves.

Bondi’s immediate public response to Trump’s demand: “Thank you, Mr. President.” She has turned the investigation over to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who now faces his own loyalty test.

Perhaps the Most Important News Since Friday

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — in a troubling and convoluted ruling — appears to have backed its way into not blocking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg from resuming contempt of court proceedings against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case. I’m sorry if you had to read that sentence twice, but you have to read the fractured court ruling several times to make sense of it. Chris Geidner gives it his best shot.

This is a critical case in the closely watched question of whether federal judges will hold the line on Trump’s attacks on their constitutional role. If a district judge like Boasberg can’t proceed to investigate the administration for contempt in a historically important case where it was blatantly contemptuous, then the battle to sustain an independent judiciary will have been lost before it had barely begun.

The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition

Following the court hearing Thursday, that signaled Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as U.S. attorney may not pass muster with the judge reviewing it, Attorney General Pam Bondi took the almost unbelievable step of attempting for a second time to ratify, after the fact and retroactively, the appointment Halligan’s conduct before the grand jury that indicted Jim Comey.

The new filing from Bondi attempts to patch the hole in her previous ratification, when it was revealed in court by the judge that Bondi had reviewed an incomplete transcript of the grand jury proceedings:

The Trump DOJ simultaneously filed a new declaration from Halligan that attempts to tamp down concern that parts of the grand jury proceedings weren’t recorded or are “missing.” Halligan attests that the gap in the transcript merely reflects the time when the grand jury was deliberating:

Halligan’s declaration clarifies some but not all of what happened in the grand jury proceedings. I had been assuming that after the grand jury returned the no-true bill as to one of the counts that Halligan would have gone back into the grand jury room and presented an alternative indictment on the two counts that they ultimately charged Comey with. But, according to her declaration, she had no further contact with the grand jury before it returned the two-count indictment.

Combine that with the paperwork fumbles (if that’s not too generous of a word) that the judge who accepted the indictment called Halligan out for in court, and there remains what Marcy Wheeler calls “a slew of problems” that I expect Comey’s lawyers will find a way to explore and possibly exploit.

Must Read

NYT: The Unraveling of the Justice Department … Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion.

The Corruption: Mike Flynn Edition

Former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn and former Trump White House lawyer Stefan Passantino have joined the gravy train of Trump allies seeking to extract taxpayer-funded settlements from the Trump DOJ over claims they were the victims of politically motivated retribution. Flynn is seeking $50 million.

Georgia Fake Electors Case Back On?

Peter Skandalakis, the director of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia, has assigned the Georgia fake electors case to himself after being unable to find another prosecutor willing to take it on following the disqualification of Atlanta DA Fani Willis – but it’s not clear if he’ll continue to pursue convictions of President Trump and his alleged co-conspirators.

Venezuela Watch

• NPR reports for the first time on comments earlier this year by then-Trump DOJ official Emil Bove, now a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, that perhaps foreshadowed the administration’s lawless attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats:

At a Justice Department conference in February, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told the department’s top drug prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn’t interested in interdicting suspected drug vessels at sea anymore. Instead, he said, the U.S. should “just sink the boats,” according to three people present for the speech.

• On Saturday, the U.S. killed three people in its 21st lawless strike against alleged drug-smuggling boats, bringing the death toll in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to at least 83.
• The dubious and still-secret OLC memo that justifies the lawless U.S. campaign against drug-smuggling boat claims fentanyl is a potential chemical weapon threat, the WSJ reports.
• Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, says reports that the OLC memo contains language absolving everyone in the chain of command from criminal liability for the strikes is unusual: “It signals a fear that what they’re doing is illegal and that they could possibly be subject to criminal action under U.S. law and under international law.”

Quote of the Day

In a reality TV presidency, you need beefs, heels, betrayals, prodigals returning, and all manner of plot tricks to sustain the manufactured artificial drama. Who knows where this plot twist ends up going:

BASH: We have seen these attacks from the president at other people. It's not new. And I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you.MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: I think that's fair criticism. And I would like to say, humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-11-16T14:31:02.802Z

Preach, Sister

Rebecca Solnit:

It’s striking to me that a lot of people want politics to be about their personal feelings, in which case they’re not engaged in politics, though they may be engaged in the sabotage of politics. …

[Y]ou vote strategically not expressively; you’re facing a ballot, not a Tinder/Grindr profile or a confessional, which I say because people often seem to speak as though they need their candidate to be someone who matches up to them in every way, even though they are only one of hundreds to hundreds of millions of voters, or see this as being about purity, aka choosing the candidate who is without sin or flaw, who they themselves will feel purer for voting for …

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