When Congress passed the Epstein Files law, the common and undoubtedly correct assumption was that the Trump DOJ would simply weed out the Trump stuff. And as we’ve seen, they’ve gone to town releasing everything about … say, Bill Clinton but in many cases obviously filtered out Trump stuff. So this basic part of the story is predicted, unsurprising and confirmed. But there’s a more complex if no less corrupt story coming into focus.
A few pretty damaging things have come out. I’m not sure for instance whether that purported jailhouse Epstein letter is real. But it’s pretty clear the White House/DOJ doesn’t have any evidence or hasn’t yet found any evidence that it’s fake. If they did, they’d release it. The best discussion of the authenticity question I’ve seen is this short piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. The gist is that, based on what we know in the public record, there’s no clear evidence pointing either to its authenticity or fraudulence. There are a couple potential red flags. But these have relativity straightforward explanations based on how the prison mail system works. They could be evidence of fakery but not necessarily. A handwriting analysis was done and that could at least point in one or the other clear direction. But we haven’t seen that report.
I got a host of very interesting responses to yesterday’s post about the tech platforms force-feeding the mass consumer market AI. I learned a lot from your responses, which included both direct personal experiences and expert perspectives on different dimensions of the topic. What is important to me about this moment is distinguishing two or three different very real things happening at once.
The first is a genuine critical mass in the development of LLM-based machine learning. This is a much better description than “AI” to my thinking, since the latter contains a vast range of meanings from simple and accurate to triumphalist and grandiose. But machine learning is real, and in recent years it’s developed real capabilities that are at least transformative in various areas of work and technology. I’m skeptical of what we’ve developed beyond this at this point but really don’t know. It could be a lot. And it will increase. I think this is the best way to understand the technology itself at this moment now.
GREENBELT, MD — For the first time since he was unlawfully deported to El Salvador in March, Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared in person this afternoon in front of U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland. He is no longer detained by El Salvador, the Justice Department, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But as his lawyer pointed out he remains in a “literal double bind,” with a bracelet on one ankle from his criminal case in Tennessee and an ICE bracelet on the other ankle from his immigration case in Maryland.
I just got a new iPhone. I didn’t need a newer version. But my old one was broken in a way that wasn’t easily fixed. So I submitted myself to the hard wheel of planned obsolescence. I’m always happy for ever-improved image quality. Otherwise, for me, it was just a need for a new, undamaged phone. But this is one of the models which Apple tells you very frequently has their AI bundled into the device. Which I’m told is awesome. Or that’s what they’re telling me. A lot. And my sense generally is that Apple is the least over-the-top of the big techs in this regard.
As I’ve been using the new phone, I’ve noticed that the Apple texting app now takes suggested phrases and completing your words to the next level — as in kind of an absurd level.
It was pretty obvious that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ admission to Vanity Fair that President Trump was engaged in “score settling” was going to make it into a legal filing sooner or later. Now it has.
In a filing overnight, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s attorneys cited the Wiles interview as part of their bid to dismiss the indictment against him on vindictive prosecution grounds:
I’ve been under the weather. That partly explains missing two days of posts. But another reason is a feeling of repetition. Everything I see in our politics right now — or at least at the pinnacle where Donald Trump dominates all the visuals and attention — has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it — crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him. That was, I believe, Wednesday, though the days run together. Then there’s his new hall of presidents, a sick-burn tweet storm embedded on a wall of what remains of the White House. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.
As the year winds down, we have a fun little project I want to pitch you on. It’s a key, incremental part of keeping TPM strong, vital and moving forward into the new year and beyond. Right now, we are 279 subscriptions short of a net increase of 3,000 subscribers for the year. True, this is not a bumper-sticker ready declaration. But it’s an important one. We want and need to keep growing like that as we move forward and the 3,000 net new members is a big milestone. So if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, please consider doing it before the new year.
And here’s the incentive. We have a supply of high-end TPM t-shirts and baseball caps from TPM’s 25th anniversary. These isn’t your standard made-on-demand online merch stuff. This is high end, plush, well made. I’m not saying it’s quite Louis Vuitton. But if you went to the campus bookstore at your alma mater and thought of getting a sweatshirt or something, it’d be that level of quality. If you are a non-member and you sign up for a TPM AF (ad free) annual membership we will give you a choice of either a T-shirt or a cap. This is while supplies last. We’ll update each day to tell you what we have left. If you are currently a TPM Prime member and you upgrade to ad free, we will make the same offer. Just to be super clear, we cannot do this for a regular TPM Prime membership. This does not mean that we don’t want you to sign up or that we’re not super grateful but these are pricey and we are trying to offer these as an additional incentive. (I’ll note how to claim your merch below.) Mainly, the reason to do this is to join our community and support our team’s work. People are often amazed that this little organization remains when so many other bigger ones, richer ones, hotter ones, have fallen by the wayside. This is why. We have this community who wants to be part of what we do and support what we do for the relatively small cost of a subscription. Click here to join right now.
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INSTRUCTIONS: If you sign up for a new TPM PRIME AF (ad free) annual membership, here’s what you do to claim your merch. Sign up or upgrade to the new membership. You’ll get a receipt by email. Someone at TPM will then follow up later (that day or the next) by email to get the details about your merch preferences and where to send it. That’s it. As I said, we will do this while supplies last and we are making the offer through this week. We will update on the Editor’s Blog if we run out of merch by the end of the week.
Our bespoke piñata of the day is the Susie Wiles piece in Vanity Fair (they must be excited to move on from Olivia …) We’re seeing the standard incantations of “fake news” from none other than Wiles herself. Trump’s Cabinet secretaries have all lined up to post tweets repeating the claim, intoning the Trump-Wiles catechism as though they’d just emerged from a fast-forward struggle session with a pack of feral MAGA toughs. I’ve started making my way through the morselly excerpts, as perhaps you have or are too. What struck me here was perhaps not even so much the quotes as the venue.
Few American publications are more at the heart of the cosmopolitan world of America than Vanity Fair. That is not liberal. Small-c cosmopolitan is different but overlapping. But it is perhaps even more than “liberal” what MAGA is talking about when it denounces the “coastal elite.” Certainly they’re talking more about that than, like, People for the American Way or Americans for Democratic Action or Heather Cox Richardson. Susie Wiles is no fool. And while she may — as in a very low de minimis chance — have gotten a touch injudicious in a few quotes, she certainly knew with perfect clarity what Vanity Fair is.
Today, I want to share some additional thoughts with you on this ranging topic of tech lords and predators, the conquistadors and pirates in our midst. It’s a point that is perhaps the most visible part of the current moment, but because of that, paradoxically, hardest to see clearly. It’s been more than a century since the men at the highest pinnacles of the American economy so visibly and directly intervened in the country’s politics. An element of that is the highly personalist nature of the big tech monopolies. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a CEO or plurality owner. He is Facebook. He’s the founder, the driving mind since the beginning. I believe that voting rights are structured in such a way at Meta that in terms of control as opposed to equity stakes he is in total control. Meta cannot be taken away from him. Whether or not voting rights are precisely the same, a similar story prevails at Amazon, Google, certainly X and all of Musk’s companies. We haven’t seen anything like that since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons, when big names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rockefeller similarly owned, drove and personified the great corporate behemoths and monopolies of the day.
For many decades, certainly since the Second World War, even the more politically- and ideologically-minded corporations kept their political spending and their exertions in the background. Perhaps they gave most of their money to Republicans but they’d give to Democrats too just to keep them mostly on side.
What we began to see in the late Biden administration and then to an almost mind-boggling degree through 2025 is not just the big tech titans cozying up to Trump and doing so visibly, but making themselves what we might call main characters in the American Political Cinematic Universe. There’s really nothing like it in our history. I know many friends who are into MMA and the UFC. My sons are into it. Not my thing. But great if it’s yours. But if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you take ringside seats at a UFC match with Trump friend and UFC CEO Dana White, you’re sending a very clear and specific message and you’re sending it far outside the channels where most traditional political messaging takes place. Even more if you put White on your board. And the same applies to going on Joe Rogan’s show and talking about a rights movement for “high testosterone males.” Yes, Zuckerberg got into MMA before the so-called “vibe shift.” But not in this politics-inflected way. We’ve seen countless examples of this in so many different contexts, starting with that unforgettable inauguration image where the seats of greatest distinction were reserved for the centi-billionaire tech titans. Government of, by and for them.
Donald Trump Jr. on Saturday said that his father did speak to fired FBI Director James Comey about his preferred outcome for the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, though President Donald Trump flatly denied doing so.
“When I hear the Flynn comments, you and I know both know my father for a long time. When he tells you to do something, guess what? There’s no ambiguity in it,” Trump Jr. told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro. “There’s no ‘Hey, I’m hoping. You and I are friends. Hey, I hope this happens, but you’ve got to do your job.’ That’s what he told Comey.”
On Friday, however, the President flatly denied making those remarks to Comey or pressuring him to drop the investigation into Flynn, implicitly or otherwise.
“You said you hoped the Flynn investigation he could let go,” ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Trump during a press conference.
“I didn’t say that,” Trump interrupted.
“So he lied about that?” Karl asked, referring to Comey.
“Well, I didn’t say that,” Trump said. “And I mean I will you tell you I didn’t say that.”
But, he added, “There would be nothing wrong if I did say it, according to everybody that I’ve read today, but I did not say that.”
Trump Jr. on Saturday claimed that “everything that went on in the Comey testimony was basically ridiculous.”
“For this guy as a politician to then go back and write a memo, ‘oh, I felt,’ he felt so threatened, he felt that — but he didn’t do anything!” Trump Jr. said.
Comey’s blockbuster testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, however, prompted Trump to offer to do the same.
Off message here for Trump Jr. Says his father did tell Comey he hoped he let the Flynn investigation go. His dad says that's a lie. pic.twitter.com/oOhaFgZY4a
President Donald Trump on Sunday suggested that there are more revelations to come from fired FBI Director James Comey, and questioned their legality.
“I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible,” Trump tweeted early Sunday morning. “Totally illegal? Very ‘cowardly!'”
I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very 'cowardly!'
Trump made similar remarks on Friday in another early morning tweet where he labeled Comey a “leaker,” referring to Comey’s decision to share the contents of memos about his conversations with Trump to the press via a friend.
Comey revealed that decision during his testimony on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he painted Trump as a liar and testified that Trump tried to obtain a loyalty pledge from the former FBI head and pushed him to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Trump on Friday said he was “100 percent” willing to match Comey and testify under oath to contradict Comey’s testimony.
A spokesman for Attorney General Jeff Sessions late Thursday pushed back on several aspects of James Comey’s Senate testimony after the former FBI director raised new questions about Sessions’ actions before and after he recused himself from the federal investigation of Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.
Comey’s testimony touched on Sessions at several points. He hinted that the FBI was aware of information that led the bureau to believe Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia probe weeks before he actually did so, and reportedly told senators in a subsequent closed session that Sessions may have met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. on a third occasion that the attorney general had not disclosed.
The morning after former FBI Director James Comey delivered blockbuster testimony in the Senate in which he painted President Donald Trump as a liar and said that the President pressured him to quash a probe into Michael Flynn, Trump published a tweet declaring “vindication.”
Trump published his tweet shortly after 6 a.m. on Friday morning, during the time frame when he typically shares his thoughts on Twitter.
He referenced “false statements and lies,” appearing to accuse Comey of lying under oath.
Trump also labeled Comey a “leaker,” referencing Comey’s decision to get a friend to share the contents of memos about his conversations with Trump to the press, a revelation the former FBI director shared on Thursday during with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!
James Comey testified Thursday that he was “stunned” by requests President Donald Trump made to curtail federal investigations related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and thought the President’s remarks were of investigative interest— and it seems other senior FBI officials agree.
Though the ousted FBI director did not go as far as accusing Trump of attempting to obstruct justice, Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered the clearest indication yet that the President may already be under scrutiny for exactly that.
Part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s job is to “sort that out,” Comey said, dismissing questions from the assembled senators on whether he personally believed Trump obstructed justice. His testimony made the case for why he felt “sure” that Mueller would look into the multiple one-on-one conversations that Trump requested of his then-FBI director.
Comey says Trump asked him to quash the FBI’s investigation into ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn in one Feb. 14 exchange in the Oval Office. In a March 30 phone call, Comey says Trump requested that he lift the “cloud” that the Russia probe was casting over his administration.
“I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct,” Comey said of the Feb. 14 meeting. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that’s an offense.”
Importantly, Comey noted that Trump asked other senior officials, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, to clear the room before initiating the conversation about the Flynn probe. He noted those officials hesitated before complying.
“Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?” Comey said. “That, to me as an investigator, is a very significant fact.”
Senior FBI officials briefed on that conversation said it was “of investigative interest” to determine the intent of Trump’s statements about Flynn, Comey testified.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe made similar remarks in separate testimony before the committee on Wednesday, telling Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) that it was “accurate” to assume that Comey’s private conversations with Trump either already are or are “likely to become part of a criminal investigation.”
These loaded comments apparently did not trouble Trump’s legal team or his defenders on Capitol Hill, who insisted that Comey’s testimony actually vindicated the President. They noted that, as Trump previously said, Comey confirmed that he informed Trump on three separate occasions that the President was not the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
Republican lawmakers, the White House and Trump’s own family members also argued that the President was merely looking out for the interest of Flynn, a longtime adviser, and never explicitly ordered Comey to end any investigation. Those defenders neglected to mention that Comey testified that a senior FBI official cautioned him against telling Trump he was not a part of the federal investigation, because that person believed that “inevitably his behavior, his conduct will fall within the scope.”
Whether Trump requested or ordered that Comey drop the investigation into Flynn is an irrelevant semantic distinction. As Comey testified, Trump asked him to swear “loyalty” and repeatedly brought up the status of his job in their conversations, leaving the former FBI director with the impression that his continued tenure at the bureau was “contingent upon how he felt I conducted myself and whether I demonstrated loyalty.”
He did not comply with Trump’s requests and was fired only four months into Trump’s term. By the President’s own admission, Comey was dismissed because of the “Russia thing.”
“I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted,” Comey testified. “That is a very big deal.”
The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it was “hard to overstate the significance” of fired FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose committee is leading its own investigation into Russian election meddling, wrote in a statement responding to Comey’s testimony that it “constitutes evidence of an intention to interfere or potentially obstruct at least a portion of the Russia investigation, if not more.”
Read Schiff’s full statement below:
“Today, former FBI Director James Comey testified that the President of the United States demanded his loyalty, and directed him to drop a criminal investigation into his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. Director Comey further testified that he believes President Trump ultimately fired him in order to alter the course of the FBI’s Russia investigation. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this testimony.
“These discussions and others took place in one-on-one telephone conversions and meetings initiated by the President, or after the President cleared the room of other people. Director Comey wrote memoranda about his conversations with President Trump because he was worried that the President and his Administration would misrepresent them.
“In my view, this testimony constitutes evidence of an intention to interfere or potentially obstruct at least a portion of the Russia investigation, if not more. It will be important for Congress to obtain evidence to corroborate this testimony — the memoranda, certainly, as well as any tapes, if they exist. We should also interview those around Director Comey at the time of these contacts, to get their contemporaneous impressions of his conversations with the President and to supplement his testimony. Finally, we cannot accept the refusal of Directors Rogers and Coats to answer questions about whether they were asked to intervene with Comey on the Flynn case or any related matter. Similarly, we will need to ask Director Pompeo the same questions. These additional steps are vital to determining the ultimate significance of the President’s actions.”
A routine budget hearing in the Senate next week featuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions took on heightened importance following ousted FBI Director James Comey’s explosive Thursday testimony, which raised questions about what Sessions did both before and after he recused himself from the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At least one member of the Appropriations Committee, Vice Chair Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), plans to use next week’s budget hearing as an opportunity to grill Sessions about Russia, Comey and President Donald Trump. “I have many important questions for him to answer,” he said in a statement.
During his feverishly-anticipated testimony Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, ousted FBI Director James Comey made a host of major revelations about his handling of President Donald Trump and the federal investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election in the months before he was abruptly fired in May.
Importantly, Comey disclosed new information about actions he took when he became concerned about the Trump administration’s attempts to establish a “patronage” relationship with him and persuade him to drop the FBI investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Here’s an overview of some of the most significant moments from the hearing, where Comey revealed exactly what steps he took and why he took them.
Throughout his testimony Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey repeatedly stressed the serious implications of Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. He argued that the issue of Russian meddling it not about politics, but about the credibility of the American government.
Toward the beginning of the hearing, Comey said that he has no doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election and that Russian government officials were aware of the meddling.
He later stressed that Russian interference is very real, countering President Donald Trump’s constant dismissals of the Russia probe.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) asked Comey about the way Trump has discussed Russia’s election meddling, noting that the President has described Russian interference “as a hoax and as fake news.” In response, Comey stressed that there’s no doubt that the Russian government tried to interfere in the 2016 election and that the conclusion on Russia’s actions is “about as unfake as you can possibly get.”
“There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active measures campaign driven from the top of the government. There is no fuzz on that,” Comey said.
“It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community — and the members of this committee have seen the intelligence — it’s not a close call,” he continued. “That happened. That’s about as unfake as you can possibly get and is very, very serious, which is why it’s so refreshing to see a bipartisan focus on that. Because this is about America, not about any particular party.”
Asked if it was a “hostile act by the Russian government,” Comey replied, “Yes.”
Later in his testimony, Comey emphasized that Russia’s attempt to meddle in the election is a threat to the United States and should rise above politics. He delivered a passionate monologue about just how grave a threat Russia’s meddling is to America.
“The reason this is such a big deal is we have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for, except other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful,” Comey said. “But we’re talking about a foreign government that — using technical intrusion, lots of other methods — tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act.”
“That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it. It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally,” he continued. “They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world. They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them. And so they’re going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible. That’s what this is about. And they will be back, because we remain — as difficult as we can be with each other — we remain that shining city on the hill and they don’t like it.”
The former FBI director also noted that Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 election was part of an ongoing effort targeted at the U.S.
“It’s a long-term practice of theirs. It stepped up a notch in a significant way in ’16. They’ll be back,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He stressed that the probe into Russian election meddling is also about prevention of future attacks, saying that Russia is not a threat to any one political party, but to the country as a whole.
Comey also addressed some of the details of the the FBI’s investigation into Russian hacking attempts. He said there was a “massive” effort to target government agencies and non-governmental groups, estimating that hundreds, possibly around 1,000, entities were targeted. He also said that the FBI never examined the hardware that was hacked at the Democratic National Committee’s, but that the FBI got the information they needed from a third party.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Thursday reflected ruefully on his questions to fired FBI Director James Comey during an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“I get the sense from Twitter that my line of questioning today went over people’s heads,” McCain said in a statement. “Maybe going forward I shouldn’t stay up late watching the Diamondbacks night games.”
McCain said he wanted to find out whether Comey believed “that any of his interactions with the President rise to the level of obstruction of justice.”
“While I missed an opportunity in today’s hearing, I still believe this question is important, and I intend to submit it in writing to Mr. Comey for the record,” he said.
