Attorney General Pam Bondi faced questions from senators about National Guard deployments and immigrant arrests in U.S. cities, the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, and files related to Jeffrey Epstein, and more. Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias joins The Weeknight to unpack the contentious hearing and what it reveals about the Justice Department’s independence.

‘Pam Bondi is a fool’: Marc Elias blasts Trump’s Attorney General

Attorney General Pam Bondi faced questions from senators about National Guard deployments and immigrant arrests in U.S. cities, the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, and files related to Jeffrey Epstein, and more. Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias joins The Weeknight to unpack the contentious hearing and what it reveals about the Justice Department’s independence.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pam-bondi-is-a-fool-marc-elias-blasts-trump-s-attorney-general/vi-AA1O3cGW

A judge who had outraged the Trump administration received an onslaught of violent threats before an explosion tore through her home.

South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein was walking her dogs on the beach when her $1.1 million Edisto Beach home went up in flames Saturday. The fire, now under investigation by authorities, left three people severely injured—including Goodstein’s son and her husband, former Democratic state lawmaker Arnold Goodstein.

Before the explosion Goodstein, 69, had come under fire from the Trump administration because she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Department of Justice from accessing voter registration data held by the South Carolina Election Commission.

On Sept. 5, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee, posted on X that the DOJ “would not stand” for Goodstein’s ruling.

“This [DOJ’s] Civil Rights will not stand for a state court judge’s hasty nullification of our federal voting laws,” Dhillon wrote. “I will allow nothing to stand in the way of our mandate to maintain clean voter rolls.”

What followed was a barrage of threatening replies, some calling for Goodstein’s disbarment, others suggesting imprisonment—or worse.

“Thank you. I’m so sick of these activist ‘judges’ thinking they run the country. Isn’t there something that can be done about them?” wrote one X user with more than 6,000 followers.

Another user with over 11,000 followers replied: “Rain Holy hell fire onto these judges who interfere with the Executive branch.”

“Diane S. Goodstein, may all your evil wishes and evil deeds directed towards Trump and the MAGA boomerang back and stick to you and yours a thousandfold. Shmsm. Amen,” another wrote.

According to local outlet FITSNews, Goodstein had reportedly been receiving death threats for several weeks before the fire.

The incident comes as Trump officials continue to lean on public intimidation tactics to pressure judges who rule against the administration. Trump himself has referred to members of the judiciary as “USA hating” and “monsters.”

On Saturday, the same day as the blaze, White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted on X that “left-wing terrorism” is being “shielded by far-left Democrat judges,” in a message viewed more than 6.8 million times.

“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general,” Miller wrote.

“The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

Democratic congressman and attorney Daniel Goldman, who served as lead counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, tagged Miller in a post containing footage of the fire on Sunday.

Stephen Miller and MAGA-world have been doxxing and threatening judges who rule against Trump, including Judge Goodstein,” Goldman wrote.

Miller fired back, calling Goldman “vile.”

“While the Trump Administration has launched the first-ever government-wide effort to combat and prosecute illegal doxing, sinister threats and political violence you continue to push despicable lies, demented smears, malicious defamation and foment unrest,” Miller replied.

While the cause of the fire remains undetermined, the threats facing members of the judiciary are increasingly coming into public view. Since Trump returned to office in January, a number of judges have begun speaking out about the harassment and intimidation they’ve faced.

From October 2024 through September 2, more than 500 threats were logged against federal judges—an increase from the previous year—according to U.S. Marshals Service data.

Earlier this year, the chief federal judge for Rhode Island told NPR his court received 400 “vile, threatening voicemails,” including half a dozen “credible” death threats, after he issued a ruling that blocked President Trump’s freeze on federal aid.

Even members from the highest court have weighed in. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts voiced his own concerns at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting in 2023. “A judicial system cannot and should not live in fear. The rule of law depends on judges being able to do their jobs without intimidation or harm,” he said.

MAGA Demanded ‘Holy Hell Fire’ Before Judge’s Home Exploded

A judge who had outraged the Trump administration received an onslaught of violent threats before an explosion tore through her home. South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein was walking her dogs on the beach when her $1.1 million Edisto Beach home went up in flames Saturday. The fire, now under investigation by authorities, left three people severely injured—including Goodstein’s son and her husband, former Democratic state lawmaker Arnold Goodstein. Before the explosion Goodstein, 69

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maga-demanded-holy-hell-fire-173257060.html

In a scathing critique of President Donald Trump, Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday accused the Republican president of deploying National Guard troops to the Democratic cities of Chicago and Portland based on fixations that stem in part from his being mentally impaired.

“This is a man who’s suffering dementia,” Pritzker said in a telephone interview with the Tribune. “This is a man who has something stuck in his head. He can’t get it out of his head. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t know anything that’s up to date. It’s just something in the recesses of his brain that is effectuating to have him call out these cities.

“And then, unfortunately, he has the power of the military, the power of the federal government to do his bidding, and that’s what he’s doing.”

The governor’s comments came as National Guard troops from Texas were assembling at a U.S. Army Reserve training center in far southwest suburban Elwood and Trump’s administration was moving forward with deploying 300 members of the Illinois National Guard for at least 60 days over the vocal and legal objections of Pritzker and other local elected leaders.

The Trump administration has said the troops are needed to protect federal agents and facilities involved in its ongoing deportation surge and has sought to do much the same in Portland, Oregon, though those efforts have been stymied so far by temporary court rulings. A federal judge in Chicago is expected to hold a hearing this week over the legal effort by Illinois and Chicago to block the deployments, which Pritzker and other local officials say is not only unnecessary but a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the use of U.S. military assets from taking part in law enforcement actions on domestic soil.

During the interview, Pritzker — who has been one of Trump’s harshest critics and is a potential 2028 presidential Democratic candidate — said the courts will play an integral role in challenging Trump’s efforts in Illinois and across the nation.

“We’re not going to go to war between the state of Illinois and the federal government, not taking up arms against the federal government,” Pritzker said. “But we are monitoring everything they’re doing, and using that monitoring to win in court.”

Pritzker also said he has not had any conversations with his staff or other Democratic governors regarding a so-called soft secession, a political and legal theory that has grown during Trump’s second term in which Democratic states would gradually withdraw their cooperation with the federal government, including withholding financial support, without formally leaving the Union.

“Preparing for and going to court with the law on our side and winning in court is important,” he continued. “It is the most important thing that we can do legally. If there are people who are suggesting there are things that we should do that are illegal. I would suggest to you, we’re not going to do those things.”

But even as the governor said he was counting on winning in the courts, Trump was openly exploring options to circumvent them.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president reiterated that he was considering employing the two-century-old Insurrection Act to get around legal court orders that would deny him the ability to deploy National Guard troops to cities such as Chicago and Portland over governors’ objections.

“It’s been invoked before,” Trump said of the law, which the Brennan Center for Justice said has been used 30 times, starting with President George Washington, to quell the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

Trump says he’d consider Ghislaine Maxwell pardon and mentions Diddy in same breath as Epstein pal: ‘Have to take a look’

The Insurrection Act is an exception to Posse Comitatus and allows a president to deploy the military to “suppress rebellion” or “insurrection” when enforcing federal law becomes “impracticable.”

Past Supreme Court rulings have given the president broad discretionary powers to decide if conditions have been met to invoke the Insurrection Act, but it has left the door open for judicial review to determine if a president invoked the law “in bad faith” or in going beyond “a permitted range of honest judgment.” And the actions of the military, once invoked, are also subject to judicial review.

The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was by President George H.W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, with the support of California Gov. Pete Wilson. It also was used in Chicago in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson to curb rioting over the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the backing of Mayor Richard J. Daley and acting Gov. Samuel Shapiro.

But the last time it was invoked over the opposition of a sitting governor was in 1965 when Johnson used it to federalize troops to protect civil rights marchers in Montgomery, Alabama, over the objections of segregationist Gov. George Wallace.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously invoked the act in 1957 to order the Arkansas National Guard to stand down from its orders from Gov. Orval Faubus to prevent the segregation of Little Rock’s public schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Eisenhower also deployed the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to protect Black students attending classes.

As Pritzker has sought to counter Trump on nearly every front, he has joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in threatening to leave the bipartisan National Governors Association because the organization hasn’t spoken out against Trump’s National Guard mobilizations.

In the Tribune interview, Pritzker noted how nearly all 50 state governors at the time signed on to an April 29, 2024, letter to then-President Joe Biden’s administration opposing the military’s push in Congress to forcibly transfer Air National Guard units performing space missions into the U.S. Space Force without the governors’ consent.

Among those who signed were then-GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who now heads the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, overseeing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and Border Patrol.

“Well, I’m somebody who likes to reach out and do things in a bipartisan fashion, and I’ve attended NGA events and had friendly relationships with some Republican governors in the past, and the NGA has an important role. But not if it’s unwilling to stand up in this moment and speak on behalf of states’ rights the way that it always has,” Pritzker said. “So I don’t know how I can trust that the NGA actually does stand up for the states with Republicans in charge, apparently they’re just going to do Donald Trump’s bidding.”

Pritzker also continued to defend the process and timing of the Illinois attorney general’s office in filing a lawsuit to halt the National Guard activations, which wasn’t filed until Monday, two days after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo about the Illinois National Guard deployments. This is despite Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul knowing for weeks that Trump had threatened to send the military to the streets of the Chicago area.

“You have to understand legal proceedings. In order for you to bring a lawsuit of any sort, you have to have what’s called ripeness. It has to be ripe. That means there has to be some action that’s taken to demonstrate that the wrong is being effectuated,” said Pritzker, calling any questions about the timing of the suit “a false avenue to follow.” “Just because someone says they’re going to call out the National Guard to do this in Illinois, until they do, you can’t file suit.”

Gov. JB Pritzker says President Trump deploying troops to Chicago due to ‘dementia’ and obsessive fixations

In a scathing critique of President Donald Trump, Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday accused the Republican president of deploying National Guard troops to the Democratic cities of Chicago and Portland based on fixations that stem in part from his being mentally impaired. “This is a man who’s suffering dementia,” Pritzker said in a telephone interview with the Tribune. “This is a man who has…

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gov-jb-pritzker-says-president-233400557.html

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit today affirmed the conviction of Billy Olvera, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, for interfering with a flight attendant’s duties by secretly taking photos and videos of her during an American Airlines flight.

Olvera, who was on board a Dallas-Fort Worth to Miami flight on November 6, 2023, was appealing his conviction for interference with flight crew members and attendants in violation of 49 U.S.C. § 46504. He had been sentenced to two years’ probation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Appeals Court Affirms Key Legal Standard

Olvera presented two main arguments in his appeal: first, that the district court erred by instructing the jury that the government did not have to prove he intended to intimidate the flight attendant; and second, that there was insufficient evidence to support the conviction, specifically that he was unaware his conduct was intimidating the victim.

In a per curiam opinion, the Eleventh Circuit rejected both claims, citing its own precedent.

Regarding the jury instruction, the court held that § 46504 is a general intent crime, meaning the government only had to prove Olvera knowingly engaged in the prohibited conduct, not that he had the specific intent to intimidate the flight attendant or interfere with her duties.

This finding relies on the Eleventh Circuit’s prior ruling in United States v. Grossman, which established that § 46504 does not require a showing of specific intent. The court affirmed that the instruction given—that the government “does not have to prove that the Defendant acted with the intent to intimidate”—was a correct statement of law.

Evidence of ‘Video Voyeurism’ Detailed

The ruling recounts the disturbing evidence presented at trial. Flight attendant A.G. testified that Olvera, who was seated in an aisle seat, had positioned his cell phone by his thigh with the camera facing upwards, about an inch and a half away from her knees, “almost like he [was] trying to get underneath [her] dress.”

After a second flight attendant, L.A., confirmed A.G.’s suspicions with a covert recording of her own, they informed the captain. The evidence presented to the jury established that Olvera covertly recorded A.G. as she moved down the aisle, holding a second phone angled upwards between his legs and then down by his legs.

A forensic examination of Olvera’s seized cell phones revealed 23 photos and 20 videos of A.G. taken on the flight, many of which were images of her skirt, legs, and backside, angled in a way that suggested an attempt to view under her skirt.

A.G. testified that the discovery made her feel “extremely enraged,” “violated,” and “helpless,” causing her to comply with the captain’s instruction to stay in the back and not perform her remaining duties for the flight. The court also noted a disturbing post-landing comment Olvera made to A.G., saying he “prefer[red] [her] heels” after noticing she had switched to flat shoes.

Sufficient Evidence for Conviction

In denying the motion for judgment of acquittal, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that sufficient evidence was presented for a reasonable jury to find Olvera guilty.

The opinion notes that the jury could have reasonably inferred that Olvera’s surreptitious conduct intimidated A.G. and interfered with her duties, based on her testimony about her emotional reaction and the actions she took in response, which included ceasing her work on the flight. The court also pointed to Olvera’s reaction when A.G. looked at him after noticing his phone—sliding the screen out of her view—as evidence a reasonable jury could have viewed as his “recognition that A.G. knew what he was up to.”

The conviction of Billy Olvera for the airborne interference with a flight attendant, stemming from what the court records describe as “clandestine video voyeurism,” was AFFIRMED.

11th Circuit Upholds Conviction For ICE Agent In ‘Upskirting’ Case On Flight From Texas To Florida

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit today affirmed the conviction of Billy Olvera, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

https://www.tampafp.com/11th-circuit-upholds-conviction-for-ice-agent-in-upskirting-case-on-flight-from-texas-to-florida

Will there be a pardon from King Donald “Grab ’em by the Pussy” Trump?

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears to be cracking under the increased demands of his job in the Pentagon, new reports claim.

Sources inside the Department of Defense – now rebranded as the ‘Department of War’ – say that Hegseth has become even more frenzied since Charlie Kirk’s violent death.

One source told the Daily Mail: ‘There’s a manic quality about him. Or let me rephrase, an even more manic quality, which is really saying something.’

Those close to the Secretary of War said he had begun pacing in meetings, with a source adding: ‘Dude is crawling out of his skin.’

‘He takes things personally when challenged – like full-blown tantrums,’ another said.

‘That warrior personae? He’s spooked.’

Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell called the allegations made by unnamed members of staff ‘false’.

After Kirk’s death Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Rauchet, repeatedly pushed for more security for her husband, their family and their homes.

It’s not the first time Hegseth has faced scrutiny. He faced fury for ‘leaking war plans’ in a group chat earlier this year.

‘Nobody was texting war plans’, Hegseth said after sharing details of a military operation against Houthi rebels before and while it was in progress.

He had used the Signal messaging app to share the time, weapons and target with Donald Trump’s top security officials and – inadvertently – a journalist.

It turns out that wasn’t the only Signal group chat where Hegseth shared details of the airstrikes in Yemen. He also shared flight schedules in a chat with his wife and brother, the New York Times reported.

Trump later confirmed he had ‘confidence’ in Hegseth, his spokesperson said.

Former chief Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot, who resigned earlier this year, called for Hegseth to be sacked.

Writing for Politico, he claimed the Department of Defense was ‘in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership’.

‘It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon’, he said.

‘From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president – who deserves better from his senior leadership.’

Trump’s ‘Secretary of War’ is ‘terrified and manic’ after Charlie Kirk’s death

Trump’s ‘Secretary of War’ has had his ‘warrior personae’ spooked.

Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed into intelligence for deportation raids and arrests.

Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED show that the agency is seeking private vendors to run a multiyear surveillance program out of two of its little-known targeting centers. The program envisions stationing nearly 30 private analysts at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Vermont and Southern California. Their job: Scour Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, converting posts and profiles into fresh leads for enforcement raids.

The initiative is still at the request-for-information stage, a step agencies use to gauge interest from contractors before an official bidding process. But draft planning documents show the scheme is ambitious: ICE wants a contractor capable of staffing the centers around the clock, constantly processing cases on tight deadlines, and supplying the agency with the latest and greatest subscription-based surveillance software.

The facilities at the heart of this plan are two of ICE’s three targeting centers, responsible for producing leads that feed directly into the agency’s enforcement operations. The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center sits in Williston, Vermont. It handles cases across much of the eastern US. The Pacific Enforcement Response Center, based in Santa Ana, California, oversees the western region and is designed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Internal planning documents show that each site would be staffed with a mix of senior analysts, shift leads, and rank-and-file researchers. Vermont would see a team of a dozen contractors, including a program manager and 10 analysts. California would host a larger, nonstop watch floor with 16 staff. At all times, at least one senior analyst and three researchers would be on duty at the Santa Ana site.

Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests.

The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft instructions specify open-source intelligence: public posts, photos, and messages on platforms from Facebook to Reddit to TikTok. Analysts may also be tasked with checking more obscure or foreign-based sites, such as Russia’s VKontakte.

They would also be armed with powerful commercial databases such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR, which knit together property records, phone bills, utilities, vehicle registrations, and other personal details into searchable files.

The plan calls for strict turnaround times. Urgent cases, such as suspected national security threats or people on ICE’s Top Ten Most Wanted list, must be researched within 30 minutes. High-priority cases get one hour; lower-priority leads must be completed within the workday. ICE expects at least three-quarters of all cases to meet those deadlines, with top contractors hitting closer to 95 percent.

The plan goes beyond staffing. ICE also wants algorithms, asking contractors to spell out how they might weave artificial intelligence into the hunt—a solicitation that mirrors other recent proposals. The agency has also set aside more than a million dollars a year to arm analysts with the latest surveillance tools.

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this year, The Intercept revealed that ICE had floated plans for a system that could automatically scan social media for “negative sentiment” toward the agency and flag users thought to show a “proclivity for violence.” Procurement records previously reviewed by 404 Media identified software used by the agency to build dossiers on flagged individuals, compiling personal details, family links, and even using facial recognition to connect images across the web. Observers warned it was unclear how such technology could distinguish genuine threats from political speech.

ICE’s main investigative database, built by Palantir Technologies, already uses algorithmic analysis to filter huge populations and generate leads. The new contract would funnel fresh social media and open-source inputs directly into that system, further automating the process.

Planning documents say some restrictions are necessary to head off abuse. Contractors are barred from creating fake profiles, interacting with people online, or storing personal data on their own networks. All analysis must remain on ICE servers. Past experience, however, shows such guardrails can be flimsy, honored more in paperwork than in practice. Other documents obtained by 404 Media this summer revealed that police in Medford, Oregon, performed license plate reader searches for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, while HSI agents later ran searches in federal databases at the request of local police—an informal back-and=forth that effectively gave ICE access to tools it wasn’t authorized to use.

Other surveillance contracts have raised similar alarms. In September 2024, ICE signed a $2 million contract with Paragon, an Israeli spyware company whose flagship product, Graphite, can allegedly remotely hack messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. The Biden White House quickly froze the deal under an executive order restricting spyware use, but ICE reactivated it in August 2025 under the Trump administration. Last month, 404 Media filed a freedom of information lawsuit demanding ICE release the contract and related records, citing widespread concern that the tool could be used to target immigrants, journalists, and activists.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has similarly sued ICE, calling its reliance on data brokers a “significant threat to privacy and liberty.” The American Civil Liberties Union has argued that buying bulk datasets—such as smartphone location trails gathered from ordinary apps—helps ICE sidestep warrant requirements and helps it pull in vast amounts of data with no clear link to its enforcement mandate.

The newly proposed social media program is only the latest in a string of surveillance contracts ICE has pursued over the past few years.

In 2020 and 2021, ICE bought access to ShadowDragon’s SocialNet, a tool that aggregates data from more than 200 social networks and services into searchable maps of a person’s connections. Around the same time, the agency contracted with Babel Street for Locate X, which supplies location histories from ordinary smartphone apps, letting investigators reconstruct people’s movements without a warrant. ICE also adopted LexisNexis Accurint, used by agents to look up addresses, vehicles, and associates, though the scale of spending on that service is unclear. In September, ICE signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that built its database by scraping billions of images from social media and the public web.

Throughout, ICE has leaned on Palantir’s Investigative Case Management system to combine disparate streams of data into a single investigative platform. Recent contract updates show the system lets agents search people using hundreds of categories, from immigration status and country of origin to scars, tattoos, and license-plate reader data. Each surveillance contract ICE signs adds another layer—location trails, social networks, financial records, biometric identifiers—feeding into Palantir’s hub. ICE’s new initiative is about scaling up the human side of the equation, stationing analysts around the clock to convert the firehose of data into raid-ready leads.

ICE argues it needs these tools to modernize enforcement. Its planning documents note that “previous approaches … which have not incorporated open web sources and social media information, have had limited success.” The agency suggests that tapping social media and open web data helps identify aliases, track movements, and detect patterns that traditional methods often miss.

With plenty of historical analogs to choose from, privacy advocates warn that any surveillance that starts as a method of capturing immigrants could soon be deployed for ulterior purposes. ICE’s proposal to track “negative sentiment” is a clear example of how the agency’s threat monitoring bleeds into the policing of dissent. By drawing in the online activity of not only its targets but also friends, family, and community members, ICE is certain to collect far more information outside its mandate than it is likely to publicly concede.

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team

Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract

The president is gambling that he can consolidate authority before the public turns too sharply against him.

President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator. If he loses the race, he will be pulled ever deeper below—and the escalator keeps moving faster against him.

Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.

Trump’s hold on power is indeed loosening. His standing with the voting public is quickly deteriorating. Grocery prices jumped in August 2025 at the fastest speed since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation in 2022. Job growth has stalled to practically zero.

Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of higher tariffs, Trump’s signature economic move. His administration’s attack on vaccines for young children is even more unpopular. This year has brought the highest number of measles cases since the Clinton administration introduced free universal vaccination for young children in 1993. Parents may be rightly shocked and angry.

Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted, “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure. As of early August, nearly two-thirds of Americans regarded Trump as corrupt, 45 percent as “very corrupt.” More than 60 percent think the Trump administration is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein case. Almost 60 percent regard Bondi personally responsible for the cover-up.

The MAGA project in many ways resembles one of former businessman Donald Trump’s dangerously leveraged real-estate deals. A comparatively small number of fanatics are heart-and-soul committed. Through them, Trump controls the Republican apparatus and the right-wing media world, which allows him to do things like gerrymander states where he is in trouble (50 percent of Texans now disapprove of Trump, while only 43 percent approve) or wield the enforcement powers of the Federal Communications Commission to silence on-air critics. But overleveraged structures are susceptible to external shocks and internal mistakes.

Trump in his first term mostly avoided screwing up the economy. His trade wars with China triggered a nearly 20 percent stock-market slump in the fall and early winter of 2018. Trump retreated, and no recession followed the slump until the COVID shock of 2020. But in his second term, Trump has jettisoned his former economic caution. The stock market is doing fine in 2025 on hopes of interest-rate cuts. The real economy is worsening. The percentage of Americans who think the country is on the “wrong track” rose sharply over the summer. Even self-identified Republicans are now more negative than positive.

The souring is especially bitter among younger people. More than 60 percent of Republicans younger than 45 say things are on the wrong track, a 30-point deterioration over the three summer months.

Trump has a shrewd instinct for survival. He must sense that if he does not act now to prevent free and fair elections in 2026, he will lose much of his power—and all of his impunity. That’s why he is squeezing Bondi. But for her, the thought process must be very different. Trump is hoping to offload culpability for his misconduct onto her. She’s the one most directly at risk if she gives orders later shown to be unethical or illegal.

The survival of American rights and liberties may now turn less on the question of whether Pam Bondi is a person of integrity—which we already know the dismal answer to—than whether she is willing to risk her career and maybe even her personal freedom for a president on his way to repudiation unless he can fully pervert the U.S. legal system and the 2026 elections.

Trump Might Be Losing His Race Against Time

The president is gambling that he can consolidate authority before the public turns too sharply against him.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-bondi-edva/684292

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “my way or the highway” message to hundreds of generals and admirals at a summit in Virginia last week has sparked fears that some top leaders may choose to bow out of the U.S. military entirely. 

The departure of two senior leaders last week stoked those worries, though the Pentagon says they were unrelated to Hegseth’s ultimatum.

“His speech directly attacked the values of many of the senior officers and enlisted members in the audience, and I would expect many of them to demonstrate their disgust by retiring,” Don Christensen, a retired Air Force colonel and former military lawyer who watched the speech, said of Hegseth.

The two senior military leaders to leave were Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, and Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of U.S. Special Operations Command based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. 

Bussiere, who was appointed by President Trump, was previously nominated to serve as the Air Force’s vice chief of staff in August, but his nomination was pulled just weeks later.

In his retirement announcement, posted to Facebook on Tuesday, he cited “personal and family reasons” as the main driver for his departure, noting he had made the “difficult” decision after much reflection.

Fenton’s retirement came after three years in the role. “FWIW, Gen. Fenton was planning on retiring, it was not tied to SecWar’s speech,” Kristina Wong, an adviser to Hegseth, wrote last week on the social platform X.

The high-profile exits came just hours after Hegseth’s speech to hundreds of top admirals and generals in Quantico, Va., in which he outlined his vision of a military void of “woke garbage,” proposing less restrictive rules of engagement and fewer waivers that allow troops to have a beard. He also declared he would curtail whistleblower and inspector general functions, change how the military handles allegations of hazing and other types of abuse, and allow drill sergeants to “put their hands on recruits.”

“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign,” Hegseth told the mostly stoic audience.

The comments prompted The New York Times to run an unusual headline last week, in which it invited senior military leaders to speak to the outlet should they indeed decide to resign.

Some Democrats are urging military leaders who disagree with Hegseth to stay where they are. 

“If the challenge was ‘get out,’ then I would say to those generals, ‘stay put,’” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an Air Force veteran, said on CNN last week. “Because we need you. We need you and your experience to counter the message of Mr. Hegseth and frankly the president himself.”

Hegseth also promised to continue firing top brass who did not align with his vision. And Friday, he announced the ouster of Jon Harrison, the chief of staff of the secretary of the Navy, who was an appointee during the first Trump administration.

“As you have seen and the media has obsessed over, I have fired a number of senior officers since taking over,” Hegseth said in his Tuesday speech. “The rationale, for me, has been straightforward: It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture, even if that culture was created by a previous president and previous secretary.”

Carrie Lee, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, said she would not be surprised to see other retirement announcements following Hegseth’s pointed words. 

“Even though [Bussiere’s] nomination for vice chief of staff of the Air Force had been pulled and his successor had been announced — there wasn’t anywhere else for him to really go, right, career-wise — but the fact that the announcement dropped kind of the night of Hegseth’s speech, I think that’s probably not a coincidence,” Lee told The Hill.

“I would not be surprised to see retirements,” she added. “This is already happening at the more kind of lower senior to kind of upper, mid-grade level. So thinking about colonels and one-stars and two-stars, folks who are refusing assignments, choosing to retire rather than stay in the force, making kind of very personal decisions with their families about whether this is an institution that reflects their values or not.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, said he doubts there will be a mass exodus, but he does sense a “widespread anxiety” among those in the armed forces.

“When I talk to military officers, they have a range of views. Most of them don’t want to pick public fights with Trump. Most of them are not at the point of considering resignation. Some of them even like certain aspects of the administration,” he told The Hill. “You put it all together, there are very few people who are indifferent to these kinds of dramatic events, these kinds of changes.”

He added that he believes there are very few people who are getting ready to resign, “but there are a lot of people who are somewhere between nervous and anxious about where the all-volunteer force is headed, where the country is headed, and for the most part, they’re just trying to roll with the punches and do their jobs as long as they’re not being asked to violate the law or their oath.”

Lee pointed out that in declining to use his speech to focus on several pressing issues within the military, including steadily rising suicide rates among service members and persistent sexual assault rates, and instead harping on the Pentagon’s process for handling complaints and accusations, Hegseth likely alienated his top leaders.

“The Army has been dealing with very high suicide rates. It’s been dealing with a sexual assault crisis. It’s been dealing with a lot of people issues. And so they have made some very necessary, in my opinion, changes to the organization and to organizational culture that it sounds like Hegseth really wants to roll back,” she said. 

“For many of the officers who are responsible for formations of troops and watched the suicide epidemic really ravage their units, and watched sexual assault tear units apart … to then be told that ‘we don’t care about that anymore,’ when the Army is really a people organization, it doesn’t surprise me that there’s a lot of folks who aren’t going to stick around for that.”

Bussiere’s retirement announcement also follows that of the Air Force’s chief of staff, Gen. David Allvin, who in August said he would retire in November after serving two years of his four-year term. Though Bussiere did not mention Hegseth’s speech in his resignation note, he suggested he would find other ways to support the U.S. military after he leaves.

“While I’m stepping away from active duty, my commitment to service remains. I look forward to finding new ways to support our Air Force, our national defense and the incredible people who make it all possible,” he wrote.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5541871-defense-secretary-hegseth-resignation-fears

The big story: The Trump Administration’s push to eliminate programs that assist one demographic group to the exclusion of others has come to Florida schools.

The Department of Education ordered the Seminole County school district to end its Latinos in Action courses, aimed at helping Latino teens complete high school, saying the program “may be discriminating based on race.”

The district announced it will cancel the program. Its move comes a week after the Broward County school system took similar steps because of an order it received from the federal government.

Seminole officials told the Orlando Sentinel that they will create a new program called Leaders in Action, which will focus on some of the same objectives.

Latinos in Action previously operated in Hillsborough County schools, but a district spokesperson said it no longer offers the courses or programs. Read more from the Orlando Sentinel.

Trump administration orders Florida schools to end courses for Latino teens

A roundup of Florida education news from around the state

https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2025/10/07/trump-administration-orders-florida-schools-end-courses-latino-teens

Donald Trump signed a memorandum in the Oval Office last month to deploy troops in Memphis. During his remarks to the press, Trump went on a tirade over the people who protested him during a recent visit to a restaurant in D.C. “They should be put in jail. What they’re doing to this country is really subversive,” Trump remarked.

‘They Should Be Put In Jail’: Trump Tests The Limits Of His Lawlessness, Says People Should Be Arrested For Protesting Him

Donald Trump signed a memorandum in the Oval Office last month to deploy troops in Memphis. During his remarks to the press, Trump went on a tirade over the people who protested him during a recent visit to a restaurant in D.C. “They should be put in jail. What they’re doing to this country is really subversive,” Trump remarked.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/they-should-be-put-in-jail-trump-tests-the-limits-of-his-lawlessness-says-people-should-be-arrested-for-protesting-him/vi-AA1O0V7H