A FEW LIKELY CONSEQUENCES OF TRUMP’S WAR OF SELF-CONVENIENCE

 

Americans learned through Donald Trump’s Truth Social propaganda network this past weekend that we are at war with Iran. That’s right. Both the president and his “Secretary of War” (that’s how they like to dub the US Department of Defense) are referring to it as such. And in doing so they are tacitly admitting to yet another overt violation of the Constitution by this regime.

The fact is that the current autocratic American head of  State has long since decided to dispense with the Constitution, the rule of law, international law, and the US justice system. Trump has also decided basically to do away with Congress, saying repeatedly that “he doesn’t need Congress.” Of course, if he weren’t acting as a de facto ruler, whether he thinks he needs Congress or not isn’t the issue, but rather that the Constitution dictates that he must work with Congress as a co-equal power. Shamefully, the skimpy GOP majority in the Senate and House are letting him get away with trampling the Constitution, their authority, and their duty to the American people.

And so, the GOP has become complicit by omission (among other blatant constitutional violations), in permitting this president to launch an unauthorized war, which is both domestically and internationally illegal. A war which promises to have truly seismic consequences both domestically and worldwide. It is—as much as any war launched to date by Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin—a war of aggression that, among other things, is as illegal as Putin’s Ukraine invasion, in terms of specific not only US laws, but also international laws and the Charter of the UN, of which the US is a founder, signatory and member of the Security Council.

These violations are made even more flagrant by the fact that the US was involved in direct peace-related negotiations with the Iranian theocracy when Trump’s regime launched the surprise attack. Indeed, there was optimism last Friday from Oman Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi who had been tapped by Washington to mediate in US talks with Iran. In Washington to meet with US Vice President JD Vance, Albusaidi told the CBS News program Face the Nation that,  "If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing (on) a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before. If we can capture that and build on it, I think a deal is within our reach." He estimated that a finalized accord could be reached within three months.

Families mourn some of the scores of girls, ages 7 to 12 murdered in Trump's
illegal airstrikes in Iran. They formed the majority of the 165 students and staff
slain in the rocket attack on the first day of the Trump regime's private war in Iran.

Clearly, then, the Trump regime duped Iran—much in the same way that Putin had pretended to negotiate with Ukraine while regrouping and planning a major new offensive—by lulling it into thinking negotiations were advancing well, while never seriously entertaining a peaceful solution. It should be recalled that these latest negotiations were just reaching a semblance of the Iran Nuclear Accords finalized in 2015, after intensive negotiations between Iran, the European Union and the Obama administration. That pact was hailed as a major achievement that promised to bring Iran back into the concert of nations. But during his first week in office in 2016, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of those accords in a move that was a slap in the face not only to Iran but also to US allies in Europe. As a result, that agreement collapsed.

The US airstrikes were as much a surprise for Americans—including Congress—as for the Iranians and the rest of the world, since in Trump’s State of the Union address a week ago, Iran got barely a mention, while negotiations were continuing. But on Saturday, just four days later, the first devastating air attacks were launched. Now, more than a thousand people have already been killed in this war that Congress never authorized.

Perhaps the Americans most taken by surprise were the at least 500,000 (some estimates say as many as a million) US nationals who currently reside in the Middle East. They had no advanced warning whatsoever from the US government. There was no evacuation plan in place, and there still isn’t. Some 300,000 of those Americans reside in numerous countries currently under alert as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s obviously unplanned and ill-prepared attack.

The US “strategy” for getting those US citizens out of harm’s way became clear this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an advisory through consular offices urging Americans in the region to “get out now.” It was the kind of evacuation order issued for random weather phenomena—except with a lot less advanced notice. Basically, no advance warning. Nor was any suggestion made as to how hapless Americans at the mercy of their own government were supposed to accomplish that task. Consular advice to the stranded Americans is, basically, to get out however they can because they’re on their own.

Indeed, in most of the area where Americans reside, there is currently no air service, and the entire region presents a huge hole in the sky if you observe the map of international air routes. Advisories to maintain airspace closed are currently in effect for  Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Those are all areas where aviation advisories are warning operators not to fly until further notice due to the risk from missiles, air defense systems and interception activity.

Current validity for the advisory runs to March 6^th, but could easily expand as military operations develop. So this is the situation: Hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas have merely been left stranded,  and to their own devices by the US government, as autocrats Trump and Netanyahu wage their private war of convenience, with no knowledge of or concern for the probable results, which appear bleak indeed. This has the potential to make the much-maligned Afghanistan withdrawal—agreed to by Trump in his nefarious deal with the Taliban and inherited by President Joe Biden on whom the GOP would heap all the blame—look like a Saturday picnic in the park.

The ones who were quickest on their feet and the most savvy travelers probably figured out that the only alternative early on would be to head north any way they could and connect via Caucasia and  Afghanistan (an iffy choice at best), or to head south and grab an air link through Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But those routes are now under very heavy demand, and are also becoming vulnerable.  

So all of that rhetoric about Trump being the president who would “keep Americans safe”…well, not so much. And whether anyone realizes it or not, the Trump regime just put all Americans at greater risk at home and all around the world, as the potential for random attacks by Islamist sleeper-cell and lone-wolf extremists just burgeoned exponentially.

But these dire situations appear almost minor compared to the mind-bogglingly major potential consequences to the world order of this mindless and unauthorized act carried out by the Trump-Netanyahu “mutual admiration society”. First, it should be noted that while Iran was indeed at the center of the ever-ongoing power struggle among three Middle East superpowers—the other two being Israel and Saudi Arabia—it posed no imminent threat whatsoever to the United States.

Let me say that again. Despite Donald Trump’s recent bloviating about Iran’s possessing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and about how it was a minute away from having a nuclear weapon, there is absolutely no credible intelligence to suggest that either of these things was true. In fact, the “nuclear threat” argument flies in the face of what Trump told the nation just last June when the US, at the behest of Bibi Netanyahu, flew joint missions with Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities out of existence. It was Trump himself who assured Americans that, thanks to that devastating bombing mission, Iran’s nuclear enrichment and development capacity had been “totally obliterated.”

So does Trump now want us to believe that, after a scant eight months, Iran’s nuclear team went from being “totally obliterated” to getting back up and running and on the verge of boasting a home-grown nuke? Really? If so, the US should, perhaps, hire them instead of trying to bomb them out of existence because they would appear to be world-class miracle-workers.

This was, without a doubt, at least from the US point of view, a completely avoidable and, clearly, an inadvisable move on the part of Washington. And, as Washington was in the midst of negotiations with Iran—even if by its sham “diplomatic” team consisting of the president’s son-in-law and his old real estate buddy, neither of whom have any diplomatic credentials at all—Trump would also have been well-advised to tell Israel to stand down.

John Brennan, the highly-respected 25-year intelligence veteran, former CIA director, and former head of US counterterrorism under Barack Obama, says he believes the plan for these attacks on Iran “was all hatched by Netanyahu”. He indicates that, just as Netanyahu did last June, he managed to talk Trump into it.

Rubio appeared to confirm this theory, though he later denied it, when he told reporters that Israel was on the verge of attacking Iran and the Trump regime realized that, if that happened, Iran would strike back at not only Israel but also at US military targets in the region. As a result, Trump decided to preempt the Israeli attack, and that’s why the US is now at war.

What? In other words, what he was saying is that US foreign policy is a mere reaction to Israeli foreign policy? That is to say, Bibi Netanyahu is dictating US military actions abroad? If that’s the case, there is something very wrong with this picture.

But this isn’t just about that. This is also about both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu trying by any means to stay out of court and out of prison. Trump, as usual, went off half-cocked and with no plan, no contingencies, and no regard for the consequences, simply because he needed yet another big diversion to take attention off of the bane on his regime—the Epstein files. It is not likely to be a coincidence that this military action—which has very real potential to spark a world war—comes just as revelations are emerging about a DOJ plot to cover up or completely destroy evidence of criminal behavior on Trump’s part linked to the Epstein Affair—including his alleged rape, assault and battery on a minor who was 14 at the time. 

As Trump’s defense team leader Pamela Bondi, who masquerades as attorney general, is coming under increasing pressure to comply with the law, and release the millions of still missing files, and as more and more obstruction allegations are accumulating against her, the president’s plausible deniability is on ever shakier ground. Among files that have seen the light of day, and which are being reported on by the independent media, this was all predicted by an unlikely observer: Jeffrey Epstein. In communications with far-right political idealogue Steve Bannon in December of 2018, Epstein held out the possibility that Trump would be fully capable of starting a war with Iran if threatened with revelations about his dark past. Specifically, Epstein speculated that if Trump felt cornered by political pressure, he would trigger a larger conflict, such as bombing Iran, to create a crisis and rally public support.

In separate exchanges with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and attorney Reid Weingarten, Epstein described Trump as “borderline insane.”

When Bannon seemed unconvinced that Trump would go so far, Epstein wrote back saying, “You guys need to understand that he is psychotic... if I go down, I'm taking everyone with me. Cornering a rat, never a good idea”.

From Bibi Netanyahu’s standpoint, the advantage is twofold. On the one hand, he was taking advantage of a passive moment in Iran as the government continued to negotiate. Strategically, he saw a chance to actively strengthen Israel’s position as a regional superpower while dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s regional power.

On the other hand, for Netanyahu as for Trump, this aggression and the initiation of a new conflict provides a great distraction at a time when the war on Gaza is losing momentum and when he is increasingly under pressure to negotiate an end to the hostilities. His personal vulnerability is the ghost of corruption charges that are still pending against him in the Israeli courts, in which he could end up not only losing his political power but also his freedom. It is a win-win short-term move for Netanyahu, and he very well knew that, given Trump’s situation, getting the US to go along was likely to be an easy lift. Turns out, he was right.

Meanwhile, the enormous collateral effects of this overnight initiation of a major conflict in the Middle East are not easy to summarize or predict, and I will be writing a great deal more about them as events develop. But here are some foreseeable consequences:

1.  The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, marks a major geopolitical rupture. It promises to cause upheaval not only in Iran but throughout the Middle East. It will profoundly affect not only Iranian politics and geopolitics but will bring seismic effects in energy markets, global trade, shipping and Middle Eastern security as a whole, with the entire region suddenly becoming a potential war zone.

2.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are acting as if, with a few airstrikes, and the targeted executions of some key players in the theocracy and military, the US has freed the Iranian people from the cruel theocratic dictatorship that has ruled them up to now. If that was the plan, they obviously know nothing about Iran or that regime.

The theocracy has already reestablished its authority, choosing a new supreme leader, and is backed by the powerful and slavishly loyal IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), which is likely to be even more ruthless in crushing dissent, after killing thousands of people while Ali Khamenei was still alive. Underscoring this are reports that the new Ayatollah is  Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the US-slain leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is much more radical than his father, has close ties to the IRGC and is thought to have been in charge of much of the repression that the Iranian opposition has suffered in recent years.
US Middle East military experts like retired General Mark Hertling and security experts like Brennan are making it clear that no regime change will take place unless there are American boots on the ground. And then, only after major and prolonged fighting. Regime change, in other words, cannot be effected from the air and will likely involve the US in another forever-war in the Middle East.
Beyond all of this, the sad news for common everyday Iranians taking Trump at his word and hoping that this is the end of their theocratic nightmare, is that Trump has said publicly that he will be employing “the Venezuela template” in Iran. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, since Iran and Venezuela are radically different countries and cultures. But on hearing the false hope that Trump is extending to them, Iranians need to look at what he did in Venezuela. He blasted strategic targets in the capital city of Caracas, snatched President Maduro and his wife and spirited them back to the US. Then, he blithely returned power directly to Maduro’s regime, in exchange for oil, while ignoring the winners of prior elections that Maduro had voided. Venezuela remained, and still remains, a dictatorship ruled by the same harsh de facto regime that was in charge before US intervention, with Maduro’s vice president simply moving to the presidential office.
Venezuelans were duped and Iranians will be duped as well. If Trump can strike a largely commercial (oil) compromise with Khamenei’s son—by making him an offer he can’t refuse—the regime will remain in power, and the Iranian people will be worse off than ever before.
Had the US really cared about the people of Iran rising up and shaking off the chains of the Islamic theocracy, it would long ago have been backing anti-regime guerrilla movements in that country with intelligence-sharing, training, money, arms and military advisors. Because without that kind of backing, no regime overthrow would ever be possible. But the US learned long ago to be careful what you wish for, since, short of setting up a US-backed puppet regime—something which history tells us never works in the long-run—there is no way to know what sort of government would follow this one, or whether it would align itself with the US which has a long history of unpopularity in Iran.

3.  Another contingency is that prolonged fighting could lead to a much weakened Iran that would slip into the sort of chaos some other Middle Eastern countries did following the Arab Spring. In that case, a power vacuum could form and government could become fragmented with the help of bad actors seeking to destabilize the area. That is the sort of action that might well be backed by far-right Israel, with Trump-backed Netanyahu taking advantage of a debilitated Iran to continue to bolster Israel’s military dominance in the region—the far-reaching consequences of which would be the further destabilization of the Middle Eastern region as a whole.

4.  A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz Strait—a narrow neck of water that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. A significant share of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also moves through that strait. Iran, to a very large extent, currently controls that passage, and has, in the past, also used its Houthi allies in Yemen to aid it in that task. In the immediate term, disruptions to shipping traffic in the Hormuz Strait will cause oil and shipping, shipping insurance and container prices to spike. Experts indicate that sustained disruptions could fuel worldwide inflation and spark a corresponding worldwide recession, with the hardest-hit areas being Europe and Asia, but also with development progress in Southeast Asia and Africa being strangled.

5.  At least one expert in international law has described US worldwide actions under the Trump regime as “the great unraveling” of international law. Through his complete disregard for both international and domestic norms regarding the use of force, and with regard to the sovereignty and self-determination of nations—principles that have governed Western foreign policy since the end of World War II—Trump has basically instituted piracy as his regime’s foreign policy. In a US policy speech that Secretary Rubio made at a world security forum in Munich a few weeks ago, he faced off against criticism of the unprovoked US attack on Venezuela and on fishing boats in the Caribbean as actions unconstrained by law and “necessary leadership” in a fractured world order. This was huge, in that it signaled a US policy shift from the rules-based postwar order to one of might-makes-right, in which the US is simply doing what it does because it can, and because no one else can stop it.
Add to this a statement this week by the DOJ’s Hegseth, in which he said that the US would be applying “no stupid rules of engagement” in its unauthorized war on Iran, and America has just joined the Nazis in applying the same sort of Hitlerian policies that Germany pursued during World War II.
In other words, the Trump regime is bent on turning back the clock to a world where the most powerful regimes make up the rules as they go along and the rest of the nations are rendered vassal states.

Donald Trump was supposed to be “the president of peace”. At least that’s what he told us when he was trying to make Democrats out to be warmongers. But then again, if there is one thing that is consistent about Trump, it is his complete disconnection with truth and sincerity. Sometimes, it is hard not to see his attacks on Venezuela and Iran, his threats against Mexico, Canada and Greenland, and his verbal and economic aggression against our Western allies as anything but retribution against the world for not recognizing him as “a man of peace.” We know that, from his first day in office in 2016, he coveted every one of his predecessor Barack Obama’s virtues. What he couldn’t destroy with the stroke of a pen, he wanted to garner, without ever doing the hard work of earning the honors bestowed on others who did.

Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. I saw with my own eyes, as did you, when he made a big deal out of accepting a made-up consolation “peace prize” created as a bespoke ego stroke by the FIFA world soccer entity. And when he whined about not getting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, for all the made-up wars he’d “solved”, until winner, Venezuelan opposition political activist María Machado, offered him her medal to shut him up—and he became an even greater embarrassment than usual to the people of the United States by actually accepting it. And then, after his illegal invasion of her country, had the audacity to back the very regime that had repressed, cheated and jailed Machado.  

Could Donald Trump be that shallow and vindictive, you ask? Short answer: Yes. Definitely. The man has all the depth of a pancake griddle and the moral character of a wharf rat.

Many of the often salt-of-the-earth type people who bought Trump’s false promises and barefaced lies, and voted for him (twice), are the very same people whose families produce the military personnel who actually fight America’s wars. These relatives of military members voted for Trump in part because he promised to keep their sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters out of harm’s way.

It didn’t seem to matter to them that he had called America’s heroes “suckers and losers” or that Trump—a five-time draft-dodger from the Vietnam conscription era—had stood on the hallowed ground of Arlington Cemetery and asked, “What was in it for them? ” They simply bought his vow to be “the president of peace”, to bring the troops home, and end America’s forever-wars on Day One. They believed that he would use America’s Armed Forces for the purpose for which they were meant: to ensure US defense, not to go off to foreign lands to start forever-wars of aggression. They too have been duped.

In this latest action in Iran, after news of the first fatal American casualties was released, Trump confirmed that US service members have already died and that more will likely die or become casualties in the future, but added, “that’s what happens in war.” He said it as if he’d had nothing to do with it, when he had, in fact, personally and without Congressional authorization, lit the fuse for another forever-war that was completely avoidable. And in doing so, had painted targets on the backs of every US service member currently deployed in the Middle East. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugged the casualties off with yet another cliché, saying, “War is hell.”

“That’s what happens in war.” The subliminal message to MAGA supporters who voted for the “president of peace”? Soldiers get killed in wars. That’s a fact. Get over it.

 

 

FROM DAY ONE, YET ANOTHER US-ISRAELI WAR ON CHILDREN

 

As the US and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran this last day of February, children once again became the innocent victims who took the brunt of the mass violence. While the Trump administration celebrated the reported slaying of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the joint attacks, the news was overshadowed by a direct hit on a girls elementary school in which the reported death toll soared to more than 80, most of them young girls, as well as other innocent civilians.

Iranian parents had just dropped their children off at Saturday morning classes when the airstrikes on multiple locations throughout the country began. A school in a suburb of Teheran was hit but not destroyed. Two children died there. But the school that suffered the direct hit was the  Shajareh Tayyebeh school for girls in the southern city of Minab. According to multiple news outlets quoting Iranian sources, the school, which was apparently near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard post, was devastated. Reports point to at least 80 fatal casualties, nearly all children, and dozens of others unaccounted for.

Factnameh, a Persian factchecking service, cross-referenced a video released of the devastation with other photographs of the school site, and concluded that the video was authentic. Reuters international news agency said it had also verified the footage as being from the school.

The US and Israel are not commenting on the tragedy. In these days of weaponry with surgical accuracy, however, it is hard to write this incident off as “collateral damage”. It is either intentional state terrorism by the US and Israel, or it is a glaring admission that those operating the weaponry are grossly untrained and inexpert in its use. Either way, the mass murder of innocent civilians—especially when it is the result of strikes on soft targets like hospitals and schools—is a clear violation of international law, and, specifically of Article 52 of the Geneva Conventions, which states:  

1. Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.

2. Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

3. In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.

This Iranian school strike could perhaps be considered a tragic error if we had not already witnessed repeated and multiple Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, leading to the mass murders of 2,000 innocent children in two-and-a-half years of war there. A cruel, genocidal war in which the far-right Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has targeted schools, hospitals and private homes, as well as creating a humanitarian crisis by blocking food, water and medical supplies from reaching the civilian victims of its dirty war. All carried out with weaponry and support provided by the United States.

It is, then, hard to give the US and Israel the benefit of the doubt. I say all of this while leaving for another day the advisability, or not, of the US going to war with Iran, especially in the midst of supposed peace negotiations with that country, which now appear to have merely been a tactic to lull Iran into a false sense of confidence that the Trump regime was not yet contemplating renewed military action.

I will leave analysis of that situation for the future, because today, to my mind, priority should be given to the targeting of children in acts of war billed by Trump as “liberation of the Iranian people” from an admittedly repressive theocracy. Iranians should, perhaps, look at what happened in Venezuela if they are holding out hope that the true purpose of the Trump regime is to deliver them from evil.

 

THIS IS GEORGE ORWELL SCARY—DYSTOPIA IN REAL TIME

 

Much of the corporate-dominated mainstream media conveniently “misses” news items that are all about your constitutional rights being violated daily under the Trump regime without your even being aware of it. But independent journalists are attuned to every nuance and are letting nothing slide.

There’s a reason that investigative journalist-bloggers, independent pro-democracy YouTube channels and citizen whistleblowers who would normally have only a handful of subscribers are suddenly becoming major players in the world of objective journalism. And it is that mass mainstream media is increasingly being usurped in often hostile takeovers by right-wing corporate conglomerates that are either watering down or completely denaturing their original philosophy.

The saddest and most blatant case of late is that of CBS, which has gone from having the most honest, objective and respected mass media news organization in history to being a corporate-censored mockery of its former self, with its bottom-line-oriented management playing on the losing side of Donald Trump’s game of intimidation and subjugation.

I make this prelude to the topic of this essay simply because, for those not tuning in to independent sources, it would have been easy to miss Defense Secretary (he calls himself “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth’s attempt to bully a major AI firm into letting the Orwellian Trump regime use its advanced technology for the most nefarious of dystopian purposes. And, in the name of the Trump regime, he gave this private contractor until midnight tonight (February 27) to accept the government’s pretensions or to suffer the consequences.

Here's what I’m talking about. It seems this AI company,  Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, by former AI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, created some spectacular software whose original purpose was specifically to make AI safer and less apt to go rogue. Dubbed Claude, this AI assistant was designed to research, develop and deploy safer, more reliable artificial intelligence systems. In other words, not just an AI system but an AI creation tool. What’s important is that Claude introduced a series of guardrails, the purpose of which was to focus on AI safety, and what Anthropic calls “Constitutional AI”.

It is a trait of the Trump regime—and among others, of former Fox far-right propaganda talk-show host cum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—that if there is a choice between what is morally and legally right and what is categorically wrong, they will pick the latter. So what Hegseth, obviously with a nod from his boss, has done is to called on Anthropic to remove those guardrails for the use being given to the software by the State (Trump’s deep state, in this case).

Specifically, the allegation is that Hegseth has two particularly nefarious uses in mind for Anthropic’s AI. One would be to use it basically as a sort of hunter-killer software, which could be programmed to carry out military strikes and extrajudicial executions anywhere in the world without human intervention. In other words, it appears the AI would make decisions according to its Trump Defense Department programming as to what or who constituted a “threat”, and launch its own strikes with no person being involved. Kind of, “Look Mom, no hands!”  That means, plausible deniability for the Executive and no need to go to the pesky Congress for approval in carrying out what are basically acts of war.

But it doesn’t end there. Hegseth (Trump) also wants to use Anthropic AI to create mass domestic surveillance software to monitor the activities of everyone in the United States. This would mean the regime could completely ignore constitutional guardrails that require probable cause, court orders and other checks and balances designed to protect your rights, my rights, and the rights of every other person in America.

It would also very likely provide the most paranoid government in US history with the potential ability to learn what individual Americans in every walk of life are thinking and saying by perusing in detail their social media accounts, emails and any other data it wished to hack, and to retaliate against “disloyalty” to the regime.

When Hegseth pitched his idea of removing the guardrails to Dario and Daniela Amodei, the couple gave him a flat “no”. Obviously and logically, because the sort of unconstitutional abuse that removing checks would potentially allow was precisely what their software was invented to block.

But we need to recall that Trump’s is not a normal administration. It is, instead a regime and a criminal enterprise. So Hegseth is using blackmail to get what he and his boss want. First, he has threatened to cancel the 200 million dollars in defense contracts that Anthropic now holds. But he has also doubled down and suggested that the firm could also be declared an enemy of the United States. And just in case that didn’t make the Amodeis quake in their boots, he has also suggested that the US might well just declare Claude essential to US intelligence operations and  invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act.

That outdated law would permit the Trump regime to essentially take over Anthropic and do as it pleased with the original software.

If any of this sounds familiar to average Americans, it may be because they recall a 2016 action thriller based on the character created by bestseller Robert Ludlum for his now world famous Bourne Trilogy. This was a continuation of the story—without the participation of Ludlum, who had been dead a decade and a half by this time—called simply Jason Bourne.  

We were already intimately familiar with Bourne—played brilliantly by Matt Damon—as an unlikely hero and patriot, a man whose mind was purposely broken by government trainers, a highly trained government assassin, one of a brainwashed killer elite under the control of the black ops group known as Treadstone. It is after Bourne becomes the victim of amnesia that his search for his former identity leads him to become a whistleblower and avenger.

Anyway, in Jason Bourne, it is already 12 years after his search began, and Bourne has become a major headache for the CIA, one who refuses to go away. He has already been responsible for the resignations of several directors and has flipped other top CIA operatives, while killing off most of his former assassin colleagues, who are now being used to hunt him.

The sinister CIA director is now Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones). We learned that Dewey is pressuring a social media software genius, Aaron Kalloor, who has created the ultimate social media experience with his platform known as DeepDream. Kalloor—like Dario and Daniela Amodei—is the public face of corporate social responsibility in the Internet Age. His dirty little secret, however, is that Director Dewey’s office provided funding for Kalloor’s startup (much as the Amodeis’ young company depends on its 200 million dollars in government contracts).

Dewey (like Hegseth) has told Kalloor in no uncertain terms that he wants the guardrails removed from his platform so that US intelligence can surreptitiously employ it as a tool to spy on Americans nationwide. And he also wants the program to run parallel to the CIA Blackbriar black ops platform for targeted assassinations. Kalloor refuses, and Dewey orders Kalloor assassinated, while trying to kill two birds with one stone by also flushing out Bourne and having him killed as well.

In the fictional account, of course, Bourne saves the day, Kalloor lives, Dewey dies, and Bourne slips away into anonymity again, to fight another day for truth, justice and “the American way”.

When this fiction is compared to the facts about Hegseth and Anthropic, the common phrase, “You can’t make this shit up,” springs to mind. And it’s true, you can’t and I can’t. It takes a creator like Robert Ludlum and those who followed him in the Bourne franchise to come up with something this twisted.

But in the “real life” of the Trump era, there isn’t even some sinister leader of secret black ops pulling the strings behind the scenes. This is all right out there. And that is even scarier than any spy thriller ever written. If this is what faux Attorney General Pamela Bondi meant when she said Trump was “the most transparent president in history,” she’s not wrong. This is the Trump regime openly extorting a company to get it to violate the Constitution, the law and the rights of all Americans, while also trying to get that firm to help it commit remote crimes against humanity, and against international law.

We can only hope that Anthropic stands firm and sues the government to the full extent of the law, instead of knuckling under as so many much more major companies have in the face of Donald Trump’s threats and mafia boss tactics.         

 

THE STATE OF THE UNION BOYCOTT

 

When Donald Trump stands before Congress this evening to deliver his so-called State of the Union Address, it will be with some notable absences in the official audience. And it will also be with the haunting presence (unless the regime finds a way to bar them) of some of the survivors of the Epstein Affair, to which Trump’s name has been so intimately linked—some of the same survivors on whom his administration has literally turned its back and victimized even further.

The boycott includes no few high-profile Democrats, and is a reflection of not merely their frustration, but also of the ever deepening divide between MAGA World authoritarianism, and the erstwhile system of American democracy that has been severely undermined in the five years of the Era of Trump, and particularly in this past year of utter lawlessness under the regime. What it also implies is that the opposition is feeling the power to be gained from Trump’s faltering popularity—especially among independents suffering from buyer’s remorse. According to multiple polls, Trump’s approval is pretty much circumscribed to his most blindly loyal MAGA base. And the gap is widening as his behavior turns daily ever more insane.

This is important, because senators and representatives all too often forget that their power is not their own, but is derived from the people. And in the grueling events of this past year, if democracy has begun to claw back some of the power usurped by the Trump regime and his hijacked GOP, it has been reclaimed, not by senators and representatives, but by the people of the United States, through their grassroots action, their incredible courage, their ultimate sacrifices, and their resounding rejection of the Trump crime organization’s authoritarian designs.

The protest promises to hurt Trump in what he considers the worst way: by taking the focus off of him and what will certainly be, as usual, one of his lengthy, wild rants, which, by now, have become a tiresome, insulting noise to anyone but his cheerleaders, enablers and sycophants, and putting it on his opponents.

Among key lawmakers refusing to attend the speech are senators Adam Schiff, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, Tina Smith and Chris Van Hollen. House members who will give it a pass are Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Becca Balint of Vermont, Greg Casar and Veronica Escobar of Texas,  Pramila Jayapal of Washington State, Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey. All of these members of Congress are taking part in the boycott on general principles and in support of America’s ailing democracy.

Other lawmakers have also said that they will boycott Trump’s speech in support of specific causes. Maryland Representative Kweisi Mfume is protesting Trump’s record on both of the main issues he ran on—the economy and immigration enforcement.  Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley says she is boycotting the State of the Union to draw attention to the trauma affecting children abused by Trump’s violent immigration enforcement policy. And Maine Representative Chellie Pingree confirmed that she will be joining other Democrats at an anti-authoritarian rally instead of sitting through Donald Trump’s State of the Union rant.

Parallel to lawmakers’ individual protests, the MeidasTouch Network—a pro-democracy independent journalism medium that just surpassed six million followers and 9 billion views—is joining ranks with the MoveOn Civic Action group to organize a parallel event billed as the People’s State of the Union. The event is expected to be hosted by media personalities Joy Reid and Katie Phang. Many of the lawmakers skipping Trump’s event will be taking part as speakers in the People’s State of the Union, headed up by Senator Schiff. Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee has said that her boycott is specifically linked to this event.

 Another parallel event is being called the “State of the Swamp”.  It is organized by DEFIANCE.org, the Portland Frog Brigade, and COURIER. Lawmakers taking part in that event will include Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Dan Goldman of New York, Eric Swalwell of California and Eugene Vidman of Virginia.

This is being described as a “live rebuttal” of the Trump State of the Union Address, and speakers are also expected to feature civic leaders, journalists, and cultural figures, including Robert De Niro, Mark Ruffalo, Stacey Abrams, Jim Acosta, and Miles Taylor.

Other Democrats have said that they will boycott the State of the Union Address but without joining specific protests. These include Illinois Representatives Sean Casten and Eric Sorensen. Sorensen said, “While I will watch the State of the Union elsewhere, I will not attend in person.” He made his reason for not attending clear: “My respect for the office of the President of the United States cannot abide the disrespect that Donald Trump shows to that office every day.”

The corporate mainstream media has given the idea of the boycott mixed reviews. Fox Trump State Media, of course,  is defending attendance and playing protests as a “disruption” of what passes in their world for “democracy.”  CNN, which is now owned by Warner Brothers and to an ever greater extent expresses the stances of that firm’s shareholders rather than those of the professional journalists and commentators who work for the network, is tending toward a wishy-washy “let’s play nice” take. If there is one thing I have learned in half a century of journalism, it is that when objectivity is taken to mean impartiality rather than fact-based reporting, the essence of news as a vehicle of awakening people to reality is lost.  And CNN has increasingly lost its way as an honest news medium.

In general, some mainstream commentators and political pundits have criticized the boycott as inappropriate or counterproductive, arguing that lawmakers should attend and challenge Trump from within. Clearly, however, with the Trump-hijacked GOP heading up both chambers of Congress, challenging Trump from within frequently turns out to be a fool’s errand. And then there is the question of how you define “within”. The Trump authoritarianism problem is no exclusive to Congress. It is a threat to the American people as a whole. And more and more, we are seeing that people are waking up and taking action without waiting for Congress to decide to do something about it.

While some traditional media like The New York Times have limited themselves to describing the climate leading to the boycott, in which there is deep-seated polarization and plummeting popularity ratings for the performance of the Trump government, The Washington Post—which is being kept on a tight leash by owner Jeff Bezos, who now tells the editorial board what it can and can’t print and who just fired 300 journalists—stuck to analyzing polling information and pointing out that low approval and anti-authoritarian public sentiment are driving the protest context. USA Today indicates that heightened political stakes and protest strategies are surrounding the Trump speech boycott. 

Fox, as I said earlier, is framing this as must-do engagement, as opposed to a boycott strategy. They seem to be trying to make the point that members of Congress have a duty to attend. This coincides what many Republicans—both politicians and at a grassroots level—who are insisting on saying that, even if people oppose Donald Trump, they have “a patriotic duty” to “respect the office” of the president.

Okay, I’m game. Let’s talk about that. Let me just start by saying that when Donald Trump starts respecting the office of the president and all that it is supposed to stand for, so will I. But I don’t figure I should hold my breath. In Trump’s five years in office, and especially over the course of this past nightmare year, he has not once behaved in a way worthy of a president. He has defied the courts, trashed the rule of law, repeatedly violated the Bill of Rights, used the Justice Department to make good on his own personal vendettas, released hundreds and hundreds of felons into society while sending out his thugs to abduct people who have formed a useful part of society, sought to take away the right to birth-right citizenship, had his attorney general cover up a criminal pedophile ring, threatened and sued senators, representatives, journalists, political opponents, members of the judiciary, comedians, and just about anyone else you can think of, and has gotten away with running for and winning the presidency with the backing of a scant third of registered voters,  despite being a convicted 34-count felon, while vastly increasing his own wealth and that of family and friends.

Donald Trump has disrespected not only his office, but also the two other co-equal branches of government. He has wiped his feet on the Constitution and the law, violently infringed on states’ rights, trucked with dictators and shunned our closest democratic allies, committed unjustified acts of war completely bypassing Congress, and has lied repeatedly, consistently, yes, even constantly to the courts, to Congress and, above all, to the American people. He has basically turned the US government—as the New York Daily News so aptly put it— into, “the most powerful crime syndicate in history.”

So tell me again, why on earth I should “respect the office of the president” as long as it is being usurped by a vile authoritarian and the head of what is clearly a criminal organization, in that it acts consistently beyond the limits of the law, and under the assumption that the rules simply do not apply to him. A would-be despot with a raging Napoleon complex. A narcissist with well-documented psychopathic tendencies. As long as Donald Trump is president, the office of the president has, in my book, ceased to exist as such and has been replaced with something very much akin to what ensued in Germany when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933, and, by February 27, had swiftly dismantled the country’s democracy, burned the Reichstag (legislature), and used the fire as an excuse to declare a state of emergency and to push through a so-called Enabling Act that, as of March 1933, permitted him and his cabinet to dictate laws without parliamentary intervention.

Trump needed no fire in the Capitol—although he held his violent insurrection there of January 6, 2021, after legitimately losing the 2020 election. All he needed was a complicit and acquiescent majority in both houses of Congress that, up to now, has let him get away with every sort of lawlessness imaginable—let him, in fact, get away with murder.

Supporters of the boycott frame it as what it is: a principled stand against what we see as the normalization of rhetoric and behavior that we find not only misleading but also pernicious for the Republic and devastating for democracy. 

Many of those who are now suddenly taking the “they-go-low-we-go-high” attitude toward tonight’s State of the Union Address are, oddly enough, some of the same ones who have accused Democrats and Independents of sitting on their hands and letting Trump and the hijacked GOP carry the United States to hell in a handbasket. They are some of the very ones who have accused the opposition of inaction in the face of tyranny.

It is hypocritical, then, to now shake one’s head, cluck one’s tongue and claim that opposition politicians’ taking part in unprecedented grassroots activism—there have never before been parallel (shadow) events like the ones scheduled for tonight’s State of the Union—is somehow improper.

It appears to me that what is improper—and dangerous—is to continue to labor under the delusion that the Era of Trump is anything like “business as usual” or that it is “just another sunny day” in US democracy.  It is not. And we can’t continue to be passive spectators in the clear and present dismantling of two and a half centuries of American freedom, democracy and justice. This is where patriots are separated from hangers-on. It is where the rubber meets the road. This is where Americans—be they politicians or common everyday citizens and residents—must choose to be part of the solution or part of the problem. This is where we must choose to hold leaders accountable, or become the victims of their despotism. And if we choose freedom and democracy, then we must be willing, from each of our own little corners, to shine a light on the dark designs of a tyrannical regime and to oppose its war on democracy with every tool at our disposal.

Democracy can survive, but only if we are willing to get behind it and oppose its enemies. Democracy dies in darkness and making ourselves beacons in any way we can is the only way to uphold it. That is why this boycott—led, I am proud to say, by independent journalists and democratic activists—is so important. That is why it is so vital in unmasking the truth and drawing attention to abnormality. It is why this protest, and other events like it being organized around the country, are a matter of life and death for the Nation as we once knew it.

 

EPSTEIN – THE WHOLE ENCHILADA

 

As the tip of the Epstein iceberg is gradually being revealed, something appears to become clearer and clearer. The Epstein files aren’t a distraction. They aren’t just a thorn in the side of Donald Trump. They aren’t even “just” a horrific chronicle of the suffering of the hundreds of victims of the worst sex-trafficker in memory. They are, rather, the core evidence of perhaps the deepest-reaching conspiracy and the worst elite network of corruption and perversion in history. An international conspiracy with direct ties to some of the most powerful and corrupt men on earth.

The Epstein files aren’t an isolated debility in the Trump regime. They are looking more and more like the key to everything in an international network of power, money and corruption, in which the currency that binds its members is the stolen innocence of children, and in which, it seems, just about everyone gets dirty in order to “keep each other honest” and loyal to the cult.

What we are witnessing is the slow-motion revelation of an international clandestine organization, the secret lodge of the rich and powerful, an underground society that reflects, perhaps more than any other, the hegemony of the One Percent elite. Considering that the name of the current president of the United States—himself one of the billionaire oligarchs—is mentioned directly or indirectly some 38,000 times in some 5,300 of the Epstein Files released to date—only perhaps half of the total—is it any wonder that key figures involved in carrying out the investigation have been purged by Donald Trump’s DOJ (headed up by the same defense team that was with him fending off the multiple federal felony indictments against him until he quashed (but didn’t disprove) them by managing to rise to office again, despite being a 34-count convicted felon? Or does it come as a surprise that many other DOJ legal professionals have resigned in protest due to regime interference in their probes?

It is not surprising either that only the most naïve of observers actually believe that Epstein committed suicide. Independent public opinion polls underscore just how few people believe the suicide story. One such poll published by Yahoo News showed that only 16% of those polled bought suicide as Epstein’s cause of death. The same poll showed that 39% were unsure what to believe, but 45% firmly believed the convicted sex-offender was murdered to keep him from talking.

It is interesting to note that despite ample evidence that Epstein was a serial rapist, child-sex predator and trafficker, and perhaps the most elite and prolific pimp in history, he was never convicted (due to his untimely death) on federal charges surrounding these crimes—charges on which he was indicted during Trump’s first term, when there was still some semblance of a working DOJ. He was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York awaiting trial at the time of his mysterious demise, which happened on August 10, 2019, again, during Donald Trump’s first term as president, a little more than a month after Epstein’s arrest and indictment.

It is hard not to speculate, since Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise was very apparently based on catering to the perversions of very wealthy men, that he would have been unwilling to take his secrets to the grave if he wasn’t promised a mere slap on the wrist for the federal rap, the way he had been when he was convicted on ridiculously reduced plea-bargained state charges—procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute —in Florida in 2008, while he was already reported to be the head of a vast sexual slavery network. After all, his entire sex empire—in which as many as 1200 girls and young women were duped, exploited, raped and enslaved—orbited around what was basically a protection racket, in which Epstein’s currency was the minors he trafficked, and his silence was his collateral. His supposed suicide is, then, a hard sell.

And the speculation grows when naked light is shined on the hard facts surrounding his death. Despite the claim that he was under 24-hour surveillance while in custody at the MCC—a high-security pre-trial detention center run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons—at the time of his supposed suicide, two cameras that should have been surveilling his cell failed to operate. This meant that the suicide story was only witness-corroborated by the two guards who were reported to have found him “hanging off the side of his bed” at 6:30am. They claimed to have performed CPR and then arranged for Epstein to be taken to a hospital where he was declared deceased. The violations of what were reported to be strict normal security procedures have greatly reduced the suicide story’s ability to pass the smell test.

And Jeffrey Epstein’s death has not been the only one that the case surrounds.

Virginia Giuffre - They called it suicide.

Perhaps the second most prominent one was the death last year of Virginia Guiffre. She was a key witness in the cases against Epstein and his enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell.  But Virginia was so much more, as founder of a highly active victim advocacy group known as SOAR (Speak Out, Act, Reclaim).

A long-time victim of child sexual abuse who, by age 14 had long fallen into the hands of her first trafficker, Virginia eventually ended up at 17 working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “spa”. She got that job through her father, a Mar-a-Lago employee, whom she later accused of sexually molesting her from age seven. It was there that she was poached by Ghislaine Maxwell as a personal masseuse for Jeffrey Epstein. She said that, at the time, she had confided to Maxwell and Epstein about her troubled young life to date and that it had been “the worst thing” she could do, because it allowed them to play on her vulnerabilities. From that point on she described her life as consisting of “being passed around like a plate of fruit.”

An underage Virginia with then-Prince Andrew
and trafficker/enabler Ghislaine Maxwell

A key accuser of both Epstein and Britain’s former Prince Andrew, to whom (among others) she was trafficked as a minor, Viginia was found dead at her home in Australia last year at age 41, in the midst of the Trump regime’s desperate attempts to cover up the Epstein files, and renewed international probes into their content. The death was ruled suicide, but suspicion continues to swirl around that ruling.

Three years before Epstein’s own death, Wendy Leigh, a biographer who was researching Epstein for a book, was found dead beneath the balcony of her home in London. A year later, in 2017, Leigh Skye Patrick, a woman identified as a former Epstein sex slave, was found dead of a drug overdose. Carolyn Adriano, another woman who identified herself as having been trafficked by Epstein in her youth, died the same way in 2023.  

Thomas Bowers

In 2019, the same year of Epstein’s death, Thomas Bowers, a former Deutsche Bank executive who managed Epstein's accounts, was found hanged in his California home. It is worthwhile recalling that there is reason to believe that Epstein was a powerful financier who, besides trafficking young girls to the rich and powerful, was also an apparent power broker in the world of high finance. It is also worth remembering that, for more than two decades, Deutsche Bank was the primary lender to Donald Trump’s organization, providing Trump with more than two billion dollars in loans despite his history of bankruptcies and red flags. Thomas Bowers was one of the officers who signed off on those loans. It wasn’t until after the January Sixth Insurrection that Trump fostered in 2021, that the bank cut all future public ties with the Trump organization, even though it was still holding more than 300 million dollars in outstanding loans with the then-former president.

In 2020, a year after Epstein’s death, Steve Bing, a film producer and investor with ties to Epstein, died after allegedly jumping from his apartment building.

Just three years after Epstein himself died in custody, one of his former associates met a similar end. Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and suspected Epstein recruiter, was found dead in his cell in France, where he was awaiting trial on charges of rape and sex-trafficking. The cause of death, like that of Epstein, was “hanging”.

Mark Middleton

That same year (2022), Mark Middleton, a known Epstein associate and an advisor to former US President Bill Clinton, was found in Arkansas, not just hanged, but also shot. Oddly enough, that death was also ruled a suicide.

Even Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, at the time expressed suspicion regarding the Epstein suicide story. But he would later walk these suspicions back, saying that he guessed the child sex-traffic kingpin’s death was merely “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” That said, however, the guards handling Epstein’s surveillance at the time of his death were later quietly charged with multiple federal counts of falsifying records. Meanwhile, amid accusations of negligence and Senate calls for prison reform, Barr also fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Epstein’s death led to dismissal of all trafficking-related charges against him. Focus was placed instead on the lower-profile figure of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. Ghislaine was convicted on five sex-trafficking counts and sentenced to prison for 20 years.

Maxwell has been smart enough to keep her mouth shut—it’s obviously healthier that way—while moving from a high security to a country club prison, and kowtowing to Trump for a possible presidential pardon. She is now saying the quiet part out loud, namely that she’ll testify that Trump is innocent of any involvement, either as a client (john) or partner in crime in Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls if he agrees to pardon her.  This is obviously transactional and raises a lot of obvious questions about Trump’s possible involvement with the sex-ring.

Ghislaine Maxwell with Trump

That kind of transactional proposal wouldn’t even be up for consideration under a normal, law-abiding administration, but under the Trump regime, anything is possible, as witnessed by the 1500 convicted felons he pardoned for their part in the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021, or the pardons he issued to his cronies in the effort to defraud American voters in the 2020 election.

Conservative writer and syndicated columnist George Will has provided, in my opinion, the best description so far of Donald Trump and his cabinet. He calls it, “a sickening moral slum of an administration.” We were “treated” once again this week to yet another disgusting performance by one of the two most immoral and unethical Trump sycophants in the government. I’m talking about Pamela Bondi, the person loosely known as the attorney general of the United States, but who, for the past year, has continued along with her assistant attorney general Todd Blanche, to head up the Trump criminal defense team, the same job they were doing before Trump invited them to become key figures in the criminal association that passes for the US administration.

Will: A sickening moral slum

I make no apology for calling this regime a criminal association. From its very beginning in January of 2025, the president and his cohorts have not even maintained the pretense of lawfulness that they did—with different, somewhat more ethical players—during his first term. This time around, Trump and his henchmen (and women) have blatantly and grossly violated the Constitution and broken federal law again, and again, and again. Both domestic and foreign policy under Trump 2.0 are based on an apparent standing order to simply break the law “and let them sue.” And this criminal organization has been able to make this method work, up to now, because the corrupt Republican Party leadership has allowed itself to be infiltrated and usurped, turning a blind eye and deaf ears toward the worse violations of the rule of law, and of the Bill of Rights, in the history of the Republic.

Normally, this sort of criminal behavior, even if espoused by the ruling party, would have been halted in its tracks by an unbiased Supreme Court. But in the Era of Trump, that once august pantheon of American law, has also been infected with Trump’s authoritarian designs. It now seems clear that this was Trump’s strategy—and his stroke of luck—when three seats out of nine on the Court came up for renewal on his watch during his first term, and he and his party made sure that the candidates chosen and approved were representatives of the radical far right, thus narrowing to just three the liberal democratic members of that body. This played perfectly into his autocratic strategy for a second no-holds-barred regime he hoped to establish in 2020—when American voters were wise enough to hand him a resounding defeat—and which he managed to procure in 2024—when American voters were not.

Analysts of all stripes warned that a second Trump term (in which he would have nothing to lose) would be disastrous for American democracy and the rule of law. We weren’t wrong. And the devastating results are on full display.

So this week, the so-called “attorney general” Pamela Bondi, (I used the term advisedly because her job description is to “enforce laws related to consumer protection, civil rights, and criminal justice”—or in other words, to be the officer in charge of ensuring the rule of law, none of which she is doing), was called before the House Judiciary Committee to testify on her purposely botched handling of the Epstein Files, which she was bound by law to turn over in full and unredacted to Congress more than 50 days ago. A law that she has blithely defied.

Faux Attorney General Pamela Bondi

But typical of the Trump regime and of Bondi’s sycophantic conduct up to now, instead of answering opposition politicians’ questions fully and professionally, she went off on a defensive tangent and staged a grotesquely obsequious vindication of her boss, and of her own involvement in what is clearly shaping up as a massive cover-up. Her entire appearance before the committee was performative, and the performance was aimed at an audience of one.

The ranking member of the committee—whose chairman is another unapologetic Trump sycophant, Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio—Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, was witheringly honest in his opening remarks, saying that Bondi was “running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Department of Justice.”

Raskin pointed to Bondi’s failure to release millions of files that she is legally obliged to disclose under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law in November after reversing his opposition to the bill, apparently due to his plummeting ratings in opinion polls, where even his own MAGA base is demanding transparency and justice.

Rep. Jamie Raskin

The lawmaker also slammed the DOJ for redacting the names of alleged Epstein co-conspirators and enablers, while failing to black out information and even underage images specifically identifying Epstein’s victims. Summarizing Bondi’s intent, Raskin said, “So you ignored the law, and even with over 100,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty towards more than a thousand victims, raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.”

Bondi’s lack of decorum would have been astounding had she not been mimicking her own boss’s way of talking to people. Failing all known protocol, she addressed the ranking member simply as “Raskin” and said that he was “a washed-up loser lawyer…not even a lawyer.” It was a phrase right out of the Trump lexicon.

She also clashed with New York Democrat Jerry Nadler and with Washington Democrat Pramila Jayapal.

Rep. Jerry Nadler

It was in her clash with Nadler that she revealed the callous nature of her Trump-defensive stance. Nadler said he only had one question for her: “How many of Epstein’s co-conspirators have you indicted? How many perpetrators are you even investigating?”

Bondi wagged an admonishing finger like a mother correcting a child, and sputtered, “First, you showed a…I find it…”

And Nadler repeated his simple question: “How many have you indicted?”

Bondi snapped, “I…excuse me! I’m going to answer the question!”

To which Nadler replied, “Answer my question.”

A defiant Bondi said, “No! I’m going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question. Your theatrics are ridiculous.”

“No,” said Nadler, “You’re going to answer the question the way I asked it.”

A flustered Bondi appealed to fellow sycophant and committee chairman Jim Jordan for help, but Nadler repeated the question again: “How many have you indicted?”

Then she launched into a windy diatribe (and complete non sequitur), first about how “transparent” Donald Trump was, and then about how nobody had asked Merrick Garland about Epstein, and finally waded into a totally unrelated and unsolicited stock market report: “This administration released over 3 million pages of documents, over 3 million,” she said—conveniently obviating the other estimated millions of documents she is still hiding in violation of the law. “And Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents.” (Which Bondi didn’t do). “He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. And none of them — none of them — asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump…the Dow…the Dow right now is over…the Dow is over 50,000…” This sudden change of subject caused opposition committee members to laugh. “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” she snapped. “You’re a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now, the S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I think the significance of this pronouncement may have been lost on many people. But what she was basically saying was, if business is booming, who cares what happened with a thousand-plus Epstein victims? Who cares how tight Trump’s ties were to Epstein? Who cares that Trump called Epstein “a great guy” who shared his taste for women “on the younger side”? Who cares that many of the gazillionaires named along with Trump in the Epstein files are some of the ones most benefiting from a bullish stock market? Who cares, as long as the oligarchy is getting richer and richer? Who cares about some little nobodies who have it tough in their teen years?

Lummis thought:
Who cares? What's the big deal?

This generalized GOP attitude was reflected by another woman this past week, namely Wyoming Republican representative Cynthia Lummis. As the tireless efforts of California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie began to bear fruit, and started revealing the horrors of the files Bondi has been obstructing, Lummis stated in an interview with reporter Pablo Manríquez, “I’ve not been one of the members who has glommed on to this as an issue. I’ve sort of intentionally deferred to others to find out about it. But nine-year-old victims …Wow!”

Lummis admitted that “initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating. And the members of Congress that have been pushing this were not wrong. So that’s really my only reaction.”

While it seems like way too little, way too late—she seems to have been fine with it when it was about girls 14 to 18 being raped and trafficked—at least she appears to have had something of an awakening, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of GOP politicians who still “don’t care and don’t know what the big deal is.” And so, we find ourselves wandering into that “sickening moral slum” George Will talks about, in which at least half the politicians in the country are apparently fine with the sexual slavery and trafficking of minors as long as it is carried out and consumed by their colleagues, friends and donors.

Bondi also bristled when Pramila Jayapal asked the Epstein victims present for the proceedings to stand and asked them to raise their hands if they had still never been able to talk to anyone at the DOJ. All of the women raised their hands.

Rep. Pramila Jayaypal

Jayapal then said, “Attorney General Bondi, you apologized to the survivors in your opening statement for what they went through at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein. Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the un…absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?”

Again Bondi sought to deflect: “Congresswoman, you sat before… Merrick Garland sat in this chair twice….”

“Attorney General Bondi…” Jayapal interrupted her.

And when Bondi persisted, Jayapal reclaimed her time. Jim Jordan tried to rescue Bondi saying that she should be able to answer the question as she wished, but Jayapal said no, that it was her time and she was waiting for an answer to her specific question on which Bondi was deflecting. Even as Jordan was telling Jayapal her time was up, she continued, accusing Bondi of an enormous cover-up and again appealing to her to, at least, on a “human level”, turn to the victims and apologize for what the DOJ has done to them on her watch.

Bondi continued to evade all questions, clashing with others including New York Democrat Daniel Goldman and Texas Democrat Gene Wu, at one point saying that those who impeached Trump twice and failed to get a Senate conviction should be apologizing instead of criticizing Trump. “You sit here and you attack the president,” she said, “and I am not going to have it. I’m not going to put up with it.” It was an odd, almost sad thing for her to say since it made her ridiculous, as if she thought she somehow had authority over the committee, when she was the one who had been called in to explain her disastrous performance as attorney general.

Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie

That was when Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie broke in and  lashed out at Bondi saying that the redaction issues she was being questioned about were a  “massive failure” on her part. He focused particularly on the blacking out of the name of Les Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, reminding her that Wexner was “a co-conspirator named in an FBI document.”

Wexner - alleged co-conspirator's name redacted

Bondi said that redaction was corrected “within 40 minutes.” Massie shot back, “(within) 40 minutes of me catching you red-handed.”

“Red-handed,” Bondi scoffed before accusing Massie of having “Trump derangement syndrome.”

In the coming days, I will be writing a lot more on the far-reaching influences of Jeffrey Epstein and his incredibly diverse empire, the core of which consisted of having something dark and ugly on a vast array of powerful men.

But for now, this is my conclusion regarding the role of Pamela Bondi. As attorney general of the United States, Bondi is in possession of the power to be an independent guarantor of the rule of law. But in a way, she is as controlled by the Epstein crime empire as any of Epstein’s other enslaved victims, because she has chosen to do Donald Trump’s bidding, and to let him subordinate her to his secret life. Trump, then, has “trafficked” Bondi to Epstein and his billionaire johns, making her the chief protector of men who, in many cases, have committed horrendous sex crimes, for which she would normally have the power to prosecute and put them away for the rest of their lives.

Instead, she has left the attorney general’s post vacant and has abandoned her duty to the American people, in order to protect the “dirty little secrets” of some of the most powerful men on earth, becoming their shill, and, instead of ensuring that justice is done, has sought to ensure that it will not. As such, there is only one big difference between Bondi and Ghislaine Maxwell. Both are enablers, both the keepers of terrible secrets, both the willing victimizers of hundreds upon hundreds of minor girls, both willingly doing the bidding of powerful men and, as women and as human beings, treacherously seeking to lead their victims to believe that they have their best interests in mind, while leading them to victimization.

But the big difference that I just mentioned is that Ghislaine, monster that she is, acted within the criminal organization of a very powerful man. Bondi’s crime is much worse, since she has made use of the awesome power of the Executive to not only protect the guilty, but also to convert the erstwhile autonomous department in charge of guaranteeing Americans’ rights and demanding that justice be served into a criminal enterprise whose aim is to do just the opposite, and has done so of her own volition, and in the name of her handler, Donald J. Trump.