Sign up for the Network for Public Education Conference in Conroe, Texas, September 25-26!

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
0

The Network for Public Education (NPE) and NPE Action National Conference will take place from September 26 to September 27, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe in the Greater Houston area (Conroe, Texas). The theme for this year’s event is “Public Schools Build Democracy.”

NPE will gather parents, educators, scholars and citizens concerned about their public schools.

Please join us as we learn about ways to defend, protect and improve our public schools.

Registration cost: $199 (includes meals).

For the agenda and registration, open this link:

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2026-national-conference/

Categories Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Resistance

Which President Has the Best Record for Job Creation?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
4

This is an interesting chart. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Categories Economy

Reading Fiction Is Good for Your Brain and Your Social Skills

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
3

Neuroscience confirms what many of us long suspected: Fiction is more powerful for developing the mind, social skills, empathy, and imagination than non-fiction. And yet for nearly two decades, American schools have been encouraged to downplay fiction. Teachers have been told to downplay novels, fewer novels are assigned, and fewer students read whole books.

Instead of reading stories, students read excerpts in preparation for the format of standardized tests. There, students are asked questions about extracts without a beginning, a middle or an end.

Why?

Seventeen years ago, the Common Core State Standards were introduced to the public as the salvation of education. Its sponsors claimed that they would raise scores and close or narrow achieve gaps.

The Common Core standards were funded almost entirely by the Gates Foundation and enthusiastically endorsed by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The Obama administration gave states a huge incentive to adopt the Common Core standards. States were required to endorse the Common Core to qualify to compete for a large chunk of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.

Most states adopted the Common Core standards, sometimes without actually reading or reviewing them. Behind the Common Core was the dubious belief that standardization of standards, tests, textbooks, and teacher training would have a dramatic positive effect on student test scores. That turned out not to be true.

But even worse, David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core (and now the President of the College Board, which publishes the SAT tests, the AP tests, and other standardized tests) believed that “informational text” was more valuable than fictional works.

The Common Core recommended that the curriculum be weighted 50-50 between literary and informational texts in fourth grade; 45-55 in eighth grade; and 30-70 in twelfth grade. That is, only 30 percent of reading in twelfth grade would be fiction.

Tom Loveless, then at the Brookings Institution, showed how these ratios, which were literally based on nothing, no research, led to a decline in the assignment of fiction in schools.

In response to the widespread adoption of the Common Core, textbook publishers and test publishing companies de-emphasized fiction. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the federal test called NAEP, downgraded fiction in its national tests for fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades.

According to an article by Richard Sima in the The Washington Post, the theory that fiction was of lesser value was wrong.

Sima, a neuroscientist and science journalist, writes that fiction is better for the growing mind than informational text.

He writes:

Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives.

But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place.

Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This can help us find “better insight into our own experiences, insight into the experiences of others who are very different from us,” said Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, who recently wrote a review on the benefits of reading narrative fiction. “It just tends to evoke a form of reflection and contemplation, which can only be good for us.”

Why reading is actually social

Social health is important for overall health. And it turns out that reading, though often thought of as a solitary activity, can boost our social abilities.

To understand why, it helps to look at how reading shapes us as we grow.

Between ages 4 and 6, children develop a theory of mind — the ability to understand that others have different beliefs, perspectives and feelings. Studies find that children exposed to more storybooks are further along this developmental milestone than those exposed to fewer ones, Mar said.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies found that children who read more storybooks had more empathy. And there is evidence that empathy and reading go both ways. Better reading comprehension was a predictor of empathy later in life, while empathy also was a predictor of better reading ability, according to a 2024 study of more than 900 children. And adolescents who read more for fun became more social adults, a 2023 study found…

Reading fiction “presents to us a complex cognitive and emotional simulation of the social world,” which is useful in the real world, Mar said.

The power of storytelling

These benefits may be due, in part, to the power of storytelling.

Neuroimaging studies find that brain networks involved in understanding stories overlap with brain networks needed for theory of mind. This suggests that “while engaging with stories, we’re also pulling online the same kinds of brain networks that we use to understand other people,” said Mar, who wrote a review about these studies.

Other forms of storytelling, such as television and movies, may provide similar benefits, but “one of the things that you do when you read is you have to construct the world” in your head, Buttrick said. “The world is not given to you. You have to do the work of imagining.”

The article goes on in greater detail about why fiction is more important for young people than non-fiction, the exact opposite of the premises of the Common Core.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Reform, NAEP, Standardized Testing

An Astonishing and Appropriate Use of AI

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2026 //
8

CNN reported an amazing story: Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher papyrus scrolls that were burned almost 2,000 years ago. Previous attempts to unravel the scrolls had damaged them, even destroyed some. But these researchers created a way to expose their contents without unraveling them.

Lianne Kolirin of CNN reported:

CNN) — A papyrus scroll that was burned and carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted almost 2,000 years ago has been virtually unrolled and partially deciphered with the help of artificial intelligence.

The scroll — named PHerc. 1667 — is one of hundreds from the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which was buried under volcanic debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, according to the Vesuvius Challenge, an initiative focused on decoding the texts of the Herculaneum scrolls without needing to physically unroll them.

Preserved under mud and ash in a villa believed to have once been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the scrolls were discovered by an Italian farmer in the 18th century. The collection is the only large-scale library known to have survived from classical antiquity.

Burned so badly they were carbonized, the scrolls are extremely fragile. Over the years, scholars have tried to unroll them using a range of methods, including weights, chemicals, gases and pulverization, though this often led to the scrolls being damaged or destroyed.

The Vesuvius Challenge was launched by Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, and entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross in 2023 to encourage researchers from around the world to try to decipher the scrolls by virtually unwrapping and decoding them.

Virtual unwrapping begins with a CT scan of each coiled-up, warped papyrus.

After following along the curved layers in the scan, researchers then virtually flatten the scrolls and explore them using advanced AI that has been trained to identify ink on the page.

There have been numerous developments in recent years but this latest one — announced at a conference in Naples, Italy on Thursday — is a “historic breakthrough,” according to those involved.

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in fully unwrapping one scroll, revealing an area measuring almost 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) of text across 20 columns.

“For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible,” Seales said in a statement published on Thursday. “Today — after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), academic research and an innovation contest — we are finally able to read them.”

To see a photograph of the burnt scroll and to learn what experts found written in the scroll, open the link.

Categories History, Innovation, Technology

How ICE Caused a MAGA Patriot to Lose Faith in Trump

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2026 //
7

Brint Jindra was a true MAGA patriot. He voted for Trump three times and was especially appreciative of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The New York Times recently told the story of how Jindra was disillusioned by a close encounter with reality.

In July, Brint Jindra had an experience that upended his political views. He took his wife to wine country in California to celebrate her 40th birthday.

His wife was a Russian immigrant. They married in March 2025. They applied for a marriage-based green card. Their application was accepted, and they were waiting for the green card to arrive.

When the couple deplaned in Burbank, the wife was pulled aside by an ICE officer and arrested.

She spent 16 days in a detention center. While they are awaiting trial, they can’t go home to Ohio. Brint’s wife Galina Bobteneva must wear an electronic ankle monitor and can’t go more than 75 miles from their location in California.

Their lawyer, Patrick Valdez, requested a bond hearing, scheduled for July 28. Ms. Bobreneva was released July 29 on a $35,000 bond with an ankle monitor and an order to report to ICE in San Francisco Aug. 5.

Over dinner at a seafood restaurant in Redwood City the night before her appointment, Ms. Bobreneva barely touched her crab cakes. She had been struggling to sleep and was terrified of being detained again.

“I never thought that it was so easy to take freedom from anyone,” she said.

Mr. Jindra, too, was nervous.

“We are living in fear in my own country,” he said.

Early the next morning, they joined a line outside the immigration building that wrapped around the block. Ms. Bobreneva entered with her lawyer more than two hours later.

They emerged with instructions from ICE to report back on Sept. 7.

The couple returned to Redwood City, where unopened birthday gifts and deflating balloons sat on their dining room table, alongside a vase of two dozen wilted roses.

“I cannot celebrate anything,” Ms. Bobreneva said.

Her first court appearance is Oct. 22, but her case will take months to be resolved.

The Trump administration is trying to fill a quota of apprehending 2,000 immigrants every day. This means that more people who are not illegal are ensnared, even including some American citizens.

This is Trump’s America. No longer the home of the free.

Categories Cruelty, Immigration, Trump

The Transgender Conundrum 

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2026 //
14

As a matter of principle, I believe in the “live and let live” way of life. So long as people aren’t hurting anyone else, their choices about how to live should be tolerated at least and respected at best. 

Governor Tim Walz used a memorable phrase that captures the same idea. “It’s none of your damn business!” 

That’s my response when Republicans whip up the public to hate or fear transgender people. 

Why do they do it? It’s a sure fire winner. It appeals to base instincts. (“How dare they flaunt society’s norms?”) They made it a big issue during the 2024 Presidential campaign.

But it’s overdone.

According to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, about 1% of the population over the age of 13 identifies as transgender. Or, 2.8 million people. 

I understand the outrage about biological males competing in women’s sports, most especially, sports where men have a physical advantage, like swimming or track and field.

But I do not understand why Trump and Hegseth have expelled members of the military who are transgender. Many of those who have been booted from the military are decorated veterans who have served their nation with courage and distinction. Some are high-ranking officers with medals and multiple commendations. 

I truly don’t understand why the military would expel officers or enlisted personnel who want to serve their nation and who are willing to risk their lives for our protection.

What does their sexual identity have to do with their ability to perform their duties? Does it give them an unfair advantage? I have not heard a convincing argument from Trump or Hegseth to justify their purge of transgender personnel from the military.

It seems to me that this is an open and shut case of bigotry, no different from discrimination based on religion, race, or gender. The transgender members of the military have been discharged because of who they are, not because of any dereliction of duty.

The Republican Party seems intent on banning the very existence of transgender people. In the states, Republican legislatures have passed laws mandating that there are only two biological genders, and you are whatever your birth certificate says. No matter what laws they pass or what executive orders Trump signs, transgender people are not going to disappear. But these official actions can make them miserable and ruin their lives.

A recent article by M. Gessen in The New York Times described the unnecessary harassment of transgender people in Kansas. There, transgender people must have their birth gender on their driver’s license. Why? What governmental purpose does this serve? None. 

For 1% of the population, this bifurcation is not true. A tiny percentage of people born male live as females. A tiny percentage of people born female live as males. This is who they are. 

Why not let them live the life they want? 

Categories Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Gender, Republicans, Trump

Trump Lashes Out at Another Female Reporter. Why Doesn’t the White House Press Corps Walk Out?

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
11

Trump despises the press and delights in insulting them. In his first term, he called the press “the enemy of the people,” a term usually associated with Joseph Stalin. He has continued to lash out at reporters who are not his lapdogs. He ridicules them, especially if they are female.

When it happens, other members of the press corps act as though nothing happened.

Why don’t they stand up for their colleagues? Why do they ignore Trump’s unprecedented bullying?

He needs them. He glories in their presence. They give him oxygen.

Why don’t they close their iPads, cell phones, and notebooks, and walk out en masse?

Walk out.

Here is Trump’s latest diatribe, directed of course at a female journalist.

The Washington Post reported:

The White House on Monday leveled a sharply personal attack against CNN reporter Kristen Holmes after she asked President Donald Trump a pointed question during a news conference, crossing a barrier rarely breached by politicians to invoke her children.

“Jon Ossoff said you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president,” Holmes said. “What is your response?”

Trump answered Holmes’s question with an insult to Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), whom he called a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” referring to the Paul Reubens character.

Then the White House’s “rapid response” account on X took up the altercation, posting a video clip of the exchange and assailing Holmes as a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

In a follow-up tweet, the account dipped into a more personal line of attack: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the White House wrote. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about its social media posts.

Trump’s personal attacks on journalists have been a defining feature of his combative approach to the press. Though he has criticized reporters throughout his political career, his critiques of women journalists, particularly those representing CNN, have grown more heated in recent months. And the administration has increasingly used official White House social media accounts to escalate what might once have been spur-of-the-moment exchanges.

Most recently, at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in July, Trump said that CNN anchor and Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins should “just smile” — a misogynistic trope — and likened her appearance to that of Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender activist villainized in conservative circles.

He followed up by posting an edited image imposing Collins’s likeness on an image of Mulvaney, which was later shared by an official White House account.

Trump’s critique of Holmes, a senior White House correspondent, continued during the news conference.

At another point, the president shushed her: “Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man, okay? Don’t you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet. Who are you with?”

“I’m with CNN,” Holmes replied.

“Fake news. You’re fake news. You’re loud. You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news,” Trump said. “Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet. You’re a fake reporter, and you report fake news.”

CNN, in a statement, defended Holmes, calling her “one of the most respected and accomplished journalists covering the White House” and said it rejects the attacks “in the strongest possible terms.”

“This afternoon, she did her job and asked the President of the United States a tough, relevant, and newsworthy question on behalf of the American people,” a CNN spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Public officials are free to challenge reporting they disagree with, but personal attacks on journalists for asking questions are beneath the office and inconsistent with the principles of a free press.”

Holmes’s colleagues on CNN’s White House team rushed to her defense. “What a horrible to thing to say. Kristen is an incredible reporter, person and, above all, mother,” White House correspondent Alayna Treene wrote on X. “I don’t understand such a reaction to a journalist asking the president for his response to something a Democratic senator has leveled against him.”

“Kristen is an excellent reporter who asked a good question, to which the president gave a fulsome answer,” Betsy Klein, a senior White House reporter, wrote. “You know what’s disgusting and inhumane? Bringing her perfect children into this.”

Categories Cruelty, Freedom of the Press, Trump

An Important New Development in the Epstein Case!!

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
0

Julie K. Brown is the reporter at the Miami Herald who broke the Jeffrey Epstein case wide open. She wrote a series in the newspaper revealing the cover-up of Epstein’s criminal activities called “Perversion of Justice.”

The newspaper says this about her series:

In her year-long investigation of Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown tracked down more than 60 women who said they were victims of abuse and revealed the full story behind the sweetheart deal cut by Epstein’s powerhouse legal team. Since the Herald published ‘Perversion of Justice’ in November 2018, a federal judge ruled the non-prosecution agreement brokered by then Florida U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta was illegal, and on July 6 Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York state. On July 12, Acosta resigned as U.S. Secretary of Labor. And on Aug. 10, Epstein died by suicide in his Manhattan jail cell. Investigative journalism makes a difference.

Julie K. Brown wrote today on her Substack blog:

Success, finally. 

Last week, a federal court in Manhattan ordered the release of the voluminous case files from Virginia’s Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. 

The release of these files was in part the result of eight years of litigation by the Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, which have been fighting for the material since I published my series “Perversion of Justice,” in 2018. 

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Judge Loretta Preska rejected Maxwell’s final arguments 

to keep the files sealed, noting that the passage last year of the Epstein Files Transparency Act superseded any earlier grand jury arguments that Maxwell was using to keep the records from the public. 

What does this mean, and what new information will we learn? 

First some history. Virginia brought this defamation lawsuit against Maxwell back in 2015, after Maxwell publicly proclaimed that Virginia was a liar who had made up her allegations of being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell and other powerful men (including Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the former Prince Andrew.) 

Giuffre, represented by the Boies-Schiller firm, sued Maxwell for defamation, asserting that she faced “public ridicule, contempt, and disgrace” when Maxwell went public with her statements. As part of the lawsuit, the lawyers gathered tens of thousands of pages of discovery, including depositions by Giuffre, Maxwell and dozens of other people. Part of the effort also involved Dershowitz, who together with social media influencer Michael Chernovich, tried unsuccessfully to unseal portions of the Giuffre-Maxwell case while it was still being litigated. 

The lawsuit was settled in early 2017. I had been told the discovery contained damning evidence against Epstein, Maxwell and other men, and that it was worth trying to get the courts to unseal the documents on the grounds that they were never properly sealed in the first place. 

Judicial records by law are supposed to be open to the public. In this case, the former judge (Robert Sweet, now deceased) issued a blanket sealing on all the documents because they contained “sensitive” and “private” information. Sweet placed a protective order on massive amounts of material, including hearings and judicial decisions made in the case — and voluminous evidence that Virginia presented to show that Epstein and Maxwell were operating an underage sex trafficking operation. 

This is not the way sealing is supposed to happen, however. Each document that the lawyers want sealed has to be examined, and those requesting it be sealed must provide legal justification to the judge for doing so. This wasn’t done in this case. 

Nearly all the evidence that Virginia’s lawyers uncovered about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking that came out during this civil case was kept secret.

Maxwell settled the case before it could go to trial, however — and paid Virginia somewhere in the neighborhood of $3-5 million. By settling it, she thought that all the evidence about her involvement would remain under seal. 

But I convinced my editors to ask our lawyers to file a motion to intervene in the case in order to unseal the files. 

An appeals court eventually ruled in our favor, and on August 9, 2019, thousands of pages were made public, including sworn statements by Virginia in which she alleged she was trafficked to Dershowitz, who represented Epstein; former Prince Andrew; former Maine Sen. George Mitchell; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin; hotel magnate Tom Pritzker; the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky. All of the men denied that they were involved with Giuffre. 

Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell the following morning. …

This is only the opening of her post. The rest is behind a paywall. But the bottom line is that the release of the Maxwell files will add lots of fuel to the Epstein fire.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Evil, Fraud, Scandal

Peter Greene: Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
2

Will the federal voucher program benefit public schools? Peter Greene says no. It is not intended to send funds to public schools, but to subtract them. How else can states afford the tuition of almost every child currently enrolled in religious and private schools? The states don’t intend to increase the funding pie. As voucher schools grow–with your tax dollars–public schools will experience budget cuts. Some will close. This is what Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos and their allies want.

Peter Greene writes on his blog Curmudgucation:

Remember “backpacks full of cash”? It was a phrase coined by reformster Jeanne Allen that captured the way that taxpayer-funded vouchers turned private school students into couriers, bagmen who simultaneously delivered and laundered taxpayer dollars so that public money could be directed to private religious schools. We may someday be nostalgic for the era in which such manipulations were necessary– “Once upon a time, not only was the government not required to fund religious organizations, but they were actually rquired NOT to.”

Vouchers were always an elegant solution to the question of “How do we get public money to private schools?” Private schools were already funded by a stream of students carrying backpacks stuffed with their parents’ cash. To get government-to-school funding going would require a whole other stream to be created, but vouchers could just hop onto the stream that already existed. Parents could stuff the backpacks with taxpayer dollars as well as their own.

It’s important to keep this model in mind when discussing one of the hot issues around the federal voucher system.

Voucher fans argue that federal vouchers will benefit public schools, which is a careful choice of wording because the federal vouchers will not go to schools– they will go to families, to shove into their child’s cash backpack.

For private schools, that’s a distinction without much difference, because vouchers pack new cash into the same old funding stream. But for public schools, it’s a completely different issue.

The public school funding stream is taxpayer to government to school district. There is no public school version of a funding stream fed by individual students carrying backpacks full of cash. That is, in many ways, antithetical to the public school mission.

In the private school backpack model, the size of the student’s backpack determines where they can go with that load of money. A large backpack full of loads of cash? You get to go to Philips Exeter. A fanny pack loaded with a small, lonely stack? You get to go to Bob’s Strip Mall Academy.

How the market treats you depends on how big and how stuffed your backpack full of cash is.

The public system is designed to work differently. All the cash comes into one big pool, and every student gets to swim in it regardless of what their family’s contribution might have been. (Does it work perfectly? No, particularly because of the ties to housing. The irony here is that the public mission is undermined by market forces in the housing market).

Point is– federal voucher dollars are not going to go to public schools unless the public schools can figure out a way to create the new funding stream for students carrying cash backpacks, and that create a whole new set of issues. If a special tutoring program is available to Susie because she has a backpack of federal voucher money, then why shouldn’t that tutoring be available to any or all students, regardless of backpack status?

Addendum: If a district already has a program that charges fees, then the federal voucher would help families pay that fee, but that would result in zero new revenue for the district.

If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to pay for a basic service, how do we square that with the mission of providing the same basic service for all? If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to “buy” an extra service, how do we justify only providing that special service to some students?

These dilemmas are unavoidable because, again, the federal voucher program will not give money to schools, but to students. For private schools, that will mean business as usual. For public schools, that will mean a new business model that will have to somehow co-exist with the traditional public service mission. There are undoubtedly some public districts out there well-positioned to wrestle with this issue, but it would be great if governors and districts put some real thought and discussion into the issue, because federal voucher dollars will only make it to public schools via a new and potentially troubling path.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Will the Rule of Law Survive Attorney General Todd Blanche?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2026 //
2

Heather Cox Richardson is masterful at analyzing the important events of recent days and putting them into perspective. Trump now has firm control of the Justice Department, since his personal defense attorney has been confirmed as Attorney General of the United States. The department will brazenly reflect the President’s agenda and diligently persecute and prosecute his political enemies. Expect that the Justice Department will have a task force devoted to proving that Trump won the election of 2020 and another one seeking ways to exonerate and compensate the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

After his confirmation, Blanche said that there were people who were absolutely harmed by a “weaponized” Department of Justice, and both he and Trump want to “make them whole” to compensate for their sufferings.

I responded on Twitter:

“Is it now legal to break into the U.S. Capitol, beat up police, and disrupt Congressional proceedings?”

At last Trump has his own Roy Cohn.

Richardson writes:

On Monday, August 10, Todd Blanche took the oath of office as attorney general, administered by federal appeals court judge Emil Bove, another of Trump’s defense lawyers before moving to the Department of Justice, where he was Blanche’s top deputy. In that capacity, CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz recalled, he fired career prosecutors and pushed Trump’s takeover of the department.

Using Bove to swear in Blanche looked like a victory lap for the Trump team. Although the press was excluded, two other Trump loyalists, FBI director Kash Patel and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, attended Blanche’s swearing-in.

Retired conservative judge J. Michael Luttig told MS NOW: “Todd Blanche now becomes the symbol of Donald Trump’s corruption of the rule of law in America and the actual ruin of the Department of Justice of the United States. This is another shameful act of acquiescence, if not obeisance, by the Senate Republicans; they will bear this badge of shame the rest of their lives.

Never before in American history has an attorney general been confirmed who was as corrupt as Todd Blanche. The Department of Justice is already in shambles.”

“And,” Luttig added, “he will further ruin the Department of Justice.”

As soon as he took office, Blanche issued a memo dramatically expanding executive privilege, which he described as the authority of the president to “withhold certain sensitive information for the public good.” Executive privilege has enabled the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny with the logic that a president must be able to get a wide range of advice, given freely, by those in the executive branch.

Now, though, the Department of Justice under Blanche says the president can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.” The memo defines as a “private adviser” “anyone the President consults outside the Executive Branch.” As John Light of Talking Points Memo notes, this definition would enable the White House to defy congressional subpoenas for anyone to whom the president talks.

As Avery Lotz of Axios reports, Democrats had been planning to begin investigations of Trump’s corruption if they retake control of the House and/or the Senate. Recognizing that the White House would stonewall them, they intended to subpoena companies, college officials, and private citizens to testify. The memo, which is not legally binding but which indicates the administration’s position, would hamper that effort.

Lotz notes that the administration is already fighting a subpoena in a lawsuit filed by the American Bar Association that orders Trump’s senior personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, to testify about the deals the Trump administration struck with major law firms early in his second term.

Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote: “This latest opinion should be seen as a partisan measure to insulate the president and his corrupt activities from Congressional subpoenas when the majority flips.”

Thursday was the day that Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held a status conference in the case of Phang v. Blanche. This is a lawsuit brought by independent journalist Katie Phang to force the Department of Justice to produce unredacted versions of documents from the Epstein files that she says were redacted against the explicit instructions in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With that law, Congress ordered the Department of Justice to release all the files gathered by the FBI investigation into sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, with redactions only to protect victims, no later than December 19, 2025.

Almost eight months later, the Department of Justice has refused to do so, probably producing about half the files, with many of the documents heavily redacted at the same time that it released some of the victim’s names, photographs, and identifying information.

As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in her Civil Discourse, Phang sued in April for access to an unredacted version of a handful of files, including emails about a “torture video” and sexual activity with girls, as well as notes from FBI interviews with a victim who claims Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13 and materials in foreign languages, which the Department of Justice has not produced at all. She also asked the Department of Justice to explain why they made the redactions they did, something the law requires but the Justice Department has not done.

In late June, Sullivan granted Phang’s request.

But the Department of Justice under then–acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who interviewed Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell shortly before she was transferred to a far less restrictive prison that should have been inaccessible to a sex offender, did not turn over those documents.

So, in July, Sullivan ordered the government to turn over the unredacted documents to him so he could review them himself to see if the decision by the Department of Justice not to release them was correct. Once again, the Department of Justice refused. As for an explanation for why the department hadn’t explained the decisions to redact, the Justice Department lawyer told the judge the process was “underway” but couldn’t say when it would be done or why translating documents in foreign languages wasn’t practical. He claimed the materials the department is withholding are simply duplicates of things that have been released, but offered no proof of that assertion.

Ultimately, as Vance explains, Sullivan asked: ““So you’re saying I’ve learned everything I’m going to learn from the government?” The lawyer for the Department of Justice, Andrew Block, answered: “That’s right.”

Sullivan wasn’t satisfied. “The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case. The victims have a right to know. The court has a right to know. The law is still in full force and effect. The court is just ensuring compliance.”

To make it clear he was being reasonable, in expectation of a review from a higher court, Sullivan repeatedly told Block he was willing to work with the department, but warned that he had held prosecutors in contempt of court in the past. Sullivan gave Phang’s lawyers 10 days to propose an order to deal with the failure of the Department of Justice to comply with his orders to produce the files Phang requested.

The administration is also undermining another popular law. This week, under Trump, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the Treasury Department not only ended the registry Congress set up in 2021 over Trump’s veto to make shell companies identify their owners, but also destroyed all the data it has already collected.

FinCEN combats money laundering. Congress set up the Corporate Transparency Act after documents leaked to BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020 found that between 1999 and 2017, banks had flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money, moved by criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria through shell companies. These are legal entities that don’t have physical plants or operations, but can be used for holding and moving money.

Shell companies also meant that the political system in the U.S. was awash in secrecy. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” one Democrat reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.” One of the documents flagged how much Russian money was flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.

The U.S. was the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company enabling them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes—Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from taking the story of her sexual encounter with Trump public before the 2016 election. So Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act to undercut the shell companies that enabled money laundering in America.

The act required the owners of any company that was not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, would go to FinCEN. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.

The plan was to pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. The measure passed on a bipartisan basis; then-senator Marco Rubio of Florida, now secretary of state, co-sponsored it, calling it the “most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades.” 

Now the Treasury Department says it will not collect the information the law requires, raising the question of whether the Trump administration is openly refusing to implement a law.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democrats, Education Reform, Funding, Republicans, Resistance
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