I am a proud alumnae of Wellesley College, class of 1960. Wellesley literally changed my life. My best friends today are classmates; we meet monthly on Zoom to compare notes. We confess our deepest hopes and fears and stand by one another. I have returned for Reunion every five years since graduation. I love the campus and the memories.
I have supported an annual lecture series at Wellesley that has brought terrific thinkers to the campus.
Not long ago, my sons endowed a Professorship in my name, the first endowed chair in the education department. It is called The Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 Chair in Public Education and the Common Good. The first person to hold the chair is a brilliant young scholar named Soo Hong.
Last night, after midnight, one of my dear classmates sent this review, just published. It made me very happy.
“I was wrong” is one of the most difficult things for a human being to say. Imagine saying it when you have been a conservative public intellectual and expert on public education for decades. Yet that is exactly what Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 does in her engaging new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
The author of numerous books about the history of American education and education policy, Ravitch turns to the personal in this volume, describing in depth her childhood in Houston, her experience at a segregated public high school, and her journey to Wellesley College in the fall of 1956.
At Wellesley, Ravitch learned not what to think, but how. She arrived on campus feeling, by her own account, like a “fish out of water.” But the College provided her with brilliant peers, gifted teachers, lively debate, and enriching friendships—including with “Maddy,” Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59. She recounts the hilarity of writing the junior show, Call It Red, and the excitement of seeing Fidel Castro speak at Harvard while she was working as a reporter for the Wellesley News.
A political science major at Wellesley, Ravitch went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from Columbia. As her memoir unfolds, she writes openly of loss—the anguish of the death of her 2-year-old son from leukemia, the painful dissolution of her first marriage. And she writes of love—at an education conference in 1984, she met teacher Mary Butz, who became her wife.
She also writes about intellectual transformation. As an education reformer, Ravitch believed deeply in standards, accountability, high-stakes testing, and school choice. Woven through the book is an account of her transition from outspoken supporter of conservative, market-driven policies in public education to one of their most forceful critics. Like many policymakers of the late 20th century, she saw competition, data, and pressure as levers that could fix public education. Serving in senior government roles, including assistant secretary of education during the George H. W. Bush administration, she helped advance reforms rooted in these assumptions, convinced they would raise achievement and close gaps.
But watching these policies unfold in real schools forced her to confront their consequences. High-stakes testing narrowed curricula and hamstrung teachers. Charter expansion and privatization failed to deliver promised gains while draining critical resources from public systems. Most troubling, education reformers increasingly blamed educators for failures that Ravitch now sees as driven by poverty and inequality. Children—especially poor children—were being left behind.
By the end of An Education, Ravitch emerges as a committed advocate for public schools, professional teachers, and democratic accountability. She followed the facts where they led and changed her mind. In this open-hearted, expansive memoir, she explains why.
A former classroom teacher, Grace is senior associate editor of this magazine
One batch in particular was missing. It consisted of FBI interviews with a woman who claimed she was raped when she was a minor by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.
The law requiring the release of the files specifically said that the names of victims should be redacted, but not the names of the perpetrators.
There is a coverup underway. Unlike in other countries, no one is being held accountable for their participation in Epstein’s illicit activities. At least a few are taking responsibility: Bill Gates apologized to the staff of his foundation and admitted having affairs with two Russian women.
The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.
The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.
The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.
The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims.
It is unclear why the materials are missing. The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.
The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.
When the files were made public late last month, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said Mr. Trump had “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein…”
The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.
The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.
The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.
The Times’ examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files. The missing materials were reported earlier by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and by NPR.
Jess Piper lives in a rural part of Missouri. She is under the impression that the people elected in her district should listen to her grievances. She tried to speak to her representative and almost got arrested.
I am not an investigative journalist. I am a storyteller, but the story I am about to tell you has me feeling a little like Erin Brockovich. It keeps getting bigger. I keep taking notes. I keep hearing from others who are experiencing the same thing.
Something stinks in Missouri, and the stench is spreading fast — like a feed lot in July.
Republican Congressional Representatives are up to something nasty, and I think it is coordinated.
On January 30th, a few local Kansas City groups decided to go to one of our Congressman’s regional offices. He has five offices, and his constituents pay the rent for each.
My Congressman is Sam Graves. He has been in office for 24 years. He wins by a landslide every two years. He hasn’t held a town hall since 2012, and last fall, when I asked him to his face when he would hold a town hall, he told me, “I don’t do those.”
Many folks in his district have grievances with his policies and his fealty to the regime, so several of us went to his Kansas City office to voice our concerns to his staffers. The event was publicized and drew over 200 people.
When I arrived at the building that houses Sam’s office, I noticed a “No Trespassing” sign. I thought it was odd. The building is large, but it houses constituent offices for both Sam Graves and Senator Eric Schmitt.
Sam Graves’s KC Office, North Ambassador Drive, Kansas City, Missouri. 1/30/26.
As I pulled into the parking lot, I found the visitor’s parking space and parked. As I opened my back door to grab my protest sign, a woman in an unmarked police car told me I couldn’t park in the visitor’s lot, while a man in the passenger seat of the car filmed me with his phone.
I told her to take it up with someone else. I had every right to park in that spot.
She told me the building’s owner didn’t want us there. I told her I parked in the correct spot to speak with my Congressman in the office I paid for.
She told me to move my car, or I would be towed, because I was on private property.
I told her to do whatever she needed to do, but they’d have to tow dozens of vehicles. I grabbed my sign and walked toward the crowd gathering on the sidewalk.
I walked to the building to find Sam’s constituent office, and a man inside the building opened the door for me. I smiled at his courtesy, and I was about to pass through the open door when he stepped in front of me.
I looked up at his quick movement, and he asked me if he could help me.
I told him I was going in to speak to my Congressman’s staff. He told me there were no appointments that day. I stated I didn’t need an appointment…I had a sticky note to deliver. He said I couldn’t come in, and he would deliver anything I had to Sam’s staff.
And that was it. I was met by a guard at my Congressman’s door and not allowed in the building. I was denied my First Amendment right to petition my government for a redress of grievances.
I thought this was where the story would end, but what happened to me and others in Kansas City that day is happening all over the state. Missouri constituents are being met with hostility and locked doors and threats of citations and even arrest for showing up at our own Representative’s offices…
Remember when my Congressman told me he doesn’t do” town halls? He meant it. He is adamant. No contact with constituents and no questions answered and no relief delivered. He is a man beholden to his donors, not his voters.
And this applies to Ann Wagner and Eric Schmitt and Eric Burlison. They don’t care.
Petitioning our government is our First Amendment right. A right that exists even under this regime. Even under a Missouri GOP supermajority.
Someday, I hope the rest of Missouri will wake up to this fact.
These Representatives don’t care about you. Stop voting for them.
NPR reported that a significant number of pages were withheld when the Epstein files were released. Some of those pages referred to Trump and his interaction with minors.
This is the original report by Roger Sollenberger that spurred additional questions about the FBI redactions.
The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.
Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appears to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, and notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.
NPR reviewed multiple sets of unique serial numbers appearing before and after the pages in question, stamped onto documents in the Epstein files database, FBI case records, emails and discovery document logs in the latest tranche of documents published at the end of January. NPR’s investigation found dozens of pages that appear to be catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly.
The Justice Department declined to answer NPR’s questions on the record about these specific files, what’s in them, and why they are not published. After publication, the Justice Department reached out to NPR, taking issue with how its responses to questions were framed. Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre reiterated DOJ’s stance that any documents not published are because they are privileged, duplicates or relate to an ongoing federal investigation.
Other files scrubbed from public view pertain to a separate woman who was a key witness for the prosecution in the criminal trial of Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. Maxwell is seeking clemency from Trump.
Some of those documents were briefly taken down and put back online last week, while others remain hidden, according to NPR’s comparison of the initial dataset from Jan. 30 with document metadata of those files currently on the Justice Department website.
NPR does not name victims of sexual abuse.
When asked for comment about the missing pages and the accusations against the president, a White House spokeswoman told NPR that Trump “has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told NPR in a statement. “And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him. Meanwhile, Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Stacey Plaskett have yet to explain why they were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender.”
The White House has previously pointed to a statement from the Justice Department that says the Epstein files contain “untrue and sensationalist claims” about the president.
In a letter to members of Congress on Feb. 14 first reported by POLITICO, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insist that no records were withheld or redacted “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
In the last two weeks, as lawmakers have begun to view unredacted copies of Epstein files, members of both parties have criticized the way the Trump administration has handled the release of the files. They have also continued to accuse the Justice Department of violating the law and operating without transparency in redacting information.
First woman accuses Trump of sexual abuse
According to the newly released files, the FBI internally circulated Epstein-related allegations that mention Trump in late July and early August 2025. The list, collected from the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, included numerous salacious allegations. Agents marked most of the accusations as unverifiable or not credible.
But one lead was sent to the FBI’s Washington Office with the purpose of setting up an interview with the accuser. The lead was included in an internal PowerPoint slide deck detailing “prominent names” in the Epstein and Maxwell investigations last fall.
The woman who directly named Trump in her abuse allegation claimed that around 1983, when she was around 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”
Out of more than three million pages of files released by the Justice Department in recent months, this specific allegation against Trump only appears in copies of the FBI list of claims and the DOJ slideshow.
But a review of FBI case file logs and discovery documents turned over to Maxwell and her attorneys in the criminal case against her point to one place the claim could have come from — and how serious investigators took it.
The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times. That is according to an FBI “Serial Report” and a list of Non-Testifying Witness Material in the Maxwell case that were also released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Only the first interview, conducted July 24, 2019, is in the public database. That interview does not mention Trump.
Of 15 documents listed in a log of the Maxwell discovery material for this first accuser, only seven are in the Epstein files database. Those missing also include notes that accompany three of the interviews. The discrepancy in the file for the Trump accuser was first reported by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger.
According to NPR’s review of three different sets of serial numbers stamped onto the files, there appear to be 53 pages of interview documents and notes missing from the public Epstein database.
In the first interview document, the woman discussed ways Epstein abused her as a girl and, in identifying him to investigators, showed a cropped photo of the disgraced financier. Her attorney said it was cropped because she “was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation.”
The FBI agents noted it was a “widely distributed photograph” of Epstein with Trump.
A woman whose biographical details and description of Epstein’s abuse found in the FBI interview also line up with details from a victim lawsuit. In the December 2019 filing, “Jane Doe 4” does not mention Trump, and the woman voluntarily dismissed her claims against Epstein’s estate in December 2021.
Attorneys for this accuser declined to comment.
Elsewhere in the released Epstein files, someone in the FBI wrote on July 22, 2025, before the list and slide presentation were compiled, that Trump’s name was in the larger case files and that “one identified victim claimed abuse by Trump but ultimately refused to cooperate.”
Second accuser says she met Trump at Mar-a-Lago
The other woman whose mention of Trump made the DOJ’s presentation appears in Maxwell discovery files released last month in what’s known as a Testifying Witness 3500 material list.
In the first interview of six with the FBI conducted between Sept. 2019 and Sept. 2021, the second woman detailed how Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse began while she was around 13 years old attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts and described how, at one point, Epstein took her to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to meet him.
“EPSTEIN told TRUMP, ‘This is a good one, huh.,'” the interview report reads.
In a 2020 lawsuit against Epstein’s estate and Maxwell, the second woman added that both men chuckled and she “felt uncomfortable, but, at the time, was too young to understand why.”
That interview was removed from the DOJ’s public files some time after initial publication on Jan. 30 and was republished Feb. 19, according to document metadata.
The Justice Department told NPR the only reason any file has been temporarily removed is because it had been flagged by a victim or their counsel for additional review.
Multiple FBI interviews with other people refer to the second woman’s meeting with Trump while she was a minor and being abused by Epstein. One interview with a fleeting mention of Trump was removed from the public database and subsequently restored last week, while another interviewwith the woman’s mother is still offline. After publication, the Justice Department said the file required additional redactions and will be reposted soon.
In that conversation, the mother recalled hearing that “a prince and DONALD TRUMP visited EPSTEIN’s house” which made her “think that if they are there then how could EPSTEIN be a criminal,” according to NPR’s copy of the file that was first published.
The possible omission of files that mention these women’s particular allegations against the president come as the Justice Department has warned about other documents it has published in full that includes what it calls “untrue and sensationalist claims” about Trump.
At the same time, the Justice Department has removed and reuploaded thousands of pages in recent weeks to fix improperly redacted victim names. That includes documents related to the allegations from these two women, who separately say they were around 13 years old when Epstein first abused them.
Robert Glassman, who represents the woman who testified against Maxwell, sharply criticized the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files.
“This whole thing is ridiculous,” he told NPR. “The DOJ was ordered to release information to the public to be transparent about Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal enterprise network. Instead, they released the names of courageous victims who have fought hard for decades to remain anonymous and out of the limelight. Whether the disclosures were inadvertent or not—they had one job to do here and they didn’t do it.”
On this day in 2022, Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine. He expected to encounter token resistance, but the Ukrainians fought back fiercely. For four years, the brave Ukrainians have held back the Russian onslaught.
Russia aimed its barrage of missiles and drones at apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, train stations, shopping centers, power plants–all civilian targets. The Russian onslaught conquered territory but at a high price in Russian men (about one million) and vast amounts of tanks, airplanes, weapons, and supplies.
Writing on Substack, Marius Didziokas disparaged the view that Russia is winning:
Imagine that, four years after invading Poland, Hitler’s troops were bogged down fighting over unnamed villages 80 kilometres from the border. The Bismarck and half of the German navy would be lying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Polish drones and missiles would be raining down on Berlin’s refineries and weapons factories throughout the Reich. This is Russia today.
Some victory!
Paul Krugman is also skeptical about Russia’s “success.” As he notes, Biden made a terrible miscalculation in limiting Ukraine only to defensive measures, not permitting them to strike back at Russian targets. Putin’s threats of nuclear retaliation were a bluff.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2002. Putin expected a quick Russian triumph — reports are that he expected the Ukrainians to fold in days. He never said “three days,” but this meme has become shorthand for his belief that it would be a walkover. Western military analysts who had bought into propaganda about Russia’s military strength shared his assessment.
U.S. right-wingers were especially enthralled with what they perceived as the toughness, masculinity, and anti-wokeness of Russian soldiers.
But Putin’s dream of a short, victorious war has turned — as such dreams usually do — into a long nightmare of blood, destruction and humiliation. Ukrainian courage and Russian incompetence — combined with the effectiveness of British and American man-portable weapons — ensured that the attempt to seize Kyiv became an epic debacle. The three-day war is about to enter its fifth year.
I am not a military expert. But I pay attention to those who are — especially Phillips O’Brien, who has been far more right about this war than anyone else I know. Furthermore, the future of the war will depend greatly on an issue I do know something about, Europe’s ability to provide Ukraine with the support it needs. So I thought I would use the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war to talk about where we are right now.
First, about the military situation. The maps at the top of this post show how the area of Ukraine under Russian control — shaded pink — has changed over the past year. You may ask, whatchange? Exactly. The Ukraine war isn’t like World War II, in which breakthroughs could be exploited by armored columns sweeping into the enemy’s rear. It’s a war in which the battlefield is swarming with drones, where there isn’t even a well-defined front line, and the “kill zone” within which even armored vehicles are basically death traps is many kilometers wide.
Some observers still don’t understand how the reality of war has changed. Thus there have been breathless reports about the danger Ukraine would face after Russia seized the “strategic city” of Pokrovsk since July 2024. Russian forces finally entered Pokrovsk late last year and may now occupy most of the rubble. But it made no difference.
This reality shows how idiotic it is for the U.S. Department of Defense — sorry, Department of War — to decide that its mission is to embrace a “warrior ethos.” Bulging biceps and macho posturing won’t help you prevail in modern war, while bombastic stupidity is a good way to get many soldiers killed.
So if modern technology has turned war on the ground into a bloody stalemate — much bloodier for Russia than for Ukraine, but still indecisive — what will determine victory and defeat? The answer, which has been true in most wars, is that it will come down to resources and logistics.
If this were purely a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the Ukrainians, for all their heroism, would be doomed. Russia, after all, has four times Ukraine’s population and ten times its GDP.
But Ukraine has powerful friends.
For the first three years of the war, the United States was the most important of these friends. Indeed, Ukraine wouldn’t have been able to resist Russia without U.S. aid.
Unfortunately, top Biden officials were too cautious. They didn’t want Putin to win, but they clearly lost their nerve at the prospect of outright Russian defeat. So they slow-walked aid and kept putting restrictions on the use of U.S. weapons. Without those restrictions, Ukraine would have been able to hammer Russian rear areas, and this war might well have ended in its first year.
As it was, Ukraine was able to hang on but not triumph. And now we have a U.S. president who clearly wants to see a Russian victory. He’s unwilling or unable to openly throw America’s weight behind Putin, but he has effectively cut off all U.S. aid to Ukraine. That’s not hyperbole. Here are the numbers:
This is a betrayal of everything America used to stand for. We’re witnessing a war between freedom and tyranny, between an imperfect but decent government and a monstrous mass murderer — and the U.S. government is de facto backing the tyrannical monster.
Yet despite Trump’s pro-Putin policy, Ukraine is still standing, while Russia’s year-long offensive has been a bloody failure. While Trump may have thought that he could discreetly hand Ukraine over to Putin, it turns out that he didn’t have the cards.
Crucially, as you can see from the chart above, Europe has for the most part stepped up to the plate, replacing most of the lost aid from the United States. True, some of the military aid takes the form of U.S. weapons purchased by European nations and transferred to Ukraine. In particular, there is still no good alternative to Patriot air defense systems. And the Trump administration has been stalling some military deliveries even though Europe is paying.
But European — and, increasingly, Ukrainian — arms production has been ramping up. One indicator of European potential for arms manufacturing is that U.S. officials have gone ballistic over proposed buy-European provisions in Europe’s ongoing military buildup and threatened retaliation. This is quite rich: America in effect reserves the right to use its control over weapon systems to hobble other countries’ military efforts — on behalf of dictators the president likes — but is furious at any attempt to reduce dependence on those systems.
But does Europe have the resources to ensure Ukrainian victory without the United States? Mark Rutte, a Dutch politician who is currently secretary-general of NATO, made waves last month when he told people who believe that Europe can defend itself against Russia without the United States to “keep on dreaming.” One sees similar declarations of helplessness from some other Europeans. But it’s really difficult to see where this defeatism is coming from. Combined, the economies of the European nations that have strongly supported Ukraine are vastly larger than Russia’s:
Source: International Monetary Fund
It’s true that Europe has in the past had great difficulty acting like the superpower it is. But that may be changing.
So, how will this war end? Russia’s strategy now appears to be to terror-bomb Ukraine into submission, but as far as I know that has never worked. The more likely outcome is that European aid and Ukraine’s own growing prowess in arms production will gradually shift the military balance in Ukraine’s favor, and that Russia’s war effort will eventually collapse.
I hope that’s how it turns out. But even if it does, shame on America, for betraying a valiant ally.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor who explains legal issues to the lay public. Her writing is clear, concise, and free of legalese..
She writes here about Judge Aileen Cannon, who has almost single-handedly protected Trump from facing criminal prosecution by her tactics and rulings.
Her post is titled, “If DOJ Is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon Is His Judge.” I have heard speculation that if Alito or Thomas should retire, Trump may well replace him with Cannon because she saved him from trial and ignominy.
In her latest ruling, a few days ago, she barred the public release of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s report about Trump and his retention of classified documents after leaving office. As Vance says, the public release of such reports is routine. But Judge Cannon saw something in the report that might be embarrassing for Trump, so she blocked their release.
Hopefully, a higher court will overrule her or some anonymous person who has the report will post it on the Internet.
I am not pasting Vance’s commentary in full. I urge you to open the link and finish reading.
Vance writes:
South District of Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon has history with Donald Trump. He appointed her to the bench in May 2020. She was confirmed that November. Then came the June 2023 indictment of Trump by federal prosecutors. It landed on her desk.
Some judges would have recused. There is no precedent, because no former president had been indicted previously. But a reasonable jurist might have thought that the public wouldn’t have confidence in the objectivity of a judge sitting on a criminal case against the president who appointed her. It would have been the safe bet for someone concerned about the integrity of the judicial branch of government. Judge Cannon did not recuse.
To be fair, the government didn’t ask her to. That turned out to be a miscalculation.
From the earliest moments of the case, even before it was indicted, Cannon’s decisions were questionable. Mar-a-Lago was searched on August 8, 2022, well before Trump’s indictment and Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel. Cannon was asked to consider the unusual motion Trump’s lawyers filed to restrict the Justice Department’s ability to use evidence seized during the search. It was an attempt to impose an unprecedented (back when that word still had meaning) constraint on the government’s ability to investigate a criminal case.
But Cannon agreed with Trump’s position, assigning a special master to review seized documents. Her decision dramatically slowed the progress prosecutors were able to make. On December 1, shortly after Jack Smith’s appointment in November, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Cannon. The per curiam order did not mince words: “This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation. The answer is no.”
The manifestly unmeritorious decision she made in Trump’s favor pre-indictment was a harbinger of everything that was to come. The case was indicted on June 8, 2023. There is no way to know how much the loss of four months in giving prosecutors full access to the evidence against Trump contributed to the ultimate demise of the case, which was dismissed without going to trial on Smith’s own motion, once Trump was reelected.
Once Trump and his co-defendants were charged, Judge Cannon ruled in their favor at virtually every opportunity. She ruled for them on pretrial motions, like this one, after delaying. She rejected a request by prosecutors, a fairly routine one, to protect witness identities pre-trial. A timeline of her rulings and the delays they engendered is set out at length in this ABC report. Ultimately, Smith’s request to dismiss the case went to the Eleventh Circuit because Cannon had dismissed the prosecution in July 2024, accepting the highly questionable defense theory that Jack Smith’s appointment was unlawful. That decision was on appeal when Trump was elected.
We discussed Cannon’s decision in this post, where I noted that “Until today, every federal judge that considered the issue—all eight of them—unanimously found that attorneys general have the constitutional authority to appoint a special counsel. But Judge Aileen Cannon disagrees. In a 93-page opinion, nicely timed for the first day of the Republican convention … she dismissed the entire indictment.”
But pursuant to DOJ rules that prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president, Smith had little choice but to ask the Eleventh Circuit to dismiss the case as to Trump. When he did so, he wrote: “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”
That catches us up, more or less, to what happened today, when Judge Cannon ruled on what she characterizes as two “unopposed” motions, one by Trump, one by his co-defendants, both designed to prevent release of Volume II of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, the one covering the Mar-a-Lago case. If it weren’t such a serious matter, “unopposed” would be funny—these motions preventing the routine release of a special counsel’s report are only unopposed because the Attorney General, who should have filed an opposition, lives in Trump’s hip pocket. Cannon has managed to hold up the release of Volume II for over a year at this point.
Please open the link to finish this valuable analysis.
In 2018, voters in Arizona overwhelmingly rejected expansion of the state’s voucher program. Despite the decisive vote against vouchers, the legislature made vouchers available to every student, regardless of income or need.
Today about 7-8% of the state’s students use vouchers at an annual cost nearing $1 billion a year.
Most of the voucher students never attended public schools. In other words, the universal voucher program is mostly subsidizing the tuition of students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
He writes:
Save Our Schools Arizona reports on the rampant fraud in that state’s school voucher scheme:
Arizona Republican leaders and Superintendent Tom Horne have long insisted that fraud in Arizona’s ESA voucher program is minimal. “One percent or less,” Horne often has said — but 12News has obtained new public records from Horne’s AZ Dept. of Education (ADE) that tell a very different story. Documents show unallowable purchases — spending explicitly banned under ESA voucher program rules — may account for about 20 percent of transactions. That’s one in five.
These purchases are among more than 100 prohibited items listed in the ESA Parent Handbook. Accounts that make such purchases are supposed to be suspended or removed from the program by the ADE. However, according to 12News, “the spending continues as Horne contends his department uses risk-based auditing that will eventually catch wrongdoing.”
84,000 unallowable purchases??? 12News found an ADE memo covering ESA voucher spending from December 2022 through last September found that of 385,000 ESA purchases reviewed by Horne’s ADE, nearly 84,000 were deemed unallowable — or more than 20 percent of all transactions that should have been refused by the ADE!
Stephen Dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who keeps track of the budgetary impact of school choice on the state’s public schools. Despite multiple voucher programs, 85% of the state’s 1,000,000 children attend public schools. Dyer’s blog is called Tenth Period.
Ohio’s State Constitution contains explicit language supporting public schools and equally explicit language barring the public funding of religious schools.
Article VI of the Ohio State Constitution says:
“The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”
Nothing ambiguous there, but Republicans in Ohio ignore or creatively distort the State Constitution.
So I came across an interesting piece of information today. Since 2021, Ohioans went from unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of a little over 3 in 10 private school students to more than 8 in 10 today.
At an astounding pricetag of a 313 percent increase — at least — in taxpayer subsidies¹.
Yes, Ohio’s private schools have seen an enrollment increase. However, that 22,000 student increase represents barely 1 percent of the 1.9 million students enrolled in all Ohio schools this year.
And the funding has vastly outstripped the rate of unconstitutional voucher growth — resulting in a nearly 20 percent per pupil funding increase for private schools.
So get this.
State leaders have spent the last 5 years increasing unconstitutional voucher spending by $600 million, demonizing public education, putting on a full-court press to convince people to take unconstitutional vouchers and that’s netted them … barely a 1 percent increase in the private school share of Ohio’s school enrollment?
Pretty awful ROI, don’t you think?
Especially when you consider that by unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of mostly wealthy people like Les Wexner, the state is literally funding a separate, second educational system in direct contravention of the state constitution.
And it has meant they have been unable (unwilling?) to fully pay for the state’s school funding formula for the 85 percent of students attending Ohio’s public schools. The state’s public school funding comes out of the same budget pot as its voucher money.
So the only way for voucher proponents to convince any good-faith judge or group of judges that they are not funding a second, unconstitutional and unaccountable² school system is to actually shrink the number of vouchers.
Which they’ll never do.
This fact, as much as any, helps explain state Rep. Jamie Callender’s recent attempt to bully the suing school districts into dropping the case— a threat from which he has (kinda) weaklybacked down.
For if these suing school districts continue to stand strong, Callender and his overlord, Speaker Matt Huffman — lawyers, both — know they are screwed.
Legally speaking.
Footnotes:
1. I’m only including the two EdChoice programs and the Cleveland voucher program because those are the ones at issue in the current lawsuit. These numbers are, obviously, higher if you include the autism and special needs vouchers. Also, as with every current year data analysis of vouchers, the funding numbers are estimates because we don’t have readily accessible current year dollar figures for the vouchers, just the number of students whose schools are now eligible to get them. So I multiplied last year’s per pupil amount for each of the voucher programs to reach the $861.6 million figure. It’s probably going to be more because per pupil voucher funding always increases.
2. Remember that not a penny of the $8 billion+ we’ve spent on unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies since 1996 has been audited.
This is an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s latest dispatch. The beginning, which I skipped, is about other countries’ holding important men accountable: former Prince Andrew, for his association with Jeffrey Epstein; and the former President of South Korea, who was sentenced to life in prison, for leading an insurrection to take control of the government.
There’s an implicit lesson here about accountability and lack thereof. None of the powerful men who are named in the Epstein Files have been prosecuted in this country. The Department of Justice redacted many or most of their names to be sure they would not be held to account. Those who led the insurrection of 2021 were never held accountable. Its foot soldiers were tried and convicted, but have since been pardoned by the leader of the insurrection.
The part that I thought you would find interesting are the latest examples of Trump’s vaingloriouness.
Today Trump’s Commission of Fine Arts swore in two new members, including Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience in the arts. Then the commission, now entirely made up of Trump appointees, approved Trump’s plans for a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand, although the chair did note that public comments about the project were over 99% negative.
According to CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty, Harris said the White House is the “greatest house in [the] world. We want this to be the greatest ballroom in the world.” Trump says the ballroom is being funded by private donations through the Trust for the National Mall, which is not required to disclose its donors.
Today workers hung a banner with a giant portrait of Trump on the Department of Justice building.
On Air Force One as Trump traveled to Georgia this afternoon for a speech on the economy, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor. “Do you think people in this country at some point, associates of Jeffrey Epstein, will wind up in handcuffs, too?”
Trump answered: “Well, you know I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated. It’s very nice, I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. To see it, and to see what’s going on with his brother, who’s obviously coming to our country very soon and he’s a fantastic man. King. So I think it’s a very sad thing. It’s really interesting ‘cause nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive, but now they speak. But I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing. In fact, the opposite—he was against me. He was fighting me in the election, which I just found out from the last three million pages of documents.”
In fact, Trump has not been exonerated.
When he got to Georgia, Trump’s economic message was that “I’ve won affordability.” More to the point was his focus on his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to secure elections. In fact, in solving a nonexistent problem, the law dramatically restricts voting. Republicans in the House have already passed it. If the Senate passes it, Trump told an audience in Rome, Georgia, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”
Why did she say he was not exonerated? She may have been referring to this case or to the many photos of Epstein and Trump together, in some photos with young girls.
Andy Borowitz is America’s humorist. More than that, he is incisive and brilliant. He used to write for The New Yorker, but now has his own Substack blog called The Borowitz Report. I subscribe, and I recommend that you do so as well.
In this post, he gives insight into our notorious Attirney General, Pam Bondi, who has turned the Department of Justice into Trump’s personal law firm.
It’s important to remember that she was Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2019. She claimed that human trafficking was her #1 issue but somehow overlooked Jeffrey Epstein. As Attorney General, she is still shielding his crimes. Could it be that she is doing this to protect Trump?
Her obnoxious, aggressive, pugnacious appearance before the House Judiciary Committee showed the real Pam Bondi.
Can the attorney general of the United States go to prison?
The answer, of course, is yes: John Mitchell, who served under Richard M. Nixon, later served 19 months behind bars for crimes related to the Watergate cover-up.
Will the toxin known as Pam Bondi follow in his footsteps?
It’s worth considering in light of her appearance before Congress on Wednesday, a performance that Kimberly Guilfoyle might call “too shouty.”
Her testimony was unquestionably obnoxious. But was it criminal?
When you examine the evidence, it doesn’t look good for Pam.
This was the pivotal moment: responding to a question from California Rep. Ted Lieu about the Epstein scandal, Bondi snapped, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Everyone knows that.”
Lieu, who must have been tickled that Bondi was dumb enough to step into the weasel trap he set for her, responded that the attorney general might have just committed perjury. Which, as every Watergate superfan knows, is exactly what earned her Republican predecessor, John Mitchell, a trip to the pokey.
When the Trump shitshow is finally over, two things must happen. First, there must be a solid month of dancing in the streets. Second, there must be a reckoning: ideally, Nuremberg-style trials of the corrupt quislings who enabled this unprecedented crime spree. With those enjoyable tribunals in mind, let us now consider the case of Pam Bondi.
Remember when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general? We were so much younger then—although, it should be added, not young enough for Matt Gaetz.
At the time, I observed that Gaetz’s nomination was not what QAnon had in mind when they said they wanted to bring pedophiles to justice. In the end, Matt turned out to be as reckless with Venmo as he was about the age of consent, and Trump quickly withdrew his name.
Pundits claimed that Trump never expected Gaetz to pass muster with the Senate. By their reckoning, he was a “sacrificial lamb”—an odd way to describe a man who, in his personal life, had consistently behaved like a wolf. But by shitcanning Gaetz, the theory went, Trump was sending a signal to his Senate toadies that they’d better confirm all his other nominees, no matter how idiotic, incompetent, or drunk. When it came to Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, and myriad other passengers in Trump’s clown Cybertruck, the gambit seemed to pay off.
Matt Gaetz, peering into the gates of Hell. (Erin Scott-Pool via Getty Images)
As for the job of attorney general, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed relieved that it would not be filled by a summer-stock version of Jeffrey Epstein. Surely, whoever Trump named as Gaetz’s replacement would be an improvement.
Instead, Trump picked Pam Bondi.
In 2016, when she was Florida attorney general, Bondi secured her place in Trump’s heart with a speech at the Republican National Convention. Her bloodcurdling attack on Hillary Clinton inspired the GOP mob to break into a familiar chant, which prompted Bondi to comment, “Lock her up? I love that.” And so, by approving the incarceration of a woman who had never been charged with a crime, Bondi displayed an attitude towards due process that would someday serve her splendidly as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
She would, of course, have another opportunity to assert her preference for imprisoning innocent people with the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. On April 14, 2025, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump’s accomplice in the world’s most notorious administrative error, joined him in the Oval Office, receiving a much warmer welcome there than was offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After chummily congratulating each other on the abduction and deportation of a non-criminal, the two men started workshopping how their brilliant strategy might be applied to innocent American citizens.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—a stroke of branding so cringe, it’s amazing it didn’t come from Elon Musk. “You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump advised him.
Where did America’s attorney general stand on this flagrant nullification of a basic right enshrined in the Constitution? Trump added, “Pam is studying. If we can do that, it’s good.”
Pam, apparently, is a quick study. On Fox that evening, she was all in on Trump’s blatantly illegal idea, asserting, “These are Americans who he [Trump] is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically.”
It’s not that Bondi is bad at her job—it’s that she’s outstanding at the exact opposite of her job, that is, using the DOJ to subvert justice whenever possible. Bondi’s Department of Injustice, a mutant creation worthy of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, has proven inhospitable to career DOJ lawyers, who have struggled in court to defend the indefensible.
One such staffer, senior immigration attorney Erez Reuveni, committed what Bondi apparently considers a cardinal sin: uttering a truthful statement within earshot of a judge. After acknowledging what was obvious to any thinking person (but seemingly elusive to Messrs. Trump and Bukele)—that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a mistake—Reuveni was put on indefinite leave and then fired.
Meanwhile, Liz Oyer, a longtime DOJ pardon attorney, was fired for refusing to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost them after pleading no contest to domestic battery charges in 2011. Apparently, Trump believes Mel Gibson needs lethal weapons more urgently than Ukraine.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see Trump standing up for the rights of domestic abusers, since a sizable number of the January 6 rioters he pardoned fit that description. He doubled down on his support for this cohort by appointing a crony accused of domestic violence, Herschel Walker, ambassador to the Bahamas.
But what makes the Mel Gibson case particularly rich is that Trump has repeatedly claimed he is punishing universities for their “failure to combat antisemitism.” If Trump is serious about spanking antisemites, he need look no further than his pal Mel.
After the actor’s 2006 drunk driving arrest in Malibu, the police report indicated, “Gibson blurted out a barrage of anti-semitic remarks about ‘fucking Jews’. Gibson yelled out: ‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’ Gibson then asked: ‘Are you a Jew?'”
Mel Gibson after his 2006 drunk driving arrest (L) and his 2011 domestic violence arrest (R).
In the upside-down world of Pam Bondi, highly regarded DOJ lawyers are fired and Mel Gibson is rearmed. But do such perversions of justice make Bondi a candidate for worst attorney general ever? They most certainly do, when one considers how decisively and repeatedly she has violated her oath of office:
“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Rather than defend the Constitution, Bondi has used her time in office to tirelessly protect pedophiles—which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her tenure as Florida’s AG. The following campaign ad from that era, in which she vowed to “put human trafficking monsters where they belong—behind bars,” hasn’t aged well:
As Bloomberg’s Mary Ellen Klas wrote, “Bondi kept her distance from the state’s most prominent sex-trafficking case, even as Epstein’s victims pleaded with the courts to invalidate provisions of his non-prosecution agreement and filed lawsuits alleging that he abused them when he was on work release from jail.”
I am confident that Bondi’s misdeeds—including but not limited to her role in the Epstein cover-up—have more than earned her a Nuremberg-style tribunal. I am not, however, suggesting we chant, “Lock her up.” Unlike our current attorney general, I believe in due process.
Diane Ravitch's blog 