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An Important New Development in the Epstein Case!!

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
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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to keep the files sealed, noting that the passage last year of the Epstein Files Transparency Act superseded any earlier grand jury arguments that Maxwell was using to keep the records from the public.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

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

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2026 //
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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

Board of Kennedy Center Votes to Put Trump’s Name on the Building Again, Defying Court Order

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2026 //
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One of Donald Trump’s first acts when he returned to the Presidency was to take full control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. During his first term in office, Trump never attended any event at the Kennedy Center.

In 2025, Trump fired its board of directors, all except members of Congress, whom he can’t fire. He replaced the bipartisan board with his cronies, who promptly named Trump the chairman of the board. The board proceeded to fire the professionals who ran the Center and to adopt a resolution renaming the Center. Henceforward, the board decreed, the Center would be known as the John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts.

That decision led the Center into a spiral of decline. Many performers and shows cancelled. The Washington National Opera moved out. Ticket sales dropped.

The Kennedy Center suffered incalculable reputation damage after he politicized it. Why did he do it?

Despite his wealth and notoriety, Trump was never accepted into the world of high culture in New York City. He was never invited to serve on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, or any of the city’s other prestigious institutions of high culture. Nor was he known as a donor to those institutions.

He built his brand as a brash businessman who hung out in night clubs with mobsters and beautiful women and sought recognition in the gossip columns of the city’s tabloid press. He was rich, and he was a celebrity, but he was never admitted into elite circles.

His vendetta against the Kennedy Center should be seen in that perspective.

His puppet board at the Kennedy Center did his bidding. In addition to adding his name to the facade of the building, the board decided to close the Center for two years for repairs and renovations. The closure would halt the embarrassment of canceled performances and empty seats. Some critics worried that Trump would tear down the Center as he tore down the East Wing of the White House. Act fast and don’t apologize.

One board member, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, sued to stop the board’s decision to rename the Center and also to close it for two years for Trump-directed “renovations.”

U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled on May 29, 2026, that the Kennedy Center board did not have the legal authority to rename the institution. He said that Congress had established the name by statute and only Congress could change it. He ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building and from all official Kennedy Center materials. Judge Cooper gave the board a deadline of 14 days.

The Kennedy Center board considered an appeal to delay or reverse the order but ultimately complied. Workers began on June 12 to erect scaffolding in front of the building, moving at a snail’s pace, and began removing Trump’s name at 1:20 a.m. on June 13.

Since then, the facade of the building that shows its name has been covered by white tarps.

At first, Trump petulantly said that Congress should run the Kennedy Center, but he soon reverted to control mode.

On August 13, 2026, the Kennedy Center board voted to put Trump’s name back on the building. It wants to add an inscription saying the center was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” despite Judge Cooper’s earlier ruling. And it voted to name the large plaza in front of the Center for Trump. It also voted to close the Center for two years, which Judge Cooper said it could not do without more detailed plans and reasons.

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty is suing to reverse the board’s defiance of Judge Cooper’s May 29 decision.

At the same time, the Trump administration is appealing Judge Cooper’s original order.

Judge Cooper could hold the board in contempt of court. Or he could order them not to change the name, as he did in May. Or he could accept the new wording for the facade, which seems unlikely. Or the board could challenge Judge Cooper’s decision to higher courts. Or Congress could step in and rewrite the statute so that Trump could add his name.

Why is the board so insistent on honoring Trump? His hand-picked President Richard Grennell praised Trump for “his visionary leadership.” Board members appointed by him have lavished praise on him.

Trump needs this sycophantic behavior. At his Cabinet meetings, Cabinet secretaries mouth the same obsequious language, stoking his ego, which is insatiable.

Why does this squabble over the Kennedy Center even matter? The U.S. is stuck in a war with Iran that has caused loss of life, depleted our supply of weapons, and harmed the global economy by limiting the flow of oil.

But Trump is deeply engaged in his vanity projects, of which this is one. He is obsessed with his ballroom, which has been stopped by the courts temporarily but is under construction. He assumes it will be known as “the Donald J. Trump Ballroom” forever. He intends to build a 250′ triumphal Arch, despite overwhelming public opposition. He ripped out Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden and paved it over.

He’s doing something to the portico of the White House, but it is hidden by huge shrouds. He is installing a permanent helipad on the White House grounds. He is renovating the Lincoln Bedroom into who-knows-what. He wants to paint the historic grey granite Eisenhower Office Building white, although preservationists have warned him against it (the paint won’t last and it is likely to damage the granite).

All of this is about leaving a permanent mark on D.C. He was not engaged in vanity projects during his first term. Now, at the age of 80, aware of his mortality, he is obsessed by his passion to create a permanent legacy.

Of the many monuments in Washington, D.C., that honor presidents–the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center–all were created after the honoree was dead.

Perhaps Trump, who is deeply insecure despite his braggadocio, is afraid he won’t be honored after his death. He remains angry that he never was accepted into the top ranks of New York City’s elite. They treated him like scum. That may be why he is so intent on building Trump monuments while he can.

Act first, get permission later from commissions packed with your flunkies.

Categories Art, Corruption, Ethics, History, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Trump Finds New Ways to Grift and Grab

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2026 //
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Thom Hartmann is a diligent journalist who digs deep into the corruption of this regime.

On the deregulation of public lands: Trump is allowing destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, to make way for its exploitation. No complaints from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

He writes:

— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon. 

— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November. 

— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics. 

— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster. 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

Republicans Fully Cave to Trump, Todd Blanche Will Be Confirmed

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2026 //
8

The confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States has been kabuki theater of sorts. We were hopeful that three Republicans had the backbone to turn down this man who has broken the Department of Justice. Surely, the Senate would not confirm a man who is so subservient to Trump. The DOJ is supposed to be at arms’-length from the President. Blanche is under Trump’s thumb.

Blanche is the one who negotiated a deal to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and Trump allies as well as a sweet deal for Trump, his sons, and their business NOT to be audited by the IRS, a gift to them of at least $100 million, probably more.

I imagined that there would be outrage towards the man who refused to release the Epstein files. The guy who spent two days interviewing sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, then arranged for her transfer to a minimum security prison where she received special treatment, as if she were a privileged guest, not a convicted pedophile.

Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski will vote against confirming Blanche. In Collins’ case, this is a pattern. She votes against her party only when her vote is not needed.

Most shocking are the “yes” votes of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, and–today–Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. All three were driven out of the senate by Trump. Till is resigned because Trump threatened to primary him. The other two were primaried by Trump choices and lost.

They had reason to stand against Trump, and they had reason to have a spine. But in the end, all three caved.

And Todd Blanche will head the nation’s Justice Department, where he will continue Trump’s agenda and his vendettas.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump

Federal Judge Rules Against Trump’s Deal with Justice Department as “Self-Dealing”

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
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Judge Kathleen M. Williams blasted Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the settlement, which created a $1.776 billion “slush fund” for Trump’s aggrieved allies and granted Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from IRS audits.

Judge Williams also referred Todd Blanche to the Florida Bar Association and the New York Bar Association for possible disciplinary actions. Blanche, the acting Attorney General, was nominated by Trump to be Attorney General; Senate confirmation hearings begin this week.

The New York Times reported:

A federal judge on Monday ruled that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement.

In the order, the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought Mr. Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. Judge Williams added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

The decision by Judge Williams did not explicitly kill the deal that Mr. Trump had worked out with his own government to receive what amounted to amnesty from investigations into tax returns that he, his family and their businesses have already filed. But Judge Williams’s scathing ruling exposed the negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior officials at the Justice Department he controls for what she says they were: backroom dealings that did not arise from a legitimate legal process.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” the judge wrote.

The 56-page decision, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, came two months after the Justice Department released a pair of documents purporting to be formal agreements that settled Mr. Trump’s remarkable suit against the I.R.S. The documents laid out a pair of separate but shocking moves — one granting the president, his family and his businesses wide-ranging immunity from tax inquiries and the other creating a $1.8 billion fund aimed at compensating allies of Mr. Trump who say they were the victims of so-called government weaponization.

After outcry from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund. But he said that Mr. Trump’s extraordinary protections from I.R.S. scrutiny would remain in place.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Discipline, Ethics, Justice, Trump

Trump is Killing the Civil Service and Reviving the Spoils System

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2026 //
9

Trump boasted about the U.S. Supreme Court decision Trump v. Slaughter gave him more power than any other President. That decision removes protection from members of independent commissions. With the exception of the Federal Reserve Board (which regulates the banking system and whose stability is crucial to the economy), Trump now has the power to fire any member of any independent commission without cause. He can stack those commissions with his cronies, with people who have no expertise but will do whatever he wants.

What’s the point of having “independent” commissions if they are not independent of political influence?

Thom Hartmann wrote that the Court majority just rolled back the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created the Civil Service:

The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s.

Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.” 

If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted…

The Federal Reserve protects the nations’ banking system and thus ensures stability and prosperity for America’s billionaires and the companies that made them that way. By blowing up Trump’s attempt to remove the Fed’s one Black governor (presumably as part of his and Hegseth’s Make America White Again campaign), the Republicans on the Court defended America’s oligarchs.

The other federal agencies, like the FTC, mostly protect you and me. They oversee our environment, consumer product safety, the purity of our food and drugs, and so on. If anything, America’s oligarchs consider them a pain in the ass.

If Democrats win the Presidency and control of both houses of Congress in 2028, they can write new laws reviving limits on Presidential power, protecting merit-based appointments, and strengthening the federal civil service.

Until that happens, Trump can fire any member of the Federal Trade Commission,

Categories Accountability, Character, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Trump

Scott Dworkin: Trump Sons Cash in, DOGE Strikes Out

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2026 //
5

Scott Dworkin runs a Democratic activist’s blog, raising money for candidates and exposing Trump scandals and grifts. I subscribe and encourage you to do the same.

He writes:

A NEW TRUMP BUSINESS: THE PENTAGON

A paper trail of federal money keeps showing up right behind the Trump name. Don Jr. joined drone maker Unusual Machines’ advisory board in November 2024—and within a year, one of the company’s largest orders ever was placed by the US Army.

Last August, Don Jr.’s firm, 1789 Capital, bought into a startup called Vulcan Elements; three months later it landed a $620 million loan, the biggest in the Pentagon’s lending office history. ProPublica found the loan was initiated by senior White House official Peter Navarro—a friend of Don Jr.’s—and pushed through in a matter of weeks, sending Vulcan’s value skyrocketing from $200 million toward $2 billion.

The sons swear their names have nothing to do with it, but the record says otherwise: roughly $3.7 billion in federal money went to at least ten companies tied to the brothers since the regime took power. That’s your April taxes, meant to defend the country, rerouted to whoever hired the right last name.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now demanding the Pentagon’s inspector general investigate: “his sons are cashing in on defense contracts funded by hardworking taxpayers.”

They built this in the dark to work in secret, betting nobody would ever turn on the lights. The investigation just started, the receipts are already public, and every dollar gets traced. This fight is only beginning.

DOGE IS DEAD. THE DAMAGE ISN’T.

DOGE’s mandate expired July 4, the end date written into Trump’s own executive order. Elon Musk swore he’d cut $2 trillion. DOGE’s website claims $215 billion—a number they haven’t updated since January and that budget experts don’t buy. Even taking their figure at face value, that’s a dime in cuts for every dollar promised.

Molly Hardy was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year. DOGE laid her off anyway. Then in March, the agency came crawling back, emailing to ask if she’d return. She turned them down—not bitter, just clear-eyed: “It didn’t feel good. It just felt really sad.”

She’s not alone, and that’s the part they didn’t see coming. All over the government, the wreckage is being reversed: HHS fired 10,000 workers and is now scrambling to hire 12,000. Agencies that bragged about the chainsaw are begging people to come back. Asked if shrinking the workforce was even still the goal, OPM chief Scott Kupor admitted: “I’m not hearing that.”

And when Congress asked what DOGE actually accomplished, budget director Russell Vought had nothing to show: “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”

The people who took a chainsaw to our government don’t get to slink off without a full accounting. We’ll see to that.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Musk, Elon, Trump

Why Ohio Got a Terrible Grade on the NPE Report

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2026 //
0

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.

She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:

Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.

The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.

A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.

What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.

Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.

If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Why Does Media Ignore Susan Collins’ Scandals?

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2026 //
23

We have read all about the scandals of Graham Platner. We know about the women he dated, the women he texted, and his tattoo. The media has written about all of them in detail.

What we don’t know is about the financial scandals of his opponent, Senator Susan Collins. Her husband is a lobbyist, and she has lovingly taken care of his business.

David Dayen, editor of The American Prospect, wrote about the media’s double standard here.

The Founding Fathers had a finely honed sense of the corroding power of corruption. They wrote prohibitions on self-enrichment and the pull of bribery directly into the Constitution on three separate occasions, banning foreign and domestic gifts, changes to presidential compensation during one’s period in office, and appointments for members of Congress that could be remunerative. They believed that someone treated well by a foreign potentate or stateside special interest would be naturally inclined to benefit them, if even unconsciously, and that a wall needed to be constructed to guard against this.

That the Supreme Court has directly or indirectly nullified these one by one is a tragedy. But the court of public opinion, at least as mediated by gatekeepers of information, has also separated what counts as corruption from what counts as a political scandal. Donald Trump personally earning $1.4 billion from a family cryptocurrency business that benefits from his administration’s lenient crypto policies (much of those crypto purchases coming directly from a foreign government) is less well known to the public than whatever wild thing he said on his personal social media site the night before.

By the same token, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a household name, and Darializa Avila Chevalier will soon be, because of what they say, or once said. Thomas Daffron is not a household name.

Daffron is Susan Collins’s husband. He was also a registered lobbyist and eventually became chief operating officer of a K Street consulting firm named Jefferson Consulting, prior to and after marrying Collins. This firm received $76 million in government contracts for acquisition and improvement consulting during Daffron’s tenure from 2006 to 2016. Much of it came after he became COO, and especially after Collins wrote a contracting reform bill in 2007, parts of which boosted Jefferson Consulting.

Some of the connections appeared rather clear. To use one example, the Collins bill required a strategic plan for acquisition at the Federal Acquisition Institute, and Jefferson billed the Federal Acquisition Institute for its strategic plan. This pattern repeated; the bill put in rules mandating precisely the services Jefferson Consulting provided.

This is not a new revelation. It was released on the eve of Collins’s last re-election campaign six years ago. Collins’s response was that Daffron, the man she has been married to since 2012 and has known since the 1970s, never officially lobbied her. Collins won re-election and that was that, until her Democratic opponent for Senate this year, Graham Platner, brought it up as part of an anti-corruption agenda he released a week ago. He proposed the “Collins Rule”: Any senator whose spouse or the firm where they work receives government contracts should have to recuse themselves from voting or oversight work on that contract.

Collins was apoplectic. She tweeted that the claim was “outrageous and false,” and that she was defamed as a criminal. (Platner replied that he didn’t say it was criminal, but that it should be.) She sent her campaign manager to stand outside Platner’s press event and rebut the charges. The campaign manager said that money is delivered to contractors through the executive branch and not the Senate, eliding the fact that the bill Collins wrote benefited the firm her good friend and future spouse worked at.

For six years, this has been a nonstory, because we don’t have a political culture that imprints this kind of financial machination and leveraging of political power as a scandal. It’s either too complicated or just politics, and people move on.

Scandals are reserved for old internet comments and personal failings. Of these, Platner has plenty. When I talked to him last week, I mentioned that he’s become like a figure in Homer’s epics who is always preceded with an epithet: the “scandal-plagued” Graham Platner.

He’s talked about these scandals countless times, and I don’t need to rehash them here. But you can believe both that personal character is important in assessing elected officials and make room within that definition of character to cover how their actions in office affect their personal bank accounts.

“We’ve been working within a political system that for so long now, this form of self-dealing and self-enrichment has become intrinsic to the system itself,” Platner told me. “A lot of people who cover this stuff have created this framework in which that kind of thing is not even worthy of discussion … We write off actual scandal, legalized corruption, because we’ve been so immunized to it.”

This may seem solely like a media critique, and yes: It’s partially that. Headlines like “Platner Tests Democrats’ Tolerance for Scandal” are rarely matched by ones like “Collins Tests Republicans’ Tolerance for Self-Dealing.” But that takes everyone but the media off the hook.

Platner and Collins are locked in a virtually tied race, according to recent polling. Other statewide Maine races show the Democrat comfortably in front. Part of Collins’s still being in the game is due to her experience and durability, but part of it is the way in which this definition of political scandal is massaged and shaped.

In her career, Susan Collins hasn’t faced a drumbeat of questions about her consistent violations of the congressional stock trading disclosure laws that she co-authored. She hasn’t had to answer many queries about a net worth that has more than doubled since 2012, after her marriage to Daffron. She doesn’t respond to reporters about her family stock holdings in Amazon and UnitedHealth and Visa, and the votes she makes affecting those businesses.

She isn’t forced to explain why she switched her vote to allow a tax break for private equity managers to stand, and how now private equity managers are supporting her re-election with millions of dollars. She hasn’t said much about the 100 billionaires who are funding a super PAC on her behalf (run by a lobbyist whom Daffron recently consulted for) that has spent $9 million in attack ads just through the end of last month. There’s been little about how one of the billionaires is a private equity mogul who destroyed paper mills in Maine and put residents out of work.

We all know chapter and verse about Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his texts to women other than his wife early in his marriage, and allegations of misconduct from former girlfriends (that one he vociferously denies). These are the kinds of revelations that are grist for gossip. We don’t have a mentality that puts financial scandal and personal scandal on the same plane. Old tweets are easy to cover, but they’re also easy to understand and to render judgments in ways not applied to things that take more consideration.

The people who decide what does and doesn’t matter in politics also don’t speak the language of no-bid contracts, pay-to-play deals, and family benefits from contractswith the same zeal reserved for putting an old tweet on a screen. Maybe that’s because corruption hits both ways and can blow back on one’s own party, and maybe that’s because personal peccadilloes are a shortcut and time-saver.

Either way, this dearth of consideration has saddled us with this myopic definition of scandal that contributes to a disaffection with politics. If graft is seen as normal, the ability for reform and even progress feels remote.

Please open the link to finish reading this examination of the media’s double standards.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, For-Profit, Maine, Scandals
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