Air Date: 5–30-2026

Today we examine how Trump turned a sham lawsuit into a $1.8 billion reward fund for his political allies who attacked the Capitol on January 6th while implementing a counterterrorism strategy that erases right-wing extremism from the threat landscape, refocuses on left-wing violence that hardly exists and threatens to "find and kill" those they deem enemies.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how Trump turned a sham lawsuit into a $1.8 billion reward fund for his political allies who attacked the Capitol on January 6th while implementing a counterterrorism strategy that erases right-wing extremism from the threat landscape, refocuses on left-wing violence that hardly exists and threatens to "find and kill" those they deem enemies. For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 60 minutes today include

Trump's Terms

Legal AF

Democracy Now!

The NPR Politics Podcast

Here & Now Anytime

The Intercept Briefing

and The Hartmann Report

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 3 sections;

Section A, ANATOMY OF THE HEIST

Section B, THE BIGGER PATTERN

Section C, ENEMIES OF THE STATE

And now, on to the show.

The IRS won't investigate the past tax returns of President Trump, his family, or his businesses. That's part of a settlement signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, ending a lawsuit brought by the president against his own government. Blanche spent much of a Senate hearing Tuesday defending that settlement and creation of a fund to pay people who claim they were targets of politicized prosecutions.

NPR's Ryan Lucas reports. The nearly $1.8 billion pot of taxpayer money, dubbed the Anti-Weaponization Fund by the Justice Department, was created as part of a settlement agreement with President Trump, who in return dropped his lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Democrats had blunt words for Blanche about the arrangement.

Here's Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen. Mr. Attorney General, this is an outrageous, unprecedented slush fund that you set up. And Washington Senator Patty Murray. This is corruption that has never been more blatant or more right spent. What is happening is you write the check, Trump and his cronies cash it, American taxpayers, who are already being whacked with high prices, are gonna foot the bill.

Under the agreement, the fund will be administered by a five-member commission who will decide who receives payouts and in what amount. Four of the commissioners will be appointed by the attorney general, while a fifth will be appointed by the attorney general in consultation with Congress. President Trump can remove any commissioner at any time.

In his testimony, Blanche defended the setup and said it was unusual but necessary. There is an unprecedented nature of what we did yesterday in response to years and years of weaponization. He pointed to the multiple indictments against President Trump after his first term in office, including the two federal cases against him for mishandling classified documents and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Blanche served as Trump's personal defense attorney in both of those cases. Democrats and a few Republicans pressed Blanche on who would be eligible for payments out of the fund. In response, Blanche said it's open to anyone who believes they were a victim of weaponization. It's not limited to Republicans.

It's not limited to Democrats. It's not limited to January 6th, defendants. It's, it's limited, only by the term weaponization. Under questioning, Blanche would not rule out potential payments to Trump campaign donors or January 6th Capitol rioters, including people convicted of violently assaulting police.

Trump himself will not receive a direct payout from the fund, but the IRS is barred from pursuing any claims or actions against him, his family, or businesses now or in the future.

we got a fast-moving docket down in Florida in the Trump versus Internal Revenue Service, basically Trump versus Trump, where he controls the Internal Revenue Service, he controls the Department of Justice, all to set up this slush fund for himself for $1.776 billion. And now standing between that and it happening is one Judge Williams, who I know well in Miami At the moment that we said coming off the weekend from Legal AF that Trump would try to avoid having to file the required jurisdictional brief with the judge because the judge basically said, "I don't see how this-- there are adversarial parties here.

I see this as Trump versus Trump in effect, one dominating over the other," and required a brief or two from the IRS from Donald Trump. No, they've been working overtime internally at the Internal Re-Revenue Service to try to settle the case. But how do you settle a phony case? That's always been the problem.

I pointed that out on Legal AF for the last month. Without a legitimate good faith lawsuit, Donald Trump has nothing to trade in consideration for the settlement, and therefore, he'd have to find another statute or he'd just be robbing the treasury of money to set up a slush fund that he controls through a phony commission.

And he's involved his own Department of Justice, which he also controls as the chief legal officer, and they're in on the conspiracy as well. That's the premise of the briefing by the ninety-three members of the House who are Democrats, led by Jamie Raskin, and filed by a friend of mine as local counsel, Andre Rivero from Rivero Mestre.

Let's get to these filings. Trump files first a notice of voluntary dismissal under Rule forty-one. He says he doesn't need the court's permission, and she can't take any other action. I'm not so sure about that because if you fraudulently file in order to fraudulently settle, I think the federal judge has inherent authority to not be used to administer justice, to bring the lawyers like Alejandro Brito representing Donald Trump, the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, the parties before her, in order to show cause and determine whether she's been had or not.

See, she should not be used this way, and there should be a hearing over it, and that's what the new motion filed by the ninety-three Democrats is asking her to do. They're asking that their amicus brief be accepted, and in their amicus brief, they say the following on pages, twelve and thirteen and fourteen.

That's really the heart of the matter. They say there in section two, this is now the Democrats writing to Judge, Williams, the DOJ lacks authority to settle this collusive suit once establishing that the suit is collusive. If this court determines that this is a collusive suit, meaning there's no true adversarial parties here, they're all in cahoots, then the DOJ would lack authority, legal authority to settle it on behalf of the defendant agencies or the United States for two reasons.

First, they say there are particular statutes that are implicated, and they don't apply nor give the power that Trump wants. There's the Judgment Fund statute 31 U.S.C. 1304, which has specific, constraints that foreclose a corrupt settlement, particularly if it's a compromise settlement, which is what this would appear to be, then the attorney general cannot compromise a settlement unless there is a legitimate obligation or liability or imminent litigation that he's settling.

But if it's been withdrawn already and it's phony from the start, then it cannot be the basis of a compromise settlement, so the argument goes. They say on the, bottom half of page 13 A feigned or collusive suit over which the court has no jurisdiction, and one that has been voluntarily dismissed already on Monday, is not fact, is not actual or imminent litigation.

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Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. They then say, look, the second reason it can't be settled and it's a fraud is because it would violate the domestic Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which applies to the president. Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 says that other than his paycheck, that a president cannot receive any other emolument.

When you hear emolument, think benefit, profit, gift, reward, anything of value from the United States or any of them other than his paycheck. And they're saying that this violates, this one point seven billion dollar slush fund creation gives him benefits, to benefit his cronies, political benefits, other benefits, both monetary and non-monetary, that he is not entitled to and then violates the Emoluments Clause.

This is going to be-- we're gonna be reporting on the next wave of lawsuits. This will be the template for them. This was a brief, but there's going to be a lawsuit. The lawsuit's brought by maybe the very same people, Democracy Defenders and Norm Eisen and Matt Platkin, former New Jersey attorney general, and others.

will be bringing suits and they'll argue that this is a violation of the Emoluments Clause. It'll be the second one in a week. There's a case in Miami as well brought by local residents in Miami against the Trump library, casino convention center, whatever it's supposed to be, in Miami, as also a violation because they got a $300 million piece of property for free from Miami Dade College, whose entire endowment is the same value of what they gave up through Ron DeSantis in order for him to build a 50-story building.

That's a violation of the Emoluments Clause, don't you think? And that case is in Miami as well, which we're following very closely. I like this filing, and the way it is argued about the fraudulent and conspiratorial nature and improper purpose of all of it. They say at the top of their filing, and it's very well-researched-- Here's wh- how they start.

"The amici curiae are 93 members of the United States House of Representatives. They are interested in this case because they took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. The president is attempting to undermine the Constitution by bringing this collusive suit against the federal government contrary to the requirement that federal courts may only hear cases or controversies.

The Department of Justice is entrusted with defending the United States against claims under these laws and ensuring that the statutory requirements are met before money is paid. However, the DOJ has colluded with President Trump and his allies, and in doing so, abdicated these responsibilities. Should this lawsuit achieve plaintiff's desired ends, it would result in the improper and unconstitutional transfer of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the president, his family, and his allies.

Having taken oaths to uphold the def-- and defend the Constitution, the movants cannot stand by and let the Constitution's provisions go ignored." We agree.

Can you respond to these developments, the anti-weaponization fund the Trump family and President Trump himself be- being, protected from any future investigation into their finances and corruption?

This is, dictatorship in action. Donald Trump had declared himself to be our dictator shortly after resuming office last year. He has been acting like a dictator. Now, he hasn't fully consolidated his power, and there are various places, where people have pushed back on him. But he is conducting himself as a dictator, and what he now has is a fund with an interesting number, $1.776 billion, to arm, his goon squads, people like, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, to carry out, acts of violence or intimidation against people on his behalf, with no accountability for who receives this money, no rationale for it, and he's able to do this because, at least for the moment, our Constitution doesn't have adequate safeguards to address what happens when you have the third-generation head of a four-generation white collar crime boss in the White House, and his personal lawyer, who by, law is still Donald Trump's lawyer, Blanche, as the acting attorney general Talk about this fund.

Again, $1.776 billion. Of course, I emphasize that because it's 1776. Under this fund, a five-member board appointed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, would decide who gets the money. There would be no public notification of this and accounting for it, only a confidential report to Todd Blanche or whoever is attorney general at the time.

There's no rules that would prohibit, as Senator Van Hollen pointed out, those who assaulted police officers, from receiving money. And this is simply a slush fund to pay a criminal enforcement arm, a violent arm of Trump supporters to intimidate people. And remember, Donald Trump always described his failed effort to overthrow our government in, 2021 as a day of love.

Only Donald Trump and people who believe that he should be our dictator would, of course, see it that way Let's go back to Tuesday's Senate hearing. Acting Attorney Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was questioned by Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Has it ever happened that a sitting president sued his own government for $10 billion and then directed the settlement of the case and the establishment of a payout fund?

Not that I'm aware, but there's a lot of things that President Trump's the first of. No president had been indicted one, two, three, four, five- Correct ... six, seven, eight times either. Correct. No president's been indicted. And will you commit that none of this money will go to President Trump's campaign donors?

I am not committing to anything beyond the settlement agreement itself. When you say campaign donors, that they are not excluded from seeking compensation if they were injured. Last question. During Police Week, I heard from a number of law enforcement friends who found it appalling that there was the possibility that folks like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys who had assaulted Capitol Police officers could receive multi-million dollar payouts from this fund.

Will you commit that no one who has been convicted of assaulting a police officer will receive a payout from this fund? So I share the concerns that apparently members of law enforcement gave to you last week, although none of this was announced last week, so that's surprising. But, except that- They had heard rumors there would be a settlement fund.

Okay. But anybody can apply. The commission will set, the commissioners will set rules, I'm sure. That's not for me to set, that's for the commissioners. And, and whether an individual Oath Keeper, as you just mentioned, applies for compensation, is... Anybody in this country can apply.

And of course, it was pointed out that the administration, Todd Blanche, President Trump's former personal attorney, can fire any of the commissioners as well. But your response overall, David Cay Johnston? I think this setup is, completely contrary to law. The problem is who has standing, that is, the right to intervene and try to stop it.

Now, the IRS makes settlements with people, and they promise the de- this is closed. We're not gonna continue this anymore. But the fact that this agreement includes this side agreement that the, Trump organization, Donald Trump, members of his family may not be examined on their past tax returns just screams that Donald Trump is in fact a criminal level tax cheat.

Now this is not the only avenue to address Donald Trump's tax cheating, and this is a man who we know from the tax returns that have been made public because of the House Democrats led by Richard Neal and the leak, as well as the ones I found in the public record, that Donald Trump has been creating non-existent companies, just made-up fictitious companies and taking, tax l- losses that reduced his taxes for all the way back to at least 1984.

That's a pattern of criminal behavior that establishes what's called mens rea or criminal intent. Now the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, or the New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, they can go after Trump over his state and city taxes. And, twice in the past, judges have found that Donald Trump committed tax fraud.

These were civil, not criminal cases. They included, Trump forging the signature of his, tax preparer, his longtime tax lawyer and tax accountant, which could've been prosecuted as a crime. And I've written a piece, it ran in the New York Daily News three years ago, showing how Alvin Bragg could easily get Donald Trump convicted of criminal tax fraud if he would bring such a case, and of course they can also pursue it civilly.

But as it stands, Donald Trump, basically will now not have to pay the, what the New York Times estimates is more than $100 million, and I think that's a very conservative number, in taxes that, from the past and he will get a walk on what are clearly from the released tax returns felony level tax crimes.

Let's start the roundup of this week's news on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers were set to vote on a budget package, but Eric, that didn't happen and now they've all gone home.

What went on? Yeah, they took a week off, basically. They're going home and they're gonna raise money and they're gonna talk to constituents and hold town halls and all that stuff. But essentially, President Trump had set a June 1st deadline for this budget bill. It's immigration enforcement funding, and it's supposed to be for three years so that this doesn't get turned into a political football like we saw earlier this year.

And the Senate had until June 1st, but since they're off next week, they needed to do it- this week, and they just didn't. They were mad about two things, one of which was the president is asking for a billion dollars in Secret Service funding to secure his ballroom project. But that's proved a tough ask because the president has long said that what was supposed to be just a $400 million project would be funded entirely through private donations.

The bigger one was a $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund out of the Department of Justice that the president said was going to be used to pay reparations to people who had been somehow targeted unjustly by the government for persecution. The thing with the anti-weaponization fund is, sure, there are some Republican lawmakers who support this.

It even could be, in a hypothetical world, the majority of them. But when majorities are so small in both the House and the Senate, you only need one, two, maybe three people opposing something to make it a non-starter, and there are way more than that right now. We should be clear, though, the Justice Department was not asking permission of Congress to create this fund.

They created this fund using an existing process, and then that became a problem anyway. Yeah, I would say there's the political problem, and then there's the constitutional problem. The political problem is that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before Congress this week and suggested that this money could in fact be used to make payments to January 6th Capitol rioters, and lawmakers were threatened by Capitol rioters.

Some of them attacked police. This is not a very popular proposition on the Hill, I would say, from conversations that I have had. Then there's the constitutional problem, which is basically that Article One, Section Nine of the US Constitution gives Congress the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent.

That power does not rest with the president. Congress did not appropriate this money. The president unilaterally decided how to do it, which according to constitutional scholars I've talked to, including Gerard Magliocca of Indiana University, makes this unconstitutional of a thing to do. Yeah, I think that one word sort of defines this week and what's going on both with President Trump and some of the lawmakers who are defying him.

YOLO, and it's not even a word, but we talked about it earlier this week. You only live once, might be thought of, as Stephen Fowler said earlier this week, you only lose once. Yeah. Because there are people who Trump has targeted who are now essentially fine with going against him, Republicans, people like Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, who lost his, primary race, didn't make the runoff, and now voted with Democrats, on a resolution that would limit Trump's ability to wage war with Iran.

Thomas Massie, representative from Kentucky, who, really has been a thorn in Trump's side on many issues, including on Iran, but also on the Epstein files, and he pledged that he's got seven months left, and he's gonna continue to press on what he wants to press forward on. And you're seeing also Republicans in districts that are, swing districts that are saying that they don't like this anti-weaponization bill.

And then when you have Trump YOLOing it and going and endorsing someone like Ken Paxton, the conservative, very MAGA firebrand, in Texas, who's the attorney general in the state running against incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Senators don't happen to like it when you endorse, people who are challengers to sitting senators.

And then you have, of course, what's happening with the anti-weaponization fund, which could see payouts for people who rioted at the Capitol on January 6th. So you want people to now say, "We are gonna give money to people who were convicted of, trying to attack us, and also you want to attack our sitting senators and get them out politically."

We-- I think we've seen a line here from, Senate Republicans. I think that the feeling coming out of the White House earlier this week was like, Trump is winning. He is firing on all cylinders. He is vanquishing his enemies. And then there's the other side of that, which is that he's making people mad, people who he actually needs in order to enact his agenda.

I'll add one other person to this YOLO caucus. This is North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis. He is retiring this year. I think that had he run, Trump probably would have challenged him, but he opted not to run, and he has been speaking freely, He was interviewed by reporters in the hallways in the Capitol yesterday.

This clip was aired by CNN, and he went off on that $1.8 billion weaponization fund. He said, "These people don't deserve restitution. Many of them deserve to be in prison." And he called it stupid on stilts. This is beyond the pale. This is not good for my colleagues. There's not one positive thing that could be spun out of this between now and November.

And I will say it's not just people who are somehow on Trump's enemies list. It's also folks like Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune. This is a man who, when asked on Thursday what he thought of this fund, what Congress was going to do about it, he said, "I think that the administration has a lot of questions to answer about it."

And so it's, that's not a ringing endorsement from the man who's whipping votes to make sure your agenda gets passed in the Senate. I think the fact is Trump misread the room. He thought that his grievances were the Republican Party's grievances writ large, when a lot of what Republican members of Congress have been doing is ducking from Trump and saying they didn't read the Truth Social post, or they want to avoid his ire.

And, I think that the White House thought that this would be something that they would go along with, and clearly they were not willing to go along with this. And, Trump went on Truth Social and talked about how this is him trying to help people, and he gave up a lot of money potentially because there was gonna be a possible settlement between him and the Justice Department, but instead he wanted to make this charitable and help people who had been weaponized against like he had been.

And I just think that has fallen on totally deaf ears, and it's also hurt his agenda because Republicans adjourning and going home for the Memorial Day weekend instead of voting on, what would've been funding for deportation action, is something that really you know, hurts what Trump has been trying to do from a policy standpoint.

And I'll say two things on that. Part of the reason they can't vote on this immigration agenda is in the Senate, part of this reconciliation process means that anyone can introduce amendments and get them voted on. Yeah. So Democrats were gonna put up a thing targeting the anti-weaponization fund, and I've heard that could have gotten, 30-plus Republican votes to knock down this thing that the president says is important.

And that would've been a huge embarrassment. So instead of being embarrassed, they are disappearing for 10 days, but it's not clear to me what happens when they get back. And Eric, on the House side, they also adjourned to avoid embarrassment. That's right. And so we've seen folks like Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, he's a independent-leaning Republican, I'd say, from a very swingy district in Pennsylvania.

He partnered with Tom Suozzi, they're both heads of this bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, to introduce a bill to say we're getting rid of this anti-weaponization fund. And, they couldn't take a difficult vote on immigration and customs enforcement, only made difficult because of these unrelated things the president was trying to put in.

I think it really highlights that primaries are not general elections, and these are people who are looking toward November, and they're saying, "The president doesn't have our back," and that they've got to be able to sell these things to their constituents. Yeah, I think the theme of much of the action of this week was President Trump doing things that were good for President Trump, or that made President Trump feel good, things that President Trump wanted, like this anti-weaponization fund, owning these people who dared to cross him.

But in the end, it just exposed that it was less about the party and more about him.

The Department of Justice absolutely does not have the authority to be making these payments or setting up this slush fund. To have a settlement, you actually need a valid case or controversy, and the problem that they had with the underlying lawsuit that triggered all this, Donald Trump's lawsuit against the IRS, is that he was on, functionally on both sides of that case.

So there was no case, valid case to settle. But how are Officers Hodges and Dunn harmed here? These were two men who defended the Capitol on January sixth, could have died that day. Officer Hodges was almost killed in particular. But the threat to them hasn't ended. By continuing to speak out about January sixth, they continue to receive credible threats from rioters or their supporters, and the money from this slush fund, if it actually goes out, is gonna endanger them further because it's going to create an endorsement by the president for what these rioters are doing, and it's going to fund their paramilitary and militia activities.

So if this fund continues, it is absol- absolutely gonna increase the danger, for these officers. Officer Hodges testified on Capitol Hill last year about political violence and what happened to him on January 6th, so let's listen to a l- little bit of what he said. I am intimately familiar with political violence, as when I fought to defend the United States Capitol and many of your very lives.

I was beaten, bloodied, crushed, with my eye gouged and my skull smashed with my own baton. And Brendan Blue, you made this case just a moment ago about how this fund will further endanger Officer Hodges', safety. You explained that. What are you seeking in the lawsuit? Any damages? No, not now. What we are trying to do is get the fund dissolved.

The fund doesn't have a legal right to exist. It doesn't have the right to disperse the money that it claims it's going to. The thing to do here is to stop any disbursement of funds and to make sure that the fund ceases to exist. So at a briefing on Tuesday, CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked Vice President JD Vance why he won't rule out giving taxpayer money to anyone who assaulted a police officer on January 6th.

Here's how Vance responded. Because Kaitlan, there are people who I don't know their individual circumstances, and I don't rule things out categorically when I know nothing about a person's in- individual circumstances. Let's say a person is accused, let's just say hypothetically, a person is accused of doing something that it, they never actually did, that they got a kangaroo court, that they had a judge who mistreated them.

I think that we should look at those things case by case. Brendan Blue, what do you make of the Vice President's response there? I'm frankly shocked that somebody like JD Vance would say things like that, given that the rioters that we're talking about tried to kill his direct predecessor. These are rioters that we had a 100% success rate in convictions and jury trials.

The people who attacked the Capitol tried to kill those inside, attacked officers, and so forth. None of those convictions were vacated on appeal for polit- as being vindictive or politically motivated. So I think it does an enormous disservice to the officers who risked their lives that day.

I think it does a disservice to the prosecutors who prosecuted those cases, and I think it frankly endangers all of us when he implicitly condones the possibility of political violence. Let me ask you one more question about this fund. Critics, and you're among them, see this as audaciously corrupt.

Trump sues the government that he runs. He settles the lawsuit by, among other things, setting up a scheme to hand over $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to his allies. The Trump administration's response seems to be, "You can't rush to judgment. That's hypothetical. We'll just have to see. No decisions have been made.

No payouts have actually been talked about or made." What's your response to that? I think it's already clear how this money is going to be spent. The president last year said that he supported the idea of paying rioters, and the rioters that the president supports says that they're going to apply for money.

It's entirely consistent with everything that these administration officials have said and with what these rioters have said, that this money is going to go to the people who attacked the Capitol and attacked my clients. Brendan, one of your clients, Harry Dunn, is also a Democratic candidate for a Maryland congressional seat.

Does that complicate his case in any way, perhaps making this lawsuit appear political? No. I've been working with Harry for several years now. We brought a case, against the Architect of the Capitol for refusing to install the plaque, to honor the January 6th officers, as required by law.

He has been speaking out and advocating on this stuff well before he was, running for office. He's running for office because he cares about these things. He's not doing this for a political gain. He's doing this to protect his safety and to protect the safety of his fellow officers.

So on Tuesday, my co-host, Akela Lacy, published a story about Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who was detained by ICE for protesting in support of Palestinians as a part of the Trump administration's targeting of student protesters.

So I know the story goes into a little bit more detail about that targeting. Maya, what can you tell us about the story? I think a lot of our listeners probably remember this moment last spring when he was detained, and he was one of the first of this group of students that the Trump administration was targeting.

And what Akela's story found was that two days before ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the FBI had gotten an anonymous tip which accused him of calling for, and this is a quote from the tip, "Violence on behalf of Hamas." Now, we don't really have any detail in th- this document on what the tip is. It came in via a FOIA request that his legal team received and passed on to Akela, and the document is mostly redacted.

But what we do know is that less than two weeks after they got the tip, the FBI closed this investigation, and they found that the tip did not warrant further investigation. But by then, he was already in ICE detention in Louisiana, and the Trump administration was already calling him a Hamas supporter and accusing him of being a supporter of terrorism.

At this point, we now know that the FBI at least had found that allegation was not worth looking into. Yeah, that's really interesting, and it feels like we're gonna be unraveling what actually went behind the Trump administration's targeting of these students. This really fits into broader efforts from the Trump administration to target any of the president's perceived political enemies, both abroad and in the United States.

Exactly. And this week, everyone in the newsroom has really been focused on this project that you've been working on with our colleagues Nick Turse and Noah Horowitz about how the Trump administration is taking that political targeting apparatus to the next level and what the next phase of it will look like.

Could you tell us a little bit more about that project? Yeah. We've been poring through this new counterterrorism strategy that's been handed down from the Trump administration, and I know that sounds incredibly boring, but this is a document laying out the president's strategy for coming after his political enemies in the United States and abroad and potentially giving him the authority to kill his political enemies.

So we've been really looking into this next evolution of President Donald Trump's attempt to label his enemies, so anyone who disagrees with him, as terrorists, and I've now successfully dragged both of my brilliant coworkers onto the show to talk about it. So Nick is a senior reporter covering national security and foreign policy, and Noah is a federal law enforcement reporter.

Let's hear that conversation. Nick, Noah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing. Thanks so much for having us on. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah. So let's dive right into this project. So last week, the Trump administration released its counterterrorism strategy. The 16-page memo outlines who they view as terrorist threats and priority targets.

So the three of us have been combing through this document for an in-document analysis that we just published. To start, Nick, can you tell us a bit more about this document and the objectives of the administration? I consider this a, a truly foundational document, a genuine distillation of Trumpism as both a movement and a system of governance.

The document is the brainchild of the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, who's a truly bizarre figure, and whose credentials for the job of counterterrorism czar are highly dubious. This Gorka-led strategy brings together Trump's war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in, Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, and it combines it with the administration's war on dissent at home, which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis.

The 2026 counterterrorism strategy puts so-called domestic quote, unquote, "anti-fascist" or Antifa organizations on par with actual terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, as well as with, international drug cartels. And it states that there are three, major types of terrorist threats.

So we're talking about what they call legacy Islamist terrorists, Al-Qaeda and ISIS, narco terrorists like the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and the supposed violent left-wing extremists, which include, anarchists and anti-fascists The latter are longtime Republican boogeymen that don't actually exist in a real way as, say, urban guerrillas or something like that in the United States.

This is a fictional foe. I think we can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies, both foreign and domestic, and both, real and imagined. Yeah, I think that's a really good way to look at this document. If we think about it as a foundational text of the Trump administration, then the foundation of the Trump administration is a politics of vengeance, which I think is borne out in so many of the administration's policies, both at home and abroad.

Noah, I wanna bring you in. One thing that this document does is loosely define who is and who isn't a terrorist. And so I wanna ask you, what did we now learn about who's considered a terrorist? Yeah, so one thing that, that I found really interesting about this document is that it specifically calls out previous weaponizations of government counterterrorism, policy, which is I think a pretty clear reference to the prosecutions of, right-wing groups and specifically participants in January 6th.

As we know, FBI Director Kash Patel, prior to becoming head of the FBI, was very critical of the federal government's policies toward violent right-wing extremists, which statistically have been, a majority of the domestic terrorists in the United States, right? And so this document really explicitly does away with that and explicitly names left-wing groups or left-wing people holding left-wing ideologies as terrorists.

There's a specific line about, doing away with the weaponization of counterterrorism policy against American citizens When in reality, we've seen the very explicit weaponization of counterterrorism policy and rhetoric by this administration against its domestic foes, if you will. Most notably, the language used to describe Alex Pretty and Renee Good in Minneapolis following their deaths, and also the prosecution of nine protesters for their roles in a demonstration outside of an ICE facility in Texas last July.

This is the Prairieland case in which eight defendants were convicted on terrorism charges. They might say that they're, ending the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens, but in reality, we've seen a dramatic escalation of it

Republicans found one point eight billion dollars overnight for Trump's thugs, so why are seniors choosing between food and medicine? Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump's one point eight billion dollar taxpayer-funded anti-weaponization slush fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm.

She started doing the math. "What if," she asked, "we put that money towards something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th?" Her list is devastating. "With that one point seven seven six billion dollars, we could," she writes, "replace fifteen hundred, fifteen, hundred and fifty thousand lead pipes in hundreds of communities, build ten thousand new affordable housing units, establish hundreds of community-owned grocery stores in food deserts, fully fund seventy community mental health clinics for a decade, support tens of thousands of foster youth aging out of care, erase all the sc- stu- school lunch debt in this country for the next nine years, or pay the salaries of two hundred and fifty thousand new teachers for ten years."

Instead, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche blatantly refused to rule out paying chunks of this money to January 6th rioters who assaulted police officers or to Trump himself, and Proud Boys le- leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to serve twenty-two years for seditious conspiracy until Trump pardoned him, told Reuters he's planning to apply be- between two and five million dollars.

Two Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have sued to block the payouts, describing the fund as a taxpayer f- funded slush fund for Trump followers who engaged in violence against cops. Aubrey's framing got me thinking about what else one point eight billion in actual pun- public money could do.

Let me extend her list, because the me- media is failing entirely to put this into a meaningful context. That one point eight billion dollars could cover the average cost of weatherizing and insulating roughly two hundred thousand low-income homes, dropping monthly heating and cooling bills for working families through the kinds of winters Louise and I weathered in Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan, and now here in Oregon.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Jeff Bezos to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could fund a year of high-quality universal pre-K for roughly a hundred and forty-four thousand three and four-year-olds, the single most cost-effective investment we know of for closing achievement gaps and get- giving working parents a fighting chance.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require f- finally forcing Elon Musk to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at zero for every Type 1 diabetic in America for years, ending the rationing that is killing young people whose parents can't choose between rent and a vial.

But Republicans won't do that because it would finally require forcing Mark Zuckerberg to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could pay for a full course of trauma-informed counseling for every one of the roughly four hundred thousand American children currently in foster care with money left over to pay the social workers who are quitting in droves because their caseloads have become unmanageable.

But Republicans won't do that because it would finally require, it would require finally forcing Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress who gave more than a hundred million dollars to put Trump back in the White House, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could fund the entire national school lunch programs free and reduced shortfall for a generation of poor kids, ending the practice of stamping a child's hand or throwing their tray in the trash because mom is two weeks behind on the cafeteria bill.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Timothy Mellon, the reclusive railroad heir who gave a hundred and sixty-five million dollars to elect Donald Trump, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could let the EPA replace something on the order of, three hundred and eighty thousand lead home water pipes at the agency's four hundred-- forty-seven hundred dollar average cost, getting toxic plumbing out from under hundreds of thousands of homes whose kids are right now being poisoned every time they drink from the tap.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the Uihlein shipping magnates who poured over a hundred and thirty-three million into MAGA-aligned causes in, in twenty twenty-four, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do It could retrofit every elementary school in America that still has lead paint, asbestos tile, or a roof that leaks every time it rains, the buildings where we are right now sending kids to learn to read.

But Republicans won't do that 'cause it would finally require forcing Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who spent twelve million just to kill a marijuana legalization initiative in Florida, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could let the VA hire enough mental health professionals to clear the appointment backlog for every veteran in this country, the men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan and then expected to wait six months for a counselor.

But Republicans won't do that 'cause it would require finally forcing Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir founder who personally manufactured the political career of JD Vance, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could buy enough domestic violence shelter beds, hotline funding, and transitional housing to clear the waitlist on, of every shelter in this country-- Oh, that every coun- shelter in this country runs every single night, the battered women and abused children currently sleeping in cars 'cause there's no room and money.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, who spent tens of millions propping up the GOP while his firm ga- gobbles up American housing stock and rents it back to working families at extortionate rates, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

It could extend rural broadband to every last farm, hollow, and reservation in America that still doesn't have it, the kind of investment Dwight Eisenhower would've signed in a heartbeat and that today's Republicans have repeatedly blocked. But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Jeff Yass, the trading firm co-founder who gave more than a hundred million to Republican causes in twenty twenty-four and who happens to hold a major stake in TikTok's parent company, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do That's the choice in front of us, and it's not theoretical.

A real one point eight billion dollars sits in a real account taken from real taxpayers, and it's gonna be handed to people who tried to violently overthrow an American election. It's not being handed to the children currently drinking lead in Newark and Flint and Chicago, or the working mother in Louisville who skipped her insulin doses last month, or the veteran in Phoenix who hanged himself in March while waiting for a VA appointment.

The Trump regime has made a choice openly, brazenly on camera, and the choice is to compensate the rioters and let the rest of us drink the lead. The fix isn't complicated, and the ProPublica reporting is now five years old and still ignored. When the twenty-five wealthiest Americans grew their wealth by four hundred and one billion dollars over five years and paid a true federal income tax rate of three point four percent, the money to do all of this exists.

It's sitting in unrealized capital gains the IRS isn't allowed to touch, in family trusts and stepped-up basis loopholes and offshore shell companies. It's the money that built the slush fund, Lawrence O'Donnell calls it the thug fund, that Trump is about to hand to his rioters, and it's the money our kids are not getting because the Mellons and Adelsons and Uihleins and Yasses paid for a Republican-controlled Congress that promised it would never come for them and their money bins.

On Tuesday, Vice President J.D. Vance held an unusual press conference at the White House. He was questioned about Trump's stock trades by Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent at The Independent. How can you and your administration argue to Americans that you're cleaning up corruption, you're preventing fraud, you're fighting the sorts of things that harm people and people's financial situations when the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them, and enriching himself?

The president doesn't sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his, Robinhood account buying and selling stocks. That's absurd. He has independent wealth advisors who manage his money. He is a wealthy person. He has had success in business. He's not making these stock trades himself, and your question imputes that.

It It doesn't say it exactly, but a reasonable person listening to that question would assume the president is sitting around doing that. He's not. Second of all, you're right. I'm a big fan of banning members of Congress from trading stocks, so is the president of the United States. All of us believe that nobody should be taking proprietary information gained from public service and buying and selling stocks.

We want to ban, we want to ban that, we want to ban that process. He answered that question after attacking the questioner. But, David Cay Johnston, if you can talk about, President Trump's stock trades, how much he's made, and responding to Vance saying, "It's not as if he's doing it himself on his own computer."

That's a complete red herring that he's not doing it on his computer. What we wanna know is what kind of information did the purchasers on Trump's behalf, the brokers and agents have, about events that were going to happen? But why is the Trump administration not looking into these enormous, commodities and stock bets that were placed 15, 20 minutes before major White House announcements that influenced the market?

We see no sign that's being pursued. And of course, if the Trump administration thinks members of Congress shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks, and I think that's what the law should be, why isn't he following his own belief? And the reason is, of course, Donald, who I've known and covered for almost 40 years, doesn't believe the rules apply to him.

He believes he's special. He believes that, the rest of us are all, idiots, unless we support him, and that no law applies to him because of his special status in the world. And when I said in 2011, Donald thinks that he should run not just America, but the whole world, there were various people who mocked me.

What did Donald Trump say about a year ago? "I run the country and the whole world." He sees himself as the world dictator. So why would he be troubled by little things like, trading in stocks when he's in the White House, where those stock prices are influenced by his actions? You've written three books on Donald Trump, David Cay Johnston.

You've won two Pulitzer Prizes. What shocked you most about what has just been revealed? And oh, the brazenness of closing the audit the way Todd Blanche did this. You notice Todd Blanche is the one who signed the letter. What that tells you is that no other lawyer in the Justice Department was going to put their reputation, if not their law license, at risk by signing this utterly corrupt agreement.

Now, Todd Blanche, remains Donald Trump's lawyer since the criminal trial where Trump was convicted on 34 felonies, so he has a conflict of interest, and one would hope that the New York State Bar would go after the law license of Todd Blanche. And a future administration, assuming we get past Trump's dictatorship, which I no longer think is a guaranteed event- Ugh

Could go into court and basically say to a judge, "This agreement isn't worth the paper that it's written on," and attack this agreement. I think it is, s- inherently corrupt. There is no controversy as the Constitution requires, because the parties here are Donald Trump, an individual, and Donald Trump, the President of the United States.

That's not a controversy. This is theft of taxpayer money, plain and simple.

We've just heard clips starting with

Trump's Terms covering acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defending the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund before the Senate.

Legal AF walked through the Democratic amicus brief arguing that Trump's IRS settlement is a collusive fraud violating both statutory law and the domestic emoluments clause.

Democracy Now! also examined the fund, warning it functions as a criminal enforcement arm for Trump with no rules barring convicted cop-assaulters from receiving payouts.

The NPR Politics Podcast traced how the slush fund alienated Senate Republicans badly enough to stall Trump's own immigration enforcement priorities heading into the Memorial Day recess.

Here & Now Anytime examined the legal case against the fund, explaining the underlying lawsuit was invalid because Trump was effectively on both sides, making any settlement legally indefensible.

The Intercept Briefing reported on Trump's new counterterrorism strategy, which explicitly names left-wing ideologies as terrorist threats while claiming to end the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens.

The Hartmann Report walked through the real-world cost of Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund by itemizing what it could buy instead, from insulin access to rural broadband

And Democracy Now! in part two of their discussion argued that Trump's stock trades, the closing of the audit, and Todd Blanche's conflict-ridden letter all reflect a president who genuinely believes no law applies to him.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, as if we needed more bad news to dwell on, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up, cutting our total budget by about 1/3.

Right now, I’m taking some time to rethink everything about the show, looking to boost and improve anything I can. The most recent news, talk about going back to basics…, I’m looking to relaunch our listeners feedback voice message segment.

Long ago, we used to have a really vibrant voicemail segment on the show and people would regularly say that it was their favorite part of the show. It faded over time but I think we’re overdue for a revival.

And what's important to understand is that this is a classic social dilemma. I think people don’t call because they don’t hear other people calling which becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

So don't ask yourself, "Do I have anything good enough to say?" Instead, if you would like for a voice message segment to exist, think of leaving a message as casting a vote saying that you want others to do the same. Maybe even literally say that in your message.

So, I’ve begun asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show, including other voice messages.

So, here are a couple of questions for today:

Some Republicans are speaking out against Trump’s slush fund, but it’s not the first time they’ve criticized him only to later go silent or change their tune entirely. Is there any reasons to think that this time could be any different?

Here’s another one: in times like these, thinking really long-term is what brings me some comfort. So the idea of not just pardoning January 6 rioters but paying them is such an explicit inversion of reality and justice that it makes me wonder whether this will energize the cause of reclaiming truth and justice in a post-Trump America or will they have enough time to sow the seeds of their alternate reality so that it actually takes root and spreads beyond the core of their MAGA cultists? I’m guessing it’s probably both but if you have any encouraging thoughts on the future, I think we’d all love to hear it.

You can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

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Now, as for today's topic,

There’s a satirical article from The Onion that was published almost 10 years ago that I find myself thinking back to fairly frequently.

It ran on January 25, 2017. Trump was only 5 days into his first term in office and The Onion wrote this piece of satire in the voice of former president Jimmy Carter, “You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President”

Here are some excerpts.

“For generations, U.S. presidents have gone to great lengths to avoid potential conflicts of interest. When I was elected, I followed suit by placing my small business in a blind trust to assure our citizens that I would always put the country’s interests ahead of my own. It’s a vital presidential tradition…

Boy, times sure have changed, haven’t they? I couldn’t help but notice that the current occupant of the White House owns more than 500 companies, has business interests across the Middle East and Asia, and owes hundreds of millions of dollars to banks he is now responsible for regulating. It seems a touch unfair that a bigger fuss was made about my little peanut operation than all his office towers, hotels, and golf courses combined. All I had was a farm, you know?…

Seriously, it was just a few fields and a warehouse, and you idiots still appointed a special prosecutor and spent six months investigating it…

Meanwhile, your new president holds a lease from the federal government to operate a $200 million hotel six blocks from the White House. I mean, come on!”

Obviously, things have gotten exponentially worse since then but the point of bringing it up is how clearly we on the left saw all of this coming.

Part of the reason is something true on both sides of the aisle. People who pay attention to politics tend to see the best in their own side and ignore the worst. Obama supporters read "Yes We Can" as exactly the thing they wanted it to mean. Trump voters did the same with a guy who talked about so many things in so many directions that you could cherry-pick whatever you wanted and conclude that he thought what you thought. What got wishfully edited out of his pitch in the minds of his supporters was, essentially, his promise to be corrupt. Almost no one in this country voted for a president to be corrupt, that’s not a partisan divide. A lot of Trump voters voted for him trusting and hoping that he wouldn't be, all evidence to the contrary.

And that’s only for Trump voters who actually think of themselves as informed. We don’t have time today to wade into the murky waters of voters who just cast their ballots on vibes alone.

The real question is why people were willing to take the gamble on someone explicitly flouting ethics guardrails in the first place.

There was a woman at a Trump rally who got interviewed a while back that I remember because she called Trump a junkyard dog. She didn't quite mean it as a compliment, but she followed it up saying that what the country needs right now is a junkyard dog.

The trade she was describing is the central thing to understand about this era. She knew he was garbage and she knew he'd break things, and breaking things looked better to her than respectable politicians who never changed anything or delivered for the people.

Now, the idea that “People were desperate" has been thrown around too loosely over the last decade, trying to explain Trump voters. On average, Trump's base was solidly middle class, comfortably above the typical American, even if they weren't the country-club Republicans.

But the situation wasn't objective desperation and rarely is, it’s comparative. People feel their economic position by looking around at who's pulling ahead and who's falling behind. The Economic Policy Institute keeps publishing the same chart showing that since around 1979, productivity in this country has grown several times faster than the pay of typical workers, with the gains pooling at the top. That's what Occupy was pointing at fifteen years ago.

The feeling the junkyard dog woman was being sold was that the culprits were immigrants, or cultural elites, or whoever was conveniently sideways or downward from her, never was she invited to look up at the actual people pocketing those gains.

The moral standard she was trading away in the deal, the old Bush-era, Christian family-man test was always just a disguised jab at Bill Clinton for his infidelity that made for convenient political point-scoring. It policed marriages and church attendance and let Iraq and the torture program right through, so I’d argue that Republican standards of morality have been in question for a long time.

However, there's still a substantive difference between someone saying, and probably believing themselves, that they want a good, moral person in office who will then carry out deeply immoral and harmful policies just as Reagan and the Bush family did, compared with openly advocating that what we need is an agent of chaos to break things.

So grant that woman the trade on her own terms. She wanted disruption and she got it. The question is where the disruption flowed. When Trump cut corporate taxes in 2017, more than 80 percent of the gains went to the richest one tenth of households, while typical workers saw essentially nothing. And the big tax-and-spending law he signed in 2025 ran the same play harder: the Penn Wharton Budget Model found the top tenth again captures around 80 percent of the value, except this time, once you count the Medicaid and food-assistance cuts that pay for it, the poorest households actually come out behind. So the junkyard dog broke things, sure, but he broke them in the direction of the people who were already winning, just as any thinking person would have expected a billionaire Republican to do.

But then you have to layer the corruption on top of it that really was new to the Trump era. The first term was grubby and groundbreaking in its own way with the DC hotel and the obvious foreign influence, the stuff the Onion piece was making fun of. The second term has dropped the pretense entirely.

Historians are starting to describe it as unprecedented in American presidential history. Barbara Perry, who runs the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, told CBC News she'd describe this administration as "on the take." The Trump memecoin has reportedly netted hundreds of millions in fees, on top of billions in the paper value of the coins his family is sitting on. His World Liberty Financial crypto venture has taken in over half a billion dollars from token buyers, with two billion of that coming from the United Arab Emirates. Qatar gifted him a four-hundred-million-dollar plane and is financing a five-and-a-half-billion-dollar Trump golf resort in their country.

Compare that to Carter. When he took office in 1977, he handed the family peanut business over to a trustee. People often call it a blind trust, although by 1979 his own team admitted it wasn't really blind, because the trustee was Carter's close friend Charles Kirbo, who visited the White House regularly. So the arrangement wasn't perfect. But around it, the system of norms was working. Republican Senator Bob Dole pushed for a federal investigation. The Attorney General appointed a Republican special counsel, Paul Curran, to look into bank loans. Carter testified for nearly four hours under oath, the first sitting president ever questioned that way in an investigation of himself. Six months later, in October 1979, Curran cleared the family. And in the midst of this in 1978, Carter signed the Ethics in Government Act, the law that formalized divestment and disclosure rules for every president after him, partly because his own mess had made it obvious those rules needed to be on paper. Can you even imagine Republicans putting forward a bill like that now or Trump signing it?

There's a lot going on there. On one hand, you could see it as partisan political warfare in a more innocent time, where it was Republicans leading the charge against a Democratic president about an investigation that ended up being baseless. That may be true, but all things considered, I would rather err on the side where people in public office get investigated too much rather than too little, because we have certainly seen what happens when people are investigated too little.

And there were two things happening there. On one hand, Carter was a pretty ethical guy but on the other, the system was actively enforcing the expectation that presidents should be free of conflicts of interest, and both of those things reinforced each other.

So, as a society, we should value the idea of electing ethical people, but the screen for ethics in office isn't who’s Christian and has a tidy family, since Bush passed that test and then ran a torture program, it’s who tells you by their stated relationship to the rules that they respect them. Trump told everyone what he was going to do by mocking divestment and disclosure before he ever took the oath, so nobody had to guess.

On top of that, we should all be long past the idea that our government can continue to run on a combination of honor and gentlemanly handshakes. We need enforceable ethics rules for everyone in office across all three branches. After the era we’re living through, that should be non-negotiable

So the Trump era should be the textbook case for the next century, in three pieces. First, you screen for candidates whose record shows they take the rules seriously because when somebody tells you they're going to be a cheat, you should believe them and recognize that you're the one they're going to be cheating.

Second, you build and defend a system that enforces those rules, the way the 1978 Ethics Act tried to, so it doesn't ride on anyone's personal character.

And third, those have to come bundled with candidates willing to actually use that integrity to move fast on the material lives of regular people. That last piece is where most of the work hasn't been done in the past 4-5 decades, and it's where the junkyard-dog temptation will always find an opening.

And the good news is this isn't a fantasy. A government can deliver for people and stay clean at the same time, and where that happens, people are noticeably happier for it. Look at the Nordic countries. The World Happiness Report came out this spring, and for the eighth year running Finland is at the top, with Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway all in the top ten. Those are low-corruption governments that actually deliver, good healthcare, real support when you're down, the basic security most people are after, and the two things feed each other. The United States, for the record, came in twenty-fourth, our lowest since the report started thirteen years ago. Meanwhile, the open kleptocracies are right down at the bottom. Venezuela, looted into collapse by the people running it, has tumbled into the eighties.

The reason that some people felt like it was time for a junkyard dog is that the third option, someone both accountable and willing to actually improve on people's lives, had been pulled off the menu.

The Republicans yanked it off decades ago and the Democrats keep politely declining to put it back.

I've been thinking recently about the very old phrase that comes in a couple different flavors. One is: "In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." That's the primary way I've usually heard it, and every time I think about it, I wonder if that's true and shudder.

Recently, though, I looked up the original phrase, and it's a little bit different. It's translated from French, but I think the best translation is something like: "Every nation has the government it deserves." In that context, I think it actually speaks more to systemic forces rather than the vaguely moralizing accusation being thrown at the citizens with terrible leaders. And as political watchers know, there are a whole lot of systemic forces at play that have colluded to give us our current kakistocracy, a government run by the worst, least qualified, and most unscrupulous people.

When, as a country, you allow your democracy to deteriorate to the point that it no longer serves the people’s needs, that creates a systemic force that encourages poor choices by voters. When, as a country, you neglect to have appropriate rules in place to maintain ethical standards by elected officials, you will end up, inevitably, with unethical people in power who will take advantage of that.

But the ray of hope here is that the opposite is also true, not just in theory but in ways that have been proven by countries inhabited by some of the happiest people in the world. So not only is our task clear for what we need to do, but we need to plan to come out of this era not just gasping for breath and hoping to get back to some sense of normalcy of a previous status quo, but energized with the knowledge of what can happen when democracy deteriorates and the drive to truly fix what is broken.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics today. First up;

Section A, ANATOMY OF THE HEIST

Followed by Section B, THE BIGGER PATTERN

And Section C, ENEMIES OF THE STATE

Would you say I overstated it by saying Trump sued the ve-- federal government that he runs and then basically struck a one point eight billion dollar deal with himself on behalf of January six conspirators and other supporters? Not at all. Donald Trump himself, when he brought this case for ten billion dollars, said that it seems quite odd because it's like he's suing himself, and he then has, achieved a, quote-unquote, "settlement," but there's really-- it's collusive because he's on both sides of the equation.

The federal judge who had the case actually commented on that, saying that it doesn't really seem like a case or controversy because the plaintiff is also the defendant. And so to say that you reached an agreement is, in my view, pretty tantamount to theft of, public money from the public fisc, by Donald Trump.

The only thing that's surprising is why he didn't just pick the number ten billion, and not just, almost two billion dollars. But this is just taking money out of the public fisc, for no good reason whatsoever. It really is not a settlement of a case. If that's the case, why didn't the judge who you just cited strike the deal?

So that is a great question. The-- in a civil case, the person who brings the case, the plaintiff, has an absolute right to withdraw the case if at any time prior to the defendant responding to the case. So the defendant here had not responded, the IRS had not responded. And the plaintiff, it's like all of this is basically Donald Trump, and Donald Trump, moved to withdraw and has an absolute right to do that.

Also, the plaintiff, Donald Trump, never submitted the settlement papers to the court, so there is no court approval of these settlement papers. The judge pointed that out, when she said, "I have to dismiss this case," that she raised real concerns about the fact that there was no adversity here, that the plaintiff's interest and the defendant's interests were one and the same.

So the judge raised concerns, but said there was no structure to disapprove the settlement. Do you understand the IRS part of this deal? What, the way I look at the, what happened with the IRS, and it's notable to me that the general counsel of the IRS resigned, and although he didn't give a statement about the reasons for resigning, it's palpable as to w- what the reason is, that this is something that is collusive.

I think something that is so indicative of how to understand what's going on is the fact that the IRS, in comparable cases, fights these claims. So there are people who have brought similar claims, and the IRS makes all sorts of arguments about why you cannot sue the IRS. In this very case, the IRS's position was that it was out of time.

Donald Trump had to bring his case within two years of the event, but he brought it well after that. So that would mean if that prevailed, and it seems like of course it would prevail, that the amount of money that the IRS owes Donald Trump is zero. And while I do not do math in public, zero I know is a lot less than one point eight billion dollars.

But the document says no examinations or reviews of tax matters that are, quote, "pending or could be pending if filed before yesterday when the deal was struck." So were Trump or his businesses being audited or reviewed by the IRS for anything that you know of? Did they officially get away with something that was currently being reviewed as possible tax evasion?

That is the reporting, that there is that ongoing investigation and from time to time that comes up in the news. We do not know whether there would be liability that was found. We do not know what the amount would be. But the way I think about this one-page document that gives what's essentially a general release of the public's claims against Donald Trump, his family, his companies, is while the president has the power to pardon all of those people, he may even have the power to pardon himself, that only applies to criminal matters.

So what this does is it's like the other shoe to drop, which is, oh, I can have that pardon power with respect to criminal cases that could be brought. This is taking away civil liability. So it's really ends all sort of accountability, civil or criminal, in this area. And they didn't even need the Supreme Court to do it for this.

Your book is about Trump and other politicians who lie to the American public and what you would like to see done about that in your book, Liar's Kingdom, and we'll get more into it. But is there an intersection between what's in the book and this kind of deal with himself that's the headline news we're talking about?

I think there is because the, one of the core concepts here that people gloss over is that, Donald Trump's, point here is that he s-says that the January 6th defendants were the victims. They were the victims of weaponization by what he calls the Biden Justice Department That is not true.

It is simply not true. The people who, were prosecuted on January 6th all had due process. They all had the ability to go to trial, to have defense lawyers, to make arguments, to appeal. And the people who were pardoned, were either convicted by a jury or pleaded guilty, so were guilty based on their own statements.

And they weren't the victims at all, and we're supposed to whitewash all of that history and view what happened on January 6th before our own eyes as what the president has termed, and this is a quote, "A grave national injustice." So to me, that is one of the sort of core lies of this presidency.

And what I write about is, aren't we entitled to something which is essentially like a truth in advertising law for political candidates and for, actual politicians? And I look at what happens around the globe to see that we are really behind the curve in dealing with political lies.

I mentioned your, organization, Public Citizen, announced an investigation today into what you described as Trump's, quote, "Proposed slush fund to protect his allies." What sort of investigation is Public Citizen able to do into any of this at this point? The first thing we're trying to do is figure out more details of what's going on here.

So we filed a public records request, asked for it to be expedited, and we'll see if we don't get a rapid response. For all the materials and conversations that surrounded the settlement. So we can understand... we do now have the short settlement agreement. It, on its face, it's nuts.

But it does leave a lot of open questions, so we're gonna try to get to the bottom of that. So- Then we and many colleagues are trying to figure out, what the heck can anybody do about this? Can- Yeah ... what's the ability to sue about it? And one thing we do know, one entity that does have the ability to stop it is Congress.

So in upcoming- Do they- ... this week's fights and it, and thereafter, Congress could make the, could bar the payments to and through this alleged anti-weaponization. But to do that, w- A, it would have to, be agreed to, I presume, in both chambers of Congress, both of which are of course led by Republicans right now.

Correct. And wouldn't any such, measure have to then be signed by the President of the United States into law? Correct. So it's... To actually get it a-adopted into law, it would have to be able to overcome a veto. Yeah. But it might well be connected to other things that Trump wants, which would make things complicated.

I see. I, frankly, I like your plan better. I know Public Citizen has had a lot of success in this sort of thing with the, Freedom of Information Act requests. I know you're gonna make them to the IRS, the DOJ, the Department of Treasury. What sort of documentation might you find in such an investigation?

And if you do find it, what then? If, if they're saying, "Hey, the president wants us to give him $1.7 billion. It doesn't seem legal, but I say we do it anyway." If you find something as, brazen as that in an email between, folks at the DOJ, what do you do with that?

What can be done with that? We will share that immediately with the broadcast. Thank you. So that the people know. Yeah. The people know. I mean- look, this is a l- totally unprecedented situation. Yeah. So you read a quote from Representative Neguse, which I think very considerably understates it.

It's not one of the most corrupt things of this administration, it's the most corrupt thing. And, at least in terms of, this kind of personal corruption- ... it's almost for sure the most corrupt, thing in all of American history. Yeah. So we will figure out, we're exploring with allies, what can we do?

It's what I said, right? Is there, what possible is it to litigate? What possible is it we get more documents out about it? What can we do in Congress? H- how could it be clawed back later on if it goes into effect in the first place? All that stuff. It may be that, the law is not designed for this because no one operates this way.

And it... but, they, have they found a legal way to, to steal $1.7 billion? Maybe. If so, then w- we've gotta go to Congress and deal with it that way. Yeah, and I'm wondering that, who has standing to sue to block something like... i'm a taxpayer, it's my money. Do I have standing, to sue?

Does Public Citizen have standing? Without getting into the convoluted standing doctrine, the answer to that question is no. Robert, I'm barely old enough to remember, when Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust while he was serving as president. We have yet, related news, I think, late last week that, President Trump has reported thousands of financial transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, including large purchases and sales of tech giants, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, in the first three months of this year alone.

That according to, new disclosure forms filed with the US Office of Government Ethics, showing more than 3,700 transactions, by Donald Trump valued between 220 and $750 million cumulatively, and they all happened, just, not all, but most of them happened just prior, just before, a major corporate deal, or, Commerce Department, approval was announced, for example, of, the sale of NVIDIA chips to China.

I would've called that the crime of the century until the news today, Robert. W- what's your response to this, this newly unearth- unearthed information about all of these stock trades that are timed to, apparently insider information by the President of the United States?

Every grift possible. That's Donald Trump's slogan. And, ex- the degree to which-- we don't know for sure the degree to which he's controlling his stock portfolio, whether it's farmed out. We don't necessarily know that he's making calls to the people who are in charge of making the trades.

But there's no reason to assume that he's operating ethically. He's definitely no Jimmy Carter. One of-- you know, another example, in that long list of trades, like he, he's made, he's made acquisition purchases of Lilly, which is now fast racing to become, I think, the first trillion dollar pharmaceutical company- on the back of GLP-1 drugs that it's selling. And there are a variety of things that the government has done under the Trump administration to expand the market for GLP-1s, this is like Ozempic and stuff. So that's yet another... Yes, there's that, plus other tech plays. And the-- we don't know for sure the president was a billionaire before he took office.

A lot of dispute about how rich he really is and how much he's puffed up his wealth. He's definitely a billionaire now. Yeah. Because I think the most conservative estimate of how much money he personally has made during the presidency is a billion. Some are estimating up to $5 billion. It's hard to figure out exactly 'cause so much of the money is tied up in, in cryptocurrency, which is just, so opaque.

But, yeah, this is... It's like literally a thousand times worse than the first administration easily- Yep ... if you measure it by dollars. And, but unfortunately, in the first administration when this was constant headlines, who was taking out a room at the Trump Hotel The media, and I'm afraid the public to some extent, has become a little bit anesthetized to this.

Yeah. But what's really important about it is not just that he's stealing from us and, degrading any ethical standard, but that the things he's doing are fundamentally driving policy. he's taking money, and the family's taking money and making deals with countries in the Middle East, right?

So he's got- gets the plane from Qatar. He has massive investments in the crypto business from UAE. Jared Kushner, son-in-law, is seeking, billions of dollars in investment from Saudi Arabia on top of the billions of dollars he's already managing on behalf of the Saudis. And then, we're prosecuting a war in the Middle East where those same countries are whispering in his ear and pushing towards more aggressive action- against Iran and to further- ... to support Israel in the aggression against Lebanon. And there is no way to separate the conduct of our foreign policy, let alone our domestic policy, from the corruption that is endemic in the administration. You need-- That's not-- That's one example, but if you look at what we're doing on AI and how we're treating big tech or what we're doing in the pharmaceutical sector, or obviously what's going on in cryptocurrency, where industry that he once called said was a total fraud is now being boosted in ways that are gonna really strip lots of wealth from lots of Americans.

All these things are policies that are directly tied to the corruption that is the defining feature of his administration- Yeah ... along with his cruelty to immigrants

So my understanding from the Senate caucus lunch, obviously you were not in there, i-it's the other caucus, was that they were pretty unhappy with this whole situation. I wanna read you just a few more quotes here and get your reaction to what's going on that side. Tell us, "Imagine that, a fund that's set up to compensate people who assaulted Capitol Police officers, people that have pled guilty to physical acts, may actually be able to get compensated.

How absurd is that coming out of my mouth?" Here's Mitch McConnell. "So the nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops. Utterly stupid, morally wrong, take your pick." It does seem like they found a thing that they won't walk the plank for.

Chris, I think what really upset them was maybe not so much the slush fund, although people like Thom Tillis who are retiring have been very vocal about it.

But the fact that we were gonna offer amendments, to the bill that we were supposed to be working on tonight, that would've put the question to them. Do you want your taxpayer dollars used to make payments to people who have been convicted of violent crimes, inclu- including beating up police officers or people who were convicted child molesters?

They didn't wanna face those votes, and so they decided to go home instead.

I wanna be clear about this 'cause this is, this is part of the Senate procedure that can get wonky. But basically, as they're moving through, there are these things we call vote-a-ramas, and it's a period where, the minority party can offer amendments, and you gotta vote on the amendments.

And the way that the majority party gets through the vote-a-rama is you just party line vote all your, the other party's ones down, right? You were gonna offer amendments like- That's exactly ... should money go to people that assaulted police officers? Should money go to convicted child molesters?

And they were gonna have to vote, yes, money should go to them, is basically what you're saying.

That's exactly right, Chris. I also filed another one that said no monies from this slush fund should go to members of Congress. You may recall there are some senators who've been trying to get federal- It's review

payments to them for what they claim is wrongdoing. So they would've had to also vote on whether or not these public taxpayer dollars would go to themselves, or whether they would continue to be eligible under the fund. The amendment would make them ineligible. So that's exactly what's happening. I'm not sure they would've actually risen up against this slush fund unless they were gonna be put to the test through their votes, and, I made clear, others made clear that we weren't gonna get out of there on the vote-a-rama without taking these votes.

Now, they've just delayed things, right? so this is a sort of short-term solution of just, unplug the gaming console from the wall, right? So that they don't have to keep playing. Yeah. But, the game saved. They're gonna come back and, it's gonna be the same situation. Am I wrong?

That, that's right. As you pointed out earlier, the underlying bill here is to provide another $70 billion to a- ... lawless ICE operation even though there's a huge pipeline of taxpayer dollars already sitting, at ICE. So the answer is they will come back, but I think what they're hoping, Chris, is in this intervening week, that the acting attorney general, who really is continuing to act like President Trump's personal attorney, but that he will somehow develop guardrails, around this fund.

Now, whether he can actually do that now that the cat's already out of the bag, I don't know. But that's what they were, I think, essentially telling him that they need, he needed to do.

The, just to be clear, the negotiation is not to get rid of the fund, which its- itself I think is completely lawless and indefensible and essentially a theft of the public purse, but to create some, side agreement that says, the child molesters won't get any.

We'll keep the pedophiles out. But I wanna, I just wanna play for this... read this to you. Enrique Tarrio, who is one of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, very serious, conviction, sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy over the role that he played in that fateful day, said he planned to apply to the fund assuming he can get between, and this is his words, "two and $5 million," and then added, "I'm not greedy, but my life was all F'd up because of this."

It... The p- the people, those are the people that seem to be ready to get in line for this money

that's exactly right, and that's why the acting attorney general is gonna have trouble putting up guardrails. 'Cause if you look at the history of this fund that was just announced the other day but has been thought about for a while, it is precisely, Chris, to try to reward people like the January 6th rioters, including those who were convicted.

I s- I questioned the attorney general the other day about somebody who'd been part of the riot on January 6th, who'd been pardoned by Donald Trump, who went on to be convicted of child molestation, who was saying to the kids that he molested, "You know what? Just don't tell people about what I did, and I'll give you some of the money I'm going to get from this slush fund."

So all of those January 6th rioters have been anticipating these funds, and that is essentially what it was designed for. So it's gonna be hard for the attorney general to put up enough guardrails here, I think. Guardrails. Guardrail is really a crazy thing to think about with respect to this thing.

Next, Section B, THE BIGGER PATTERN

in Donald Trump's first term, his tax returns were released. Donald Trump was President of the United States- when his returns were released. It was illegal, but it was under Donald Trump's IRS. Flash forward to the current administration, Donald Trump, President of the United States, allegedly in his personal capacity, has sued the government, meaning the government of the United States, presided over by Donald J.

Trump- ... represented by the Department of Justice, which he is clear works specifically and directly for him, is answerable to him and only what he thinks. He has sued, he sued seeking $10 billion for the alleged injury caused to him, which is just, again, laughable doesn't quite get to it. Yeah. D- by the way, let me stop you there for a second.

Wouldn't, if you sue for $10 billion, don't you need to be able to show that there was some, in some fashion, $10 billion worth of damage against you, your reputation and so forth? Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's completely preposterous. There's no evidence of... he had a privacy injury, but, his actual harm, his reputation, at the time he said, he bragged about it.

He said it showed how smart he was- ... taxes you were describing. So according to him, actually no injury whatsoever. And in fact, it didn't hurt him from getting elected president, so the injury wasn't too bad. Yeah. And it certainly, it probably has no money value at all, and the 10 billion, which is far more than he's personally worth, is ridiculous.

But the c- the problem of course is, besides just that the claim is nonsensical- Yeah ... he's suing himself, so he's on both sides of the case. And as you're describing, that's actually not permitted. So he brought the case and the judge said, "What the heck is this? How is the Department of Justice supposed to defend, or is there even a case here when you, Donald Trump, are on both sides?"

And the judge was plainly getting to the answer of no, there's no case. So they rushed a settlement deal so the judge couldn't interfere. And what they did, cleverly, was to say, "Okay, we're dropping the case." "This is not a, this is not a settlement for the judge to review. We dropped the case. Oh, and by the way, we're creating a $1.776 billion fund," described exactly as you said, that 1776 for people who didn't catch that.

If there is no settlement- And you described it quite accurately except that it's even worse than you said. It's entirely possible for Donald Trump to take some or all this money that's being paid out by this, preposterous, fund. And the terms of the fund itself, which have just been made available, there's a lot we don't know, but a couple things have just been published, said that because the claims process is voluntary- There should be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

Meaning no one can do anything about what this made-up committee does, including giving all of the money to Donald Trump if they so choose. Yeah. I, Robert, let me try to make sense of this because I'm, like I said, having trouble wrapping my brain around it. They didn't, file a motion to dismiss, 'cause that then would've been up to the judge.

Instead, they just said, "We're pulling the... We're dropping the suit." If they're- Dropped it. Now, they had been talking about this ridiculous $10 billion settlement between the parties that are both Donald Trump, but, Trump as a person and Trump's government. But now, if they have dropped the case how can there even be a settlement when there is no case?

It seems like Donald Trump and the DOJ are just agreeing to, "Hey, how about y'all give me $1.776," whatever, billion dollars. Billion. Billion. Don't miss the billion in there. Billion, yeah. There's no suit. How can there be a settlement? How can this be agreed upon without approval of, somebody, the courts, the Congress?

Yeah. It... when things are functioning regularly and honestly, there is a judg- judgment fund in the Department of Justice. And they can't make payouts without the whole- without a conflict even getting to the courts- Okay ... in the first place. Of course, that had-- That, so that's how it's supposed to...

like many things where Trump is doing, there's an underlying logic for things to work in regular times. And then you have a corrupt, evil force, selfish and grifting beyond belief, turning it inside out and using it for something that no one ever possibly could have contemplated, which is what this is.

Is that what this, the, apparently the DOJ is citing this $760 million landmark settlement fund that the Obama administration had created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades. So that's what they seem to be comparing this to.

This is similar to, Native American farmers who were screwed over for decades by the government, except these were violent criminals who tried to overthrow the government, and we're gonna give them money. But that's the comparison they're making. Your response? Correct. So that's the precedent they're citing and you're right, they're implying that the injustice, visited upon the Native American farmers, just a small one in the horrible history, is comparable to the injustice inflicted on Donald Trump.

However, there's some interesting things about that settlement. One, that settlement actually was filed in court, so it was reviewed by a court unlike this. Ah, okay. And when you read through the settlement, it actually goes to length to say " we're two-" separate parties here. We have adverse interests, meaning the government is actually trying to protect taxpayer dollars.

We did a, we had an extensive exchange of information. We looked honestly what the value of the claims might be and the validity of the underlying claims. And based on all that, we came up with this settlement, which was then a structure that individual Native American farmers could apply to and receive payment.

And, that has nothing to do with what's going on here. Although it is the case that now individuals who claim to be aggrieved by Biden administration weaponization, including, as you say, the January 6th per- perpetrators, the Proud Boys, Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump himself, among many others, are now going to make individual claims.

Yeah. And Donald Trump himself could be on this commission, as I understand it, so could his sons, and they could, if we're under- if I'm understanding this correctly, they could choose to give money to themselves as well. Is that a- allowable under this pretend made-up, idea of a fund that they're creating?

Yes. I, I never wanna... i, it's always a mistake to underestimate the extent of their crass corruption. Yeah. I would imagine that they wouldn't put themselves on the f- the fund, committee. A, 'cause it's probably too boring, and B, because why not just put Crony in there who'll do what they want?

But it is correct. They could conceivably put themselves on. And, Donald Trump has, is a man of unparalleled genius. He's a man of many jobs and functions. And, being on the board to pay himself a corrupt fund based on a collusive corrupt settlement of a collusive corrupt case that he filed in the first place might be the kind of poetry that he enjoys.

He is not very bright, frankly, in my opinion, but he's a ge- he is a genius when it comes to figuring out how to defraud the public, and in this case, the taxpayers. It occurs to me that, i- if that commission doesn't ma- manage to give away some of that $1.8 billion, I suspect they would keep it for themselves.

Is there anything to prevent them from doing that, that you know of, Robert Weissman? The commission has to retire by the end of the Trump administration, and if there money, if there's money left over, then it would, go back to the Department of Justice. Oh, good. Obviously, the entire incentive is to get the money out the door before Trump is out the door.

I think what's new in type or degree is that we have such a fundamental core lie that is still with us, which is that there was material fraud in the 2020 election. And a huge number of people, enormous, it's over sixty percent of Republicans, it's a third of the voting electorate, believe that lie.

And so it is true that lies by politicians and by others is something that we've had, for decades and generations, but now we're having-- seeing it in a core way. And we also have a media environment where these, this is obviously not new, a new insight from me, is that we have these media bubbles where it's a lot harder to say, " don't worry that the answer to the falsity that, that politicians put out there is just more truthful statements," because it's not clear that there will be...

those truthful statements will be able to frack down into the media bubbles that everyone is listening to. My guest is Andrew Weissman, NYU law professor. His new book is Liar's Kingdom: How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America. Andrew, you say Trump's widely reported use of deceit has enabled the use of law enforcement and the military against the people of the United States, the unlawful deportation of immigrants, and the disregard of international rules meant to promote a civilized and peaceful world, among other things.

Why do you hang all that on his deceit? I could argue that Trump is mostly more direct than other conservative politicians in just saying what a lot of people in the movement believe. We have too much immigration by people of color, who he considers a cultural threat. Law enforcement should have more power, and the United States shouldn't be constrained by international law or treaties as it's been.

He just says all those things straight up. I could ask, aren't those the real issues? I think those are real issues, but I do point out ways in which lies are used, particularly in the legal system, to justify what's going on. Let me give you an example. Mr. Abrego Garcia, somebody who was extracted from this country in violation of a court order and then summarily put in prison with, again, no judicial oversight and approval of any of this.

And the president said, A, he's a terrorist. Th-there's no evidence of that. And his acolytes said he was a terrorist. B, they said that, he was part of an invasion of this country that was taking place, at the behest of the Venezuelan government. Again, no evidence of an invasion. And this, by the way, you don't have to take it from me.

You have all sorts of judges appointed in, by, Republicans and Democrats, including judges appointed by Donald Trump in his first term who has- But this was taken care of in court. The court found, on Abrego Garcia's side. Yes, that-- in many ways, I think that sort of is a good transition, which is that one of the institutions and an institution that I look to as a way forward for us is the court system because that is a place where facts and law still matter, and where if you say things that are false...

So a very eminent conservative jurist said with respect to the allegation that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a terrorist and a, a bad guy and thus could be treated this way, the jurist said, "Maybe yes, maybe no. But that's why we have a court system. That's why we have hearings. And if you bel-- if you are correct, you will be able to prove that in court, and we will make that decision.

But you don't get to do it in the court of public opinion and have that rule the day." And so I'm very focused on how can we use that truth-seeking function and oversight of the court system to get ourselves into a place where there are stronger checks and balances than what we have now.

I don't know why I am surprised at the level of self-dealing and corruption that Trump has because the only thing he cares about, we say it just about every week, is the grift, is enriching himself and protecting his own family and his own interests. And, he proves it every single day.

But now with this, 1.7... it's actually, people talk about it as a $1.7 billion slush fund. Just because he's an epic fucking troll, it's actually a 1.7 s- 76 billion dollar slush fund. Clever. 776. So clever. Like- So perverse. So perverse ... so perverse on the eve of our anniver- our country's anniversary, 250th, anniversary.

He creates this slush fund basically going to January 6th rioters potentially, to anyone who's had any perceived threat, and as a provision of this too, the IRS is now not allowed to audit or investigate him or his family members. They are officially immune from investigation into tax fraud as they create this $1.8 million slush fund that they can do whatever they want with, and all payments from it are confidential, so they don't...

By these rules that they just made up. And to be clear, this is not authorized by Congress. This is not authorized by the courts. He's taking power that he doesn't have. There's, there... He does not have this authority. He's just doing it anyway. There's nothing that says he can just create a $1.8 billion slush fund, and payments can be confidential, and he can't be investigated.

That's completely illegal what he's doing, again. It goes in the face of the Emoluments Clause, first of all, and, it will not hold legal scrutiny. I hope that in some way, w- we can stop this. There's certainly Democrats are fighting tooth and nail against this right now. Also, Harry Dunn has joined other, Capitol Police members who are suing to block this, too, a- and block any, J6 rioters from receiving, what could be, like, a million dollars each, for, storming the Capitol and assaulting police officers with American flags.

It's, it's so fucking sick. And, it's it's a slush fund, but it's really Trump trying to just buy off his folks and create his own, private army of sycophants and people who are willing to do anything for him. So it's, at a time when we are all struggling so much, when gas prices are so high, he's fixated on building this billion-dollar ballroom.

He's co-opting taxpayer dollars to build an arc to Trump. He wants a helipad at the White House and, and now this $1.8 billion slush fund, with no strings attached. Man. Yeah. From his- I don't know, I don't know what we gotta do. I don't know what we gotta do to get people, involved in the midterms to, get some accountability and push back on this stuff 'cause Republicans aren't...

If Democrats had the majority, they could stop this. This is the kinda thing that, that they could stop from happening 'cause the Congress controls the purse strings. So like you talked about the War Powers Act. Okay, so if, Trump is in power, he would veto that. We wouldn't be able to pass a new law like that.

But if he tries to grab $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to, to pay off his cronies, that's something Democrats could stop in Congress. That's right. Accountability starts when we take back power in November. If we take the House and Senate, there is real accountability. There's subpoena power.

Committees can call the entire administration, i- in for hearings and, hold their feet to the fire. We actually get some accountability and we set off the Trump agenda in its tracks. He can no longer do anything through Congress. We completely lock it up for, you know It cannot help him accomplish all his, corrupt, self-serving and evil- Yeah

brutal goals. Amen. So that's what we need to do. In the, national landscape currently, just an update with the gerrymandering, fluid, state of play that we're in. It now looks like Republicans may have a seven to nine seat advantage in November. And while that's terrible because they're, procuring this advantage through explicitly racist gerrymandering- Yeah

Not just the regular cheating, but racist cheating. Yep. It's not ... that does not in any way guarantee them a win. No. Seven to nine seats, that, we can absolutely overcome that. We got 41 seats in 2018, so let's aim for that

Yeah. Yeah. It just underscores how important it is to, and this will dovetail into, our to-do list right now, get involved in these tight swing races. And they are all around us. No matter where you live, there is a swing district close to you. I know our friends at Swing Left just expanded their map a little bit, so you can check out their new targets at swingleft.org.

And, wherever it is, and it's also primary season. Let's take the example we saw in Pennsylvania. If you're in a blue area, now is the time to push for some progressive candidates too. Get involved in the primaries. That's, that, that's where we push our Democratic Party in the direction that we want it to go too.

And I find that I'm often, I know you're probably in the same situation, Jason, torn between, in my blue areas, I always wanna make sure that I'm fighting for the most progressive candidates and the, candidates that are gonna move us forward and create the kind of equitable society that we all deserve.

But then I'm also working in a lot of these swing districts where the candidates that I'm championing tend to be more conservative than I am, and we can do both at the same time. In fact, it's very important that we do both at the same time. But, I think what we're seeing with some of these Working Families Party, candidates in Pennsylvania and other places show that we can build that progressive bench in Congress while also building the infrastructure in the more conservative districts to win there too.

Yeah, that's a great and fascinating point. It's always been interesting to me, this, one of the conundrums of being an activist. Activists are, in general, the most hair-on-fire liberal people in society who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into electing middle-of-the-road Democrats.

Sometimes. In- Sometimes, yeah ... in, in these swing districts because that's who can-- the kind of Democrat that can get elected in a swing district, and these, strategically, that is absolutely the move. Those are the pressure points the Republican Party, where just a few new registered voters, who come out can swing an election.

So yeah, it's absolutely necessary. Push blue areas bluer, push purple areas just over the edge so they become blue. Yeah. Super, super crucial. And, great to keep that in mind that we're not going to agree on every issue, that these candidate, the positions these candidates take on every single issue, and that's fine.

Democratic unity is that unicorn that pushes everything forward. When we unite, like Republicans always do, it's easier for them. They're a monoculture, yeah. They-- especially united around this whole nexus of fears, of a fear-based philosophy, white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia.

All the fears kind of bond them together in a unifying philosophy. We're the side of free thinkers, so we have all different perspectives in our tents, and races and sexual orientations and, philosophies. So it is tougher for us to foster that unity. But when we do, we beat fascism, and that's exactly what we need to do right now.

And Finally, Section C, ENEMIES OF THE STATE

But we're gonna begin with San Diego, where on Monday a security guard and two others were killed after two teenagers opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

The pair were later found dead of apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime. Mark Remillard, special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego field office, said they were radicalized online. "These subjects did not discriminate on who they hated." Odette, kick us off because been reporting on this, looking into these two suspects.

What do we know about them? As you said, Mary Louise, they are two male teenagers. Apparently, they met online. Authorities say they were radicalized online. And we know from some of the materials that they, appear to have made connected to this attack, that they are part of a global far-right, accelerationist movement that's trying to bring about societal collapse through this kind of violence or attacks on infrastructure.

You said global far-right accelerationist movement. What is that? So accelerationism is an ideology that is closely tied with neo-Nazism, and the idea is to bring about the total disintegration of social order. Often these people are looking to incite, a race war. They're looking to basically undermine, all elements of the social order that we are familiar with, make it harder for us to get literally electricity to our homes, disrupt, supply chains, anything they can do to, collapse the social order.

And the idea is that, from the ashes, a new world order would be, rebuilt, in, a fascist authoritarian regime. You said we know some of this from materials online. Materials like what? Where did you find this? So specifically, it appears that these two, live streamed the attack and so there is a video of that live stream, and there is also a 75-page document that appears to have been authored by these two teenagers.

Now these were materials that they wanted to reach circulation in the public, and so they were uploaded to an online forum, where users, share and view graphic gore videos, im- and images, things including suicides, torture, rape, murders, and- God, yeah. You said an online forum.

This is a website that if you- Yes ... if you know where to look, you, you can find this stuff? That's right. And so a source found these there and sent them to me. But, the fact that they were there is itself important to talk about, because, it, this kind of follows a script that is well-established among far-right extremists who are, seeking what they call sainthood, in this sort of subculture of w- white nationalist neo-Nazi accelerationists.

What about this is, speaks to the far right? What's the far-right influence here? So these are people who embrace neo-Nazi ideology- ... and Nazi ideology. This is, this comes from notions of, rigid hierarchy based on race, based on gender. And so this has always been, conceived of as a far-right movement.

So this is white supremacy, male supremacy, and so forth? Correct. Okay. Y- you also mentioned they live streamed, and, this of course was an attack on an Islamic center. Are there similarities to... I'm remembering the mosque shootings in, in New Zealand, in Christchurch back in 2019. Yes, and I think similarities is a way of undercutting actually what this is.

So if we look at the, just the very first page of that 75-page document, it features the words Sons of Tarrant, Tarrant being Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of that attack- ... in Christchurch. And then at the bottom of that page it says, "A Sons of Tarrant debut manifesto." So for the most part, this was an attack formulated to replicate what happened in Christchurch as closely as possible.

One more to you, Odette. Y- you're saying there appears to be direct links, direct playbook from the Christchurch, New Zealand shootings. How common are these type attacks here in the United States? I think that we've seen the Christchurch attack as inspiration for many other attacks.

I'm thinking certainly of the attack in 2022 in Buffalo, New York, where, a young white nationalist killed 10 people at, a Tops Friendly Markets in, and, was certainly drawing inspiration from the Christchurch attack. But I think it's important to know that, these attacks are committed by people who are not just looking domestically.

This i- they very much are building on a, a global, movement where these attacks have happened all over the world. And I wanna bring, something that I heard from Heidi Beirich, while I was reporting this out. She's the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

These movements, they're not confined by borders. They are truly transnational. There have been killings in multiple countries motivated by the same idea, in Germany, in Norway, in the United States, in New Zealand, in, Serbia not that long ago, in Bratislava, in Slovakia. But if I can just add one last point here, Mary Louise.

At the same time, this attack feels to me, and to others that I've spoken to about it, a bit strange. It's, I hate to say this, but it almost feels like a kind of throwback. Because the violent extremism space has really evolved over the last few years to be something a bit different.

One where we've seen the sort of aesthetic elements of neo-Nazism and accelerationism, but without a grounded ideological underpinning of white nationalists that really is driving the violence. It, it's been more of sort of an incoherent mishmash of different ideologies and more of violence for the sake of violence.

So this attack actually was a bit surprising because it reflects back on, dare I say it, an older model of violent white extremism. Terrifying

this is very short, actually. This is just 14 pages of actual text, about half the length of previous comparable documents. Now, there's been a lot of headlines about the political weaponization after this strategy was released, and we'll talk about that in a sec. But let's first start by talking about how the document starts, with a presidential forward by none other than Donald Trump, dated May 2026.

Trump lists counterterrorism accomplishments from the first year of his second term, like mobilizing DHS to remove illegal alien criminals and jihadist sympathizers, to arresting the ISIS-K operative who planned the Abbey Gate suicide bombing in Afghanistan, and rescuing over 100 American hostages.

Speaking of, Trump also says he secured the release of the remaining October 7th hostages and, quote, "Began the process of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven for terrorism and extremism," unquote, and that's through establishing Trump's own board of peace. The president writes that Operation Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have dealt, quote, unquote, "Devastating blows to Iran," which Trump calls the world's number one state sponsor of terror.

Other actions the Trump admin has taken include designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters and, quote, unquote, "Deadly cartels as terrorist organizations," with Trump boasting that he, quote, "Began using the strength and power of the US military to stop and destroy cartel operations." The example that he includes here is when the US armed forces captured the, quote, unquote, "Narco-terrorist outlaw Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro."

So Trump's opening forward covers the majority of what this 16-page total strategy is focused on. As Trump writes, quote, "Cartels, jihadists, or the governments who support them." And what Trump doesn't actually write about in this forward is what most reporting on the new counterterrorism strategy has focused on, the later inclusion of left-wing terrorism as one of the nation's leading terror threats.

And that's what we'll be mostly talking about today. Good. Though we will cover the other two types of terrorism that this guide focuses on. Now, th- this strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, a far-right Hungarian commentator who briefly served in Trump's first term.

This new document states, quote, "A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged, driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life. The terrorist threat has changed. We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that make established ways of doing counterterrorism insufficient or obsolete."

This is a pretty clear political weaponization of the intelligence community apparatus, and the new counterterrorism strategy doubles down on what NSPM-7 established, writing, quote In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.

We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on US soil or against Americans anywhere, unquote.

Sure. Are there any cases of that happening? Are there any Antifa groups killing Americans? They have one case. They have one case. Not Antifa groups, but yes. Oh, they don't have cases of, state sponsors backing- Yes ... backing Antifa, but they do have one instance included of violent left-wing extremism- Yes

which we'll get to in a sec. That's one example across this, 14 to 16-page document. Now, the violent secular ideologies that I just listed are very similar to or overlapping with the common indicators and motivations animating violent conduct included in NSPM7: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Now, after this new strategy was published, Sebastian Gorka told reporters, quote, "We are taking ideology and counter-ideology very seriously," unquote. Now, despite that clear political focus, literally calling it left-wing extremism, something that Biden never really did with right-wing extremism- ... at least in documents like this.

No, shocking. Despite that clear focus, this counterterrorism strategy claims that counterterrorism operations will be executed, quote-unquote, "apoliticaly." And actually spends a significant portion complaining about how the Biden admin previously weaponized counterterrorism operations against innocent Americans.

Great stuff. Quote, "As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies."

Unquote. This is the only example of, quote-unquote, "left-wing violence" included in this entire document. Just this. Just this one killing. Now, on executive disorder, we have reported on a few instances where the Trump administration has tried to weaponize the killing of Christians or attacks against churches as being motivated by, anti-Christian bias, even when the people committing those attacks were themselves Christian, and for all that we can tell, were not religiously motivated against Christians.

Yeah. But they tried to glom onto a few of these incidents. Certainly not the Charlie Kirk assassination. Exactly, right? Yeah. But they try, tried to glom onto these examples to build this narrative of, anti-Christian violence, which is rising in the United States. And as for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we still don't have a clear picture of the motivations behind that attack.

More on that later. After this new counterterrorism strategy dropped, I did the thing that I assume anyone would do and read through the past, three or four counterterrorism strategies. Really? Yeah. Great. Great stuff. From the past 10 years. Good work. Trump released one in 2018, and Biden's came out in 2021.

Now, the first mention of any non-Islamic terrorist group in Trump's 2018 counterterrorism strategy is the Nordic Resistance Movement, quote, "A prominent transnational self-described National Socialist organization with anti-Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left-wing groups, and others," unquote.

This document from Trump's first term focuses almost exclusively on Islam and terrorism, specifically ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but also briefly mentions the neo-Nazi National Action Group in one paragraph, and in another reads, quote, "The United States has long faced persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, but are instead motivated by other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism," unquote.

But that's really all it has on non-Islamic extremism in what is a thirty-four-page document. By the time Biden got into office, white supremacist violence had risen dramatically, and the Biden admin released a domestic terrorism-specific counterterrorism strategy. This document, released in June of 2021, starts by describing racially or ethnically motivated violence from the KKK during Reconstruction to attacks on Black churches and synagogues and the El Paso shooting at the Walmart.

Then the document covers what it calls anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Congressional baseball game shooting, and the recent January 6th attack. I'm gonna read a paragraph from Biden's domestic terrorism strategy here to compare. Quote, "Today's domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations.

They also take on a variety of forms, from lone actors to small groups of informally aligned individuals to networks exhorting and targeting violence towards specific communities to violent self-proclaimed militias. Among that wide range of animating ideologies, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly those who promote the superiority of the white race and militia violent extremists, are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats."

These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence towards the same segment or segments of the American community, whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, or other religious minorities, women and girls, LGBTQI plus individuals, or others. Their insistence on violence can at times be explicit.

It also can at times be less explicit, lurking in the ideologies rooted in a perception of the superiority of the white race that call for violence in furtherance of preservation and abhorrent notions of racial purity or cleansing, unquote. Now, Biden's strategy does later specifically mention, quote, unquote, anarchist violence, though within the broader context of anti-government or anti-authority extremism.

Quote, A significant component of today's threat includes self-proclaimed militias and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the US government based on perceived overreach. Anarchist violent extremists who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions which they perceive as harmful to society.

The document goes on to mention sovereign citizen violent extremists and other groups that resist or oppose legislative, regulatory, or other actions taken by the government. This strategy also names a few single-issue ideologies which may motivate violence like abortion, animal rights, environmental issues, or involuntarily celibate violent extremism.

But that little section there is the closest that the Biden strategy gets to, quote, unquote, left-wing violence, as Trump would call it. But rather than referring to violence as somewhere on left-right politics, Biden's strategy tries to specifically name the exact motivating factor driving the violence.

His document reads, quote, The definition of domestic terrorism in our law makes no distinction based on political views, left, or center, and neither should we, unquote. Biden's AG Merrick Garland would often say that combating domestic terrorism is about stopping violence, not policing ideology, and quote, unquote, violence, not ideology, was an often repeated refrain during the Biden administration.

And this is something that the Biden administration definitely acted on. The FBI investigated Stop Cop City under Biden, and a significant portion of the domestic terror-related charges while Biden was in office were levied against Stop Cop City protesters by the state of Georgia with investigative assistance from multiple federal agencies, and almost all of whom were charged with terrorism were not actually charged with any specific violent crime.

The attack in San Diego underscores bigger problems, the rise of far-right extremism, the rise of Islamophobia. But a new White House document on rising threats makes no mention of right-wing extremist groups. Greg, I am talking about the latest version of the United States Counterterrorism Strategy.

This is a 16-page Document. It's brand new, hot off the presses, came out earlier this month. Start with the architect, the man behind this. His name is Sebastian Gorka. Who is he? So Sebastian Gorka is this big, hulking guy, and he has a booming voice, so he certainly has a presence. You tend to notice him pretty quickly.

He's got a bit of a British accent. He has, roots in Britain and Hungary. He immigrated to the US, legally he likes to say, less than two decades ago, and, he made his name by talking a lot about, terrorism, counterterrorism, with a real emphasis on, Islamic extremism. A- and so that's really where he would-- you would see him commentating publicly.

He caught the attention of President Trump. So he'd been in this country less than a decade, and in Trump's first term, he named him as a presidential advisor. Now, a lot of chaos at the beginning of Trump's first term, a lot of people coming and going. Gorka was out, lasted only a matter of months, I believe seven months or so.

And so he disappeared. He was doing more commentating in the interim, but he's been brought back again to the White House as an- Second administration, he's back ... that- that's right, and as an advisor, and now he's emerged as the point person on counterterrorism at the National Security Council. So official post, he's officially a member of the National Security Council in the White House.

That's right, and he's taken over as the counterterrorism person. And with this report that's come out, it's drawn attention to him, and he's given interviews. And so there's a lot of focus on him and the approach, which is, different and emphasizes the thing that President Trump likes to talk about and not what we've often heard about in the past, 10, 20 years when it comes to counterterrorism.

And just one more thing on, on Gorka personally. He has been in the headlines quite recently because the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned in protest over the Iran war. Sebastian Gorka has been in the news when people wondering if he is perhaps angling for that job, so expanding on his White House portfolio and taking over the whole National Counterterrorism Center.

Yeah, it seems so. That is certainly the talk. Now, at the White House, he's more involved in the policy aspect of it. Yep. To run the National Counterterrorism Center is really the operational, where would you put resources? What cases would you be following most closely? And so that would have more actual, clout, generally seen as the operational person.

It would also be a Senate-confirmable post. And so this is-- We don't know where that may go. Watch this space. We do know... I just want people to get to hear from Gorka directly. We dug out an interview that he gave last year to Politico in which he was asked about counterterrorism and he was asked, what's your mandate?

Very simply, to protect the innocent and to deal earthly justice to evildoers, the individuals who threaten our U.S. citizens, whether here or abroad, the global jihadi movement, be it Sunni or Shia. Our job in the directorate for counterterrorism is to suppress that threat until these organizations, the Tier 1 threat groups, are incapable of executing mass casualty attacks against Americans.

It's a very simple mission. So a taste there of Sebastian Gorka and his approach to his mission. A- and Greg, to focus on this new strategy document that he has produced, it identifies three main types of terror groups that threaten the US according to the Trump White House. They are narco-terrorists, number one, Islamist terrorists, and left-wing extremists.

Left-wing. What do we make of that? Yeah, so it's certainly an expansion and a different point of emphasis than we've seen in the past. Certainly, the Islamist groups, the Al-Qaeda or ISIS, they're still there, although we're, they've not- Number two ... has been as active as they have been in the past. the narco-terrorists, we've seen that being acted upon in terms of these US airstrikes on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

And the part that really is entirely new is violent left-wing extremists. And he's mentioned Antifa, LGBT, transgender ideology, so things we just have not dealt with in terms of this- A terror threat ... tying it into counterterrorism. Completely unprecedented. Odette, what about the emphasis on left-wing extremists?

Unless I missed it, I didn't see a lot of emphasis on the other side, on right-wing extremism. Yes, there is no mention really of right-wing extremism, and that is, I think, what's causing the greatest amount of concern, for people who work in this field, right? So we've seen, we, it's no surprise that the document, would focus on, quote, "violent left-wing extremists."

We've already seen the State Department, designate certain, European-based groups as violent left-wing extremist groups. The fact is that we haven't seen, a body count, frankly, of, th- people who were killed by left-wing extremist activity the way that we have seen with violent far-right, movements.

And so there's a lot of concern that this is simply turning away from where the problem really lies, and I think that the attack in San Diego this week, has been an illustration of the dangers of not paying attention to violent far-right extremism. Do we know what they're doing with this document, Greg?

Are there any concrete steps or signs that they are overhauling counterterrorism efforts, diverting resources from one area to another to act on the priorities outlined in this document? I would say that we've seen, very broadly speaking, whether it's going after the drug traffickers, that we mentioned in the Caribbean or the Pacific, the emphasis on the Western Hemisphere as opposed to, say, the Middle East when it comes to counterterrorism.

the actions that Trump has taken against Venezuela and is threatening against Cuba, not specifically counterterrorism actions, but part of his broader, efforts in terms of national security and the points of emphasis he wants to make. So it does seem to fold into at least the narco terrorists that they talk about.

And again, you could even question whether drug smugglers are terrorists. That's something that the Trump administration has certainly emphasized, but there's no real overt political component to drug traffickers. They seem to be criminals who want to make money and have certainly inflicted, all sorts of, of suffering on this country, whether it's the drug overdose deaths or the violence or whatever.

But lumping it in as terrorism is something that's been new and eight groups with ties to drug trafficking or gang activity have been added to the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. The FTO list, yeah. And that would include the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, the MS-13 gangs, Tren de Aragua, so groups that had not previously been on the terrorist list, but the Trump administration says, "no, these are terrorist groups, and we're going to spend a lot of resources focused on them."

Nick, I was looking at a piece you did last year focused on NSPM-7, the presidential memorandum that effectively created a secret list of domestic terrorists, which included everyone from anti-Christians to anti-capitalists. One of the really haunting questions from your piece was whether the administration has the authority to kill people on the list that it has designated as terrorists.

The line, "We will find you, and we will kill you," appears in this new counterterrorism strategy. I know that stuck out to both of us as incredibly chilling. Does this new strategy give us an answer to your earlier question? Does the administration have the legal authority to kill its enemies? The White House and Justice Department have never answered this question.

It's been left hanging there in both cases since the fall when I started asking. But in December, General Gregory Guillot, the chief of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from Pete Hegseth and oversees the United States, seemed to answer this question, and worryingly when he was asked about his willingness to attack so-called designated terrorist organizations within U.S.

borders by Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Guillot said that if he had questions about such an order, he would ask Hegseth. And if not, if he thought it was a legal order, then he would, quote, "Definitely execute that order." Now, as far as four-star generals go, Guillot has a good reputation. People on the Hill, decent people there, like him.

He's not a Hegseth acolyte, not a MAGA general. But the military are, in the end, orders followers. They kill on command. They do what they're told, and you don't get four stars on your shoulder by saying, "No, sir, that's immoral. I won't do what you want, sir." You don't see a lot of military officers at any level pushing back against the orders of this administration to attack and kill people, whether it's, in Iran or Venezuela, or specifically the boat strikes that every legal authority worthy of that name says are illegal extrajudicial killings.

With, secret lists of both foreign and domestic terrorists, we don't know who can be targeted. But it's possible that left-wing extremists could be targeted and killed on Trump or Hegseth's say so. In a world of secret wars, secret enemies lists, secret legal findings, we just can't know for sure, and that alone should scare every American.

Yeah. I think most people in the United States would like to believe that the military would not follow those kinds of orders. But as you've documented throughout your entire career, we cannot count on individual soldiers not following through on those orders. And the fact that we now have an enemies list and a counterterrorism strategy that is rather explicit about targeting the left, that includes the words, "We will find you, and we will kill you I think that should be terrifying to pretty much anyone.

And Noah, you've covered other targets, specifically nonprofits. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into the broader efforts to not only tamp down, but arguably eliminate any dissent? Has the Trump administration strategy here evolved over the last year? And if so, how? As we mentioned before, the, this anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.

Prior to the Trump administration returning to power, I reported extensively on, what was known as the Nonprofit Killer Bill, which was, a piece of legislation in Congress that would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the nonprofit status of any, 501[c][3] organization found to be providing material support for terrorism.

And that was a bill that had received relatively broad bipartisan support prior to the reelection of Donald Trump. And then in the immediate aftermath of the reelection of Donald Trump, it became much more of a partisan issue because suddenly the Democrats looked around and realized that we were gonna be handing this tool to a new emboldened Trump administration, right?

And so that bill ended up languishing in legislative hell. I see that as an early warning sign of the way in which the Trump administration planned to use this terrorism rhetoric to tamp down on pretty non-terroristic political enemies. And I think that we've seen most clearly that coming through in its prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Now, that is through the DOJ. They are not necessarily using the rhetoric of anti-terror against the SPLC in that lawsuit, which is based on the use of undercover informants in white supremacist groups. They did accuse the SPLC of essentially providing material support to these extremist groups by paying informants, but it was a slight evolution of the somewhat more crude use of this terrorism label against political enemies.

But we do see that they are using e- every tool in the toolbox to delegitimize, to prosecute, to make the lives harder of anyone they see as their political enemies. What's also fascinating, maybe horrifying is the better word, is the fact that they don't even have to pass this legislation. They don't even have to convict these organizations on any charges, and yet there's already damage.

And The Intercept has been reporting on the fact that certain financial institutions essentially complied in advance and begun preventing donations from their donor-advised funds to SPLC. Nick, at different points in history, we've seen the government target civilians it perceived as enemies of the state, from the McCarthy era to COINTELPRO to the war on terror.

Perhaps it's too soon to tell the full impact, but how does what we're seeing now with the Trump administration compare to these other periods? Yeah, I was really struck by some of the language in this new counterterrorism strategy. At one point, it notes that the national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is, this is quoted, "anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist."

This language of neutralization, it really harkens back to the FBI's analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program that you mentioned, which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement, the new left, anti-Vietnam War protesters, basically, domestic groups and individuals.

It's very much the spiritual precursor to Trump's current war at home. It's just that COINTELPRO was secret, and Trump's effort is out and proud. According to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on US intelligence activities, COINTELPRO turned a law enforcement agency into a law violator. The Senate committee found that the FBI went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to, quote, "disrupt and neutralize" target groups and individuals, and that they used, wartime counterintelligence techniques that were antithetical to a democratic society.

There was a, 1967 internal FBI memo that laid this out. Basically, this type of counterintelligence was meant to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize, that language again, African American groups and leaders. These efforts were meant to, this is another quote, "cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets," according to the Senate committee Martin Luther King Jr.,

for instance, was one of the targets of the FBI's campaign, and the Senate Select Committee again uses that same language. They said that the FBI targeted him to neutralize him. The man that was in charge of the FBI's, what they call, quote-unquote, "war against Dr. King," said that they used the same methods they employed against Soviet agents.

It's the Cold War at the time, very much at war with the Soviet Union. To me, I think Trump is really reinstituting COINTELPRO under a new name. The groups that you just mentioned are all generally considered left-leaning movements. What impact did those efforts have on leftist movements in the United States?

Yeah, COINTELPRO and some analogous operations were going on at the same time. They really weakened activist groups. They sowed dissent within organizations, discord among members. They broke up families. They encouraged gang warfare on streets of American cities. It got people killed. They utilized informants and agent provocateurs.

They undermined groups that were trying to bring about social change through democratic means, and hurt people that really just wanted to build a better, more inclusive America. We can talk about, the promise of 1960s radicalism and the movement, and people trying to bring about social change and how it failed, but, we can't seriously address those failures if we don't talk about a sophisticated government campaign that was meant to undermine those groups and destroy those people.

Now, in Trump's new strategy, it states that under the Biden admin, US officials, quote, "used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections," unquote.

Now, under Biden, there was an increase of domestic terrorism-related prosecutions following January 6th, plus unrelated felony cases against Trump himself and prosecutions of Trump allies related to the Stop the Steal efforts. In 2022, the DOJ opened a new unit focused on domestic terrorism investigations and just that year, $100 million of additional resources were allocated to the DOJ, FBI, and DHS for countering domestic terrorism.

Now, this increase in focus was correlated to an increase in attacks. The Government Accountability Office reported that between 2010 to 2021, domestic terrorism-related investigations had grown by 356%, with 231 confirmed incidents according to the DHS. In just Biden's first year of office, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations more than doubled.

During this time period, the intelligence community classified racially or ethnically motivated violence as the most common type of attack. That's 35% of domestic terrorism, and this category also contributed to the most deaths. The second most common type of attack was anti-government or anti-authority motivated violent extremism with 32% of attacks, and that category covered a lot of different things, including the militia stuff as well as the anarchist stuff.

It depends on who's doing the exact categorization, though. Yeah. Now, the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were most likely to conduct civilian mass casualty attacks, while militia types were more likely to target law enforcement or government apparatus. In comparison, Trump's new counterterrorism strategy does not contain a single mention of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.

Oh, yeah. Weird. Not one. Not one, huh? Which is which is astounding, right? Even like beyond the clear partisan wea- weaponization, like just from a counterterrorism standpoint, like this is bizarre. This is quite, quite a choice. The last pillar of Biden's counterterrorism strategy was, quote, "Confronting long-term contributions to domestic terrorism like racism, bigotry, religious or ethnic hatred," unquote.

Meanwhile, Trump's new strategy says that the fearsome powers of the US government must never be abused, quote, "Whether under the guise of de-radicalization, protecting our democracy, or any other pretext," unquote. Great. Which is, I don't even know how to respond to that. Yeah. And what are we s- yeah, what are we supposed to say?

it demonstrates they're not actually interested in combating what is the most lethal form of domestic- No ... terrorism. No, and they never have been. Even in Trump's first term, at least they moved towards that as the threat wa- was increasing, but now they just have no interest whatsoever and actually target de-radicalization as an example of the fearsome powers of the US government.

Yeah, like the thing that never worked and like never actually did anything is the big boogeyman for you guys? Okay. It's wild. The new strategy includes a few examples of US government overreach. Quote, "Our nation has not been well served by its intelligence community, which has been mirrored in old ways of looking at threats or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool.

Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at school board meetings, members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this administration will continue to prohibit the intelligence community from being used politically against innocent Americans," unquote.

So that's the main example of partisan weaponization of the intelligence community. Let's start with this first one, targeting Catholics attending traditional mass. This refers to a 2023 FBI memo from the Richmond field office on how racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were displaying a growing interest in traditionalist Catholicism- Great

and how trad Catholic extremist violence could be mitigated by building connections within the church. Now, random Latin mass churchgoers in Virginia were not being investigated. Rather, this memo was discussing the, quote-unquote, "growing overlap between the white nationalist movement and," quote-unquote, "radical traditionalist Catholics," and how white supremacists may use trad cath social media to promote violence and recruit This memo also made a distinction from ordinary traditional Catholics who prefer Latin mass and the extremist beliefs and violent rhetoric from what they call radical traditional Catholics, what we would just call Trad Cats, like colloquially.

After backlash to this memo, the FBI claims to have scrapped it for not meeting the standards of the FBI. Sure. Yeah, we've seen how high those standards are in Kash Patel, Sarah. I'm gonna go on a little bit of, a tangent here. 'Cause I wanted to get more information about this Richmond field office memo and investigation.

So it turns out the FBI did monitor a traditionalist priest at a church, and this church was not considered by the Vatican to be in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it's still Catholic affiliated. This priest refused to speak with the FBI about communications he had with a parishioner who was a self-described radical traditional Catholic clerical fascist, self-described, who was posting about conducting a mass shooting at a special needs school, armed resistance against government, learning how to manufacture pipe bombs, and using untraceable means to purchase supplies to manufacture 3D-printed weapons.

Posting about that on this Catholic account. Yeah, nothing sketchy. This Nazi was actually previously arrested in 2019 after being overheard making comments about political violence while purchasing several AR-15 style rifles, multiple high-capacity magazines, and large quantities of .223 ammunition, as well as making online statements advocating civil war and the murder of politicians.

Now, after getting out of prison, this guy started attending this traditionalist church and planning an attack. The FBI claims he tried to recruit others with similar belief systems and made comments to churchgoers about his intent to commit violence. He was arrested again and pleaded guilty to possessing a destructive device.

So the FBI was looking into this priest because this priest was not talking to them about what the communications were with this Nazi, communications that they know existed, and so they briefly looked into him. This caused a massive backlash among the right. This is where Marjorie Taylor Greene was posting about defunding the FBI.

A lot of the, a lot of the dismantle FBI stuff coming from the right was based on this incident of the FBI, targeting conservative churchgoers. Little side tangent there. The other main example from the Trump counterterrorism strategy refers to parents and school boards. This is in reference to a letter from the National School Boards Association requesting federal intervention into the harassment, threats, and attacks against school boards in 2021, and this letter read in part, quote, "These heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terror and hate crimes."

Unquote. After this letter was sent, the AG, Merrick Garland, announced that the government was gonna look into these threats. This too sparked a huge backlash from the right, claiming that the FBI was investigating parents for terrorism. There was congressional hearings, and a month later, the National School Board Association apologized for some of the language they included in this letter.

Those are the two main examples of this horrendous government overreach and weaponization of the intelligence community against innocent Americans. Yeah, of course. It's just, it's frustrating how, reality doesn't matter at all here. But I don't... what is the point of even, going in and line by line, here's everything that's wrong with that?

I don't even know anymore.

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The Brian Lehrer Show

The BradCast

All In with Chris Hayes

The Practivist Pod

The NPR Politics Podcast

The Intercept Briefing

and It Could Happen Here

Further details are in the show notes.

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