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The 'Weaponization Of Justice' Began During Trump's First Term

The 'Weaponization Of Justice' Began During Trump's First Term

Pundits who portray President Donald Trump's recent steps to secure federal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James as simply a response to prosecutorial efforts to hold Trump accountable after his first term have either forgotten what actually happened during Trump’s first term or are lying to their audiences.

Trump, an authoritarian to his core, repeatedly sought the investigation, prosecution, and imprisonment of his political foes throughout his first four years in the White House. The fact that he's had more success leveling actual criminal charges at his enemies in his second term says far more about the sycophants and toadies with which he's populated the government than about his own demeanor, which has always been laser-focused on using the levers of power to punish his perceived enemies.

On September 20, Trump publicly posted a message to Attorney General Pam Bondi he had reportedly intended to be private, complaining that investigations he had demanded into Comey, James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) had stalled. He said that he had fired a U.S. attorney who had defied White House demands for politicized prosecutions and recommended Lindsey Halligan, who was serving in the White House after working as Trump’s personal lawyer. Trump subsequently said he had installed Halligan in the vacated U.S. attorney slot, and she obtained charges against Comey and James from a grand jury.

These indictments triggered denunciations from defenders of liberal democracy agog over his decimation of the rule of law and paroxysms of glee from MAGA foot soldiers. But a third category also emerged: conservative pundits who acknowledge that the indictments are politically motivated and improper, but nonetheless claim Democrats contributed to the situation by seeking charges against Trump between his terms in office.

Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson wrote in an October 10 piece that the Comey and James indictments were “absolutely politically motivated” and described them as “persecutions.” But he also claimed they were the flip side of the “law fare” he said the president had experienced.

“Unfortunately for Democrats, some of whom are complaining that ‘Trump would do this anyway’ even without those prior indictments, we actually have a 45th presidential administration where no such things happened and that was also the presidency of Donald J. Trump,” Erickson added. “Two wrongs do not make a right, but Democrats did start this.”

The editorial board of The Washington Post, recently reborn as a right-wing organ, likewise published an October 8 piece which described the Comey charges as “pathetically weak” but also complained: “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked.”

And in an October 13 piece at The Wall Street Journal, columnist Gerard Baker wrote that Trump “seems intent on repaying his enemies in kind” for purported Democratic “lawfare,” even as he warned that the James indictment “corrupts the legal process, corrodes public faith in civic institutions, and invites further leaps up the partisan warfare escalator.”

This argument aligns with Trump’s presentation of these prosecutions as retaliation for past Democratic efforts to hold him accountable.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he declared in his message to Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Set aside the question of whether Democrats should have accepted that a president must be allowed to commit crimes with impunity — even attempting to overturn an election that he lost — because otherwise he might some day regain power and demand prosecutors indict his foes.

It is simply not true that Trump began seeking to prosecute his political foes only in his second term, after his indictment by state and federal prosecutors during his years out of power.

Trump’s first-term quest to lock up his political enemies

During Trump’s first term as president, he frequently sought “to deploy his power against his perceived enemies,” and after his “repeated public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government, they faced federal pressure of one kind or another,” including federal criminal probes, as The New York Times detailed in a September 2024 investigation.

The Times produced an extensive but by no means all-inclusive list of individuals who faced such treatment, noting that “there was no legal basis for the investigation of many” of the targets. In some cases, baseless but furious accusations aired in the right-wing media led to pressure from Trump for investigations into his political foes’ purported crimes — but when Trump-appointed federal prosecutors actually reviewed the allegations, they found them underwhelming and did not seek charges.

The list includes Comey, who was subjected to Justice Department investigations into whether he had leaked classified investigations and into his handling of the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. John Durham, appointed special counsel during the Trump administration, probed the latter subject for four years; he did not bring charges against Comey and failed to win jail time from any defendant.

It is difficult to take seriously the argument that Trump sought an indictment against Comey only as retaliation for Democratic efforts to prosecute him when his attempts to indict Comey predates those efforts by years.

Other targets identified by the Times who were subjected to Justice Department investigations during Trump’s first term include:

  • Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election. “Federal prosecutors and a special counsel examined nearly all the issues and conspiracy theories Mr. Trump raised about Mrs. Clinton, her campaign and the Clinton Foundation, including the Clinton campaign’s role in gathering information during the 2016 campaign about ties between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia and providing it to the F.B.I.,” but Clinton “was never charged with anything.”
  • John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Justice Department officials in Washington referred an investigation into Kerry’s contacts with Iran after Trump publicly highlighted them, but U.S. attorney’s offices in New York and Maryland ultimately declined to charge him.
  • Andrew McCabe, former deputy FBI director. “The Justice Department conducted a criminal investigation into whether Mr. McCabe had lied to the F.B.I. and Justice Department, and Mr. McCabe was investigated over whether he had leaked material to journalists,” but when prosecutors sought McCabe’s indictment, a grand jury declined to charge him.
  • Peter Strzok, lead FBI agent on the Clinton and Russia probes. “Federal prosecutors and a special counsel investigated his handling of the Clinton and Russia investigations” but did not bring charges against him.
  • John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser-turned critic. The Justice Department “opened a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Bolton had unlawfully disclosed classified information” in his 2020 book but did not bring charges against him (that probe has been revived in Trump’s second term).

Trump’s desire to prosecute his political enemies didn’t change between his first and second terms. In both terms, the FBI and Justice Department proved willing to respond to his public and private ire by looking into the purportedly criminal behavior. And in both terms, federal prosecutors eventually found that the evidence against his enemies was insufficient.

What’s changed is that during Trump’s second term, when federal prosecutors declined to bring charges, he replaced the recalcitrant U.S. attorney with a crony who had no issue seeking indictments anyway. But explaining that reality won't keep you on the good side of the MAGA movement.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump Gang Positions 'No Kings' Rallies As Excuse To Crush Dissent

Trump Gang Positions 'No Kings' Rallies As Excuse To Crush Dissent

President Donald Trump, Republican officials, and their right-wing media allies have laid the groundwork for a broadbased attack on core progressive and Democratic Party institutions in response to Saturday’s planned nationwide “No Kings” protests. They are reframing and weaponizing the concept of antifa as a framework to target their political enemies — and anyone else who dissents from their authoritarian political project.

Trump hosted a White House event last week about the purported scourge of antifa, an umbrella term for a broad and decentralized grouping of militant far-left activists who say they oppose fascism. In remarks to top law enforcement officials and a slate of MAGA influencers, the president promised to be “very threatening” to antifa, which he recently designated as a “domestic terror organization,” and said his administration would target “the people that fund them.”

But Trump quickly pivoted from describing purported antifa attacks on law enforcement and journalists to complaining about “paid anarchists” holding “very expensive” signs at protests. His remarks indicate that he is eager to stretch the “antifa” label so that it covers as many of his political enemies as possible — including peaceful protesters holding signs and the organizations and funders who pay for them.

The amorphous nature of antifa lends itself to such abuses. Though then-FBI director Christopher Wray explained in a 2020 congressional testimony that antifa is “not a group or an organization” but rather “a movement or an ideology,” the MAGA right typically applies the moniker to any person on the left engaged in violence, real or imagined, particularly at protests.

Other top Republican officials went even further in the days following Trump’s comments. In interviews with right-wing media outlets, they have claimed that antifa and other violent extremists are behind Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, which oppose Trump’s authoritarian actions. Organizers said that five million people attended the more than 2,000 “No Kings” rallies in June, and the protests are actually backed by an array of mainstream progressive organizations, led by Indivisible and including the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, and the League of Conservation Voters.

  • House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed during an October 10 Fox interview that Democrats had planned “a hate America rally that's scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall” featuring “the pro-Hamas wing and antifa people.”
  • Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said on Newsmax the same day that the Washington, D.C., rally would be “a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protesters show up,” adding: “The agitators show up. We'll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully it will be peaceful. I doubt it."
  • Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy alleged during a Fox Business hit on Monday that the No Kings protest “is part of antifa, paid protesters,” and said that “it begs the question who's funding it."
  • House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said in a Tuesday Fox Business interview: “We call it the 'Hate America' rally because you'll see the hate for America all over this thing when they show up. … The rumor is that they can't end this shutdown beforehand because this small but very violent and vocal group is the only one that's happy about this."

Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a Tuesday night Fox appearance, similarly suggested that she sees no distinction between antifa activists whom the president has identified as criminals and terrorists and peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.

“That’s one of the things about Antifa,” she told Fox host Sean Hannity. “You’ve heard President Trump say multiple times, they are organized, they are a criminal organization. And they are very organized. You’re seeing people out there with thousands of signs that all match, pre-bought, pre-put together. They are organized, and someone is funding it. We are going to get to the funding of antifa. We are going to get to the root of antifa, and we are going to find and charge all of those people who are causing this chaos.”

The MAGA plan for Saturday seems clear. The right-wing media has spent months fearmongering about the conditions in American cities to justify Trump’s desire to deploy military and quasi-military forces on their streets. They want headlines about violence at No Kings rallies that the president can use as a pretext to target his political foes.

A Trumpist plot to criminalize dissent

Trump views criticism from his foes as illegitimate by definition, and he responded to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk by threatening a crackdown on political opposition.

Before a suspect in the killing had even been identified, Trump blamed the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” as “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” Attorney General Pam Bondi subsequently declared that the Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”; when a reporter asked Trump what she meant, he replied, “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate.” These attacks on free speech crested with the Trump administration’s attempt to drive Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Trump also promised that his administration would go after not just Kirk’s killer, but the purportedly “radical left” individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence.” Investigators have not uncovered any evidence of ties between the alleged killer and any left-wing group, NBC News reported last month — but that has not stopped Trump’s effort, echoing demands from his supporters, to use Kirk’s killing to justify the suppression of the Democratic Party and the left over the last several weeks.

Last month, Trump signed a national security directive on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” also known as “NSPM-7.” The directive, as extensively detailed by investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, orders federal agencies to undertake “a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.” According to the document, potential indicators of political violence include “anti-fascist” rhetoric and views like “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism,” or “anti-Americanism.” The document specifically focuses the FBI’s network of roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on combatting this purported threat.

At a signing ceremony for the directive, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that it created “an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism.” Trump, in turn, made clear how broadly he views that effort, naming major Democratic donors George Soros and Reid Hoffman as potential targets of the “domestic terrorism” crackdown. “They’re bad, and we’re going to find out if they are funding these things,” he explained. “You’re going to have some problems because they’re agitators, and they’re anarchists.”

The New York Times further reported that same day that the office of the deputy attorney general had “instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorney’s offices to draft plans to investigate” Soros’ Open Society Foundations and had even listed “possible charges prosecutors could file, ranging from arson to material support of terrorism.” While the directive cited a report from the right-wing Capital Research Center as evidence supporting such charges, the Times subsequently reported that the document “does not show evidence that Mr. Soros’s network knowingly paid for its grantees to break the law, which legal experts said would be necessary to build a criminal case,” and the group’s president acknowledged to the paper that it did not show evidence of a crime.

A Reuters investigation published October 9 likewise suggests that the Trump administration is considering looking into core Democratic Party supporters like Soros, party infrastructure like the fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue, and Indivisible, the lead organizer behind the No Kings rallies that Republican officials claim are a front for antifa.

Saturday’s No Kings rallies present a potential opportunity for the Trump administration to take this effort to the next level. If no violence develops, they will move on and wait for their next chance. But if a conflict involving No Kings protesters breaks out anywhere in the country — particularly if there’s a standoff with the increasingly violent and unaccountable federal law enforcement apparatus, then all bets are off.

The right’s propagandists, eager for “war” on the left and fully enmeshed with the administration, will seize on the incident and try to turn it into a national story by whatever dishonest means are necessary. Trump officials who have lost all credibility lying on his behalf will leap to smear the left as a whole as responsible. Fox and its ilk will run whatever footage is available on a loop while their demagogic stars demand action.

Then the federal law enforcement agencies, which are serving as extensions of the president, will go to work finding ways to target the organizations and funders involved in the protests. Any career prosecutors and investigators or even Trump appointees who oppose such tactics will be ruthlessly purged.

Trump will have gotten exactly what he wanted — a chance to bend the No Kings protests to his own authoritarian ends.

'Worse Than Watergate'? MAGA Right Rewrites January 6 To Erase Trump Coup

'Worse Than Watergate'? MAGA Right Rewrites January 6 To Erase Trump Coup


The MAGA right’s cynical effort to rewrite the history of January 6 reached a new but seemingly inevitable low this week, as right-wing media figures, the GOP, and the Trump administration teamed up to demand retribution against those who attempted to impose consequences on the perpetrators of the event.

In late 2020, President Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party and right-wing media attempted to overturn the results of the election that he had lost, using false claims of widespread voter fraud. That campaign’s final phase relied on Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the electoral count based on a nonsensical legal theory. When it became clear Pence would not cooperate, a mob of Trumpists — summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president who told them “we will never concede” — assaulted scores of law enforcement officers as they stormed the U.S. Capitol, sending Pence and the assembled Congress into hiding and delaying the counting of electoral votes.

This January 6 insurrection faced widespread public condemnation in its immediate aftermath. But right-wing propagandists, led by then-Fox star Tucker Carlson, went to work dismantling what turned out to be a fragile consensus. In the insidious counternarrative they created, January 6 was either righteous or something of a nothingburger, and the true scandal was the subsequent efforts to punish its perpetrators. Four years later, that version of events is the dominant one on the right, with special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over his role treated as part of a Democratic plot. And as a result, efforts to achieve accountability for the crimes of January 6 have become partisan almost by definition.

Fox News star host Jesse Watters said the day after the storming of the U.S. Capitol that “people that think it wasn't that big of a deal” were wrong. “You can't smash windows, spray police with chemical agents, assault police officers, loot, and vandalize.”

But this week, Watters declared that “the Democrat reaction to January 6 was worse than January 6.” Watters pointed to the new revelation served up by Trump law enforcement appointees that Smith had received the phone records of several Republican senators from the period around January 6 as part of his criminal investigation of the events and baselessly concluded that “what they were probably trying to do is cast this wide net to create some grand criminal conspiracy and indict the entire Republican Party.”

Watters then demanded retribution against Smith and other federal law enforcement figures involved in the January 6 investigations. “This guy should be in prison,” he said. “And what they need to do is either appoint a special counsel or have some sort of Senate select committee to go up, do hearings, put Wray, put Garland, put Smith under oath, and if they lie, you throw them in prison.”

Legal reporters and experts have noted that seeking phone records of Republican officials who might have been in communication with Trump around the time of January 6 was an obvious step for the investigators, who ultimately indicted the president over what they alleged were attempts to use “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” But that conclusion presumes that investigators should have been investigating at all, and the current position of the Trumpist right is exactly as Watters pitched it: After Trump’s return to the presidency, he pardoned January 6 perpetrators and purged law enforcement who helped prosecute them.

On Tuesday night, Fox hosts and the Republican guests they hosted pushed falsehoods about Smith’s probe in order to justify retaliatory investigations into his effort. The sequence of events is roughly analogous to the crusade by Trump, congressional Republicans, and propaganda outlets like Fox to secure investigations into special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. That resulted in years of content for Fox’s stars — but the resulting four-year probe failed to garner prison time for a single person.

Here we go again.

Jack Smith did not “spy” on Republican senators in a scandal “worse than Watergate”

Fox stars Watters, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all used the same false characterization on Tuesday as they sought to stir up outrage about Smith’s January 6 probe.

Watters claimed that the “big story” was “that Joe Biden's FBI was spying on top Republican senators”; Sen. Josh Hawley, one of the senators whose records were included, subsequently told the host that the FBI “got wiretaps essentially” against them. Ingraham claimed the senators “were all spied on” in “an attempt at partisan surveillance.” According to Hannity, Smith had been “using the federal government to spy on several U.S. senators.”

Hannity and Ingraham also ran with with Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) absurd characterization of the report as “WORSE THAN WATERGATE”: Ingraham termed it “arguably worse than Watergate,” while Hannity claimed more definitively that the report was “worse than anything alleged against Richard Nixon during Watergate.”

These claims are baseless and absurd.

The Watergate scandal featured operatives associated with Nixon’s reelection campaign attempting to break into the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the orders of a White House official, most likely in an effort to place equipment to actively surveil the president’s partisan opposition for explicitly political purposes. This is obviously very different from legitimate investigative steps taken as part of a duly promulgated criminal investigation.

And the FBI document at the root of the claim does not say anything about active or real-time surveillance — it references only a “preliminary toll analysis on limited toll records associated with” nine members of Congress.

The records were reportedly obtained from major telephone providers responding to a subpoena Smith obtained. And according to Grassley, the record the FBI reviewed “shows when and to whom a call is made, as well as the duration and general location data of the call” but “does not include the content of the call.”

Fox uses false premises to call for criminal investigations

All three shows featured calls for further investigations into Smith’s probe.

“It's time Pam Bondi appoint a special counsel to investigate Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, and Chris Wray,” Watters declared. “At the very least, we should have a Senate special select committee hold hearings and have these goons testify under oath, and if they lie to Congress, off to prison. As they said, no one is above the law.”

Hawley, in his interview with Watters, likewise called for “a special prosecutor who's going to go at this hard,” adding, “We need hearings in public. Put these people under oath. Start with Jack Smith. Let's hear from Merrick Garland. Let's hear from Christopher Wray -- and anybody who broke the law needs to be prosecuted.”

“I think the time has come for criminal prosecutions,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) told Ingraham. “I think indictments should be coming here. We can't tolerate this and the Democrats try to act like President Trump's weaponizing. It's not what's happening.”

And on Hannity’s show, FBI Director Kash Patel declared that such probes were ongoing.

“We're just warming up,” he said. “But we are running our investigations to the ground. We are finding every single person involved. We will not leave a single room locked.”

“This is what Donald Trump was put in place to do,” he concluded. “And I'm honored to be his FBI director to lead this charge. And the men and women at the FBI, we're all in on this mission.”

That doesn’t include, of course, the FBI agents fired or reassigned because they worked January 6 cases. Because for this administration and the propagandists who support it, those who tried to get accountability for January 6 are the saga’s true villains.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Republican Judge Demolishes The MAGA Mythology Of 'War-Torn' Portland

Republican Judge Demolishes The MAGA Mythology Of 'War-Torn' Portland

Fox News propagandists cheered last month when President Donald Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send 200 National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, claiming the move was necessary because, in host Jesse Watters’ words, the entire city “has been under siege by antifa for four months.” But a Trump-nominated federal judge blocked the deployment on Saturday, noting that protests in the city have been “small and uneventful” for months and writing that the president’s order “was simply untethered to the facts.”

After Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., in August and suggested he would do the same in other U.S. cities, right-wing media spent September trying to turn Portland into the president’s next target. They created and fed the narrative that Portland is a “chaotic city” consumed by “civil insurrection” in which “every weekend is war.” While news reports from the city portrayed the protests as minor, MAGA pundit Steve Bannon told his audience, “Antifa's burning down Portland every night. … They've taken control of Portland.”

The president responded to the overheated commentary of his most zealous supporters. In a September 27 post to Truth Social, Trump ordered Hegseth to send troops to protect “War ravaged Portland” from “Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” and claimed he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”

But after Hegseth directed 200 members of the Oregon National Guard to the city over the objection of Gov. Tina Kotek, the state of Oregon and the city of Portland sued in federal court, arguing that the president had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority.

District Court Judge Karin Immergut — a stalwart of the GOP legal community who worked on Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, served as a U.S. attorney under President George W. Bush, and was nominated to the bench by Trump himself — agreed. On October 4, she issued a temporary restraining order which blocked the deployment.

Trump-appointed judge: Portland protests “were small and uneventful”

Immergut wrote in her ruling that Trump had not met the standard under the statutory authority he invoked, which only allows the president to federalize National Guard units in cases of invasion, rebellion, or when the federal government has been rendered otherwise unable to execute the law.

She explained that contrary to Trump’s depiction of the situation in Portland, her review determined: “As of September 27, 2025, it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland. During this time frame, there were sporadic events requiring either PPB monitoring or federal law enforcement intervention, but overall, the protests were small and uneventful.”

The judge added that the federal government produced “only four incidents of protesters clashing with federal officers in the month of September preceding the federalization order,” calling these “inexcusable, but they are nowhere near the type of incidents that cannot be handled by regular law enforcement forces.”

She further wrote that the standard the federal government tried to set “would allow the President to call in the National Guard whenever one law enforcement office receives support from another office, which is a routine aspect of law enforcement activity. If the President could equate diversion of federal resources with his inability to execute federal law, then the President could send military troops virtually anywhere at any time.”

Immergut concluded that Trump lacked the statutory authority to federalize the guard in this case “because the situation on the ground belied an inability of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal law,” adding: “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”

That’s not how Fox presented Portland to its viewers

Fox hosts pulled out the stops to present the city as a violent hellhole crying out for the federal intervention the president had ordered.

“Left-wing terror is at record highs,” Watters declared on his September 29 broadcast. “They're shooting at Teslas, Trump, Charlie, and ICE. After sending in the Guard into L.A. and D.C., Trump is going for round three — Portland.”

“This weekend, he directed the secretary of war to send 200 National Guardsmen to protect war-ravaged Portland, and he is authorizing them to use full force if necessary, because federal facilities in Portland have been under siege since the start of the summer,” Watters continued, adding, “Every weekend, antifa has been on the warpath.”

Watters claimed two nights later: “Portland has been under siege by antifa for four months. The Guard is there to get things under control, but Portland Democrats say they want to deport the Guard because the protests are mostly peaceful.”

On September 29, host Laura Ingraham similarly claimed that Portland was “getting a dose of Trump-style safety” because an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and “the areas around it have been under siege regularly in Oregon, and it continued this past weekend.” She added that Oregon was “rushing to court siding with criminals and against public safety.”

The same night, host Sean Hannity accused Oregon and Portland of “typical radical, predictable left-wing sanctuary state and city lies” because officials there supposedly won’t acknowledge that the “city’s on fire” and consumed by “a whole lot … of violence, lawlessness if you ask me.”

Their arguments are wildly overstated on the facts. But there’s so much more at stake, as Immergut pointed out in her ruling.

“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” she wrote. “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”

Fox’s star hosts apparently disagree, and are standing with Trump as he tries to send the nation hurtling toward martial law.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Why Are Fox Hosts So Eager To Jack Up Americans' Health Care Costs?

Why Are Fox Hosts So Eager To Jack Up Americans' Health Care Costs?

Fox News propagandists are overwhelmingly backing the GOP’s bogus shutdown message that congressional Democrats are refusing to fund the government because they want to give health care to illegal immigrants. But every once in a while their masks slip, and they reveal that they oppose extending the crucial Obamacare subsidies at the heart of Democrats’ actual position, which would trigger drastic premium price hikes for millions of Americans.

A partial government shutdown began at midnight on Wednesday after both Republican and Democratic proposals to extend government funding failed to reach 60 votes in the Senate. CBS News reported that the Democrats’ “red line” was “a permanent extension of enhanced tax credits for Americans who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.” Those enhanced tax credits, authorized under the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, are scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

That’s as it should be, according to some Fox pundits.

Fox host Sean Hannity complained on Wednesday night that Democrats had refused to fund the government in part because “they want to extend Biden COVID-era health care subsidies, which were supposed to be temporary. COVID is over.” But rather than explain the implications of allowing those subsidies to expire, Hannity pivoted away to his main gripe. “Don’t let the left fool you. This is also about your tax dollars funding health care for illegals,” he said, while airing B-roll from 2022 and 2023 of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. “Democrats have been lying, trying to deny it,” he added.

Earlier that day on The Five, after Democratic co-host Jessica Tarlov pointed out that the ACA subsidies are “the crux” of the dispute, Jesse Watters interjected that Democrats “juiced up the premiums for COVID-level spending” and Republicans simply “want to bring it back down to pre-COVID.”

Guest host and Fox contributor Paul Mauro chimed in that Democrats “used COVID to throw all of these subsidies in, and like any entitlement, when you go to take it away, people have strokes.”

“Right,” Fox host Greg Gutfeld interjected.

This position is wildly unpopular — polls show that supermajorities of Americans support extending the subsidies, with even Republicans and self-identified MAGA supporters backing it by a wide margin — and for good reason.

The 22 million Americans who benefit from those enhanced subsidies will face crushing increases in the cost of health insurance if those Fox hosts get their way and Republicans allow them to expire. According to CBS News:

The cost of premiums for people who buy their insurance through the ACA marketplaces could more than double, rising from an average of $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026, according to a Sept. 30 analysis by KFF. About 4 million people would likely drop their insurance coverage if the credit is allowed to expire because they would't be able to afford the costs, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated.

That’s a huge potential impact for millions of people — but Fox’s mentions of these subsidies are breathtakingly rare.

Tarlov and other Democrats have used appearances on the right-wing network to try to warn its viewers, but Fox’s stars are far more blasé. They are relying on a typical page from Fox’s standard playbook: Mentions of the Obamacare subsidies and potential results of the policy they support are few and far between, as the hosts instead try to redirect the attention of their audience and stoke their rage over the prospect of undocumented immigrants receiving benefits.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

January 6 Riot

Right-Wing Media Blaming FBI Agents For January 6 Riot

The right-wing conspiracy theory that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents who were deployed to respond to the riotous mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, had actually incited the crowd in a “Fedsurrection” spread through the right-wing conspiracy echo chamber over the weekend and reached President Donald Trump in just over 36 hours after its inception.

Elements of the right-wing media, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, spent years concocting an alternate narrative of January 6 in which the rioters were heroes, any violence was actually caused by federal agents, and the resulting prosecutions of perpetrators constituted a brutal campaign of government repression.

Following Trump’s return to office, his pardoning of the rioters, and the firings and demotions of prosecutors and FBI agents who handled their cases, this is effectively the position of the United States government.

Given those dynamics — and the president’s willingness to promote any lie, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it fits his biases — false claims supporting the narrative of January 6 as an “inside job” can spread with alarming speed.

Late on September 25, right-wing journalist John Solomon’s Just the News outlet published a story with the headline “FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns.’”

“The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to ‘wokeness’ and allowed its employees to become ‘pawns in a political war,’ according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years,” Solomon and Steven Richards wrote in the article’s first paragraph.

Solomon and Richards did not reveal until the story’s 11th paragraph that the agents had been deployed “after the violence started.” The pair lifted up complaints from FBI agents that in an emergency situation — in which thousands of people had laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers and threatening the safety of the entirety of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, who were assembled to count the electoral votes — those agents had been hurriedly assigned riot control duties even if they lacked training and gear for that purpose.

Solomon and JustTheNews both shared the story on X using the text of the headline. And right-wing conspiracy theorists quickly responded by assuming that the report fit their assumption that January 6 was a false flag operation.

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, said of the story: “The question this begs is; was there sedition or conspiracy committed on the part of the DOJ & FBI at the time?”

“You don’t just have 274 FBI agents or employees show up to execute this massive of a ‘fedsurrection.’ This required foreknowledge (intent),” he added.

MAGA poster Bill Mitchell likewise claimed that the FBI agents had been “infiltrators.”

Trump himself quickly adopted this misreading of the JustTheNews report. He posted to a Truth Social midday on September 27 that “it was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed… 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.” He added that the reporting showed that “FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials,’” and demanded the identities of the FBI agents involved.

Trump’s post brought a new wave of right-wing conspiracymongering over the report, with various MAGA figures claiming that it showed there had been a “Fedsurrection” in which FBI agents acted as “provocateurs.”

FBI Director Kash Patel stepped in to try to tamp down the situation. Without admitting that Trump was wrong, he said in a statement to Fox News Digital that “Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” for which he blamed “corrupt leadership.”

Faced with the same situation, presumably Patel would have allowed the January 6 insurrection to proceed, rather than violating standards by sending FBI agents to quell it?

By Sunday morning, the false claim about the FBI agents had been thoroughly baked into mainstream GOP discourse.

When CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) whether rule of law applies “to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6,” Johnson replied, “I’m glad you brought that up,” citing “new information over the last couple of days” about how “there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.”

Tapper quickly cut him off, saying that according to Patel, “They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. They weren’t — it wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested.”

But Johnson, who was among the members of Congress evacuated to a secure location during the riots, replied, “Well, Jake, wait a minute. Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions.”

He added: “There's videos, and it's always been disputed, what involvement some of those persons engaged in, what involvement they had. Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions. But they should be answered.”

Johnson went on to say that a House subcommittee newly established to reinvestigate the attack would get to the bottom of the situation.

The campaign by the Trump administration and MAGA media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict political violence as purely a phenomenon of the left raises some obvious questions, among them, “What about January 6?” A pro-Trump mob, summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president and incited by his calls for them to “fight,” descending on the U.S. Capitol and assaulting numerous law enforcement officers while sending Congress into hiding would surely seem to qualify.

The answer is that on the right, the January 6 rioters have been reimagined as the good guys.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Donald Trump Is America's Biggest Threat To Free Speech

Donald Trump Is America's Biggest Threat To Free Speech

The greatest threat that free speech currently faces in this country is that the president doesn’t believe in it. Donald Trump treats criticism of himself, his administration, and his policies as fundamentally illegitimate, and he is eager to use government power to curtail it. When Trump’s allies downplay or spin the anti-speech activity flowing downstream from his whims, they engage in willful ignorance or deliberate deception.

Trump responded to Jimmy Kimmel’s Tuesday night return to ABC’s airwaves following a suspension his administration helped bring about by once again threatening the network with retribution. After claiming that ABC had reversed a decision (apparently announced only privately to the White House) that Jimmy Kimmel Live! “was cancelled,” the president accused Kimmel of being an “arm of the DNC,” which he alleged makes Kimmel’s show “a major Illegal Campaign Contribution.” He went on to say: “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”

The president’s comment demolishes the pathetic argument some elements of the right have pushed over the last week.

According to Fox News stars, Republican members of Congress, and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, ABC’s decision to take Kimmel off the air was purely a “business decision.” In their telling, it was simply a quirky coincidence that the move came just hours after Carr said that ABC’s affiliates and parent company Disney could “do this the easy way or the hard way” and either “take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead” — a credible threat given his history of leveraging regulatory power for the right’s benefit.

Even Senate Republicans who criticized the administration’s clear violation of the First Amendment focused their attention solely on Carr while leaving a Trump-shaped hole in their arguments.

Trump’s post, however, shows that Carr’s actions were totally in keeping with the president’s desire to use state power to try to impose censorship on media outlets. Trump is not concerned that his administration was violating the First Amendment by trying to force his critics off the air — he is concerned that it didn’t work, and he is making it abundantly clear to everyone who works for him that he wants them to keep trying.

That position is hardly a new revelation. Denunciations of critical media coverage are a hallmark of Trump’s politics, and he has frequently used personal lawsuits and government authority to try to strong-arm outlets into submission.

We saw a similar inability to grapple with Trump’s closely held and consistent position that his administration should be able to punish critics for their speech earlier this month. After Attorney General Pam Bondi declared that the Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” the floodgates opened.

Commentators across the right condemned her comments as an affront to free speech principles. They wrote that she “fails to understand the basics of the U.S. Constitution” (the editors of National Review), lacks “a basic understanding of the First Amendment” (The Wall Street Journal editorial board), and should be fired (The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh). The response was so furious and widespread that Bondi was forced to clarify her remarks.

That’s commendable as far as it goes. But it’s not like Bondi is some sort of wild outlier in a Trump administration otherwise committed to free speech. When an ABC News reporter asked the president about Bondi’s remarks the following morning, he didn’t even try to distance himself from them. Instead, he told the reporter, “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate.”

Trump’s remarks once again give the game away — he views potential “hate speech” prosecutions as an extension of his desire for his administration to punish his critics and media outlets that publish or air them. But right-wing criticism of Trump’s comments was far more muted than the backlash Bondi faced.

Perhaps they think that it’s much more important that an attorney general support the Constitution’s protections than that the president do so. I think it’s more likely they understand the president’s position is a threat to the First Amendment, but also recognize that it is impossible to remain a conservative in good standing while voicing such concerns about the president and have simply decided not to talk about it.

Meanwhile, the president will continue his administration’s efforts to punish critics and coerce media outlets until he can turn on his TV, flip through the channels, and see nothing but Fox-style propaganda on every network.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Kimmel Suspension Exposes Trump Scheme To Seize Total Control Of Media

Kimmel Suspension Exposes Trump Scheme To Seize Total Control Of Media

As with so many of the Trump administration’s excesses, a simple recitation of the events leading to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension sounds like something out of dystopian fiction. ABC’s Wednesday night announcement that it was putting Jimmy Kimmel Live! on indefinite hiatus in the face of White House threats is the latest sign that U.S. media are increasingly coming under the control of President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Trump had been targeting Kimmel and ABC for months. In the wake of frequent administration critic Stephen Colbert’s July announcement that his late-night show was ending, the president gloated that Kimmel would be “NEXT to go.” Last month, Trump argued that the Federal Communications Commission should revoke the licenses of ABC stations because it broadcasts too many “BAD STORIES” about him and provides “unfair coverage of Republicans.” And on Monday morning, he threatened ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi might target him and his network for purportedly airing anti-Trump “hate speech.”

Kimmel inaccurately suggested during his Monday night monologue that the alleged killer of Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk was part of “the MAGA gang.” Under ordinary circumstances, such a statement could result in a correction and apology. But Kimmel’s remarks occurred in an environment in which Trump and his administration are eager to punish political speech they dislike.

Brendan Carr, the FCC’s Trumpy chair, wielded Kimmel’s monologue as a cudgel against his network during a Tuesday appearance on right-wing influencer Benny Johnson’s show. Carr accused Kimmel of “an intentional effort to mislead the American people” and threatened Disney and ABC’s affiliates with regulatory retribution in response, saying: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

He specifically suggested that affiliate networks should tell Disney that they would not run Kimmel’s show “until you straighten this out” and insinuated that they could face “license revocation from the FCC” if they did not.

Carr’s threats appear to be a clear violation of the First Amendment — but that matters only if Disney and the affiliate networks are willing to fight to uphold those rights in court.

Instead, Nexstar Media Group, which needs FCC approval for its proposed purchase of the stations owned by media company Tegna, said its affiliates would immediately preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! Shortly after, Disney announced that it was putting the show on hiatus. And Sinclair Broadcasting Group, owned by the pro-Trump Smith family, said it would not return Kimmel’s show to its airwaves until ABC committed to “appropriate steps” and called for the late-night host to make a “meaningful personal donation” to Kirk's right-wing political group.

Carr subsequently joined Fox News’ Sean Hannity to take a curtain call and praise Nexstar and Sinclair for following his dictates.

It’s worth pointing out that neither Johnson nor Hannity could operate under Carr’s stated standard — but they had no objections to his statements because they understand that his actual goal is enforcing MAGA political correctness norms by which they already abide.

This capitulation is only the latest sign of increasing MAGA control over the free press

Trump has long benefited from a massive parallel right-wing ecosystem, from Fox News to talk radio to a host of MAGA streamers and influencers. But since Trump won election last fall, more and more of the corporate titans who control the U.S. media have come under his thumb.

When Trump attempted similar extortion tactics during his first term, the heads of media companies and owners of news outlets were willing to fight him in court. But since his election in November, executives at companies like Disney have proved far more willing to bend to his will.

Other news outlets either are owned by businessmen who have become more Trump-friendly (perhaps due to fears of retribution), like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, or have been taken over by businessmen with close ties to the president, like CBS News’ new Trump approved-owner David Ellison. More such consolidation is under way, with Ellison seeking to take over CNN and the Trump White House effectively nullifying the law as it tries to broker a deal in which TikTok would be sold to a coalition including companies controlled by his father, Larry Ellison, and fellow pro-Trump magnate Marc Andreessen.

Reporters at those outlets can and have continued to do vital reporting about the Trump administration under those circumstances. But they do so with knowledge that their ultimate bosses will not stand behind them in a pinch.

Other potential corporate targets like Comcast, which Trump has previously threatened over the coverage of NBC and MSNBC, have not yet faced the same level of retaliatory scrutiny. But their day will inevitably come, particularly after Trump and Carr saw how quickly Disney folded in the face of their Kimmel attack.

The New York Times is among the few major news outlets that has no choice but to stand up for its output and a free press because its ownership does not have other substantial business interests. But Trump is targeting them in a different way — this week, he launched a $15 billion defamation lawsuit over reporting that questioned his business acumen.

And in a sign that even regime-aligned owners will face punishment for critical reporting, Trump filed a lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and its corporate parent’s chairman, Fox founder Rupert Murdoch, seeking $10 billion in damages over the paper’s coverage of his ties to disgraced financier and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s endgame is clear. He wants to ensure that media outlets don’t produce coverage that criticizes him or his administration, but instead convey an endless stream of propaganda about his accomplishments.

He wants every outlet to be Fox News. And at this rate, he may get it.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump's Multi-Billion Dollar Emirates Payoff Dwarfs Biden 'Scandal'

Trump's Multi-Billion Dollar Emirates Payoff Dwarfs Biden 'Scandal'

President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are constantly pushing boundaries and transgressing norms of behavior and discourse. That’s not to say, however, that they find such rules useless: Trump’s media propagandists aggressively call out infractions by his opponents even when he and his allies break those same strictures on a far more expansive scale.

To wit, The New York Times on Monday published an investigation providing new details into “two multibillion-dollar deals” which revolve around Steve Witkoff, simultaneously Trump’s Middle East envoy and his business partner, and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. The paper reported of the deals: “One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.”

According to the Times, “while there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary.” The Times further reported:
In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.
Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.
…
The first instantly propelled World Liberty into one of the world’s most prominent crypto companies, giving it a revenue stream that could be worth tens of millions of dollars annually.
The second is still pending, with final details under discussion in the White House. But it is poised to be a monumental victory for the Emirates. The Trump administration agreed to exponentially increase the U.A.E.’s access to one of the most important inventions in modern history.

For a sense of the scale of this alleged corruption, it’s worth comparing it to the various allegations that Fox News propagandists like Sean Hannity and Republican politicians like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) made during former President Joe Biden’s term as part of their effort to manufacture an impeachable offense from the business dealings of his family members, primarily his son, Hunter.

The $2 billion deposit from the UAE sheikh's investment firm into the crypto company controlled by Trump, his family, and the family of his Middle East envoy, is:

  • 100 times the size of the $20 million Trumpists typically claimed that “the Bidens” or “the Biden family” received from foreign sources. Even that $20 million figure is a fabrication — according to a Washington Post review, two-thirds of the money actually went to Hunter Biden business partners who were not members of the family; only $7.5 million was collected by Biden family members, most of it by Hunter Biden, and none by Joe Biden.
  • 400 times the size of the $5 million “bribe” they claimed President Biden received from a Ukrainian oligarch whose company employed Hunter. The Justice Department subsequently alleged that the FBI informant behind that charge had fabricated his story; the informant pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and a judge sentenced him to six years in prison.
  • 8,333 times the size of the $240,000 President Biden received from his brother Jim, which was cited as evidence of the president receiving laundered money. In fact, this appeared to be Jim Biden repaying a loan Joe Biden had made to him.
  • 483,092 times the size of the $4,140 President Biden received from one of his son’s companies, cited by Comer as evidence that “Joe Biden knew & benefitted from his family's business schemes.” In reality, Joe Biden bought a truck for his son’s use at a time when Hunter was battling drug addiction, and Owasco PC, Hunter Biden’s law firm, subsequently made three monthly payments of $1,380 to repay Joe Biden’s initial payments on the vehicle.

It goes without saying that the volume of coverage right-wing media outlets give to these shady deals won’t be proportionate — or even inversely proportionate — to what they provided for those Biden stories. Indeed, when House Democrats issued a report last year showing that China directed millions of dollars straight to Donald Trump’s businesses during Trump’s first term, Hannity promptly excused him and moved on.

Perhaps they’d all care if there were an email in which Witkoff referred to the president as the “big guy.” But probably not.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Not A 'War': Trump And MAGA Exploit Kirk's Murder To Suppress Opposition

Not A 'War': Trump And MAGA Exploit Kirk's Murder To Suppress Opposition

Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.

Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.

Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”

Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.

“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.

“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”

“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”

Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.

There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.

Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties

It is not true, as Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.

”It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.

The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.

It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.

After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.

Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.

Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.

Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.

Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.

MAGA wants “the Left” to be “crushed with the power of the state”

While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.

“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”

Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”

“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”

Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.

Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”

Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”

Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.

The elephant in the room

It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.

On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.

In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.

But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”

On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump Has Intimidated MAGA Outlets As Epstein Scandal Boils Over

Trump Has Intimidated MAGA Outlets As Epstein Scandal Boils Over

President Donald Trump has succeeded in getting his media supporters to stop talking about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier. Prominent MAGA media figures ignored a wave of Epstein news on Tuesday, signaling that Trump’s pressure campaign has paid off with their silence — even as (or, perhaps, because) his own corrupt involvement in the story has grown.

The initial resistance but eventual submission of Fox stars, Newsmax hosts, and MAGA influencers demonstrates that the Trumpist right’s only defining principle is that the president is good and his position at any time is the correct one — everything else can be tossed over the side at his command.

MAGA media figures lashed out at the Trump administration in July after the FBI and Justice Department released a memo which debunked foundational claims of the right’s Epstein narrative. Trump, who has a host of connections to Epstein, responded to that criticism by demanding his allies move on from the story and offering up new common enemies for them to focus on instead.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ made a series of shady moves related to the case. First, the DOJ attorney who successfully prosecuted Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2022 was fired. Then the department’s No. 2, former Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche, interviewed Maxwell in prison with clemency from her old friend the president all but dangling over the conversation. The Trump administration subsequently transferred Maxwell to a minimum-security prison camp and released transcript and audio from the interview, in which the convicted sex trafficker asserted that she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting.”

Nothing to see here!

On Tuesday, members of Congress returned to Washington following the summer recess and brought with them a passel of Epstein news:

  • The House Oversight Committee met behind closed doors with six women who say they were sexually trafficked by Epstein.
  • Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed a discharge petition to force a vote on his bill with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) requiring the release of files related to Epstein that have not been publicly released.
  • House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY), in an apparent effort to forestall momentum around the bill, put 34,000 pages of Epstein files online — but as reporters and committee Democrats quickly noted, the documents included redactions and the overwhelming majority had already been released.
  • Massie accused Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) of orchestrating a cover-up of the Epstein story.

The influx of Epstein news, combined with a press conference on Wednesday featuring 10 of the disgraced financier’s victims, led Politico’s Playbook to declare this “the story Trump can’t kill.”

But while mainstream news outlets are providing plenty of coverage of the Epstein case, many Republican voters are likely not hearing about any of it. The propagandists they listen to prioritize remaining in Trump’s good graces over everything else, and they are largely following his command to sweep Epstein and his victims under the rug.

Fox host Laura Ingraham signaled she planned to cover the Epstein story, teasing the Oversight Committee’s document release at the top of her Tuesday broadcast. “We'll bring you any breaking details as they come,” she said.

But Ingraham never returned to the story. And her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld did not mention Epstein that night. On Wednesday, while CNN, MSNBC, and a host of other networks carried the press conference with Epstein’s victims live, Fox instead aired a few minutes of remarks from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) before cutting away. The Trump administration even helped the network counterprogram, providing an appointee for Fox to interview.

Fox isn’t the only MAGA outlet giving the Epstein story short shrift.

Newsmax’s prime-time hosts — including Greg Kelly, whose show took a bizarre pro-Maxwell turn last month — also did not mention Epstein on Tuesday.

And several MAGA commentators who initially criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein story after the release of the DOJ/FBI memo did not mention Epstein on Tuesday on their X accounts, including Tim Pool, Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec.

Trump told them to stop caring about Epstein and his victims, and after some initial resistance, they’ve done it. Instead, the MAGA right’s most prominent figures are focusing on stories the president wants covered in the way he wants them discussed. They are spending their energy greasing the skids for Trump’s federal invasion of Chicago and praising the military strike he ordered on a vessel the administration claims was carrying Venezuelan gang members and drugs.

Perhaps the stories Epstein’s victims tell at Wednesday’s press conference will force these people to find their consciences. But for now, it appears any effort to inform Republican voters about developments in the Epstein story will run up against the reality that their preferred news providers have dropped the story at Trump’s insistence.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Chicago is “a war zone”

Trump-Fox Feedback Loop Is Prelude To Troops Occupying Chicago

Chicago has likely seen fewer shootings this year than in any other in nearly six decades, and was not even among the top 20 U.S. cities by homicide rate in 2024. But according to President Donald Trump, the city is “THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

Trump’s false Tuesday morning declaration after watching overheating commentary from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, which cited shootings over the weekend as evidence Chicago is a “war zone” and its elected leaders are sending the message that they “like the violence."

The president’s favorite TV show is helping to ease the country onto a glide path toward Trump’s authoritarian goal of putting troops on the ground in more U.S. cities.

Shooting and murders in Chicago have plummeted to near-record lows

Crime data analyst Jeff Asher reported Tuesday that while the scale of shootings and murders in Chicago represents a terrible toll inflicted on far too many city residents, “the available evidence suggests that Chicago has seen fewer shootings so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s.”

“The 1,264 people shot in Chicago through August 30 this year signifies far, far too many lives impacted by gun violence, but that figure is down 37 percent through this point last year and down nearly 60 percent from this point in 2021,” he wrote.

"Chicago is on pace for just over 400 murders in 2025 which could be the fewest murders there since 1965,” he continued. “Obviously, there’s a lot of time left in the year, but Chicago will almost certainly have way fewer murders in 2025 than it did in any year between 1966 and the early 2000s.”

Murders and shootings rend the fabric of communities, and the fact that they seem to have fallen to the lowest level in Chicago since the president was in college does not mean that the work of reducing crime is done. The data does, however, provide context for whether the state is facing an emergency that requires federal intervention.

But Trump’s worldview isn’t shaped by the thoughtful analysis of statistics — he cares about what he sees on his television.

Trump is responding to Fox & Friends lie that Chicago is “a war zone”

On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends’ co-hosts were telling viewers that Chicago is in crisis and denouncing its elected leaders for saying that they oppose Trump surging federal forces into the city against their will.

“VIOLENCE GRIPS CHICAGO AS DEMS REJECT TRUMP’S HELP” was the chyron Fox & Friends aired at the top of the 7 a.m. segment.

“We’ve talked a lot about the crime in Chicago,” Ainsley Earhart said. “Fifty-six were shot over the Labor Day weekend. Eight people died in Chicago as a result of those shootings.” Fox & Friends aired a graphic displaying those figures while she spoke.

Earhardt contrasted those numbers with a video of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson saying at a rally on Monday, “No federal troops in the city of Chicago.”

“These leaders spend more time targeting the president of the United States than caring about the issues that matter to their community,” Lawrence Jones replied. He claimed that the weekend’s level of violence is “happening almost every other week in Chicago,” adding, “I think it is a war zone there.”

Co-host Griff Jenkins claimed that Johnson’s comments “have got to be offensive to the families and loved ones” of victims, adding that Democrats were “defending, essentially, the criminals by trying to resist federal assistance to bring it under control.”

Jenkins then aired a clip of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker saying in an interview that “no one in the administration” had reached out to him about federal intervention, which he said suggested they were planning “an invasion with U.S. troops."

“It's not an invasion,” Earhardt responded. “The reason that Donald Trump has to get involved is because the leaders of these blue states can't keep crime off their streets. They can't do anything about it. They are not trying to do anything about it. The message we hear is: We like the violence.”

Again, this is how the president’s favorite program is responding to crime in Chicago at a time when the city is seeing the lowest levels of shootings and murders in decades.

Trump often responds in real time to the shows he is watching from the White House and elsewhere — a phenomenon I’ve described as the Fox-Trump feedback loop — and that’s exactly what he did on Tuesday morning.

Roughly 40 minutes after the Fox & Friends segment, Trump posted to Truth Social:

At least 54 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, 8 people were killed. The last two weekends were similar. Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far. Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC. Chicago will be safe again, and soon. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Trump is trying to justify an authoritarian invasion of Chicago

Trump’s claim that Chicago is the “most dangerous city in the World, by far” is absurd. In fact, the city isn’t even among the top 20 cities with the highest reported homicide rates in the United States, according to an Axios analysis of 2024 FBI crime figures, while “eight of the top 10 cities with the highest murder rates and populations of at least 100,000 were in red states."

But Trump, according to many of his former top aides, is a fascist, and the president has repeatedly displayed his eagerness to put National Guard and even active-duty military on the streets of blue cities in blue states.

He lied about conditions in Los Angeles to justify a deployment there (which a federal judge on Tuesday said violated the law) and lied about crime in Washington, D.C., to do the same thing in the nation’s capital.

With Trump’s propagandists at Fox and elsewhere chomping at the bit for the president to order “full military occupation” of other “problematic cities,” Chicago may be next.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

As CDC Spirals Into Chaos, Fox Spins For Bobby Kennedy

As CDC Spirals Into Chaos, Fox Spins For Bobby Kennedy

The hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends are tryng to help Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clean up the mess caused by the purge of top leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, downplaying the agency’s crisis while serving up softball questions to the Department of Health and Human Services secretary in a morning interview last Thursday.

The White House said that it had fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, just a month after her confirmation by the U.S. Senate. The Washington Post reported that Kennedy, who was a notorious antivaccine activist before his appointment at HHS, had demanded Monarez’s resignation after she declined to say that she would “support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines.” At least three senior CDC officials announced their resignations following her dismissal, including the agency’s chief medical officer and its top scientists overseeing vaccines and emerging infectious diseases.

Fox bears significant responsibility for Kennedy’s ongoing dismantling of U.S. health agencies and their work. The network’s stars helped mainstream antivaccine sentiment within the GOP, elevated Kennedy during his 2024 presidential campaign as part of a strategy to return President Donald Trump to the White House, and greased the skids for Kennedy’s ascension to the pinnacle of the U.S. health bureaucracy. They even assured their viewers, in the words of Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, that Kennedy was “not going to take away vaccines.”

But rather than treating Kennedy’s CDC purge as an off-ramp, Fox responded by doubling down on its support.

Plenty of reporters surely wanted to speak to Kennedy after he pushed out the CDC director then watched other agency leaders leave. But it was the co-hosts of Fox & Friends that got the opportunity, and it’s obvious why — they were willing to treat the exodus as a minor story. Indeed, Brian Kilmeade’s promo focused on an entirely different topic.

“RFK Jr. is taking on the chronic disease epidemic and how he wants to change medical schools to make America healthy again,” Kilmeade said. “The HHS secretary will deal with that — and all his staff changes — coming your way.”

That was also the tenor of the interview.

Kennedy fielded nearly four minutes of questions about Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Minnesota Catholic school before guest host Emily Compagno finally raised the issue of Monarez’s ouster.

But Compagno did not mention the reason for Monarez’s dismissal or the number of CDC officials who had subsequently resigned, instead asking: “The CDC director was fired after refusing to resign, as her lawyers accuse you, sir, of putting millions of lives at risk, as the CDC vaccine chief slammed in a resignation post. What are your thoughts on that?”

Kennedy responded that “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on a personnel issue” before pivoting to critique the CDC’s praise of vaccines and its need for “strong leadership” that “will be able to execute on President Trump's broad ambitions.”

Kilmeade then read from a statement criticizing Kennedy from Monarez’s lawyers and noted two of the other CDC resignations before adding, “Is this something that’s caught you by surprise? What’s your reaction to people that are getting a little worried?”

Kennedy responded: “I think that no, it has not caught us by surprise. Again, I cannot comment on personnel issues, but the agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

And with that, discussion of the CDC losing four top leaders overnight was concluded, as Compagno asked Kennedy an open-ended question that allowed him to segue to “our newest initiative to try to get the medical schools to start teaching nutrition.”

After a few minutes of discussion on that topic, the interview closed with an ominous sign for the future, as the HHS secretary previewed his promised September report on the purported causes of autism.

“We are now developing sufficient evidence to ask for regulatory action on some of those, or at least recommendations,” Kennedy said.

It seems likely that Kennedy will attempt to carry out the anti-vax project to which he’s already dedicated years of his life, using false claims that vaccines cause autism to try to alter the childhood vaccine schedule that reduces pediatric deaths and hospitalizations from infectious diseases.

After last week there are fewer senior leaders at CDC to stand up to Kennedy and his conspiracy theories. And going forward, we can expect Fox to be in his corner.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Jeanine Pirro

Fox Propaganda Falters As Grand Jury Rejects Pirro's 'Hoagie Hurler' Charges

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s former colleagues at Fox News cheered her August 13 announcement that she was charging a D.C. resident who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement officer with felony assault. The network’s hosts claimed that thanks to the “new sheriff in town,” the man “will be held accountable in a court of law.”

But two weeks later, Pirro’s office has reportedly been unable to secure an indictment against the man, a glaring failure which highlights the weaknesses inherent in appointing a Fox commentator to oversee D.C.’s prosecutorial system.

On the evening of August 10 — two days after President Donald Trump announced he was deploying federal law enforcement officers in the nation’s capital to “make D.C. safe again” — police allege local resident Sean C. Dunn called a group of federal agents on patrol “fascists” and threw a wrapped “sub-style” sandwich which struck a Customs and Border Protection officer. The incident was captured in a viral video.

Pirro, a longtime Fox host who has served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia since Trump appointed her in May, announced in a video posted to social media on August 13 that she had charged the man with “a felony: assault on a police officer.” She added, “We’re going to back the police to the hilt! So there, stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else!”

Dunn’s arrest came less than seven months after the president, in one of his first acts in office, issued clemency “to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the” January 6 insurrection, including “violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.”

(Dunn had reportedly tried to turn himself in but the White House apparently really wanted to make a hype video it could post of armed and armored U.S. Marshals apprehending him at his apartment.)

Pirro‘s former Fox colleagues were quick to tout her action.

Fox host Sean Hannity promised on his August 14 broadcast that Dunn “will be held accountable in a court of law by the U.S. attorney, our former colleague, our friend, Judge Jeanine Pirro,” adding that “the subway sandwich assault is just the beginning of what will be weeks of temper tantrums from elites.”

The failed indictment of sandwich guy shows the limits of Fox's propaganda www.mediamatters.org

Hannity later claimed that a sandwich “may not sound like a big threat,” but “what a lot of people may not be thinking of, an agent being assaulted like that, they have no idea what is being hurled at them.”

The Five’s Greg Gutfeld likewise touted that the “new hero” of “the left” is “facing a felony assault charge after hurling his hoagie at a federal agent in D.C.” When Democratic co-host Jessica Tarlov noted that Trump “pardoned all these January Sixers who beat the crap out of police,” he responded, “They didn't beat the crap out of police.”

On Outnumbered, Emily Compagno said Dunn “could dish it, but he couldn't take it. So now he's going to take it after the felony assault conviction.” And Rachel Campos-Duffy, guest-hosting Jesse Watters Primetime, claimed, “There's a new sheriff in town and the judge already hit him with something worse than a sandwich: a felony assault charge.”

But Pirro’s strategy played better in a Fox News greenroom than in a D.C. courtroom. The New York Times reported Wednesday that a grand jury had rejected the felony assault charge, which it described as “a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington” and “a sharp rebuke by a panel of ordinary citizens against the prosecutors assigned to bring charges against people arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime and patrol the city’s streets.”

“It is extremely unusual for prosecutors to come out of a grand jury without obtaining an indictment because they are in control of the information that grand jurors hear about a case and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented,” the Times noted.

But such failures are becoming more common in D.C. under Pirro’s leadership of the U.S. attorney’s office. “Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case,” The Washington Post reported.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Tulsi Gabbard's 'Russiagate' Conspiracy Crumbles In Fox Interview

Tulsi Gabbard's 'Russiagate' Conspiracy Crumbles In Fox Interview

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that former President Barack Obama directed a “treasonous conspiracy” against President Donald Trump took a hit on Tuesday night when she was asked the most straightforward question possible about her allegations during a Fox News interview. Her response demonstrates how painfully little she’s actually found — and how far over their skis the MAGAverse and Trump administration have gotten in response to her absurd charges.

In mid-July, as Trump sought to defuse a right-wing revolt over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered and referred to the Justice Department documents which she said showed that at the end of Obama’s second term, his administration attempted “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” Her ridiculous and revisionist claims were widely touted by Fox stars and other MAGA propagandists eager to help Trump change the story from his former friend, the deceased sex offender Epstein.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly ordered federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury probe in response to Gabbard’s referral. Responding to that news on Monday night, Fox host Sean Hannity suggested that the probe’s targets could include Obama, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former special counsel Jack Smith. Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett replied that “those are appropriate names,” adding that “dozens, I think, could be charged as co-conspirators,” including former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

But a “telling exchange” on Tuesday night between Gabbard and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, first flagged by CNN’s Aaron Blake, shows that what Gabbard considers the most damning revelations of Obama’s malfeasance were actually reviewed years ago by the GOP-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee, whose membership at the time included current Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Ingraham asked Gabbard: “Now, director, you said there was irrefutable evidence that Obama was the mastermind of this intelligence manipulation and the perpetuation of the Russia hoax. What is that irrefutable evidence for our viewers tonight?”

Gabbard replied that the documents she had uncovered showed “how President Obama directed that a National Security Council meeting be called to talk about Russia, that the report that came out of that meeting was filled with tasks that were delivered by James Clapper's assistant to John Brennan and to other elements of the intelligence community — John Brennan was the head of the CIA at the time — all saying per the president's direction, per the president's order.”

She continued:

TULSI GABBARD: And very specifically, they were tasked to create an intelligence assessment that detailed how Moscow tried to influence the election. Not “if,” but “how.” And this was the beginning of this manufactured intelligence assessment where they knowingly wrote things in this assessment that were false, and they knew they were false. They knew that they were basing it on discredited intelligence or documents like the Steele dossier that was politically motivated and that they knew was false, and this was how they came up with — with the Russia hoax that was then weaponized and used to try to delegitimize the president, President Trump, and to try to ultimately enact this years-long coup throughout his entire four years of his first administration.

But Gabbard’s discoveries aren’t sinister — they aren’t even new.

The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that Obama ordered is the subject of the fourth volume of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s bipartisan Russia investigation, a 158-page document published in April 2020.

That report states that at a December 6, 2016, meeting of the National Security Council, “President Obama instructed Director Clapper to have the Intelligence Community prepare a comprehensive report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.” This was apparently such a banal request that it drew no commentary from the report’s authors.

The committee also reviewed the assessment itself and concluded that, far from some sort of malicious attack on Trump, it was “coherent and well-constructed,” featuring “proper analytic tradecraft,” and its authors experienced “no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.” From the report:

From a report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Russian active Measures and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 4: Review of the Intelligence Community Assessment"

Then-committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) issued a statement alongside the report in which he said, “The ICA reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning, and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” adding, “The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

Gabbard’s position appears to be that asking for and receiving intelligence showing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf is an attack on Trump by definition — one that Bondi now seeks to criminalize. But the Justice Department and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee under Rubio’s leadership came to the same conclusion.

We’ve seen all this before. Fox — and Hannity in particular — spent years promising viewers that investigations into the Russia probe were about to finally send all their political enemies to prison, only for those efforts to come up short or fall apart.

Unfortunately, Trump’s second-term appointees to top law enforcement and intelligence leadership are people like Gabbard — conspiracy theorists who are in positions of power because they’ve demonstrated to the president, through myriad Fox News appearances, their willingness to put his desires above all else.

So here we are, doing it all over again.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Need To Deflect Public Rage? Take Aim At Obama (And Murdoch!)

Need To Deflect Public Rage? Take Aim At Obama (And Murdoch!)

President Donald Trump is seeking to reunify allies enraged by his administration’s repudiation of MAGA claims about late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein by offering up spurious attacks on common and familiar enemies: the media — in this case Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and former President Barack Obama.

Trump brought together an ideologically diverse coalition and a fractured right-wing media ecosystem during his 2024 campaign based largely on their shared hatred for Democrats, liberal institutions like the press, and the left. His administration’s actions have at times sparked criticism from different factions over the handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran, immigration enforcement, and, most of all, disclosures in the Epstein case.

The president spent last week failing to tamp down discussion of the Epstein story that seemed to be fracturing the MAGA movement. He tried claiming that his political enemies had “written” the “Epstein Files,” argued that the Epstein case is “pretty boring stuff,” and even lashed out at supporters who talk about it as “weaklings” and “stupid people.” But while the propagandists at Fox News were willing to play ball, Trump’s statements backfired elsewhere, leaving many right-wing media figures and the base alike in a state of revolt.

On Thursday, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s signature had been included in an album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday (before allegations of his sexual abuse of girls became publicly known). The document, according to the Journal, had been reviewed by Justice Department officials who handled Epstein’s case.

The Journal report could have focused the right’s attention on Trump’s voluminous ties to Epstein. But Trump redirected them at a familiar target: journalists. responded that night by calling the letter “FAKE,” denouncing the paper, and claiming that he would sue. The following day, he followed through with a defamation lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the two authors of the article; the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co.; parent company News Corp and that company’s CEO; and Murdoch himself.

Trump’s lawsuit is both unprecedented and consistent with Trump’s authoritarian treatment of a free press whose criticism he seeks to curtail through corrupt means. The message it sends is straightforward: If you publish reporting that displeases the president — even if, like Murdoch, your support was crucial to his political ascension — he may try to ruin you, so don’t try it.

While the Journal’s corporate cousins at Fox News mostly avoided the story on Friday, the network’s competitors throughout the fractured marketplace of right-wing media responded by sharpening their knives and attacking the paper. Laura Loomer deemed the Journal story “totally fake,” Charlie Kirk accused the Journal of a “terrible drive-by,” and Benny Johnson claimed that the real “scandal is in who wrote the story,” referencing a baroque conspiracy theory that was circulating on the right at the time.

The same day Trump’s lawyers filed their suit, former Fox contributor and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard offered even more grist for the right-wing media mill. In a story served up to Fox as an exclusive, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered documents proving “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She suggested that figures including Obama “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and said she was referring the documents to the Justice Department. Leaving nothing to subtext, Trump subsequently posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama beng arrested and imprisoned.

Those documents, however, demonstrate nothing other than Gabbard’s own ignorance and/or malice. They show that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election — which is consistent with what the Obama administration said publicly at the time — then asked for and subsequently received another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. That effort, according to the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, included hacking and releasing Democratic emails.

Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy, in a withering piece at National Review, described Gabbard’s argument as a “frivolous” attempt to further Trump’s “foolish stance” that Russia had not tried to influence the 2016 election via “overwrought and misleading” language and “thundering claptrap.”

But her attacks served to reignite years of conspiracy-mongering about the Russia “witch hunt,” and thus were credibly regurgitated elsewhere on the right, including by Fox’s stars, with some echoing Gabbard’s demagogic language about purported “treason.” Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly posted Fox clips and articles from right-wing media hyping the purported scandal.

Much of MAGA media seems eager to target the Journal and Obama on Trump’s behalf. But it remains to be seen whether those influencers — or their audience — will be willing to allow the Epstein story to fade away altogether.

That said, Trump’s best hope of keeping his supporters happy may very well be increasing the scale and tempo of his authoritarian attacks — and that means there will be more to come in the months ahead.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Eating Their Own: MAGA Media Trash Trump, Bondi Over Epstein Files Fiasco

Eating Their Own: MAGA Media Trash Trump, Bondi Over Epstein Files Fiasco

President Donald Trump appointed conspiracy-obsessed MAGA media favorites to the highest levels of federal law enforcement, and now those figures are coming under fire from the right-wing fever swamp for failing to confirm their bullshit.

Axios reported on Sunday night that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded that there was no evidence convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “blackmailed powerful figures, kept a ‘client list’ or was murdered.” Those findings repudiated claims that had for years permeated the MAGA influencer ecosystem and been promoted by the stars of Fox News and the broader right-wing media.

The Trump-appointed leaders of both the FBI and DOJ had previously stoked the same conspiracy theories their agencies rejected. “As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI's director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died,” Axios noted. Moreover, Attorney General Pam Bondi had claimed in a February interview on Fox News that the purported “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

While the Epstein saga is a bit of a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, what it highlights about the underlying dynamics of the MAGA movement is deeply unsettling. It demonstrates that the Trump administration is in hock to some of the most deranged conspiracy theorists imaginable, treating them as among its closest allies and devoting substantial resources to their care and feeding.

The White House brought 15 MAGA influencers in to meet with Bondi in February, sending them home with glossy binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” When those binders did not satisfy the MAGA faithful, the attorney general reportedly tasked “hundreds of FBI employees” with reviewing Epstein investigation documents for release. In May, Patel and Bongino were sent to Fox to make the case, with the fervor of the converted, that Epstein had actually killed himself. And now the FBI and DOJ have produced a memo detailing their findings and released footage taken from outside Epstein’s cell in the hours surrounding his suicide.

The final result left Trump’s most zealous online allies with two options: They could finally acknowledge that they had been peddling nonsense for years — or they could insinuate that the Trump administration itself is part of the cover-up.

MAGA’s Epstein conspiracy theorists lash out at Bondi — and even Trump

In the hours after Axios’ story broke, several prominent MAGA influencers took the latter path, hammering the administration for failing to confirm their Epstein hypotheses.

“This new DOJ memo admits there are countless victims of Epstein on video but no client list or evidence of other rapists they can charge. Oh it claims Epstein wasn’t using videos as blackmail,” Robby Starbuck sneered on X. “NO ONE believes this for very good reason.”

Starbuck put the blame squarely on the attorney general.

“Bondi just made it all worse with this memo,” he wrote. “What a terrible, terrible idea it was to write this memo. It’s also incredibly insulting to our intelligence.”

Noting her prior claim on Fox that she was in possession of Epstein’s “client list,” he commented, “Was she lying then or is she lying now?”

Laura Loomer also blamed Bondi.

“Blondi lied,” she posted on X, using the nickname she typically utilizes for the attorney general. “She was always lying.”

Others were less specific about who was responsible for the cover-up.

“We were all told more was coming,” Jack Posobiec lamented. “That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”

Tim Pool suggested that the administration was protecting “the adult child rapists who were blackmailed” and floated the possibility that they were protecting “shareholder value” from “the economic fallout if say, hypothetically, Bill Gates was revealed to have been flying around with Epstein and then we got videos of him abusing underage girls.”

And Mike Cernovich suggested that the buck stopped with the president.

“No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “This will be part of your legacy. There’s still time to change it!”

The right-wing media ecosystem is built to manufacture and distribute conspiracy theories to an audience trained to believe them. Under the incentive structure this ecosystem creates, it makes sense that the Trump campaign relied on conspiracy theorists to bolster its position, that Patel and Bongino boosted their standing within that ecosystem by echoing such claims, and that Bondi kept claiming an Epstein reckoning was imminent.

But eventually, the Trump administration trapped itself. Bondi, Patel, and Bongino were unable to produce the information that the MAGA faithful demanded, and they seem unable to convince them the information does not exist. It is the nature of conspiracy theorists to insist that anything which appears to rebut their claims actually confirms it. And now they’re turning on their erstwhile allies.

The truth about Epstein and Trump

One ironic aspect of the Epstein saga is that while MAGA influencers were apparently certain that the Trump administration was going to implicate a wave of prominent individuals in Epstein’s sex crimes and, perhaps, his death, there are few figures as prominent with ties as close to Epstein as Trump himself.

Consider:

  • Trump was quoted in a 2002 profile describing Epstein as a longtime friend and “terrific guy” about whom “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
  • Trump was among the politicians and celebrities who hitched rides on Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s.
  • In 2019, shortly before Epstein’s arrest on sex charges, longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon prepped Epstein for a potential interview.
  • Trump chose for labor secretary in his first term Alex Acosta, who as a U.S. attorney oversaw a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein that a judge later ruled illegal.
  • Alan Dershowitz, the Trump supporter who served on the president’s second Senate impeachment trial team, was one of the defense lawyers who helped Epstein secure that plea deal.
  • Epstein’s 2019 suicide occurred while he was in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, an agency overseen at the time by the Trump-appointed attorney general, William Barr.
  • After longtime Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2020, Trump told reporters: “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”
  • Trump waffled about whether he would “declassify the Epstein files” during a Fox interview — but the network edited out that portion of his answer.
  • Trump appointed as attorney general Bondi, who was “Florida's attorney general 2011-2109 -- a period of time when Jeffrey Epstein's plane records became public, victims' lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced –” but she did not take action.

None of this is actually proof that Epstein was killed to cover up the fact that he had possessed evidence that he had sex-trafficked underage girls for Trump. He killed himself, and the idea of a “client list” was, as the reporter who exposed Epstein put it, “a figment of the internet's imagination -- and a means to just slander people.”

But if, say, a similar set of facts linked former President Joe Biden and his associates to Epstein, you can bet that MAGA’s conspiracy corps would treat them as clear evidence. And so it will be interesting to see, as they scrounge for an explanation for the Bondi/Patel/Bongino about-face, if any of them eventually land there.

Why the right’s conspiracy theory engine matters

The Epstein saga is ultimately a minor drama. It is embarrassing for the right that so many of its leading lights pushed the conspiracy theories for so long, and it’s unnerving that some of those conspiracy theorists now occupy the highest levels of government, but on its own terms, the stakes for the public are relatively low.

But this treatment of the Epstein saga is not an anomaly — the right responds in this same fashion to every news event. Its ecosystem is constantly pumping out new conspiracy theories intended to prove the perfidity of the left, its audience is trapped in a bubble in which it is constantly bombarded by such claims, and the consequences can be real and dire.

Following MAGA media’s fervid promotion in September 2024 of the racist, baseless lie that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, local institutions received bomb threats and residents kept their children home from school out of fear for their safety.

Officials at all levels of government seeking to respond to a devastating hurricane in North Carolina the next month were forced to spend precious time debunking that ecosystem’s deranged lies because those were the sources some victims counted on for their information.

When the Epstein conspiracy theories are firmly in the rearview, everyone involved in propagating them will retain their influence over a Trump administration that is more concerned with placating them than in acting in the public interest. And that is truly dangerous.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.