Among Democrats, 58% say their party is too supportive of Israel, 62% believe it is not supportive enough of Palestinians, and 77% want a two-state solution.1 Two weeks ago, 103 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted in favor of a measure to cut off aid to Israel.

A similar bid two years ago received only 37 votes. Among the 103 was former speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who stated that Americans “are rightly demanding an end to a perpetual cycle of war, and the Netanyahu government cannot maintain its course.”

“We're in the process of witnessing elected Democrats scrambling to catch up to the public opinion of their constituents,” said Shelby Telhami, a political science professor at the University of Maryland who polls U.S. attitudes toward the Middle East.2

The divide over Israel in the Democratic Party is further reflected in recent primary elections in New York and Colorado, where long-term incumbents were ousted in favor of progressive challengers who campaigned against Israel in one form or another. This is further evidenced by Abdul Al-Sayed’s primary victory over Haley Stevens—who lost despite receiving $60 million in outside spending—in which support for Israel became a defining issue.

Democratic voters are overwhelmingly against the actions of the Netanyahu government against Israel’s neighbors, with 67% concluding that Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute either “genocide” or are “major war crimes akin to genocide,” and 72% agreeing that U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel enables those actions.3

Two Words for Democrats to Avoid When Discussing Israel

Clearly, the Democratic base is angry and feels it’s not being heard. But this unresponsiveness is only half the problem the Democratic Party has when it comes to Israel.

The other is an inability to effectively communicate internally or externally on the question of Israel. Two words bring this into sharp relief: Zionism and genocide. Both are used constantly in discourse on Israel, and neither serves much utility while arriving with endless baggage.

“Zionism” has been used by both supporters of Israel and its detractors to mean entirely different things.4 It is one of the most inscrutable words that human beings attempting to communicate have ever had the misfortune of giving a central role in any debate.

It can have at least four different definitions, with each category having multiple subheadings, all of which change depending on perspective and even geographic location. The one who seeks to change the status quo in any social movement bears the burden of persuasion.

That is an art and a science that requires the use of simple words and concepts arranged into a compelling narrative. Don’t speak in riddles wrapped in a Rubik’s cube. Figure out what, at bottom, you are trying to convey. Then find the simplest way to get that across. Zionism, in contrast, is a form of verbal immolation. Avoid it if you care about the Middle East.

The term genocide, in contrast, is dicey for a separate, distinct reason: more people know what it means, but proving it requires evidence that is unnecessary to the point for which it is offered. More specifically, people use the word genocide to describe Israel’s military actions in Gaza that they feel are illegal, cruel, or disproportionate, without realizing that genocide has a very technical definition.

It comes down to intent. The controlling legal definition of genocide appears in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which is also incorporated into Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

It requires “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” and then lists the prohibited acts, including “(1) killing members of the group, (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or (5) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Here’s the thing: many acts against civilians that would constitute war crimes can also qualify as genocide, but only if they are also performed with the intent to destroy a particular national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

While there are disputes as to whether Israel acted with the requisite intent to commit genocide (an argument I am purposely not resolving here), the equation is much tighter when it comes to the question of whether Israel committed widespread war crimes.

Col. Andy Milburn (Ret.), the former Deputy Commander of Special Operations Command Central, thoroughly debunked the common pro-Netanyahu talking points that seek to displace responsibility for the IDF’s actions in Gaza in his excellent piece linked below.5 Approximately 85% of the people killed in Gaza were civilians, with over 100,000 direct and indirect Palestinian deaths. There’s a reason for the polling.

Using the term genocide standing alone when discussing Israeli actions in Gaza gives rhetorical cover to those who will defend Israel at any cost, keeps daylight off of Israel’s patently illegal actions in the West Bank, and makes the lynchpin of persuasion unnecessarily difficult.

The Arguments Democrats Should be Making on Israel

So what should Democrats do?

It’s rather simple: (1) focus on Israel’s actions in illegally settling the West Bank, (2) highlight Israel’s discrete actions against residents of the West Bank, such as the passage of a death penalty law that mandates executions without basic due process, and (3) erect a workable standard for Israeli accountability when it comes to foreign aid.

Gaza must be part of this discussion, especially given the ongoing humanitarian situation, but Democrats have given almost zero oxygen to the most compelling reasons why we need a change in foreign policy on Israel, on key issues that raise critical moral and foreign-policy dimensions. Let’s take these matters in turn.

Initially, if you want to frame the debate on the actions of Israel’s foreign policy in the most favorable terms, start every discussion with their most indefensible and quantifiably illegal behavior: the ongoing resettlement of the West Bank. Israel obtained this territory by force through a surprise attack on Jordan during the Six-Day War, in violation of the UN Charter.

In the immediate aftermath, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 242, which began with the preamble recognizing “the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war,” and in Section 1(i) stated the principle of “[w]ithdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

The European Union’s official position is that Israeli settlements are illegal and that it will not recognize any permanent change to the pre-1967 borders that are not agreed to by the parties affected. Every member of NATO, other than the U.S. and Hungary, has individually recognized the settlements as contrary to international law.

The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 in 2016—which the U.S. under Barack Obama abstained from voting on—stated that the settlements “have no legal validity” and constitute “a flagrant violation of international law.” This is hard to dispute. During its 58-year occupation of the West Bank, Israel has moved more than 700,000 Israeli settlers permanently into this territory.

This violates a broad range of international laws. Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into territory it occupies.

Doing so also violates Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and UNSC Resolution 242 because it converts occupation to annexation. Moreover, the settlements violate the rights of West Bank residents to self-determination under Article 1(2) of the UN Charter and ICCPR Article 1, both of which Israel has ratified.

If you want to make Israel defend something, make it defend that. This matters, deeply, given the paramount importance of the post-WWII rules-based international order that is under assault, including from Donald Trump himself in Venezuela and in his repeated threats against our NATO allies.

If it matters that Russia invaded Ukraine and is occupying and resettling Mariupol and other cities (and it does), it matters that Israel has been doing the same thing, from a legal perspective, for longer than I have been alive. We cannot have this rampant hypocrisy in our foreign policy and expect to be successful. How do we attack Trump for threatening to invade Greenland if we don’t also call out Israel for its actual invasion and resettlement of the West Bank?

Beyond this question, there is the issue of the civil rights of West Bank residents. On that score, because of the Democratic Party’s messaging failure, almost no one is aware that Israel passed a barbaric mandatory death penalty law that allows the execution of West Bank residents (1) without access to the allegedly incriminating evidence, (2) without an opportunity to confront their accuser, (3) without the right to an appeal, (4) before a biased panel of military judges, for whom only 1 of 3 has to have legal training, and (5) which is based on an expressly discriminatory classification implicating race and national origin.6

This death penalty law was championed by Ben Gvir, the Israeli Defense Minister who famously wears a noose lapel pin signifying the execution of non-Israelis, for whom the death sentence remains illegal. The same Ben Gvir who recently posted on X an explicit threat to commit crimes against humanity in Lebanon.

This is a law that violates the ICCPR and would violate dozens of U.S. Supreme Court cases interpreting basic concepts of due process dating back hundreds of years. It also violates Israel’s natural law, which treats the right to a fair trial as a fundamental human right, thus begging the question of how Israel can pass such a law and still claim they see West Bank residents as human beings.

Against that backdrop, here is a rational, workable policy for Israeli accountability: the United States should not provide foreign aid to countries that practice violations of the Geneva Convention or the ICCPR as official state policy. If Israel does not comply, provide for a graduated cessation of foreign aid, starting with offensive military aid first, financial aid, and then ending with defensive foreign aid. Clear benchmarks, clear accountability, and transparency.

The all-or-nothing cutoff proposed earlier this year is too radical and would be destabilizing. Israel has nuclear weapons. The goal is not to isolate and leave Israel entirely behind in a way that heightens the risk of all-out war, but to modify its behavior and stop giving it the moral and financial blank check that the United States currently practices.

We need to do a better job of actually making Israel reflect and explain why it should be entitled to violate the Geneva Convention for 6 decades, violate the ICCPR, deny basic due process to those accused of death penalty offenses, and violate its own laws.

All of those issues are being totally left out of the present conversation, both inside and outside of the Democratic Party. It’s time to change that.

No doubt, this was fueled in significant part by MAGA influencer Laura Loomer’s visit to Ukraine, where she interviewed President Zelensky, publicly apologized for her prior advocacy against Ukraine, and posted photos on social media of damage inflicted by Russian strikes. Then, almost as if on cue, the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined “Impressed by Ukraine’s Gains, Trump Warms to Zelensky” and noted the two met on Tuesday at the White House.

What the article failed to mention is that Zelensky was in Washington to attend the funeral of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, not for any planned visit with Trump, and that over the past several days, the Trump administration’s actions regarding Russia and Ukraine directly contradicted the headline.

The Ghost of Hopiums Past: Just Maybe, This Time, Yet Never.

Ukraine’s remarkable defense against Russia’s genocidal invasion has spanned 4.5 years, longer, ironically, than Russia’s fight against Nazi Germany in WWII.

When wars grind on for such extended periods, they often create their own internal historical patterns: battles are fought on the same ground years apart, strategies that worked in the past fail the second time around, and ironies both cruel and fantastic evolve of their own inertia. History within history, similar to how wildfires create their own weather.

And one unique, enduring feature of this conflict is the recurring hopium that somehow, just maybe, Trump will see the light, turn against Russia, and finally back Ukraine. Every time, it leads nowhere. But it’s far more than just a letdown; these episodes have damaging consequences. Not only does it dent morale for Ukraine, but it also reinforces dangerous European reliance on America while solidifying continuing Russian intransigence.

This hasn’t happened once. Or twice. But seven times, where Trump appeared to grow frustrated with Putin, made public statements in support of Ukraine, or otherwise seemed to signal a shift in policy. If you add in Lindsey Graham’s public statements that a “crushing” Russia sanctions bill had Trump’s support or was close to passing (neither of which turned out to be true), that’s 15 times where hopes were raised, only to later collapse.

Every time Putin sees Trump climb down, it grows more confident that he can wait out Ukraine and her supporters by simply throwing more bodies at the problem in pursuit of his maximalist goals in the war. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of behavior that is worse than if Trump had remained silent on the issue.

But What About Laura Loomer? Doesn’t She Have Trump’s Ear?

Sort of. To begin with, I am a realist, and believe that if Loomer’s supporters learn the truth about the war, that is a net positive. However, there are some important caveats.

First, it doesn’t mean Loomer doesn’t bear responsibility for her past advocacy against Ukraine. She calls herself a journalist, yet repeated obvious falsehoods and Russian propaganda, which, combined with similar work by others in the MAGA orbit such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and Tim Poole, meaningfully contributed to delays in providing critical aid to Ukraine. This matters. People died as a result.

Second, Loomer’s influence with Trump is fairly limited. While there is evidence that she has been able to impact personnel decisions and tank a single nomination for IRS Commissioner, her role has been thus limited. There isn’t a shred of proof she’s had any effect in shaping policy, and Trump’s strong bent towards Russia is a major policy both practically and personally.

Third, this isn’t a do-no-harm situation. Ukraine has a rich history of diversity in cultural and religious matters, and its armed forces similarly reflect a melting pot driven not by nationality or race, but instead by a singular human belief in democratic values. Loomer also has a history when it comes to such issues, but it isn’t positive, and it reared its head soon after she arrived in Ukraine with tweets praising the lack of Muslims in Ukraine, who she likened to an “incurable disease.”

Not only is this racist, it’s also ahistorical: there are 1 million Muslims in Ukraine. Over 300,000 are living under the dark midnight of Russian occupation in Crimea, the majority of whom are Crimean Tatars. Like Ukrainians, the Tatars have suffered immensely from Russian brutality.

The 1944 forced deportation of the Tatar population by Joseph Stalin is recognized by international consensus as an act of genocide. Indeed, even the Soviet Union official declared the expulsion illegal in 1989.

Whether the juice is worth the squeeze isn’t for me to decide, but this isn’t a costless endeavor. Ukrainian morale and national unity have been its greatest strength against Russia, not just in this war, but also in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Loomer’s words erode that, and it’s not something that can always be easily repaired. If no results are achieved with Trump, then it would have been all for naught.

The Trump Administration’s Action Undercut any Shift in Policy

Talk is cheap. But we don’t even have that. What we have are no words in favor of Ukraine and a host of concrete actions by Trump and his administration that signal its policy with respect to Ukraine will remain wholly unchanged.

Initially, at the United Nations, Trump’s own delegation barely 24 hours ago was repeating the trope that there is no military solution to the conflict (like many falsely claimed about Syria, see how that turned out) and both-sidesing Ukraine and Russia as equally culpable for the breakdown in negotiations when it is entirely Russia’s fault.

Moreover, both Trump and his UN Ambassador Mike Waltz have continued to scapegoat Ukraine with false claims that the provision of weapons to that country is somehow responsible for the depleted state of U.S. long-range precision weapons and air defense stockpiles. Making Ukraine the villain and tying its fate to the alleged misconduct of Joe Biden is as pro-Russia as it gets, and only serves to implicitly justify Russia’s barbaric targeting of civilians with thousands of drones and missiles.

Finally, Trump has refused to accept, incomprehensibly, the conclusions of his own intelligence services (and evidence provided by Ukraine) that Russia is helping Iran to target U.S. military forces, leading to hundreds of U.S. casualties. This begs the simple question: if Trump won’t stand up to Russia for our own soldiers, for Americans, by what logic would he stand up to Russia for Ukraine?

At the end of the day, I would welcome it if Trump changed his tune when it comes to Russia’s genocidal war of aggression in Ukraine. But, speaking of realism, I also accept the reality that it is incredibly unlikely to happen. Ukraine got to where it is today because of its own ingenuity and grit.

It hasn’t needed significant American help in Trump’s second term, and if none is forthcoming, it will be in no worse position. Let us not delude ourselves and repeat the offense of believing against evidence and common sense. If Trump helps, great, but when he doesn’t, don’t let it get you down.

Todd Blanche intentionally violated his ethical and fiduciary obligations to the United States, his current client, to benefit Donald Trump. Those violations have two sources, and they continue.

First, given his prior, comprehensive representation of Donald Trump in criminal matters, he knew he would be materially limited in taking a job at the DOJ, given the substantial likelihood DOJ would investigate Trump at some point, and by his own personal interests in helping his boss. Despite this prohibition, he accepted the role of Deputy Attorney General (DAG).

Second, while he now purports to be “acting Attorney General” (AG) he appears to be working on behalf of Donald Trump in numerous matters where the interests of the DOJ and Trump’s are directly adverse. None of this is accidental. Trump nominated Blanche because of these conflicts.

Indeed, they engineered this situation for purpose of weaponizing the attorney-client relationship between Blanche and the United States, so it would effectively be without counsel during Trump’s second term as President. The whole point is to take advantage of the U.S., the American people, and the rule of law.

The consequence of these events is that any actions undertaken by Blanche, or those subject to his control, with even a remote connection to Trump should be voidable at the election of the U.S. during the next administration.

Legal Standards Governing Todd Blanche’s Conduct at the DOJ

The relevant duties owed by Blanche arise from the common law of torts, which treats the attorney as a fiduciary of the client, and the rules of professional conduct.1 Both of these seek to vindicate the same interests, but provide different remedies that are imposed by different tribunals. Since these provide the contours against which Blanche’s violations must be measured, let’s briefly visit them each, in turn.

“There are few of the business relations of life involving a higher trust and confidence than those of attorney and client or, generally speaking, one more honorably and faithfully discharged; few more anxiously guarded by the law, or governed by sterner principles of morality and justice; and it is the duty of the court to administer them in a corresponding spirit, and to be watchful and industrious, to see that confidence thus reposed shall not be used to the detriment or prejudice of the rights of the party bestowing it.”2

This unique reliance is the foundation of the fiduciary relationship owed by an attorney to a client. It is the highest level of obligation owed by one party to another recognized by the American legal system.

Thus, as a fiduciary, the attorney must (1) act with undivided loyalty, by always placing the client’s interest over his own, (2) deal fairly and honestly with the client, (3) avoid conflicts of interest, and (4) maintain confidentiality.3

In a similar vein, the rules of professional conduct recognize that “[l]oyalty and independent judgment are essential elements in the lawyer’s relationship to a client.”4 It is these interests, along with the attorney’s duty of confidentiality and the need to maintain public confidence in the legal system that are vindicated by the ethical rules against conflicts of interest.5

Notably, compliance with the ethical rules does not create an immunity against a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, as the latter can be broader than the former.6

There are three categories if conflicts recognized by the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct: those involving current clients, former clients, and material limitation conflicts. These are governed by Rules 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9.7

ABA Model Rule 1.7 deals with concurrent conflicts of interest, and provides as follows:

(a) Except as provided in paragraph (b), a lawyer shall not represent a client if the representation involves a concurrent conflict of interest. A concurrent conflict of interest exists if:

(1) the representation of one client will be directly adverse to another client; or

(2) there is a significant risk that the representation of one or more clients will be materially limited by the lawyer’s responsibilities to another client, a former client or a third person or by a personal interest of the lawyer.

Under Model Rule 1.8, which focuses on specific rules for conflicts of interest involving a current client,

(b) A lawyer shall not use information relating to representation of a client to the disadvantage of the client unless the client gives informed consent, except as permitted or required by these Rules.

Finally, under Model Rule 1.9,

(a) A lawyer who has formerly represented a client in a matter shall not thereafter represent another person in the same or a substantially related matter in which that person's interests are materially adverse to the interests of the former client unless the former client gives informed consent, confirmed in writing.

Blanche’s Nomination and Expected Duties

On November 14, 2025, Donald Trump nominated Todd Blanche for the role of DAG at the DOJ. The DAG is second in command to the AG, and acts in a capacity akin to the chief operating officer of a corporation: overseeing federal prosecutors, supervising major legal investigations, and helping to shape national enforcement priorities.

Blanche worked as DAG until April 2, 2006, when he was elevated to acting Attorney General, and subsequently nominated to be the next Attorney General subject to Senate confirmation on June 3, 2026. Thus, since Trump’s inauguration to a second term, Blanche has performed at the highest levels in both an operational and managerial capacity at the DOJ.

This includes one of the most critical functions of that agency: handling investigations into the President and those acting on his behalf. Indeed, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden were each, at one time or another, subjected to formal inquiries by the DOJ. Given this history, anyone nominated to DAG or AG knows they are likely to become involved with an investigation of the President.

Blanche Violated His Duties to the United States

Todd Blanche is also Trump’s former criminal defense attorney. Not on a single traffic ticket, but as the leader of his entire defense team, on a broad range of complex matters. In that role, he acquired a wide array of confidential information about Trump, from how he testifies a witness, to the substance of his personal and business dealings, and of course, his potential exposure to various federal criminal laws. Blanche thus owed Trump—even as a former client—a continuing duty of loyalty.8

And therein lies the first problem: as a matter of historical fact, Blanche knew that he would be called upon, at some point, to manage an investigation, or at least be significantly involved in one, against his former client. His nomination to DAG was in effect switching sides, within a short period of time, from representing the target of federal prosecution to becoming the one controlling the prosecutors.

This is a prototypical material limitation conflict under Rule 1.7(a)(2). His expected duties at DOJ were directly adverse to the very client who he just represented him and who nominated him to that position. Switching sides, almost immediately, in the same or substantially related litigation. Even if this could be waived, from an adverseness perspective under Rule 1.9, it does not eliminate the broader fiduciary duties owed to Trump.

To be clear, the concern is not for Trump’s legal interests—he’s the one who purposely engineered this situation precisely because Blanche was his former attorney, who could wear the fabrication of being the people’s attorney while working to serve the interests of his ostensibly former client. In short, Blanche cannot fully advocate for the very entity he was just defending against.

And that brings forward another form of material-limitation conflict: the personal interest of the attorney. Blanche owes his position to Trump. While arguably, in some respect, every person appointed to DAG or AG owes their position to the President appointing them, none secured it through a promise to undermine the very client they are supposed to represent, the people of the United States, the Constitution, and the federal laws.

Blanche is putting his interests of pleasing Trump over the interests of his actual client at DOJ. The evidence is everywhere.

First, there are the words of Trump himself, where he has said in his various lawsuits against the federal government that “I’m the one that makes the decision” on whether there will be a settlement and for how much.9 In an interview with NBC, he did it again, stating "Well, what I would do, tell them to pay me.”10

Think about how astonishingly brazen that is: the Plaintiff in a civil lawsuit, the President, telling the Defendant, the United States, how much to pay him. There can be no good-faith argument that Blanche is acting to benefit his purported client at the DOJ, when its opponent, the President, is calling the shots. Indeed, it is hard to even imagine stronger proof of the United States being effectively deprived of counsel, than being openly controlled by the person pursuing litigation against it.

Second, there’s the lawsuits themselves. At no point has the Blanche-controlled DOJ put up even the appearance of a fight against Trump’s various lawsuits. Most notoriously, let’s look under the hood of Trump’s $10 billion dollar action against the Internal Revenue Service. Initially, despite being filed way past the two-year statute of limitation, no motion to dismiss was filed by the DOJ. That is bona-fide attorney malpractice, period, which could have cost the American taxpayers billions.

During the litigation, the DOJ put up effectively zero resistance. Indeed, it was so transparently obvious Blanche was representing Trump’s interests, as well as his personal interests in pleasing Trump for his own political and financial gain, over the interests of his actual client. So obvious in fact, the Federal District Court Judge presiding over the IRS litigation, Kathleen Williams, made discrete findings to this effect and just dismissed the case, with prejudice, for a lack of jurisdiction.11

The basis for her jurisdictional ruling is that there was such a lack of adversity between the parties it eviscerated the possibility of a case or controversy, which is a requirement for a federal court to adjudicate a dispute. In her decision, speaking as to Blanche himself, she said “[a]cting Attorney General Blanche’s decision, which has not been memorialized or adopted by Plaintiffs or their lawyers, demonstrates his confidence that he could speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter.”

She further held “[a]cting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a “settlement” document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of the agreement, demonstrates there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case.” Taken in combination, these circumstances should be a watershed, shock the conscience moment for the American people and Congress, regardless of party affiliation.

And yet, it is almost certain Republicans in the Senate will dutifully confirm Blanche as Attorney General, in effect ratifying his outrageous behavior as the key actor who weaponized the most critical attorney-client relationship on the entire planet against the American people. There is no doubt Blanche has a material-limitation conflict under Rule 1.7(a)(2) as to his personal interest and his duties to Trump, but it goes far beyond this.

The record to date reflects he appears to be acting as Trump’s attorney and as AG at the same time, especially in cases where they are directly adverse. Formation of an attorney-client relationship does not require a written fee agreement, and can arise merely through the giving of legal advice under circumstances that would create the impression in a reasonable person’s mind they are receiving informed guidance on a particular matter.

The judge’s findings in the IRS case implicitly recognize this. What we have is an engineered fraud on the public, out in the open, in the most brazen fashion imaginable. Regardless of whether he is acting as Trump’s attorney and purporting to be AG at the same time, however, is almost irrelevant. The fiduciary duty of trust and confidence he owed to the American people and the Constitution has been shattered, from the inception of his work at the DOJ.

In effect, in any matters with even a remote connection to Trump, the DOJ and the U.S. have been hijacked by a double agent posing as an attorney. This isn’t just ineffective assistance of counsel, this is getting repeatedly knifed by one’s own supposed bodyguard. Imagine being in a divorce and finding out that your attorney had in fact been passing information to your ex-spouse the entire time for the purpose of screwing you over and robbing you blind. That is what we have here. on an almost unimaginable scale. Unconscionable.

Remedies Available to the Next Administration

The key facts here establish Trump and Blanche colluded to harm Blanche’s client, the United States, for the benefit of Trump. Unprecedented in its malice and scope. When the facts fully come out, it will make legal history, in all the wrong ways.

There are a variety of claims and remedies available to the next administration to set aside transactions entered into by the United States with even a remote relationship to Trump or the Trump family. Whether by way of claims for civil conspiracy, fraudulent inducement, aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty, or unjust enrichment, the party who engaged in the misconduct cannot be permitted to perpetuate its benefits.

Some of these theories may seem novel in the abstract, but the situation itself is novel, and courts, especially those who have been employed unwittingly in the Trump-Blanche scheme, have inherent, equitable, and legal authority to see that justice is done. The findings of the court in the IRS case can provide the initial roadmap.

It is difficult to see, through the haze of current circumstances, where the Trump administration’s road to hell will leave this country. America has been through extraordinary difficulties in the past, and I believe she will emerge through the current regime as well. On the other side, opening the books on the Todd Blanche era at DOJ will be an essential component of our national healing. In that sense, the greed of Trump and Blanche will be their undoing. The loyalty trap.

It began on Wednesday July 1st. In the 64th minute of the USA’s victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina, striker Folarin Balogun received a red card for stepping on the ankle of Bosnia’s Tarik Muharemovic.

Under Article 5(1) of the 2026 World Cup Regulations, he was immediately ejected, which triggered an automatic one-game suspension for the next match pursuant to Article 10.5. “No protests may be made about the referee’s decisions regarding facts connected with play [further] such decisions are final and not subject to appeal” according to Article 9.6.

Over the next three days, from July 2nd through July 4th, public reporting of Balogun’s availability matched the clear language of the Regulations: he would be unavailable for the Round of 16 match against Belgium on July 6th. The historical record was clear: no red card suspension had been reversed since 1962, and when the disciplinary rules didn’t provide for automatic penalties.

There was one curious parallel, however: when that player, Garrincha, received a red card as a member of the defending champion Brazil, another President—Manuel Prado of Peru—directly interfered to secure his availability for the final. A phone call, and ultimately, a $10,000 bribe (only half of which was paid, oddly Trump-like) reduced the penalty to a mere warning, leading to Brazil’s repeat World Cup title.1

The Phone Call

On Sunday, July 5, Trump telephoned FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and in his words “[a]ll I did was ask for a review.” But it goes further. At a White House press event the next day, he described his conversation with Infantino, wherein he complained bitterly about the red card and instructed him, with respect to the automatic next-game suspension, “you can’t do that.”

This was after, of course, he droned on at great length about how this World Cup was the best ever and how a suspension of the USMNT’s best player would have negative repercussions for FIFA in the U.S.

In making his request to Infantino, of course, Trump was doing exactly what the rules expressly prohibit: obtaining an appeal of the referee’s decision to issue a red card. The word “appeal” means “a request to someone in authority to change a previous decision.” 2

The Reversal

And that’s exactly what happened: the day as Trump’s call, a Sunday, FIFA “suspended the execution” of Balogun’s automatic one-game suspension.

They did so without removing the red card, through a dubious interpretation of the Regulations that removed an automatic sanction but not the underlying factual determination that triggered it in the first place.

For his part, while Infantino claimed the Trump call had nothing to do with the stunning reversal, The Athletic reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Andrew Giuliani—the executive director of the White House Task Force for the World Cup—recruited lawyers to work on the very same appeal that is expressly barred by the Regulations.3

Thirteen players received red cards in this World Cup, but only Balogun’s was reversed. In fact, Garrincha and Balogun stand alone across the span of World Cup history as the only two players who have red card suspensions, whether presumptive or automatic, overruled.

UEFA, the governing body for soccer in Europe and the most powerful of FIFA’s six members, called the ruling an “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.” Despite the clear corruption at work, the Royal Belgium Football Association’s appeal seeking reinstatement of the suspension was denied by FIFA on the ground that “the RBFA is not a party to the proceedings and, as such, has no standing to appeal the decision.”

The Trump Effect, Act 1: The Worst Among Us

What happened next is classic Trump. The only thing he is truly “good” at: causing those who lack conviction of their principles to unearth themselves. The superficial. The empty. The do-it-while-it’s-easy types. Slogans, not beliefs. The former you say and advertise. The latter you fight and die for.

Never before has there been a trigger for so many to show their whole ass. From MAGAs to so-called liberals, from athletes to journalists to pundits to the douchebag famous. Leaping to their feet to prove how little they stand for, variations of approval for Trump’s degrading performance multiplied at seeming infinite pace.

Let’s take a merry stroll through some of this dark matter, shall we?

First up, we have JJ Watt, former NFL football player, doing his best fortune cookie written by a head injury impression to date. It admits there was an appeal—clearly unaware that’s the entire problem—and concludes that one’s country is never wrong, in so many words. History teaches us where that leads.

Then there’s Cenk Uygur, the sweaty titan of bad takes who transitioned to from the below cat litter to victim-blaming Graham Platner’s ex-girlfriend for getting raped. Cenk has spent years attacking Trump for corruption, but then immediately turnstiled to approving it when it benefitted him. All it took was a dumb game where humans kick a ball into a net.

Next, we go full intellectual—backwards—to find a justification so tortured, so painfully useless, that only someone with a Ph.D. could’ve birthed it. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, who has the word “Distinguished” twice in his Twitter biography (as a scholar at such and such, then as a fellow at this and that):

He’s trying to say that because FIFA bad (he’s saying this to justify Trump’s corruption is somehow a remedy to their corruption, in an “I’m rubber you’re glue, bounces off me, sticks to …” or “two wrongs make right” unlogic), the next Democratic President of the United States should hold them accountable (because he’s an eminent coward who tries to hide behind some alignment with Democrats as making him less terrible while simultaneously making direct utility of a MAGA Republican Trump’s corrupt act) and ends with describing the red card as an “obvious injustice” when it wasn’t obvious and whether it was “just” is totally irrelevant.

The Trump Effect, Act 2: Wow That Sucked, Now You Clean It Up

Trump’s lesser talent is leaving behind a mess for others to clean up. That has two components here. First, as the BBC so aptly put it, “Balogun decision could lead to football cesspit.”4 In essence, Trump sacrificed an entire sport, its history, and its future out of pure selfishness.

This should have been clear when you used his election-denial ideology to justify calling Infantino in the first place, saying that if Balogun didn’t play, the U.S. would claim the result was “rigged.” Kind of like how only elections he loses are “rigged,” while those that put Republicans in control of the House, Senate, and the Oval Office are not.

Now, as the Vice President of UEFA explained “[a]ny political leader could potentially pick up the phone and say there's a precedent for changing a punishment awarded to a player and I think it's extremely dangerous.” Infantino isn’t escaping the storm, either, finding out like many others that getting close to Trump is often a fatal error.

He has been referred to Olympic ethics investigators for a possible breach of political neutrality, which have jurisdiction over him since he is a member of the International Olympic Committee.

His humiliation will be less public and less immediate than that of the USMNT—which showed a deep lack of sportsmanship by celebrating Trump’s intervention on Twitter—who lost in a comical 4-1 obliteration at the hands of the Belgians. They weren’t done. After winning, the Belgians mocked Trump’s YMCA dance and posted this glass-case worthy troll on Twitter:

Beneath all of this, of course, is Trump’s mistreatment of our NATO allies, of which Belgium is one. Earlier in the day on Monday, July 6th, an article detailing how the Europeans had an emergency meeting to discuss plans for defending Greenland from a potential U.S. attack earlier in the year.

It included this prescient statement by Belgium’s Prime Minister: “We will become a miserable slave to the U.S. if we don’t stand up to them now.” Sometimes the good guys win. The government in the land of your birth isn’t always right. Sometimes they’re damn well wrong. Those who love America call it out when it’s justified. And I thank the Belgians for putting us in our place. Slaves to nobody.

On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed law 5789-2026 entitled “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law” (DPL). With none of the reverence expected of passing a law that authorizes the taking of human life, an outbreak of jubilation and raucous cheering washed over the plenum. The festivities soon spilled into the hallway, where Ben Gvir and other members of the Otzma Yehudit—the far-right Israeli political party he leads—began toasting champagne while wearing lapel pins in the shape of a hangman’s noose.1 2

This vulgar display, however, takes on an entirely new aura of depravity when one actually reads the DPL. It is more than a law. It is a discriminatory and comprehensive assault on every pillar of due process, which is the foundation of modern legal systems that define democratic nations.3 The resurrected osobaya troyka. Nothing escapes its wrath.

Notice of the witnesses and evidence against you? Maybe, unless the local IDF commander says otherwise. An impartial fact-finder? No, just 3 military officers, only one of whom has legal training, from the same units engaged in a 58-year occupation. Freedom from discrimination? If you’re Israeli, yes, if not, you get the mandatory rope. Right to an appeal? Kind of. Not really. It’s a military order. Orders can instantly be changed. Also, the DPL requires execution within 90 days, a mere eyeblink in the slow grind of a legal process.4 5

Taken together, the DPL appears to be the most egregious death penalty law presently in existence, based on its express language. Worse than the Islamic Penal Code of Iran. Worse than North Korea. Worse than Russia. America hasn’t had anything remotely similar since the pre-Civil War slave codes. South African Apartheid laws? Ballpark, maybe. In a revealing fit of irony, the closest parallels are the repressive dual legal systems practiced by settler colonialists in places such as French Algeria, British India, the Belgian Congo, and the Dutch East Indies.

For a nation that effectively abolished the death penalty in 1954, has only executed 1 person in its history since, Adolf Eichmann, and lists protection of life, body, and dignity in its Basic Law, the DPL is a breathtaking moral collapse of the Israeli government.

Step One: Occupy and Settle

Key to the DPL is the fact that it applies only in the West Bank.6 Israel obtained this territory by force during the 1967 Six-Day War, and used its military to occupy it ever since. There is strong debate about whether the occupation itself is unlawful.

The UN Charter’s foundational principle, the basis for the so-called “rules-based order,” is that international borders cannot be changed by force.7 In the wake of the Six-Day War, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 242, which began with the preamble recognizing “the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war,” and in Section 1(i) stated the principle of “[w]ithdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” And while the Fourth Geneva Convention and Hague Regulations govern the conduct of occupying forces and not the length of occupation, they both contemplate a temporary situation that only exists during and immediately after the conduct of hostilities.8

There is more cohesion internationally on the lawfulness of Israel’s conduct of the occupation. The European Union’s official position is that Israeli settlements are illegal and that it will not recognize any permanent change to the pre-1967 borders that are not agreed to by the parties affected. Every member of NATO, other than the U.S. and Hungary, has individually recognized the settlements as contrary to international law.9 The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 in 2016—which the U.S. under Barak Obama abstained from voting on—stated that the settlements “have no legal validity” and constitute “a flagrant violation of international law.”

This consensus is difficult to dispute. After obtaining the West Bank by force in 1967, Israel has stationed its military there for 58 years. During that time period, over 700,000 Israeli settlers have permanently moved into the West Bank.10 This violates a broad range of international laws.11 Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into territory it occupies. Doing so also violates Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and UNSC Resolution 242 because it converts occupation to annexation. Moreover, the settlements violate the rights of West Bank residents to self-determination under Article 1(2) of the UN Charter and ICCPR Article 1.12

Step Two: Classify and Discriminate

So that is the backdrop against which the DPL was passed: by an occupying military force, which is presently engaged in an illegal forced displacement of West Bank residents and annexation of their homes, farms, and businesses. In an area that Israel obtained through a surprise military attack in the Six-Day War.

These actions, as is usually the case, are not happening peacefully, but with the support and violent backing of the Israeli Defense Forces. Major General Avi Bluth, the commander of IDF in the West Bank, recently commented that his troops were “killing like we haven’t since 1967.”13 Day after day, the outrages and settler violence—which is politically motivated and intended to coerce and intimidate West Bank residents, thereby constituting definitional terrorism—multiply.14

Not only does it apply only in the West Bank, at heart the DPL is a discrimination law that operationalizes dehumanization. It creates an express classification based on national origin—Israelis and West Bank residents—which is then used to create a regime of separate legal procedures and punishments that favors the occupiers.

If you’re Israeli and accused of murder in furtherance of terrorism, your case is adjudicated through the civilian Israeli criminal justice system. Therein, thanks to rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court holding that the right to a fair trial is a human right guaranteed under its Basic Law, you will receive the full spectrum of due process protections, as follows:

“[a] fair trial is supposed to guarantee the protection of the ‘general’ human rights that the defendant has as a human being. Therefore, in order that a trial may be considered fair, it should comply with various criteria, which include the need for impartiality and the absence of bias on the part of the persons sitting in judgment; the need for the trial to be transparent and public; the holding of the trial within a reasonable period of time; protection of the presumption of innocence and the right not to incriminate oneself; protection of the defendant’s right to present evidence to prove his innocence, to object to prosecution evidence and to cross-examine its witnesses; the right of a suspect or defendant to know of the existence of investigation and trial proceedings against him.”15

If convicted, you have the right to an appeal, and the maximum penalty is life in prison. The timelines to prepare a defense, craft arguments, and file essential documents are set by rule, not left to the whims of an adversary posing as a neutral jurist.

If you are a non-Israeli resident of the West Bank—including an American citizen temporarily, but lawfully present—every one of these protections is stripped away. Initially, you are shuttled into a military court system, not a civilian one. Instead of three impartial judges, your guilt or innocence will be determined by three Israeli military officers, only one of whom is required to have legal training. Officers of the occupying army. A verdict of guilty and imposition of a death sentence does not require a unanimity among the three judges, only a majority decision.

The evidence used against you can be withheld, merely because an IDF commander signs a document stating that disclosure would “harm the security of the region or an important public matter.”16 The impact of removing perhaps the most foundational component of due process cannot be overstated. Evidence cannot be objected to, cross-examined, or mined for probative material if never provided to the defendant. This creates an intolerable risk of the prosecution or IDF misleading the tribunal or even fabricating evidence, knowing it’ll never be challenged.17

Compounding these deficiencies is the lack of a meaningful right to appeal. The DPL requires execution of the accused within 90 days of the verdict. This is a plainly insufficient amount of time for an appellate process, which can last years, through no fault of the defendant. In Israel’s civilian criminal justice system, for example, a defendant is given 45 days just to file their notice of appeal, a simple document that merely states an intent to seek further review. In any event, the “right” to an appeal a conviction under the DPL is contained in IDF Military Order 1651 and such orders can be changed at any time, without notice.18

Then there is the sentence itself, upon conviction. Mandatory execution by hanging.19 It bears repeating, although obvious, that a death sentence, once carried out, cannot be reversed. It is the ultimate in finality. That’s a problem when it is meted out as the conclusive act to a prosecution riddled with egregious violations of fundamental concepts of due process, and thus, highly likely to produce mistaken convictions. This is a concern that should have weighed heavily against the DPL, given Israel’s history with wrongful executions. In 1948 Meir Tobianski, a Captain in the IDF, was executed as a traitor after a hasty drumhead court-martial on the orders of Isser Be’eri, head of the Military Intelligence Directorate.20 His trial had lasted only 45 minutes.

Beyond the concern of mistaken convictions, mandatory death sentences implicate the question of basic human decency. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Woodson v. North Carolina that a state law requiring imposition of the death penalty for murder was unconstitutional, because “the fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment . . . requires consideration of the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense as a constitutionally indispensable part of the process of inflicting the penalty of death.”21 The Eighth Amendment, the Court explained “stands to assure the State’s power to punish is exercised within the limits of civilized standards.”

Thus, fifty years ago, the highest court in the world’s then-greatest democracy held that the same penalty Israel now seeks to inflict upon an occupied people after a grievously flawed, shambolic excuse for a trial was inconsistent with the values of civilization. Israel doesn’t disagree, at least when it comes to its own people: 14 years ago, it completed a major sentencing reform with Amendment 113 to the Penal Law that renders mandatory punishments illegal, even for lesser crimes not involving the death of the victim.22

Furthermore, Israel ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as a treaty in 1992. There are numerous provisions of the ICCPR that the DPL violates, including Articles 2 ((1) prohibits discrimination based on national origin), 26 (equal protection), 14 (due process and appellate rights), and 6 ((1) and (2) right against arbitrary deprivations of life and requirement of a competent court).

This goes beyond Israel’s statutes and treaties, and drives further, to its very identity as nation. In 1992, the Knesset passed Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty 5732-1992. This became a cornerstone of the “Constitutional Revolution” that transformed Israel from parliamentary sovereignty to a constitutional democracy, enabling judicial review and the overturning of laws.23 In essence, the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty operates like the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, and it contains several provisions that seem to directly contradict the DPL:

Basic principles 1. Fundamental human rights in Israel are founded upon recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of human life, and the principle that all persons are free;

Preservation of life, body and dignity 2. There shall be no violation of the life, body or dignity of any person as such.

Application 11. All governmental authorities are bound to respect the rights under this Basic Law.

This brings us to the seminal question. The Israeli Supreme Court has held that the due process rights embodied within the concept of a “fair trial” are in fact human rights under the Basic Law. And yet, defendants charged under the DPL will be deprived of due process and fair trial. Doesn’t this necessarily indicate that the state of Israel views residents of the West Bank as less than human? Doesn’t it also mean that Israel has gotten itself into the business of classifying one set of people as humans and another set of people as less than humans? Who does that remind you of?

DPL Versus the World and History:

Viewed against western democracies of the modern era, the DPL looks less like a valid criminal justice statute than it does state-sponsored violence ornamentalized with the costume of procedure. So, just how bad is it, when viewed against the rest of the world and the dim light of history? Israel champions itself—in support of maintaining its status as the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid and to excuse its militaristic foreign policy—as an island of contemporary values in an ocean of primitive dictatorships.

Let’s recap the DPL: it is a law imposed by a hostile occupying power, which expressly discriminates based on national origin, and routes the disfavored class (occupied residents of the West Bank) into an entirely separate legal system that lacks even basic due process protections, terminating in a mandatory death penalty upon conviction. Without a realistic right of appeal. Where else on planet earth, right now in 2026, are there two territorial legal systems for two resident populations, with one system affording substantially greater rights in a discriminatory manner?

There are none. Since Iran is in the news, let’s start there. The same court systems apply everywhere across the country, with the same procedural rules for charging crimes, incarceration, the conduct of trial, and establishing guilt. At the penalty phase, there is the potential for discrimination under the principle of Qisas, or retributive justice, but it is based on religion, not national origin or residency status.

So to compare, both the DPL and the Islamic Penal Code of Iran have discriminatory penalties for a category of violent crime, but only the DPL routes defendants through an entirely different legal system that has far less procedural protections based on discrimination. In totality, Iran is less bad, on the black letter of their respective laws and in the context of procedural fairness during the guilt or innocence phase of the proceedings.24

North Korea has an oppressive criminal justice system, but it applies evenly, to everyone, at least as written. There is no express racial, national origin, or residency classification that creates dual legal systems. The same for Russia, which has abolished the death penalty, at least on paper.

To find a legal system analogous to the DPL, one must go back in history. And the company Israel is keeping in this respect is dark—European colonial rule, pre-abolition slave codes in America, and Apartheid South Africa. In French Algeria, the Code de l’indigénat established two legal systems, one for French settlers and another for Muslim Algerians.25 Separate courts, different legal protections, and unequal punishments. Similar legal structures were used in British India, the Dutch East Indies, and the Belgian Congo.

Slave codes in the U.S. prior to the Civil War provided different procedural protections, punishments, and other rights based on race. This lacks the territorial characteristics of the DPL, but the different procedural fairness based on express discrimination is critically similar. Finally, in Apartheid South Africa, the Bantustan system was a central mechanism utilized to create separate political and legal identities between black and white South Africans, under which blacks received different legal treatment in all respects.

Without conducting a dissertation on the nuances of these examples, the analogy to the DPL holds firm at a macro level. And these examples are either more than century old (colonial rule and American slave codes) or reflect the actions of a pariah state that was universally shunned by the international community, and subjected to heavy coercive punishment (South Africa). In all three examples, the nations that managed those disparate legal systems have formally recognized the barbarity of their actions.

Epilogue:

“No enemy has ever been able to cause such damage to us as we inflict upon ourselves.”26

I went into this article with the purpose to expose the full reality of the DPL. I did so as someone who has traditionally been a strong supporter of Israel. In that regard, let me speak plainly: I feel deeply disappointed at what my old friend has become, through the Netanyahu government. I know this is the same emotion felt by a great many Americans.

We must in these times speak with moral clarity. The people of Israel are not the same as the Israeli government. But we are all in a democracy in some sense responsible for our leadership, just as I admit I am responsible to my European friends for Donald Trump. And our foreign policy must reflect the actions of what a nation’s government is actually doing, not what we hope that it will do.

Yitzhak Rabin said “Violence is the erosion of the foundation of Israeli democracy. It should be condemned, uprooted, isolated.” That is the Israel I grew up with. Now its government is woven with extremists like Ben Gvir, who wears a noose lapel pin on his clothing and even placed one on his birthday cake. This is revolting to most Americans. When we see a noose, it has a specific meaning: a racial threat that instantly plays a videotape of barbaric lynchings in the Deep South across the landscape of our national conscience.

Indeed, the Jewish antidiscrimination organization ADL describes the noose as follows: “The hangman's noose has come to be one of the most powerful visual symbols directed against African Americans, comparable in the emotions that it evokes to that of the swastika for Jews.”27 Something is dreadfully wrong. The tone-deafness inherent in making the noose a symbol of a political movement in Israel while simultaneously being the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid cannot be overstated.

This is where Israel finds itself. And this is where we, in America find ourself. The DPL is wrong, in every way. The continued movement of settlers onto the West Bank is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. It is fair, just, and required that our foreign aid not support clear Geneva Convention violations in the West Bank or the infliction of procedures such as the DPL, which reflect a deep, heartbreaking inhumanity.

There must be accountability procedures put into place, which tie at least offensive foreign aid to good-faith efforts at compliance with the Geneva Convention and the ICCPR, both of which Israel has ratified. This should be done over time, transparently, and in a phased manner.

We cannot wholesale ignore things like the DPL, which are in their plain language barely removed from Stalinist troikas. No nation is above scrutiny, certainly not our own. Being a democracy is hard. Following the rules is hard. Trust me, I know, what it is like to fight a war against terrorists. I volunteered for that. I was in Kherson when Russians blew the dam and sent artillery into first responders, which I was one of at that date.

But I decided long ago that I would rather die than lose my humanity. It is my belief and hope that the people of Israel would use a new approach to foreign aid, over time, to return their government to the fundamental truth of their founding principles. Both nations have lots of moral ground to make up. America, perhaps even more. This partnership in a brighter tomorrow can illuminate a new path. But we must make the first step.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel (the “Coalition”) launched surprise airstrikes across multiple cities in Iran. In that initial package, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with dozens of top intelligence, defense, and security officials were killed. This followed months of military buildup in the region, which took place against the backdrop of indirect negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

And yet, what seemed like a stunning blow to the regime that would open the door to to inevitable victory is now starting to look more and more like the high-water mark of a campaign that inflated Donald Trump’s hubris to heights from which it could not possibly recover. This description is ungenerous, but apt. This Iran War, viewed in a traditional sense, is a riddlesome and vexatious creature.

On the one hand, the Coalition has unleashed a storm of the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen at an industrial scale. They obtained immediate air superiority. Lumbering B-52s with the radar-cross section of Alaska fly with impunity over Iran, dropping iron. Off the coast of Sri Lanka, an American Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine sent hapless Iranian frigate to the bottom of the ocean with a single torpedo.

Day after day, the Coalition posts an endless stream of violence-pornographizing explosions of all types on social media. To legitimize the hype into hard data, we are fed a steady diet of statistics such as reduced missile firings, lower missile quantities per barrage, interception percentages, number of naval vessels destroyed, and amount of targets hit. Bravado plus metrics transform war into an equation with a soundtrack.

And yet, on the other hand, a nation with no air force, no formal navy, and no air defense controls the the Strait of Hormuz, enjoys a virtual embargo by fire over the entire Persian Gulf region, and somehow obtained effective sanctions relief, making more money than ever while growing a regional oil monopoly in the middle of a war. Furthermore, regime leadership keeps getting deleted, and it keeps not mattering.

How to make sense of this inverted reality? That is the subject of this article. The Iran War may seem unpredictable, but there are key elements that give a more predictable course to what has happened, and for what the future holds.

II. Key Elements of the Iran War

A. Asymmetric Burdens

The parties face radically disparate burdens. That is the most foundational concept in this conflict. The Iranian regime only needs to survive and maintain its grip on power in the near-term. Anything beyond that is a bonus: continuing access to oil revenue, its stockpile of enriched uranium, and the knowledge base necessary to rebuild its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The U.S., as the driving force behind the Coalition, has constantly changed both (1) its reason for the timing of its military action and (2) the objectives that should be reached before declaring an end to hostilities. Objectively, however, we can identify a simple measure for success or failure: its final position must improve upon that obtainable through negotiations. In other words, it must’ve improved its position.

That would require, at a minimum, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. Neither objective is obtainable, except through regime change, ground troops, or negotiations that will inevitably result in conditions that are far less favorable than existed before the war. This strategic asymmetry is just one of the disparities.

The regime will fight, as it has, without regard to the laws of war. They will, for example, emplace civilians in close proximity to military facilities, use vehicles disguised as protected objects as firing platforms for missiles to complicate ISR and targeting, and disregard the concept of proportionality when striking dual-use facilities. It’s wrong, but it’s a reality of attacking a terroristic regime and it shifts certain additional burdens onto our armed forces.

The regime is also fighting on its own territory, as the home team. Meanwhile, the U.S. must travel halfway around the world, lugging all of its fuel, spare parts, and munitions with it, and must constantly resupply using airlift capabilities to the tune of a billion dollars a day, which is layered on top of the Pentagon’s requested $1.5 trillion dollar annual budget.

The impact of time is the final key differentiator between the regime and the U.S. For the U.S., every day the Strait of Hormuz is closed, economic damage to the world economy accumulates. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum. In today’s globalized economy, supply reductions of 20% of the oil, 25% of LNG, and 35% of helium from the world market—that can’t be made up through excess production—will reverberate into the U.S. economy.

And yet the opposite is true for the regime. These are boomtimes. Its oil is worth more, sanctions have been lifted, and it has an effective oil monopoly over the Persian Gulf. The Iran War increased government revenue. The U.S., in contrast, is both spending astronomical amounts on wartime operational costs and suffering economic damage every minute the Iran War continues.

B. The Two Wars Being Fought

Interrelated with burden asymmetry is the concept that the belligerents are fighting two separate wars.

1. Conventional Warfare by The Rules: The Coalition

The Coalition is engaged in the traditional endeavor of degrading the enemy’s military capacity. Delivering effects on as many weapons, combatant personnel, and strategic objects as possible. It’s a slog. By late March, the Coalition claimed to have conducted 11,000 airstrikes.

Beyond the number of targets in a country more than twice the size of Texas, is the tenacity of key facilities. The regime has spent 47 years planning for a major war with the United States, and knowing that it could never challenge for control of the skies, wisely chose instead to focus resources on hardening its offensive capabilities. And it’s working.

The underground “missile cities” where it stores vast numbers of its ballistic missiles and drones are buried under hundreds of feet of rock, well beyond the penetrative capabilities of conventional bombs. Analysis of satellite images by CNN before and after Coalition airstrikes during the Iran War indicate that many tunnel entrances are cleared within 48 hours by earthmoving equipment.1

This parallels the findings of a study conducted after the 2025 12-Day War, which found damage to surface buildings had only temporarily rendered large launch bases inoperable.2 Beyond physical hardening, the regime can utilize a dispersion strategy across Iran’s 9 million-plus buildings for its many thousands of drones, primarily of the Shahed type. These are relatively small, uncomplicated, and can be replenished by wartime production or, if needed, through wartime deliveries of even more advanced analogues from Russia.3

What this means is that (1) most of the ballistic missiles will survive Coalition bombing, (2) the only way to neutralize existing stocks is through the use of ground troops at dozens of locations within Iran or a negotiated settlement, and (3) Iran can maintain an effective strike tempo in at least the near to mid-term. This is borne out by the number and effectiveness of the weapons launched over time.4

A U.S. intelligence assessment, as reported by Reuters on March 27th, indicates that only 30% of Iran’s missiles have been destroyed.5 At the same time, the U.S. has expended approximately 30% of its Tomahawk cruise missile inventory.6 Put those numbers against each other, but add in that time is on the regime’s side. Now consider two additional factors: Iran can likely regenerate their missiles faster (at least outside wartime, possibly also during wartime) and every missile fired by the regime expends multiple Coalition air-defense munitions such as Patriot and THAAD, which take years to replace.

2. Total War of Economic and Political Attrition: Regime

The Iranian regime is engaged in a total war of economic and political attrition that it perceives as existential to its survival. Taken together, these concepts establish that its relative fighting burden is much lower, but its commitment and pain tolerance are much higher. This is not about destroying the Coalition’s men and machinery so as to effectuate their defeat in direct combat (a large-scale ground invasion may change that calculus) but instead to impose costs severe enough to break its political will. In that regard, the regime has several near-implacable advantages, which work together to magnify the effect of the other, exponentially.

a. The regime’s three advantages

First, the most dense network of critical petroleum-related infrastructure on the planet exists within 250 miles of the Iranian coastline. This includes terminals and refineries for 20% and 25% of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas (LNG), respectively, which account for, on average, 75% of the government revenue for Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. It also includes production facilities for 35% of the world’s helium supply (MRIs, semiconductors, and aerospace), 30% of petrochemical feedstock (plastics, fertilizers, and industrial chemicals), 25% of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and 35% of globally-traded urea (key ingredient in fertilizer and diesel exhaust fluid). There is little global excess production capacity to make up for shortfalls in this region.

Second, the Gulf States, on average, rely upon desalination plants for 90% of their freshwater. This covers 100 million people, all situated in a brutally hot desert environment. By design, desalination plants are located on the Persian Gulf to intake seawater for conversation into freshwater. That renders them easily targetable and well within range of Iranian weapons systems.7

The repair cost for both desalination and petroleum-related facilities if destroyed is almost incalculable, in the many trillions of dollars. Moreover, repair times from even minor attacks take 5-plus years.8 They are also remarkably fragile. A single Iranian attack on a Qatari LNG site at Ras Laffan caused damage that will take 5 years to repair and cost $100 billion in lost revenue.9

Third, the Strait of Hormuz. With its hairpin turn, narrow width of 10 miles from the Iranian shoreline10, shallow depth of 200 feet at its narrowest point, and surrounding rock faces that leap immediately to 3000 feet in altitude, it is the most severe choke point in the maritime world.

It is also ideal ambush terrain, a littoral region that neutralizes the reach of the U.S. Navy’s advanced sensors and standoff weapons; it forces the sniper into a knife fight. Radars can’t see over the high cliffs, with acquisition times cut from minutes down to seconds.11 The region is layered with threats of every type, in every domain, and at every level.

Naval mines beneath the water, uncrewed surface vehicles on the surface, anti-ship cruise missiles skimming 50 feet, drones swarming at all altitudes, and anti-ship ballistic missiles descending from tens of miles above. At all different speeds, from all different directions, from point-blank distance to hundreds of miles away. Masking each other’s approach, to enhance the other and overwhelm.

The anti-ship cruise missiles in particular launch from box trucks that are indistinguishable until the moment of firing from thousands of civilian trucks of the same outward appearance. The ballistic missiles travel five times the speed of sound and likewise use road-mobile launchers. Indeed, is suspicion that the Thai-flagged oil tanker Mayuree Naree was hit by an C-802 Noor cruise missile, a, a few feet above the waterline.12

There is simply no way to reopen this bottleneck without ground troops, the use of vast ISR assets airborne 24-7, and a massive, long-term air-interdiction campaign tasked to the depth of threat, to a minimum of 300 miles, along an axis parallel to the Strait. This area alone would encompass an area larger than the state of Indiana. Iran’s use of box truck launchable missiles means hundreds of false-positive targets will embed themselves in this area. At best, this is a 60-90 day campaign.

Even if successful in military terms, how much economic damage will occur in the interim? Will the outcome be sufficient for risk-avoidant insurers? What would prevent the regime from treating occupation of the Strait of Hormuz area as an existential threat, triggering an all-out campaign to destroy refining and desalination capacity across the Persian Gulf region? A lot, maybe, and nothing. Unsatisfying, bleak, but true.

b. How the regime uses those three advantages

The regime has leveraged these three advantages—global concentration of energy resources, infrastructure density and fragility, and geography—to great effect, creating a layered web of coercive leverage, escalation dominance, and persistent revenue. That’s a gatling gun of descriptors, so let’s break this down situationally.

i. Economic leverage

First, at the same time no other Gulf State except Saudi Arabia (at reduced capacity) is selling petroleum-related products, Iran has significantly increased its revenue from the reduced supply. Before the war, Iran was exporting 1.1 million barrels a day at $47 per barrel, yet during the war they’re selling roughly 1.5 million barrels a day as high as $110 a barrel.

Although prices fluctuate, Iran is making on average an additional $130 million a day. Iran is also receiving what amounts to extortion payments from ships from “friendly countries” willing to pay $2 million to ensure safe passage through the Strait. This adds up to an additional $10-$20 million per day.

It has also somehow worked itself into the position—no doubt with the help of the Trump administration’s incompetence—where it has obtained immediate sanctions relief, something that wasn’t even under consideration during negotiations. Thus, for the first time in American history, we are paying both sides of the war. Iran’s treasure is everyone else’s trash: extra money that arrives as its opponents suffer, in direct correlation.

It is important to be clear, this effect is not restricted to the Middle East region. The regime has the United States over a barrel of Iranian sweet crude. The S & P 500 has lost $4.8 trillion in market capitalization, while the rest of the global stock markets have lost an additional $7 trillion. Oil prices have increased 90% since December 1, 2025, which has spiked jet fuel and gasoline prices by 90% and 30%, respectively. This is the worst oil supply disruption in modern history, worse than the 1970s oil crises as a percentage of global oil output.

Bonds are getting hammered, with the 2 to 10 year yield curve dropping from .72 on February 1st to .43 on March 24th, and 10 year yields shooting up from 3.9% on February 27th to 4.4% on March 29th—50 basis points in a month. Consumer sentiment is now below the 2008 Financial Crisis and in line with the 1980s recession. Add to that a weakening job market, with unemployed job seekers and job openings meeting at the same number for the first time since 2021.

There are a plethora of unique harms the Hormuz Strait closure will cause. Let’s consider two as an example. First, the helium supply shortage is critical to the AI industry, because it is used in manufacturing the chips used in data centers. The massive investment in AI is propping up the U.S. economy. The chain reaction is obvious.

Urea is used not just for fertilizer—important for developing nations with the spring planting season nearby—but also diesel exhaust fluid. DEF is a consumable liquid used by modern diesel engines, including all tractor-trailers made after 2010. This is a double impact for the logistics industry, to have diesel and DEF prices increasing at the same time.

These discrete issues are occurring as unemployment rates and inflation continue to rise, reversing positive trends that were emerging. Iran has made an ally of not just economics, but time. Every day the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the impact on global markets accelerates and the political situation worsens for the Trump administration. In a recent YouGov poll, support for the war at 28%, against the war at 59%, for a net negative of 31%. Four weeks in, as the cushion provided by tankers in transit evaporates, the reality will start to set in, harshly.

Over time, the consequences intensify. If the Strait of Hormuz is left near-closed for an additional month, oil prices will shoot above $200 a barrel.13 We live in a global economy. Despite its enormous benefits14, it has created vulnerabilities in the context of wartime conditions.15 Supply chains are no stronger than their weakest link, and America is one of the most vulnerable nations in the world to this risk. Data has its own choke points, with, for example, 90% of Europe-Asia subsea internet capacity running through the Red Sea corridor.

What is even more pernicious is the overriding theme of this war that thing which hurt the U.S. help the regime applies to the global economy. While it creates bottlenecks and emanating harms for the world, for Iran, it provides additional channels to source materials to sustain its drone program. And yet, while the world economy and the Gulf States are characterized by an interwoven series of fragilities, Iran is akin the doomsday prepper of the Middle East-Southwest Asia region.

It only gets 3% of its freshwater from desalination, while providing 100% of its own domestic power generation. It shares the Caspian Sea with Russia, which is no doubt eager to facilitate “humanitarian” importation of food and medicine (also a convenient front for weapons shipments). The chances of Trump aggressively interdicting anything Russian are virtually nil. It is difficult to imagine a worse set of overall conditions for implementing a war of choice.

Iran’s terrain is also, quite possibly, the most challenging on the planet for a large invasion force. Ringed by high mountains, large in size, and set at high altitudes. Iraq threw a million troops at this with superior firepower and advanced weaponry, and barely made a dent across 8 years of the Iran-Iraq War while suffering horrific casualties. This occurred despite substantial U.S. assistance, a virtual arms embargo against Iran, and employment of war crimes such as the use of chemical weapons and hurling ballistic missiles at civilians in the War of the Cities.

ii. Escalation dominance

The Coalition is in an escalation cul-de-sac. After hammering Iran for weeks with thousands of airstrikes, it has no further options left except using nuclear weapons or ground troops. The former is unthinkable and might set off a chain reaction of Russian tactical nuclear use in Ukraine. The latter is laden with risks, both politically and militarily. It is the same calculus for any Gulf State desirous of joining the festivities: there is no shortfall of airstrikes, but that’s all they’re willing to offer.

The regime, in contrast, has a broad menu of options at its disposal to gradually turn up the heat. It established control over the Strait of Hormuz, and then leveraged an embargo by fire over the Persian Gulf region. And in doing so it displayed a sophisticated knowledge of how modern warfare operates on different terrains: not just physical land, sea, and air, but also in the realm of insurance, regulations, and global markets.

It isn’t necessary to physically drop a giant metal arm across a waterway to obtain control; it is enough to create a credible threat of harm that prevents scrupulous insurers from providing wartime risk coverage. Same thing with airports. The runway at Dubai International doesn’t need to be cratered so as to make usage physically impossible. Flying a few drones near the terminal building makes the potential cost to
an airline of losing a $500 million dollar Airbus A380 intolerable.

When Israel hit Pars Gas Field, Iran responded precisely: they hit Qatar’s parallel gas facility at Ras Laffen—which provides 20% of the world’s LNG—knocking out 20% of its capacity for up to 5 years. After Israel hit two steel mills in Iran, again, the regime replied in a calculated way by knocking out Kuwait’s Doha West Power and Water Distillation Station, responsible for 38% of its supply of freshwater. There is a pattern here: Iranian infrastructure is attacked, and the regime responds with an attack on similar targets, but in a way that demonstrates overmatch and capability.

Trump has nowhere to go. The Strait of Hormuz cannot be left as-is. Reopening it would require the use of ground troops, a negotiated settlement, or regime change. Escorting ships won’t work, because even when, during Operation Earnest Will, the U.S. had a Navy twice the size of today’s but only got 35 tankers a week through the Strait. The backlog is 3,200 ships, which would take nearly 2 years at this pace. Further, the normal rate of transit is 150 ships per week. The math doesn’t add up and is not feasible without a ground campaign, due to the threat profile of the Strait, regardless.

Even a successful reopening campaign has its own enormous risk potentialities of economic damage, inability to compel tanker transits, and an all-out destructive response by the regime. Simply put, at every decision point, for the U.S., the costs are immense, the risks substantial, and the outcome uncertain, while none of this is equally true for the regime

iii. The role of refugees

Something that is absent from the public discourse on the Iran War is the potential role of refugees. Right now 100 million people in the Gulf States live under the specter of losing their access to drinking water while living in a roasting hot desert environment. In Iran, there are 90 million people under relentless bombing by the Coalition, who just endured the bloodletting of 20,000 protestors slaughtered by the regime.

A cascade of unpredictable events within a very short time window could unleash these populations into a humanitarian crisis like the world hasn’t seen since World War II. If Iranian infrastructure is hit, the regime will not suffer, it will use the civilian population as a weaponized buffer. Turkey, a NATO ally, which absorbed large portions of the Syrian refugee crisis, will be placed in the crosshairs, yet again.

And this potential crisis will take place alongside a widespread destruction of Persian Gulf infrastructure and resulting worldwide economic impacts likely to be severe. Such an outcome would be akin in cumulative geopolitical impact to a limited exchange of strategic nuclear weapons, minus the radiation. The outcome would be unpredictable, but the negative possibilities would stretch the darkest depths of our imagination. The potential role of refugees is a massive hidden element in this war.

C. Personal Elements of the Iran War

1. Trump’s Inability to Understand the Regime’s Motivation

Trump is the regime’s best weapon. There are many reasons for this bold statement. Let’s start with the most obvious: he has no idea who he’s dealing with and he will never understand them. He is the person who never volunteered for military service, received 5 draft deferments during the Vietnam War, and is utterly incapable of grasping why a person would take risks secondary to financial gain. The person who inherited $413 million from his father and lived between limousines, gilded hotel suites, and country clubs.

In the starkest contrast imaginable, while Trump was on the golf course, the leading members of the regime were having their formative life experience in the cauldron of the Islamic Revolution, followed by the most violent conflict since WWII in the Iran-Iraq War. 1.4 million casualties. Human wave attacks. Child soldiers. Relentless use of nerve and mustard gas by the Iraqi military. The War of the Cities, with 500 ballistic missiles fired into 20 Iranian cities, resulting in thousands of dead civilians. Trench warfare. Outnumbered 5-1 in tanks, 5-1 in fighter aircraft, 3-1 in helicopters, and 4-1 in artillery.

Facing an Iraqi military supported by U.S. intelligence and the latest French aircraft and munitions. Led by the brutal Saddam Hussein with a million-man army. On the heels of the 1979 Revolution, while Iran was supposedly weak, and with its officer corps decimated by execution, imprisonment, and desertion. And yet, the Iraqis barely made a dent over 8 brutal years of all-out war. They obtained zero territory. The consequences left the Iraqi nation in a state of disrepair and economic ruin, which helped trigger their invasion of Kuwait, starting in a motion a series of events that led to Saddam Hussein on the gallows for crimes against humanity.

Trump, already a psychologically-damaged individual with zero capacity for empathy or humility, is in a worst-case scenario to win the emotional component of the Iran War. He does not know why his enemy fights, or have any comprehension of their immense will to resist. His imagination is nonexistent: everything exists through the lens of a singular experience with removing Nicholas Maduro. This, in spite of the fact that every single important feature of the Iran War is entirely different.

The regime knows that if it loses power, it will be facing an orgy of Qaddafi-like violence by the repressed civilian population. Everything about the Iran War is existential from the regime’s perspective. They are methodical, patient, and relentlessly committed. Everything that Donald Trump is not. Beyond this, what they see from the President of the United States is an impulsive demagogue who has never been told no in his life, an individual who lives in a cocoon of denial, fed lies and emotional support by those in his administration.

The people of Iran see it too. They saw when Trump told the protestors to go out into the streets. They saw when Trump set “red lines” against the regime. And they saw when the regime totally disregarded his threats, and gunned down tens of thousands of the very seem people who were essential to any possible uprising. They also listened, as Trump rocketed back and forth between encouraging them to threatening them. The communications needed to facilitate a popular movement must be pristine, yet with Trump, they existed as the rantings of emotional graffiti, spray-painted across the landscape of a broken mind.

Trump’s cabinet reflects his disarray. Marco Rubio lists the objectives for the war, and fails to include nuclear weapons. Within 48 hours, he’s changed, radically, those very same objectives without explanation. J.D. Vance speaks in absurdities about a nuclear-weapon suicide vest. Everything is bathed in obvious, farcical lies. One could spill a hundred pages of ink cataloguing all the inconsistencies and contradictions.

And on April 1, 2026, Trump gave a speech that showed the world just how far America had fallen. He has also resorted to repeatedly making threats of war crimes combined with an obvious coercive goal: give up Hormuz or I will bomb all your power plants and send you, 90 million people, into the Dark Ages. On April 3rd, he threatened to steal all of Iran’s oil, and invited others in the world along for the ride, a clear case of unlawful pillaging. These threats are clear violations of the Geneva Convention and the DoD Law of War Manual.16

The inescapable fact is that Trump, barring impeachment, will remain the greatest weapon for the regime, blunting the effectiveness of the U.S. military while at the same time amplifying the regime’s strengths.

2. Remaining Factors: Russia, the Houthis, and China

Trump refuses to view Russia in any adversarial manner. This is a massive, perhaps decisive, blind spot in the Iran War. The reasons why are unclear, but there is zero indication the U.S. is doing anything about the critical intelligence, targeting, and drone support Russia is providing to the regime.

There is no question that Iran’s military effectiveness is increased many times over due to Russia’s targeting assistance. They have hammered one high-value target after another, from KC-135s to AWACS to priceless THAAD radars. Trump even lifted sanctions on Russia.

He is sending J.D. Vance to campaign for Russia’s client, Viktor Orban, after learning that Orban’s government has been engaging in what amounts to treason, on tape, in favor of Russian interests. Trump, at the same time, has been threatening to leave the NATO alliance and cutoff weapon sales to Ukraine. Whatever the reasons, Trump’s near-fealty to Russia is another self-imposed obstacle that works to neutralize America’s many advantages.

China has not yet taken an elevated role in the Iran War. But the oil supply shocks and Trump’s self-inflicted wounds provide it ample terrain to save years of time and effort in marginalizing America’s global standing while increasing its strategic advantage. Trump even invited China, unbelievably, to take on a central military role in the Strait of Hormuz in one of his many unhinged Truth Social posts. This only accelerates our negative position against China that has been in motion for years.

The Houthis remain a final wild card. They have announced a formal entry into the conflict, but have so far only taken up symbolic, limited strikes against Israel. But they have the power to cause tremendous additional harm. In Operation Rough Rider, the U.S. was unable to dislodge the Houthis from the seat of power in Yemen, and lost $800 million of aircraft in the process.

They retain an advanced arsenal of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles, along with a keen understanding of employing them in a maritime environment. The Bab-el-Mandeb Strait can be effectively shut down by the Houthis, which would cut the flow of another 5% of the world’s oil supply. Beyond that, any U.S. invasion force would be subjected to attacks in their rear areas, potentially, given the range of their weapons. Battle-hardened, they survived 7 years of the Yemeni Civil War and took on the Saudis and UAE, emerging strategically victorious.

II. Conclusion: Anything is Possible

The United States finds itself in a perilous moment. Some of Donald Trump’s worst features—impatience, impulsiveness, self-aggrandizement—got us into an ill-planned major war in the Middle East, and those same features are digging a hole, relentlessly, from which we will not escape without major damage. It is difficult to see how we don’t exit this conflict in a worse position. Beyond the tangible current impacts on the economy and the casualties, Trump’s persistent threats of war crimes as a coercive device—which constitutes definitional terrorism—will reverberate across U.S. foreign policy for decades. We must not underestimate the harms at stake: global economic depression, a world war, widespread famine, and the sunset of American power are all on the table.

The EFTA was signed into law on November 19, 2025, and generally required the Department of Justice (DOJ) “to produce . . . all documents, files, records, videos and images related to the investigations and prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell.”1 Under subsection (2)(c) of the statute, the DOJ is only permitted to withhold or redact the personal information of victims, material that depicts death or injury to a person, child pornography, and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation.2

However to the extent covered information is redacted, the DOJ is required to provide a written justification in the form of a summary of what was redacted, including the legal basis, akin to a privilege log commonly used in civil litigation under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26. Curiously, when items are withheld—removed entirely from disclosure, rather than simply produced and marked over with redactions—the EFTA imposes less stringent explanatory rules. In that situation, the DOJ need only describe them by general category.

Missing in Action: Laws Don’t Enforce Themselves

Despite the EFTA’s clear mandates, the DOJ has flouted its obligations in every conceivable way: the first production was made over 40 days late, more than 3 million unknown files are being withheld, no justification for redactions has been provided, and dozens of Epstein’s victims were exposed. In addition, the DOJ has relentlessly meddled with what it did disclose, removing documents, photographs, and entire files with zero notice or explanation.3

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Pam Bondi (while screaming in a manner that Lisa Kennedy of Fox News described as “sounding like a shrieking Karen”) was caught on camera with a list of the files reviewed by members of Congress at the DOJ earlier in the week, an unprecedented act of surveillance. There is also clear evidence of targeting, where disclosures are provided in a manner that is intended to implicate Trump’s political enemies.

This isn’t just noncompliance, or laziness—it is a brazen, calculated plan. Viewing all these violations of the EFTA, millions of Americans are asking a simple question: how can the DOJ just break the law? Can’t they be forced to comply? Wasn’t that the whole point of the EFTA? These are logical questions in the abstract, but they collide against foundational principles of law that limit federal court power. Simply put, under our Constitutional system, laws do not enforce themselves. Primary among the restrictions enforcing this rule is the case or controversy requirement under Article III, Section 2, Clause 1.4

It is rooted in the separation of powers doctrine, which precludes the adjudication of hypothetical disputes or the issuance of advisory opinions.5 Put another way, if federal courts could rule on the legality of law not yet passed, or pass on a dispute not yet ripe, they would effectively be legislating or executing the laws. This is why, prior to filing suit, the plaintiff must establish standing, which requires "an invasion of a legally protected interest" that is "concrete and particularized" and “actual or imminent."6 Further, “[a] plaintiff must allege personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief.”7

Congress must provide for an enforcement mechanism in the statutory text, and if they fail to do this, courts will not provide one themselves.8 In the past, there was a greater availability of what are known as implied causes of action, whereby a court could impute that Congress intended to create a right to relief from various factors, even if not written into the statute itself, but these have been severely limited by recent Supreme Court case law.9

The Hapless and Defective EFTA has no Enforcement Mechanism

The EFTA has no such enforcement mechanism. It does not say what happens when the DOJ willfully violates its command. This is obvious from the fact that neither Thomas Massie nor Ro Khanna filed an independent civil action, where they or someone else was a named plaintiff, seeking to enforce a right in the EFTA.

Instead, they filed a brief as amicus curiae, or as friend of the court, not as parties, in Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal case seeking to enforce the EFTA. The problem with that approach is first, standing, and second, perhaps more importantly, both actual parties to the case don’t want the EFTA enforced strictly. Non-parties rarely override parties to litigation, criminal or civil.

Thus, unless the EFTA is amended, or unless some federal court finds there is an implied cause of action, which is excruciatingly unlikely to happen or be upheld on appeal, the executive and legislative branches are in the arms of a stalemate that can only be resolved through the imposition of Congressional mechanisms such as using funding or appointments to turn the screws on DOJ into positive action. If however, Congress had the wherewithal to amend the EFTA, it has a spectrum of enforcement options it could build into the statute.

Amending the EFTA Opens a Variety of Enforcement Options

Nothing precludes Congress from providing a private right of action under the EFTA to enforce it against the DOJ. For example, the False Claims Act grants standing to private individuals (relators) to file qui tam lawsuits on behalf of the government for fraud against federal programs.10 While typically requiring personal injury for standing, FCA relators gain standing by acting on behalf of the government, which is the injured party.

The EFTA could be corrected to operate akin to an open-records or Freedom of Information Act statute that gives standing to any person who sought covered information and was denied access.11 Another mechanism that could be employed is automatic DOJ funding cutoffs similar to the Nunn-McCurdy Act, a federal law that extinguishes a defense procurement where the price per unit rises more than 50% above original estimates absent a certification from the Secretary of Defense that satisfies three cost-control criteria.12

What Congress cannot do is nothing. The current EFTA is a toothless crocodile, which exists as a political mechanism to exert public pressure, or to justify further Congressional action, but which has no force in and of itself to compel positive action. It is unclear whether this is the product of some compromise, or just a mistake, but it was never, as written, a statute that was going to get the worst, most damaging records to the public.

Everyone knew Trump would fight all the way to the Supreme Court through the DOJ to keep back what are surely devastatingly incriminating files. But, whatever the root cause, total compliance is essential. We are at a crossroads as a people, and the metaphorical and symbolic effects go far beyond the files themselves. This is about essential fairness, equality, and the credibility of our democratic system, which has never been so tested outside of wartime. Let’s hope Congress is moved to action as soon as possible.

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the H.R. 1, which provided an increase in spending—ostensibly for immigration and border enforcement—of $170 billion through 2029. This eye-watering amount increased the annual budget allocated to those operations from $8 billion per year to $42 billion. By comparison, the annual budget of the Israeli military, which operates F-35 stealth fighters and an extensive arsenal of nuclear weapons, is $35 billion.

By far the largest, and most visible, allocation of that total was $30 billion for the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and $45 billion for the expansion of ICE detention facilities to warehouse the expected influx of migrants awaiting deportation or further adjudication. With the five-fold increase in spending, ICE more than doubled the size of its workforce from 10,000 in 2024 to 22,000 in 2025 and quadrupled its detention capacity from 41,000 beds in 2024 to 135,000 in 2025.

Any time a massive federal agency vested with the broad powers of arrest, incarceration, and deportation goes through such a transformational change, challenges are expected. But this goes far beyond the usual growing pains associated with an increase in size. More of a whole-cart, rip out and replace, root and branch approach that used the tidal wave of new funding and recruits to wash any lamplight of the old agency out to sea in favor of a new, ideologically-driven paramilitary force as the vanguard of Trump’s authoritarian project.

No longer some distant functionary, working on yawn-worthy bureaucratic stamps and paperwork, ICE is now the fist of Trumpian retribution, the accelerant poured into Democratic cities to subdue his critics and entertain his rabid base. It is not measured use of force to achieve a discrete, lawful goal. Instead, unchecked brutality is the end in itself. Like a gang of drunken boars, ICE is seen mobbing into American cities, parks, and public schools, rippling flash-bang grenades, hissing tear gas canisters, rubber buckshot, and pepperballs across the landscape.

Everyone catches it. Men, women, children, journalists, protestors, wrong place-wrong time guys, all the same. Masked-up, unaccountable, and gratuitously violent. Just as no person is safe from their abuse, neither are Constitutional rights. Take any treasured freedom. The Fourth Amendment? ICE is entering homes without a judicial warrant. The First Amendment? Film ICE on a public street and end up in a “domestic terrorism” database. Equal Protection? Trump apparatchiks publicly boast of retribution against blue states for their vote, penalizing the bedrock of democracy.

Federalism? The Tenth Amendment? The Attorney General sends an open letter, brazenly, offering to withdraw Trump’s violent rabble if Minnesota gives up confidential voter information. Nobody at this stage denies ICE is Trump’s personal hammer of coercion. Not even the GOP gubernatorial candidate for Minnesota, who just withdrew from the race. ICE is so violent, it has literally tripled the murder rate of Minneapolis in a matter of weeks, shooting one suburban mother in face after dropping off her son at school and executing a VA ICU nurse in the street with shots to the back across from a doughnut shop on a Saturday morning.

Solution: Three Methods to Resolve the Disparity in Numbers

But what to do? Simple. The method ICE uses to accomplish its mission is concentration of force, by flooding itself into one blue city at a time, thereby outnumbering local law enforcement. Deprive them of that advantage. There are three available methods to achieve this. Not to create purposeful conflict, but to keep force ratios constant.

This can be accomplished by equalizing the relative number of federal versus local law enforcement to reflect what the framers intended for our federalist system: a federal government of limited power, with the bulk of power residing with the states, including the police power. It merely ensures proportional growth in local law enforcement as the surge of federal agents rises.

First Method: Blue State Mutual-Aid Police Detachments

Blue states, and more directly, prominent blue cities in those states, are the targets of Trump’s ICE-fueled hostile invasions. That creates a parallel risk among all blue states that demands a cooperative response, and an integrated plan, which combines their resources.

The most critical of these is manpower, and fortunately, blue states can marshal have huge numbers of law enforcement officers. California alone has 77,000. New York City, by itself, has 50,000, and 68,000 statewide. Illinois has 48,000. The cities that have already been targeted, including Los Angeles (9,000) and Chicago (11,000), among others, also have some of the largest police departments in America. Notably, these include some of the most advanced law enforcement agencies in the world with ample experience working in complex urban environments.

If one takes a rough, low estimate of the total number of local law enforcement officers at the state, county, and municipal levels that are employed in states that voted against Trump in the 2024 election and thus are at risk for the same ICE invasion and thuggery as Minneapolis, that gives a pool of 750,000. Blue states could easily provide for a temporary deployment force of 10,000 from this number available within 48 hours notice to augment local police in areas subject to an ICE invasion. One could view this as a form of mini-NATO for blue states, but without the necessarily confrontational aspects of that military alliance.

The point is not to get into armed conflict with ICE, Border Patrol, or any other federal agency. The point is to equalize the numbers consistent with our federalist structure and the 10th Amendment, to ensure that citizens of blue states are protected from brutalization and coercion, to spread the expenditure of resources across a larger risk pool, and to avoid the scenario now extant whereby Trump picks off one prominent blue city after another, one by one. A critical point must be made: the purpose of this concept is not to stop ICE enforcement of federal immigration law, but to protect against illegal political coercion against U.S. citizens.

There already exists a legal framework similar to this concept that has been successfully used at the state level known as the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). Think of how police are often borrowed by one jurisdiction from another for events such as hurricanes, wildfires, or prior incidents of public unrest and adapt it to the ICE invasion.

EMAC gives a workable analogy for matters such as cost reimbursement sharing, workers’ compensation claims, credentialing and logistics, and achieving unified training and command structures. And while EMAC is Congressionally-approved, no federal approvals are required for a network of blue states to create an agile force structure to augment local police departments.

Our legal and political history never contemplated, and certainly does not countenance, the use of a gigantic paramilitary force that utilizes violence as an ideological control mechanism on behalf of an individual President to bludgeon entire states into submission. The problem is not one of the blue states’ choosing, but they retain the police power under the Constitution, and have the unquestionable obligation to protect their citizens against the mafia-like tactics of the Trump administration. Unprecedented threats require decisive action and creative solutions.

The mutual-aid, resource sharing concept I have described serves two key functions. From a strategic planning level, it neutralizes the Trump plan at its earliest stage, in a chess-like, preemptive manner. Assuming a rational actor, which is a big ask with this administration, it may neutralize the problem before it ever arises.

It would be pointless to try and use the tidal-wave method of pouring ICE into a blue city if the force ratios necessary for that theory cannot be achieved. Additionally, if Trump still goes forward with his plans, at the very least blue states will know, and their citizens will understand, that they cannot be bullied into sacrificing their rights and political freedoms. For example, the Pam Bondi effort to extract confidential voter information by pointing ICE like a sword at the neck of blue states won’t achieve its desired effect, because the leverage won’t exist.

Damage has already been done, damage far beyond the lives lost or property burned in states like Minnesota. The conscience of America is bleeding. Fear has been injected into our communities. Our very faith in the rule of law, the promise of free and fair elections, and the belief we as Americans are safe from state-sponsored political violence has been called into question. That is intolerable in a civilized society. The world is watching. It will be too late much sooner than we can now predict.

Second and Third Methods: National Guard and Intrastate Police Deployments

These final two options are listed as lesser analogues to the first option. They are less desirable because they fail to directly counteract the underlying strategic premise of Trump’s use of ICE against individual blue states, in that they drain the resources of those states one by one, sequentially.

Each state subjected to an ICE invasion can call out its national guard. The recent Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Illinois, 607 U.S. --- (2025) makes clear that Trump cannot federalize a state’s national guard under 10 U.S.C. § 12406 unless he first tries to use the regular military and is still, after doing that, unable to execute the laws of the United States.

However, to fulfill those requirements, Trump must show not only failure by the regular military forces, but also a separate statutory authorization for their use. The point is, after the Supreme Court’s decision, it is a far more complex and fraught endeavor for Trump to federalize the national guard. He could invoke the Insurrection Act, but again, that has separate legal requirements and political risks that he may be averse to given the current climate.

The third and final option simply involves blue cities such as Minneapolis utilizing law enforcement resources from other parts of their home state. This is less desirable, however, because it does not spread the cost, resource drain, and risk across multiple densely-populated states, but instead, retains it in one individual state. It also has less preemptive strategic effect, as a practical matter.

In summary, there are multiple options available to counteract Trump’s current unprecedented use of ICE as a tool of political violence and coercion. The time for action, is now. Even preliminary discussions made public could have the desired effect. But the time is now, and the need is urgent. Our local leaders must act like it.

Early last week, an intense lobbying effort aimed against the Ukrainian government was launched on Capitol Hill. The central message of the group behind this campaign claims that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) is being persecuted under a wartime legislative provision, Law 3894.

Any good assault deploys concealment, deception, and concentrated firepower. And this utilized all three: a virtuous message of religious liberty, concern for Ukrainians, and the amplification of an online ecosystem of entities recently created for this purpose. Given its choice of target, having Anna Paulina Luna at the vanguard was a natural choice: her ardor for all things Kremlin (and all things irrationally anti-Ukraine) remains peerless across the landscape of Congress. There was just one massive problem.

The concept of operation for this anti-Ukraine hostility was unique in that it required the one thing Luna is incapable of providing—genuine, authentic concern for the plight of at least some Ukrainians. From this perspective, irony abounds. The only lawmaker who’d ball and chain themselves to this caricature of legitimate advocacy is the same one that immediately doomed its credibility. This initial suspicion was well-justified.

From stem to stern, every aspect of the UOC advocacy was permeated with the irreducible stench of bad faith. The underlying message dramatically misleading and often false on what it said, and more importantly, on what it omitted. The UOC lobbying group misrepresented its the nature of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the ROC Outside Russia (ROCOR), and by extension, their connections to the ROC. Their spokesperson made statements on funding to Ukraine that directly contradicted her past, very public positions.

While they posture their advocacy as grounded in altruistic concern for Ukrainians, the social media profiles of some of the most prominent, outspoken members of the group are littered with vile Russian propaganda, genocide apologia, and Tucker Carlson’s lies. Instead of condemning Russia’s patently illegal war of aggression, we hear one-sided criticisms of the Ukrainian government and the U.S. as responsible for causing the war.

Beyond the deceptive substance of the group’s message, the manner in which they have cultivated it bears several disturbing hallmarks of the information laundering techniques that typify influence operations. Multiple apparent shell entities with a comprehensive social media presence, amplifying each other while existing under common ownership. A news website that approvingly reports on the spokesperson, without disclosing that she is married to the owner of the website, and that website’s parent company flying a Russian flag outside its headquarters in Cyprus.

I am drawing no conclusions as to motive, nor am I stating that Russia is pulling the strings here. But what I am saying, supported by clear evidence, is that the group behind this voracious lobbying effort against the Ukrainian government is relying on a dishonest premise and is engaging in misleading behavior. Let’s review the statements made, the people involved, and the tactics used against the evidence. You be the judge.

The Architecture of Deception

People and Entities Behind the UOC Lobbying Campaign

Catherine Whiteford:

Ms. Whiteford spokesperson for the effort, who appeared at the podium during events on Capitol Hill. She is the Co-Chair of the Young Republicans National Federation (YRNF) and ran for a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives in 2022, but lost in the primary.

From those activities to her proud photos with Mark Robinson—the self-described “black Nazi,” of Nude Africa fame—her persona is one of a person well-entrenched in the machinery of Republican politics.1 She styles herself as the Director of Government Affairs for the Society of St. John and San Francisco, which is a single-member LLC registered by her husband in North Carolina, barely a month ago.

Ms. Whiteford has long sought to punish Ukraine. On January 20th, 2025, on her public X account, she identified the election of Donald Trump as a “historic moment” that marked the “beginning of the end for neoliberal godlessness that has reigned in the Christian West for too long.”2 3 She then threatened Ukrainian government, promising “retribution is coming” and used a thinly-veiled reference describing President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “tyrant.”

This wasn’t a hollow statement: she has worked consistently to undermine U.S. assistance to Ukraine, a concrete action that would directly threaten the lives of its people and its very existence as an independent nation. On October 13, 2024, she posted a photo on her public Instagram account of her, husband Ben Dixon, and J.D. Vance, noting that she had personally lobbied Vance to make Ukraine aid conditional on its handling of UOC issue.4

Yet again, on November 18, 2025, on her public X account, she revealed that she has requested, during her formal lobbying efforts, that Ukraine be punished by cutting off assistance that “contributes to the persecution of religious groups.”5 Ever-zealous in her efforts to interfere with Ukraine’s sovereignty, she is also seeking a special waiver for UOC clergy to prevent them from serving in combat roles in the Ukrainian military.

Consider the hypocrisy of that ask: the person claiming religious discrimination is seeking to do just that—to impose a religious-based special exemption that would not apply to Catholics or Muslims, just clergy of the UOC, and to do it outside the legislative process of Europe’s largest democracy. This isn’t about religious discrimination, at all. It’s about imposing discrimination in favor of her preferred group.

She combines these anti-Ukraine efforts with brazen lies about Ukraine. In her multitude of public statements, on her public X profile and as reported in a host of Russia-sympathizing “news” outlets, she has repeatedly claimed that Law 3894 criminalizes the practice of religion—“religion is not a crime.”6

This is false. It focuses the organizations and their institutional links to Russia. The UOC could be operating in Ukraine right now, but it chose to maintain its ties to the ROC over its own country, an arm of the Russian military-intelligence-propaganda complex. Ukraine has similar laws regarding for-profit businesses attempting in Ukraine that are controlled from Russia.

As I explain below in a thorough analysis of Law 3894, Ukraine isn’t attacking the UOC. It is refusing to grant special immunity from a secular, national-security law passed by an overwhelming majority of its legislature, a law which has immense public support.

In these same statements, she also lies by claiming that Law 3894 criminalizes religion. Again, anybody who actually reads the statutory language would know is this a ridiculous claim. There are zero criminal sanction such as jailtime provided for in Law 3894. Thus distilled, the central, animating features of her platform are lies about things Law 3894 doesn’t regulate, and penalties that it doesn’t even provide.

But, of course, dishonesty needs company, and that holds true with Ms. Whiteford. Let’s visit with a few. She has labeled it “defamatory” to link her group’s advocacy with the ROC. Which is odd, because her father, John Whiteford, who helped organize attendees for her recent trip to Washington, D.C., openly claims on his church’s website that he works for Patriarch Kirill, the head of the ROC and former KGB agent who justifies Russia’s genocide in Ukraine as a righteous “holy war.”

Moreover, Gregory Livitsky, a subdeacon at ROCOR, traveled with Ms. Whiteford’s delegation and was directly involved in their lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. Not as a bit player, but a central figure: visiting the offices of lawmakers, speaking at the podium at public events, and lambasting opponents—all on behalf of Ms. Whiteford.

ROCOR attempts to paint itself as being totally separate from the ROC, but this is misleading, at best. Patriarch Kirill is routinely commemorated during an event known as divine liturgy, which can take place as often as every Sunday, as the supreme authority on religious matters (“canonical authority”) to whom ROCOR is subordinate.7 Ms. Whiteford cannot employ religious figures to advocate on a self-described issue of religious freedom, when those individuals believe the head of the ROC has supreme authority over their very purpose in life—religion—and simultaneously claim zero connection to the ROC exists.

Ms. Whiteford claims she cares about Ukrainians and religious freedom. Yet, a search of her public social media profiles, websites, and advocacy from the date of Russia’s illegal war of aggression reveal a one-sided series of relentless attacks on Ukraine. She has said nothing critical of the murder of over 50 Ukrainian priests and the destruction of 700 religious structures by Russian forces in Ukraine since 2022.8

She has failed to even mention Russia’s relentless, barbaric, and systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity across Ukraine, which have occurred on a daily basis. The mass-murder of families, the rape and murder of toddlers in front of their parents, the execution of POWs as an official Russian state policy, all totally absent from Ms. Whiteford’s advocacy. There is no mention of the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children by the Russian government. No words about the firing of precision-guided missile into a children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv.

Indeed the only public words I could find, anywhere, across her comprehensive social media profiles, websites, and lobbying efforts is a single oblique statement on March 2, 2022 on Facebook that dispensed equal blame between Russia and Ukraine and contained the familiar Russian propaganda technique of denying the separateness of Ukrainian existence and historical identity. The only time she’s mentioned the plight of a Ukrainian that I could find outside the UOC was the tidal wave of right-wing exploitation concerning Iryna Zarutska, earlier this year.

None of this should be surprising, considering who she surrounds herself with. Her father, for example, refuses to criticize Russia, hosts sermons where he talks about his grandchild being afraid of fireworks on July 4th in the context of the war but says nothing about Ukrainian children in nightly bomb shelters, posts the most atrocious Tucker Carlson pro-Russian filth imaginable, and blames the U.S. and western media for starting the war. Go his X feed, but be forewarned.9

Ms. Whiteford doesn’t care about Ukraine. She doesn’t care about Ukrainians except to the extent they are part of an organization in the UOC that willfully refused to even attempt to cut its ties with the ROC, that collaborated with Russian forces in the occupied territories, and can be used to promote false anti-Ukraine themes. At a time when Ukraine is fighting for its very right to exist, as the separate, much older, and actually democratic nation that Russia is not.

Ben Dixon, “Union of Orthodox Journalists,” “Society of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco,” and the Textbook Information Laundering used by UOC Advocates

Imagine this scenario: Person A is the sole owner of News Website B and Entity C, is married to Person D, and through his News Website B, repeatedly provides favorable reporting on Person D who is the spokesperson for Entity C, without ever disclosing he owns B and C, and is married to D.

Does that seem trustworthy, or deceptive? Can you think of a good-faith reason for doing that? Before answering, let’s add in that such non-disclosure of rampant conflicts of interest violate journalistic codes of ethics and are contrary to the business interests of News Website B. It’s business and reputational suicide for News Website B.

Of course it’s deceptive. Of course there’s no good-faith reason for it. And of course, the example given is precisely what Ben Dixon, Ms. Whiteford’s husband, Ms. Whiteford herself, and the two entities he owns, solely controls, and recently created as LLC’s in North Carolina have engaged in to promote an anti-Ukraine narrative.10

It is also textbook form “information laundering,” a classic disinformation technique often, but not solely, employed by Putin’s genocidal regime in Moscow to undermine the rules-based post-WWII order.11 Let’s review what information laundering is, and how it was applied here to deceive and amplify with respect to an anti-Ukraine message.

Information laundering is “a stratagem used by hostile actors within an information influence campaign. In this process, false or deceitful information is legitimized through a network of intermediaries, who gradually apply a set of techniques in order to distort it and obscure the original source.”12

Two of these techniques include “smurfing,” where an actor sets of multiple websites or accounts to disseminate the information, and “Potemkin villages” in which a network of accounts or platforms that share or endorse each other’s content, serving to amplify and propagate the material.13

Let’s look at the facts of UOC advocacy efforts in the U.S. and see how clearly they fit into this framework, starting with the example at the outset of this section. One tweet starts the roadmap.

Here we have an organization called the “Union of Orthodox Journalists America” (UOJ USA) tweeting about Ms. Whiteford’s press conference and directing the reader to go watch it on UOJ USA’s YouTube channel. Ms. Whiteford is identified as the Director of Government Affairs for the Society of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco (SSJSSF). So who are these entities?

UOJ USA is a single-member LLC, meaning, ownership and management are vested in one person. And that one person is Ben Dixon, Ms. Whiteford’s husband.14 It was registered on June 3, 2025.

SSJSF is also a single-member LLC, with the sole member and manager listed as Ben Dixon.

UOJ lists a website on its Facebook page, uoj.news, where it posts frequent stories about Ms. Whiteford and her advocacy against Ukraine. This pattern is repeated across UOJ-USA’s comprehensive social media accounts, across every major platform. Dixon is listed on the website as the Editor-in-Chief of uoj.news in the “about us” section. The owner, the editor, total control. By outward appearances, uoj.news clearly portrays itself as a legitimate news outlet.

It is anything but. UOJ-USA’s behavior with respect to Ms. Whiteford and SSJSSF violates the most foundational concepts of journalistic ethics. It’s a jubilee of wrong: undisclosed conflicts of interest, lack of editorial independence, audience deception, lack of transparency, just name it.15 Dixon is literally reporting on his wife and his company, through his own website, pretending to be news, and disclosing nothing.

The final layer on this hall-of-mirrors, Being John Malkovich-level absurdity is Ms. Whiteford retweeting these social media posts. None of it makes sense, unless the entire point is information laundering. Viewed from this perspective, everything fits: lies about an adversary, Ukraine, repackaged through intermediaries, using classic smurfing and Potemkin village techniques, to push it into the public discourse with the patina of validity.

UOJ-USA’s Links to UOJ, szph.eu, and the Headquarters Flying a Russian Flag

The content isn’t the worst part. It’s the deeper connections that are far more pernicious. UOJ USA’s webpage has links to other countries along the top. Clicking on Ukraine opens up szph.eu, entitled “Union of Orthodox Journalists,” (UOJ) which has a country identifier for the U.S. that leads back to uoj.news. Both websites have near-identical formatting and layout, and not in a good way.

They very rarely have bylines or attribution for the vast bulk of their articles. Timestamps use the 24-hour format that is uncommon in U.S.-based news outlets. Such practices are consistent with information-laundering operations, where speed and repetition are the focus, rather than trust.

And of course, these websites have constantly attacked the Ukrainian government, but said virtually nothing in relative terms about Russia’s illegal invasion and daily war crimes. Incredibly odd for a news organization based in Ukraine to focus on its own government rather than the mass murderers firing missiles into their cities on a daily basis.

The Ukrainian government has blocked spzh.eu in Ukraine as an informational sabotage network linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).16 This is based on actual pro-Russia, genocide-apologia posts tied back to the organization, and evidence obtained during raids, not raw speculation. The Religious Information Service of Ukraine (RISU) found donation and organizational ties to an entity registered in Cyprus called “Team of the Orthodox Journalists (TOJ) LTD,” (TOJ), which UOJ acknowledges is the operator and publisher of its website activity.17

The allegations against TOJ-OUJ aren’t limited to Ukraine, and underscore key features of a hostile foreign influence operation. Earlier in 2025, Bulgarian National Television published a comprehensive analysis of UOJ’s operations in that country and its organizational ties, in a deeply-sourced article.18 UOJ was described as “an international information network that has been spreading propaganda in favor of Moscow for years.”

BNT noted the peculiar nature of UOJ’s website—the lack of attribution on most articles, the absence of an address, or any explanation of the conditions for membership in the Union. The timing of UOJ’s entry into the Bulgarian media environment was also suspect, because it waited until after the 2024 death of Patriarch Neophyte, the staunchly anti-Russian head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. UOJ only did so in the midst of a heated national debate about mandatory religious instruction in schools, despite operating in Russia for over a decade, BNT claims.

But it was the information about TOJ-OUJ that should most concern Americans. Remember, neither UOJ-USA nor UOJ plausibly deny that TOJ-OUJ is their parent company with operational and publishing authority over their activities. TOJ-OUJ’s registered address in Cyprus is a business center that proudly flies a Russian flag and contains a company sanctioned by the U.S. for illegal arms trafficking with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

According to BNT, based on attributed reporting, Cyprus has also turned into a refuge for fugitive UOC priests who fled Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, and continue from Cyprus to glorify Russia against the interests of their home country. This structuring, involving cross-border incorporation, international donation channels, and domain-hopping are common tactics used by Russian disinformation networks to increase deniability and survive enforcement.

In finalizing this article, I perused UOJ’s Bulgarian website and was met with yet another example of what could be interpreted as information laundering: the 2024 photograph of Dixon, Ms. Whiteford, and J.D. Vance from her Instagram account where she sought to diminish Ukraine funding in connection with the UOJ issue.

Just ask yourself, with everything going on in the world, why would a more than year-old photo of three Americans suddenly be newsworthy in Bulgaria, of all places? (The screenshot is posted below as interpreted from Bulgarian to English). Simple, it’s not newsworthy at all, but it is useful to recycle anti-Ukraine narratives, because the focus is with repetition, speed, and deception, across platforms, not newsworthiness.

While these ties are incredibly disturbing for most, they don’t seem so out of place with Dixon, a lay member of ROCOR according to the UOJ-USA website. His Substack, linked to his public X account, proudly reposts the “Father Joe’s Newsletter - Moving to Russia Escaping America and Western Europe.”

Besides advocacy for moving to Russia, to “escape America & Western Europe” what else does Father Joe endorse? See for yourself, below. Hardly America First to glorify Russia as a glorious haven from Dixon’s own native country, but hey, perhaps the have the “sexual restraint” and “obedient Christian wives” that are missing here.

There are many peculiarities with UOJ-USA. It has unquestionably engaged in information laundering using both smurfing and Potemkin village techniques. Its organizational structure is incredibly suspect. And, there is the powerful circumstantial evidence that arises from the fact it is engaging in behaviors that are contrary to the business interests of a legitimate journalistic entity. I make no affirmative conclusion about who is ultimately behind its activities, to be clear, and the sunlight of time may or may not answer that question.

But, nevertheless, it is important to understand the reality of Russia’s ongoing hostile actions and intentions towards the civilized world, as relayed by General William J. Hartman of U.S. Cyber Command earlier this year:

“Russia appears determined to continue its persistent threats to the peace of Europe and to the global order. Moscow violates international norms with its eleven-year old aggression in Ukraine, coupled with its overt and covert attempts to intimidate Ukraine’s supporters. As with China, Russia’s sophisticated military and intelligence cyber forces actively support its strategic objectives. Russian cyber actors work to subvert Ukraine and divide the Western allies, seeking to undermine them both abroad and internally. In the Russian case, moreover, the Kremlin encourages, or at least tolerates, brazen cyber-criminal enterprises that often serve state purposes against foreign targets.”19

Law 3894 is a Rational Legislative Response Akin to the U.S. TikTok Ban

Ms. Whiteford has blatantly lied about Ukraine’s Law 3894. Perhaps she didn’t even read the statute, but the truth of the matter is that it reflects the rational legislative response to the very real national-security risk posed by Russia’s ongoing ties to the UOC no foundationally different than the U.S. TikTok ban. Let’s refute her lies.

After living under the withering violence of Russia’s criminal war of aggression for over 900 days, on August 20, 2024, Ukraine’s national parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed Law 3894 by a vote of 265-29. The statute’s purpose is simple: it requires foreign religious organizations that are governed from within Russia to transition their command and control to Ukraine.

This is a recognition of two salient facts: first, that Russia operates as a totalitarian state, where religious organizations have no practical independence from the government, and second, that such entities have been actively utilized by the Russian war machine to commit crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Notably, this concept isn’t limited to religious organizations. Law 2116 has much harsher prohibitions against foreign businesses that operate in Ukraine but are headquartered in Russia or are owned by Russian nationals.

These enactments derive from the sovereign, considered judgment of Ukraine’s democratically-elected political leadership. Their conclusion—that when a nation run as a “virtual mafia state”20 is your invader, any enterprise operated from within its borders is indistinguishable from a hostile actor—is eminently rational. Indeed, the animating concern behind these Ukrainian laws and the TikTok ban is identical, and they operate in the same fashion. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the TikTok ban, and did so during peacetime, when the government has less latitude to restrict freedoms.

It is absurd, and frankly, outrageous to suggest that Ukraine, facing an existential threat to its very existence, with millions of its citizens under brutal Russian occupation, its cities being wiped from the earth, and thousands of its children kidnapped, somehow acted so far outside the realm of civilized norms in passing legislation parallel to the TikTok ban that it is deserving of denunciation or even punishment by the United States.

But that is what the UOC’s supporters are apparently doing, even though many these same people refuse to criticize Russia’s genocidal actions against the people of Ukraine. A few technical points about Law 3894 are worth mentioning before moving on. It has already been upheld by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, it did not take effect for nine months, and it provides for comprehensive due process protections in the form of consultation with state authorities, a robust compliance architecture, and a court hearing concerning any actions taken.

The UOC Falsely Believes It’s Above the Law and has Betrayed Ukraine

There is an even more pernicious lie that has been repeated by Ms. Whiteford and her gaggle of barking seal social media regurgitation networks: that the UOC has “cut ties” with the ROC and that it is somehow the “victim.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Initially, the UOC has not fully separated with the ROC. It remains canonically tied to the ROC—meaning, they treat, like ROCOR, Patriarch Kirill as the supreme spiritual authority over the UOC. That’s what “canonical ties” means. In stark contrast, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) requested, and was granted, total and complete independence from the ROC, in a process known as “autocephaly,” by the Patriarch of Constantinople. The UOC not only didn’t even attempt this, itself, it vehemently opposed the OCU receiving autocephaly.

There has been a long history of collaboration between the Kremlin and the UOC:

“The case against the Russian Orthodox Church is lengthy. It has ‘long used [the church] as an arm of the state’ according to investigative journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov. That has meant the extensive misuse of clergymen for intelligence and subversion work that even involved the employment of Kirill himself as an informer in the 1970s and 1980s, according to KGB files briefly opened to researchers in the 1990s.

In occupied regions, there have been documented cases of representatives of the ROC in Ukraine passing troop locations to Russian forces, openly supporting the occupation and even enabling torture, according to the investigative site, Bihus Info. In one case a priest from the Kyiv region collaborated with the aggressors during the occupation of his area in 2022, providing information about Ukrainian patriots and keeping volunteers in the basement of his church.

Raids on Church offices by Ukrainian security forces have uncovered unregistered Russian citizens living in Ukraine, a significant amount of cash, pro-Russian literature for use in seminaries, and several people without any legal documents. Polls show 82% of Ukrainians distrust Russian-linked churches.”21

Comparing the behavior of the OCU and UOC in the occupied territories of Ukraine since 2014 is useful in this regard. In Crimea, Russia demanded re-registration under Russian law, acceptance of Russian legal jurisdiction, and removal of Ukrainian symbols. The OCU refused, publicly rejected the legitimacy of occupation, and was met with violence, eviction, and being forced to go underground to worship.

The UOC, on the other hand, did re-register under Russian law, was not subjected to violence or eviction, and was treated by occupation forces as the canonical, proper orthodox body compatible with Russian governance. That is not neutral behavior. It is a legitimization of the occupation and displaced Ukrainian civic identity from the public sphere. This pattern repeated itself, again and again, and was magnified through acts of affirmative collaboration, as noted above.

Under the ROC statute, Section X, paragraph 11, “[t]he decisions of the Holy Synod shall be effective in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church . . .”22 The Holy Synod of the ROC is the supreme executive governing body of the ROC, which, under its own statute, is the umbrella organization over the UOC. It is headquartered in Moscow and chaired by Patriarch Kirill. Under Section X, Patriarch Kirill is who the UOC is to commemorate, the ROC’s Holy Synod has final authority, ROC blesses or confirms their primate, and the UOC is under the authority of the ROC.

The UOC may dispute that, but they have been uncooperative with the Ukrainian government. They refused to supply appropriate documentation, for example, confirming their unsupported statements that they are truly separate from the ROC. Quite simply, the UOC believes it is above the law. In a pluralistic democracy, no religion is above the law. And you know how we know this? Because Ms. Whiteford sought a discriminatory religious provision that would have granted a special waiver for the UOC personnel from serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

No other religion sought this special treatment. Everyone in Ukrainian society, from organizations, to businesses, to religious entities, are responsible during a time of grave national crisis brought on by Russia. No one has special immunity. Law 3894 does nothing to ban religions, but only to require, consistent with the realities of the state of Russian’s mafia-like governance, that command and control of such organization be present in Ukraine.

You be the judge of who you find more trustworthy: the Ukrainian government or the UOC. The overwhelming majority of legislators passed Law 3894, it enjoys overwhelming public support, and the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians do not trust the administrative hierarchy of the UOC based on its collaborative and oftentimes treasonous behavior.

On September 2, 2025, during an Oval Office event, President Donald Trump announced that he had directed the military to fire on a boat allegedly carrying drugs near Venezuela. Since that day, his administration has disclosed 18 additional strikes using lethal military force against small vessels transiting the Southern Caribbean, resulting in the deaths of 75 people.

The stated objective of this campaign is to kill unarmed civilians who are purportedly transporting drugs to the United States. People not engaged in armed hostilities, not members of any military organization, and who are, at worst, engaged in mid-level felonies for which the typical punishment is 10 years of incarceration. Thus, the reason they are being killed—the alleged commission of a criminal offense—is the same fact that triggers due process protections barring extrajudicial punishment.

Condemnation of these events as a clear violation of the U.S. Criminal Code, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) has come from sources far and wide, from Richard Painter, White House Ethics Counsel under George W. Bush, to John Yoo, author of the infamous “Torture Memos,” to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. In fact, it is difficult to find any expert in this area, not otherwise connected with the Trump administration, who can provide a cogent theory of legality.

For its part, the Trump administration has refused to provide anything beyond a vague series of ever-evolving justifications for the strikes, from national self-defense to the contention that America is in an armed conflict with drug cartels it refuses to even identify, which are absurd on their face. It has likewise refused to disclose, or even describe the contents of, an unclassified Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that it is purportedly relying on to justify its actions.

The only consistent communication from the government comes in the form of social media posts by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, which dress up the strikes with ornamental jargon such as calling the deceased “narcoterrorists” who have “killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda” accusing them of “waging war on our people,” “just as Al-Qaeda waged war on our homeland” and promising they “will be treated the same.” And yet, while each of the social media posts by Hegseth begin with the claim that the boats destroyed were operated by a “Designated Terrorist Organization,” he has named the DTO in only 2 of the 19 strikes.

Which brings us to a fundamental question that Americans must face, no matter how painfully ironic it may be: is the Trump administration’s clearly illegal campaign of mass-murdering civilians to achieve coercive social and political goals itself terrorism under federal law? Yes. It is. On first reading, it may feel, intuitively, emotionally, as if this conclusion resides beyond the last outpost of reason. But that is because we have as a people been conditioned to believe that the United States is a civilized democracy, not a rogue state that dwells on the same low moral plane as Russia and Hamas.

But the facts and law bear no other outcome. And the answer staring back in reflection will be the same, again and again: we are the terrorists now.

How is Terrorism is Defined in the U.S. Legal System and Abroad

The word “terrorism” is defined 16 times in the U.S. Code. Most prominent among these is 18 U.S.C. § 2331, the criminal statute used to prosecute acts of both domestic and international terrorism.

“Terrorism” is defined here as (1) acts that are dangerous to human life that are a violation of criminal law and (2) appear to be intended to either (a) intimidate or coerce a civilian population or (b) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.

The U.N. Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism (1994) and Resolution 1566 (2004) define terrorism as “criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury . . . with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government . . . to do or to abstain from doing any act . . .”

Finally, the Framework Decision on Combatting Terrorism from the European Union (2002) defines terrorism as “offences under national law [including but not limited to causing death or serious bodily injury to a person] committed with the aim of seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a Government . . . to perform or abstain from performing any act . . .”

Regardless of which formulation is chosen, the core elements are the same: criminal acts against the life or safety of a person undertaken with the apparent intent to coerce or intimidate a civilian population or influence government policy through coercion or intimidation.

The U.S. criminal code formulation in § 2331 is the precise one that will be used here, but distinct purposes. First, to measure the Trump administration’s conduct. Second, to dispel the false assertion repeated by Hegseth that common criminals engaged in nonviolent drug transportation over 1,000 miles from any U.S. border are “terrorists” akin to Al Qaeda.

Trump’s Use of Military Force to Mass-Murder Civilians in the Caribbean

The administration began its campaign of using lethal military force against civilian vessels transiting the Southern Caribbean on September 2nd.

In total, there have been 19 strikes, resulting in the death of 75 people, with three individuals who survived the initial attack. Two survivors were detained by the U.S. Navy on October 16th, and repatriated without criminal charges to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador. The third individual, who survived a strike on October 28th, was designated by U.S. military forces for rescue by the Mexican Navy, but was never located and is believed to have perished at sea.

Trump announced the first strike from the Oval Office, but has typically relied on Hegseth to post information regarding the timing, number of persons killed, and reason for the strikes on X using his nom de guerre “Secretary of the Department of War.” Hegseth’s posts have evolved somewhat, but nevertheless follow a consistent pattern typified by the below from November 1st:

Troubling discrepancies abound. In the first paragraph, he makes specific accusations that suggest knowledge of who we are attacking and the discrete activities they were engaged in. He refers to the vessel as one operated by a DTO that was engaged in “narco-trafficking.” The occupants are described variously as “narco-terrorists”—an operational term that has no basis in American law—or “terrorists.” Most of the time, he provides a general location, such as “the Caribbean off Venezuela” or “the Eastern Pacific.”

Despite phrasing the posts as if he has actual knowledge of the DTO operating the vessel, in only two of the 19 strikes has that DTO been identified by name, on October 19th (Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN)) and on October 24th (Tren de Aragua (TDA)). The same pattern repeats as to the identity of the individuals—using the labels “narco-terrorist” or “terrorist” seem to derive from specific knowledge they are engaged in terrorist activity. And yet, none of the individuals falling within this accusation, including the two we treated and released, have been identified by the Department of Defense.

In contrast to the first paragraph, the second paragraph of Hegseth’s posts contain a cornucopia of vague generalizations seemingly offered to infer the correctness of the targeting decision. We are told the vessel was “transiting along a known narco-trafficking route,” “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling,” and “carrying narcotics.” It is unclear if merely being a “narco-terrorist” or “terrorist” is enough to use lethal force, or if they also have to be in the process of allegedly transporting drugs.

The distinction is relevant, because the current legal justification the Trump administration is offering for its Caribbean operations is that the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with as-yet unnamed cartels.1 Under the LOAC, members of the opposing force can be lawfully targeted wherever they exist, regardless of their activities when killed, as long as they aren’t hors de combat, that is, removed from battle by virtue of injury or capture. If what the government is saying is true—that the U.S. is truly in “armed conflict” with cartels and that the persons killed were cartel members—it is irrelevant what they were doing in their final moments.

Unfortunately, the issue isn’t just with the tortured syntax used by Hegseth. More disturbing is the factual record that has developed in the wake of the U.S. military’s conduct of operations. Simply put, the words and behavior are incomprehensible unless one accepts that the Trump administration is being intentionally dishonest and engaging in egregiously unlawful behavior.

No evidence has been publicly released by the administration to support any claim made by Hegseth in his social-media posts, interviews, or public statements. No evidence the boats were involved in drug trafficking, no evidence the individuals killed were “terrorists,” had engaged in "terrorist activity,” and no evidence the vessels were “operated by” a “Designated Terrorist Organization.” Not only is there no evidence that any drugs, if they were present, were in transit to the U.S., the vessels destroyed were incapable of delivering drugs across 1,000 miles of open ocean water both as a matter of fuel capacity and seaworthiness.

The cartels we are allegedly in an armed conflict with have never been named. Just pause for a moment and consider how breathtakingly odd that is: either (1) they don’t know who the cartels are, in which case any attack is a roll of the dice that the wrong people will be killed (a separate legal violation in itself), or (2) they do know, and are lying by omission. Neither scenario has ever occurred in American history. It is also unfathomable how the legal definition of “armed conflict” can be satisfied when the U.S. seems to have no idea who they’re fighting against.2

Furthermore, the treatment of the people killed is wholly inconsistent with their alleged status as members of a hostile enemy force. When two survivors were recovered, the “terrorists” who Hegseth promised to “treat EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda” were immediately sent to their home countries with zero indication they will be detained or prosecuted there. No effort was made to contact, interrogate, or prosecute the third survivor.

The U.S. has never treated terrorists in this manner—claiming they are so dangerous they must be summarily executed—but inexplicably not dangerous enough to place into custody, even temporarily. It also makes zero sense in the context of military operations. Battlefield detainees are a potential goldmine of human intelligence, and that is why the various branches of the U.S. military have entire field manuals and occupational specialties dedicated to their interrogation.3 Failing to exploit a human source of this type puts fellow soldiers in danger and threatens mission success.4

And now, we need not rely on a harvest of suspicions. Over time, a growing body of evidence has emerged. The Associated Press published an article on November 7th highlighting the results of an investigation, based on dozens of interviews, into nine of the 75 people killed by the U.S. military.5 None of the deceased were terrorists, none had engaged in terrorist activity, and none belonged to a DTO.

Also on November 7th, MSNBC published an article based on interviews with family members of those killed, local journalists, and human rights groups, which concluded that none of the victims were terrorists, none had engaged in terrorist activity, and several were fisherman who either weren’t transporting drugs, or were unaware of the contents of their cargo.6 The area where the strikes have taken place, is a route for cocaine, not fentanyl, which is headed not to the U.S., but instead to Europe.

Now put those facts up against Hegseth’s social-media posts. The foundational reason he provided for the campaign of violence is to keep drugs from American shores. The only evidence that exists as of this writing indicates none of the strikes accomplish that purpose. Hegseth also claimed the dead are terrorists. Yet again, the only evidence available shows this too is false. And a similar fate befalls Hegseth’s clear implication that the non-terrorists belong to a DTO.

These concerns were echoed in a bipartisan letter sent to the administration earlier this week from Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., Mike Turner, R-Ohio, Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and Jason Crow, D-Colo., requesting further information on the people killed in the strikes. “Cartels often force low-income individuals into maritime smuggling through threats or deception,” they wrote. “What evidence confirms that those killed were cartel operatives, rather than coerced, deceived, or trafficked civilians?”

President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has publicly accused the U.S. of violating its sovereignty and conducting an assassination in connection with the death of a Colombian national, who he claimed was merely a fisherman.7 It is notable anytime such diplomatic rows spill out into the public sphere. But is uniquely jarring when it happens with a nation such as Colombia, once a stalwart ally of the U.S. in the realm of counternarcotics. Indeed, the cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S.-trained military forces of Colombia that resulted in the death of Pablo Escobar is considered one of America’s foreign-policy success stories.

The evidence shows a course of conduct that is plainly at odds with what the administration has told us, and the only way to make any rational sense of their public statements is to assume they are engaging in illegal and dishonest behavior.

Trump’s Effort to Justify the Killings Backfire and Prove their Illegality

Apart from its bombastic, jargon-riddled social media posts, the administration has waged a more formal, private campaign in its dealings with Congress to justify the killings. This effort has come primarily from two written notices, on September 4th and October 2nd.

The September 4th notice was sent under the War Powers Act8, which requires the President to provide a report to Congress within 48 hours of committing U.S. forces to military action.9 The notice begins with a list of societal ills allegedly caused by unnamed drug cartels that are designated terrorist organizations, such as drug addiction in the U.S. and violence in other countries. Nowhere does it state that any of the cartels has engaged in, or is about to imminently engage in, an armed attack against the U.S. In the third paragraph, it claims the September 2nd strike was undertaken as an act of national self-defense.

However, self-defense only applies when a nation is subjected to an armed attack by a hostile military force or there is clear evidence such an attack will imminently occur.10 There has been no accusation from the administration that the U.S. was subjected to an armed attack, or was imminently about to be. At best, it appears their theory might be that somehow the shipment of a product to be used later in a voluntary business transaction (drugs) between Americans and third parties not subject to the Caribbean strikes is a proxy for an armed attack by those killed.

Even if that was the claim being made, it would be farcical, because an “armed attack” embodies “the most grave forms of the use of force” with “widespread scale and effects” such that even localized border encounters between small infantry units involving loss of life do not qualify.11 It must be pointed out that while Hegseth and others have attempted to portray drug overdoses as the product of some intentional aggressive act by those involved in the drug trade, this characterization has no basis in fact or law.

When an American purchases narcotics for personal consumption, they assume the risks with that activity, namely, possible contamination of the drug with fentanyl, allergic reactions, overdosing, and death. This concept is an ironclad feature of American tort law, and has long historical roots. It is beyond absurd to treat the sale of drugs as akin to a military invasion, when the purchaser of those drugs would be be unable to even succeed on a civil negligence claim against the seller.12

Beyond the absence of an armed attack, for an act of national self-defense to be valid, it must also be necessary and proportional. There are no facts, or even accusations, that could possibly support the use of our military to carry out an extrajudicial killing under the principle of national self-defense. And that condemns the entire course of conduct by the Trump administration, from the first strike on September 2nd through to the present day.13

More specifically, self-defense is the principle that governs the initial use of military force, after which the LOAC takes hold and governs the conduct of hostilities. which fall under the rubric of armed conflict. That is the tactic the administration is using in an October 2nd memo to Congress, where it claims to be in an armed conflict with unknown cartels, who it describes as unlawful combatants. Even if that faulty premise were true, the outcome is the same: the Caribbean campaign is a criminal enterprise.

The LOAC principle of distinction bars the targeting of civilians or civilian objects, such as non-military vessels operating in international waters outside of any warzone. As noted in the excellent article by Marty Lederman in Just Security, DoD Directive 2311.01 § 1.2(a) confirms the Department of Defense’s longstanding policy that “[m]embers of the DoD Components comply with the law of war during all armed conflicts, however characterized” but also that “[i]n all other military operations, members of the DoD Components will continue to act consistent with the law of war’s fundamental principles and rules, which include . . . the principle[] . . . . of distinction.”

No matter how you view it, there is no justification present, or even plausible, for the killings of 75 civilians by the U.S. military. Those killings constitute murder under the U.S. criminal code, murder under the UCMJ, and for those who helped planned and took overt acts to complete those offenses, conspiracy to commit murder.14

Calling the victims unlawful combatants doesn’t change the result, but it does provide insight. Using this term is a circular word game that is yet another episode of Trump’s theory of executive power: Article II + unmitigated jargon. There can be no unlawful combatant in a situation where there is no armed attack by an adversary. It is a status that only exists in fully-situated war. While it can’t be stated with certainty, it appears this terminology is being used as some lost artifact from the Global War on Terrorism, which ultimately found its way into the undisclosed OLC opinion.

In much the same way that Hegseth constantly uses the word terrorist and references Al-Qaeda, it is likely that the OLC fashioned some crude theory of legality that analogizes the drone strikes against armed terrorist groups during GWOT to the current situation, but with total disregard of facts on the ground. To be clear, if that is the case, any the effort will fail.

There is no rational parallel between a few fishing boats that might, at worst, be carrying a few kilos of cocaine that Americans voluntarily purchase and a 20-year worldwide conflict that involved the occupation of two countries, combat with several organized military forces, and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers. When 9-11 occurred, that was an armed attack that triggered an armed conflict. Neither of those conditions exist.15

The distinction between then and now, as John Yoo recognized in an Washington Post op-ed, is fundamental to the dividing line between law enforcement and war. “The U.S. has long considered drug trafficking a matter for the criminal justice system. The difference in purpose dictates different tools. The FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration — not the U.S. armed forces — have prime responsibility for interdicting drug smuggling.”

Using Mass-Murder for Coercion, Intimidation, and Policy is Terrorism

The only terrorist in the Caribbean equation is the United States. Illegality of the mass-murder of civilians having been clearly established, the sole issue remaining is whether it appears those killings may have been committed with (1) the intent to coerce or intimidate civilians or (2) affect the policy of Venezuela’s government through intimidation or coercion.16 The answer is an emphatic yes. Just look at their own words.

On September 17, 2025, while giving a speech to a crowd in Michigan, Vice President J.D. Vance commented on the boat strikes. He recalled a conversation with Hegseth, in which he said, “We don’t see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They’ve completely stopped.” “I said, ‘I know why,’” Vance explained as he was met with laughter.17 “I would stop too. Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”

Then there is the President himself, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military, who said on September 21st the following to reporters while on Air Force One: “There are no boats in the water anymore. You don’t even find a fishing boat, you don’t even find cruise liners anymore. There’s nothing in the water near Venezuela.” He made similar remarks later on October 15th during a press conference, stating “If you want to go fishing, a lot of people aren’t deciding to even go fishing.”

These are admissions that the administration’s intent with the strikes is at least in part to coerce or intimidate the civilian population of Venezuela—80% of whom live below the poverty level—away from conducting lawful maritime activities they need to survive. There is also clear evidence, direct and circumstantial, that the administration’s intent with the strikes is to affect the policy of the government of Venezuela through intimidation or coercion, namely, to effectuate regime change.

During that same October 15th press conference, Trump said that Maduro had offered his country’s resources in exchange for a deal because “he doesn’t want to fuck around with the U.S.” At several points, Trump has made clear through bellicose language that he is seeking regime change, saying things such as “his days are numbered.”

News reports have indicated that there is a strong push within the administration for regime change, especially from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and that the boat strikes are part of an effort to pressure Maduro into leaving office. Soon after his inauguration, Trump doubled reward for capturing Maduro to $50 million dollars. And this all comes amid a massive military building in the Caribbean involving approximately 20% of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet, spread across submarines, guided-missile destroyers, amphibious assault ships, and potentially an aircraft carrier, along with 10,000 soldiers.

While the administration has claimed this is a counternarcotics strategy, this makes no sense, as the weapons deployed, from F-35s that cost $30,000 per hour to operate to nuclear attack submarines and Tomahawk cruise missiles, have little utility in the context of drug interdiction. Viewing the totality of the circumstances, experts believe that the boat strikes, the military buildup, the doubled reward and the messaging from the administration are part of an overall strategy to bully Maduro into leaving office, and to increase pressure against him from the civilian population to that end.18

These facts all point to a conclusion that the apparent intent of the administration in conducting the boat strikes is therefore also aimed towards affecting the policy of the Maduro regime through intimidation or coercion. Every element of the U.S. terrorism statute is therefore satisfied based on the publicly-available evidence. That makes us, the United States of America, the terrorists now.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Arrest and Death at MCC

On July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein flew on his private jet from Paris to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, stepped onto the tarmac, and was immediately arrested by a swarm of federal agents on two charges of child sex trafficking. Later that day, he was transported to Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Lower Manhattan (MCC), to be detained while awaiting trial.

Just thirty-five days later, on August 10, 2019, Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell, dead of an apparent suicide. Yet again, he gamed the system to avoid full accountability for his diabolical crimes, thereby denying his many victims their day in court. Anger mounted as one of the most high-profile inmates in the entire federal prison system had lasted barely four weeks in custody before suffering what appeared to be a entirely preventable death.

Then-Attorney General William Barr acknowledged that “Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered” and directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to review the matter. Their findings and recommendations were compiled in a report spanning 120 pages (OIG Report), which was released to the public on June 22, 2023.

The conclusion reached by the OIG Report, consistent with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York, was that Epstein committed suicide, hanging himself using a bedsheet tied around his neck. The Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, found that a “combination of negligence, misconduct, and job performance failures” by MCC staff were contributing factors in providing Epstein the opportunity to take his own life.

Epstein’s Death Gives Rise to Right-Wing Conspiracies

Although that seemed the end of the matter, irony still wanted to have its turn. The moment Epstein’s death hit the news, the right-wing social media ecosystem erupted into an inferno of conspiracy theories, accusations, and wild claims. In short order, these were weaponized into a blunt instrument against various and sundry Democrats, who were allegedly part of a “Deep State” plot to murder him. Once this inertia had been acquired, a report released years later was powerless to stop it.

While hardly cohesive, Epstein lore was a fellow traveler with core features of the QAnon movement: both involved a Deep State, pedophiles, wealth, and subversive activities undertaken by liberal elites to hide the truth and manipulate the levers of power. Ultimately, these ugly twins were cultivated into central, animating features of the MAGA political movement, by many of the same people who came to populate the highest echelons of the Trump administration.

Trump Repeatedly Amplifies the Epstein Conspiracy Theories

Donald Trump was a ringleader, not a bystander, to these events. In August 2019, within weeks of Epstein’s death, he amplified a baseless conspiracy that the Clintons were somehow involved. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump suggested Epstein might have been murdered. In an interview with Tucker Carlson in August 2023, he again said it was possible Epstein was murdered. Incredibly, this directly contradicted the OIG Report—the product of an investigation started by his own former attorney general, William Barr—that had been released to the public just two months earlier, in June.

Trump Promises to Release the Epstein Files During his Campaign

But it was during an interview in June 2024 when Trump dropped the gauntlet—on himself, no less—by promising to release the Epstein Files if elected: "Would you declassify the Epstein files?" Fox News' Rachel Campos-Duffy asked. Trump responded, "Yeah, yeah, I would." That clip was posted to the Trump campaign social-media account, Trump War Room, with the caption “President Trump says he will DECLASSIFY the 9/11 Files, JFK Files, and Epstein Files.” He again promised to release the Epstein Files in September 2024 during an interview with Lex Fridman.

And yet, when he took office in January 2025, it became clear there was no actual plan in place to make good on these promises. It was as if having rode a scorpion into the Oval Office, he couldn’t figure out how to get off. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino gave conflicting statements concerning the release of the Files. These fits and starts seemed to focus on timing and coordination, not to signal the potential for reversing one of Trump’s core campaign promises to his base.

Trump Reverses Campaign Promise in Unsigned DOJ Memo

On July 7, 2025, Trump did just that in an unsigned memo from the Department of Justice. It began, unironically, with the words “as part of our commitment to transparency.” Next, after describing the vast collection of evidence in the government’s possession, totaling over 300 GB of data—which could be millions of pages of information—the memo made clear there would be no release of the Epstein Files:

“while we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein, it is our determination that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

DOJ Releases MCC Surveillance Video that Reveals Flawed Investigation

To justify this decision, the memo concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide and provided a link to a previously-unreleased video from MCC that purported to contain 11 hours of footage from August 9th through the morning of August 10th, when Epstein’s body was discovered. The memo was intended to quell the public discourse on releasing the Epstein Files, but it failed spectacularly in that regard.

Not just because Trump reversed himself, but also due to the fact the video has eight missing minutes, shows an orange figure in prison clothes going towards Epstein’s cell on the night he died, and was not the original footage promised. In short, the video completely undermines the investigation into Epstein’s Death, contradicts key, essential findings of the OIG Report, and creates an even greater impetus to release the complete Epstein Files.

The most helpful way to demonstrate these points is by viewing the newly-released video in context, against the timeline of events and key narratives being pushed by the Trump administration to avoid fulfilling their own campaign promise.

Key Events and Evidence Relating to Epstein’s Death

Epstein Blamed Violent Cellmate for Earlier “Suicide Attempt” at MCC

The Trump administration has characterized the evidence of Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide as clear-cut. We’ve been told that Epstein had a “prior suicide attempt,” when in reality, Epstein himself told three different prison employees that his cellmate tried to kill him. He never said he hung himself, despite being repeatedly asked.

Upon his arrival at MCC, Epstein was initially placed in the general inmate population, but was quickly transferred to the Special Housing Unit (SHU) a close-custody section of the facility where inmates spend 23 hours a day in their cells. His status was administrative segregation, a non-punitive designation for individuals who are at risk of being attacked by other inmates.

His first cellmate in the SHU was Nicholas Tartaglione, who has now been sentenced to four consecutive life terms for a quadruple, drug-related homicide in which he tortured the victims. Tartaglione was a steroid abuser, drug dealer, and avid bodybuilder with a reputation for uncontrollable rage. Incredibly, Tartaglione, identified as “Inmate 1,” in the OIG Report, was selected to be the cellmate because “the Warden believed Inmate 1 was the least likely SHU inmate the harm Epstein.”

And yet, within two weeks, Epstein himself would accuse Tartaglione of extorting him for money, threatening violence, and ultimately, trying to kill him by wrapping a piece of orange cloth around his neck and strangling him—which is identical to the manner of Epstein’s eventual death just a few weeks later.

Specifically, July 23rd at 1:27 a.m., two officers heard a noise coming from Epstein’s cell, and saw him with a piece of orange bedsheet wrapped around his neck, which was tied to the bunk bed ladder. After being transported to the Health Services Unit at MCC, Epstein told the officer monitoring him that “he thought his cellmate had tried to kill him.” But that’s not all. “Epstein further stated that his cellmate had tried to extort him and that for the last week his cellmate had threatened to beat him if he did not pay him.”

Later that day, Epstein told a different officer that when he returned to his cell after an attorney meeting at 8 p.m. the previous day, Tartaglione was reading a Daily News newspaper, and “turned to page that had Epstein’s picture and reported that Epstein was worth $77 million, then balled it up and threw it in the garbage.”

It is true that Epstein was placed on suicide watch for 31 hours starting on July 23rd, but this was done as a preventative measure, not because MCC staff concluded that Epstein had attempted suicide. The incident was investigated by the Bureau of Prisons Special Investigative Services (SIS) but they could not determine what happened in Epstein’s cell before officers rendered assistance.

It is worth emphasizing that Epstein was always at a much greater risk of harm from other inmates, than from himself, from an objective standpoint: he was 66 years old, extremely wealthy, had significant health problems, was a registered sex offender by virtue of his prior conviction in Florida, and was facing an entirely new slate of child sex trafficking charges. These factors made him a target for extortion, physical intimidation, assault, and other forms of abuse.

Repeated Psychological Evaluations of Epstein Found Low Risk of Suicide

From July 6th through August 8th of 2019, psychologists at MCC who have specialized training and experience in detecting suicidal inmates had at least 15 different meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. This process began with an intake evaluation, after which Epstein was placed in the lowest risk category.

Every single time, including the day before his death, Epstein denied feelings of depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation. Every single time, these psychologists cleared Epstein and determined he did not pose a risk of suicide. Even in the immediate aftermath of the July 23rd event, Epstein did not display suicidal behaviors, and was smiling during the evaluation.

The Trump administration has worked hard to portray Epstein as a broken man who had his life of wealth and privilege torn away, was facing serious prison time, and cracked under the conditions of incarceration. This would make some sense in the abstract, but it ignores Epstein’s history. He was in a similar situation in Florida in 2005, but he endured 13 months in jail, got special favors, and used his power and money, which he still had, to beat the system.

There is also the issue of timing: his purported suicide did not happen after receiving a long prison sentence, or even after a trial, but within a few weeks of being arrested when it was still conceivable he could obtain a positive outcome in the case—a sentiment he expressed during a psychological evaluation.

MCC Staff Falsified Records, Slept on the Job, and Lied to Investigators

There were two MCC employees present in the SHU from 10 p.m. until midnight on the evening of August 9th, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel. What they did, or more importantly, failed to do, is a critical piece in the continuing fog of deception that surrounds everything Epstein.

MCC orders required the SHU employees to conduct two sets of check-ins on the inmates, where they look through the windows on the cell doors to make sure they are present, not engaged in prohibited activities, or in any obvious distress. First, daily scheduled counts are to take place at 4 p.m., 10 p.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. Second, in addition to those times, counts must be performed every 30 minutes, no more than 40 minutes apart.

To remind Thomas and Noel of the importance of checking in on Epstein, the Daytime Watch Commander had specifically created the following large orange sign and placed it at the officer’s station: “MANDATORY ROUNDS MUST BE CONDUCTED EVERY 30 MINUTES ON EPSTEIN #76318 AS PER GOD!!!!” with the word “mandatory” underlined in red.

Inexplicably, despite having a large orange sign right in front of them for their entire shift, with four exclamation points and red underlining, Noel and Thomas failed to perform any of the scheduled or 30-minute counts after 10 p.m. on August 9th until Epstein was found dead the next day at 6:30 a.m. This could be accounted for by the fact that they both slept during their shift, off an on, throughout the night.

To hide the fact they had done nothing at work the night Epstein died except sleep and surf the internet, Noel and Thomas falsified several documents reflecting counts that had never taken place.

Thomas and Noel were charged with crimes for falsifying records. They were offered a deferred prosecution agreement in exchange for cooperating with the OIG Investigation into Epstein’s death. This means they had to agree to be interviewed and provide truthful information to the OIG regarding everything that happened during their shift on the night of August 9th-10th. In December of 2021, Federal Prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges in December of 2021, citing Noel and Thomas’ full compliance with the agreement.

This exposes the most critical defect with the investigation into Epstein’s death. On the evening of August 9th at 10:40 p.m., the surveillance footage shows a person with an orange outline walking up the stairs to Epstein’s cell on L Tier of the SHU. The OIG Report—which was released in June 2023—states that this was Noel taking linens to an unknown cell on L Tier, and there was no way to test this assertion until the video was released on July 7, 2025.

If in fact the person on the stairs is Noel, why is there no statement, admission, or confirmation from her confirming this? She admitted to serious federal crimes as part of her deferred prosecution agreement, but wouldn’t admit to walking up stairs she was fully entitled to use? This is but one of many critical flaws in the government’s narrative regarding Epstein’s death revealed by the surveillance footage, which will be addressed in greater detail below.

MCC Cameras Suffered a Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure on August 8th

There are 150 surveillance cameras at MCC, and 11 which were in the SHU. One of these 11 cameras was located at the end of the hallway on L Tier, where Epstein’s cell was located. On August 8, 2019—the day before Epstein died—it was discovered that the digital video recording system had suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure.

This failure resulted in only 2 of the 11 cameras in the SHU recording after August 8th: one which has an obstructed view of the common area and a tiny sliver of the stairway up to L Tier, which was released for the first time on July 7, 2025, and another of an elevator bank on the ninth floor that has not been released. The other nine cameras were providing live video feeds, but no one working at MCC on the night of August 9th-10th were monitoring them. The default screen for the live feed was the same common area camera in the SHU that was released on July 7th.

Epstein’s Second Cellmate is Removed August 9th Without Replacement

After the incident on July 23rd, the MCC Psychology Department ordered that Epstein must have a cellmate at all times. This was memorialized in an email that was sent to over 70 people at MCC, as Epstein was being taken off Psychological Observation. Further, it was discussed at staff meetings, required trainings, and amongst the staff working at the SHU.

On August 8th, the U.S. Marshals Service sent two emails notifying numerous MCC staff that Epstein’s cellmate was being transferred to another facility on August 9th. However, no action was taken to find a replacement. On 8:30 a.m. of August 9th, Epstein’s cellmate was removed. No valid explanation has been provided as how this failure was allowed to occur.

Thus, within 24 hours of Epstein’s death, two means of witnessing what happened, video recordings and a cellmate eyewitness, became unavailable.

Epstein is Discovered Dead with Piles of Cloth in Violation of MCC Rules

On the morning of August 10, 2019, at approximately 6:30 am, Epstein was found dead in his cell. He had orange cloth wrapped around his neck, with the other end tied to the bunk bed frame, identical to how he was found on July 23rd. Photographs of Epstein’s cell show a giant mass of blankets, sheets, and linens.

This was in direct violation of MCC rules, which only permitted 2 blankets and 1 sheet. Epstein died in August, when it is hot in New York City, so there would be no need for extra linens. In addition, MCC Orders required that all cells in the SHU to be searched 5 times a day, and any items that violated facility rules to be immediately removed.

These were not trivial violations. Inmates have used excessive linens to facilitate escapes, assaults, and suicides. No valid explanation has been provided for why this was allowed when it should have been immediately rectified during one of the 5 daily cell searches or any one of the dozens of daily inmate counts.

The Video Footage Exposes Systematic Lies by the Trump Administration

The surveillance video released for the first time on July 7, 2025 is most critical piece of evidence. It proves that the Trump administration is engaged in a systematic pattern of deception. The video was provided as a link to the unsigned July 7th DOJ memo. It purports to show 11 hours of footage from the SHU common area on August 9th-10th of 2019.

The American people were told two things in the July 7th memo, both of which are patently false: first, that it was the original, raw footage except for color enhancement, and second, that it was taken from a viewpoint that proved no one could’ve accessed Epstein’s cell on L Tier at the SHU.

Initially, this is not the original, raw footage. CBS News and Wired hired video forensics experts to analyze the video at their conclusion was the same: the video’s metadata shows it is two files stitched together.

This is clear from the cursor that appears near the bottom, showing this is a screen recording. Moreover, the aspect ratio, meaning the size format, changes during playback.

Most critically, there’s 8 minutes missing. Recall that on July 23, 2019, the two MCC staff who heard a noise immediately ran to Epstein’s cell, opened the door, and had to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation to revive him. That’s how fast someone can die in the setting of a correctional facility. A lot can happen in eight minutes.

Put those technical details aside. Nothing is as damning as the content of the video itself. Recall that most of the surveillance cameras stopped recording at MCC due to a hard drive failure that occurred during the day before Epstein died. What we are left with is this video taken from an obstructed viewpoint all the way across the SHU from Epstein’s cell on L Tier. It does not cover his cell, most of the common area, the entrance to L Tier, and only a few inches of the stairway leading to L Tier is visible.

The July 7th memo claims that no one, consistent with the OIG Report, could have entered the SHU or Epstein’s cell without being seen. This is comprehensively refuted, however, by the tape itself. Throughout the day, you see numerous people enter the SHU without being seen until they are in the middle of the common area. This makes sense, given the location of the camera as demonstrated by this CBS News diagram constructed from photographs and maps of the SHU.

Let’s just watch Epstein himself on the evening of August 9th, while he was escorted back to his cell after MCC staff allowed him to make an unauthorized phone call to an unknown phone number in violation of BOP policy. He is wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, and the corrections officers are wearing dark clothing. This screenshot shows all three clearly visible on the screen at 7:49:34 p.m.

Once Epstein and one of the corrections officers start to ascend the stairs to L Tier, they both completely disappear from the screen just six seconds later.

Based on the footage, it would have been straightforward for someone to enter the SHU, walk up the stairs to L Tier, and enter Epstein’s cell without being detected on camera.

However, the deception gets much worse, because we see the outline of a person doing just that on the night Epstein died. Specifically, at 10:40 p.m., an orange shape ascends the stairs to Epstein’s cell on L Tier. Orange is the color of inmate clothing. MCC staff wore dark blue or black clothing.

The government’s position is that this reflects an MCC employee taking “linens” up to L Tier. The explanation is absurd and unsupportable, for several reasons.

First, the only MCC employees in the SHU at this time were Thomas and Noel. They were both interviewed, charged with crimes, pled guilty, and purportedly cooperated with the government. But neither of them admitted to being the mysterious figure on the stairs.

Are the American people supposed to believe that these two employees, who admitted to breaking numerous laws on the night of Epstein’s death, somehow wouldn’t admit to carrying bedsheets up a flight of stairs? If they truly cooperated with investigators, then they should’ve been asked about this critical issue. Either they weren’t, which is difficult to believe, or they were, and denied it was them.

Second, the timing makes no sense. At 10:40 p.m., inmates are asleep. The last “stand up” count is at 10:00 p.m. Inmates do not wake up until after 6 a.m. the next morning when breakfast is served. Why would Noel or Thomas wake up an inmate to give them linens 40 minutes after they went to bed?

Third, remember that Noel and Thomas pled guilty for lying about conducting the regularly-scheduled counts at 4 p.m., 10 p.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. as well as all of the 30 minute counts from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. the next day. They filled out records memorializing these lies. Throughout the night, they were sleeping on the job. For the government’s position to be correct, it would mean they did no work, but found time to carry linens to a sleeping inmate.

The discrepancy with the individual on the video at 10:40 p.m. went undiscovered for years, because the OIG Report did not provide video footage.

Conclusion: Total Transparency on Everything Epstein

During Jeffrey Epstein’s life, he used his wealth and power to facilitate the sexual abuse hundreds of underage girls. When he was finally charged, in Florida, he leveraged his connections to an unprecedented plea deal, which the government illegally hid from the victims.

And in death, Epstein continues to be the subject of government deception, which is once again calculated to protect the rich and powerful. This recurring theme echoes another: abandoning and retraumatizing the victims. Enough mistakes have been made. Enough lies have been told. It’s time for unflinching truth that only total transparency on everything Epstein can bring.

Release the Epstein Files.

That’s just one number. Harris lost Latino men by 10 percent, a dramatic shift of 33 points from Biden, who won them by 23 percent. Harris lost first-time voters by 10 percent, a precipitous drop of 20 percent from Biden. This pattern echoed across demographic categories: women, men, minorities, younger, older, rural, and urban: Harris lost ground, often significant ground, across the landscape of Biden's 2020 numbers.

The reasons for this collapse are being debated: Biden's decision to run for a second term, Harris's inability (or refusal) to distinguish herself from an incumbent saddled with low approval and high perceived inflation, and the campaign's failure to even attempt address television ads that ran 30,000 times in swing states that painted Harris as an extremist on social issues, among others.

These discussions, however, focus on messaging and the logistics of a presidential campaign. As such, they are secondary to the experiences of the electorate, the permanence of those experiences, and how they organize themselves as supporting cast members into a narrative amplified by the Trump campaign. I am a former lifelong Republican. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.

Since that time, I have voted Democrat and deregistered as a Republican in 2022. While there are many reasons for changing my political stripes—from January 6th to Ukraine—I retain an understanding of how events during the Biden administration were exploitable, and how those events have a lasting impact on voter perception. Before continuing, it is important for the reader to understand that I believe America has a character problem with respect to Donald Trump. Many who voted for him fully embraced his nativist, xenophobic, and anti-democratic brand of populism.

Be that as it may, we have to win with the electorate that we have, not the one we wish we had. This is the same country that gave Barack Obama eight years. They are winnable and focusing on racism or misogyny as the primary cause of Kamala Harris’s loss defeats the purpose of elections: to win. If we don’t win, we cannot protect people and we cannot protect democratic values. Reflection is the road we must follow in this endeavor, and future victory starts at this terminal.

To follow are the areas where the Democratic Party failed to separate itself from President Biden’s governance failures, and the perceptions that they created in the mind of the electorate.

The Trifecta

Immigration:

To understand where we are, we need to understand the road we traveled. So, let’s rewind a bit on immigration. Kamala Harris and indeed, 7 of the 10 candidates in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary stood on stage, before a national television audience and raised their hands to confirm they supported an immigration policy that totally decriminalized illegal immigration. In nearly every debate, which were highly publicized, a version of this litmus test repeated itself. Digest that for a moment.

This is effectively an open-borders policy on immigration. It is contrary to the existing federal statutes, the policies and decades-long practices of every agency in the federal government with a role in the immigration process, and it certainly polls like an extremist position, with 77% of Americans believing that illegal immigration is either a “crisis” or “major problem.”

That was the starting point, and over the next four years, the Biden Administration handled illegal immigration in a way that Donald Trump was able, with relative ease, to castigate as a damaging governmental failure. On his first day in office, President Biden immediately went to work to dismantle Trump-era policies that sought to reduce illegal immigration, through the use of executive orders. Some of these policies, like the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and family separation, were in need of significant changes, no question. But those were only two of many. Further, and more importantly, Biden’s first days in office signaled a trend of relaxing restrictions on illegal immigration.

Against this backdrop, illegal immigration soared to record heights, both in terms of statistics and in terms of the real-world impacts witnessed by everyday Americans. Let’s take the numbers first. In the first three years of Biden’s term, the illegal crossings at the southern border with Mexico were 1.7 million, 2.2 million, and 1.9 million from 2020 through 2023. During Trump’s four years in office, the illegal crossing numbers were drastically lower, amounting to 300,000, 396,000, 851,000, and 400,000 from 2016 through 2019.

Biden also released 3.3 million illegal border crossers into the United States. When you add in the “gotaways”—those who crossed the border illegally and were never encountered or apprehended—of 1.6 million, that leads to a verifiable, best-case scenario of approximately 4.9 million new illegal immigrants in the United States from February 2021 through February of 2024. These statistics are from the Department of Homeland Security or its subsidiary agencies, not Republican numbers.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention an event that seemed like pure political theater at the time, but which, with hindsight, was transformative in electing Donald Trump: Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign to bus unlawful migrants from Texas to large urban centers across the United States with Democratic Party political leadership. This had two critical effects: first, it increased the visibility of illegal immigration, and second, it took the tangible impacts of illegal immigration from the border states to the rest of America.

Concurrently with this time period, overdose deaths from Fentanyl also increased, dramatically, from 36,000 in 2019 to 56,000 in 2020, 70,000 in 2021, and 74,000 in 2022. This does not mean that all fentanyl came through the southern border with Mexico, or even most of it. It is, however, additional data point that is readily exploitable when woven into a message that can be used by the Trump political machine to animate the central theme of the 2024 campaign: illegal immigration is out of control and it’s hurting Americans.

It’s not just the numbers. It’s how the numbers jive with the reality perceived by broad swaths of the electorate. Across the United States, illegal immigration had real impacts. In my home state of Colorado, the City of Denver—a city with 550,000 residents—had to absorb 40,000 migrants over a two-year period, from 2022-2024. The cost to educate, house, and provide healthcare to this group cost $190 million dollars across the Denver metro area.  

This caused severe impacts on public services. Recreation centers were closed for emergency housing, offices for the department of motor vehicles were reduced to a 50 percent schedule, police and fire department budgets were slashed by millions, and the city froze hiring for 160 open positions. The experience of Denver was by no means unique.

New York City—the largest media market in the U.S.—is perhaps the most visible example. In one 12-month period from June of 2023 through June of 2024, over 183,000 unlawful migrants arrived and were provided shelter, food, health care, and education, at a cost of over $1 billion dollars. Put aside the numbers. They are the least important part of this equation. It is the imagery of this problem that tells the story.

And on that score, there were plenty of compelling set-pieces. Some of these unlawful migrants were provided free debit cards with $18,200 of annual value and free shelter in the iconic, four-star Roosevelt Hotel. That amount is more than double what is available under New York City’s SNAP welfare benefit program to U.S. citizens, according to an analysis by Newsweek in March of 2024.

Pause for a moment to consider the cost of living facing the average voter in New York City, as an example of the scene that played out in large cities across the United States. The median monthly rent for a studio apartment is $3,800, for a two-bedroom apartment, it is a soul-crushing $7,479. The former is 148% higher than the national average of $1,558 per month. In the 2024 Presidential Election, exit polling showed that 27% of the voters had a family income totaling less than $50,000 per year, and 60% had a total family income of less than $100,000 per year. Even at the high end, these statistics include a married couple each making $50,000 annually, with multiple children.

Inflation:

Now the line between inflation and illegal immigration becomes more clear: 90% of voters polled in September 2024 said that the economy was either an “extremely important” or “very important” issue to their voting decision. Although inflation had cooled from a high of 7% in 2021 to a 2.6% in 2024, inflation is unique as an economic condition because it is cumulative. It describes the rate at which prices increase, not the prices themselves. Once inflation has raised the cost of a good, it will stay at that level.

This explains why the Harris campaign was unable to get through to voters on the economy. When she said that the economy had improved because inflation had come down, she is describing an abstract concept—the reduction in the rate of price increases—rather than the simple question people ask themselves when assessing the economy: is my life more or less expensive?

With this constellation of factors, it isn’t difficult to see how illegal immigration and inflation influenced voting decisions. Imagine you are making $50,000 a year, maybe less, and working full time, barely making ends meet and paying through the nose for rent and health insurance. Every day, you are hearing about the flood of tens of thousands of unlawful migrants coming into your city, receiving free health care, living in four-star hotels, and getting debit cards with double the amount available to U.S. citizens, all taxpayer funded.   

You can’t go to the local recreation center to workout, because it is closed to house unlawful migrants. Your license plate just expired, but when you go to the DMV—already a dystopian exercise in the best of times—the door is locked, and the office is closed due to budget cuts. You go home, watch on the news, or turn on a right-leaning podcast, and see, day after day, authentic video footage of a thousand-plus unlawful migrants—in a single day—streaming across the border. If you watch Fox News, or any other right-wing media outlet, you would have seen this on a near-constant loop.

Lawlessness:

The Trump campaign, in combination with the right-wing media ecosystem used illegal immigration to frame the political landscape with another key message: public safety. Uncontrolled illegal immigration has the inherent character of lawlessness. This perception was exacerbated by reductions in public-safety budgets that were reallocated to caring for unlawful migrants, which had downstream effects, or perceived downstream effects, on crime.

Throughout the 2024 election cycle, lawlessness remained in the headlines because of the persistent barrage of anti-Israel protests that included imagery of rioters spray painting “Hamas” on treasured public monuments, pelting unarmed U.S. Park Rangers with bottles, and blocking highways leading to airports, with law enforcement nowhere in sight, seemingly acting with complete impunity.    

There was another perceived crisis, rarely mentioned as of late, but which created a lasting image of lawlessness that impacted the same large cities straining under the burdens of illegal immigration: homelessness. During Biden’s term in office, homelessness experienced a precipitous and steady increase. In 2023, an all-time record 653,104 Americans were homeless with 50% of those individuals residing in America’s 50 largest cities—including all of the cities experiencing budgetary difficulties due to illegal immigration. Tent cities that cropped up in these areas provided a constant visual reminder of perceived urban decay, lawlessness, and difficult economic conditions.

I have used the term “perceived” and “perception” frequently, because that is what drives voter behavior. The Trump campaign, the right wing media ecosystem of Fox News, OAN, Brietbart and others, and his army of right-wing influencers and podcasters relentlessly pushed narratives that echoed the thematic elements of his campaign for President: illegal immigration, inflation, and lawlessness. By September of 2022, the right track-wrong tack numbers were at an ominous level, with 70% of Americans believing the country was on the wrong track. This trend continued through the election, with 65% of registered voters polled in September of 2024 agreeing the country was on the wrong track.

Failed Response of the Harris Campaign

Up against these terrible polling numbers, when Kamala Harris was asked what she would do differently from President Biden, she had no answer. This was a critical failure for one simple reason: it signaled to the American voters—77% of whom thought illegal was a crisis or very important, and 70% of whom thought the country was on the wrong track—that nothing would change if she were elected. More of the same.

Kamala Harris also had a credibility problem: she had gone from an open-borders primary candidate who supported to single-payer health care to a Clinton moderate during the Presidential campaign. Voters simply did not believe she was as moderate as she attempted to portray herself and would not govern as such.

The trajectory would continue. Worse yet, there was a common refrain from the Democratic Party that attempted to deny the perceived reality of a many Americans: the economy is good, crime is down, and immigration will be handled, finally, over the next four years. Using esoteric statistics to argue against what many voters feel and believe is rarely an effective strategy.

On immigration, the Harris campaign tried to place blame on Trump for interfering with passage of the comprehensive border legislation in 2024. When she was asked why the Biden administration waited 3 years to submit this legislation to Congress, again, there was no effective response. To be fair, it is hard to see what response would have worked given that she was Biden’s Vice President and perceived as being part and parcel of his unpopular policies.

Much ink will be spilled in the coming weeks, months, and years on what went wrong for the Harris campaign. On the margins, this may be a useful exercise. But the key problems are straightforward and obvious: illegal immigration policies that contradicted what 77% of the Americans wanted at the outset of the Biden’s presidency, which had a predictable result over the next four years and was effectively used to feed an anti-incumbent message.