<....The DOGE duo dispute what they say is conventional wisdom that says presidents can’t fire federal workers, that those protections are there to protect workers only “from political retaliation,” but not from broader reductions that don’t target individuals. Further, they say, the president has the power to make other administrative changes, such as the relocation of agencies outside of Washington, which likely would result in many workers choosing to leave government service rather than uprooting. Congress might want a word on anything like that.

The Wall Street Journal opinion piece does not mention cost savings of nearly $2 trillion. Instead, the piece mentions taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in spending “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended.”

Musk and Ramaswamy also said that their initiative would identify “pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.” Whether this is a scaling back of ambitions or an oversight in failing to cite the full scope of the cuts previously described isn’t clear.

Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, who oversaw Gore’s reinventing government initiative, offered counsel to the incoming administration in a piece on the Brookings website entitled, “Cut the government with a scalpel, not an axe.” That was the approach taken during the Clinton administration, which resulted in the elimination of 640,000 pages of internal agency rules and a reduction in the federal workforce of 426,000 employees.

In an interview on Friday, Kamarck applauded the Trump team’s determination to review federal regulations. “A regulatory review is a very sensible and good thing to do and ought to be done periodically anyway,” she said. But she had reservations about some of the other things Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about.

As a candidate for the Republican nomination this year, Ramaswamy claimed the federal workforce could be cut by three-quarters over eight years, with a 50 percent reduction achievable in the first year or two, along with a 40 percent reduction in the number of agencies and units in the executive branch. “I’m probably the candidate in the last 30 years who has the deepest understanding of how to actually shut down the administrative state,” he told Washington Post editors and reporters in June 2023.

Musk has a reputation for cutting budgets or workers at companies he owns, including Tesla, X and Space X. A recent New York Times article said he was often willing “to cut too much rather than too little” and also described him as having spent six hours going line by line through Twitter’s budget with the company’s executives, ordering cuts along the way and brooking no resistance.

Kamarck, however, questioned whether the federal bureaucracy is truly bloated, as Ramaswamy and the Trump team claim. There are, she noted about 19,000 Border Patrol agents. How many of those would Trump cut while still making good on his promise to secure the border and deport millions?>

<....There are about 1,800 air traffic controllers, she said. Would Trump’s team cut that workforce significantly, causing potential flight cancellations and disruption? “It will take about a week and Congress will say, ‘Hey, you can’t do this,’” she said.

And how deeply would he try to cut the workforce at the Social Security Administration, at the risk of checks not being sent out promptly or other breakdowns in a program that he has otherwise vowed not to touch?

Kamarck offered other examples of where the Trump team could produce only symbolic victories. Trump has targeted the Department of Education for elimination. Kamarck said the department could be eliminated but two key programs likely would remain — the student loan program and Title 1, which adds to state and local governments for low-achieving students in areas of higher poverty.

The student loan program could be shifted to the Treasury Department and Title 1 to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said, which means a portion of its budget would be shifted rather than cut. Its workforce is the smallest of any Cabinet agency. Kamarck’s point is that after programs are shifted, the money saved might not be significant and the number of workers eliminated would be tiny.

Kamarck also cautioned the Trump team about its notion that the best approach is to rely primarily on people outside of government to lead the effort, if that is their plan. The Grace Commission did that, using people in the private sector to bring a business sensibility to the federal government. Gore’s operation worked closely with people in the agencies, which Kamarck argued produced better results. “The fat in the government is like the fat in good piece of steak,” she said. “It’s marbled through it.”

Musk and Ramaswamy claimed that with his electoral college majority and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump is poised for “a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.” In the face of expected opposition, they said, “We expect to prevail.”

Those words no doubt reflect the aggressive approach the president-elect and his advisers hope to take once he is sworn in. Meanwhile, executive branch employees are bracing for what could be coming and opponents are preparing to resist through legal and other channels. Whether Trump’s shock troops, led by Musk and Ramaswamy, are truly ready will be known soon.>

Don't like it here, <ozhole ****sucker>? Stay away; no-one is forcing you to stalk me!

<In 2022, Kari Lake narrowly lost the race for Arizona governor to Katie Hobbs.

Many pundits predicted a bright future for the outspoken former television news broadcaster in the MAGA Republican Party. But this month, Lake came up short again, this time by a larger margin, in her Senate race against Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). She ran eight points behind Donald Trump and six points behind GOP candidates for the House of Representatives in Arizona.

In explaining Lake’s defeat in an election that was favorable to Republicans throughout the country, political scientist Larry Sabato declared, “Kari Lake is a case unto herself … The way she comes across, there’s just an arrogance that turns people off.” Columnist Phil Boas wrote in the Arizona Republic that Lake is “an unreformed fanatic.”

They may be right. But it’s also possible that her defeats indicate — as did the unsuccessful 2022 candidacies of Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — that voters do not respond to Trump wannabes nearly as enthusiastically as they do to the man himself.

Lake describes herself as “Trump in heels.” Echoing Trump during her 2022 campaign, Lake called the late Sen. John McCain “a loser.” At one of her rallies, she asked if any McCain Republicans were in the audience and then told them to “get the hell out.”

At another rally, she announced she was “going to repeat something that President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him into trouble: They are bringing drugs, they are bringing crime, and they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”

Reprising Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media, Lake called the Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in the state, “repugnant.” She dismissed a reporter who criticized her advocacy of using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 as “a worm.”

When Hobbs was declared the winner of the gubernatorial race, Lake maintained that the election was “the most dishonest” in the history of Arizona. She refused to concede and filed legal challenges, none of which have gotten any traction in the courts. She accused Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican who was the Maricopa County official in charge of voter registration and mail voting, of sabotaging vote tabulations.

After receiving “threats of violence, even death” against himself and his family, Richler [sic] sued Lake for defamation. Lake insisted she was the victim of “a political witch hunt and everyone knows it.” But as the trial date approached, Lake — probably to avoid embarrassing revelations in the legal discovery process — refused to defend herself in court and lost her right to contest the merits of the case. A default judgment was made against her and a jury will decide on damages next year.

More than a few Arizona voters who believe that Trump won the 2020 election and it was stolen from him do not think that Lake was robbed in 2022.

In 2024, the content and tone of Lake’s campaign remained unmistakably Trumpian. Lake falsely accused Gallego of voting to let millions of illegal immigrants “who poured into our country” cast ballots in the election. She claimed, without evidence, that Gallego and Vice President Kamala Harris planned to “decimate” Social Security by raising the age at which retirees can receive benefits. Although Gallego had voted for legislation funding the recruitment and retention of law enforcement officials, she insisted that he had actually cosponsored a bill to defund the police.

Citing the conviction of Gallego’s father for possession of and intent to distribute marijuana and cocaine, Lake alleged the congressman was “controlled by Colombian cartels.” Gallego’s parents, it turned out, divorced when he was in high school. Ashamed of the crimes committed by his father (who is actually Mexican), Ruben subsequently took his mother’s last name.

And to refute baseless Lake campaign claims that Gallego is a “deadbeat dad” who abandoned his family shortly before his wife gave birth, he released the text of his own divorce and coparenting agreement, characterized by the judge as “one of the most garden variety” filings he has ever seen.

Love him or hate him, Trump is a case unto himself. To date, no Trump wannabe — including Lake, the “Trump in heels” who struck out twice — has emerged as an electable successor. Trump, no doubt, likes it that way.

And many Americans, who voted against him out of fear and loathing, may take a sliver of solace in that apparent political reality as they suffer through the next four years — tempered, to be sure, by the 47th president’s recurring “joke” that he might find a way to stay in the White House for a third term.>

<Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) called for all Department of Justice employees who worked on President-elect Donald Trump's indictments to be fired.

In an appearance on NBC News's Meet the Press, Schmitt went further than most in calling for "accountability" against those who prosecuted Trump, saying retribution should extend to all employees who helped prosecute Trump.

"You saw all these cases resurrected. They all fell apart under the weight of the law," he said. "And so I do think there needs to be accountability. I think that getting it back to crime fighting is important, but there has to be accountability for these kinds of abuses."

When pressed on what this would entail, Schmitt said that it should go much further than just removing special prosecutor Jack Smith.

"I think accountability means, first and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately," he said. "And anybody a part of this, this effort to keep President Trump off the ballot, and to throw him in jail for the rest of his life because they didn't like his politics, and to continue to cast him as a 'threat to democracy,' was wrong, and so we'll see where that goes."

"But I just don't think in this country, unless we want to be a banana republic, I don't want to see that happen. You can't have the Justice Department abused in this way," Schmitt added.

He also praised Trump's attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, saying she would end the "weaponization" of the DOJ.

Schmitt was previously on the shortlist to become Trump's attorney general.

Trump and his allies have always portrayed the four criminal indictments against him as politically motivated, arguing that President Joe Biden and the Democrats were using the DOJ to crush their foremost opponent, accusations they denied. Trump's victory on Nov. 5 effectively ruined the four indictments against him, with each being either suspended or dismissed.

Sentencing for his one conviction, in the New York hush money trial, has been suspended indefinitely.>

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been tapped to lead a House subcommittee connected to the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has named her targets for investigation and defunding. They include: NPR, "toilets in Africa," "sex apps in Malaysia," sanctuary cities, and the Pentagon.

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, Greene said America has been "really spoiled for a long time," calling the federal government "one of the worst abusers of American's tax dollars and the American people's trust."

She promised to comb through "every single government department, program, grant programs, contracts" to identify what she deems as waste.

"When we look into a deep dive into this massive problem that's caused America to be 36 trillion dollars in debt, we're going to have to go into all kinds of buckets. And that's how I'll be separating things on the oversight subcommittee on DOGE," she said.

She continued, "We'll be looking at everything from government-funded media program like NPR, that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda. We'll be going into grant programs that fund things like sex apps in Malaysia, toilets in Africa."

NPR has long been a target of conservatives who don't like its reporting. In April, after NPR CEO Katherine Maher declined to testify at a committee hearing about alleged biased reporting, the Republican House majority sent a letter to Maher demanding she report to Congress about NPR newsroom employees' political affiliations. Musk fired shots at NPR when his company, X, added a tag to the media outlet's posts that identified it as "state-affiliated media," later changing the label to "government-funded media." NPR pushed back, saying identifying it with those terms is false and misleading, and it ceased posting on X.

The alleged "sex apps in Malaysia" Greene mentioned is a reference to JomCare, an app created by Roman Shrestha, an assistant professor in the University of Connecticut's Department of Allied Health Sciences, with a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The app is designed to increase access to harm reduction services for gay and bisexual men engaging in chemsex - the practice of taking psychoactive drugs before or during sexual activities - with the goal of reducing the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

Although Greene did not expand on what she meant by "toilets in Africa," she could be referring to USAID funding for sanitation programs in Africa that reduce the spread of disease and bring clean water to communities in need. As USAID writes on their website, "Water and sanitation are essential to advance global health, prosperity, stability, and resilience."

Also on Greene's hit list are the Department of Defense. "I want to talk to the people at the Pentagon and ask them why they can't find billions of dollars every single year and why they fail their audit," she said.

"But not just that," Greene continued. "I'd like to talk to the governors of sanctuary states and the mayors of sanctuary cities and have them come before our committee and explain why they deserve federal dollars if they're going to harbor illegal criminal aliens in their states and their cities."

"We're going to look into every single aspect, and we don't care about people's feelings," Greene concluded.

Of course, rather than going on a federal budget witch hunt, another way to reduce the deficit is to roll back the massive tax cuts for the wealthy that Trump signed in 2017. But considering Republicans are already planning to extend the cuts, even though doing so will further reduce federal revenue by approximately $4 trillion, that route seems unlikely. Instead, we'll get whatever circus Musk, Ramaswamy, and Greene can conjure up.>

<Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) fired back at Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) on Sunday morning after his colleague stated she has no doubts ex-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has been "compromised" and is unfit to serve as Donald Trump's Director of National Intelligence.

Gabbard has come under increasing scrutiny after the president-elect nominated her for the highly sensitive intel post with even Republicans –– including Nikki Haley –– questioning her judgment and her foreign ties.

During an earlier interview on CNN's "State of The Union," the Illinois Democrat told host Dana Bash, "Well, I think she's compromised. I think by going to Syria and basically backing a brutal dictator there — I mean, Russian-controlled media called her a Russian asset. So I do think that we have a real deep concern whether or not she's a compromised person. And, frankly, the U.S. Intelligence Committee — I'm sorry — the U.S. intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America's foes. And so my worry is that she couldn't pass a background check."

After a commercial break, Mullin was asked about Duckworth's remarks and he was not pleased.

"I got a lot of respect for Tammy, and I've known her for years we served together in the House, but for her to use ridiculous and outright dangerous words like that is wrong," he responded.

"You got to keep in mind, Tulsi Gabbard is still a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army," he offered. "She commands the reserve unit here in Oklahoma and Missouri. If she was compromised, if she wasn't able to pass a background check, if she wasn't able to do her job, she still wouldn't be in the Army."

"So Tammy is absolutely dead wrong on this and she should retract those words, that's the most dangerous thing she could say," he warned.>

<Elon Musk is already identifying specific government employees with “fake jobs” as he recommends mass firings as co-chair of Donald Trump’s newly-created Department of Government Efficiency.

The billionaire re-shared a post last week that highlighted Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the US International Development Finance Corporation. The original poster shared a screenshot of Thomas’s role, writing, “I don’t think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation.”

Musk captioned his re-shared post: “So many fake jobs.”

Thomas’s role is anything but fake. Her work involves finding innovations that serve the country’s interests, an agency official told the Wall Street Journal, including bolstering infrastructure and agriculture against extreme weather events — which are on the rise due to the ongoing climate crisis.

Thomas, 37, holds engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford, and “works for a federal agency that partners with private companies to finance ways to improve living standards in developing countries,” according to the Journal.

Musk’s remark sparked a flurry of responses, with some defending Thomas while others mocked her.

“A tough way for Ashley Thomas to find out she’s losing her job,” one user posted, according to the Journal.

“You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and dangerously targeting a person who works an honest job to provide for their family,” civil rights activist Michael Skolnik said.

An official with the US International Development Finance Corporation told The Independent the agency “does not comment on individual personnel positions or matters.”

Musk and Ramaswamy also penned an op-ed for the Journal last week explaining their plan for the Department of Government Efficiency.

They claimed their department will be guided by a pair of Supreme Court rulings that legal scholars have warned will turn the courts into weapons against federal regulations that right-wing groups have spent years trying to undermine, The Independent previously reported.

“We are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers,” they wrote. “The Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone.”

“They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress,” they continued. “Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”

Musk and Ramaswamy appear “utterly ignorant” of federal laws that mandate clear and strict procedures for repealing regulations, administrative law expert and George Washington University professor Richard Pierce told The Washington Post on Sunday.>

<On Nov. 5, Americans hired Donald Trump to do three things: put more money into their pockets; lower prices for gas, groceries and rent and restore order at the southern border.  

Trump was not hired to gut the Justice Department, abolish the FBI, pardon the Jan. 6 rioters, weaken our intelligence agencies, eliminate the Department of Education or “go wild on health.”

Trump’s initial nominations of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for attorney general (now withdrawn), Pete Hesgeth [sic] for secretary of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, and Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services go far beyond the directives he received from voters.

Instead of lending expertise to those departments, Trump is determined to exact revenge by gutting them. As Trump consigliere Steve Bannon says, “It ain’t morning in America.”

In 1967, social scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril explained that Americans were ideological conservatives who wanted to reduce the size of government, but programmatic liberals who did not want to cut Social Security and Medicare or eliminate education and environmental spending.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who is working with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, says that Musk “doesn’t bring a chisel, he brings a chainsaw, and we’re going to be taking it to that bureaucracy.” Ramaswamy added, “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

But chainsaws are not what the voters ordered. The “fun” will stop when they conclude that less government is very different from no government.

Trump is determined to overstep the instructions he received from the voters. In so doing, he is repeating a pattern that has plagued recent presidencies.

The twin examples of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are illustrative.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected to improve economic conditions and lead the United States into a post-Cold War world. Campaigning as a New Democrat, Clinton rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal one-size-fits-all approach to big government.

But once installed in the Oval Office, Clinton put Hillary in charge of healthcare. Her expansive and complex plan was not what the voters had in mind.

Similarly, Clinton’s order allowing gays to serve in the military under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy also ran counter to what voters were willing to accept.

Finally, Clinton’s ban on assault weapons was viewed as an attack on the Second Amendment.

By 1994, voters wondered whether they had elected George McGovern instead of Bill Clinton. Using the slogan “God, guns and gays,” Newt Gingrich led his fellow Republicans to a resounding victory. For the first time since 1953, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

Assessing the outcome, Bill Clinton admitted voters sent him a message: “We just don’t like what we see when we watch Washington, and you haven’t done much about that.”

George W. Bush suffered a similar fate. In 2004, he won reelection on his promise to keep America safe following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the homeland.

But flush with victory, Bush boasted, “I earned political capital in this campaign, and I intend to spend it.” He spent that capital (and more) with his unpopular proposal to partially privatize Social Security. Incurring immediate opposition, his plan never received a vote even though Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

That failure, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the quagmire of the Iraq War led to a backlash in the 2006 midterm elections. Democrats were put back in charge on Capitol Hill, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) began her long tenure as House Speaker. A humbled George W. Bush called the results “a thumping.”....>

<....There is something about the presidency that causes its victors to overreach beyond what the voters want. The late George Reedy, who was Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary, wrote in “The Twilight of the Presidency” that a state of euphoria envelops every president-elect when “caution, introspection, and humility are most needed.”

Winning the presidency is a heady experience. The victor sits atop the political world as their White Houses, as Reedy wrote, resemble a king’s court. Suddenly emboldened, these newly minted Chief Magistrates want to exercise vast powers beyond those voters wished to confer with few around to tell them “no.”

Writing in The New Yorker after John F. Kennedy’s 1960 win, Richard Rovere perceptively noted that the “sovereign people” had given Kennedy “a victory without a verdict and a majority without a mandate.” 

A humble Kennedy understood the fragility of his political situation. When liberal Democrats sought his backing for progressive social programs, he would remind them that he had not won a mandate and needed to be reelected first.

Trump will never face the sovereign voters again. Lacking any such accountability makes it even more likely that those inside the Trump White House will treat its occupant, as Reedy once explained, “with all of the reverence of a monarch.”

Humility is not a personal characteristic associated with either monarchs or Trump. And presidents with outsized egos have caused more than one administration to end in failure.

Even before Trump renews his promise to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the twilight of his presidency is already visible on the horizon.

Steve Bannon is right: “It ain’t morning in America.”

Having won a hard-fought victory, Trump is quickly squandering it.>

<With the early exchanges on the queenside, this one had draw written all over it.

18.f3!? Properly played, and the horses soon repeat. Surely Ben Finegold agrees with FTB this time.

After years, decades of vehemently stating otherwise, it's important for CG regulars to realize that the all-knowing perfidiot gave his two cents and said nothing - NOTHING - against playing the Four Knights, Italian variation C50: analysis of move 5...?

Astounding that such a repeat verbal abuser could somehow keep his big trap shut. Maybe the old dog has learned something from stalking FTB around all these many years....>

Speaking of abusive conduct....

<House Republicans' hunt for cold, hard cash threatens to further complicate Speaker Mike Johnson's majority — which is on track to be the narrowest since the Great Depression.

Johnson's power flows from his close bond with President-elect Trump. Keeping that power will depend on how many of Johnson's members he can convince to defer their big paydays until after 2025.

Salary is a major sore spot for House lawmakers. They last got a pay bump to $174,000 in 2009 and are banned from the lucrative advances on book deals that their Senate colleagues enjoy.

Just Monday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) joined — and then deactivated — a Cameo account offering personalized video pep talks for $250 a pop.

Her colleagues aren't that far off: Multiple House Republicans have told Axios they'd be eager to monetize their X accounts, among other side hustles.

🚨 But the real threat to Johnson's majority is people leaving for private-sector jobs.

At least five House lawmakers quit Congress early in the last two years to pursue private-sector paychecks. Another four resigned early for other reasons, two died in office and one was expelled.

If similar patterns play out over the next two years, Johnson's majority is permanently at risk.

"They're going to need to do something because it impacts recruitment," one member told Axios. "You'll get rich people or people that [sic] can't get better jobs."

Johnson will start Jan. 3 with (at most!) a 221-213 vote majority, before falling as low as 218-216 until special elections can replace Trump Cabinet appointees.

Florida will hold a special election on April 1 to fill the seats of former Rep. Matt Gaetz and Trump's national security adviser nominee Rep. Michael Waltz.

New York expects a similar timeline to replace Rep. Elise Stefanik, who's nominated as UN ambassador.

Even at full strength, the House GOP majority will be at most 221-214. That's a margin nightmares are made of.>

<stoner and perfidiot will never admit that they're just plain wrong about anything. Now the duo tropes think they understand chess better than the youthful Dommaraju Gukesh. What a pair they make.

We wonder when they'll renounce their citizenship and move out of the country?? Perhaps migrate to Canada, Little St. James Island, Cuba, or Gaza City? They'll give Americans a bad name there.>

There is almost imagination displayed here, <fredremf>. Spent time with someone who has a brain lately? It's the only possible explanation, moronic twat.

<One of the most useful things to remember about Donald Trump’s response to the investigations he has faced since announcing his first presidential bid nine years ago is that he began calling the investigation into Russian interference in that election a “witch hunt” on Jan. 10, 2017. This was after the New York Times published a report about Trump having been briefed on the probe but well before most of the most damaging or most contentious elements emerged.

In other words, he didn’t call it a witch hunt only after the investigation concluded. He called it a witch hunt just as it was beginning — meaning that the phrase reflected his interest in framing the probe as invalid and unwarranted far more than it reflected what would ultimately be uncovered.

This pattern continued as the investigations continued: They were artificial, all of them, created by his enemies to take him down. He established the baseline of unfairness and, however obviously fair the investigations would ultimately prove to be, he and his allies painted all of them with that same brush.

Few allies of Trump's deployed that brush as enthusiastically as Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity holds a unique spot in the vast right-wing media universe that surrounds Trump. His loyalty is unwavering and his personal relationship with Trump intimate — but he also has one of the most prominent platforms in media, which he uses to present pro-Trump messaging as objective assessments. Fox News classifies his program as opinion, but Hannity has for a long time intimated to viewers that he was offering something much more concrete.

His Monday show began with Hannity celebrating the end of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results. That request from Smith’s office has been expected since Trump won this year’s election earlier this month; Trump’s fuming about the probe (which, of course, he presents as biased) made very clear that it would not continue once he is inaugurated.

Hannity, of course, presented this very differently.

“Tonight, a monumental win for Donald Trump and the rule of law,” he crowed. “The weaponized, politicized Biden-Harris justice system is now waving the white flag of surrender, thanks, frankly, to all of you, the American people.”

He went on like this for a while, praising his own program for reporting regularly what was “now crystal clear to all: These charges were never about justice, and the American people rejected all of the nine years of smears, slander, besmirchment, lawfare, weaponization of justice” in the presidential contest.

All of this is just framing, obviously. The election didn’t hinge centrally on the investigations of Trump; nor, if it had, would that have rendered the investigations as invalid. Trump’s presidential bid was always his best defense against the charges, and his victory gave him the power to kneecap them. Smith withdrew the indictment while retaining the ability of federal prosecutors to file them again in the future — a move rooted in the understanding that the charges were a response to Trump’s actions, not the Trump-Hannity argument that it was simply President Joe Biden trying to be mean.

“This was always a blatant effort by, unfortunately, actors, Democrats, your federal government, to destroy Donald Trump and prevent him from ever becoming president again,” Hannity claimed, later adding that it was “critical that the Department of Justice undergo much-needed reforms. Measures need to be put in place so this can never ever happen again to anybody, Democrat [or] Republican.”

After the monologue, he spoke briefly with Fox News contributor Gregg Jarrett, who echoed the same assertions about vindication and the failures of Trump’s opponents. Then Hannity again summarized the need for change.

“My warning to conservatives is there might be a desire to get back at them,” meaning Democrats, he said. “We can’t become them, and we have to reject this outright.”...>

<....Then he introduced his next guests: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Tom Homan, chosen by Trump to lead the government's handling of border issues when he becomes president.

Hannity began the conversation by echoing rhetoric about the dangers of immigrants and of crossing the border. He played a clip of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (D) in which Johnston responded to a comment Homan made recently about potentially jailing elected officials who wouldn’t facilitate Trump’s mass deportation plans.

“I'm not afraid of that,” Johnston said, “and I'm also not seeking that.”

Hannity asked Homan to respond.

“Me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing,” he said. “He’s willing to go to jail. I’m willing to put him in jail. Because there’s a statute. It’s Title 8 United States Code 1324 (iii). And what it says is it’s a felony if you knowingly harbor and conceal illegal aliens from immigration authorities. It’s also a felony to impede a federal law enforcement officer.”

He went on a bit, including talking about Trump's “mandate” and that sort of thing.

You see the contrast here, though. Hannity begins his show fuming at how federal prosecutors attempted to hold Trump to account for allegedly attempting to subvert the 2020 election and for retaining classified documents at his home in Florida. This was political; this was unacceptable. But then Homan steps up and, pointing to Trump’s political support, declares that he will use the letter of the law to punish Democrats who stand in his way.

Homan wants to use the letter of the law to arrest Trump’s political opponents because they oppose Trump’s political goals. Smith was appointed as special counsel to separate the prosecutions of Trump from the Justice Department. Federal grand juries in D.C. and Florida determined that there was enough evidence to bring charges. The former Hannity views as proper governance; the latter, hopeless partisanship.

“So you will be going into Colorado, Illinois, New York, California, and you are going to uphold the law of the land,” Hannity replied. “That’s your commitment. It doesn’t matter what these elected politicians threaten or say that they’re going to do?”

“We're going to enforce the law, period,” Homan replied. “And they're not going to stop us.”

After a while, the segment wrapped up.

“We've got to protect every American against all of these criminals that have gotten into this country,” Hannity said in conclusion, accusing the Biden administration of putting Americans at risk. He thanked his guests before preparing to go to commercial.

“When we come back,” he said, “the left, their lawfare against Donald Trump continues to collapse. The American people overwhelmingly support the Trump transition. Lara Trump will join us next.”

You will not be surprised to learn that she also thought that the prosecution of her father-in-law was just politics at its worst.>

<The top lawyer on Donald Trump's transition team investigated a longtime adviser to the president-elect over allegations he used his proximity to Trump to score payments from those seeking roles or influence in the new administration.

The review conducted by lawyer David Warrington recommended that Trump aides sharply constrain adviser Boris Epshteyn's access to the president-elect, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter.

The personnel drama spotlights the unusual and often-disorganized cast of characters around Trump who contributed to the chaos of his first term, some of whom are part of the transition to the second as he looks to build out his administration before he takes office on Jan. 20.

Among those Epshteyn is alleged to have sought payments from is Scott Bessent, Trump's nominee to be treasury secretary. Bessent mounted a monthslong campaign to win the job but was opposed by Epshteyn allegedly after the hedge fund executive didn't agree to pay him a substantial retainer.

The review also examined a complaint from former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who resigned in scandal but has expressed interest in joining Trump's administration. Greitens signed a declaration last week recounting a Nov. 7 conversation with Epshteyn that alleged that his “overall tone and behavior gave me the impression of an implicit expectation to engage in business dealings with him before he would advocate for or suggest my appointment to the President. This created a sense of unease and pressure on my part.”

Epshteyn isn't accused of doing anything illegal — securing fees for access to senior government officials is the bread and butter of Washington's lobbying establishment — but the investigation appeared designed to weaken or eliminate his prominent position within Trump's orbit. The president-elect has long chafed at those he viewed as using him for their own personal gain.

“As is standard practice, a broad review of the campaign’s consulting agreements has been conducted and completed, including as to Boris, among others," said Trump communications director Steven Cheung. "We are now moving ahead together as a team to help President Trump Make America Great Again.”

Veterans of other presidential campaigns and transitions said such a review was anything but standard, and Cheung did not comment on Epshteyn's role going forward.

Epshteyn, who served briefly in a mid-level role in Trump's first White House, became a central player in Trump's life after he left office in 2021. He was one of the architects of Trump's legal team and strategy as the former president faced an array of criminal and civil threats after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Epshteyn himself was indicted on state charges in Arizona related to alleged efforts by Trump allies to subvert that election and has pleaded not guilty. He holds the title of senior counsel and senior adviser to Trump, but even before the review he was not expected to take a role in the incoming administration.

“I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” Epshteyn said in a statement. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from Making America Great Again.”

Eric Trump, the president-elect's son who went to college with Epshteyn, told Fox News that if the reported allegations were true, his old friend might not be around the campaign much longer.

“Listen, I have known Boris for years, and I have never known him to be anything but a good human being,” Eric Trump said Monday. “So, that said, I will tell you, my father’s been incredibly clear. You do not, you do not do that under any circumstance. And, believe me, there will be repercussions if somebody was.”

The investigation into Epshteyn was first reported by the conservative website Just the News.

“I suppose every President has people around them who try to make money off them on the outside. It’s a shame but it happens,” Trump told the website. “But no one working for me in any capacity should be looking to make money. They should only be here to Make America Great Again.”

During the 2022 midterms, some in Trump’s orbit also represented candidates seeking his endorsement, leading to accusations that aides were profiting off their proximity to the former president.>

<The results were decisive.

The president-elect won a second term by more than 2.5 million raw votes, and convincingly in the electoral college. Republicans added four seats in the Senate and three in the House of Representatives to establish a power trifecta. While there were no changes in each party's tally of governorships or major shifts in state legislatures, voters nonetheless solidified a Republican advantage at the state level.

As a result, the returning president declared that he had earned a lot of political capital and intended to spend it.

This is all referring, of course, not to today, but to the re-election of George W. Bush 20 years ago. And it's a cautionary tale, because Bush made the fundamental mistake of misreading his mandate and overreaching on ideas that the American public never signed up for. It killed his second term.

Now, the biggest question in American politics is whether President-elect Donald Trump is about to do the same thing. Sure seems like it.

In Bush's case, his first error was treating a near-tie like a rout. He had not really "earned capital in the political campaign" as he claimed. He had eked out a narrow victory based on the afterglow of the post-9/11 "war on terror" and by redirecting voters' focus onto cultural issues. So, his "capital" had all the staying power of a crypto-bro's bitcoin account.

His second error was trying to cash in this phantom currency on something voters hadn't asked for and didn't want. Despite only one percent of Americans saying Social Security was one of their top priorities, (zero percent for Bush's own voters) Bush launched a quixotic attempt to privatize America's most popular entitlement program. It...didn't go well.

Of course, that debacle wasn't the only thing that cratered Bush's second term. But the rapid, angry voter backlash—the issue cut almost 10 points off his job approval rating in three months—badly weakened him. And weakness is provocative. A politically enfeebled Bush found it harder and harder to overcome other setbacks, like the increasing quagmire in Iraq, a growing backlash to the cultural conservatism of 2004 on issues like gay marriage, and the fumbled response to Hurricane Katrina. He left office with one of lowest approval ratings ever.

Is Trump about to repeat this history?

The setup is certainly there. Note the eerie similarity between Bush's election results and Trump's: the numbers are virtually identical—a clear win, but hardly a crush. Nor would it be the first time a president fell into a mandate trap: they almost invariably do, because it's so tempting to claim that voters love you and all of your ideas. And boy does Trump love to claim that.

But whether hubris turns into overreach comes down to whether Trump and his team can accurately read what voters are asking for. While that's usually more art than science, this year, the post-election analysis makes it clear.

The research consortium Blueprint finds that "The top reasons voters gave for not supporting Harris were that inflation was too high (+24), too many immigrants crossed the border (+23), and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class (+17)" (among swing voters, that last concern about cultural issues was the strongest reason). Polling firm Navigator Research confirms that Trump's best assets were voters' belief that he would "secure the border and fight illegal immigration" and "fix our economy and get things back to the way they were when he was president last time."

Trump can reasonably claim a mandate to maintain low inflation, tighten the border, and ratchet back progressive culture a bit. Simple.

At the same time, Trump would be wise to remember a few important points. Voters prioritized the economy over immigration by a three to one margin. While voters thought Vice President Kamala Harris had gotten too woke, only 8 percent cited a candidate's position on transgender issues as a reason for their vote. And during Trump's first term, his child separation policy created an angry public recoil, with polling numbers at almost the exact same level as Bush's Social Security privatization.

In other words, go too far, and your "mandate" can turn sour pretty quickly. Trump seems not to have gotten that....>

<....Voters' clearest message is, whatever you do, don't create another round of inflation. But that is exactly what his tariff plan would do, and his cabinet picks and messages to European allies seem to be signaling his intention to follow through on it bigly.

If the president throws resources at border control and follows through on targeted deportation of undocumented immigrants, he'll be on very solid ground with the electorate. But if he veers into cruelty again or follows through on mass deportations using the military, stalling the economy and bumping up inflation, he'll find himself standing on a sinkhole. Did I mention that he named the architect of the child separation policy, Stephen Miller, as his lead staffer on policy?

Cut back on DEI training in the federal government? No problem. Obsess about trans folks? Watch the worm turn.

And guess what else is nowhere to be found on voters' priority list? Chaos.

Voters gave Trump a pass on the bedlam of the first term, and the disaster of 2020, largely because they forgot about it in a post pandemic haze. If Trump makes them relive it, they are unlikely to appreciate the reminder.

So, if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants communities to reconsider a lower priority policy like water fluoridation, sure. But if he undermines people's access to insurance through the Affordable Care Act, not so much. And remember that vaccines have prevented the deaths of more than a million American children in the past three decades. Trump will let RFK "go wild" on that at his peril. (Also, Don, here's a hint: don't let Dr. Oz mess too much with people's Medicare. Just sayin'.)

Above all else, Trump should remember that he's facing the headwinds of history. Every midterm of the last 20 years has gone against the sitting president. The fastest way to make the backlash a certainty is to overreach. And that seems to be where he's headed.>

<Many Americans were sorely disappointed this week when special prosecutor Jack Smith decided to drag up and withdraw the Jan. 6 indictment and the appeal of the classified documents case dismissal against Donald Trump. Smith said in his filings that the government stood by the charges but because of the Justice Department's (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel's rule that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, he had no choice but to drop the charges.The judges in the cases acceded to his requests and dismissed them both without prejudice although the idea that anyone will bring these cases in 2029 when Trump is 82 years old is fanciful. It's over. He got away with it once again.

It's not that we didn't know it was coming one way or the other. In fact, from the moment the Supreme Court issued its shocking opinion on presidential immunity, the writing was on the wall that Trump would face no accountability even if he didn't win the election. It went without saying that if he won, he would order the cases dismissed and that would be that. So, this wasn't a surprise but like so much else we've experienced with Trump, not the least of which was this last election, it was just one more depressing, enervating event seemingly designed to drain the fight out of anyone who sees this man's lawlessness and corruption as a blight on our nation.

That's because one of the disturbing consequences of the repeated failures to hold him to account is the fact that he seems invincible, impervious to negative ramifications for his actions and is therefore seen by his followers as a kind of superhero with magical powers. It's not true, of course. He's no hero, super or otherwise. He's just a shameless, corrupt con artist who has lied his way out of trouble his whole life. And now that he knows he has immunity from any criminal acts he might commit as president, he is willing to use his power to punish his enemies. He's made it clear that Jack Smith and his team are among them.

On a radio show before the election, Trump said that he would fire Smith in "two seconds" because he now has immunity. He also declared that "we should throw Jack Smith out with them, the mentally deranged people. Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country." Do you think he bears a grudge at all?

When former Congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew after Trump's daft nomination of the Florida man for Attorney General there was a great sigh of relief that someone so unfit would not be made the top law enforcement officer in the land. It was obvious that Trump had nominated Gaetz with the express purpose of going after his enemies in the DOJ and using the power of federal law enforcement to prove his accusations against the department's alleged "weaponization." He has scores to settle and Gaetz was champing at the bit to help him do it.

Unfortunately for Gaetz, he'd made so many enemies on Capitol Hill that Trump was forced to tell him he had to go. (It almost certainly wasn't because of any concerns about the sordid accusation of underage sex and drug use. Those were more likely considered qualifications since Trump related to his legal travails having a similar history himself.) There was hope after he dropped out that Trump might appoint someone more respectable to this important post and one who would be less likely to become his hatchet man. Fat chance.

He didn't name a hatchet man, that's true. He named a hatchet woman, one of his impeachment defense lawyers and the former Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi.

As David Dayen at the American Prospect has reported, her tenure as Florida's top prosecutor was notorious for her ruthless treatment of Floridians whose homes had been unlawfully foreclosed upon. But America first became acquainted with Bondi during Trump's first campaign when it was reported that as Florida AG she had dropped out of the class action suit against the now-defunct Trump University after having received a $25,000 check from the (also now defunct) Trump Foundation. Bondi was an early Trump supporter when he ran for president, eagerly joining him on the campaign trail as one of his most energetic endorsers and making frequent appearances on Fox News. From that moment on she was always hanging around the periphery of Trump World in one way or another.

She gave a singularly unimpressive performance during Trump's first impeachment trial but turned up later with Rudy Giuliani and his motley crew contesting the election results in 2020. She was in Pennsylvania insisting that "cheating" was going on and was among those who gathered at that historically bizarre press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping office, which they had evidently mistaken for the Four Seasons Hotel....>

<....Bondi has also made it clear where she stands on the idea of seeking retribution for the indictments against Trump. As far back as 2023 she has said that the prosecutors should be prosecuted:

Coming from a former prosecutor and state attorney general that's quite a statement. It's clear that this sentiment is one of the main reasons Trump has chosen her for the job.

One of her most important tasks will be overseeing the mass deportation program. Trump's chosen "immigration czar" Tom Homan, who has been tapped to run it, calls her "one hell of an AG" declaring that they plan to prosecute anyone who stands in the way of their plans:

The Washington Post reports that Trump wants to fire all of the DOJ attorneys who worked with the special prosecutor's office, including the career civil servants. That would require some extraordinary actions on the part of the new AG. And she seems up for the task.

And that's not all. According to the Post:

Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.

You can bet that Trump's new attorney general will not make the mistake that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made when he recused himself from the Russia investigation even though she clearly should, having been involved in his attempt to overturn the election. She's no doubt as eager to prove the Big Lie as he is. (If she isn't Trump will not be happy.)

Bondi is the perfect Trump choice for this particular gig and I'm surprised he didn't choose her in the first place. She has all the credentials Matt Gaetz didn't have and will likely be much more competent in her pursuit of Trump's vengeance agenda. It would be nice to think that she'll be stopped in the Senate but there's virtually no chance of that. It will be smooth sailing for her. She's right out of Central Casting.>

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...

<President-elect Donald Trump nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department last Thursday as he wound down his whirlwind of Cabinet announcements ahead of his second term.

While former federal prosecutors noted that Bondi, who was Trump's former defense lawyer, is a seasoned litigator and thus more qualified to be attorney general than former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration for the role last week, some told Salon that that upside also makes Bondi's nomination as a fierce Trump loyalist all the more cause for concern.

"My first instinct is,' Well here's someone who is at least <qualified>,'" Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, told Salon in a phone interview. "She's had a few problems of her own, but she has decades of criminal law experience. She was a Florida A.G., so she can certainly, certainly be the Attorney General of the United States, whereas Matt Gaetz should not be anywhere even near the Department of Justice."

Bondi's nomination came just hours after Gaetz's withdrawal amid a firestorm that spawned from resurfaced claims he paid to have sex with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz has denied the allegations, and the release of a report on the House Ethics Committee's investigation into the matter was blocked last week.

Bondi previously served as Florida attorney general from 2011 to 2019 and is currently a partner at the lobbying firm Ballard Partners, chairing its corporate regulatory compliance practice. Still, legal experts had mixed reactions to the Trump pick, citing her allegiance to the president-elect and her comparatively minor controversies.

"Although Bondi has a much stronger record as a lawyer than Gaetz, including her experience as a prosecutor, that likely means she may be more effective in implementing Trump’s promised goal of turning the DOJ on his political enemies," argued Temidayo Aganga-Williams, a partner at Selendy Gay PLLC in New York and former assistant U.S. attorney.

Trump’s selection of Bondi confirms "that the next Trump DOJ will be bound to the president instead of being bound to the rule of law," he added in an email.

Bondi has spent the last decade vehemently defending Trump, lambasting the officials who have investigated him and repeating his stolen election claims. As she awaits confirmation from the Senate, whether she will follow through on promises she made in media appearances to probe federal prosecutors and FBI agents she deemed out-of-line has come into focus, NBC News reports.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones,” Bondi said last year in an interview on Fox News following Trump's indictment in Georgia for allegedly plotting to overturn the state's 2020 election outcome. “The investigators will be investigated.”

She went on to dub the prosecutors who filed charges against the president-elect in his criminal cases members of the "deep state" — a reference to a false theory that DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents schemed to undermine Trump. Without citing evidence, the former Florida prosecutor declared that since they now had a "spotlight on them they can all be investigated."

Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former federal prosecutor, told Salon that, while Bondi's political ideology and support of Trump aren't disqualifiers, her comments are "very troubling" and "reckless" given that there is no evidence of any misconduct in the Trump prosecution.

"Calling out for criminal prosecution of people who have simply been doing their job, I think, is a distortion of the facts and a violation of law, and it has given me great pause," she said in a phone interview, noting that she hopes to see rigorous questioning from the Senate on what Bondi meant in those statements.

"If indeed she simply wants to use the Justice Department as a tool of revenge for Donald Trump, I think that would be disqualifying," McQuade added.

Aganga-Williams voiced a similar concern, calling the comments "incredibly dangerous" and arguing that they turn public servants into the "unfair target of the very government they've served."

But Rahmani indicated he was skeptical of Bondi's ability to follow through on her comments or execute Trump's push to investigate those who have investigated him. What Bondi could feasibly charge the prosecutors who indicted Trump with is unclear, he said.

"Whether it's Gaetz or Bondi or whomever, what can Jack Smith and others really be prosecuted for? There's not an easy answer," he said, noting prosecutors' immunity from civil lawsuits and the lack of any evidence of a civil rights violation they could be charged with.....>

<...."There's no clear charge that she could use to go after folks," Rahmani said, adding: "I don't think judges, even Trump-appointed judges, would put up with that. I think those cases would be dismissed pretty quickly."

On Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump intends to fire special counsel Jack Smith and the team of prosecutors that helped him indict Trump on charges of illegally retaining national security documents and attempting to subvert the 2020 election results. Smith moved to dismiss the case and appeal against Trump on Monday.

While Rahmani speculated that Smith and his team are likely worried, he also questioned whether Trump will actually stay true to his word.

"Trump has made all sorts of promises. He's delivered on some. He hasn't on others," Rahmani said. "You never know with him. He's a little bit of an enigma when it comes to these types of things, but if he's gonna go through on that promise, Pam Bondi is going to be the one that's [sic] executing it."

Also of concern for McQuade and Aganga-Williams was Bondi's boosting of Trump's election fraud claims. The former district attorney traveled to Philadelphia and held news conferences where she amplified false allegations of widespread ballot fraud and insisted the election had been stolen, according to NBC News.

“We know that ballots have been dumped,” Bondi said. “We’ve heard that people were receiving ballots that were dead, the thing that is happening all over the country.”

The former state attorney general later acted as a defense lawyer for Trump during his first impeachment proceedings, claiming the 2019 probe was a "sham" and that he was unfairly investigated. She also made an appearance at Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan last spring over charges of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment made to an adult film actress ahead of the 2016 presidential contest.

"I think the Senate needs to satisfy themselves [as to] what her view of that was because simply pushing an agenda designed to undermine public confidence in the electoral system is a danger to democracy and not something we would expect by an attorney general whose job it is to uphold the rule of law," McQuade said.

Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr dismissed Trump's claims of election fraud and declined to launch DOJ investigations into them over a lack of evidence. The then-president then attempted to appoint Jeffrey Clark, a DOJ official who backed his 2020 claims, as acting attorney general, but the effort was thwarted when a half dozen senior Justice Department officials threatened to resign.

McQuade also raised ethics concerns around Bondi's potential confirmation, encouraging the Senate to "carefully" probe her handling of a $25,000 political donation she received from Trump in 2013.

Bondi and then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who had also received a donation from Trump, had both declined to join a lawsuit in 2016 accusing Trump University, a company that wasn't an accredited college or university but offered real estate training courses, of tax fraud.

Bondi's office had received 22 complaints of fraud against the company — only one of which she said later her office considered credible — and she opted not to pursue a case. A spokesperson for Bondi later confirmed she had solicited Trump's donation.

Later that year, the Internal Revenue Service found Trump's gift to Bondi violated tax laws in response to a complaint from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Trump paid a $2,500 fine, while a Florida ethics panel later cleared Bondi of wrongdoing....>

<....“I will not let any money from anyone affect what I do,” Bondi said, per the Washington Post, at a 2016 news conference in defense of her handling of the situation.

Though the donation was a violation, it shouldn't necessarily be disqualifying for Bondi, argued Rahmani, who previously served as the director of enforcement for the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission.

McQuade added, however, that the Florida ethics panel's decision, while valuable, also may not rise to the same rigor and standard of probing as seen at the federal level. She also said she hopes Trump follows through in having his nominees, including Bondi, undergo FBI background checks to ensure they're all fit to serve.

Still, Trump's spate of nominees makes clear that the president-elect is demanding loyalty from them — Bondi included, Aganga-Williams and Rahmani both argued. Rahmani added that he hopes her "experience carries the day," though he said he doesn't expect Bondi will stand up to Trump as Barr did.

While McQuade said she worries that, if confirmed, Bondi would be interested in carrying out Trump's calls for "revenge against his political rivals," she's also hopeful that Bondi's past comments amount to "political rhetoric and not an actual plan."

"I'm also hopeful that there are enough guardrails in the system to prevent that" like career prosecutors balking at efforts to charge anyone who hasn't committed a crime, the grand jury and trial systems, and judges, she added.

Aganga-Williams, however, said he expects Bondi's execution of the attorney general role, should she be confirmed, to be "exactly what Trump wants it to be and not what the rule of law demands it to be."

"She has shown her willingness to support Trump’s lies, including by supporting his false claims about fraud in the 2020 election," he added. "Someone who is willing to lie on behalf of a candidate will only be more dangerous when doing so on behalf of a president."

Bondi did not respond to an emailed request for comment.>

<The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols knocked Sen. Tommy Tuberville on Wednesday over the Alabama Republican’s claims in opposition to sending military aid to Ukraine for its war against Russia.

“This is one of the oldest false choices in American politics, this is something that happens every four years. ‘If only we weren’t spending the money here, we’d be spending the money there,’” said Nichols in an appearance on MSNBC.

He later continued, “First of all, Americans need to understand that foreign aid is actually money spent in the United States.”

MSNBC’s Katy Tur, in her interview with Nichols, noted that President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have claimed that the U.S. should focus on “problems at home” instead of funding wars like the one in Ukraine.

She went on to ask if the U.S. would redirect money to welfare programs, Social Security, Medicaid, a child tax credit or paid parental leave should it not provide aid to Ukraine or Israel.

Nichols — who appeared on MSNBC after Donald Trump tapped Army Gen. Keith Kellogg to serve as a special envoy to Ukraine and Russia on Wednesday — referred to Tuberville’s recent comment complaining about aid to Ukraine where he seemingly confused the U.S. with Russia.

″[He’s] apparently unaware that many of the weapons that are bought and sent to Ukraine are made in Alabama,” he noted.

“People don’t realize that most of American foreign aid, which is less than 1% of our budget, is spent in the United States, on American workers for American products. And the idea that you can simply say that things happening in other parts of the world will never effect us is foolish and shortsighted...”

Nichols said one of the “myths” about the war is that the U.S. “can’t afford to keep” sending weapons and money to Ukraine.

He noted that about 5% of the U.S. defense budget has “destroyed about half” of Russia’s military capability in the war.

“This isn’t costing us that much money, that’s an old saw,” said Nichols, adding that conservatives used to argue that the U.S. has “plenty of money for guns and butter.”>

<Elon Musk accused former Army officer and Trump administration official Alexander Vindman of treason after he suggested the X owner is a Russian puppet.

Vindman is mainly known for testifying against President-elect Donald Trump during the Trump-Ukraine scandal in 2019. His twin brother, Eugene Vindman, recently won election to Virginia’s 7th Congressional District as a Democrat.

“Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Musk posted in a reply to Vindman’s comments on X.

Alexander Vindman was born in Ukraine but immigrated to the United States decades ago. He served under Trump as his director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council from 2018 to 2020.

“Clearly, Putin has a type,” Alexander Vindman said in an interview on MSNBC. “He likes narcissists and egomaniacs that he knows as a case officer who could easily pander to manipulate, to do his dirty work.”

“We are under attack,” Alexander Vindman added. “Russia has been using different levers, whether that’s corruption networks, in this case, it’s influencers like Donald Trump, like Elon Musk to sow discord, and it’s particularly troubling with Elon Musk in this case because Elon Musk has access to state secrets. He has top secret security clearance. It’s possible that some of that is seeping through.”

Trump just nominated Musk as his Department of Government Efficiency co-chairman after the owner of Tesla shadowed the president-elect through much of the back half of his campaign.

“Putin has been very effective in playing both Trump and Elon, and he’s been using the richest man in the world to do his bidding,” the former Trump administration official said. “In some cases, that’s encouraging him probably to support Donald Trump. That’s not speculation. We see how far in Elon has gone and then using Twitter as a disinformation platform. This is not some sort of far-off, distant threat. This is going to impact our elections, it’s a national security threat.”

Alexander Vindman issued a response on X shortly after Musk’s comments.

“Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics,” he said on Musk’s platform. “That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason?”

Alexander Vindman added that he doesn’t take money from oligarchs, “Ukrainians or otherwise,” and that he runs a nonprofit group that assists Ukraine in its war with Russia.

“You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated,” he concluded.>