<....Back in August, independent reporter Catherine Herridge declared on Twitter, now X, that “With the newly declassified records via [Kash Patel] into media leaks and the role of third parties, Director Comey’s 2017 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about leaks appears problematic.” In another post, she cites material related to an investigation called “Tropic Vortex,” which dealt with a disclosure to the New York Times that took place sometime in October of 2016 and was investigated by John Durham.

Yet a quick look at the documents reveals that this material is most unlikely to be damaging for Comey given his testimony. For one thing, it was fully investigated during the first Trump administration and the Justice Department declined to bring charges against anyone in connection with it. The closing memo for the investigation is dated March 2020, meaning that any non-prosecution decisions were made no later than under Attorney General Bill Barr.

For another thing, it appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with either the Trump or Clinton investigations, which was the subject of Comey’s testimony in 2017. The documents don’t reveal much about the story in question, and folks in the right-wing press have assumed that the story in question was this one from Oct. 31, 2016, which dealt with the Russia investigation. That’s a reasonable assumption, given that the material at one point refers to a March 2017 article that clearly is about the Russia investigation. But it is still an assumption.

And it’s very likely wrong. The documents reveal several facts about the underlying article: It appeared sometime in October 2016; it was sourced to two government officials; it contained classified information; and it obviously somehow involved the FBI.

Exactly one news story meets these criteria, according to the New York Times website search engine. It is headlined, “Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter.”

Further evidence that this is the story at issue in this leak investigation came in the Michael Sussman trial, when former FBI General Counsel James Baker testified that there had been a leak investigation conducted by Durham of which he was a subject related to this issue. Reported Politico at the time:

Both the prosecution and defense also discussed with Baker that he’d been the focus of a separate investigation Durham conducted into an alleged leak that appears to have involved a 2016 New York Times report about broad-based email surveillance that Yahoo conducted at the demand of the U.S. government.

Baker provided scant details about the probe but confirmed that Durham ran it and said it involved a telephone conversation he and a top FBI public affairs official had with a journalist “during which I made an authorized disclosure of information that I understood at the time to no longer be classified.”

Baker said he understood the disclosure to have been approved in advance by the FBI director and the director of National Intelligence, but other witnesses gave conflicting and or uncertain accounts. No action was ultimately taken, but the probe wasn’t formally closed until after Durham got a new assignment in 2019 to look into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.

(Disclosure: James Baker is a friend of one of the present authors and is a contributing editor at Lawfare. He contributed no information to this article.)

In other words, Herridge’s premise here appears to be factually wrong. Even if Comey improperly authorized a classified disclosure to the New York Times in connection with that story—and we are certainly not saying that he did, and we note as well that the investigation of the matter recommended no charges against either Baker “or anyone else”—Comey likely wouldn’t have been lying in this exchange with Sen. Charles Grassley more than eight years ago:

GRASSLEY: Director Comey have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?

COMEY: Never.

GRASSLEY: Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?

COMEY: No. (emphasis added)

Nor would he have been lying five years less six days ago, when he had this exchange before the Senate Judiciary Committee with Sen. Ted Cruz about his earlier testimony:

COMEY: I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.

CRUZ: So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak? And [former Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth, is that correct?

COMEY: Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today....>

<....Cruz’s specific allusion to McCabe presents another possibility—but it’s another lemon.

The McCabe matter relates to an Oct. 30, 2016, article published in the Wall Street Journal, which cited an anonymous source confirming the existence of an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of government emails during her time as Secretary of State—a probe that, prior to the article’s publication, the FBI had refused to confirm. The article also detailed internal disputes between FBI and Justice Department officials over how to proceed with the investigation.

In response to the Wall Street Journal story, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General opened an internal probe to determine whether the article contained unauthorized disclosures and, if so, who was responsible. The inquiry ultimately focused on potential misconduct by McCabe, the then-FBI deputy director. In a report made public in 2018, the inspector general found that McCabe inappropriately authorized aides to disclose sensitive information about the Clinton probe to the Wall Street Journal, and that he demonstrated a “lack of candor” when questioned about it on multiple occasions by FBI officials and investigators.

As the inspector general’s report details, Comey and McCabe’s accounts of the leaking episode “contradicted one another.” In his telling, Comey denied authorizing the leak and claimed that he was ignorant of McCabe’s own plan to authorize the disclosure. Comey said that his first conversation with McCabe about the leak occurred after the article’s publication, on Oct. 31, 2016. During that meeting, according to Comey, McCabe “definitely did not tell me that he authorized” the disclosure.

Comey said McCabe gave him the opposite impression: “I don’t remember exactly how, but I remember some form or fashion and it could have been like ‘can you believe this crap? How does this stuff get out’ kind of thing? But I took from whatever communication we had that he wasn’t involved in it.”

By contrast, McCabe said that he told Comey during the Oct. 31 meeting that he had authorized the leak. According to McCabe, Comey “did not react negatively, just kind of accepted it.” McCabe also claimed that Comey “thought it was a ‘good’ idea that they presented this information” to the media.

It’s obvious that McCabe and Comey offered different recollections of events surrounding the leak episode. But it’s equally obvious that those divergent recollections will not support a prosecution.

Indeed, as a criminal case against either man, this case has deep problems. For one thing, there is no evidence that Comey was lying about these interactions. Though his account and McCabe’s are not consistent, it is not at all clear that Comey’s memory is the false one—much less that any errors in his account were intentional. The inspector general found that it was McCabe whose answers lacked candor. Indeed, the report found that “the overwhelming weight of that evidence supported Comey’s version of the conversation.” Among other reasons supporting Comey’s side of the story, the inspector general noted that McCabe’s claim that he told Comey about the disclosure on Oct. 31 is inconsistent with his statements during earlier interviews, in which he said he had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did.

The Justice Department (quite disgracefully) tried to bring a criminal case against McCabe for his statements in the matter. A grand jury in 2019 refused to return an indictment on the subject. It would be quite rich, having sought and failed to charge one party to a memory dispute to turn around and try to charge the other.

The case has another problem: McCabe’s own statement to the inspector general acknowledges that he did not discuss the disclosure with Comey in advance of the article’s publication. As the report summarizes: “McCabe told us that he did not recall telling Comey prior to publication of the October 30 article that he intended to authorize or had authorized Special Counsel and AD/OPA to recount his August 12 call with PADAG to the WSJ, although he said it was possible he did.”

In other words: Neither McCabe nor Comey suggests that Comey knew about or authorized the leak prior to the article’s publication. Yet that is what Cruz’s question to Comey in 2020 was about.

At best, McCabe’s account of the Oct. 31 meeting suggests that Comey acquiesced to the disclosure after the fact. But he never “authorized” it, even under the least generous version of the facts.

So that case is also a dud....>

<....Then there’s the Dan Richman option. Richman, a law professor and close friend of Comey’s, did some media outreach work on Comey’s behalf, as well as advising him on encryption and other matters. He famously was the person who disclosed the contents of Comey’s memo about the loyalty oath dinner with Trump to the New York Times—which Comey testified about. And his role as an informal, non-governmental spokesman for Comey came up at some length in a separate leak investigation known as “Arctic Haze”—documents about which the FBI has also dumped in Grassley’s lap and thus made public in the right-wing press.

(Disclosure: Daniel Richman is a friend of one of the present authors and a contributor to Lawfare. He contributed no information to this article.)

One reason to think that the current case focuses on the Richman matters is that Richman has actually had a recent interview with prosecutors. Reports the New York Times:

[P]rosecutors from Mr. Siebert’s office subpoenaed Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law professor and close friend and adviser to Mr. Comey, in connection with an investigation into whether the former director had lied about whether he authorized Mr. Richman to leak information to the news media, according to people familiar with the situation. Documents released by the F.B.I. in August showed that investigators had examined possible disclosures of classified information to The New York Times.

Mr. Richman’s statements to prosecutors were not helpful in their efforts to build a case against Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the matter.

It’s easy to see, looking at the Arctic Haze documents, why a conversation with him would not have been helpful in building a case against Comey. Between redactions, the declassified documents contain such sentences as, “Although Richman later told the interviewing agents Comey never asked him to talk to the media”; “Richman claimed Comey never asked him to talk to the media”; “The investigation has not yielded sufficient evidence to criminally charge any person, including Comey or Richman, with making false statements or with the substantive offenses under investigation”; and “Investigative efforts have failed to identify the source or sources of the unauthorized public disclosure.”

Richman certainly talked to the press on Comey’s behalf. But the FBI never found that he had been a source for the disclosure at issue in Arctic Haze. And critically for Comey’s testimony, it never found that Comey had asked him or authorized him to be a source for the story, much less to do so anonymously. (Richman was often quoted by name in stories about the FBI and Comey.)

This one is a loser too.

There’s another possibility, which is to charge Comey with a false statement not about supposed leaks but about the conduct of the investigation itself. This idea appears to be what was on CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s mind when he made the criminal referral that started the investigation of Comey. Back in July, he said on Fox News:

John Brennan testified to John Durham in August of 2020. He also testified to the House Oversight Committee in 2022. Hillary Clinton testified before John Durham under oath in 2022. James Comey testified before the Senate committee in September, 2020. All of that’s within the last five years. And much of that testimony is frankly, completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified in the Durham Annex — what that reflects.

This appears to be a reference to Comey’s September 2020 testimonies that he didn’t recall receiving a referral that later became the subject of the so-called Durham annex. Here is the relevant exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham:

SEN. GRAHAM: Do you recall getting an inquiry from the CI, excuse me, the intelligence community in September, 2016, about a concern that the Clinton campaign was going to create a scandal regarding Trump and Russia?

COMEY: I do not.

GRAHAM: You don't remember getting an investigatory lead from the CIA, hang on a second ... Let me find my document here. . . . September the seventh, 2016, the US intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server. You don't remember getting that or being talk, that doesn't ...

COMEY: That doesn't ring any bells with me.

GRAHAM: Okay. Well, that's a pretty stunning thing, it didn't ring a bell, but it did come to you....>

<....The Durham appendix, released recently by Sen. Grassley, describes the relevant incident in detail. But given its description, it’s perfectly understandable why Comey might have been confused by Graham’s account of the matter. Graham made it sound like there was a sudden referral of this matter to the FBI in September 2016. In fact, as the Durham material details, the FBI had been studying this matter for some months. Officials had briefed senior Justice Department officials on it months earlier. The reaction by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had so alarmed FBI officials that it had actually played a role in Comey’s decision in July 2016 to announce the end of the Hillary Clinton email investigation himself and without Justice Department involvement. Comey had testified about this matter before, as Durham summarizes: “Director Comey subsequently testified before Congress that the Sensitive Intelligence was among the reasons he decided to announce the conclusion of the FBI’s conclusion of the investigation of Clinton’s private email server in July 2016 without the participation or awareness of the Attorney General or the Department.”

The matter even shows up in Comey’s book, which had been published in 2018, two years before the 2020 testimony. The details were still classified then, but here’s how he described the matter:

[I]n early 2016, there was a development that threatened to challenge that effort significantly. A development still unknown to the American public to this day. At that time, we were alerted to some materials that had come into the possession of the United States government. They came from a classified source—the source and content of that material remains classified as I write this. Had it become public, the unverified material would undoubtedly have been used by political opponents to cast serious doubt on the attorney general’s independence in connection with the Clinton investigation.

Oh, and one other thing: the material in question was likely fraudulent, as the FBI had determined long before September 2016.

In other words, Graham asked Comey about a document that showed up on a particular day concerning a matter Comey had been dealing with for months before that document landed on his desk. The matter in general is one that Comey had testified about, written about in public, and was sufficiently on his mind as to affect major decisions he made. And Graham was asking about the material as though it were new and genuine, rather than disinformation that the FBI had, in fact, run down carefully.

Comey had exactly zero reason to lie about this and seems pretty clearly—and understandably—to have been confused by the question. He also said no more than that he didn’t recall a specific intelligence referral on a matter he had already been aware of and dealing with for months. Why would he? And how on Earth are you going to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he understood what Graham was talking about and remembered the specific referral?

There’s a final possibility, which is to blow through the statute of limitations and not try to make a false statements case based on the Sept. 20, 2020 testimony.

The alternative, floated recently by Ratcliffe and by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is a more esoteric case based on an alleged conspiracy that began during the 2016 campaign and ended, well, never.

As Ratcliffe put it: “In a conspiracy . . . the statute of limitations does not start to run until the last act in furtherance of that conspiracy. And . . . part of why this is so important is the people behind this are still furthering the conspiracy. They are refusing to admit or acknowledge what they did in 2016 and what they did in 2020 was wrong.”

Miller was blunter about it:

<It is an ongoing and continuing conspiracy. It continued through the entirety of President Trump’s first term. It continued through the entirety of President Biden’s term in office. And it continues to this day. There are still Deep State coup plotters who are trying to conceal and hide this information. . . . All of this behavior, all of this conduct collectively means that the conspiracy hasn’t ended, is ongoing. Comey, in particular, has throughout the years engaged in conduct, and lies, public statements and testimony in front of Congress, false testimony, whose sole purpose was to perpetuate and continue the conspiracy....>>

<....This is the kind of thing that makes for good red meat television, but a lousy indictment. Note that neither Miller nor Ratcliffe bothers to identify the supposed underlying offense of this ongoing conspiracy. Miller at one point refers to a “seditious conspiracy,” but a seditious conspiracy requires a plot to overthrow the government or use force against it. He also suggests it’s a conspiracy against the government, which could theoretically be a reference to a so-called Klein conspiracy “to defraud the United States.”

Good luck with that. A conspiracy to defraud the United States requires, among other things, an agreement to commit an unlawful act to impede or obstruct a legitimate government function. Nowhere in the verbal salad of allegations people throw at Comey or Brennan or any of the others is there anything like an agreement to do anything illegal, much less by way of obstructing governmental functions.

In a courtroom, a conspiracy has to aim to commit a violation of federal law or articulate a coherent fraud against the United States. The director of national intelligence can declare that people committed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016 . . . to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.” But you—the prosecutor—can’t. Because this is legal gibberish. Without a predicate offense or a coherent theory of what the defendants were trying to deprive the United States of to which it was lawfully entitled, it doesn’t allege a crime. Alleging that a conspiracy to commit a non-crime continues until this day is just another way of saying that people keep criticizing Trump.

In short, whatever way you play Halligan’s hand, you lose. You lose by bringing a conspiracy case. You lose by bringing a false statements case involving the conduct of the investigation. You lose by bringing a false statements case involving supposed leaks. You lose by not bringing any case. You lose by going after Letitia James. And you lose by going after James Comey.

The only question is whether you lose at the hands of a grand jury, a federal judge, or the president who just finished praising you on social media.>

<The six Republicans on the Supreme Court have been amazing, baffling, and horrifying Court-watchers and judges beneath them from across the political spectrum, as they use their so-called Shadow Docket to issue dictates that clearly contradict the Constitution, violate settled precedent, and even break black-letter law.

All, apparently, to appease Donald Trump.

As the famous conservative Judge Michael Luttig recently wrote:

<“He has enthralled our Supreme Court, spellbinding it into submission to him and his will rather than to the Constitution and its will, and our Supreme Court has favored him with its affirmation and its acquiescence in his lawlessness.”>

But why are these six justices going along with this?

Is it because, like is alleged of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, they’re all on the take, benefiting from the largess of rightwing billionaires or the fundraising impresario Leonard Leo, powerful figures who are ordering them to violate the very oath they took when they assumed office?

Or is it because they’re so ideologically extreme, wed to a 21st-century form of neofascism, that they’re enthusiastic to overturn 249 years of our constitutional order?

Or could it be that they’re simply terrified to cross The Don, a man who told the world this weekend that he “hates” people who cross him? Look at what he’s doing right now to his former Republican colleagues and employees, James Clapper, James Comey, and John Brennan. And don’t forget Miles Taylor. It’s brutal.

Consider also what else they’ve done so far this year, handing down more shadow docket rulings in nine months than during the entire 16 years of the Bush and Obama administrations combined:

In US v Shilling they let Trump dismiss transgender individuals from the armed forces even though the ban clearly constituted invidious discrimination that violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection component and due process. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation.In OPM v AFGE they blew up civil service protections for federal workers, creating a due-process debacle to let Trump fire pretty much anybody he wanted. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In Dept of Education v California they allowed Trump to engage in illegal viewpoint-based retaliation against DEI-related content and violate the First Amendment and Spending Clause limits. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson were so furious they wrote two dissents.

In Noem v National TPS Alliance they trampled due process and undermined the law Congress had passed that allowed immigrants to have temporary protected status so Trump could pull that protection from any brown-skinned person he wanted (although this was specifically about Venezuelans). They heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In Noem v Svitlana Doe they allowed across-the-board termination of “humanitarian parole” and work authorizations for hundreds of thousands of people here legally from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, trashing the Constitution’s requirement for individualized process and to avoid disparate impact. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation; Justices Sotomayor and Jackson were so angry they wrote a joint dissent.

In Trump v CASA de Maryland they allowed Trump to start narrowing birthright citizenship in what the dissenters said “directly contradicts the text and original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Civil rights groups called Trump’s executive order “flatly unconstitutional” but they heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In Noem v Vasquez Perdomo they allowed ICE to seize, search, and detain people based on their race, language, accent, or job description, in clear violation of both civil rights laws, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment protections of privacy and the requirement for a warrant to be judge-issued based on reasonable suspicion and witness testimony. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation; Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were so furious they wrote a dissent.

In Trump v Wilcox they allowed Trump to defy the constitutional separation-of-powers framework (and longstanding limits on at-will removal for certain independent-agency officials), to get rid of officials he didn’t like in independent agencies that Congress had previously separated from the president’s overview, in clear defiance of the US Constitution.

Every one of these decisions is shocking on its face, and more like them are expected. Up next is most likely a decision that may further gut voting rights in America, the only advanced democracy in the world where voting is still a privilege that can be withdrawn without notice instead of a right....>

<....Why is this happening?

While the two elected branches get their legitimacy from “the will of the People,” the Supreme Court derives its legitimacy from openly and transparently deliberating after hearing arguments, and explaining its rationale, so anybody can understand its logic and the decisions can become a guide for future court cases.

When the Court simply says, “This is the way it is because I say so,” like a parent talking to a child, rather than explaining, it erodes faith and confidence in our justice system.

It becomes a type of justice system, in fact, that America has never seen before outside of the old Confederacy. That’s the kind of damage these Shadow Docket decisions cause.

So, why would they do this? Why would these six people defy the Founders and Framers, spit on the Constitution, and trample the rule of law, all in the service of a single wannabe dictator?

I’ve heard the arguments that they’re on the take, and they’re compelling, particularly when it comes to their Citizens United decision that allowed billionaires to buy politicians and judges and came soon after a rightwing billionaire had showered Clarence Thomas and his wife with millions in gifts and vacations.

And it’s clear that at least Thomas and Alito are so ideologically extreme that they probably wouldn’t have been uncomfortable on the German supreme court in the 1930s.

But I think the real reason is that they’re terrified.

After all, these are not (like 13 of the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet) rich people. Sidewalk protests in front of Kavanaugh’s and Roberts’ homes have let the nation see that they live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods, but don’t have the gated security and armed guards of your average decamillionaire or billionaire. They feel vulnerable.

And for good reason.

Roy Den Hollander posted pro-Trump writings online and had officially volunteered for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign prior to showing up at the door of federal Judge Esther Salas disguised as a FedEx driver. Her 20-year-old son, Daniel, answered the door and Hollander shot him dead, then wounded his father before escaping and ultimately killing himself.

The initial story that went viral was that he’d been dressed up as a pizza delivery person, so in the years since this incident, according to the US Marshall’s Service over a hundred judges who’ve handed down anti-Trump decisions have had pizzas delivered to their homes at weird hours, by way of saying, “We know where you live and can kill you whenever we want.”

The pizzas are often addressed to be delivered to “Daniel Anderl” care of the judge whose home is targeted, and sometimes even to the children of the judges receiving the pizzas; Daniel was the son of Judge Esther Salas who was killed in the attack targeting her entire family, and Salas described this ongoing rightwing terror campaign against her peers as “psychological warfare.”

Trump has used terms like “monsters,” “lunatics,” “crooked,” and “radical left” to describe judges who rule against him. His rhetoric regularly portrays judges who rule against him as political enemies, further fueling attacks and harassment from his supporters.

Judge John McConnell, for example, said he received more than 400 threatening voicemails, including messages like “Tell that son of a b---- we’re going to come for him” and “I wish someone would assassinate your a--” after ruling against Trump....>

<....On top of that, of the 31 politically motivated attacks and assassinations since 2018, only one was done by a “leftist”; all 30 others were committed by confirmed rightwingers, the majority openly Trump supporters.

Given this history, it’s easy to see why these Supreme Court judges may be afraid of earning Trump’s ire by ruling against him.

They know that with just a half a dozen sentences on his low-rent social media site, Donald Trump could say things about any one of them that would incite a lone wolf to come to their homes to kill them.

Just last week, responding to the Kirk killing, Amy Coney Barrett said, “Political discourse has soured beyond control…”

After all, if university presidents, wealthy heads of major law firms, the heads of CBS and ABC, and billionaires from Zuckerberg to Bezos are so terrified of Trump they’ll humiliate themselves (think Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg) before him, why wouldn’t Supreme Court justices be, too?

It also explains why they’re using the shadow docket instead of the normal merits docket; shadow docket decisions are temporary and easily overturned after Trump leaves office, theoretically limiting the damage these rulings are causing to our republic.

They might have even convinced themselves they’re doing the best thing, by postponing a moment of conflict to reduce Trump‘s damage to America. After all, both JD Vance and Elon Musk have said that they’re willing to ignore decisions of the Supreme Court; once an administration has gotten away with that, pretty much any power the Supreme Court has completely vanishes.

This is a horrible truth all nine members are well aware of, one alluded to by both Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall. The court has no mechanism to enforce it rulings other than its credibility.

The Trump administration last week asked Congress for an additional $58 million to provide security to federal judges, presumably including the Supreme Court. Ironically, if they begin to feel safe as a result, Trump may rue the day he provided them with that additional security.>

<I’ve written a good bit about the economic wreckage wrought by President Donald Trump’s economic policies—tariffs, manipulation of the Federal Reserve, a deficit-doubling tax cut for the rich—and how these might tank the economy. Today let’s consider how, even if Trump weren’t president, the finance sector could tank the economy all by its lonesome through shadow banking, most especially in the private equity industry.

The term “shadow banking” was coined in 2007 by a money manager named Paul McCulley to describe financial institutions that mimic what commercial banks do—money markets, mortgage companies, investment banks, hedge funds, and, yes, private equity—but are not regulated like banks. It’s called shadow banking because these firms lack banks’ transparency. Shadow banks furnish a higher return than banks typically do, but their investments are much riskier and lack government protections for investors. Much of the mischief in the 2008 financial crisis was caused by shadow banks, whose combined assets were as large or perhaps larger than those of commercial banks. Five years later, shadow banks’ holdings represented nearly 80 percent of global gross domestic product. Nobody disputes this makes the global financial system less secure.

Even those parts of the financial system that would seem to have nothing to do with you and me can disrupt our lives. I’d never even heard of “family offices” until I read Chuck Collins’s excellent 2021 book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. (Clearly, I don’t hang with the right crowd.) Family offices are organizations set up by very rich people to preserve their wealth over multiple generations; they’re more or less Thomas Jefferson’s worst nightmare.

Although family offices have been around a long time—the Cabots and the Lowells had them in the nineteenth century—more than half of those now in existence, per Collins, were created in this still-young century. Jeff Bezos’s dad just expanded his. Sometimes family offices combine into multifamily offices, or family funds. Vacationing in Nassau last year, I drove past what looked like a Walmart or Costco; on closer inspection, it was a big-box family fund. (It won’t surprise you to learn that family funds flourish in tax havens like the Bahamas.)

Family offices and family funds are perhaps the most blatant engines of what Thomas Piketty calls “patrimonial capitalism.” That makes it tempting to greet the prospect that they might collapse with a hearty, “Good riddance!” And yes, if they declined in some gradual, stately manner like the Magnificent Ambersons, that’s what I’d say too.

The trouble is that they’re at least equally likely to decline abruptly, taking the rest of us down with them. As The Economist observed in 2018, “Family offices could endanger the stability of the financial system. Combining very rich people, opacity, and markets can be very expensive.” When the family fund Archegos went bust in 2021, it cost Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley more than $10 billion, with ripple effects in the stock market of $33 billion. If your retirement fund held stock in CBS or Discovery then it was hard cheese for you.

The corner of shadow banking that appears shakiest today is private equity, which is what we called leveraged buyouts before the convicted junk-bond king Michael Milken gave them a bad name in the late 1980s. Private equity firms use debt to buy existing firms; manage them to be more profitable, typically through layoffs; then take them public. Defenders of the practice used to say this made the target companies more efficient. But today almost everybody who doesn’t work in private equity hates private equity for loading up companies with insurmountable debt and raking in so much money on fees that private equity firms don’t have to care all that much whether this or that company survives.

Another common criticism is that private equity puts the squeeze on certain enterprises—hospitals, retirement homes, even hospice providers—that were never intended to be profit-maximizers, weakening the quality of the vital social services they provide. Can’t afford to buy a house? In his latest book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, Collins demonstrates various ways in which private equity drives up housing costs. One Ohio firm invests in short-term and vacation rentals—Airbnb, Vrbo, etc.—to the tune of $1.5 billion, with capital from the Blackstone Group and other 800-pound gorillas in private equity....>

<....Lately I’ve had trouble reconciling two story lines in the financial press about private equity. One story line is that private equity is taking over the world. The other is that private equity is on the verge of extinction. Bethany McLean, the superb financial reporter who last week started a column in The Washington Post, squared the circle in her inaugural essay by explaining that private equity is swallowing up everything in sight precisely because it’s in financial trouble.

McLean’s piece was about President Donald Trump’s executive order last month directing the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to ease fiduciary requirements to encourage people to invest their 401(k)s in private equity and other “alternative assets,” by which Trump meant shadow banks. As it happens, Blackstone’s chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, gave $37 million to Republican and conservative groups in the last election cycle. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Trying to herd grandma into private equity is insane. The rationale for private equity going unregulated is that the customers are either rich people or investors for giant pension and other funds who are savvy enough to take risks you and I shouldn’t, and rich enough that, should the risk go sour, no great harm is done. That’s the precise opposite circumstance from defined-contribution pensions, which until now have been regulated to the hilt to protect grandma from getting swindled. McLean doesn’t put it as bluntly as I do here, but her bottom line is that while you don’t particularly need private equity, “it is absolutely clear that private equity needs you—or rather, the trillions of dollars Americans have in our retirement accounts. Without our money, the industry is slamming into a brick wall of its own making.”

I phoned McLean to ask her whether that brick wall is something that you and I need to worry about. Might private equity take us down with it? Absolutely, she replied. “Private equity has become too big to fail,” she said, “which raises a whole question of whether it should be private at all.” The solution, McLean said, is to regulate private equity as we do commercial banks and public corporations, with comparable transparency and legal limits on what it can do with our money.

Private equity started to falter around the time Lina Khan became chair of the Federal Trade Commission, because any limit on mergers is a limit on how private equity firms reassemble the companies they acquire. Rising interest rates dealt another blow. Mostly, though, private equity was a victim of its own success. It ran out of things to buy and bid up the price of whatever was left. Default rates for private equity–backed companies, McLean pointed out, hit 17 percent during the previous three years, more than double the rate for companies not backed by private equity.

By 2022, nearly half of all the supposedly slimmed-down and tuned-up companies exiting private equity firms were sold to other private equity firms, prompting one investor to tell The Financial Times, “This is the start of, potentially, I’m saying ‘potentially,’ a pyramid scheme.” In January, the FT columnist John Plender, writing about systemic risks in private equity, concluded: “No prizes for guessing where the next financial crisis will emerge from.”

Of course, Trump doesn’t help matters by urging us all to throw our money into private equity and other risky shadow banks. But barring strict regulation of this sector to a degree that seems politically impossible at the moment, these outlaw financial institutions are fully capable of crashing the economy on their own.>

‪@markjacob.bsky.social‬

<🧵10 ways MAGA is NOT like the Nazis🧵

The right wing hates it when people compare MAGA to the Nazis, as I’ve done in the past, based on their fascist behavior. But to be fair, I’ve decided to provide the other side. So here’s a thread with my list of 10 ways the MAGA movement is NOT like the Nazis.

September 22, 2025 at 8:17 AM

1. The Nazis dressed better. They wore uniforms. Meanwhile, Trump-allied strategist Steve Bannon looks like a cat hairball in the corner of a room that needs vacuuming.

2. Hitler liked dogs. Trump, on the other hand, is the only U.S. president in a century to not have a dog in the White House.

3. Hitler was a war veteran. Trump avoided the military draft because of “bone spurs.”

4. ICE routinely wears masks. The Gestapo didn’t.

5. Hitler went to prison after his attempted coup failed. Trump got off scot-free after his attempted coup.

6. In his youth, Hitler was an artist who struggled to draw the human figure. Trump, on the other hand, drew the form of a naked woman in a birthday greeting for his child molester friend Jeffrey Epstein.

7. Trump hasn’t gotten an infrastructure bill passed. In contrast, the Nazis built the autobahn.

8. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, accidentally sent military attack plans to a reporter. Hitler’s military leaders were much more careful.

9. Hitler wrote his own book, “Mein Kampf.” Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” was ghost-written by Tony Schwartz, who says Trump didn’t write a word.

<President Donald Trump has corrupted the Department of Justice to target his political enemies as part of a "cynical ploy" borrowed from Vladimir Putin, according to a former federal prosecutor.

A federal grand jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey for making alleged false statements to Congress and obstruction of justice, both based on his denial that he had authorized leaks to the media about the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails, and former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade published a column for Bloomberg examining the case on its merits.

"The indictment came a week after Trump posted a demand to Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge Comey and other perceived enemies, calling them 'guilty as hell,'" McQuade wrote. "Perhaps cognizant that the five-year statute of limitations would be expiring within days, Trump added, 'We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.'"

That social media post made plain the DOJ was acting on Trump's orders, but he made that even more obvious by replacing the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who questioned the case's strength with a former personal attorney of his who has never prosecuted a single case before presenting the Comey evidence to a grand jury.

"By directing his DOJ to charge Comey, Trump appears to be borrowing a tactic from the playbook of Vladimir Putin," McQuade wrote. "According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser, Putin doesn’t try to convince the Russian people that he is honest. Instead, he works to persuade them that everyone else is corrupt."

"It’s a cynical ploy meant to condition people to tolerate corruption," she added. "If voters believe that all public officials are crooks, then they will overlook the crooked leader who professes to share their values."

Trump, of course, is the only president who has ever been convicted of a felony – all 34 counts against him in the only criminal case out of four in which he faced trial – and McQuade suspects his vindictive prosecution of Comey, and the others he's threatened, shows he's playing the same game as the Russian president he admires.

"If Trump can make people believe that indictments like the one targeting Comey are meaningless, then the indictments against him can be dismissed just as easily," McQuade wrote. "Indeed, following the Comey indictment, New York Democratic Representative Dan Goldman said, 'The problem is how are you ever going to know whether an investigation by the FBI, an investigation by the Department of Justice, is legitimate or is corrupt.'"

"Exactly," she added. "When everyone is corrupt, then no one is.">

Well has <putin's biyatch> learnt from the master.

<On April 6, 2022, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 opinion that reinstated a policy from the Trump administration that restricted states’ ability to regulate how projects might impact water quality in their jurisdiction. The decision, unsigned and without any accompanying explanation, prompted a dissent from Justice Kagan that was signed by three other Justices, and was joined by the Chief Justice, John Roberts. It was issued under the emergency, or shadow docket, which made us want to know – what is the Court’s shadow docket, and how does it work?

The Court's Various Dockets
The term “Shadow Docket” was first coined in 2015 by William Baude, professor at the University of Chicago Law School but describes a Supreme Court process that has been in place for decades. Before we dive into the specifics of that docket’s current usage, we should note that Baude initially used the term “shadow docket” because the cases being decided were typically low profile and remained in the shadows, away from public attention. That has changed during the Trump administration; while we still use the term “shadow docket” in this post, one could also refer to this process as the “emergency docket” or “non-argument” docket. Additionally, the term “shadow docket” carries a negative connotation that some opponents of the way the docket is being implemented use to their advantage when making their critiques.

The cases that most Americans are aware of moving through the Court are those heard on its “merits docket,” which follow a set of ordinary procedures as they are being considered. A case is added to the merits docket when at least four Justices agree that it has sufficient merit to be heard by the Court. Petitioners and respondents then file briefs on the case, which the Justices and their clerks use to prepare for the case’s oral arguments. After hearing those arguments, Justices enter into conference, discussing each case and making assignments for opinions. Finally, opinions are announced and handed down to the public.

In our digital age, each step of this standard process is made as accessible as possible to the public. Before decisions are made, briefs are posted on the Supreme Court’s website, as are audio recordings of oral arguments. Once opinions are handed down, they are available for immediate access by the public.

And we pay attention when high-profile cases are before the Court. Media outlets often cover oral arguments in cases that handle controversial issues, or film the running of the interns when a landmark case’s opinion is handed down. But these noteworthy cases represent a fraction of the Court’s operations. While only 70 or so cases will have oral arguments before the Court each year, thousands of unsigned opinions and orders are issued through the shadow docket. Because these typically relate to unremarkable issues, they receive far less media attention and tend to go unnoticed by the general public.

In recent years, however, there has been a shift in the way the Court uses one function of the shadow docket. Occasionally, the Court is asked to provide immediate relief in a case that has been heard by a lower court while the appeal is making its way to the Supreme Court. As an example: in 2021, a district court remanded and vacated a stay from a lower court regarding a Trump administration rule that tightened an Environmental Protection Agency process governing federal permits for projects that might impact “waters of the United States.” In short, companies could receive waivers that allowed them to avoid obtaining certification that their work would not cause harm to state waterways. In 2020, a District Court vacated the Trump administration’s rule, and an appeal failed to yield a stay. Petitioners asked the Supreme Court to issue a stay which would reinstate the Trump-era rule. One note: applicants seeking emergency relief from the Court must illustrate how lack of immediate action from the Court would cause them “irreparable harm.”

On April 6, 2022, a decision was issued through the shadow docket granting the stay, our lead example. That order was unsigned and was accompanied by no reasoning from the Justices as to why they decided to grant the stay. The Trump-era EPA rule is back in effect, but legal scholars, lower court judges, and attorneys have no written decision to help understand how to interpret the order. In her dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan argued that there was not sufficient evidence to suggest that the petitioners would face irreparable harm if the Court did not issue an emergency decision. She continued:....>

<....“By nonetheless granting relief, the Court goes astray. It provides a stay pending appeal, and thus signals its view of the merits, even though the applicants have failed to make the irreparable harm showing we have traditionally required. That renders the Court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all. The docket becomes only another place for merits determinations—except made without full briefing and argument. I respectfully dissent.”

This lack of transparency is central in the criticism some legal scholars have raised with the Court’s increased use of the shadow docket. The legal community relies on the extensive content of the Court’s written opinions to parse the meaning of its decisions. How precedent should be applied is often reliant on the Justices’ arguments in support of or opposition to a decision from the Court. But in the shadow docket cases, no supporting information exists to help members of the legal profession interpret the Court’s actions.

And yet others find the criticism of the shadow docket’s emergency applications to be baseless. Speaking at a lecture at Notre Dame, Associate Justice Samuel Alito explained his perspective:

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its way. And this portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

Justice Alito and others assert that the Court has always needed to use its emergency docket to provide immediate relief to applicants. Furthermore, they argue that the most vocal critics of its current use are those who disagree with a particular decision. Rather than critique the opinion itself, they argue, disgruntled opponents launch attacks on the process.

Regardless of how the Court continues to use its emergency docket in the future, one thing is certain: the public is now significantly more aware of its use than in previous decades. In February of 2021, the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing to investigate the shadow docket’s use (use the link below to see the footage from the hearing), meaning that congressional attention is also tuned into its operations.

FAQs: How Does the Shadow Docket Function?
Q: What do legal analysts point to when claiming that shadow docket cases have increased recently? A: During the two-term presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, those administrations only filed 16 shadow docket cases with the Court. That number more than doubled under by the Trump administration – 41 were filed during his single term in office. While the Court only granted a total of eight cases during the Bush and Obama terms, 28 were granted during Trump’s tenure.

Q: What happens if a Justice disagrees with a decision from the shadow docket? A: One or more Justices may submit a dissent to a shadow docket order. Again using the EPA case we reference above, Louisiana, Et Al. v. American Rivers, Associate Justice Kagan wrote a dissent, joined by Associate Justices Breyer and Sotomayor, and Chief Justice Roberts.

Q: Are all shadow docket cases related to headline issues? A: No, in fact the vast majority of the orders issued under the shadow docket deal with noncontroversial procedural issues before the Court. Under the shadow docket’s aegis, the Court permits extra time for petitioners and respondents to file briefs, refuses appeals for emergency intervention, and denies petitions of certiorari from lower courts. See this April 18 order from the shadow docket to get a sense for how brief and non-controversial the opinions can be.>

<Well if I find it doesn’t make any sense … I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.

[I]f [it’s] totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided.

— Justice Clarence Thomas, in remarks given during an appearance at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, where he was asked how he balances stare decisis with originalist viewpoints. He went on to liken the Supreme Court’s reliance on precedent to adding more cars to the back of a long train, saying, “We never go to the front to see where it’s going. You could go up to the engine room and find that it’s an orangutan driving. And you’re going to follow that? I think we owe our fellow citizens more than that.”>

The above, of course, applies only to precedents he is disposed to ignore.

<A new House panel will re-investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with an eye toward recasting the narrative about the events in Washington that day.

It’s the latest sign that the deadly riot remains a wound on Congress that might never fully heal amid ferocious partisan sparring. Retribution, not reconciliation, appears to be the prime motivation behind the new probe, with the Republicans behind it still bitter over the work of the panel’s previous iteration, which was largely led by Democrats and concluded President Donald Trump was singularly to blame for the violence inflicted by his supporters.

One GOP member of the new panel, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, did not rule out questioning members of the prior committee.

“They were not invested in actual investigative work anyway,” said Higgins, who has pushed an unfounded theory that FBI agents helped coordinate the events at the Capitol. “That thing was never legitimate. It was always biased. And therefore, if we question them, it may be with the angle of having them implicate themselves in lies that they presented as truth.”

Speaker Mike Johnson called it "a committee investigating the previous committee" in a CNN interview Sunday and said the prior effort "was rigged."

The panel’s chair, Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk, describes the investigation more soberly. He said in an interview that GOP staff have been quietly toiling for months, even before Johnson moved to formalize the probe this month.

Loudermilk said his team has been “talking to different entities,” reviewing documents and brainstorming potential investigative targets.

“We need to look at it from a factual standpoint,” he said. “It’s dangerous out there. There were a lot of civilians, as well as members of Congress and staff and even press that were here on Jan. 6. And I think we’re all interested to know, why did the Capitol get breached — regardless of who did it — how did it get breached?”

But to Democrats and even some Republicans, that rationale is a smokescreen for the panel’s true purpose: rewriting the history of Jan. 6, 2021, to minimize the culpability of the president and supporters who violently assaulted police officers and entered the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the final certification of Trump's 2020 election loss.

The security failures Loudermilk cited have been the subject of a slew of wide-ranging investigations: a review by retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, a series of reports by the Capitol Police’s inspector general, a bipartisan Senate review and two appendices in the final report of the previous House Jan. 6 select committee.

That previous select committee concluded that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, and months of false claims to sow doubt about his defeat in the 2020 election, inflamed his supporters shortly before he directed them to march on the Capitol. But the review also acknowledged that Capitol security officials were underprepared for the onslaught, leading to the breach of the building and several near-confrontations between rioters and lawmakers.

“They can't even seem to settle on which conspiracy theory they want to advance,” said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who served on the previous Jan. 6 panel and serves on the new one. “Was it Antifa? Did it not happen at all? Did Donald Trump really win the election? They can't figure out what it is they want to say, and it's because it's just a tissue of lies and conspiracy theories.”

The backdrop for the new GOP-led investigation is Trump’s return to the presidency and his persistent efforts to reject any blame for the attack — and to accuse his political enemies of persecuting his supporters. On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned about 1,000 members of the mob and ordered his Justice Department to drop pending criminal cases against hundreds of others.

Trump has spent the intervening years downplaying the violence that occurred that day, which left more than 100 police officers injured. One officer died a day after the riot after suffering strokes, and several others died of suicide in subsequent weeks. Four Trump supporters died in the violence, including one who was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to enter the lobby that leads onto the House floor.

The attack remains a raw issue on Capitol Hill. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) helped sink the nomination of conservative attorney Ed Martin to be Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, citing Martin’s advocacy for Jan. 6 criminal defendants and his comments about the attack. FBI Director Kash Patel has faced intense questioning about his own advocacy for Jan. 6 defendants and his role in producing a rendition of the National Anthem by some of the most violent offenders that day....>

<....There is even an ongoing controversy over whether to hang a plaque previously commissioned by Congress to honor those who protected the Capitol that day. Johnson has refused to display the memorial, and Loudermilk, while expressing personal support for the officers, said that decision is “not in my decisionmaking wheelhouse.”

Meanwhile, the prior select committee, led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), remains a particular sore spot for Trump and many Republicans. Even after it was disbanded, Trump continued calling its report a “Hoax” and its leaders “Political Hacks and Thugs” while championing Loudermilk’s work.

Reinvestigating the attack has been a longstanding priority for the Georgia Republican, who came under scrutiny by the previous Jan. 6 panel for hosting a tour of the complex the night before the Capitol riot. One person in his party was later found to have posted incendiary videos and marched toward, but not into, the building the next day.

Neither Loudermilk nor anyone in his tour group was accused of any wrongdoing, but the Jan. 6 committee interviewed one of the group members and questioned why Loudermilk did not inform authorities about the presence of his group.

After Republicans retook the House majority in 2023, Loudermilk led a probe “on the failures and politicization of the January 6th Select Committee” as chair of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight. In that investigation, some entities were uncooperative with his requests, Loudermilk said.

This time, in helming a select subcommittee under the Judiciary Committee, he has full subpoena power to compel compliance with his demands. “We think we’ve got a little more cooperation at this point,” he said.

The formal creation of Loudermilk’s panel followed months of negotiations over its scope and powers, with Loudermilk pushing for greater jurisdiction than Johnson’s team had been willing to give — and complaining to fellow Republicans about how GOP leadership was trying to stifle his effort. Then the Trump administration privately applied pressure to get the effort set up, Loudermilk told reporters earlier this year.

Johnson, who was central to the effort on Capitol Hill to overturn the 2020 election, acted quietly — inserting a provision establishing the panel as part of an unrelated procedural measure. One House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive dynamics around the panel, was unaware the subcommittee even existed before being asked about it by a POLITICO reporter.

Besides Loudermilk and Higgins, the panel’s members are Republican Reps. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, Troy Nehls of Texas and Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, as well as Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell of California, Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Jared Moskowitz of Florida. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) will serve as an ex officio member alongside Raskin, the top Judiciary Democrat.

These lawmakers are some of the most aggressive political messengers of their respective parties. Nehls sued the government over what he claimed was retaliation from the Capitol Police for his criticism of the force’s handling of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Hageman unseated Cheney after she was ostracized by her party for her leading role in the prior panel and her unrelenting criticism of Trump....>

<....The panel is wasting no time in launching an effort to review the findings of that previous committee. Earlier this month, Loudermilk sent letters to some businesses and other entities that had been in contact with the previous Jan. 6 panel to request data that was deleted or not otherwise archived. That committee disclosed a host of information in its possession, but some materials — including footage of its interviews — remain unreleased.

Other details of what the panel’s work will entail in the coming months remain sketchy. Loudermilk said he anticipates releasing a final report, while hearings would be called “based on a need and based on the evidence that we're collecting.”

He added that his team was focusing on the unsolved mystery of the pipe bombs placed near the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee offices the day before the riot and the FBI’s use of confidential human sources who were present at the Capitol.

Patel recently said the bureau’s pipe bomb investigation remained active and promising. The Justice Department’s inspector general reported in December that there were 26 FBI sources present in Washington on Jan. 6 but only three had actually been tasked by the bureau with tracking potential bad actors.

Both issues have fueled conspiracy theories about government involvement in the violence that day. Johnson in the CNN interview Sunday repeated an unfounded narrative endorsed by Trump that there were hundreds of FBI agents in the crowd as the Capitol was stormed — a misapprehension of data released by the bureau that includes agents dispatched to the scene after the violence broke out.

Loudermilk said he intends to steer his panel away from politics.

“I'm trying to make it clear I do not want this to be a partisan clown show,” he said. “This isn't about getting clicks or media interviews.”>

<Not long after U.S. housing prices reached a record high this summer – the median existing home went for US$435,000 in June – President Donald Trump said that he was considering a plan to make home sales tax-free.

Supporters of the idea, introduced by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as the No Tax on Home Sales Act in July, say it would benefit working families by eliminating all taxes on the sales of family homes.

But most Americans who sell their homes already do so tax-free. And the households that would gain most under Trump’s proposals are those with the most valuable real estate.

As a legal scholar who studies how taxes affect racial and economic inequality, I see this proposal as part of a familiar pattern: measures advertised as relief for ordinary families that mostly benefit the well-off.

Most families already sell their homes tax-free

Right now, according to the Internal Revenue Code, a single person pays no tax on the first $250,000 in gain from a home sale, while married people can exclude $500,000. All told, about 90% of home sales generate less than $500,000 in gains, so the overwhelming majority of sellers already owe no tax.

The minority who would see new benefits from the proposed tax change are those with more than $500,000 in appreciation – typically owners of high-priced homes in hot real estate markets. Yale’s Budget Lab estimated the average benefit for these tax-free sales was $100,000 per qualifying seller.

Homeownership itself isn’t equally distributed across the U.S. population. About 44% of Black Americans are homeowners, compared with 74% of white Americans. That racial gap has only widened over the past 10 years. Similarly, single women – particularly but not exclusively women of color – face additional barriers.

A broader trend of upward wealth transference

Though still just a proposal, the tax-free home sales bill is part of a broader set of Republican tax plans that would have regressive effects – that is, where the vast majority of benefits go to high-income people and very few to low-income people – under a pro-worker banner.

Trump floated the tax-free home sales idea less than three weeks after he signed a large package of tax and spending measures in July 2025. That bill generated strong public criticism because of its emphasis on tax savings for the rich at the expense of almost a trillion dollars in cuts for federally funded health care for the poor and disabled.

The home sales idea follows the same script – and echoes the distributional pattern established by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That tax reform increased racial wealth and income disparities and provided 80% of its benefits to corporations and high-income individuals. In fact, my research shows that white households received more than twice as many tax cuts as Black households from that law.

The same dynamic plays out in this new tax-fueled housing policy. Eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales would primarily benefit the 29 million homeowners who already have substantial equity – a group that skews heavily white, male and upper middle class.

Meanwhile, America’s millions of renters, disproportionately people of color and women, would receive no benefit while potentially losing access to social programs Congress must cut to fund these tax breaks.>

<In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term in office, his administration has made many attempts to suppress speech it disfavors – at universities, on the airwaves, in public school classrooms, in museums, at protests and even in lawyer’s offices.

If past is prologue, these efforts may backfire.

In 2018, I published my book “Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock.”

A devout evangelical Christian, Comstock hoped to use the powers of the government to impose moral standards on American expression in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. To that end, he and like-minded donors established the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which successfully lobbied for the creation of the first federal anti-obscenity laws with enforcement provisions.

Later appointed inspector for the Post Office Department, Comstock fought to abolish whatever he deemed blasphemous and sinful: birth control, abortion aids and information about sexual health, along with certain art, books and newspapers. Federal and state laws gave him the power to order law enforcement to seize these materials and have prosecutors bring criminal indictments.

I analyzed thousands of these censorship cases to assess their legal and cultural outcomes.

I found that, over time, Comstock’s censorship regime did lead to a rise in self-censorship, confiscations and prosecutions. However, it also inspired greater support for free speech and due process.

More popular – and more profitable

One effect of Comstock’s censorship campaigns: The materials and speech he disfavored often made headlines, putting them on the public’s radar as a kind of “forbidden fruit.”

For example, prosecutions targeting artwork featuring nude subjects led to both sensational media coverage and a boom in the popularity of nudes on everything from soap advertisements and cigar boxes to photographs and sculptures.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs of racy forms of entertainment – promoters of belly dancing, publishers of erotic postcards and producers of “living pictures,” which were exhibitions of seminude actors posing as classical statuary – all benefited from Comstock’s complaints. If Comstock wanted it shut down, the public often assumed that it was fun and trendy.

In 1891, Comstock became irate when a young female author proposed paying him to attack her book and “seize a few copies” to “get the newspapers to notice it.” And in October 1906, Comstock threatened to shut down an exhibition of models performing athletic exercises wearing form-fitting union suits. Twenty thousand people showed up to Madison Square Garden for the exhibition – far more than the venue could hold at the time.

The Trump administration’s recent efforts to get comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air have similarly backfired.

Kimmel had generated controversy for comments he made on his late-night talk show in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination. ABC, which is owned by The Walt Disney Co., initially acquiesced to pressure from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr and announced the show’s “indefinite” suspension. But many viewers, angered over the company’s capitulation, canceled their subscriptions of Disney streaming services. This led to a 3.3% drop in Disney’s share price, which spurred legal actions by shareholders of the publicly traded company.

ABC soon lifted the suspension. Kimmel returned, drawing 6.26 million live viewers – more than four times his normal audience – while over 26 million viewers watched Kimmel’s return monologue on social media. Since then, all network affiliates have resumed airing “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

‘Comstockery’ and hypocrisy

In the U.S., disfavored political speech and obscenity are different in important ways. The Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment provides broad protections for political expression, whereas speech deemed to be obscene is illegal.

Despite this fundamental difference, social and cultural forces can make it difficult to clearly discern protected and unprotected speech.

In Comstock’s case, the public was happy to see truly explicit pornography removed from circulation. But their own definition of what was “obscene” – and, therefore, criminally liable – was much narrower.

In 1905, Comstock attempted to shut down a theatrical performance of George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” because the plot included prostitution. The aging censor was widely ridiculed and became a “laughing stock,” according to The New York Times. Shaw went on to coin the term “Comstockery,” which caught on as a shorthand for overreaching censoriousness....>

<....In a similar manner, when Attorney General Pam Bondi recently threatened Americans that the Department of Justice “will absolutely … go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” swift backlash ensued.

Numerous Supreme Court rulings have held that hate speech is constitutionally protected. However, those in power can threaten opponents with punishment even when their speech clearly does not fall within one of the rare exceptions to the First Amendment protection for political speech.

Doing so carries risks.

The old saying “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” also applies to censors: The public holds them to higher standards, lest they be exposed as hypocrites.

For critics of the Trump administration, it was jarring to see officials outraged about “hate speech,” only to hear the president announce, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

In Comstock’s case, defendants and their attorneys routinely noted that Comstock had seen more illicit materials than any man in the U.S. Criticizing Comstock in 1882, Unitarian minister Octavius Brooks Frothingham quoted Shakespeare: “Who is so virtuous as to be allowed to forbid the distribution of cakes and ale?”

In other words, if you’re going to try to enforce moral standards, you better make sure you’re beyond reproach.

Free speech makes for strange bedfellows
Comstock’s censorship campaign, though self-defeating in the long run, nonetheless caused enormous suffering, just as many people today are suffering from calls to fire and harass those whose viewpoints are legal, but disliked by the Trump administration.

Comstock prosecuted women’s rights advocate Ida Craddock for circulating literature that advocated for female sexual pleasure. After Craddock was convicted in 1902, she died by suicide. She left behind a “letter to the public,” in which she accused Comstock of violating her rights to freedom of religion and speech.

During Craddock’s trial, the jury hadn’t been permitted to see her writings; they were deemed “too harmful.” Incensed by these violations of the First and Fourth amendments, defense attorneys rallied together and were joined by a new coalition in the support of Americans’ constitutional rights. Lincoln Steffens of the nascent Free Speech League wrote, in response to Craddock’s suicide, that “those who believe in the general principle of free speech must make their point by supporting it for some extreme cause. Advocating free speech only for a popular or uncontroversial position would not convey the breadth of the principle.”

Then, as now, the cause of free expression can bring together disparate political factions.

In the wake of the Kimmel saga, many conservative Republicans came out to support the same civil liberties also advocated by liberal Hollywood actors. Two-thirds of Americans in a September 2025 YouGov poll said that it was “unacceptable for government to pressure broadcasters to remove shows it disagrees with.”

My conclusion from studying the 43-year career of America’s most prolific censor?

Government officials may think a campaign of suppression and fear will silence their opponents, but these threats could end up being the biggest impediment to their effort to remake American culture.>

<Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s most polarizing superintendent of public instruction in modern history, has submitted his official resignation letter less than three years into his term. His departure, announced in a letter to parents and guardians, marks the abrupt end of a tenure defined by censorship, culture-war crusades, and a deepening crisis for students and teachers across the state.

In his resignation letter, Walters framed his exit as a victory lap, celebrating what he called “historic education reforms.” He boasted about eliminating “DEI, CRT, and woke indoctrination,” restoring the Bible to classrooms, expanding private school vouchers, and overseeing record bonuses for select teachers. “Serving as your State Superintendent has been an honor,” Walters wrote, before announcing his transition from state office to a national advocacy role.

A Culture Warrior in the Classroom

From the start, Walters made clear that his approach was seemingly less about teaching and learning and more about reshaping schools into battlegrounds for conservative ideology. He fought to impose religious texts in public schools, attempted to dismantle diversity initiatives, and used state resources to stoke fears of “indoctrination.”

Black communities experienced his tenure as a direct attack. By weaponizing words like “CRT” or critical race theory. Walters signaled his refusal to confront Oklahoma’s legacy of racial violence and inequity.

“But let’s not tie it [the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre] to the skin color and say that the skin color determined it,” Walters said at a meeting in reference to the Massacre. Descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and Black educators working to ensure history is taught honestly saw his policies as erasure, not reform.

Walters also drew national headlines for supporting St. Isidore, the nation’s first religious charter school, in a move that many legal scholars argued violated the constitutional separation of church and state. His battles with civil rights groups, teachers’ unions, and even fellow Republicans made Oklahoma education a flashpoint in the broader culture wars.

Targeting Immigrant Children

Walters’ tenure also took aim at immigrant students. He pushed a rule requiring parents to show proof of citizenship or legal residency during school enrollment, effectively turning classrooms into immigration checkpoints. He even suggested cooperating with ICE to remove children whose parents faced deportation.

The proposal drew immediate backlash from educators and immigrant-rights advocates, who warned it would terrify families and violate the constitutional right to education. Governor Kevin Stitt ultimately blocked key parts of the plan, but Walters defended it as necessary to measure the “burden” of undocumented students — reducing children to statistics and deepening fear in vulnerable communities.

Turmoil, Transparency, and Silenced Voices

Walters’ administration became notorious for its hostility toward the press. In 2023, his office barred The Black Wall Street Times from conducting interviews, citing this paper’s critical coverage as an unprecedented attempt to silence a Black-owned newsroom. That move however underscored what many critics described as Walters’ authoritarian streak: intolerance for dissent and a refusal to be held accountable.

At the same time, Oklahoma classrooms faced worsening teacher shortages, declining test scores, and the loss of valuable instructional time. Educators reported feeling demoralized and vilified, while parents raised concerns about the politicization of their children’s education.

From State Office to National Stage

Rather than take responsibility for the controversies that defined his leadership, Walters is using his resignation to expand his reach. He will now lead the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative group vowing to “destroy the teachers’ unions.” By leaving early, Walters is betting that his combative, grievance-driven politics will resonate with right-wing donors and media outlets....>

<....“It’s no surprise Ryan Walters has chosen his own personal ambitions over serving our students and teachers, like he always has,” Oklahoma Senate Democratic Leader Julia Kirt said. “Republicans failed to hold him accountable to do his job, and they should be embarrassed he’s left this office of his own accord.”

“Ryan Walters’ resignation is long overdue. Parents across Oklahoma have watched in frustration as he turned classrooms into culture-war battlefields instead of places where children learn and thrive. His attacks on immigrant families, efforts to erase the role of race in the Tulsa Race Massacre, and hostility toward educators created fear when what families need is hope,” Keri Rodrigues Langan, president of the National Parents Union, told The Black Wall Street Times.

Governor Kevin Stitt struck a different tone: “I wish Ryan and his family the best in this next chapter. Oklahoma students remain my top priority, and with my first appointment to this role, I will be seeking a leader who is fully focused on the job Oklahomans expect: delivering real outcomes and driving a turnaround in our education system.”

Stitt must now appoint a replacement to serve through January 2027. The transition gives Oklahoma a chance to turn the page on a turbulent chapter, though Walters’ imprint from voucher expansion to ideological curriculum mandates will not fade easily.

What’s at Stake for Black and Marginalized Students

For Black families in Oklahoma, Walters’ resignation raises urgent questions. Will his successor dismantle the policies that censored history and punished diversity efforts? Additionally, will students once again be free to learn the unvarnished truth about their state and America’s past and the challenges of its present?

The fight for public education is far from over. Walters may be leaving the superintendent’s chair, but his move to the national stage ensures that the same battles he waged in Oklahoma will continue to echo across the country.

For communities of color, educators, and parents who have resisted his agenda, the task now is clear: remain vigilant, amplify the truth, and hold the next superintendent accountable to the students who deserve more than politics in their classrooms.>

<Russell Vought has been planning for this moment for years.

President Trump’s budget chief—one of the main players in the government shutdown that has ground Washington to a halt—might also be one of its biggest beneficiaries, as the freeze gives him the opportunity to implement funding cuts he has long advocated.

Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, was quick Wednesday to target Democratic priorities and projects. In a move that affected Democratic Congressional leaders from New York, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Vought posted on X that a hold had been put on $18 billion in federal funds for New York City infrastructure work: a Hudson River tunnel project and a subway extension.

The Transportation Department pinned the blame on the shutdown, saying a review of the projects’ contracting policies and their relationship to diversity, equity and inclusion requirements couldn’t move forward. “Without a budget, the department has been forced to furlough the civil rights staff responsible for conducting this review,” the agency said in a statement.

Vought also posted that $8 billion in Energy Department funds for climate projects would be canceled in more than a dozen Democratic-leaning states. He didn’t specify which projects would be affected.

Last week, he issued a memo directing federal agencies to craft plans for widespread layoffs in the event of a shutdown. Vought told House Republicans on a conference call Wednesday that layoffs likely would begin in another day or two, according to people on the call. While he didn’t specify how many layoffs were in the pipeline, one person familiar with the call said Vought indicated it would be consequential.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), a close Trump ally, predicted a shutdown might not last long, in part because of the specter of Vought. “This OMB guy, you need to watch him,” Graham said. “I think there’s definitely a downside to a shutdown for the system…I think he will try to wreak havoc on the workforce.”

Vought “has been thinking for his entire life and career about how to downsize the government,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) told The Wall Street Journal, adding that “he’s acting very judiciously.”

The extent to which Vought plans to follow through on his threat remains to be seen. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.) said he thought it was more a negotiating tactic, but “no one should doubt Director Vought’s willingness to carry out the threat. I know I don’t.”

Rep. Sean Casten (D., Ill.) said Vought was “threatening to fire federal employees for political reasons and without concern for the impact on the government.”

Even before the shutdown, Vought has outraged Democrats—and even some Republicans—by pushing a policy known as “pocket rescissions,” under which the executive branch asserts it has the right to withhold congressionally approved spending.

Vought’s posture in theory puts pressure on Democrats demanding the restoration of healthcare spending in exchange for support for funding the government. They have taken a defiant stance so far, pointing to Vought’s pocket rescissions as evidence that the administration will move forward with cuts with or without Congress, causing them to doubt it will negotiate in good faith.

“Our response to Russ Vought is simple,” Jeffries said. “Get lost.”

A longtime budget hawk and co-author of the conservative Project 2025, Vought is a veteran of the first Trump administration, when he also ran OMB, which acts as the budgetary and regulatory nerve center for the executive branch. He has been steeped in conservative causes for decades, working in Congress and later with Heritage Action, the lobbying affiliate of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

After President Joe Biden’s election, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a Washington think tank focused on taking steps to reorder the federal government. He spent the next four years working on potential executive actions and policies to rein in Washington’s reach and cut spending—policies he is now working to implement.

Vought is “very dedicated to the idea of shrinking the government, getting rid of federal employees, and he’s really clever in finding a way to do that in any situation,” said David Graham, author of “The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.”....>