<This is the most transparent Justice Department in the history of the United States and maybe all of human existence. Just ask them.

When pressed in November 2025 about DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to “follow the law with maximum transparency.” In a December 2025 letter, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche kvelled, “Never in American history has a president or the Department of Justice been this transparent with the American people about such a sensitive law-enforcement matter.” Bondi gushed last month about serving under Trump, “the most transparent president in the nation’s history!” DOJ’s current leadership loves little more than to congratulate itself on its world-historic, crystal-clear, nothing-to-hide transparency.

Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Let’s ignore the fact that the Justice Department complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act over a month late with millions of pages improperly withheld, with victim identities inexcusably revealed, and with the names of various apparent wrongdoers improperly redacted. Let’s take as true (for the sake of argument) Bondi’s claim that she wants nothing more than for the American public to see behind the curtain.

What, then, would we expect of this Most Transparent DOJ Ever when the AG receives a subpoena issued with bipartisan support from a Republican-led congressional committee? Maybe something like: “The attorney general, who prizes transparency above all, looks forward to the opportunity to testify to Congress and the American people.”

Instead, within moments of the subpoena’s issuance, DOJ’s actual response: “Completely unnecessary.”

In that initial statement, the Justice Department offered a glimpse of its strategic game plan: “The Attorney General has always made herself available to speak directly with members of Congress. She continues to have calls and meetings with members of Congress on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which is why the Department offered to brief the committee tomorrow.” Of course, none of that answers the question of whether she’ll show up to testify. That’s not an accident.

Let’s pause here to draw a vital distinction. On one hand, there’s Bondi’s formal testimony, required by a House Oversight Committee subpoena, scheduled for April 14. That testimony would be given under oath. It would be visible to the American public, recorded verbatim by video and stenographer. And it would proceed according to a set of established rules allowing committee members to question the AG directly. Bondi doesn’t exactly shine in these settings, of course. Recall her disastrous testimony last month — the hackish personal insults, the bizarre non sequiturs about the Dow being over 50,000 (it’s not anymore), the overall tone of shouty defensiveness — which made her the subject of a series of derisive memes.

On the other hand, there’s the informal “briefing” Bondi offered (together with her human heat shield, Blanche) last week, the day after the subpoena’s issuance. Predictably, it became a pointless free-for-all. Bondi was not under oath, there were no specific procedural rules, and there was no video recording or transcription — leaving it to partisan lawmakers to offer their after-the-fact, often contradictory (and self-serving) recollections of what happened behind closed doors. Democrats objected, all heck broke loose, and everyone stormed out unsatisfied.

The Justice Department plainly hoped that, by sliding in for a quick, informal chat with the committee, they could obviate the need for Bondi’s formal testimony on April 14. A couple of Republicans on the committee seemed to be trying to help them cling to that position. Lauren Boebert, who had voted for the Bondi subpoena, announced after the chaotic debriefing that she was reconsidering her support for it because it “is absolutely shameful to have her come in there willingly to answer anything that we want to ask, and to be treated that way. It just shows what’s to come.” Republican representative Tim Burchett, who had also supported the Bondi subpoena, said after the briefing, “She was there, they had an opportunity, and they blew it.”

Committee Democrats weren’t having it. Ranking member Robert Garcia called out the ruse, saying, “We’re not going to participate in fake hearings and briefings like the one that they tried to set up yesterday to get out of sworn, under-oath testimony.”....>

<....Bondi’s own remarks on the question have been as noncommittal and slippery as the public statement by the DOJ. On her way out of the briefing, when asked by a reporter if she would still testify on April 14, the AG proclaimed she had “made it crystal clear I will follow the law” — which means absolutely nothing. Bondi may mean “Of course, I will testify in compliance with a lawful congressional subpoena.” Or (more likely) she could mean “I think the subpoena is unlawful, so I will defy it.”

If Bondi in fact refuses to testify on April 14, the next move will belong to the committee, which holds the power to recommend a formal contempt resolution. The Oversight Committee includes 25 Republicans and 21 Democrats, so the votes of all Democrats plus three Republicans would constitute a majority. Five Republicans voted for the Bondi subpoena, including Boebert and Burchett (who probably shouldn’t be counted as solid votes going forward). If the committee votes for contempt, the matter goes to the full House — 217 Republicans, 214 Democrats, and one Independent (plus three vacancies). Again, Democrats can hold a majority if they all vote in favor of contempt and peel away three other votes.

Here’s where it all comes full circle. If the House votes for contempt, then the matter gets sent for potential prosecution to … the United States Department of Justice, which is currently helmed by … Attorney General Pam Bondi. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict the odds of Bondi approving an indictment captioned “United States v. Pamela Jo Bondi” are slim.

We’ve seen recently that attorneys general, as a rule, aren’t exactly eager to indict themselves. We somehow managed to go 230-plus years as a nation without holding any attorney general in contempt. But lately, it has become a ritual. In 2012, the Republican-controlled House (with some Democratic support) held Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to provide documents relating to the “Fast and Furious” firearms sting operation. In 2019, the Democratic-controlled House held AG Bill Barr in contempt when he declined to provide documents relating to the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census. And in 2024, the Republican-controlled House held AG Merrick Garland in contempt for his refusal to release audio of an interview between special counsel Robert Hur and then-President Joe Biden. In all three cases, the AGs shocked precisely nobody by declining to charge themselves with criminal contempt.

Still, beyond the privileged world of attorneys general, contempt-of-Congress charges can have teeth. Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were held in contempt for defying subpoenas from the January 6th Committee. Both were indicted in 2022, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for four months each. More recently, the House Oversight Committee (with bipartisan support) approved a contempt resolution against Bill and Hillary Clinton after they defied subpoenas relating to the Epstein investigation; after the vote, the Clintons decided to testify rather than risk prosecution.

While Bondi surely has no fear of an indictment, it’s tough to square a formal finding of contempt — especially one that would require bipartisan support — with her constant self-congratulatory claims of unprecedented transparency. But that bit of overt hypocrisy may be a small price to pay for Bondi to avoid another round of humiliating testimony like she gave last month on Capitol Hill. Circle April 14 on your calendar, but only in pencil.>

<FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to release a decade-old investigative file involving Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) and a suspected Chinese intelligence operative, recently dispatching agents in the bureau’s San Francisco office to quickly redact the files before they are released publicly despite no evidence of wrongdoing by Swalwell, according to three people familiar with the effort.

The potential release is part of the Trump administration’s aggressive push to investigate Swalwell, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, according to the people familiar with the effort. It is highly unusual for the FBI to release case files tied to a probe that did not result in criminal charges.

As FBI director, Patel has focused on trying to bring a criminal case against the outspoken Democrat, reassigning multiple agents in San Francisco to work on the matter, the current and former officials said. FBI leaders have even discussed sending agents to China to talk to the suspected intelligence operative, believing she could have damaging information about Swalwell, according to two of the people familiar with the investigation. The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an investigation that has not been made public.

The Chinese woman at issue is Christine Fang, also known as Fang Fang, who reportedly courted Swalwell and other California politicians in the United States from 2011 to 2015. She helped with fundraising for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign and even helped place an intern in his congressional office. When federal agents conveyed their concerns about Fang to Swalwell around 2015, he reportedly cut off ties with her and said he helped investigators.

Swalwell was not accused of any wrongdoing when the FBI investigated his relationship with Fang a decade ago. In 2023, the Republican-led House Ethics Committee closed a two-year investigation into the congressman, deciding to “take no further action.”

Despite that, FBI leaders have recently suggested in internal discussions that the government could try to arrange for Fang to get a U.S. visa in exchange for speaking with FBI agents about the Democrat, according to the three people with knowledge of Patel’s efforts. It would be highly unorthodox to grant a visa to a person suspected of being an intelligence agent for a foreign superpower.

An FBI spokesperson disputed any notion of improper motives. “The contentions in this story are incorrect,” the spokesperson said. “This FBI, being the most transparent in history, prepares documents for numerous different reasons, including for release to different agencies and departments to further review investigations that may have been opened under previous administrations.”

The push to publicly release the investigative files, the people interviewed said, suggests that the FBI has struggled to so far to build a criminal case against Swalwell. Even if there is no incriminating evidence in the files, an extensive case file could contain revealing and personal details about Swalwell and his campaign operations.

The lengths that Patel’s circle is going to in the bid to pursue a political foe of the president has raised alarms within the bureau, where some officials fear that releasing the files — even with redactions — could compromise law enforcement sources and investigatory methods, making it harder for the FBI to gain trust with potential witnesses.

They also said they feared the repercussions of sending agents to the territory of an adversarial nation to dig up information on a sitting congressman. Such an interview, legal experts said, would be impossible without Chinese interference, and Fang would be considered an unreliable witness.

“Most troubling about this is that we are now literally at war. We also face threats against the homeland,” Swalwell said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Kash Patel should be spending every moment trying to keep us safe, not scoring political points. A lot of people have bent the knee to this administration. But I will not, and neither will the people of California.”

Swalwell, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has been an unusually aggressive and colorful critic of the president, frequently criticizing the president in media interviews and on the dais as a member of the House Judiciary Committee. Swalwell also was a House “manager” — essentially, a prosecutor — in Trump’s 2021 impeachment for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol....>

<....Swalwell’s district in Northern California includes a large Chinese American population. Republicans and media personalities frequently criticize Swalwell for his ties to Fang and the Chinese community, suggesting that he is improperly working with them.

But FBI agents typically need a specific investigative reason to reopen a closed investigation. The people familiar with the probe said it is unclear how or why the FBI reopened its examination of Swalwell.

Internal Justice Department policy has long said that law enforcement should refrain from taking any public investigatory steps against a political candidate in the 60 days before an election, to prevent even the appearance of the department using its power to sway the vote.

The Justice Department is not legally bound to follow this rule, however, and it is unclear whether it would do so in Swalwell’s case. The California gubernatorial primary is June 2.

In California’s primaries, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, move on to the November general election. Two Republicans currently lead the governor’s race in recent polls, despite the state’s liberal leanings, as a large number of Democrats — led by Swalwell — split the vote. Democratic leaders hope their voters ultimately coalesce around one or two candidates, but the outcome remains uncertain.

The investigatory files are likely to include numerous interviews with Swalwell, his aides, friends and others about the congressman’s interactions with Fang, details about his campaign and more.

Under a long-standing legal principle, agencies do not release potentially damaging material about people against whom they were unable to build a case strong enough to take to court.

The department recently released the investigatory files in the case of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who had been indicted on federal sex trafficking charges but had not yet faced trial before killing himself. But in that case, the department’s hand was forced by political pressure and ultimately an act of Congress.

Republicans and Democrats criticized the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein release, saying the rollout was disorganized with few effective systems in place to ensure that appropriate redactions were made.

Since Trump took office, his administration has mounted an aggressive campaign to use federal law enforcement agencies to pursue his political adversaries.

The Justice Department filed criminal cases against former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, for example. A judge threw out both indictments in November, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor overseeing both cases, had been unlawfully appointed.

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte — a staunch Trump ally — referred Swalwell to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution over mortgage fraud allegations, but the department never indicted Swalwell. Swalwell sued Pulte, saying he unlawfully used his position to look through private mortgage fraud documents, but he ultimately dropped the lawsuit.

The department is also investigating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell over the cost of the Fed’s recent building renovations. A federal prosecutor acknowledged in a closed-door hearing this month that the department did not have evidence of wrongdoing, The Post has reported.

Even against this backdrop, a proposal to release extensive files, send agents to China to interview a suspected intelligence operative and offer her a U.S. visa in exchange for revelations about a U.S. congressman would be extraordinary.

Patel, who before becoming FBI director was a conservative firebrand who attacked the “deep state” and vowed to “come after” Trump’s adversaries, has long been a critic of Swalwell. In his 2023 book “Government Gangsters,” Patel published a list of 60 names in an appendix that has been widely viewed by Patel’s critics as a sort of enemies list. It includes Trump foes, Democrats and FBI agents who were involved in investigations into the president.

Swalwell was among those named by Patel, who has said that his critics are mischaracterizing the appendix by calling it an enemies list.

At a congressional hearing last year, Swalwell asked Patel if he would recuse himself from any investigation of people on the list, and Patel said no.>

<The Trump presidency is over. Those words seem harsh and, perhaps, overstated. But Donald Trump is governing without the consent of the governed. Most polls show Trump’s approval hovering around the 40 percent mark. But behind these numbers is a presidency in distress. On handling inflation and the cost of living and immigration — issues that matter to voters — Trump has dismal scores.

In 2024, voters elected Trump to do four things: curb inflation, restore the economic conditions that prevailed before the COVID-19 pandemic, deport individuals living in the U.S. illegally with criminal records and keep the U.S. out of any possible forever wars. He has failed on all counts. His tariffs have raised prices, inflation persists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deporting people indiscriminately and Trump has started a war of choice with Iran.

Trump’s first term ended when he proved unable to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks after the country shutdown, Trump promised that by Easter there would be “packed churches all over our country.” Even though Trump knew the virus was easily transmittable, he sought to bend reality to his liking. It didn’t work.

Today, Trump is doing the same thing. In his 2026 State of the Union Address, he bragged that “prices were plummeting downward.” That does not comport with the stark realities of drivers who must get to work, the truck drivers completing their runs or farmers purchasing diesel fuel. Rising prices posted on gas stations are a daily advertisement of Trump’s failures.

Presidents are remembered by the images the public associates with them. Think of Lyndon Johnson’s haggard appearance upon leaving office. Or a beleaguered Richard Nixon announcing that he wasn’t a crook. Or a worn-out Jimmy Carter declaring a crisis of confidence.

The images associated with Trump have now come into focus. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered on the streets of Minneapolis by federal immigration officials. Persons of color are fearful of being seized by masked ICE agents. Terrorized children are held in cages. Dead and wounded soldiers are returning from a war Trump started in the Middle East.

Those images will be forever associated with Trump. While he still wins support from true believers, most Americans have turned on him. Hispanics who supported Trump in 2024 are repelled by his immigration policies and have deserted the Republican Party in places like Texas. Sixty-seven percent of independents, the group of voters that decides elections, disapprove of Trump’s performance.

An old rule of politics says how you win determines how you govern. Trump’s strategy has been to rely exclusively on GOP support. But the Trump coalition is fracturing. Only 1 in 4 Republicans approve of Trump’s actions in Iran. According to an analysis by G. Elliott Morris, young, non-white and low-income members of Trump’s coalition are between 2 and 5 times more likely to disapprove of Trump’s job performance than Republicans.

Some presidents with low ratings recover because they can change the subject. Following the Iran-Contra affair, Ronald Reagan returned to his value-laden themes of family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom. The public’s affection for Reagan helped restore his standing: In 1987, 66 percent said they liked Reagan personally, according to the Roper Center Polling Library. Bill Clinton took a leaf from Reagan’s playbook after the drubbing he received in the 1994 midterms and declared that “the era of big government is over.” In 1996, he won an easy victory over Bob Dole.

Presidents who don’t recover can’t change the subject. Johnson couldn’t get the public’s mind off the Vietnam War. Nixon was undone by the daily revelations of the Watergate scandal. Carter couldn’t get the public’s mind off the hostages in Iran. George W. Bush became mired in Iraq. Joe Biden couldn’t escape the harrowing images of U.S. troops and refugees leaving Afghanistan.

Try as he might, Trump finds himself unable to turn the public’s attention away from surging gas and grocery prices, masked ICE agents patrolling the streets, the Epstein files and now, the war in Iran. Ever the salesman, Trump likes to pitch an ideal version of reality that compels the prospective buyer to enter his world. But the reality Trump creates in his own mind is at odds with what voters know to be true.

For the next two years, Trump will retain the powers of the presidency. He can veto bills, issue pardons and executive orders and even wage war. But he will govern without the consent of the governed. As Abraham Lincoln famously observed: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

Trump cannot recover his political standing. His presidency is over.>

<There’s a word we use all the time without really thinking about it:

Wait.

I’m waiting in line.
I’m waiting for a text back.
I’m waiting for my business partner to finish something. I’m waiting for the right opportunity.
I’m waiting for a good hand.

It seems harmless, right? In fact, “waiting” almost seems virtuous. As if one sitting patiently for the perfect opportunity.

But the word itself tells a deeper story.

The verb wait comes from the Anglo-French word waiten, which literally meant to watch with hostile intent.

Think about that for a second.

To wait is not just to pause. It’s not neutral. It carries tension. Impatience. Resistance. It implies that you do not want reality as it is. You want it to change. Now.

And that’s exactly how most people move through life.

They don’t receive reality.
They don’t work with reality.
Heck, they aren’t even tolerant of reality.

They resist it. They wait.

And that subtle shift in language creates a very different psychological state.

Because when you’re waiting, you’re not present. You’re not creative nor engaged. You’re not looking for what’s available now.

You’re fixated on what’s missing.

That mindset shows up everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than at the poker table.

The Amateur Poker Mindset: Waiting for the Cards to Save You

I hear it from students all the time.

“I’m just waiting for aces.”
“I’m waiting for a real hand.”
“I’m waiting for a better spot.”

It sounds disciplined on the surface, but underneath the hood, there’s resistance. The mind is rattling with anticipation:

“When will my reality change for the better?” is the underlying mood.

They truth is they’re resisting the current situation. They don’t like the fact that they’re card dead, or the game isn’t giving them what they want.

So, they retreat into this passive state where they quietly hope reality improves. They stop playing the full game and start bargaining with the deck.

By relying on external circumstance to rescue them, they give up their power, and proudly label it “waiting.”

Waiting for good cards.
Waiting for good flops.
Waiting for good timing and better luck.

When one puts themselves in that state, they miss the deeper opportunities that are always available to the player who is actually paying attention.

What Poker Pros Do Instead

The best players in the world are not sitting there “waiting for aces.”

They’re observing.

That’s a very different verb. And with it comes a very different energy.

To observe is to notice carefully. To watch closely. To remain engaged with what’s happening, without forcing it.

That’s how great pros operate.

They notice stack sizes.
They track emotional changes.
They watch how people enter pots.
They study who is uncomfortable.
They pick up timing tells.
They recognize who is overfolding, who is protecting too much, who is trying to survive, who is trying to dominate.

They’re present enough to recognize that every hand contains information, and information becomes opportunity.

They can only do this because of their mindset, which is a prerequisite to success.

By observing, they preserve their optionality. They don’t merely rely on good cards (luck) to win; instead, they create their own edge by seizing opportunities that others don’t notice.

It’s subtle but it makes all the difference.

The amateur says, “Nothing is happening for me.” The pro asks, “What is happening around me that I can use?”

One player is waiting for reality to come to them. The other is preparing to create the reality they prefer.

Language Shapes Our Reality

This is why the words you use to describe reality matter more than most people realize.

As I’ve written about before, language is literal programming.

The words you repeat don’t simply reflect your experience; they help create it. Since most decisions are driven far below conscious awareness, changing the language is often one of the fastest ways to change behavior.

If you continually say, “I’m waiting,” you reinforce a state of impatience, passivity, and resistance. You train your mind to focus on what’s absent. You keep yourself oriented toward lack.

But if you say, “I’m observing,” that changes the frame. It gives an entirely different meaning to the same situation.

Now you’re engaged and attentive.
Now you’re a participant, not a victim.
You’re in harmony with reality instead of fighting it.

And it’s from that place where you can begin to seek new opportunities that were previously unavailable to the person stuck in “waiting”.

Language and the meaning we give to something explains why two people can have the same experience yet feel entirely different about it....>

<....This is why I’m always mindful of how my clients describe their situation. I look for subtle clues which reveal how the deeper meanings.

Are they playing the victim?
Are they missing opportunities?
Are they experience boredom?
Are they unaware of the proper adjustments to win?

Because a player who says, “I’m card dead and waiting for a hand,” will play differently than a player who says, “I’m observing a table full of patterns, and I’m ready when the moment comes.”

Going Beyond the Felt

During your next session or moment of boredom, try replacing waiting with language that creates agency.

Instead of saying, “I’m waiting for a good hand,” say:

I’m observing this table.
I’m staying ready.
I’m looking for an opening.
I’m preserving optionality.
One says, I hope something happens for me.
The other says, I’m ready when it does and empowered to create it.

Hopefully you can see how this idea goes way beyond poker.

A lot of people are waiting for life to begin. Waiting for clarity. Waiting for confidence. Waiting for the perfect moment.

But winners don’t sit around “waiting” for ideal conditions. They create the conditions they prefer by making the best of the hand they’re dealt.

<Throughout his 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate, John Fetterman often took to social media to needle the few centrist Senate Democrats with histories of breaking party ranks.

Then Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor, Fetterman cast himself as the anti-Joe Manchin and anti-Kyrsten Sinema candidate who would give Democrats a reliable 51st vote in the Senate.

The oversized, tattooed, hoodie-and-shorts-wearing Fetterman overcame Dr. Mehmet Oz's celebrity status and his near-fatal stroke to become the only Democrat to flip a GOP Senate seat during that cycle.

Fast forward four years, and the former Braddock mayor finds himself playing the part he once deplored.

And many of the people who voted for him have taken notice.

"Overall, we feel abandoned," Erie, Pennsylvania, Democrat Freda Tepfer said. "Most of us do. We feel unrepresented.

"We're highly disappointed with Fetterman," she said. "He's certainly not made himself available to the people in the district. I think the people who expected him to be a progressive were overly hopeful of who he was."

Various constituent groups are planning to gather March 30 at Fetterman's five offices across Pennsylvania to voice their displeasure. Events are planned in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Wilkes-Barre and Erie.

Tepfer organized Erie's event through the local chapter of 50501, which has held "No Kings" protests across the country.

"We're going to be there with signs, and people will go in and talk to the staffers and let them know how they feel," Tepfer said about the Erie event, which will start at noon outside the Erie County Courthouse.

Fetterman's office did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Pennsylvania Democrats take swipes at Fetterman

Fetterman, 56, has rankled his party over his votes to reopen the federal government, including in November when he backed a continuing resolution, and again in February when he supported funding the Department of Homeland Security, which remains shut down because of the budget battle.

He's been a staunch supporter of Israel in its attacks on Palestine in Gaza and, more recently, he's supported Israel and the Trump administration's war in Iran.

He's also backed Trump's deportation crackdown and, in March, was the deciding committee vote to advance fellow Sen. Markwayne Mullin's nomination to secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, who's become one of Fetterman's biggest critics, has called for his ouster.

"Once again Sen Fetterman shows why he is Trump's favorite Democrat," Boyle wrote on X after the committee vote on Mullin. "He needs to go."

Hours later at a town hall meeting in Carlisle, U.S. Rep. Christine Houlahan lobbed another sharp accusation at her fellow Democrat.

“ We have this senator. We have two actually,” Houlahan said, according to reporting from The Keystone. “And I have to be really honest with you. Of the two, I have more success working with the one on the ‘R side of the aisle’ than I do with the one on the ‘D side of the aisle.’"

'Punished as a Democrat'

Fetterman has been just as vocal as his critics about his standing in the party. On a recent episode of the All-In podcast, he said Democratic leadership was stricken with "Trump Derangement Syndrome," the concocted malady Trump has used to brush aside criticism.

"Our party is governed by the TDS," Fetterman said. "It's made it virtually impossible without being punished as a Democrat to agree something's good, to agree with the other side."

On an appearance with "Real Time with Bill Maher," Fetterman addressed his fitness for office and accusations that he had "gone crazy," as Maher paraphrased it.

"Parts of my party just want to turn me into a Colonel Kurtz," Fetterman told Maher, referring to the main antagonist in the 1979 film "Apocalypse Now," played by Marlon Brando.

'People are really upset about some of the positions he's taken'

Questions about Fetterman's political loyalties arose after a trip to President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, ahead of Trump's 2025 inauguration. It foreshadowed a much cozier relationship to come between Fetterman and Trump and his MAGA base than what most Democrats anticipated.

In Erie County, where Fetterman chose to relaunch his 2022 campaign following his stroke, Democratic Party Chairman Sam Talarico said he is fielding scores of complaints.

"It's certainly been a turnaround, but it's hard to explain," Talarico said, noting that he can't recall if Fetterman has made an appearance in Erie since taking office. "And it's hard to explain because he's really not available much anymore. Being a public official, that's not a good thing."....>

<....A Quinnipiac University poll of 836 self-identified registered voters conducted Feb. 19-23 found that Fetterman maintains a 46% favorability rating, but with the support of 73% of Republicans, 48% of independents and only 22% of Democrats.

Fetterman told News Nation's Chris Cuomo March 25 that he was "confused" by the GOP support given that he's voted against some of Trump's big-ticket priorities, including his spending plan, known as "The Big Beautiful Bill," and the SAVE Act.

Fetterman, who voted to confirm former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has also noted that he called for her firing, too.

Talarico said he is trying to stay positive.

"I remind people that there's still some good there, that he still is conferencing with the Democrats and he still votes our way a majority of the time — although we would like to see a little more of that," Talarico said. "So that's the positive. People are really upset about some of the positions he's taken, especially on the war. In the Democratic Party, it's hard to find anybody who really supports going to war in Iran, and Fetterman supports that."

Tepfer, too, said Fetterman has been better than his Republican counterpart, Sen. Dave McCormick, and Oz, whom Trump appointed as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2022, she backed state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta in the Democratic primary.

She can't imagine Fetterman can win support from the party when he's up for reelection in 2028.

"It would be to his advantage to gracefully leave if he must finish his term," she said. "I don't know how he could possibly consider running again."

Will Fetterman choose to run again?

Robert Speel, professor of political science at Penn State University's Behrend campus in Erie County, attributes Fetterman's break from the party to his health.

"Many people seem reluctant to say anything about it, but he did have two health crises within the past five years, and that can change people," Speel said about Fetterman's 2022 stroke and a 2025 fall caused by atrial fibrillation.

Unless he makes a major pivot or Pennsylvania expands its closed primary system, Fetterman is unlikely to win another term, Speel said, and that includes as an independent or a Republican.

Speel recalled Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter's switch from the GOP to the Democratic Party in 2009. Polls showed Specter trailing his eventual successor, Pat Toomey, in the 2010 GOP primary. However, he was also unable to convince Democrats to choose him over then-U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak for the nomination.

"I guess he could try as an independent," Speel said. "Although, people who have abandoned their party and run as independents in congressional elections in recent decades have almost never succeeded."

The rare exception is Sen. Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, who, like Specter, faced a revolt from her party in 2010. The Republican incumbent lost the GOP primary that year to Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, but made history by defeating both Miller and Democratic nominee Scott McAdams as a write-in candidate in the general election, the first time since 1954 that a write-in candidate won a Senate seat.

Names of potential primary challengers to Fetterman in 2028 have emerged in recent months. They include Boyle and former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, who was the runner-up in the 2022 Democratic primary, among others, according to various reports.

Speel noted that throughout Fetterman's political career he's never had a lot of friends within the party, so it's not surprising that fellow Democratic officials are speaking out against him.

Talarico, though, wonders if Fetterman even wants another term.

"I'm not even sure if he's going to run for another term," he said. "It appears he doesn't really even like the job. And that's understandable, because it's hard to get anything done.">

<Donald Trump’s second presidency has been a disaster since the beginning, but it appeared to further spiral out of control this week.

Almost all of Trump's woes harken back to his stupid decision to launch a war in Iran, which has proven to be a much more difficult endeavor than he thought it would be.

Iran continues to fight back against the United States and Israel's aggression, attacking oil infrastructure in nearby nations and maintaining its blockade of a critical oil passageway called the Strait of Hormuz, thus creating an oil shortage that is spiking gas prices and weakening the global economy.

Trump has tried to calm financial markets by saying the war will end soon and that he is negotiating with Iran—neither of which appear to be true. And while his Truth Social posts seemed to mollify investors for a time, even they appear to be ignoring Trump's comments now. The stock markets are set to have their worst week since January, and oil commodity prices are rising to around $110 per barrel.

It’s probably why Trump is already looking for a scapegoat for this catastrophe.

Those high gas prices are clearly taking a toll on Trump and his party's approval, threatening not just Republicans’ House majority but also their control of the Senate in the November midterms. Trump's approval is now at a second-term low, falling more than 16 percentage points underwater. His approval is even underwater with men, a constituency that helped propel him to the White House in 2024.

Given that experts anticipate that fuel prices will increase even more, those numbers could get worse for Trump. It's why he and his doltish administration officials tried to gaslight the public at a batshit-crazy Cabinet meeting on Thursday, saying that Americans will be fine with high gas prices. Sure, guys, keep telling yourselves that.

Worse yet for Trump is that his poor approval rating appears to be influencing election results. On Tuesday, Democrats flipped two Republican-held state legislative seats in Florida, including the state House district encompassing Trump's tacky Mar-a-Lago residence.

The flips were even more concerning for Republicans because the electorates that turned out leaned Republican, meaning that independents backed the Democratic candidate by Assad margins. In fact, Republicans are now having second thoughts about gerrymandering Florida's congressional districts, fearing that a new map could backfire on the GOP and lead Democrats to win more seats than if the maps remained unchanged.

Redrawing congressional districts was critical to the GOP’s midterm plans, with their belief being it would help save their House majority. But that plan is falling apart.

If all of that wasn't bad enough, Congress this week refused Trump's demand to pass the SAVE America Act, a voter-suppression bill championed by Trump and other far-right Republicans. On Friday, Senate Republicans left Washington, D.C., for a two-week recess, without any action on the legislation.

What's more, Trump's efforts to force Democrats to cave on fully funding the Department of Homeland Security failed. The funding lapse caused chaos at airports, adding hours to already-long security lines, as Transportation Security Administration workers quit or refused to show up for unpaid work.

But instead of scaring Democrats into caving, the GOP-led Senate instead passed a DHS funding bill that did not include money for Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the two agencies for which Democrats are seeking reform.

Ultimately, it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for Trump.

But hey, at least he'll get his ugly signature on American currency. For now, he has that.>

<President Donald Trump's Department of Justice, which consistently and ludicrously claims to be "the most transparent Department of Justice in history," inadvertently suffered some actual transparency.

And that has revived calls to release the records about the criminal investigation into Trump's hoarding of classified documents after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Trump's Republican allies have been busy trying to rewrite the history of that investigation, to make the investigators the bad guys and the ex-president who swiped classified documents the victim. Actual transparency is the last thing they want right now, so of course, they'll double down on protecting Trump from himself and the consequences of his actions.

Will Republicans call Jack Smith back to testify? Probably not.

His Republican allies on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have been using the drip-drip-drip of selective document releases from the DOJ to criticize former special counsel Jack Smith, who ran the investigations that led to two indictments for Trump, one in the documents case, the other of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

But the DOJ, in the latest release of documents on March 13, included a 2023 memo from Smith's team of investigators about some of the classified documents that Trump squirreled away at his Florida estate. That memo, which recently went public, showed how reckless ‒ and greedy ‒ Trump was while hanging onto those documents.

Some of them "pertained to his business interests," according to U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who wrote that this established a "motive for retaining them." Raskin sent Attorney General Pam Bondi a March 24 letter suggesting that Trump “may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

Raskin also noted that the memo showed that some of the documents Trump held onto were so classified that "only six people in the entire U.S. government" could see them. And Susie Wiles, now Trump's chief of staff, witnessed "Trump showing off a classified map" to people on his private plane, the congressman wrote.

Sounds like Smith should have something to say in public ‒ in testimony, under oath ‒ about what this memo meant to his investigation, right? Not to Republicans.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and has tried to make all this about Smith and not Trump, said in a March 26 hearing that he would not "give in to the Democrats' ill-advised strategy to bring Jack Smith in before our investigative record is entirely ready."

U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the committee, called in that hearing for the former special counsel to testify and urged his colleagues to "weigh in with" the Florida federal judge blocking the release of Smith's classified documents investigation, "so that we have access to that report."

Department of Justice rushes to protect Trump

The released memo was a rare glimpse inside Smith's classified documents investigation since U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon ‒ who was appointed by Trump during his first term and never fails to serve his interests from the bench ‒ in February granted Trump's request to keep the records of that investigation secret.

The DOJ, which now acts more like Trump's private law firm rather than public servants, was quick to insist the inadvertent release of Smith's memo did not violate Cannon's protective order for those files.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt complained that Raskin's March 24 letter to Bondi demanding more information was "a cheap political stunt." Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted the document showed "zero proof of wrongdoing" because it wasn't part of the indictment against Trump that was "tossed out by the court."

"Tossed out" is doing some seriously heavy lifting there. A grand jury indicted Trump, but Cannon dismissed that case in 2024 ‒ not on the merits, but on a technicality about how Smith was appointed as special counsel.

That ruling was under appeal when Trump won the 2024 presidential election. The case, like the indictment on Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, was dropped after that election because of a longstanding DOJ policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.

So the cases against Trump went away. But the controversy lingers....>

<....The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee on March 25 mocked the DOJ for claiming to be transparent, accusing the department of "doing legal gymnastics to prevent the American people from ever seeing Special Counsel Jack Smith's full report on how Trump stole classified documents to advance his corrupt business interests."

The Democrats asked a justifiable question: "If the DOJ is so confident in Trump's conduct, why are they desperate to keep Smith's report under lock and key?"

Amendment Institute, as I recently wrote, are two nonprofits that work on free speech and access to government documents. They have been fighting in court for a year to get Cannon to release Smith's report in the classified documents case. They've appealed her ruling to keep the record sealed.

Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, in an email to me called it "outrageous that DOJ is defending Judge Cannon's injunction – which categorically bars the disclosure of the Special Counsel's report – while apparently selectively disclosing some of the material in the report."

American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu, in a statement, said, "Every new detail that comes to light about the report Judge Cannon has gone to great lengths to keep hidden underscores the same basic truth: the public is being denied access to critical information about one of the most serious national security scandals in American history."

Republicans can end this by asking Cannon to release the report and calling Smith to testify. Anything short of that keeps them complicit in Trump's continuing disregard for the rule of law and national security.>

<It’s another week at the Supreme Court that started with Democratic-appointed justices calling out their colleagues for refusing to address a perceived injustice.

Last week began with Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamenting the rejection of a petition from Rodney Reed. She said the effect of the denial is Texas will likely execute Reed without ever knowing whether his or another person’s DNA is on the murder weapon.

This week started with Sotomayor writing again in protest as the court declined to review yet another criminal appeal.

Monday’s denial came in the case of James Skinner, who was tried in Louisiana for the 1998 murder of Eric Walber. A co-defendant, Michael Wearry, was tried for the same crime. Wearry was convicted and sentenced to death, while Skinner’s initial trial ended with a hung jury, and then he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In 2016, the Supreme Court vacated Wearry’s conviction because the prosecution violated its duty to disclose evidence to him.

Yet the high court declined on Monday to review Skinner’s appeal, even though, as Sotomayor wrote, “the prosecution failed to disclose the same favorable evidence to him in connection with his case.” She said the court should have granted review rather than “leaving that injustice in place,” and the court failed to “treat like defendants alike.”

The upshot, the Obama appointee wrote, is Skinner “risks spending the rest of his life in prison while Wearry walks free,” and by refusing to get involved, the high court “refuses to enforce its own precedents” stemming from the landmark 1963 ruling in Brady v. Maryland, regarding prosecutors’ duty to disclose favorable evidence to the defense.

Opposing review, state officials said Wearry’s case doesn’t help Skinner because the latter “has no viable challenge to his confessions and the other corroborating evidence that squarely support the jury’s verdict.” Skinner’s lawyers said in his final reply brief to the justices that the state “insinuates the jury heard Mr. Skinner himself confess,” but what the jury “actually heard was two informants (themselves the subject of Brady violations) claim Mr. Skinner confessed.”

It takes four justices to grant review. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor on Monday. Even when they are joined by the court’s third Democratic appointee, Elena Kagan (as they were in the Reed case last week), it will still be one vote short of securing review — to say nothing of how the Republican-appointed majority would rule if review were granted.>

Isn't it something, this thing called Trumpanomics?

<Turn on your local billionaire-funded rightwing media (it’s ubiquitous, after all) pretty much any day of the week and you’ll hear a similar rant, uttered with the same grinning certainty:

“ICE is going to surround the polls this November, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

They’re not floating it as a idea or something up for debate. They’re not raising it as a question of legality or even practicality. They’re promising it, celebrating it, and daring those of us who believe in democracy to try to stop them.

Steve Bannon says it nearly every broadcast. Hate-monger Jesse Watters applauds it on Fox “News” in prime time. Professional victim Ben Shapiro calls it reasonable. Newsmax, owned by two billionaires and Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, hosts commentators who treat it like a done deal.

They’ve decided, in the open and on camera, with a swaggering confidence that no Republican will dare stand against them, that armed, masked thugs will stand at the entrance to your neighborhood polling place this fall, just like the Klan did in our great-grandparents’ generation in the South. Especially if you live in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and Hispanic voters.

And if you or some of your neighbors are frightened enough to turn around and avoid the building or even simply stay home, well, that’s precisely the point of this awful echo of some of the worst of America’s history.

The 150+ billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s return to the White House now own the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, and enough of our nation’s media to make their threat feel like it’s simply inevitable. As I’ve pointed out before, they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars building a media and think-tank infrastructure to keep working people confused, divided, and willing to believe whatever bulls*** they’re fed.

But what these wannabe fascists don’t own yet, at least not completely, is your right to vote. And, looking at the prospect of a Blue Tsunami, that’s exactly what hard-right Republicans are working to fix before November.

“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon announced on his podcast back in February, and he’s been repeating it in variations ever since.

Fox “News’” Jesse Watters thinks it’s a splendid idea. Ben Shapiro is fully on board. Newsmax hosts have been cheerleading it for weeks. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—formerly Trump’s criminal attorney—stood at CPAC and asked, with feigned innocence, why anyone would object to armed, masked goons menacing people by standing outside polling places. You know, just like in the 1920s and the 1880s in the Deep South.

They’ve wrapped the whole scheme in the claim of “election integrity,” which is the same language every authoritarian in history has used when he decided the wrong people were voting too easily. It was the underlying logic and rationalization for Jim Crow in previous generations.

The real target of this obscene scheme isn’t some mythical army of illegal voters: as the Heritage Foundation discovered, they literally don’t exist in any meaningful way. Their real target is you, particularly if you’re not a straight white man, and the one of the several tools they’re planning to use is raw, naked fear.

And it’s not like they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, assembled by people who have every political incentive to find a crisis, has documented exactly 68 cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Sixty-eight cases across four decades in a country of 330 million people having cast billions of votes.

And when Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security conducted an internal review specifically to build the legal and political case for this “emergency,” they came back with the same answer: there is no evidence of widespread fraud. None.

The “crisis” Republicans have been using to justify making it hard to vote since the 1960s is entirely fictional. The emergency was cynically manufactured by rightwing operatives including William Rehnquist and proclaimed in 1980 by Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich. But the armed thugs they want to plant at your polling place will be very, very real, and their effect on who decides to show up and vote will be very, very real, too.

What they’re proposing is also, not incidentally, a federal felony.

Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 592—a law written in the aftermath of the Civil War by horrified legislators who’d personally watched armed and officially deputized members of the Klan threaten Black voters with nooses and at gunpoint—makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and the loss of any elected or appointed position to deploy armed federal personnel to any polling location, anywhere in America:>

<....“Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.” (emphasis added)

That law has been on the books for more than a century because the people who wrote it understood that the moment we let the government sanction terror at voting locations, we no longer have a real democracy. Which, of course, is exactly the point of these rightwing fascists.

The cruelty of the scheme becomes even clearer when we consider how closely what ICE has been doing resembles previous generations’ experience of the Klan. A 2025 Supreme Court “shadow docket” ruling written by Pillsbury Doughboy imitator Brett Kavanaugh in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo says ICE can profile Americans based on how dark their skin is, where they work, or how they talk—the so-called “Kavanaugh Stops”—and what’s followed has been a wave of well-documented harassment of brown-skinned U.S. citizens.

A 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen, for example, was stopped by masked ICE agents while walking from work to lunch in Minneapolis, shackled, and violently dragged off to a federal building—as he repeatedly protested that he was a US citizen and carried in his pocket the proof of it—before being threatened, humiliated, and ultimately released. He repeated “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen” the entire time, but the agents, hungry for their bonuses and high on functional Vice President Stephen Miller’s racism, didn’t care.

A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 cases of U.S. citizens beaten, shackled, or dragged off at raids and protests, and that’s probably just the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg.

According to the Cato Institute, 73 percent of people booked into ICE detention since October 2025 had no criminal convictions whatsoever. You don’t need a scientific study to know what happens to Latino voter turnout when an ICE thug is the first thing you see when you walk up to cast your ballot.

The Brookings Institution found around 75 percent of Latinos across the country can speak Spanish well enough to be flagged under ICE’s “Kavanaugh Stop” profiling criteria, making enormous numbers of Latino citizens vulnerable to harassment and detention based on nothing more than how they sound. Not to mention that Brett Kavanagh’s diktat allows for harassment and arrest based on the color of their skin.

And Republicans know it. That suppression of the vote isn’t an incidental side effect of this GOP plan. It is the plan.

And what gets suppressed along with those votes is everything that working people in this country depend on to survive.

This—in addition to trying to keep Trump, his grifter family, and his toadies out of jail—is also the most recent way Republicans are going after FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs that built the modern middle class.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute documents how the states with the most aggressive voter suppression are also the same states with the lowest wages, the weakest labor protections, and the highest rates of poverty.

Red states with aggressive voter suppression have, in fact, the highest rates in the nation of:

Spousal abuse
Obesity
Smoking
Teen pregnancy
Sexually transmitted diseases
Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”) Bankruptcies and poverty
Homicide and suicide
Infant mortality
Maternal mortality
Forcible rape
Robbery and aggravated assault
Dropouts from high school
Divorce
Contaminated air and water
Opiate addiction and deaths
Unskilled workers
Parasitic infections
Income and wealth inequality
Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”) People on welfare
Child poverty
Homelessness
Spousal murder
Unemployment
Deaths from auto accidents
People living on disability
Gun deaths....>

<....That’s not a coincidence, and, for social scientists, it’s not a mystery. When working people can’t vote union rights evaporate, so corporate bosses don’t have to negotiate with their workers. When working people can’t vote, the minimum wage stays frozen, healthcare gets stripped, unions get busted, and social services are cut to pay for tax cuts so the morbidly rich keep all the money they’ve made from the labor of the people at the bottom.

Research from Equitable Growth has gone even further, showing a direct causal link between higher voting rates and higher minimum wages, more generous state support programs, and lower income inequality overall, which is why Blue states consistently have the highest standards of living in the country.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, by breaking down barriers that kept Black workers from the polls, actually reduced the Black-white wage gap. When five corrupt, racist Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of that Act in 2013, the racial wage gap got worse again.

The ballot box isn’t just a civic ritual. For working people, it’s the democratic lever that moves everything else. It’s how you get a raise, keep your healthcare, and make the people who write the rules answer to the people who must live under them.

That’s why what Bannon, Trump, and his billionaire backers are doing is so nakedly corrupt. They know that if Black, Latino, and young voters, along with hourly workers and people in the communities ICE is currently terrorizing, all show up in November, the GOP will experience an electoral bloodbath.

When their congressional allies lose their majority, the billionaires’ and Trump crime family’s looting gets interrupted. Two years of ruinous tariffs, Medicaid cuts, tax giveaways to the morbidly rich, and the demolition of every federal agency designed to protect workers rather than owners all face a reckoning. Trump’s lickspittles—including his Attorney General—face prison, just like over 40 of Nixon’s aides and his Attorney General did.

That’s what they’re in an absolute panic about. That’s what armed, masked thugs at the polling place are designed to prevent.

I’ve spent enough time studying the history of authoritarianism, both in literature and in countries I’ve visited or worked in, to recognize what this moment represents. Every Putin-, Orban-, and Trump-style strongman who’s converted a democracy into an authoritarian state started by making “certain people” afraid to participate.

Today’s Republicans aren’t even original in their obscene threats of implied violence at the polling places. For almost a century after the Civil War, this was completely normal in the previously Confederate South.

And as the Klan taught previous generations of Americans, intimidation also doesn’t need to be legal to work. The chilling effect lands the same way whether or not the statute books say it’s permissible, which is exactly why they’re planning this in open defiance of federal law, and exactly why we have to name it for what it is: an attack on our constitutional right to determine our own leaders and thus our own nation’s future.

Call your member of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand they go on record opposing any deployment of ICE or other armed Trump goons to polling places. Let them know it’s a federal crime that should be enforced, and any federal official—including the president—who pushes it must “be disqualified from holding any office” and lose their job.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org and make sure nothing has changed since the last time you looked, particularly if you live in a Red state.

<DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — President Donald Trump expressed frustration Tuesday with allies who have been unwilling to do more to support the U.S. war effort, telling them to “go get your own oil” as the conflict with Iran and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent average U.S. gas prices past $4 a gallon.

Hours later, Trump said securing the strait is “not for us” and estimated that the U.S. will be done attacking Iran in two to three weeks. Trump said the U.S. “will not have anything to do with” what happens in the strait, instead telling reporters that the responsibility for keeping the vital waterway open will rest with countries that rely on it.>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.07.01"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "3"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Bolduc, Steve"]
[Black "Shutzman, Joseph"]
[ECO "E69"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "94th US Open"]
[Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.08.07"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Braun, Paul E"]
[Black "Hanken, Jerome B"]
[ECO "B06"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "94th US Open"]
[Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.08.08"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Braun, Paul E"]
[Black "Porter, Ryan W"]
[ECO "B34"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]