Department of Justice

Ten days ago, I woke up in a six-by-nine concrete box. No camera crews. No suits. No applause. Just silence and steel. I was in solitary confinement, locked down 23 hours a day, pacing in circles inside a room smaller than my walk-in closet. The walls seemed to have their own heartbeat. Every breath echoed. Every second felt like an hour. When I entered prison in July, I thought I knew what to expect. I thought humility would come gently. Instead, it came like a storm. You don’t understand loneliness until the lights go out and the only sound is your own heartbeat. I wrote letters to my husband and my sister and prayed to God. In my darkest moments, I even wrote suicide notes. I had to keep reminding myself: this can’t be the end of my story. Solitary confinement stripped me bare.

Now comes word that Attorney General Pam Bondi is opening a grand jury investigation into the attempt to falsely dragoon President Donald J. Trump with criminal Russian meddlers during the 2016 presidential election. In attempting to direct some measure of sunlight to ground that has been well trod and littered with distracting debris, the US Department of Justice will be facing a significant uphill battle. First, various government officials planted seeds of disinformation and sowed misdirection during the first Trump administration, aided and abetted by the Biden administration in subsequent years. Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017 to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and purported ties to the Trump campaign.

With the retirement of North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, the Republican with the heaviest Senate primary burden in 2026 becomes John Cornyn. The Texas incumbent faces off in a contest against MAGA favorite Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is relying on backlash against some of Cornyn’s more centrist moves in recent years and a range of financial backers who poured nearly $3 million into his campaign coffers in the first quarter, a number Cornyn exceeded – but not by a lot. It’s too close for comfort for some Republicans, who are concerned the clash puts Texas at risk of a rare turn from red to blue.

President Joe Biden granted 1,500 pardons in what was the largest single-day act of clemency by a US president back in January, on his final full day in office. But these were not the typical pardons since Biden did not actually sit down, uncap a fat Sharpie and draw out his signature. No: the pardons were granted with the autopen, and the Department of Justice and congressional Republicans have been investigating whether the former president was actually aware they were being signed. After seven months of crickets, Biden finally broke his silence on these accusations, last Thursday. He spoke to the New York Times, maintaining he "made every decision," and he did it "because there were a lot of them." The January 19 pardons did two things.

The death of the financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at Manhattan’s notorious Metropolitan Correction Center has been ruled to be a suicide, and one that took place entirely by Epstein’s own hand, without any external interference. At least, that’s the story according to the Department of Justice and the FBI, who have also announced for good measure that the so-called Epstein Files, which supposedly contained the details of his high-profile clients, do not exist. After the disappointment of the decidedly low-profile release of the JFK-assassination files earlier this year, this is a second blow for conspiracy theorists who have been assured by the government that there is definitely, 100 percent nothing to see here. Will this be enough for them?

Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, he did his sex crimes in private and no one who associated with him – much less visited his properties, including his Little Saint James private island, need be investigated or charged. That’s the FBI’s latest version of events, announced this morning, after an apparently lengthy investigation of the dead financier’s belongings.  “This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the FBI statement said.

On a trip to the nation's capital last week, 77-year-old Governor Janet Mills of Maine was confronted with an old skeleton in her closet: accusations of cocaine use. A man approached Mills and, while filming, asked if she believed "sniffing cocaine at work" is a "human right," Fox News reported. Mills gracefully responded, "What the fuck?" That, Cockburn notes, is not a no. The man followed up with a more straightforward question: "How much more does an eight-ball cost with inflation?" Unfortunately, Mills did not give the reporter current street prices and instead chose to walk away. (The answer is around $180 in DC, per Cockburn's law enforcement sources.

Firefighters do not run into a blaze like you see on TV. We crawl with purpose like rats in a maze, which is what a well-involved structure fire feels like, the smoke so thick our high-powered flashlights can’t cut through it. We are trained to locate windows and leave furniture in place as reference points while we conduct search and rescue then scurry to the nearest walls. It makes it all the more vital to have another firefighter with you. The fire was consuming a construction site on Yale’s campus. “The security guard’s inside.” The water company hadn’t arrived yet. No matter, we were going in. I ordered the firefighter to grab the forcible entry saw. He didn’t know where it was. Precious seconds gone.

The tenure of Christoper Wray as FBI director represents a missed opportunity.  After the problematic directorship of James Comey, Wray’s appointment by President Donald Trump on May 9, 2017, was welcomed by most current and former agents as well as the American people, who wanted the Bureau restored to its position of trust. With a ten-year term and the principal malefactors of the Russian collusion farce already fired, Wray was in a position of strength.   Under the Mueller/Comey cabal, the bureau culture had changed from that of a law enforcement agency to an intelligence mindset. That’s what led us into the ugly morass of the Russian collusion narrative and ensuing fiascos.

“My word as a Biden.” Remember that? It was something that Joe Biden was in the habit of saying whenever he was about to utter something untrue. A couple of years ago when the Great Unraveling was beginning to be obvious to everyone, Biden deposited the phrase right before saying that he was “never more optimistic” about the prospects for the country. This prompted one social media wit to respond: “The border is open, real wages are down, energy costs are outrageously high, the Taliban controls Afghanistan, and the cartels are making billions smuggling fentanyl. There is reason to be ‘optimistic’ though — we have a [House GOP] majority who is working to hold Biden accountable.

What a waste. As Special Counsel Jack Smith had his 2020 election charges against President-elect Trump dismissed by Justice Tanya Chutkan, any amusement derived from the fact Smith and his merry band of anti-Trumpers just spent two years spinning their wheels is belied by the damage caused by his travesty. It is not only the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars squandered. It is not only thousands of misused hours of investigators and prosecutors who should have been pursuing violent crimes, drug and human trafficking and terrorism cases. It is not only countless time spent clogging the dockets of courts in Florida and Washington, DC, which should have been used for legitimate cases.

According to President Biden, not since the Civil War has American freedom and democracy been so under assault. In his State of the Union address, Biden characterized January 6 as a day when “insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.” With this kind of rhetoric emanating from the White House, it is no wonder a good portion of the country believes that any use of the legal system is justified to protect us from a second Donald Trump administration.  Except... that is not how the law works. By stretching their prosecutorial powers to the breaking point, Democrats are perverting the very system they are claiming to protect.  Take the charade in New York.

“We identified evidence that President Biden willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen," former special counsel Robert Hur testified Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee, confirming the contents of a report he released last month. Hur also testified that his report did not “exonerate” Biden, contrary to statements from Democrats on the committee. Hur was professional and prepared and only testified to the facts contained in his report; he would not engage in hypotheticals and would not speculate or opine on cases he was not involved in.

In what may be the most obvious catfishing scam of all time, a contractor for the Air Force was caught sharing military secrets with an individual posing as a Ukrainian woman on a foreign dating app.   David Franklin Slater, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was serving as a US Air Force civilian employee at the time of the catfishing, was arrested Saturday on three charges of conspiracy and disclosing national defense information.  Slater held a top-secret security clearance from August 2021 until April 2022 which gave him access to briefings about the Russo-Ukraine War.