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In the wake of a third ICE death at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, we speak with Gabriela Soto, whose husband Martín was one of the leaders of the May hunger strike at the immigration jail. Martín was transferred to Elizabeth Detention Center, New Jersey’s other ICE facility, during the hunger strike at Delaney. Gabriela is calling for the closure of both facilities. “At first, I was fighting for my husband, but then I started to meet all of these people who are just innocent, and they are the people that make this country great,” says Soto, who blames her recent miscarriage on the stress of her husband being detained. “I am still grieving,” she says. “To me, this is an ICE murder, too.” This comes as Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a Salvadoran immigrant, died Saturday after being held for six weeks at Delaney Hall. He is the third immigrant to die at the ICE jail, which has been open since May 2025. Lopez-Cornejo’s mother, Maria Cornejo, says her son took medicine to manage diabetes, seizures and his blood pressure, but had not received his medications regularly since being detained. ICE said in a statement that Lopez-Conejo experienced a “medical emergency” on Saturday and was transported to University Hospital in Newark, but Maria Cornejo says her son died at Delaney Hall. More than 70 people inside the ICE jail have filed lawsuits alleging medical neglect. That neglect was one of the factors that led to the hunger strike. “Individuals are not receiving the kind of healthcare that they in fact need, particularly for chronic health conditions, for pregnancies, for cancers,” says Analilia Mejía, Democratic congressmember from New Jersey. “Being undocumented should not be a death sentence.”

In the wake of a third ICE death at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, we speak with Gabriela Soto, whose husband Martín was one of the leaders of the May hunger strike at the immigration jail. Martín was transferred to Elizabeth Detention Center, New Jersey’s other ICE facility, during the hunger strike at Delaney. Gabriela is calling for the closure of both facilities. “At first, I was fighting for my husband, but then I started to meet all of these people who are just innocent, and they are the people that make this country great,” says Soto, who blames her recent miscarriage on the stress of her husband being detained. “I am still grieving,” she says. “To me, this is an ICE murder, too.” This comes as Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a Salvadoran immigrant, died Saturday after being held for six weeks at Delaney Hall. He is the third immigrant to die at the ICE jail, which has been open since May 2025. Lopez-Cornejo’s mother, Maria Cornejo, says her son took medicine to manage diabetes, seizures and his blood pressure, but had not received his medications regularly since being detained. ICE said in a statement that Lopez-Conejo experienced a “medical emergency” on Saturday and was transported to University Hospital in Newark, but Maria Cornejo says her son died at Delaney Hall. More than 70 people inside the ICE jail have filed lawsuits alleging medical neglect. That neglect was one of the factors that led to the hunger strike. “Individuals are not receiving the kind of healthcare that they in fact need, particularly for chronic health conditions, for pregnancies, for cancers,” says Analilia Mejía, Democratic congressmember from New Jersey. “Being undocumented should not be a death sentence.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.As you’ve heard by now, Donald Trump’s effort to prosecute people for vandalizing his Reflecting Pool renovation crashed and burned when the facts showed the charges were bogus. Then it got weirder as Trump raged for days at prosecutors for refusing to bring the prosecution he had ordered up. Now, new leaks to reporters show Trump’s conduct here to be even more corrupt than we thought. How much worse might this get, and can a Democratic Congress rein it in?We’re asking former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade to walk us through just how irregular all this really is and what can be done about it. Barb, good to have you back on.Barb McQuade: Thanks, Greg. Good to be with you.Sargent: So a former Olympian, David Hearn, and several others had been facing vandalism charges for supposedly ripping up the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, because Trump was badly embarrassed by the failure of his renovation of it. But then Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., dropped the case, admitting the problem was shoddy construction. Barb, can you just sum up how we got to this point?McQuade: Well, it’s pretty shocking that these charges were ever filed in the first place. I looked at the charging document when it first came down, to try to understand what facts they were alleging. And it was the most bare-bones of an indictment you’ve ever seen. It was one sentence. And there are two parts of it that struck me as very difficult to prove. One is that you have to prove that the person acted knowingly and willfully. That is, that they intended to do damage, that they acted maliciously. And the one that I always thought they would have problems proving is that they caused damage exceeding $1,000 in value.Now remember the timing of this. This all happened long after the public became aware of the failures to the Reflecting Pool. I mean, the reason he said he went over there to check it out after a long bike ride is he wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And he saw all kinds of floating pieces of paint. And so now, whether he picked one up or he grabbed it or he pulled on it, you were never going to establish that he caused $1,000 worth of damage by what he had done. And so it struck me as really doomed from the start.Nonetheless, Jeanine Pirro indicted this case, in my opinion, because it advanced Donald Trump’s false narrative that the reason his renovations to the Reflecting Pool failed were not because of his own mismanagement, but because of vandals. And so Mr. Hearn provided a convenient scapegoat, even though it meant perhaps ruining his life.Sargent: So just to give you a sense of how angry Trump got when Pirro dropped the charges, listen to him raging over it to reporters. Here he’s talking about Pirro and then goes on to abuse a reporter who asks him a question. Listen.Donald Trump (voiceover): I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department. And I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened.Reporter (voiceover): Are you reconsidering her role here?Trump (voiceover): I don’t know what you—you don’t—you’re fake news. Don’t ever talk again. You’re fake news. One of the worst of the business.Sargent: Barb, note how Trump says there, “they did it.” He really doesn’t understand that he doesn’t get to make that true by decree. I mean, there’s like a long history of presidents trying to corrupt DOJ in various ways, but here it’s just stated baldly that this one man gets to decide by fiat who’s guilty and who’s innocent, and the system’s supposed to just bend itself around that. Can you talk about this?McQuade: Yes, it does seem that President Trump wants to call the shots, as we’ve seen with cases being filed against Jim Comey for seashells and Letitia James for mortgage fraud—cases that have fallen apart. He really seems to think that he can just demand that lawyers file indictments against his enemies and it will be so. And maybe if they follow his orders, they can file indictments, but they’re never going to get convictions unless they have evidence to prove each and every element of a crime. That is, what the person did, what they were thinking, and any causation that the statute might require, as we saw here. I don’t know if President Trump doesn’t understand that, or if he doesn’t care, because you can really wreck somebody’s life just by charging them, even if ultimately the charges don’t stick.And that’s why one of the principles of federal prosecution that was promulgated after Watergate is that prosecutors should bring indictments only if they believe the evidence is sufficient to convict a defendant at trial, and that that conviction can be sustained on appeal. You’re not supposed to just take a flyer, or let’s see what we can make stick. You have to believe you have the evidence. Now, certainly no case is a slam dunk. Sometimes witnesses go sideways, or juries disbelieve, or juries nullify, but you have to believe you have the goods. It’s just impossible to imagine anybody ever thought they had the goods in this case. And Donald Trump, it seems, does either not understand it or, more likely, not care.Sargent: Right. And then Donald Trump got so angry at her that she decided she had to go to the White House to talk him out of his fury. Sources have now leaked to CBS News that Pirro went to the White House this week with a box full of physical evidence that exculpated all those people of vandalism, in order to persuade Trump that the culprit was in fact bad construction. The meeting got heated, according to CBS. Barb, can we talk about how crazy that is on just a lot of levels? First, the level of presidential interference, then Trump refusing to accept the facts, and then Trump apparently raging at her, despite being presented by his own prosecutors with direct physical evidence. Your thoughts on that?McQuade: Yeah, it’s really a complete change from the way the Justice Department has operated in the post-Watergate era. In fact, most administrations, including Trump’s first administration, have issued memos reminding prosecutors that they are not to have contact about case decisions with the White House. That is both to prevent actual interference or even the appearance of interference with charging decisions on the basis of partisan politics. Now, a president might direct priorities. They might say, I would like to prioritize immigration enforcement, or fraud enforcement. That’s fine. But when they’re talking about giving directives on specific cases, that is where it violates those norms of the past fifty years.And the idea that Jeanine Pirro has to come over and say, look at this evidence, Mr. President, here are my receipts, I really did make the right decision—I mean, even William Barr, when he took the job as attorney general, said he did so only on the condition that President Trump not interfere with his decisions about charging cases, that he would base decisions on the facts, on the law, and the fair administration of justice, and Donald Trump would butt out. According to Barr, Trump agreed to that during that first term. But this term he seems to have completely abandoned any pretense of that. And in fact, Todd Blanche has embraced it. He’s even said the American people should be grateful that the president is taking charge and very involved in these cases and is making sure his Cabinet is working hard. That’s not what he’s doing. He is injecting partisan politics into the rule of law.Sargent: Well, The Washington Post reports on more leaks—that this whole thing has sparked tirades inside the White House. Barb, what’s funny about Pirro going over to Trump with physical facts is she thinks those will persuade him to come to his senses and stop raging at her. But this is the essence of it, Barb: Trump is angry at Pirro for refusing to throw out considerations of fact. Trump is angry at Pirro for refusing his command to prosecute innocent people despite what the facts and the law dictate. So, like, evidence can’t change Trump’s mind by definition, right?McQuade: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, and it really goes back to, I think, a couple of data points that provide real insight into his strategy. Remember when there was an effort to declare that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud? And he was trying to convince Justice Department leaders to go along with that and make an announcement. And remember what he said is, just say there was fraud in the election and leave the rest to me. Because what he really wants is some independent, objective, respected third party to validate his claims. He said the same thing to Volodymyr Zelensky. Remember when he wanted him to announce that there was an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden over energy sector election interference in Ukraine.Sargent: I want to bring up something that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said about this thing, because I think it really gets at the corrupt nature of it. After Pirro dropped this case, Burgum went out on Twitter and contested her dropping it. He said, “the evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. We provided the U.S. Attorney’s office with expert and eyewitness testimony,” etc., etc., right? What drives me crazy about that is Burgum, who is not Trump and presumably not crazy the way Trump is, is willing to attack Pirro for the act of following the facts and the law, and willing to attack Pirro for not putting Trump above those considerations of facts and law. Trump’s lackeys will sell each other out for a tiny bit of good favor from the despot. And of course that’s always fleeting, and it’ll be followed by him turning on them at some point anyway. You can kind of see how the corruption seeps down from the top in that one Doug Burgum tweet.McQuade: Yeah. Yeah, and the lack of integrity is appalling. And we know he’s wrong, because we’ve seen it. In the motion to dismiss this case, Jeanine Pirro’s crew didn’t just say, we don’t have the evidence. They documented over 20 pages the evidence that they had received that demonstrated this failure. They talked about the company that was hired. They talked about their efforts. They talked about their failure. They talked about how it was overpainted, and why, and the dates and the problems and the peeling of the paint. So it isn’t just, you know, a one-sentence decision or motion. It is detailed facts over 20 pages.And so it is really disturbing that someone like Doug Burgum, a Cabinet secretary, would be willing to make these statements really just to indulge Donald Trump in his fantasies. Everybody involved in this knows that these claims are false. But I suppose this is the way one stays in good stead. I mean, earlier today we had the Senate Judiciary Committee voting on Todd Blanche, and Thom Tillis, for all of the good things he’s done to put some obstacles in the way and answer some questions by the candidates—even he reverted to whataboutism, and talking about the weaponization of the Biden DOJ and the Russia investigation and all of that, Crossfire Hurricane, like, my gosh. And so I don’t know whether they really believe it or they are just catering toward the MAGA right.Sargent: Yeah, it’s really hard to know what goes through the head of someone like Thom Tillis, who shows a lot of integrity and courage and then at the last second just throws it all away for nothing.McQuade: For nothing. For nothing.Sargent: This whole Reflecting Pool fiasco is completely buffoonish and a total embarrassment for Trump and so forth. And yet at the same time it’s deadly serious, right? It’s an indicator that Trump is getting worse with his willingness to just use DOJ as a weapon in whatever way he decides at any given moment. And so what’s the worst-case scenario here going forward? We’ve got two more years at least of Donald Trump, presuming he serves the rest of his term, and potentially a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate—or just a Democratic House. What’s the worst thing that you anticipate happening with DOJ in the next two years? How bad could it get?McQuade: Well, I mean, we could see more of these weaponized prosecutions. The seashell case against Jim Comey, the effort to investigate what they’re calling the “grand conspiracy” out of Florida. I mean, imagine charges against people like John Brennan or other members of the intelligence community who are simply serving their country, charges against Anthony Fauci. I mean, I think we could see charges on any of these fronts. I also worry about how the Justice Department might try to interfere in the midterm elections. With, you know, they’ve tried all kinds of things already to obtain voter rolls. The president is trying to use the Postal Service to prevent it from providing absentee and mail-in ballots to voters. So I worry about that.Sargent: There’s a lot to worry about. It sounds like you’re basically saying we can’t rule out the possibility that Trump will put innocent people in jail.McQuade: I think that’s right. I like to think that the system will work, and that ultimately, because of the rights that people have at trial—to a jury, to counsel, to cross-examination, to a fair and impartial judge, to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt as a legal standard, to appellate processes—that people will not go to jail as a result of unjust prosecutions. But I think their lives could be made into a living hell before that.Sargent: Absolutely. You wrote this book. It’s called The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. Great title, that very much applies right here, unfortunately. What can a Democratic House, or a Democratic House and Senate, do to stop DOJ from bringing corrupt prosecutions against Trump critics, and against whoever the despot orders them to? What can be done?McQuade: I think some very important things can be done to serve as a check on this administration. One is conducting oversight. And so they can have hearings to expose to the public some of what’s going on at the Justice Department. That’s incredibly important. They also have the power of the purse. They have the ability to defund programs if they think the funds are not being spent in a responsible way. That includes the judgment fund. And this one has become—it was once kind of a sleepy financial problem, but now I think it has come in the news. What Congress does is it funds this huge pot of money called the judgment fund. And then it trusts the Justice Department to use its discretion and best judgment to dole out settlements, or to make judgments when there are verdicts in court.But we rely on the Justice Department to act in good faith to serve the best interests of the United States of America. So if somebody gets hit with a postal truck and they break a leg, they assess the fair market value of that, lost wages, pain and suffering, injuries, medical bills, and the like, and they say, that was worth $100,000, here you go. Now what we see is the use of the judgment fund to pay people like Michael Flynn and Carter Page. I think one of the things they could do is what they used to do, and that is to fund judgments on an individual basis. And if they find that the Justice Department is acting in bad faith, they could decline to provide those funds. So I think between oversight and the power of the purse, they have a lot of power there to rein in the Department of Justice. And of course, they also have the power of impeachment, which includes the power to impeach the attorney general.Sargent: One last thought. A Democratic House and Senate—if Democrats win both, which is hard but not impossible—couldn’t a Democratic House and Senate essentially pass legislation that does things like the bills that Democrats passed during the first Trump administration, though they didn’t get anywhere, of course, because Trump was president? Some of these bills did things like really build a real firewall between DOJ and the White House. Presumably a Democratic House and Senate could pass that kind of thing, challenge Trump to veto it, and then have a big political fight over these reforms, which I think would poll very well. What do you think of that idea?McQuade: I do. After Watergate, there was a whole slew of reforms that came into play. Some legislation, some norms at the Justice Department. And I think there is great public appetite for that once again. And so it may be a different landscape now, after the Supreme Court has shown interest and support for this idea of the unitary executive, about what separation-of-powers legislation will be permitted. But I think it’s worth the fight to really test those boundaries. I mean, Donald Trump has certainly pushed the boundaries of executive power. I think we need Congress to do the same, assert its own power, its own legislative power, so that we don’t have this failure of equilibrium that we seem to be in right now.Sargent: And let’s remember, Donald Trump, if he loses one or both houses of Congress, he’s going to be even weaker next year. And so there would be a real chance to take on these fights and maybe win some of them.Barb McQuade, always awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for all that.McQuade: Thank you, Greg.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inexplicable advancement of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general—who is now, according to Politico’s Chris Marquette, only one vote shy of Senate confirmation—has me thinking about the anchoring effect, a topic explored by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their 1974 paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The piece is a foundational work in the field of behavioral economics; it led to Kahneman winning the Nobel prize for economics in 2002 (even though Kahneman wasn’t an economist).“Heuristics” in this context means “mental shortcuts,” and Tversky and Kahneman spent their careers demonstrating that these tend to follow seriously bad logic. They were especially fond of showing how bad heuristics can be when it comes to math. If you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s delightful joint biography of Tversky and Kahneman and their ideas, The Undoing Project, published in 2016, I recommend it highly. Kahneman also popularized his research with Tversky in his 2011 bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow. “In many situations,” Tversky and Kahneman wrote in their 1974 paper, “people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer.” That’s “anchoring.” These initial estimates, Tversky and Kahneman argue, are pretty arbitrary and extremely susceptible to suggestion. In one experiment, they spun a wheel of fortune and then asked participants whether the percentage of United Nations delegations that represented African countries was higher or lower than that anchor number. They then invited participants to guess what the real number was. When the anchor number was higher, the guesses were higher, and when the anchor number was lower, the guesses were lower, even though the anchor numbers were arrived at through transparently arbitrary means and had zero bearing on the real answer (which, incidentally, is 28 percent).Christopher Voss, a negotiation expert and author of 2016’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, writes of extreme anchoring, citing Tversky and Kahneman and taking it one step further. If you’re negotiating over something and you let the other guy bid—that is, you let him anchor—then “you’ve got to be careful”:If the other guy’s a pro, a shark, he’s going to go for an extreme anchor to bend your reality. Then, when they come back with a merely absurd offer it will seem reasonable, just like an expensive $400 iPhone seems reasonable after they mark it down from a crazy $600. Voss, who used to do hostage negotiation for the FBI, advises strongly against extreme anchoring because “your reputation precedes you” and if you get a reputation for making preposterous demands, nobody will want to deal with you. What goes around comes around. Point taken. On the other hand, you might end up in the Oval Office.President Donald Trump is a dedicated practitioner of extreme anchoring, having learned it (according to Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s excellent new biography, American Scoundrel) from the reptilian McCarthyite and mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn’s terrible reputation preceded him, which led, among other things, to multiple indictments (though no convictions). Cohn learned early on that people weren’t going to like him and he made his peace with that. Trump’s terrible reputation precedes him, too, and it’s cost him over the years in certain business sectors like banking. Even Trump’s fellow Republicans don’t like him much. You’d think that would be a liability in elective politics, but in Trump’s case it hasn’t been.Trump has made extreme anchoring work for himself on a scale Cohn could only fantasize about. His $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, filed while he was president, and concerning events that occurred during his first presidential term, is perhaps the most extreme anchor in the history of negotiating. And the likely Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche shows that it kind of worked.I won’t rehash Step One, which is the lawsuit itself, because I’ve written about that already. I also won’t dwell on Step Two, which is the settlement Blanche approved (part one, part two) as deputy attorney general—a $1.8 billion slush fund plus indemnification from IRS investigations—because I’ve written about that, too. Instead, let’s look at Step Three, which is the negotiation over supporting Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee.The holdouts were Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both are lame ducks who have, in their latter days in office, offered some token resistance to the president. Their defiance probably isn’t based entirely on principle because they’ve both gotten screwed by Trump. Cornyn lost a primary earlier this year after Trump endorsed his opponent. Tillis decided to retire after Trump threatened to support a primary challenge against him. The salient point is that neither has any obvious reason to appease Trump. The two senators both opposed Blanche’s nomination in committee and said they wouldn’t back down unless it could be demonstrated that a.) Trump’s slush fund, which Blanche said previously was cancelled, really was cancelled, and b.) Trump’s IRS immunity, in Cornyn’s words, “does not extend to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit.” Trump and Blanche met these two conditions, or purported to, and so Cornyn and Tillis changed their votes to “ay.” Blanche put in writing that “there is no fund” and he posted his Senate testimony stating that the IRS indemnity applies only to the Trump family plaintiffs (Donald, Eric, and Don Jr.) and to the Trump Organization. There are persuasive reasons to doubt whether Cornyn’s and Tillis’s conditions truly have been met. These are described here, for instance, and here. But don’t let’s lose sight of the lameness of Cornyn’s and Tillis’s conditions even if they are legitimately met. The outrageousness of Trump’s lawsuit should have yielded no concessions at all from the Justice Department (and the courts may yet throw them out). Why didn’t Cornyn and Tillis get that? Why didn’t they condition a “nay” vote for Blanche on demonstrated proof that both the slush fund and the IRS immunity deal were kaput? (I set aside here the many other arguments to oppose Blanche to keep the focus on Trump’s extreme anchoring.)Trump filed a kleptocratic lawsuit against the federal government that itself could be grounds for impeachment. Any settlement in such circumstances is intolerable because Trump’s legal claim possessed no merit and the mechanism for settling it possessed no legitimacy. Cornyn and Tillis surely understand this. They owe Trump nothing. They are 74 and 65, respectively, so any future opportunities in Republican politics would seem, even in this gerontocratic moment, quite limited. Yet they accepted the warped reality Trump created that he ought to get something out of his $10 billion lawsuit. Why did they do that?Maybe they just didn’t read their Voss. In Never Split the Difference, Voss writes that “no deal is better than a bad deal. If you feel you can’t say ‘no’ then you’ve taken yourself hostage…. Never be needy for a deal.” Cornyn and Tillis’s willingness from the start to allow Trump some of his IRS indemnity showed they were, for no apparent reason, needy for a deal. Maybe it’s a Senate thing. It is, after all, a place that prides itself on being the world’s greatest deliberative body. Deliberation isn’t always such a great idea. Trump was not needy for a deal. At one point he threatened to withdraw Blanche’s nomination over this dispute temporarily until January, when Cornyn and Tillis would have left. Cornyn and Tillis should have replied: “Be our guest.” Instead, they “worked collaboratively” with Blanche, according to “a source familiar with the meeting.” Why weren’t they working uncooperatively? Trump was.This was a make-believe conflict from the beginning. Cornyn and Tillis had some power to deny Blanche Senate confirmation, but they had no power to keep Blanche from remaining as attorney general in an acting capacity. Blanche was likely going to be attorney general either way, just as President Joe Biden’s nominee for Department of Labor secretary, Julie Su, remained acting Labor secretary after the Senate wouldn’t confirm her. In both instances, their previous Senate confirmations as deputies allowed them to be acting secretaries indefinitely. For this reason, I was surprised Cornyn and Tillis picked a fight over Blanche in the first place. But if they were going to have this fight, they should have really had it. When a person makes an outrageous demand, the appropriate response isn’t “Let’s negotiate.” The appropriate response is “Hell no.” There’s no honor in compromising  under such circumstances. The United States Senate is the last place to understand that.

President Donald Trump is an unimpressive person. He possessed no real intellect even before his cognitive faculties began to decline. His real estate business career was mediocre at best; he inherited most of it from his father before going bankrupt multiple times. He lacks any real sense of ethics or integrity and often appears incapable of moral reasoning.As an electoral candidate, Trump’s only real skill was disposing of ossified, entitled competitors: the Clintons, the Bushes, the unremarkable and uninspiring band of GOP primary challengers, and so on. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College and the luck of having an opponent falsely tarred by the FBI director on the eve of the election. He won in 2024 amid public backlash to inflation that he helped cause and after President Joe Biden stepped aside mid-campaign after the incumbent turned in a disastrous debate performance.Having attained the White House twice through sheer luck, Trump has largely squandered the legacy of past generations. Trump’s mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic led to his defeat in 2020. He lacks the focus or interest to build sustainable policy achievements beyond harming his perceived foes. He lacks the basic capacity to transmute a GOP majority in Congress into permanent legislative accomplishments. Among our nation’s presidents, he will surely rank as the worst.The only thing truly impressive about Donald Trump is his skill at corruption. This is not, strictly speaking, a good thing to be good at. Yet one cannot help but be awed at the talent that he possesses for abusing power and enriching himself. The last 10 years have seen more innovations in corruption by Trump than the 240 years of American history that preceded them.Take, for example, his latest scheme to enrich himself and others at the expense of everyone else. Trump owns a social media company named TruthSocial on which he writes his infamous stream-of-consciousness posts. (He previously posted them on Twitter before its then owners banned him for trying to overthrow the 2020 election in 2021.) These posts can provide an unusual level of insight into Trump’s thinking, and interpreting them has been a recurring feature of his political career.Last week, TruthSocial announced an extraordinary new “product”: Truth API, a version of his social media feed that gives subscribers “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” (Truths is the hyper-Orwellian name that TruthSocial gives to posts.) In practical terms, it would allow Wall Street firms and other financial institutions access to Trump’s market-moving posts a handful of seconds before they reach the general public.Why would anyone bother to pay for a few seconds’ advantage to read a Trump post? Because TMTG, the company that operates TruthSocial, can make money off it. Imagine, for instance, that Trump announces higher or lower tariffs against U.S. trading partners, a new bombing campaign against Iran, or his decision to support or oppose a publicly traded American company. A few seconds of lead time could allow firms with complex trading algorithms to cash in on market movements by Trump’s posts—all by handing him a small monthly slice of the profits.Insider trading is not an unintended by-product; it is the point. “Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, the interim chief executive officer of TruthSocial owner TMTG, reportedly said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”This is a long-winded way of saying that the president is cashing in on his own public comments. According to some reports, subscribers would be charged $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts. Trump personally holds a 41 percent ownership stake in TMTG himself, making him a direct financial beneficiary of his own actions as president. The scheme is functionally no different than if he asked for giant burlap sacks of cash from Wall Street executives in exchange for reading his executive orders the day before they are issued.Trump has largely given up on anything resembling policymaking or governance during his second term. His legislative agenda is practically nonexistent, save for a constitutionally dubious bill to reshape American elections that is dead on arrival in the Senate. He has outsourced his foreign policy, which largely consists of being humiliated by the Iranian government over closures of the Strait of Hormuz, to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy guru, is largely running the mass-deportation portfolio without real supervision.That gives Trump plenty of free time to devote himself to his two great loves. When it comes to remaking Washington, D.C., in his own image, Trump has had a mixed record of success. The Kennedy Center no longer bears his name, thanks to a court ruling, while the ruins of the East Wing are slowly being built over into a gaudy ballroom. The administration also plans on erecting a giant marble arch outside Arlington National Cemetery to honor Trump himself; the next Democratic president will likely demolish it as soon as they can.When it comes to corrupt self-enrichment, however, there are no obstacles or guard rails. He has stuffed the Justice Department with his former (and, in a way, current) personal lawyers to end its post-Watergate tradition of independence. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that Trump enjoys “absolute immunity” for any crimes committed in connection with his “core constitutional powers.” This anti-constitutional decision amounted to a blank check to collect bribes, kickbacks, and other forms of graft. To that end, Trump has taken millions from various donors in exchange for pardoning a wide range of white-collar criminals. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the rumored going price for clemency is at least $1 million. In one instance, Trump pardoned a Democratic member of Congress whose family had petitioned him for help and then lashed out at him on social media for not switching parties, implicitly suggesting a quid pro quo of sorts. (Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, the lawmaker in question, has denied any wrongdoing over his original bribery charges or the pardon he obtained from Trump.)This is fairly unimaginative by Trumpian standards, of course. A more characteristic scheme is assigning a personal aide—Meredith O’Rourke, a fundraiser whom he reportedly calls his “princess of darkness”—to collect tens of billions of dollars in contributions from major corporations for various pet projects. The Journal reported last month that O’Rourke has taken to referring to Trump as “the boss” and telling the companies, many of whom have regulatory concerns in Washington, that “the boss wants this money.” Those companies have in turn donated hefty sums for the new White House ballroom, Trump’s planned presidential library, and more.Then there is Trump’s tax immunity deal with the Justice Department. Earlier this year, Trump’s personal lawyers struck a bargain to create an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate alleged victims of “lawfare” by the Biden administration. In real-world terms, it was a slush fund to reward his loyalists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and faced criminal charges for it. (Trump pardoned all of them on his first week in office last year.) Trump himself also purported to obtain retroactive immunity for any tax-related crimes he or his family had committed before this year, under the guise of pushing back against the “weaponization” of his tax returns. One of Trumpism’s basic dogmas is that Trump can commit no crimes and it is a crime to investigate him for them. Translating that dogma into legal language proved to be harder than expected. Rare bipartisan pushback from Capitol Hill led Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to seemingly back down from the fund itself, but not from the purported immunity agreement. Trump insisted that Blanche be confirmed as attorney general nonetheless, and Republican senators appear ready to fold on the matter, as well. Corruption, like any disease, is spread by close contact.It is impossible for an honest person to not be repulsed by Trump’s grotesque adventures in self-enrichment, by his near-total sense of amorality and lack of any belief in honest government. At the same time, there is something remarkable about the depths and lengths to which Trump will go to stuff a few more dollar bills in his shirt. It is like watching Barry Bonds hit home runs in the early 2000s—yes, obviously, it is all corrupt and tainted, but isn’t it incredible to see the outer bounds of the human experience? Isn’t it stunning to see what the most corrupt person in America can do when placed in the most powerful job in the nation?That said, it’s worth noting that Trump’s genius for depravity still can’t hold a candle to the true GOAT of American political corruption. Richard Nixon and his cronies were breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters and kidnapping the attorney general’s wife in an era when Congress was powerful, most government officials saw themselves as public servants, and the Supreme Court regularly upheld our constitutional order. Imagine what a man of Nixon’s genuine brilliance could have accomplished if he played under today’s rules. It would be like watching Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points every night, but for bribery.

The report shows how employees at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan helped to hide Epstein’s activities because he was a load-bearing part of their ‘wall of cash.’ The post Sen. Wyden Report: Banks Systematically Ignored Jeffrey Epstein’s Crimes appeared first on The American Prospect.

Donald Trump has been raging at Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., because she dropped those high-profile prosecutions for alleged vandalism of his Reflecting Pool renovation. That pressure is corrupt on its own. But new leaks are making it look even worse. CBS News reports that Pirro actually carried a box of evidence to the White House showing that the facts simply didn’t support those prosecutions. The meeting got “heated,” per CBS, seemingly meaning Trump wanted prosecutions in spite of what the facts and the law dictated. Meanwhile, we just learned this fiasco triggered private “tirades” from Trump, further underscoring his quest for lawless prosecutions. We talked to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. She walks us through just how deeply irregular this presidential conduct truly is, discusses what has been lost at the Justice Department, and reflects on how a Democratic House and/or Senate can rein in all this madness next year. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

A single guilty plea or misdemeanor conviction can trigger deportation, detention, and a bar on return. The post A Conviction Can Follow You Into Immigration Court appeared first on DCReport.org.

Attacking immigrants and Black voting power. Gutting election security. Voter purges. Threats of arrests and raids. And so much more. Trump’s assault on elections is truly unprecedented.