Ian Welsh

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 23, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

 

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops

[ProPublica, via The Big Picture, November 16, 2025]

After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence was misleading.

The Comey Hearing: This Would Be Hilarious If It Weren’t So Scandalous

Harry Litman, November 20, 2025 [The New Republic]

…I was in the northern Virginia courtroom Wednesday for the argument before Judge Michael Nachmanoff on former FBI Director James Comey’s motion to dismiss the case….

Nachmanoff pressed the government lawyer about how Halligan could have been the decision-maker when she came to the case only a few days before she sought the indictment.

It was in chasing down the implausible timeline that Nachmanoff cornered the government into conceding that the grand jury had not even reviewed the actual indictment in the case.

It was a gobsmacking, Perry Mason moment of the sort that doesn’t happen in actual hearings; except it did. The spectators emitted a kind of silent gasp while Judge Nachmanoff pursed his lips and remained silent for several seconds.

The bizarre and unprecedented chain of events happened because the grand jury declined to return the first of three charges in the government’s proposed indictment (and it approved charges two and three by reportedly very narrow margins). But instead of presenting to the grand jury a new indictment with the two approved counts—not only standard procedure but the only conceivable one—Halligan and her colleagues simply cut and pasted the original indictment, removing the first charge and renumbering the remaining two….

It’s hard to convey how consummately boneheaded it was to try to slip a revised indictment past the court rather than presenting it to the grand jury. Earlier in the week, Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick had referred to the situation as “uncharted territory.”

As this all spilled out, Nachmanoff summoned Halligan to the podium to confirm that when the second indictment was presented, the full grand jury wasn’t in the courtroom. Halligan acknowledged it, and Nachmanoff curtly dismissed her….

…Perhaps more seriously, the [Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s] opinion outlined two fundamental misstatements of law that Halligan made to the grand jury, each in response to juror questions. The opinion redacted the statements but described them sufficiently to reveal more breathtaking prosecutorial malpractice.

Halligan mischaracterized Comey’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a way that could have suggested to jurors that the burden of proof lay with him. And she told them that if the government’s evidence appeared thin, they need not worry—additional evidence would come out at trial….

In its filing yesterday, the government did little to dispute the facts, arguing instead that if Halligan misled the jury, dismissal would be inappropriate unless the court found prejudice. That may be true in the abstract, but nothing about these errors feels harmless: The misstatements were grave, fundamental, and, given the grand jury’s already narrow votes, plainly consequential.

And on this score, another malefactor surfaces: Attorney General Pam Bondi. DOJ filings assert that Bondi reviewed the grand jury proceedings and materials and, on that basis, ratified both the indictment and Halligan’s authority. If so, she necessarily signed off on the very misstatements Judge Fitzpatrick highlighted. Her willingness to act as a shill for Halligan implicates her directly in the ethical and constitutional violations….

What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility: The Comey Prosecution

Joyce Vance, Nov 18, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…The Judge called what happened here “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding” and granted Comey’s request for access to all of the grand jury proceedings. He ordered the government to turn over those materials by 3 p.m. on Monday. Predictably, the government pushed back….

The Trump Administration’s Favorite Tool for Criminalizing Dissent

Quinta Jurecic, November 18, 2025 [The Atlantic]

Federal prosecutors have charged more than 100 people with Section 111 violations. Was their crime anything more than opposing Trump’s immigration policies?

The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator.

These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials….

Michael Steele’s [Malcolm Nance’s] GRAVE WARNING about Trump Will Give You CHILLS

[Your Daily Political Fix, November 18, 2025, YouTube]

1:14
…we are at the point of danger now. Uh, this administration has convinced themselves based on their own fantasies wrapped within their heads watching footage that’s five and 10 years old … they want to kill Americans that other American citizens now need to be designated as equal to a foreign terrorist group or armed vigilante gang or armed gangs in El Salvador in an effort to poison the mind of onethird of the electorate to attack and potentially kill another third of the electorate.

If that sounds familiar, that’s what Adolf Hitler did. He won with 33% of the vote. He got the other 33% to join together to try to wipe out the democratically elected 33%. We are in a very very very dangerous place right now. Well, I don’t know what else you call it when you’re sending red state, you know, troops into blue states without their permission. That feels inciting of a a civil war or whatever you want to call it. when you openly say insurrection act … and even a Trump judge says it has no relation to reality.

2:44
Well, what we’re seeing here is quite simple. It’s military occupation. And he’s sending forces from people who he thought from states that were supposed to be Trump supporting. Let me tell you
something. These guardsmen go where they’re ordered because that’s their their job for the weekend, right? So when they get mobilized and activated, they’ll go there. But with few exceptions, this the force is 40 to 45% African-American, Latino, and women. And they’re not going to go out and start shooting people. We haven’t even seen any evidence of where they actually are other than doing support. It’s ICE, the secret police, the new American Gestapo. And I will call them that professionally because what they are doing is the technical term in my manual that is used throughout the world. The terrorist recognition handbook is state terrorism where all instruments of government and law enforcement the intelligence apparatus carry out acts of terrorism in order to intimidate the entire nation into a state of fear.

White House blew past legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats

Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Hortonibe, Nov 22, 2025 [Washington Post]

President Donald Trump and his top White House aides pushed for lethal strikes on Western Hemisphere drug traffickers almost as soon as they took office in January, and in the past 10 months have repeatedly steamrolled or sidestepped government lawyers who questioned whether the provocative policy was legal, according to multiple current and former officials familiar with the debates….

So much for constitutional conservatives — CBP violates federalism, civil rights, and state laws as Republicans cheer.

Thomas Mills, Nov 21, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about the Border Patrol’s invasion of the state, citing their assault and abduction of an American citizen in Charlotte. I concluded the piece asking, “Where are the lawyers?” Well, one attorney replied.

John Runkle sent me a letter he had written in July addressed to Governor Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson. In it, he reminded them that Republicans passed a law banning masks in public with few exceptions. The Customs and Border Patrol agents in the state are brazenly defying it.

John writes, “It is clear to me that ICE agents wear a mask solely to hide their identities and operate through threatening tactics. On its face our Mask Law prevents these actions.”

The Republicans who passed that law should be outraged. People from outside of North Carolina are flaunting their disregard for the state’s laws and the GOP’s deeply held conviction that masks should not be worn in public. Republicans were so committed to that belief that they overrode then-Governor Roy Cooper’s veto. Now, they need to either demand that the law be respected and enforced or admit that it was a political stunt to satisfy their base that believed COVID was a hoax.

In addition to the masks, who thought wearing military-style camo gear is a good idea? These guys aren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Vietnam. They’re in the Home Depot parking lot. They are supposed to be carrying out police actions, not military ones….

The south rises again

Trump, Border Patrol Retreat in Failure from Chicago

Garrett Graff, November 17, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]

In the last few days, roving Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino decamped from Chicago, where his military-style raids have terrorized that community for weeks, for Charlotte, North Carolina — a somewhat inexplicable new target (more on that below) — and a move that underscores what has to be the growing conclusion of the now six-month-old campaign of “acting president” Stephen Miller to turbocharge immigration enforcement: It’s failing. Bigly.

The Border Patrol retreated from Chicago in defeat, not victory.

Writing about the Border Patrol a decade ago, I referred to it as a “fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry,” and watching Bovino’s tactics, I’ve come to believe the analogy has even more truth in the current moment.

Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan “night rides” of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often “respectable” leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history….

Here are five important conclusions we can better understand now, six months into the increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement efforts nationwide:

1. Trump and Bovino face diminishing half-lives.…

2. The politics aren’t working…. 

3. The data shows Trump’s lies — these aren’t the worst of the worst….

4. Most of the arrests are being rounded up in “Kavanaugh Stops.” ….

5. Operation CHARLOTTE’S WEB is horrid, ahistorical, and anti-American.…

Read More

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

After three decades of creating ruin and disaster across the globe, Larry Summers is finally being pushed from the lofty heights of power and prestige.

The proximate cause of his downfall are recently released emails between Summers and suicided arms dealer/sex trafficker/intelligence asset/money launderer Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails show the married, middle-aged Summers going to Epstein for advice on how best to manipulate a woman he claimed to be mentoring into a sexual relationship.

Summers comes off like a complete putz in the exchange:

Summers: We talked on the phone. Then “I can’t talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow”. I said what are you up to. She said “I’m busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming” She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.

Epstein: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.

While it’s nice to finally see Summers pushed off the world stage (we hope!), Matt Stoller, Rudy Havenstein and others are pointing out that Summers’ loathsome exchange with Epstein is the least of his sins.

Surely it’s more important that Summers was “wrong on the big important stuff for most of his career” as Stoller put it than that he was a creep who looked to a monster for advice on attempted adultery.

Politico sums up Summers’ prodigious rise in politics, for which he abandoned his Harvard tenure:

Summers would never achieve the type of intellectual breakthroughs that his uncles had. Perhaps he was too attracted to — too distracted by — the more muscular life of political power and influence that he first experienced in 1981, when he went to Washington to work with Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The year after winning the Clark medal, Summers headed to the capital again to work at the World Bank, then joined Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the new Clinton administration.
…
(Summers) would become Robert Rubin’s deputy when Rubin took over from Bentsen in 1995. Their work together on the international debt crises of the 1990s made Summers famous; in February 1999, TIME magazine put him, Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan on its cover, with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.” A few months later, Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, serving until the end of the Clinton presidency.

Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:

…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.
…
As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.

Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:

When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world’s leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people’s money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a “full-blown financial crisis” and a “catastrophic meltdown.”

When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a “Luddite,” dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector.

But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:

after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations—quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis.

Incredibly, before the release of his Epstein correspondence Summers had been playing a leading role in formulating the Center for American Progress’s Project 2029, intended to guide the policy for a potential Democratic administration to follow Trump 2.0.

The highest-profile think tank on the center-left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has assigned several high-profile policy types to lead an effort that documents show was internally described as “Project 2029.”

According to two people with knowledge of the arrangement and a member of CAP, one of the leads on the economic policy plank for this project is Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers…

They also said that Summers was the final sign-off on a CAP housing policy paper set to be released next week.

Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people?

No matter how vast the conspiracies of Jeffrey Epstein, no matter how deeply tied he was to American and Israeli intelligence (and Drop Site News has proven Epstein was both), Larry Summers ruined vastly more lives, caused more death and suffering, and did more harm in his public roles as an economics advisor to two Democratic U.S. Presidents.

It’s also important to note that he started his political career working for the Republican Reagan administration and seamlessly transitioned to the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to complete the neoliberal economic transformation begun under Reagan.

Now that the U.S. economy is completely hollowed out and its days as a global hegemon are rapidly coming to a close, Summers is finally being pushed from his high seats at Harvard, Open AI, and the Center for American Progress.

Too bad it came at least 20 years too late.