Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
When President Donald Trump appointed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as the new acting head of National Intelligence, critics were quick to ask what, exactly, a former residential homebuilder knew about international spycraft.
The answer appears to be “nothing.”
Pulte earned Trump’s favor after using his role at FHFA to launch multiple mortgage fraud investigations against some of the president’s most vocal critics, including Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook.
The Government Accountability Office is currently reviewing Pulte’s investigations as a possible misuse of his office, but that didn’t stop Trump from elevating Pulte to an even more powerful position.
Pulte isn’t the only official Trump has shifted into a position of immense power after a conspicuous show of loyalty. In fact, more government agencies are filling up with acting officials than ever before, including the National Security Agency, the Departments of Justice and Labor, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and even the National Archives.
That isn’t an accident. Trump’s second term has been marked by the installation of acting officials to avoid the thorny process of Senate confirmation hearings—a headache Trump has been especially keen to avoid as his relationship with Senate Republicans crumbles.
Pulte’s nomination as acting National Intelligence director is a prime example of how Trump is exploiting the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to undermine the clear intent of the law and to evade Senate transparency.
Unlike other roles, National Intelligence legally requires confirmed directors to have “extensive national security expertise.”
Pulte, the owner of a home construction company with no background in national security or intelligence, certainly falls short of that bar. But as an acting official, he can exercise the full scope of his power—and carry out Trump’s personal wishes—without ever facing a single question about his lack of expertise.
Senate Republicans were already irritated by Trump’s ousting of GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who many of them find personally odious.
And when Trump’s rancid $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund was approved, Republicans balked at the thought of defending payouts to Jan. 6 insurrectionists during the heat of the midterm campaign season. GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky denounced the proposal as a “slush fund to pay people who assault cops.”
Last week, Trump quietly abandoned his scheme.
The author of Trump’s $1.8 billion political landmine was none other than acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, another Trump loyalist chosen more for his submissiveness than for any hint of competence.
Despite only having the legal cover to hold his job for another 210 days, the White House is already hatching a plan to let Blanche—and other acting officials—remain in their roles indefinitely. So much for the Senate!
Under normal circumstances, Blanche would be required to leave the acting attorney general role on Oct. 29, which would set up a heated confirmation fight just five days before voters head to the polls. But if Trump “nominates” Blanche for the permanent job without ever moving his confirmation forward, the countdown clock would effectively stop.
That also explains why Trump has failed to nominate any permanent successors for the multiple roles currently being held by his hand-picked acting appointees. Trump is wagering that Senate Republicans, already beaten down by months of brutal polling and the prospect of losing both chambers of Congress in November, will be in no rush to have hearings for Trump’s nominees. He’s probably right.
In place of the transparency and accountability of public hearings, the American people will get only silence and excuses from a White House that long ago stopped caring about any opinion other than Trump’s.
As confirmed officials depart the administration and find themselves replaced with willing functionaries in active roles, Trump only tightens his grip on an executive branch that has increasingly become a weapon of his personal vengeance.
Trump’s demand for more control over the government may satisfy his lust for revenge, but it’s also alienating Republicans from the voters they’ll need to persuade if they want to maintain their congressional majority.
Trump’s slush fund debacle is a reminder that a government full of flunkies may make Trump feel powerful, but it’s a terrible way to get anything done.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
As of this afternoon, President Trump is retreating from the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, according to The New York Times and multiple other reports. The White House communicated the decision to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill today. The decisive moment came earlier Monday, when Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump and told him bluntly that the fund was torpedoing the $70 billion immigration enforcement bill—the centerpiece of the administration’s legislative agenda.
That conversation, a source says, is what finally convinced the president to drop it. Senate Majority Leader Thune had already told reporters that changes were a “safe bet” and that “the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.” House Republicans had been actively looking for ways to kill the fund, and the Senate was already in open revolt—with more than a dozen Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham, privately urging Trump to pull the plug.
Trump and the DOJ waged a similar, strategic retreat a few weeks ago, when his lawyers filed a panicked voluntary dismissal two days before they would have had to walk into Judge Williams’s courtroom and explain, under the solemnity of federal proceedings, how Donald Trump suing an agency he controls, defended by his own former personal criminal defense lawyer, constituted a genuine adversarial lawsuit. Pinned between a rock and a hard place, he bolted.
So Trump blinked. Again. And on an ill-advised move—bogus and illegal on multiple fronts—on which he nevertheless had fully staked his diminishing political capital.
DOJ issued a statement today that it would “abide by the Court’s ruling”—meaning Judge Leonie Brinkema’s temporary restraining order out of Virginia, which froze the fund Friday, not Judge Kathleen Williams’s order reopening the settlement, about which more below.
The DOJ statement defended the fund, said nothing about it being permanently dead, and left conspicuously open the question of whether it could be revived.
So the parameters of the retreat remain unclear as of this writing. It may be a full capitulation. It may be a tactical pause dressed up as a concession. Either way, as a matter of political reality, it is a humiliation—the administration’s biggest self-inflicted wound of Trump 2.0, now compounded by a very public retreat.
In my dispatches on this scandal going back to February, and in my conversations with Representative Jamie Raskin and others, I argued that while the legal avenues for challenging the fund were real but difficult—standing problems, appropriations law hurdles, the fund’s architecture designed specifically to be unreachable—the political blowback would ultimately be too powerful to ignore.
That was because the emotional and political core of the entire scheme was the proposition that the January 6 rioters were victims—“patriots” at a “love-in,” not insurrectionists at a riot designed to hijack the Constitution—entitled to taxpayer-funded compensation. That core was part and parcel of Trump’s relentless and corrupt effort to whitewash history and his own role in trying to steal the 2020 election.
And the political winds, in fact, proved too strong to ignore. The moment Republican Senators and House members had to confront the question—do you support giving money to the people who beat police officers on January 6?—the fund became politically radioactive. Ted Cruz called a meeting with Blanche and Senate Republicans last week one of the roughest he had seen in his Senate career. Another attendee called it the toughest grilling of any administration official they had ever witnessed. Lindsey Graham, of all people, privately urged Trump to drop it.
Thune told reporters that “the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.” And Johnson, in his Monday meeting with Trump, delivered the message that finally landed: The fund was killing the immigration bill, and House Republicans were looking for ways to stop it with or without the White House.
Senate Democrats twisted the knife further today, with Schumer releasing a “Dear Colleague” letter vowing a coordinated multi-front assault—floor votes, oversight, appropriations fights—and Senators Schiff, Kelly, and Slotkin introducing the Drain the Slush Fund Act to bar any payouts to those convicted of crimes or connected to January 6. They might not have been positioned to stop the arrangement legally, but they were able, with the foreseeable aid of Republican defectors, to keep the spotlight turned up high enough to make it impossible to look away, as the White House plainly was hoping.
Trump will now take serious lumps from the MAGA base—far more than if he had never embarked on this asinine detour in the first place. The pardoned rioters who were salivating over their anticipated windfalls are going to be furious. Brandon Fellows, who spent three years in prison for his January 6 conduct, had already sought $30 million from DOJ before the fund was even announced and told CNN he was “feeling confident.” The Proud Boys leader expected a $2 to $5 million personal payout. Robert Gieswein—who marched with the Proud Boys, sprayed aerosol irritant at Capitol Police officers, threw a punch at another officer, and served four years in prison—told The Free Press he wants up to $10 million, though he’d be willing to settle for less.
It looks as if all of them, and the roughly 1,600 other January 6 defendants, are going to be left empty-handed and enraged. More, Trump is backing down precisely because the politics of supporting them became untenable—it is they whom Trump is plainly abandoning. All of that amounts to a richly deserved comeuppance for Trump’s staggering audacity in trying to make the American people not just pardon but financially reward the most serious assault on American democracy since the Civil War.
But if Trump, Blanche, and the attorneys involved in the original scheme—including Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Trump private attorney Boris Epshteyn—think that retreat puts an end to the prior misconduct, they may be in for a rude surprise.
Whereas Brinkema’s order froze the fund’s operation going forward, Williams is asking a fundamentally different question: What already happened in her court? She is not interested in where the fund goes from here. She is interested in whether she was deceived, whether her court served as an instrument of fraud, and whether the lawyers who were involved in the bogus settlement violated their most basic obligations to the tribunal.
Last week, a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges filed a motion urging Williams to reopen the case under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(4). Their filing was blunt: “The Court was deceived.” They argued that Trump and his co-plaintiffs deliberately withheld any mention of the settlement from their dismissal notice—timing the withdrawal to outrun Williams’s scrutiny—and that the resulting arrangement “is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.”
Williams did not hesitate to act on the suggestion. On Friday, she issued an order reopening the case, invoking Rule 11—which requires attorneys to certify that any filing serves a legitimate purpose—and citing extensive case law for the proposition that a court may raise Rule 11 violations on its own initiative and that a party cannot avoid sanctions simply by voluntarily dismissing the case.
I expect the administration to try the same move with Williams that it just tried with the fund itself: a strategic retreat dressed up as compliance. He and Epstheyn may try to elude her order altogether, or failing that, to submit on June 12 a filing that treats the whole reckoning as moot: the case is closed, the voluntary dismissal is self-executing under Eleventh Circuit precedent, there is nothing left for her to adjudicate. It is the legal equivalent of a stiff arm: not quite refusing to respond, but responding with nothing of substance.
Williams is unlikely to find that satisfying. We have seen this movie before—most vividly in the Boasberg-Bove-Rao confrontation over deportation flights, where the administration’s combination of contempt and foot-dragging met a judge who simply would not stand down. I don’t think that a dismissive June 12 filing will cause her to close up shop. Nor should it: the retreat from the fund is completely separate from the past potential abuse of the court.
If Williams insists on getting to the bottom of what happened, the various lawyers and participants will look like flies on flypaper, trying to wriggle away from the consequences of their conduct. That would presumably include Trump and the administration’s tried-and-true technique of seeking emergency review in the Eleventh Circuit, and if that fails, the Supreme Court (where the circuit justice for the Eleventh Circuit is Clarence Thomas). But in effect, they’d be doubling down on the whole dubious wager, and risking even greater humiliation.
Williams is not done. She has the record, the legal tools, and clearly the will to press forward, and the 35 former judges have handed her both the doctrinal roadmap and the judicial mandate to act. Political retreat does not erase a fraud on the court. The lawyers who engineered this heist still have a June 12 deadline, and a federal judge waiting for their answer.
The fund may be withering. But the investigation and accountability of the overall constitutional swindle may just be getting started.
Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.
In 2013, then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi personally solicited a $25,000 political donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation for her re-election PAC – and soon received it. Days later, Bondi’s office abandoned plans to join a New York lawsuit investigating fraud allegations against Trump University.
It is against the law for charitable foundations to make political contributions. But in the universe of Trump corruption, $25,000 was laughable chump change. It just proved to him how cheaply Pam Bondi could be had.
Fast forward a few years. Bondi, no longer in elected office, got serious about money as a $115,000-a-month lobbyist with the DC-based influence giant Ballard Partners. Her client list included deep-pocketed private prison corporations and the government of Qatar (for whom she was specifically registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act for “dealing with matters pertaining to combating human trafficking”). When Trump nominated her to be his attorney general in early 2025, she didn’t bother mentioning those clients in her statement of potential conflicts of interest.
So far so good: lies and omissions are standard operating practice in Trumpworld.
His initial pick for attorney general was Matt Gaetz, who might have been a more fitting choice to oversee the Epstein cover-up, having himself been investigated for child sex trafficking and found to have violated Florida’s statutory rape laws according to the House Ethics Committee. Gaetz had skated on all of it, but was ultimately too tainted even for the slavish Senate Republican majority that would have to approve the nomination.
Still, Bondi was something of an unusual choice for a Trump casting. His preferred front-of-house women tend to be more colorful and histrionic – Pirro, Loomer, Omarosa, Noem. Bondi, though from Florida herself, for some reason never went full Mar-a-Lago face, though it’s not clear self-mutilation would have saved her.
Managing the fake release of a fake politically-motivated conspiracy while simultaneously curating the cover-up of real files tied to a real conspiracy was always going to be a tall order. One day she was riding in the presidential limo with Trump to the Statue of the Union address. The next, she was out in the cold.
To add insult to injury, this week, Pam, the defenestrated private citizen recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, will have to endure a day of questioning about her role in the Epstein cover-up. While her former DOJ deputy – Trump’s personal attorney Todd “Whiteout” Blanche – wins the Old Man’s heart by erasing January 6 criminals from the DOJ website and rewarding violent coup plotters like Stewart Rhodes with taxpayer money, Pam will, at least for a day and maybe longer, become the public face of the Justice Department’s Epstein files cover-up.
In advance of her star turn on the Hill, here is a Freakshow timeline of Bondi’s ignominious reign as the nation’s top law enforcement official, and how she became Trump’s Brer Rabbit in the tar pit.
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the Justice Department orders the Southern District of New York, which has an active investigation still underway, to send all Epstein-related evidence to Washington. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD.) would later state that “neither the survivors nor the SDNY prosecutors knew that the purpose of this transfer was to terminate the case.”
Despite the fact that Trump won the 2024 election in part by juicing the Epstein conspiracy and promising to reveal the sordid details, the Senate Judiciary Committee advances Bondi’s nomination without asking anything about the files.
The Senate confirms Bondi, by a vote of 54 to 46, with all Republicans and one Democrat – John Fetterman of Pennsylvania – voting in favor.
Republican Reps. Jim Comer (R-KY) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), as chairs of House Oversight and the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets respectively, send a letter to Bondi requesting an ASAP briefing on documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Bondi goes on Fox and famously announces that the Epstein “client list” is “sitting on my desk right now to review” as part of a directive from President Trump himself.
Bondi incites an influencer revolt by inviting a pack of MAGA fake journalists, including Laura Loomer, to the White House and passing out binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” They pose for a photo op, thinking they are holding “declassified” material, only to realize that none of it was ever classified and much of it was already public (Epstein flight logs had been available since 2021).
Worse, the redactions are so badly mishandled that dozens of victims’ names – but not the names of their abusers – enter the public record.
With the stunt having failed, Bondi hops on with Fox News’ Mark Levin and shifts the blame to the New York federal prosecutor’s office, claiming they are “sitting on thousands of pages of documents regarding Epstein.” She promises that America will soon see “the full Epstein files” and then writes a letter to Kash Patel demanding delivery of the “full and complete Epstein files” to her office by 8 AM the next morning, while also demanding an “immediate investigation” into why her orders to the FBI were not followed.
James Dennehy, head of the FBI’s New York field office, is fired.
Bondi tells Sean Hannity that the DOJ has received “a truckload of evidence” and department staff begin processing 100,000 pages of the Epstein files in Winchester, Virginia. The job takes too long, so two weeks later, Bondi reportedly pressures the FBI to increase staffing and intensify efforts. A whistleblower later reports that she and Patel put crime-fighters on 24-hour document redaction shifts, with instructions to look out for Trump’s name. Sen. Dick Durbin’s letter about this episode contains many questions Bondi has not yet been asked publicly.
Bondi reportedly tells Trump during a briefing that his name appears in the Epstein files.
Elon Musk claims that the Epstein files have not been released because Trump is in them. “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” House Democrats immediately fire off a letter asking Bondi and Patel whether Musk’s claim is true.
A weekend of mysterious, panicked scrambling unfolds between Main Justice in Washington and the FBI’s New York office to get additional copies of Epstein file photos to Todd Blanche’s office.
The DOJ and FBI release an unsigned joint memo stating their “exhaustive review” found no co-conspirators, “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” and that no further disclosure of documents was warranted. At the end of the letter, officials link to video footage of the MCC Epstein cell area. Bondi never releases any materials related to the “exhaustive review.”
Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna introduce the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Trump posts that the Epstein files are a “Democrat hoax” on Truth Social, then repeats that claim in person from the Oval Office. That same day, Maureen Comey, lead prosecutor in the New York Epstein investigation, is fired.
The Wall Street Journal publishes the first of its “birthday book” stories, revealing that Trump gave his old friend Jeff a lewd drawing as a gift. Trump denies that it’s real and eventually files a $10 billion lawsuit that is later tossed by a judge. As another distraction, Trump instructs DOJ to seek release of Epstein grand jury materials. A day later, Bondi and Blanche ask the federal court to release the transcripts.
Pam Bondi posts a statement from Todd Blanche announcing that she directed him to communicate with Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorneys.. “If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”
Two days later, Blanche meets with Maxwell in Tallahassee. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson, trying to head off a vote on the Epstein Transparency Act, shuts down House business for the rest of the summer.
The Bureau of Prisons, a DOJ agency, transfers Maxwell to a low-security prison despite BOP guidelines for convicted sex offenders.
Pam Bondi appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She seems flummoxed by questions about photos of Trump in Epstein’s safe, as described by Michael Wolff, and deflects questions about DOJ failures to investigate Epstein’s finances by blaming Democratic administrations.
At Trump’s behest, Bondi asks New York U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton (a lawyer previously brought into Epstein associate Leon Black’s hedge fund for reputation rehab) to “take the lead” on investigating Epstein’s involvement specifically with Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, and other institutions.
Bondi tweets that the Justice Department will bring charges against “anyone involved in the trafficking and exploitation of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.” She claims the DOJ has already met with “many victims” and urges others to reach out to her, Blanche, or the FBI “and we will investigate immediately.”
(NOTE: Victims have repeatedly said that Bondi never talked to any of them and the DOJ has so far not prosecuted anyone other than Ghislaine Maxwell.)
Bondi testifies before the House Oversight Committee – prickly, cornered and occasionally unhinged – while refusing to acknowledge a group of Epstein victims in the audience. The spectacle likely ended her run in the Trump cabinet reality show.
As The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles put it:
These hearings, like so much political theater now, are staged for an audience of one: the great and powerful Donald Trump. So while Bondi thought she was playing the role of loyal defender, her sneering responses and burn book takedowns turned her into something else: the Angry Woman. And that is not something her boss would order from Central Casting.
American Freakshow reports the existence of three missing FBI interviews related to a sexual assault allegation against Trump by a woman whose redacted name is marked with the unusual label “protect source.” The story gets picked up by NPR, and after two weeks of denials, the DOJ finally acknowledges the three interviews. But questions remain about what other materials might be similarly withheld.
Trump fires Bondi over her handling of the Epstein files. There’s a difference between suave, brazen disregard for the law in quiet practice and full-frontal rudeness to the legislative branch. It’s a difference her replacement, Acting AG Blanche, having auditioned as Trump’s Roy Cohn for the last several years and grown increasingly willing to put his client’s kingly immunity into practice, understands.
He immediately announces that there will be no more Epstein file releases.
.Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
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