Tag: Department of Justice

Wednesday, April 29

White House Corresponents Dinner

  • Security at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performed as well as one would expect any American institution to perform in 2026. That is, it was competent enough to accomplish its basic task yet incompetent enough to leave everyone wondering whether the country survives mostly on luck.
  • Treating Saturday’s assassination plot as cause to ignore the legal niceties and plunge ahead with construction [of the White House ballroom] anyway felt like absurdist satire of the “emergency” rationales authoritarians are forever concocting to rationalize their power grabs and lawbreaking. The president’s life is in danger! Only a fabulously luxe gilded ballroom built to his exact specifications without any oversight whatsoever stands between America and catastrophe!

Nick Catoggio.

The luxe gilded ballroom Trump is building summarily like, I dunno, a dictator or something, wouldn’t come anywhere close to accommodating the White House Correspondents Dinner (2000+ guests versus ~900 capacity of the WH ballroom), apart from any other symbolic or logistical issues.

Royalty meets Pretender

[T]he trick of the royal family is to make everyone feel special, however brief their acquaintance. Some presidents realize that this is a necessary illusion …

…

In “The Godfather, Part II,” Michael Corleone tells his treacherous brother Fredo that he no longer means anything to him. “You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend,” he says. “I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?” Michael issues strict instructions to his aides that nothing should happen to his brother while his mother is alive.

It’s a story that might ring a bell. Just a few years after the queen’s death, Charles stripped his brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, of his title and evicted him from his home. The image handed down to posterity will be of Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor slumped in the back of a police car, desperately trying not to be seen.

This week Charles will be smiling benignly and nodding politely, but it’s worth remembering that beneath that good humor and politesse there is a layer of steel. Courtesy can be tactical as well as virtuous.

Craig Brown, Beneath the British Monarchy’s Polite Smiles Is a Layer of Steel

I hope that the King won’t allow any meeting with Trump to be recorded. I guess Trump is kind of star-struck by the British Royals and might actually behave himself, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Life among the North American Banana Republicans

All items from a Wall Street Journal newsletter

The Justice Department secured an indictment against James Comey in connection with a photo showing seashells arranged in a way that prosecutors said could be interpreted as a threat to kill President Trump.

The case is the Trump administration’s second attempt to prosecute the former FBI director, a prominent Trump critic. He was charged in September with lying to Congress, but a judge dismissed that case. The latest indictment centers on a 2025 Instagram post. At the time, Comey said it didn’t occur to him that the post would be read as a threat, and that he opposed such violence. Comey and his lawyers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nobody believes this was a threat. Trump’s DOJ is indicting one of Trump’s enemies for publishing on Instagram a wry, cryptic and mild criticism of him because a deranged person (like the President, a toxic narcissist) might interpret as a threat.

This is what they do in authoritarian regimes. I only once did a piece of a Federal Criminal Law matter and have no opinion on how the courts will deal with this. I can only hope that they will deal with it summarily and with a stern rebuke to the government.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr is launching an early review of Disney’s broadcast TV licenses, the regulatory agency said.

Trump yesterday called for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for joking that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” His show is broadcast by Disney’s ABC network. Kimmel made the remark days before an alleged gunman opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump attended on Saturday. Yesterday, Kimmel called his prior remarks a “very light roast.”

A crypto venture linked to men sanctioned in a scam-ring probe partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against what it said was a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars through online scams. Less than a month later, World Liberty Financial announced that it had partnered with a virtual-currency venture, one of whose projects had been led by two men sanctioned in the U.S. crackdown. A lawyer for World Liberty said it has never had any association or relationship with the sanctioned individuals. “WLF takes its compliance obligations very seriously,” he said. The lawyer said his client first became aware of allegations that the venture was connected to a project that had involved sanctioned individuals in January this year.

Shorts

  • In The Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno pondered piety and pooches: “Sitting at the right hand of God-Trump is Vice President JD Vance, a converted Catholic all of seven years. That’s 49 in lapdog years.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • In his newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, Jeff Maurer responded to commentary about overlong movies — including in my newsletter last week — by observing that the huge piles of money spent on key sequences all but guarantee those blockbusters’ bloat. “This isn’t just sunk cost fallacy — this is sunk cost fallacy plus the knowledge that if you go to your boss and say, ‘We wasted $10 million of your money,’ your boss will say, ‘I understand, I respect your honesty, now step into this rocket: I’m going to fill it with scorpions and fire it into a volcano’,” Maurer wrote. (Via Frank Bruni)
  • Wishful thinking is the alchemy that turns fools’ gold into silver linings. (Kevin D. Williamson)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Pi Day

Subtle subversion

I went to a High School Show Choir show the other day. The highlight was a top Show Choir doing a star-spangled show with red, white and blue, flouncy red and white skirts, high energy, a made-in-America ballad (Aaron Copland, The Promise of Living), and other familiar pieces like Can’t tell a book by looking at the cover and America (from West Side Story)

The even had a Tejano-looking horn line, complete with black cowboy hats, adding a Mariachi flavor to one interlude in the singing.

All in all, it was a show that celebrated diverse America, subtly pushing back against … oh, just about anyone who fancies that Real America is white and European.

That’s the kind of resistance that’s hard for tyrants to crush.

Attacking the First Amendment

The bleeding-heart RINO communists at the Wall Street Journal investigated one particular aspect of immigration enforcement: the handling of peaceful protesters:

  • Out of 279 people accused of attacking federal officers on social media over the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens.
  • Nearly half of these Americans were never formally charged, and none have been convicted at trial.
  • Many faced public doxxing—release of personal information such as addresses and photos—leading to death threats.
  • Some bore financial burdens from bail, legal fees, and lost workdays defending themselves.

It’s impossible to keep up with all the outrages. Kudos to Brenna T. Smith, Hannah Critchfield, Brian Whitton, Belle Cushing and Emma Scott of the WSJ for trying.

Writing

Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don’t enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn’t make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books don’t even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.

Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Shorts

  • Against the “flood the zone” strategy of misinformation that the current administration seems to favor, lawyers and judges, bound by legal, professional and social obligations to work in a reality-based world, can function as a critical levee. (Deborah Pearlstein, The Justice Department Wants to Make It Safe for Government Lawyers to Lie – shared link.)
  • [Self-identified Secretary of War Pete] Hegseth says that in order to win wars like the one now being waged in Iran, “our warriors deserve legal teams as lethal and focused as they are,” though he does not elaborate on what a lethal legal team might look like. (Sarah Fitzpatrick and Missy Ryan, The Pentagon’s Lawyers Are Now Under Review)
  • “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits (sic) right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.” (Mr. Obvious nominee Pete “Big Hair” Hegseth)
  • “I’m not worried. I do whatever the f**k I want. DJT will pardon me,” – Corey Lewandowski.
  • We know not through our intellect, but through our experience. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty via Economist)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.