Particles are small enough to burrow into lungs, says report, with health impacts more substantial than we realize

 

Every breath people take in their homes or car probably contains significant amounts of microplastics small enough to burrow deep into lungs, new peer-reviewed research finds, bringing into focus a little understood route of exposure and health threat.

The study, published in the journal Plos One, estimates humans can inhale as much as 68,000 tiny plastic particles daily. Previous studies have identified larger pieces of airborne microplastics, but those are not as much of a health threat because they do not hang in the air as long or move as deep into the pulmonary system.

The smaller bits measure between 1 and 10 micrometers, or about one-seventh the thickness of a human hair, and present more of a health threat because they can more easily be distributed throughout the body. The findings “suggest that the health impacts of microplastic inhalation may be more substantial than we realize”, the authors wrote.

“We were quite surprised about the microplastic levels we found – it was much higher than previously estimated,” said Nadiia Yakovenko, a microplastics researcher and study co-author with France’s University of Toulouse. “The size of the particle is small and well-known to transfer into tissue, which is dangerous because it can enter into the bloodstream and go deep into the respiratory system.”

Microplastics are tiny bits of plastic either intentionally added to consumer goods, or which are products of larger plastics breaking down. The particles contain any number of 16,000 plastic chemicals, of which many, such as BPA, phthalates and Pfas, present serious health risks.

The substance has been found throughout the human body and can cross the placental and brain barriers. Food and water have been thought to be the main exposure route, but the new research highlights the risks in air pollution. Among other issues, microplastics are linked to chronic pulmonary inflammation, which can lead to lung cancer.

The concentrations in indoor air are far higher than outdoor air, which the study’s authors say is worrying because humans spend about 90% of the day indoors. Yakovenko said the concentrations indoors are higher because it is an enclosed environment with high levels of plastic in a small area, and there is generally poor ventilation.

The study measured air in multiple rooms throughout several apartments, as well as car cabins as the authors drove. The source of the microplastics in the apartments is thought to be degrading plastic in consumer products, from clothing to kitchen goods to carpets.

Virtually any human activity will kick up the microplastics because the bits are so light. The levels were much higher in an apartment in which two people lived because of virtually any human activity that kicks up the particles. Smaller particles stay suspended in the air longer because they are lighter, Yakovenko said.

-Tom Perkins, The Guardian

Revisiting America’s Dark History of Internment

 

“The objective of this contract is to obtain all infrastructure, including temporary housing structures, physical plant, staffing, resources, services, and supplies necessary to house aliens in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a safe and secure environment to effectuate their removal from the United States,” the 80-page document on ICE’s new staging facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, starts out. 

But the vanilla bureaucratic language can’t hide the stark reminders of one of the worst episodes in our nation’s history, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Instead of being treated like the cautionary tale it should be, Fort Bliss is on the way to becoming another stain on our nation.

During World War II, Americans were held at Fort Bliss in an uncomfortably small compound behind a double barbed wire fence overseen by guard towers. Internment is an ugly word. It refers to the confinement of people due to suspicions, based on nothing other than Japanese origin or ancestry, that they were a security threat after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were never charged with a crime. They were not brought to trial and given an opportunity to defend themselves. They were incarcerated without due process.

The National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains that when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, “about 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived on the US mainland, mostly along the Pacific Coast. About two thirds were full citizens, born and raised in the United States. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, however, a wave of anti-Japanese suspicion and fear led the Roosevelt administration to adopt a drastic policy toward these residents, alien and citizen alike.” Virtually all Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps for the duration of the war.

The military had already arrested people it believed posed a risk. It was the public that was concerned about Japanese Americans. Two journalists fueled that fever. Walter Lippmann, a national columnist, fearmongered, warning people that “the only reason Japanese Americans had not yet been caught plotting an act of sabotage was that they were waiting to strike when it would be most effective.” Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote that “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.” They swayed public opinion. Internment was the result.

Unsure, at first, of how to proceed, our government created makeshift camps with horrific conditions. One was at Santa Anita Park, a racetrack in Southern California, where entire families were forced to stay in horse stalls with dirt floors. Fort Bliss was one of the first facilities used to house people, with over 100 individuals held there. 

Ultimately, more than 125,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes, and people whom our government interned lost approximately $400 million in property. Reparations paid in later years did not come close to fully compensating people for their lost homes, businesses, and community, let alone the deprivation of rights they suffered.

Now, Donald Trump is doing it again. The Department of Homeland Security has constructed a large tent facility on the base at Fort Bliss for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making it the largest immigration detention site in the nation. People who do not learn history’s lessons are doomed to repeat them.

Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles said that “The use of national security rhetoric to justify mass incarceration today echoes the same logic that led to their [Japanese Americans] forced removal and incarceration.” She continued, “It is inconceivable that the United States is once again building concentration camps, denying the lessons learned 80 years ago.”

Inconceivable is a word I have returned to again and again in these past few years.

In an effort to brush off criticism, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement claiming that “Comparisons of illegal alien detention centers to internment camps used during World War II are deranged and lazy … The facts are ICE is targeting the worst of the worst—including murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, and rapists.” 

Except we know that isn’t true. ICE is targeting students, parents, day laborers and other people who are easy to find, rather than making good on claims that violent people are being removed from American streets. 

In July, government data confirmed that the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions, and among those who do, only a few have convictions for the kinds of crime the Trump administration claims. 

An independent, nonpartisan data research organization reported that the numbers are even worse: roughly 70% of the estimated 59,380 people held in ICE detention as of August 10 have no criminal conviction.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of internment in a case called Korematsu v. United States. That case has never been overturned, although in a case during the first Trump administration involving his Muslim ban, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “gravely wrong the day it was decided,” and said it should have “no place in law under the Constitution.”

It cost roughly $1.2 billion to build the new facility at Fort Bliss. That’s our taxpayer dollars at work—to hold 1,000 people. In addition to being morally bankrupt, it’s hardly a cost-effective way to conduct deportations. The ACLU reports that the people being held in the tent facilities at Fort Bliss face soaring summer heat and inadequate access to medical care and legal counsel. All of it is being done in our names.

ICE wants to conduct its Fort Bliss facility without any public scrutiny. The “Performance Work Statement” we started with makes that clear: “There shall be no public disclosure regarding this contract made by the contractor (or any subcontractors) without review and approval of such disclosure by the ICE Office of Public Affairs. 

The government considers such information privileged or confidential. The contractor shall notify the COR when a member of the U.S. Congress or any media outlet requests information or makes a request to visit the facility. The contractor shall coordinate all public information related issues with the CO. All press statements and releases shall be cleared, in advance, with the ICE Office of Public Affairs.”

In other words, they want to make sure we don’t protest this facility. That we don’t demand accountability for it from our elected officials. That the kind of lawsuits that shut down Donald Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” don’t materialize here. We know what to do. In moments like these, the threads between politics, law, and history matter more than ever. Understanding how they fit together helps you make sense of what’s really happening. 

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

"Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism"

 

Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election: “Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans,” Pritzker said bluntly. “None of those states is Illinois.” In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri respectively, both in Red States.

So, if this isn’t about crime, why is Trump working so hard to get Americans used to heavily armed troops — who aren’t trained in policing but can be very effective at crowd control — in our Blue cities?

The simple answer is that he and his cronies are terrified of suffering Richard Nixon’s fate (40 of his senior officials were indicted; many went to prison including his Attorney General and White House Counsel). That’s why they’re planning to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections by any means necessary, and the troops are part of their plan.

Because they know that one of the most common causes of people pouring out into the streets — including in ways that brought down authoritarian governments — was the regime in power stealing an election.

Governor Pritzker said it clearly and emphatically: “This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Let that roll around in your head: “Militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Pritzker is no wild-eyed leftie or crazed conspiracy theorist. He’s the billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune so he knows the billionaire circles Trump travels in well. He’s the governor of America’s 6th largest state, with a population larger than 170 nations or 87% of all UN member states.

He’s an attorney who knows the law, and a successful businessman who’s founded multiple companies, including backstopping tech companies, starting a venture capital operation, and building a private equity firm from scratch. He was elected in 2022 with the highest vote share of any Democratic governor anywhere in the nation in over 60 years.

And he’s watching what Trump is doing, far better, apparently, than our national mainstream press. He’s tracking Trump’s executive order giving the president the power to direct the military to seize voting machines (and thus nullify their votes) in Blue cities that may swing states away from the GOP. And Trump’s Executive Order to end mail-in voting.

Trump’s statement this week that Americans “want a dictator,” was almost certainly cribbed from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. His new order for the National Guard to work with ICE (eventually, presumably, to work for ICE, Trump’s personal secret masked police force) to create a “Rapid Reaction Force” to deal with civil disturbances reveals his end game.

Its mandate is to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.” It appears to be modeled almost exactly after the Rosgvardiya National Guard rapid reaction force Putin created in 2016 to put down anti-Putin and pro-Navalny protests; today the Rosgvardiya numbers over 600,000 men under arms. Putin probably told him about it in the car in Alaska, as this EO came right after that meeting.

Additionally, Trump‘s executive order essentially invites Proud Boys and other white supremacist militia into the tent to help with election intimidation efforts. It creates “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” who National Guard leaders “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”

As Alec Karakatsanis of the Civil Rights Corps, wrote on X, this will “permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers.” It’s a 21st century echo of the GOP’s Operation Eagle Eye, which enlisted white men to threaten people of color at voting polls in the 1960s and 1970s, or Hitler’s SA, the Sturmabteilung.

So, what sort of civil disturbance is it that Trump’s anticipating putting down with his Rapid Reaction Force?

Here’s a partial list of countries where a recent stolen or apparently stolen election caused citizens to pour out into the streets to challenge the regime in power: 

Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Panama, Philippines, Georgia, Mozambique, Serbia, Malawi, Hong Kong, Comoros, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mauritania, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Peru.

Stolen elections and the protests they provoke are one of the most common features of countries that are in the process of sliding from democracy into authoritarian fascism and strongman rule.

And if you think Trump doesn’t believe people will turn out in the streets — sometimes violently — to demand the overturn of a stolen election, just remember January 6th. If you truly believed that an election had been stolen in broad daylight, might you have been among those protestors, too? Given that example, you can add the United States to the list above. And Trump definitely doesn’t want Americans — particularly Democrats — out in the streets protesting a stolen election again (unless Republicans lose so decisively, he can’t steal the election, in which case he’ll try to repeat January 6th).

Make no mistake: this is what Trump’s militarization of Blue cities is all about. If he can confiscate enough voting machines, refuse to count enough votes, intimidate enough voters, and disqualify enough mail-in ballots to invalidate Democratic majorities in a few dozen big cities, he can flip as many Blue states to Red as he wants. And keep the GOP in power forever.

And he has to; in his mind he has no choice. After Merrick Garland finally got off his ass following two years of worried thumb-sucking, just the smallest and most tentative efforts to hold Trump to account for a tiny percentage of the many crimes he committed both in and after his first term would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

Trump knows this well. He was arrested and mug-shot photographed in Georgia, convicted of fraud and what a judge called “rape” in New York, and was looking at dozens of other lawsuits and potential criminal and civil charges that are all on suspension since his election as president last year.

He can’t go back. His life and his fortune literally depend on his holding power and never allowing Democrats to have subpoena ability in the House or Senate again, at least as long as he’s alive. It might explain why he just appointed 2020 election denier/activist and Cleta Mitchell protégé Heather Honey to a senior position in the DHS where she’s charged with “overseeing” the 2026 and 2028 elections, particularly, as Miles Taylor points out, the overseas mail-in votes that tend to trend Democratic. 

As ProPublica noted: “Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

“Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.”

He’s getting ready. After all, Trump is the man who cheered as his followers killed three police officers and smeared feces on the walls of America’s Capitol while trying to overturn the 2020 election. He’s the guy who routinely lies to the American people while threatening and castigating reporters who dare call him out on it. He’s the one who openly admires Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Kim, Xi, and pretty much every other tinpot and major dictator in the world.

And the people who work for him — looking at the fates of John Mitchell, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy and others who were busted for following the illegal and unconstitutional orders of a corrupt president — are equally emphatic that they’re never going to spend a day in a federal prison, either.

So, get ready because Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism and, in his mind, there’s no stopping until America’s democracy is buried under the old Rose Garden and our dissenters are as quiet and terrified as are those few still remaining in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

If Democratic governors and mayors are going to stop Trump from having his armed forces pre-positioned to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections, they need to get an infusion of Pritzker’s and Newsom’s courage and begin to seriously fight. A coalition or interstate compact — formal or informal — will be absolutely necessary to resist Trump’s armed forces. Perhaps even a sort of soft succession, openly defying Trump’s illegal orders and threatened violence. Governors are not without resources, as both Pritzker and Newsom have pointed out; they just need to use them. Let your state’s governor know!

-Thom Hartmann

 

 

"For the second time in as many days, President Donald J. Trump suggested that Americans want a dictator"

 

In a meeting in the Cabinet Room that lasted more than three hours, during which he listened to the fulsome praise of his cabinet officers and kept his hands below the table, seemingly to hide the bad bruising on his right hand, Trump said: “The line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.’”

With Trump underwater on all his key issues and his job approval rating dismal, the administration appears to be trying to create support for Trump by insisting that the U.S. is mired in crime and he alone can solve the problem. The administration’s solution is not to fund violence prevention programs and local law enforcement—two methods proven to work—but instead to use the power of the government to terrorize communities.

There is a frantic feel to that effort, as if they feel they must convince Americans to fear crime more than they fear rising grocery prices or having to take their children past police checkpoints on their way to school.

Last night, speaking with personality Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the person behind the draconian immigration raids in the country, seemed to be angry that Washingtonians weren’t sufficiently grateful for Trump’s takeover of the streets. But Miller indicated that the administration is really focused on splitting Republicans and Democrats who disapprove of the administration's policies, demonizing the Democrats.

Miller asserted to Hannity that the “Democrat Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization…. The Democrat Party, Sean, that exists today,” he said, “it disgusts me.”

Now, with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker taking a stand against the deployment of troops in Chicago, Trump appears to be nervous about sending troops on his own hook and instead trying to pressure Pritzker to ask for them. In the Oval Office today, he complained that Pritzker wasn’t asking for troops, and on social media tonight he called Pritzker “an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.”

And yet, for all their talk of dispatching soldiers to combat crime, National Guard troops today were picking up trash in Washington, D.C., and working on dozens of “beautification and restoration" projects.

The administration’s focus on crime to win back support for the president is going to have to overcome increasing uneasiness with Trump’s attempt to take control of the nation’s monetary policy.

In a letter posted to social media last night at 8:02 Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump announced that he was removing Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook from her position “for cause.” That cause, he claimed, was the allegation from Trump loyalist William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that Cook had made false statements on a mortgage years ago. With Pulte’s help, the administration has gone after a number of Democrats with such allegations. Cook has not been charged with any crime. Historically, “for cause” has meant corruption or dereliction of duty.

Trump has been at war with the Federal Reserve for months. The Fed is an independent institution that oversees the nation’s economy and manages the nation’s monetary policy, which means the Federal Reserve sets interest rates for the country. Trump wants it to lower interest rates to make it easier to borrow money.

Cheaper money will goose the economy, but it is also likely to spur inflation, which is already on the rise thanks to Trump’s tariff war and massive deportations of migrant workers. Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates or, failing that, to resign.

Trump has mused about taking control of the Fed himself, but the politicization of the nation’s monetary policy so it responds to the whims of Trump rather than actual economic conditions makes economists and most elected officials recoil. Today in his newsletter, economist Paul Krugman wrote that if Trump’s illegal firing of Cook is allowed to stand, “the implications will be profound and disastrous.

The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent. And,” he added, “the damage will be felt far beyond the Fed. This will mark the destruction of professionalism and independent thinking throughout the federal government.”

In May the Supreme Court suggested it would overturn an almost century-old precedent saying that the president cannot remove the heads of independent agencies created by Congress. But even then, it protected the independence of the Fed, writing: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Trump administration officials appear to be trying to find a way around that ruling by going after Cook on trumped-up charges. After serving as a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University and on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Cook has been on the board of governors since 2022. She is the first Black woman to sit on the board and might have drawn Trump’s ire as well when she noted publicly that the jobs report earlier this month could signal an economic turning point.

Cook responded to Trump’s letter in a statement saying: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”

The administration’s apparent persecution of undocumented immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it unlawfully deported to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March and then refused to return despite court orders to do so, is a more immediate illustration of the lawlessness of authoritarian rule.

The government finally returned Abrego to the U.S., only to announce that it had secured an indictment against him in Tennessee for allegedly conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants for financial gain, charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop for which Abrego was not charged with anything.

He was jailed in Tennessee, and a judge ordered that he remain in jail to protect him from the government, which threatened to deport him again if he were released. He was finally released on August 22 and went home to his family in Maryland, but when he attended a mandatory check-in at the ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland, on Monday, August 25, he was arrested.

Members of the administration routinely describe Abrego, who has no criminal convictions, as a gang member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser, and child predator who is terrorizing the United States. Trump referred to him yesterday as “an animal.”

Now, as Jeremy Roebuck, Maria Sacchetti, and Dana Munro of the Washington Post explained yesterday, Abrego’s lawyers say the government is trying to coerce him into pleading guilty of human trafficking, offering to send him to the Spanish-speaking Latin American country of Costa Rica if he does, but threatening to deport him to Uganda if he does not. As legal analyst Harry Litman notes, deportation would enable the government to avoid “having to show their hand on what seems to be a very threadbare case.”

The official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet-level department of the United States government—trolled Abrego, whom the media often identifies as a “Maryland man,” by posting: “Uganda Man.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, whose order to return Abrego to the U.S. the government ignored for months, indicated she had no faith that the government would obey the law. She temporarily barred the administration from deporting Abrego until she can make sure the government follows the law, making Department of Justice lawyer confirm he understood that “[y]our clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States.”

[Yesterday], Democrat Catelin Drey won a special election for the Iowa state senate, breaking a Republican supermajority and flipping a seat in a district Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024. Drey won the seat by 10.4%, showing a swing of more than 2o points to the Democrats. And in a seven-way race in Georgia for the state Senate in a deep red district, the lone Democrat, Debra Shigley, came in first with 40% of the vote. Since no candidate won 50% of the vote, Shigley will face whichever Republican candidate comes out on top—the top two are currently hovering around 17%—in a runoff on September 23.

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker spoke at a news conference, addressing reports Trump is planning to send the military to Chicago

 

I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.

Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against, and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.

What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.

No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor. No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us. Local law enforcement has not been contacted. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None.

We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did: We read a story in The Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no inter- insurrection. There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities. Here in Chicago, our civilian police force and elected leaders work every day to combat crime and to improve public safety, and it's working.

Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area. But calling the military into a U.S. city to invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification.

Look around you right now. Does this look like an emergency? Look at this. Go talk to the people of Chicago who are enjoying a gorgeous afternoon in this city. Ask the families buying ice cream on the Riverwalk. Go see the students who are at the beach after school. Talk to the workers that I just met taking the water taxi to get here. Find a family who's enjoying today sitting on their front porch and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator. Ask if they'd like to pass through a checkpoint with unidentified officers in masks while taking their kids to school.

Crime is a reality we all face in this country. Public safety has been among our highest priorities since taking office. We have hired more police and given them more funding.

We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines. We invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs. We listened to our local communities, to the people who live and work in the places that are most affected by crime and asked them what they needed to help make their neighborhoods safer. Those strategies have been working. 

Crime is dropping in Chicago. Murders are down 32% compared to last year and nearly cut in half since 2021. Shootings are down 37% since last year, and 57% from four years ago. Robberies are down 34% year over year. Burglaries down 21%. Motor vehicle thefts down 26%. So, in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois. Memphis, Tennessee, Hattiesburg, Mississippi all have higher crime rates than Chicago, and yet Donald Trump is sending troops here and not there? Ask yourself why.

If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.

Trump is defunding the police. To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is.

"There's a lot that casts doubt on whether the individuals involved are acting in good faith"

 

There’s a concept in the law called the “presumption of regularity” – the idea that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, executive branch employees are presumed to have acted in good faith and through the proper channels in arriving at an outcome. The presumption is typically applied by the courts in reviewing agency decisions, but the principle can be applied to how, ideally, we should think about government actions more broadly.

Having worked inside the government, and in the executive and judicial branches specifically, I have seen firsthand that when it is operating normally, government servants do, in fact, follow the rules and do their jobs like they’re supposed to. But the news that Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, had his home and office searched – and in particular, the conflicted people and irregular circumstances surrounding it – has made me realize that we can no longer operate on this presumption. In fact, there is a lot that feels hinky, as we would say in the FBI, about the Bolton search.

Since the search seems to be related to some stuff that happened half a decade ago, let’s start at the beginning. Two months after Bolton left the Trump administration (or was fired, depending on whether you ask him or Trump) in 2019, he got a deal with Simon & Schuster for a book. By December of that year, he had a draft manuscript of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened – the book was critical of Trump and also bolstered some of the allegations being made against him in his first impeachment.

Because the book contained Bolton’s accounts of conversations and observations during his time as Trump’s national security adviser, he was required to put his manuscript through “prepublication review” with the NSC, to ensure that it did not contain classified information. He did so, and went through four months of edits with the Senior Director for Records and Information Security Management at the National Security Council, Ellen Knight (a career employee who had been detailed to the NSC from the National Archives and Records Administration). At the end of that process, she advised him that the manuscript no longer contained classified information.

However, Bolton never received formal authorization from the White House to publish his book. In June 2020, John Eisenberg, the Deputy White House Counsel and Legal Adviser to the NSC, wrote to Bolton and told him that his book still contained classified information. At that point, though, Bolton had already sent his manuscript to his publisher. The Trump administration then sued Bolton, seeking to enjoin him from publishing his book.

The judge, Royce Lamberth, denied the injunction, finding that the government could not meet the criteria showing that an injunction would prevent “irreparable harm” since 200,000 copies of the book had already been published, noting that “the horse is not just out of the barn – it is out of the country.” But Judge Lamberth also stated – after reviewing the White House declarations of the classified material contained in the book – that the government would likely succeed on the merits, because “Defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations” and had “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability.”

That’s pretty damning coming from a federal judge, and the Trump administration did, in fact, subsequently open a criminal investigation into Bolton. But the drama didn’t end there. In September of 2020, the lawyers for Knight – the person who had initially conducted the prepublication review – sent Bolton’s lawyers an 18-page letter. In the letter, Knight stated that political appointees at the White House, including Eisenberg and his deputy, Michael Ellis, had commandeered the prepublication review process right before she was about to clear the book for publication.

Specifically, they put the authorization on hold, and Ellis had personally gone through the manuscript and declared, improperly, huge swaths of the manuscript classified. Judge Lamberth did not have the letter when he was considering his ruling and had relied on Ellis’ and other NSC officials’ declarations in making his statement concerning Bolton’s potential criminal liability. Knight also alleged that the political appointees at the NSC pressured her to change her assessment of Bolton’s manuscript – she refused, and her detail to NSC was terminated. In short, Knight’s account is evidence that ought to rebut any presumption of regularity with regard to the prepublication process. (It also suggests that the criminal investigation on Bolton was arguably opened on false pretenses.)

(By the way: If Ellis’ name seems familiar, it is because he’s one of the ‘Where’s Waldo’s’ of the Trump era. He first surfaced in 2017, when he was working in the White House Legal Counsel’s office and was one of the officials who shared information about classified intercepted communications with Devin Nunes (for whom he had worked previously) that led to the “unmasking” controversy. Trump later tried to install Ellis as the General Counsel at the NSA, but his appointment was stalled because of an Pentagon inspector general investigation and a security inquiry into whether he mishandled classified information. Ellis, who was placed on administrative leave, later resigned.)

Anyway, all that was five years ago. Fast forward to now. Search warrants require the probable cause to be current, meaning that there has to be a reason to believe that evidence of a crime is in the places to be searched now. If Bolton’s search is related to the investigation that was opened in 2020, that would mean the FBI would have to show there was probable cause that there was evidence of possession or dissemination of classified information present now, years after he left the government and published his book. The big question is, what could possibly have come up to suddenly provide enough probable cause to obtain a warrant?

According to the New York Times, the “fresh” evidence was intelligence collected overseas by the CIA, which was recently shared with the FBI. Importantly, the CIA is prohibited from directly collecting evidence on U.S. persons (USPERs). However, the CIA can use human or technical sources to target non-U.S. persons (non-USPERs), which may result in “incidental” collection about a U.S. person (so the source says something about an USPER or they capture the target communicating with the USPER).

And if that incidental collection reveals evidence of U.S. laws being broken, it can pass it to the FBI. This is relatively rare, mainly because if the FBI decides to use that information to prosecute a criminal case, it has the potential to reveal the CIA’s sources and methods. Ordinarily, this built-in disincentive would mean that the CIA would not take this step lightly – i.e., you could use the presumption of regularity.

In Bolton’s case, though, it’s hard to maintain the presumption. For one, the intelligence was passed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe to the FBI Director, Kash Patel, both of whom are Trump loyalists aligned with his agenda, including Trump’s obvious long-standing animosity towards Bolton. (Ratcliffe had provided an affidavit against Bolton in the lawsuit about the book, and before becoming FBI director, Patel had Bolton among 60 names on a “deep state enemies” list.) And guess who is the Deputy Director of the CIA, right under Ratcliffe? One Michael Ellis. You can see why this is feeling hinky.

Perhaps, though, this search warrant is unrelated to any of the book stuff. Maybe the CIA passed intelligence to the FBI on something wholly unrelated, some recent incident involving classified information. In fact, Vice President JD Vance suggested that the search was based on something new and unrelated to the book investigation, stating, “We are in the very early stages of investigation.” But that’s red flaggy, too.

Searches are typically executed in the later stages of an investigation. Because it is highly intrusive, a court will want to know that the FBI has already conducted a fairly thorough investigation and that the specific evidence sought can be obtained only through the search. It’s hard to see how the FBI would immediately run out and execute a search based on this (raw?) intelligence alone.

Perhaps the intelligence did reveal an urgent national security threat that had to be addressed immediately. If the FBI had reason to believe that, say, someone had hundreds of pages of classified documents, including nuclear secrets, sitting in their bathroom which hundreds of randos had access to, it might be able to get a search warrant immediately. Unless it involved a former president, in which case they might spend eighteen months asking nicely to get it back. But I digress.

Vance’s comments only add to the problematic aspects of this case. Vance also stated that “there was broad concern about Ambassador Bolton” and that they were gathering evidence on “something we are worried about,” adding that “if [Bolton] committed a crime, of course, eventually prosecutions will come.”

Let’s pause for a minute. Even if there is an urgent, national security reason to undertake a search of someone’s home, you do that because you are investigating a specific crime, not based on vague, “broad concerns” or “worries.” That smacks of a fishing expedition. (It’s also possible that Vance doesn’t really understand criminal law and is just talking out of his butt.) And not for nothing, but am I the only one wondering why the hell the Vice President, who literally has no role in law enforcement, even knows anything about this case?

Look, I’m a process gal. For as long as I’ve been doing legal commentary, a presumption of regularity was always my starting point. Of course, any institution can have rogue and bad actors, but a properly working system will have oversight mechanisms in place to identify and weed them out – we have seen that happen before, in things like the FISA process during the first Trump administration. Right now, there is nothing to suggest that the judicial process of getting the search warrant itself was not followed. That’s a good thing. But there’s also a lot that casts doubt on whether the individuals involved are acting in good faith or observing internal executive branch norms and processes at all.

As my colleague Joyce Vance eloquently put it, “We are caught in the tension between our desire to preserve what is left of the system and the need to be clear about what is wrong.” My version is more straightforward: This whole thing just feels hinky.

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Jack White's Response to Steven Cheung

“Jack White is a washed-up, has-been loser posting drivel on social media because he clearly has ample time on his hands due to his stalled career. It’s apparent [White]’s been masquerading as a real artist, because he fails to appreciate, and quite frankly disrespects, the splendor and significance of the Oval Office inside of ‘The People’s House,'” claimed White House spokesman Steven Cheung.

Jack’s response:

"Listen, I’m an artist and not a politician so I’m in no need to give my answer or opinion on anything if I’m not inspired or compelled, but how funny that it wasn’t me calling out trump’s blatant fascist manipulation of government, his gestapo ICE tactics, his racist remarks about Latinos, Native Americans, his ridiculous 'wall' construction, his attacks on the disabled, his attempted coup and mob insurrection and destruction of the sacred halls of congress, his disparaging sexist and pedophilic remarks about women, his obvious attempts at distraction about being a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein and his inclusion in the Epstein files, his ignorance of the dying children in Sudan, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his lack of empathy for military veterans and those struggling with poverty, his attempts to dismantle healthcare, his obvious wimpy and pathetic kowtowing to the dictators Putin and Kim Jong Un, his nazi like rallies, his attempts to sell merchandise and products like Goya beans through the office of the Presidency, his fake 'gunshot to the ear' that he showed no medical records or photographs of, his constant, constant, constant lying to the American people, etc.

"No, it wasn’t me calling out any of that, it was the f*cking DECOR OF THE OVAL OFFICE remarks I made that got them to respond with insults. How petty and pathetic and thin skinned could this administration get? 'Masquerading as a real artist'? Thank you for giving me my tombstone engraving! Well, here’s my opinion: trump is masquerading as a human being; he’s masquerading as a Christian, as a leader, as a person with actual empathy. He’s been masquerading as a businessman for decades as nothing he’s involved in has prospered except by using other people’s money to find loophole after loophole and grift after grifting.

"His staff of professional lying toadies like Steven Cheung and Karoline Leavitt have been covering up and masking his fascism as patriotism and fomenting hatred and division in this country on a daily basis. And I have 'ample time on (my) hands'? That orange grifter has spent more taxpayer money cheating at golf than helping ANYONE in the country. There is no progress with him, only smoke and mirrors and tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

"So Maga folk, enjoy your concrete paving over the rose garden, your 200-million-dollar ballroom in the White House, and your gaudy-ass gold spray painted trinkets from Home Depot, cause he ain’t spending any money on helping YOU unless you fit into his white supremacist country club rich idiot agenda.

"Wow, he hates who you hate.... good for you, be proud of yourselves, how Christian of you all. The only way you can support this conman is because you are a victim of the 2-party system, and you defend your guy no matter what he does. No intelligent person can defend this low life fascist. This bankruptor of casinos. This failed seller of trump steaks, trump vodka, trump water, etc.

"This man and his goon squad have failed upwards for decades and have fleeced the American people over and over. This professional golf cheat, this grifter who has hundreds of thousands of deaths from his inaction of the pandemic on his hands, this man that the majority of the country somehow were fooled into supporting and voting into office (through the flawed electoral college) and their love of reality television stars.

"Being insulted by the actual White House that this particular conman leads is a badge of honor to me, because anyone who trump supports and likes is a villain who gives nothing to their fellow man, but only takes what can benefit themselves. And no, I’m not a Democrat either, I’m a human being raised in Detroit. I’m an artist who’s owned his own businesses like his own upholstery shop and recording label since he was 21 years old who has enough street sense to know when a 3-card monte dealer is a cheap grifter and a thief.

"I was raised to believe that we defeated fascism in World War II and that we would never allow it again in the world. I don't always state publicly my political opinions, and like anyone I don't always know all the facts, but when it comes to this man and this administration, I'm not going to be like one of the silent minority of 1930's Germany. This man is a danger to not just America but the entire world and that's not an exaggeration, he's dismantling democracy and endangering the planet daily, and we all know it.”

-Jack White