“These experiences have given Patel a worldview that I think is best defined as paranoid.
Patel believes that foreign enemies — ranging from China to Iran to drug cartels — are doing their best to infiltrate the United States and wreak havoc on its homeland. Only Trump has the strength and the fortitude to stand up against these enemies and defend American allies like Israel.
The Democrats, he believes, do not just disagree with Trump on how to handle these threats: They are actively aligned with America’s enemies.
In one War Room segment, for example, Patel hosted a discredited China “expert” named Gordon Chang to warn that China was “planning an attack on our facilities on our soil.” But it’s worse than that, Chang argued: China had installed Joe Biden as the president of the United States.
“They were actually able to cast the decisive vote in 2020,” Chang told Patel, claiming without evidence that China “poured money into Joe Biden’s campaign” through the Democratic crowdfunding platform ActBlue. Patel’s response was not skepticism but credulity: “I hope people are paying attention.”
But Democrats are not merely unwitting cat’s paws of foreign powers, per Patel: They are nefarious actors aiming to tear down American democracy.
One of Patel’s favorite phrases, one that he uses again and again on Bannon’s show, is “two-tiered system of justice.” In his mind, federal law enforcement employs two distinct standards — one for “the deep state’s” friends and another for its enemies. Its allies, like the Bidens, receive only limited and superficial scrutiny, while its enemies are constantly harassed and persecuted. The four prosecutions of Trump, for Patel, are not legitimate inquiries into wrongdoing and abuses of power, but rather agents of a corrupt system lashing out at the one man who threatens their grip on America.
For this reason, Patel has an enemies list — literally. His book Government Gangsters, which he is constantly hawking on War Room, contains an appendix listing dozens of names that comprise the “executive branch deep state.””
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“he is constantly proposing schemes — like Congress arresting Garland — that amount to efforts to criminalize political disagreements. This includes proposals to investigate prominent Democrats and even prosecute journalists.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said in a guest appearance on War Room last year.
“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.””
“Video footage of Phoenix police officers beating and tasing a deaf black man with cerebral palsy has led to an internal investigation and widespread media coverage—and it couldn’t come at a worse time for the city. This summer the Justice Department (DOJ) released a scathing report accusing the police department of systemically violating the civil rights of vulnerable residents.
Local TV news outlet ABC15 first published footage last week showing the violent arrest on August 19 of Tyron McAlpin, who is now facing felony aggravated assault and resisting arrest charges as a result of the incident.”
“Donald Trump’s opponents were hoping for more bombshells in Jack Smith’s final document dump before the election. On Friday, those hopes fizzled.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed portions of four large volumes of the special counsel’s evidence against Trump — but most of the materials remained redacted from public view. And the small number of materials that were released on the court docket consisted almost entirely of previously public documents.”
“The state eventually dropped the charges against Miller. His two years in jail, however, took a toll, according to his criminal defense attorney, who said Miller’s cancer was in remission but recurred after the state locked him up, as he could not access his medication.
Following his release, Miller sued Craycraft. The district court concluded Craycraft was entitled to absolute immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit subsequently noted that Craycraft’s alleged chicanery was “difficult to justify and seemingly unbecoming of an official entrusted with enforcing the criminal law.” But that court went ahead and ratified the grant of absolute immunity anyway—a testament to the malfeasance the doctrine permits.
Core to the decision, and to similar rulings, is Imbler v. Pachtman (1976), the precedent in which the Supreme Court created the doctrine of absolute prosecutorial immunity. The Court ruled that a man who had spent years in prison for murder could not sue a prosecutor who allegedly withheld evidence that eventually exonerated him.
Plaintiffs’ only way around this doctrine is proving that a prosecutor committed misconduct outside the scope of his prosecutorial duties. It’s a difficult task. Louisiana woman Priscilla Lefebure sued local prosecutor Samuel C. D’Aquilla after he sabotaged her rape case against his colleague Barrett Boeker, then an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.”
“On its face, there’s nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support for federal agents who work with trafficking survivors. But HSI—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has quite a questionable record when it comes to “helping” trafficking victims. At times, HSI has been known to subject suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the “human trafficking” work the agency does just involves plain old prostitution stings.”
“his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.”
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“Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.”
“The annual U.S. death toll from illegal drugs, which has risen nearly every year since the turn of the century, is expected to fall substantially this year. The timing of that turnaround poses a problem for politicians who aim to prevent substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply.
Those politicians include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who promises to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose platform is also heavy on supply-side tactics. Neither candidate seems to have absorbed the lessons of the “opioid epidemic,” which showed that drug law enforcement is not just ineffective but counterproductive, magnifying the harms it is supposed to alleviate.”
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“While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, Dasgupta et al. say, it does not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” can account for the recent drop in deaths. But they think it is “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone, which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, has played a role.
By contrast, Dasgupta et al. say it is “unlikely” that anti-drug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped reduce overdoses. They note that recent border seizures have mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
Supply-side measures, which are doomed by the economics of prohibition, not only have failed to reduce drug-related deaths. They have had the opposite effect.
Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable, and efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Trump and Harris seem unfazed by that debacle. Trump imagines “a full naval embargo on the drug cartels,” while Harris aspires to “disrupt the flow of illicit drugs.” They promise to achieve the impossible while glossing over the costs of persisting in a strategy that has failed for more than a century.”
“Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge who oversaw his Manhattan hush money trial, which ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts, to throw out the case now that Trump is president-elect.
Dismissing the case is “necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the court made public Tuesday.
In light of Trump’s request, Justice Juan Merchan agreed to pause all proceedings in the case, including a ruling that had been expected Tuesday on whether the Supreme Court’s July decision on presidential immunity requires that Trump’s conviction be tossed.
“President-elect Donald Trump was indicted four times — including two indictments arising out of his failed attempt to steal the 2020 election. One of these indictments even yielded a conviction, albeit on 34 relatively minor charges of falsifying business records.
But the extraordinary protections the American system gives to sitting presidents will ensure that Trump won’t be going to prison. He’s going to the White House instead.”
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“Two of the indictments against Trump are federal, and two were brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia. The federal indictments (one about Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection, and the other about his handling of classified documents) are the most immediately vulnerable. Once Trump becomes president, he will have full command and control over the US Department of Justice, and can simply order it to drop all the federal charges against him. Once he does, those cases will simply go away.
The White House does have a longstanding norm of non-interference with criminal prosecutions, but this norm is nothing more than that — a voluntary limit that past presidents placed on their own exercise of power in order to prevent politicization of the criminal justice system. As president, Trump is under no constitutional obligation to obey this norm. He nominates the attorney general, and he can fire the head of the Justice Department at any time.”
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“The fate of the state charges against Trump is a little more uncertain, in large part because there’s never been a state indictment of a sitting president before, so there are no legal precedents governing what happens if a state attempts such a prosecution (or, in the case of New York, to impose a serious sentence on a president who was already convicted).
It is highly unlikely that the state prosecutions can move forward, however, at least until Trump leaves office. On the federal level, the Department of Justice has long maintained that it cannot indict a sitting president for a variety of practical reasons: The burden of defending against criminal charges would diminish the president’s ability to do their job, as would the “public stigma and opprobrium occasioned by the initiation of criminal proceedings.” Additionally, if the president were incarcerated, that would make it “physically impossible for the president to carry out his duties.”
There’s little doubt that the current Supreme Court, which recently held that Trump is immune to prosecution for many crimes he committed while in office, would embrace the Justice Department’s reasoning.”
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“These same practical considerations would apply with equal force to a state prosecution of a president, and there’s also one other reason why a constitutional limit on state indictments of the president makes sense. Without such a limit, a state led by the president’s political enemies could potentially bring frivolous criminal charges against that president.”
“it’s not true that shoplifting less than $950 is no longer illegal—it can still be charged as a misdemeanor. “What Prop 47 did is increase the dollar amount by which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950 to adjust for inflation and cost of living,” Alex Bastian, who co-authored the proposition, told the Associated Press in 2021. “But most shoplifting cases are under $400 to begin with, so before Prop 47 and after Prop 47, there isn’t any difference.”
And even after being raised to $950, California’s felony threshold is lower than more than half of all other U.S. states: Deep red states like Montana and Kansas set theirs at $1,500, while Texas’s is set at $2,500.
“Under current law, prosecutors can already add together thefts that are demonstrably related, for example multiple thefts from the same store in the same week or skimming small amounts from your employer every day,” notes the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy advocacy organization that supports criminal justice reform (and opposes Proposition 36).
In fairness, evidence indicates that certain crimes did increase after Proposition 47. “Driven by larcenies, property crime jumped after Prop 47 compared to the nation and comparison states,” according to a September 2024 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. At the same time, it wasn’t the biggest contributor: “Evidence is clearer that retail theft increased due to pandemic responses by the criminal justice system, and the increases were of greater magnitude than increases due to Prop 47.”
Similarly, a 2018 study in Criminology & Public Policy found “that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately,” but the rates of increase were both minor and had other potential causes.”