Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and then he tried to steal that election himself, and is now trying to steal future elections. US democracy is under threat.
If you are disenfranchising millions of Americans to stop a few dozen potential illegal voters, then your goals are to make it harder to vote, rather than to secure the election, unless you are just ignorant of the facts.
Kansas tried a documentary proof of citizenship law in 2011 and it blocked 31,000 citizens from voting–12% of first time registrants.
The founders intentionally did not give the president the power to regulate elections because they feared something like a king or a dictator. Yet, Trump is claiming such powers.
“The Department of Homeland Security has hindered internal investigations amid scrutiny for its handling of President Donald Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration, the agency’s official watchdog warned in a letter to Congress.
DHS has been “systematically obstructing” investigations by withholding records, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said in a letter released Tuesday — hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced withering bipartisan questioning at a Senate hearing.”
“Human soldiers can disobey unconstitutional orders, but “with fully autonomous weapons, we don’t necessarily have those protections,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Ross Douthat in a recent interview. Amodei also worried that AI could help the government track protesters and political opponents and “make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.”
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While not explicitly expressing a desire to use AI for those purposes, the Pentagon has insisted that Anthropic setting any limits on the military’s use will not do. It wants Anthropic to grant the government the right to employ its products for “all lawful use,” according to CNN.
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This refusal hasn’t gone over well with the Trump administration. Hegseth has reportedly demanded that Anthropic remove its restrictions on certain military uses or else face consequences.
These consequences could include the Defense Department ending its business relationship with Anthropic as soon as Friday—which, OK, fine.
While not reassuring that the government won’t respect these limits around robot death machines and mass spying, it’s sadly not surprising. Ending its relationship with Anthropic’s contract in response would be a disappointing but not outrageous or beyond bounds.
What pushes this above and beyond normal government villainy are the other potential consequences that Hegseth has been floating, including using the Defense Production Act to compel compliance or declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk”—possibly both. An anonymous senior official reportedly told Axios that severing ties with Anthropic would be “an enormous pain in the ass” for which Anthropic would have to “pay a price.”
Declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk would mean anyone who wants to work with the U.S. military in any capacity must sever ties with the AI company.
“Activating this power would cost Anthropic a lot of business—potentially quite a lot—and give investors huge skepticism about whether the company is worth funding for the next round of scaling,” writes Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. “Capital was a major constraint anyway, but this makes it much harder. This option could be existential for Anthropic.”
Declaring an entity a supply chain risk is usually a move reserved for risky dealings with foreign companies. Deploying this designation against a U.S. company just because its leaders have some morals and some backbone is highly undemocratic—the sort of move one would traditionally expect from the Chinese Communist Party, not a U.S. administration.
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But it gets worse. Hegseth is also threatening to “invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs” and remove all safeguards, per Axios.
So, here we have an AI company trying to act ethically and prevent government abuse of this technology and the government threatening to seize the company’s property and do with it whatever the Pentagon wants. If that’s allowed, it means no limits on what abuses the government can force private companies to participate in.”
““The average person doesn’t appreciate how stunning” it is for a grand jury to outright reject an indictment, as a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. put it to me. “The rules are skewed so heavily in favor of the prosecutor that it’s almost comical. But the public is essentially saying, ‘We do not trust you. We are skeptical of you.’”
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Pirro, like Attorney General Pam Bondi, is willing to use her power to try to intimidate and punish Trump’s political opponents — even if that means degrading herself, the office and DOJ, and wasting taxpayers’ money all at the same time. On top of that, Pirro has managed to antagonize federal judges in the district and racked up a long list of rebukes, which will only make it harder for her and her prosecutors to win in court in the future.
Through it all, Pirro is failing to win the indictments, let alone convictions, that Trump craves. She is stumbling not just by the traditional standards of a U.S. Attorney, but also by the Trumpian version.
The Trump administration’s abuse of the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s antagonists would probably be an even bigger story if they were succeeding instead of flailing. The department’s cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were borderline frivolous on the merits, but they got dismissed after a judge concluded that Lindsay Halligan, who was separately taken to task for serious prosecutorial errors before the Comey grand jury, had been illegally installed as the U.S. Attorney overseeing the cases in the Eastern District of Virginia. The DOJ tried to charge James on two more occasions, but grand jurors rejected those efforts.
Of course, Pirro had joined the pile-on against Trump’s adversaries even before last week’s case. In January, she opened a criminal investigation into whether Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell lied to Congress about renovations at the Fed’s D.C. headquarters. The investigation was roundly criticized as a pretextual effort to force Powell to lower interest rates, as Trump has been insisting. It is also blowing up in Trump’s face, with GOP Sen. Thom Tillis vowing to block Kevin Warsh’s nomination as Fed chair until the Powell investigation is resolved.
Pirro’s effort to indict the six Democratic members of Congress marks her highest profile flop to date, but it is far from the first. Remember Sandwich Guy? Pirro made a video mocking the man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent, then failed to secure felony charges from a grand jury before losing the fallback misdemeanor case altogether.”
Despite some changes, the Venezuelan regime is still the same authoritarian regime, just with a new dictator who is, at least for now, trying to give the Americans what they want.
“They batter bodies with rubber bullets and sear eyes with pepper spray. They lob tear gas and explosive flash-bangs at chanting crowds. They smash car windows. They shove people to the ground. They ram vehicles and point their guns.
Federal officers carrying out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in cities across the country have shot 13 people with guns. But far more often, they have used harsh tactics to scare or repel those they see as getting in their way. The officers, masked and kitted out with military-grade armor and rifles, have faced down peaceful protesters and people who have threatened, obstructed or attacked them, with methods that are less deadly than guns but still inflict grievous injuries. Hundreds have been hurt, and courts in at least four states have found that officers used force inappropriately and indiscriminately.
NBC News reviewed dozens of incidents since the spring and found that Department of Homeland Security officers have repeatedly deployed “less lethal” weapons in ways that appear to violate their own policies or general policing guidelines, unless they believed their lives were in danger. The review was based on interviews with lawyers, experts and protesters who were injured as well as witness statements, documents from criminal and civil cases and videos taken at protests.”
“It’s highly unusual for federal judges to issue such direct accusations and contempt threats against the government. However, an increasing number of judges have become exasperated by the Trump administration’s noncompliance with their orders in immigration cases.
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The Trump administration insists that it can arrest anyone present in the country unlawfully without a warrant and hold them in mandatory detention without a bond hearing. This interpretation of the law abandons a precedent that has been in place for nearly 30 years.
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judges find themselves batting down the same specious arguments from the Justice Department over and over.”
Trump is personally involving himself in the investigation of the 2020 election. The investigation itself seems driven by Trump’s false beliefs, or lies, that the election was stolen from him. This could be an attempt to undemocratically steal the 2026 midterms, ironically using false claims of election malfeasance to commit election malfeasance.
“The agent’s resignation comes as the agency has undergone another purge of seasoned FBI agents across several states, multiple sources familiar with the departures told CNN. Some of the people who are being pushed out were confronted after the bureau conducted a review of the FBI’s internal messaging system and discovered instances when they made negative comments about President Donald Trump, according to the people familiar.
Some of those comments go as far back as a decade, the sources said.”