
Josh Marshall

As you have probably seen, Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced that there’s no there there with the whole Jeff Epstein saga: no list, no hidden group of the world’s most powerful men having sex with minors, no prostitution ring, etc. etc. etc. Of course MAGA has gone into paroxysms with claims that Bondi, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino may be part of the Deep State themselves. I confess to as much schadenfreude as the next red blooded American seeing MAGA eat itself alive over this latest turn of the conspiracy theory. But is it possible that none of this stuff was ever true in the first place or that it’s perhaps been wildly exaggerated?
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This is my official new favorite story ever. It’s from the Journal News, which covers three suburban counties just north of New York City, and it’s about local congressman Mike Lawler (R) and a raucous town hall which I actually covered back in May. It turns out that at that town hall, his deputy district director, Erin Crowley, was simultaneously patrolling the boisterous constituents who had showed up to express their opposition while also apparently egging the anti-Lawler crowd on to disrupt the town hall using a fake identity known as “Jake Thomas.”
The Journal News is careful to note that it is impossible to prove definitively that “Jake Thomas” is Erin Crowley — who is also a county legislator in addition to being Lawler’s staffer. But they’ve got hard proof that “Jake Thomas” used Crowley’s cell phone when “he” joined an anti-Lawler Facebook group and the Signal group it uses and used during the May town hall.
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I wanted to elaborate on some points Theda Skocpol addressed in her reader email this weekend about ICE and the supercharged ICE the new Trump budget law envisions. Some of this may be obvious just seeing what we’ve all seen in recent months. But I wanted to describe some of the exact modalities we’re talking about.
First, a general point about ICE. Long before the current moment and even the controversies of the first Trump term, ICE was generally known as a place made up of people who couldn’t get jobs at the more established and reputable federal policing agencies — so, FBI, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, etc. Because of this, it has a high proportion of people who are there because they want to wear a uniform, knock people around and act tough. That’s an aspect of every policing organization. But more professional organizations do their best to weed those people out on the front end and instill discipline that keeps those impulses in check. There’s much less of that at ICE. So it’s never had a good reputation within federal law enforcement.
Read MoreTPM Reader TS (Harvard sociologist/political scientist Theda Skocpol) and I often compared notes on the news of the day and I am always particularly attentive to her thoughts on state structure and power. So I asked her to write out her comments in response to Josh Kovensky’s piece on the vast expansion of ICE funded in the new budget bill. I really strongly recommend you read this, especially in you’re a government worker or elected official in state or local government.
Read MoreThe Trump monster bill’s huge upward rewarding tax cuts and punitive shrinking of health and food benefits are crucial, but you are right Josh that massive militarization of ICE is the real heart of this law – didn’t J. D. Vance say just that a little while ago?
Late this afternoon, the Social Security Administration sent out an email, seemingly to all recipients, cheering the passage of the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”



AdImpact is the canonical source that many journalists use to track political ad spending, where ads are running, the ability to see the actual ads and so forth. A few times I’ve considering subscribing for TPM during the peak of the big election cycles. (These are very high-dollar price points.) So I’m on their mailing list for the data overviews that are basically teasers for subscribing. I got one of those today and something immediately jumped out at me. The top political advertiser by spend this cycle is the Department of Homeland Security.
Read MoreI continue to get requests for updates about the DOJ-in-Exile project. The update is that while I got a lot of inquiries from people who were interested in being involved and a number of people who were interested in making large (5- or 6-figure contributions), I was not able to find someone or some entity to run it. Or I haven’t yet. And here I mean someone to organize and run it as opposed to do the actual work, which needs to be done at least mostly by people with experience as prosecutors. To be fair, it’s not like I’ve spent all my time on this. I have TPM; I have what I write each day; I have a book project. But a lot of people are scared. Possibly more so than I realized. And leerier as you go forward. But as things have developed over the last couple months I think the whole thing is more important now than I did at the outset. So I will continue to look and consider other possibilities including possibly launching and running it myself, at least at the outset. That’s the update. Remain very open to suggestions. This really needs to happen.
I’ve had several TPM Readers reply to the post below about denaturalization and say it’s actually even worse than I say. Specifically, that we can’t really have any confidence that people who were born citizens won’t face denaturalization too. One reader simply makes the point: why not? What’s the bar that is stopping that? And of course, sure: Anything can in theory happen. And some things that we would have thought were only possible in theory a decade ago are happening routinely now or appear on the horizon. Another reader, more concretely, notes that, while his ancestors have been here for a century, the Chinese Exclusion Act raises the possibility that some of his “natural-born” ancestors may not have been citizens after all and that could be applied against him.
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I want to focus your attention on this new piece by Josh Kovensky on the DOJ appearing to open the door to denaturalizing citizens based on political activity or belief. I doubt I need to convince anyone reading this that this is a bad thing. But I want to underscore what is implicit in what is bad about it but needs to be as front and center as possible. The only cases in which denaturalization should ever be used are in the most extremes cases of egregious acts which, had they been disclosed prior to naturalization, would have barred citizenship in the first place. Even in most of those cases, the downsides usually outweigh the upsides. Because outside of the most extreme and unusual cases denaturalization is a stark threat to the equality of all American citizens.
I was born in the United States. Depending on what I do, the state can send me to war, imprison me, even execute me. But I can never stop being an American citizen unless I affirmatively renounce that citizenship. As long as that threat exists in any meaningful sense, no naturalized citizen is really my equal. Their membership in the club is contingent, contingent on behavior, which is to say not equal at all.
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Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. TPM Executive Editor John Light worked for Bill for a number of years and has written this remembrance of him which I recommend to you. I wanted to share some additional thoughts about Bill and how his life affected my own and the life of this site.
The first thing I want to mention is two documentaries Bill produced in the late 80s. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth is a series of six one-hour interviews with Campbell, who died shortly after the interviews were completed. The second is Amazing Grace, his documentary about the history and life of this song, so embedded into the cultural and spiritual life of the Anglophone world. College is a time of promise, adventure and challenge for many people. And I encountered the first of these at a moment of particular challenge in the summer of 1988. Amazing Grace debuted in 1990. I haven’t watched either in many years, though I own a copy of Amazing Grace. They explore common themes from very different directions. Both showcased Bill’s ability to bring fascinating, human issues to life in ways that are both sophisticated and accessible to a mass audience.
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