Avarice – New Christian Faith, Best SCOTUS JUSTICES Money Has, Bidenomics-Inconvenient Facts, Civility, Principles, Decorum, Deficit, Debt & Other GOP Hits, Dept. of Government INeffiency, Dismantling of Democracy, FEIGNED OUTRAGE VS DIGNITY, GUILTY-12 JURORS, 1 FELON, Hypocrisy’s Finest Hour, Ignorant Voting Consequences, INFLATION WOES, Let Them Eat Cake!, Misplaced Blame Game, Musk’s Wall of Fake Receipts, Political Prostitution, Project 2025, Project 2025 Enabling Lawmaker, PROJECT 2025, ZIKLAG & TREASON, Shock and Awe…, Smirking Mike Johnson, Social Insecurity (GOP’s Lie), State of DISunion Address, SUBSIDIZING THEOCRACY, The Accusatory Perpetrator, The Facts, Please, The REAL Enemy Within…, Trump ’25-Make America Corrupt, Trump Absurdities, TRUMP’S PROJECT2025 DENIAL, Trump’s Rigged Election, Trump’s Third Reich 2.0, Trump/Vance Neo-Nazi Bromance, Unintended Consequences, VOTER APATHY 2024, Voter Motivations, Voters: DUI or Asleep??, What’s One More Felony?, What’ve You Done For Me Lately
How much more stupidity, duplicity, inefficiency, and hypocrisy are Americans, and in particular, MAGA cultists willing to accept and defend before the inevitable collapse of Democracy occurs?
While Elon Musk and Donald Trump pose for a Tesla car sales ad on the Whitehouse Lawn, an act by ANY other President that would have raised the roof with American outrage, the Nation yawned.
While tariffs and unfounded allegations of a lack of attempts at stemming the border crossing of drug trafficking cartels were being spewed like lava from an active volcano, a few whimpers were heard but again, mostly shrugged shoulders and then back to the recliner to watch Seinfeld reruns.
When scattered bits and pieces of news broke of a gay Venezuelan hairdresser LEGALLY in the US under asylum protections who got kidnapped on the street and whisked away through multiple states before being jetted to an El Salvadore prison camp where a Newsweek journalist witnessed him pleading with his kidnappers and guards that he was NOT in any gang, then crying for his mother while they shaved his head bald, stripped him naked publicly like all the rest and placed him in a cell of hundreds of SUSPECTED gang members (suspected ONLY because of their nationality and presence of a tattoo), slapped him and shoved him to his knees, not a single national news agency reported the matter on nationally. Still, when word finally DID get out, there was no outrage… no demand to uphold our Constitution that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, illegal seizure without due process, a trial by jury, and supposedly no way to retrieve him from El Salvadore hands who WE as taxpayers, are paying $6 million a year to house immigration detainees in their prison camps… in fact, not a care in the world from the party leaders that like to wear their supposed Christian values on their sleeves, but couldn’t understand or practice ANY of the definitive tenets of Christ’s teachings.
When Abrego Garcia, a LEGAL El Salvadoran and husband of an American and father of an American 5-year-old (in the US under protected status due to his informing El Salvadoran authorities about gang activities which put him in danger from the very gangs that he provided information on, all the Trump Administration could say is OOPS! They claimed it was an administrative error but also claimed he is not in danger of torture or being killed. Really?? He is in a SUPERMAX prison in a cell of HUNDREDS of what the Trump Administration claims are hardened, violent criminal gang members WHO GARCIA PREVIOUSLY PROVIDED INFORMATION ON! But it’s ok??? They won’t exact retribution because now, all is forgiven? Or is it because Trump and Vance (who claimed to not understand what all the fuss is about regarding the mistaken deportation because we should be focused on the violence gangs commit against Americans) know that they’ve deported harmless people under the guise of being gang members simply because they had tattoos and had a Spanish accent and surname, and THAT is why they claim no harm will come to Garcia? Still, this story WAS carried by national media outlets but barely a word from the GOP and MAGA cultists who incessantly rant about their Constitutional rights being abridged when they are NOT but fail to see an ACTUAL violation of human and Constitutional rights happening directly under their ever-watchful eye.
When DOGE fired Dept. of Agriculture staff without understanding that they were the Nation’s leaders in the fight against the bird flu that had killed humans and killed or caused the need to euthanize millions of chickens causing egg prices to triple, it wasn’t long before they had to try to quickly undo what they had done and rehire those folks. The MAGA response? Crickets.
When DOGE fired the staff for the Dept. of Energy before knowing they had some of the highest security clearances in the country because they oversaw and retrofitted, repaired and maintained our nuclear weapons arsenal, they again had to try to locate and rehire those fired individuals. What was the response from MAGA and republicans in general? Silence! Not a word about how they literally put our nuclear defense capabilities in jeopardy for several days while the “EFFICIENCY experts in DOGE stumbled around like elephants in a chandelier showroom.
When Trump instituted tariffs ON OUR CLOSEST TRADE PARTNERS under bogus claims that the trade agreements favored them and not us, and that the broker of that agreement negotiated the worst deal ever (but forgot to mention, or simply forgot entirely), that the negotiator and signer of that trade agreement was Trump himself in his first term, was there a cacophony of outrage or media attention at the mental capacity of MAGA’s idiot -in-charge? Nope. The best story was how the tariffs might increase costs for consumers. No reference to what happened the last time in history when America went down this same path of isolationism and how it exasperated and prolonged the Great Depression…uh oh…I’m sorry. History is now banned. Scratch that part. I don’t want to be deported for speaking the truth.
So when Trump and his band of morons, including those who are entrusted with this nation’s national security and the safety of our troops abroad in harms way disclosed “attack plans” (Trump Administration’s euphemism for “war plans” as if that somehow made the security breach less damning) on a public texting app called Signal, including the date, time, targets, and types of armament and delivery vehicles for same, while doing so after inadvertently adding the Editor of the Atlantic into the chat group, Trump claimed he had no knowledge of the breach (not surprising and totally believable given his seriously declining mental acuity). What he actually said on the record is: “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?”
But what about the other 17 OTHER Trump appointed people on the illegal public chat platform (illegal because it violates several laws which I will get into later)? People like his National Insecurity Advisor, Michael Waltz (who would later take the blame for inviting Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief for The Atlantic after days of denying any real problem and no Secret info had been exposed), or Marc Rubio, Sec. of Fascist State, or Pete Hegseth, Sec. of Drunken Defense, his Director of (pause for laughter to subside) Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or his VP, JD Vance, or Brian McCormack (representing the National Insecurity Council), or CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, just to name a few!
Well, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had THIS to say to reporters immediately after the announced leak: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again…This is a guy who peddles in garbage…Nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say.”
Whitehouse Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on X (apparently the new official site for Government communication) tried desperately to deflect and use euphemisms in an attempt to downgrade the seriousness of the breach: “Jeffrey Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin. Here are the facts about his latest story: 1. No “war plans” were discussed. 2. No classified material was sent to the thread. 3. The White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible. (Frankly, if their Chief Council advised them that using this messaging app that auto deletes all messages somehow comports with the ”
Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the NSC, confirmed the group text: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
So what’s the big deal?
Well, let’s look to 2015-2016 when Trump, Rubio and Gabbard were on the campaign trail. Rubio and Trump in particular made it a nearly daily claim that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had State Department emails on her personal computer. The fact that her cyber security was better than the Government’s as demonstrated by the number of successful hacks (Clinton’s had ZERO and the US Government has been hit too many times to count), did not make a difference. The message was the same. Private email was very bad and endangered our nation’s security, facts be damned. The fact that several other REPUBLICAN Secretaries of State did the same thing in previous administrations had no impact. After all, this was Hillary and the “Lock her up!” chants flooded the nation’s news cycle for moths before and after the election, not to mention the thousands that flocked to Trump’s rallies and responded to his Hillary email vitriol with that chant.
But from a legal perspective, the Signal chat breach is far more serious than campaign BS. First, there is the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. § 793 – U.S. Code – Unannotated Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure § 793. Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information) which makes it a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison to anyone who handles national security secrets with such “gross negligence” that it allows them to fall into the hands of an unauthorized person. Specifically, the Act states that anyone who causes information “to be removed from its proper place of custody” or allows it “to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” or fails to promptly report any such destruction to his superior officer “Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” While this is NOT likely a charge that would be pursued, it IS a possibility and certainly falls within the language and spirit of the law.
Perhaps more to the point at hand are the government record keeping laws which are a bit more problematic for Trump and his squadron of imbeciles running amok in the halls of Congress and the Whitehouse. The Presidential Records Act (44 U.S.C. ß2201-2209)and the Records Management by Federal Agencies Act (44 U.S.C. , which set rules dictating which records must be preserved and for how long have likely been violated, although there is a 20 day time frame to comply so there are still a few days in which they MIGHT comply, but given the fact that Trump has essentially installed his own automatons in the National Archives so as to obscure any wrongdoing being maintained in the records, and are fast and furious with obliterating any records of his transgressions, I guess there will be no accountability and he is now literally above the law.
Under the Concealment, Removal, and Mutilation of Records law, 18 U.S.C. § 2071,anyone who conceals, removes, or mutilates records “shall be fined, imprisoned not more than three years, or both and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. “The disqualification is not optional. It is mandatory, not discretionary.
Unfortunately, with the Department of Justice owned and operated by Trump and MAGA, the likelihood of ANY charges being levied for this obvious breach in Security and violations of existing laws are as likely as seeing Trump break dancing with Rachel Maddow.
So at least in the short term, what we are witnessing unfold before our eyes is an administration of scofflaws determined to operate outside the law and obscure any wrongdoing by systematically eliminating all records of same simply by deleting them on unsecured messaging apps. Make no mistake, this is NOT accidental. They are setting the app to delete at certain time periods. Some of the recent Signal chat messages were defined by the user to delete after one week (and therefore, already in violation of the laws) while other users set the messages to delete in 4 weeks (leaving them a few more days to comply before being in violation of the law).
Apparently, the US Constitution and laws that MAGA clings to so fervently when it is convenient and fits their narrative, means absolutely nothing to them in reality