Saturday Report 8/23/25 — Do we have a retribution Presidency? Who is next?

The Best of the Rest of the News

FYI, news and internet gods willing, I’ll be on Ali Velshi’s Sunday program on MSNBC at 8 am PT, 11 am ET, along with my friend and colleague Dean Obeidallah, to discuss how to reform and refocus the Democratic Party. Tune in and let me know what you think!

— Last weekend, John Bolton told ABC News that he thought Trump’s FBI would be coming after him; yesterday, they did. And JD Vance says this is just the beginning of Bolton’s punishment for his perceived disloyalty. “Before you go, Jonathan Karl said to Bolton, “we’re about to talk about Trump’s retribution campaign we’re seeing at the FBI and the Justice Department. You’re obviously on his enemies list. At least Kash Patel’s enemies list. Are you worried that they’re going to come after you in some way? I mean, he’s hinted at it before.” Bolton’s answer was, in part, “I think it is a retribution presidency.” I’ve only rarely agreed with Ambassador Bolton; he’s been a guest on my program multiple times over the years and we’ve had some pretty lively debates. But I never doubted his intellect or his commitment to his own version of neoconservative principles; Bolton is a man who lived his beliefs, which is why he turned against Trump when he realized the former reality TV show star and convicted felon was dead-set on turning America into a fascist state (my words, not his). Bolton now joins Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, Adam Schiff, James Clapper, Fed Governor Lisa Cook, and NY AG Letitia James on Trump’s target list, all having to hire expensive attorneys to defend themselves against lawfare — the use of the law as a political weapon — for having exposed or resisted Trump. This is just another stage in the Putin-ization of America, as Trump tries to remake our nation in Russia’s image with attacks on the press, the judiciary, attorneys, legislators, scientists, museums, schools, colleges, and any other institutions or individuals he sees as a possible impediment to his goal of complete domination of America. After all, if Democrats take back the House next year there will be investigations into his multiple crimes and breaches of norms and protocols, and that’s something he’s absolutely unwilling to allow to happen. George Conway yesterday noted on BlueSky that Trump may be anticipating people pouring out into the streets should he try to steal the ‘26 elections and that’s why he’s militarizing the nation’s capital city right now.

— Now we see why Trump’s people moved Ghislaine Maxwell from a high-security women’s prison to the nation’s cushiest country club facility where she can leave during the day to take a job. The House Oversight Committee had subpoenaed the Epstein files from the Department of Justice, which has literally millions of pages and gigabytes of Epstein’s material. Instead of useful information, though, the Committee was yesterday given tapes and transcripts of Trump’s criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, throwing softball questions at Maxwell as she insisted that she’d never seen Trump do anything wrong or even getting a massage. This is the woman who’s in prison for lying under oath to both the FBI and a court of law, and now the DOJ is holding her words up as proof that Trump is pure as the driven snow and had nothing to do with that awful Epstein guy, who she wouldn’t even say was “friends” with Trump. Quid, meet quo.

— Tina Peters was a Colorado county clerk who criminally helped Trump partisans hack into voting machines in an attempt to prove he won the 2020 election and is now serving 8 1/2 years in prison for her multiple crimes involving that. So, of course, Trump is now threatening “I will take harsh measures!!!” if she’s not released from prison. Even “law and order” Nixon must be rolling over in his grave at this mind-boggling abuse of power and embrace of lawlessness.

— Trump goes after the only Black woman on the Fed’s Board of Governors. “Mortgage fraud” seems to be Trump’s weapon of choice these days; he’s investigating or charging Senator Adam Schiff and NY AG Letitia James for it, and now he’s going after Lisa Cook, the only Black woman on the Fed’s Board, for the paperwork-error-based crime. He says he’ll fire her if she doesn’t resign, but she’s standing up to him, saying she refuses to be “bullied.” Nonetheless, he’s forcing her to spend a small fortune on expensive lawyers and if they can prove that she checked the wrong box on a mortgage application she may well be looking at prison time. The simple reality, as we’re seeing with the Bolton case as well, is that if the FBI or any other serious police agency decides to come after you they’ll always be able to find something to charge you with. Republicans have been squealing about “lawfare” and abuse of police and legal processes ever since Merrick Garland, after a two-year delay, began a serious effort to hold Trump to account for his many crimes. Turns out they were just telling us what they planned if Trump got back into power, and now he’s doing it with a vengeance.

— The Republican war against science hits the Supreme Court and even John Roberts gagged on it. Trump’s administration was blocking $783 million in research grants via the National Institutes of Health, investigations that could save millions of lives and develop entirely new ways to treat cancer and other serious illnesses, because, they said, some of that research may benefit racial minorities and was therefore part of a “DEI agenda.” A lower court ruled it was a violation of the Constitution, arguing that when Congress appropriates funds the duty of the president is to, as the Constitution says, “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” meaning that he has to spend the money that Congress appropriated. When it got to the Supreme Court, though, five of the six corrupt Republicans chose to side with Trump, leading John Roberts to join the dissent written by Ketanji Brown Jackson in which she said the Court “lobs this grenade” of a ruling without even looking at the intent of Congress. This is the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history, bar none, and their embrace of Trump’s racist war on DEI is nothing less than shocking.

— Say what?! Trump wants to investigate all 55 million people with visas to make sure none are engaged in “support for terrorism,” which appears to be rightwing code for “critical of Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza and land thefts on the West Bank.” It’ll be a huge job to vet them all, but it’s a safe bet they’ll begin with people from countries that have majority-Black or -Brown populations. Meanwhile, the Pentagon appears to be trying to organize something like Hitler’s old Sturmabteilung or SA, which started out as a volunteer civilian militia that was later integrated into the military to police Germany’s civilian population for dissidents and “outsiders.” The Pentagon is asking civilian federal employees to give up to 180 days each year (with a huge boost in pay) to provide “support” services to ICE and Trump’s mass imprisonment and deportation efforts. How much longer do we have to wait before the mainstream media starts calling out these fascist actions for what they are?

— Is a 100-seat permanent Republican majority Trump’s gerrymandering endgame? You may think such a thing is beyond the pale, but he’s saying it right out loud. In a post on his Nazi-infested social media site, the orange felon wrote that Republicans must put an end to fair districts and mail-in voting, so — like in Hungary and Russia — Republicans have a permanent majority in Congress regardless of how the people vote. Single party rule. “If we do these TWO things,” Trump wrote, “we will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over.” Again, when will our media call this out for what it is?

— A New York appellate court confirms that Trump and his real estate empire committed massive tax and insurance fraud. Trump partisans are bragging that the White House criminal had a “complete victory” in court because the appeals court judges set aside his roughly half-billion-dollar judgement in the case where his company was accused of inflating the values of his properties when insuring or selling them and deflating the values when reporting taxes. But all five of the judges agreed that Trump and his peeps had been-a-criming in a big way: “[We] find that Supreme Court correctly found defendants liable [for fraud]. We agree with Supreme Court that the Attorney General [Letitia James] acted well within her lawful power in bringing this action, and that she vindicated a public interest in doing so.” Is there anything this guy has touched that he hasn’t managed to turn into a grift, a crime, or a strategy to get women into bed? And the nation’s “Christians” love him, giving us an insight into how corrupt the modern evangelical movement has become in the years since Reagan brought them into the GOP.