Quick Summary

The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted 8-5 along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions related to COVID-19, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights during a hearing.

Chairman Rand Paul directed that the contempt resolution bypass the full Senate and be sent directly to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for possible prosecution.

Here’s what you need to know.

Background (This Isn’t Normal)

Understand what this hearing was actually for. It was not an investigation. It was theater, staged by people who figured out years ago that Dr. Fauci’s name raises money and fires up a base, and who have been promising their audience a prosecution ever since. Senator Paul said out loud in December 2021 that Fauci should serve five years in prison. That was the destination. Everything since has been the drive there.

Now walk back to where this started. In early 2020, a virus was killing Americans and the President of the United States was denying COVID was a serious problem and even telling the country it would vanish like a miracle and you’d be fine.

Dr. Fauci was in that building trying to give people accurate information while Trump insisted there was no problem to solve. Dr. Fauci was one of the most experienced infectious disease officials on the planet, working an emergency in real time, and he was doing it while his own administration undercut him publicly.1

Well, despite Trump’s promises that like a miracle, COVID will disappear, it didn’t. Millions of people around the United States and world died.2

President Biden read the warning signs the same way Dr. Fauci’s lawyers and frankly, the rest of normal Americans did. Trump had spent the 2024 campaign promising his MAGA base retribution against a public enemies list. Republicans in Congress had already fired off criminal referrals aimed at Dr. Fauci and kept floating prison time. Biden understood where this was headed. So in his final hours in office, he signed a preemptive pardon, and he put his reasoning in writing. He said the pardon carried no admission of guilt and no acknowledgment of any wrongdoing. Speaking of Dr. Fauci and several others, Biden said these public servants did not deserve to be targets of unjustified, politically motivated prosecution, the kind built to punish people for doing their jobs through the worst health emergency in a century.

Read the pardon. It’s not a confession. It’s a shield. Biden looked at the target already painted on Dr. Fauci’s back, praised a career spanning decades that helped steer the country through HIV, Ebola, Zika, and Covid, and moved to protect one of his most decorated public servants from people determined to make an example of him.

So with all that context before you, ask yourself what Dr. Fauci gains by misleading America during a time in crisis. Also yourself what Dr. Fauci gains by sitting down and answering questions from a man who has spent five years promising to imprison him, who published his private diary the week before the hearing, and whose party has built a fundraising operation around his face. There is nothing. Not one thing.

Every answer he gives becomes raw material for the perjury charge they have already announced they are hunting for. He knows it. His lawyers know it. Anyone who has practiced law for more than a week knows it. That is not a man hiding something. That is a man who, along with his lawyers, understands exactly what room he is sitting in.

The General Law

Here’s the setting. Dr. Fauci is sitting at a witness table. Across from him is the chairman, Senator Paul, who has spent years telling the public Dr. Fauci belongs in prison, who asked the Attorney General to investigate him, who published Dr. Fauci’s private diary the week before the hearing. Then that chairman starts asking questions under oath.

If the Fifth Amendment does not apply in that room, it does not apply anywhere. This is not a loophole. This is the exact situation the framers had in mind when they wrote it. You do not have to help the government build a case against you, and you especially do not have to help a man who has already announced what the case will be.

The pardon does not change the analysis. It narrows one slice of the danger. It leaves the rest sitting right there. State prosecutors are untouched by it. Lying to Congress is a new crime committed the moment he speaks, and no pardon can forgive something that has not happened yet. The pardon’s own text stops at January 19, 2025, and has a subject-matter limit written into it. And nobody knows if a preemptive pardon this broad even holds up, because no court has ever ruled on one and President Trump himself declared it void in a post.

Any single one of those is enough. He does not need all of them. He needs one.

I. The Privilege Turns on Reasonable Apprehension of Danger, and the Chairman Supplied the Apprehension Himself

The rule comes from a 1951 Supreme Court case, Hoffman v. United States. You can take the Fifth when your answer might become one link in a chain that leads to a prosecution. Not proof of guilt. A link. And here is the part people skip over: the tribunal has to accept the claim unless it is perfectly clear, after looking at every circumstance surrounding the hearing, that the witness is wrong and no answer he gives could possibly hurt him.

Every circumstance. That is what the Court said. So look at the circumstances in this room.

In 2021, Senator Paul falsely accused Dr. Fauci of lying to Congress and asked the Attorney General to investigate whether his testimony violated the federal false-statements law. In December of that year, he said Dr. Fauci should serve five years in prison. In June 2026, after Dr. Fauci declined to appear voluntarily, and I would say he had every reason to decline given that history, Senator Paul subpoenaed him. Days before the hearing, Senator Paul released more than a thousand pages of Dr. Fauci’s private diaries and inaccurately described them as proof of deception (they weren’t, and it wasn’t even close). The Secretary of Health and Human Services then announced that his department had spent eight months searching its own files for evidence to use against Dr. Fauci.

Then listen to the people who would actually bring the charges. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s own criminal defense lawyer, has said publicly that some ongoing federal investigations involve people Trump believes should be investigated, and that steering those matters is within Trump’s rights and duties.

Now put yourself in that chair. You did not volunteer. You were subpoenaed. The man questioning you has promised for five years to imprison you, published your diary, and told the country what he is looking for. In forty years of practice, I have never had a client who would walk into that room and start talking. Not one. Any reasonable person and any competent lawyer recognizes that setup for what it is. You are the lamb, and the slaughter is scheduled for the cameras.

Someone will say that an innocent man has nothing to fear. The Supreme Court answered that in 2001 in Ohio v. Reiner. The Court held that the Fifth Amendment protects the innocent, precisely because innocent people get tangled up in ambiguous circumstances. Circumstances exactly like the ones I just described. Innocence does not weaken this claim. It is the reason the protection exists.

And the privilege applies in a congressional hearing with the same force it has in a courtroom. The Court settled that in 1955 in Quinn v. United States. There are no magic words a witness has to recite. If the committee can reasonably understand that he is invoking the Fifth, the committee has to honor it. Fauci stated his grounds on the record and repeated them every time he was asked.

II. A Pardon is Not Immunity, and Only Immunity Displaces the Privilege

Start with what the Fifth Amendment actually does. It lets you refuse to answer a question when your answer could help get you charged with a crime. The government can strip that right away from you, but only on one condition. It has to hand you something just as strong in return. The Supreme Court laid that down in 1892 in Counselman v. Hitchcock and has never backed off it.

In 1972, in Kastigar v. United States, the Court spelled out the floor. It is called use and derivative use immunity, and it has two parts. Prosecutors cannot use your words against you. And they cannot use anything they found because of your words.

That second half carries as much weight as the first. Suppose you name someone while testifying. Investigators go knock on that person’s door and come back with evidence. That evidence traces straight back to your testimony, so it is off the table too. Without that rule, the government could force you to talk, treat your answers as a treasure map, dig up everything the map points to, and then claim with a straight face that it never used your words at all.

So the deal is simple. If the government wants to make you talk, it has to shut both doors first.

Congress built that promise into an actual procedure, and it is not complicated. It lives in sections 6002 and 6005 of Title 18. Think of it as a short checklist.

The committee votes first, and not by simple majority. Two-thirds of the full committee has to say yes. Then the committee gives the Attorney General at least ten days notice before going to court. That head start exists for a reason: it lets the Justice Department flag evidence it already has, so nobody can argue later that the case was built out of forced testimony. Then the committee asks a federal judge for the order. The Attorney General can delay it up to twenty days, and that is the end of his power. He cannot block it. He has no veto.

Then comes the part almost everyone misses. If the committee checked every box, the judge does not get to decide whether this is a good idea. The statute says the court “shall issue” the order. At that point the judge is confirming the paperwork and signing.

And here is what the witness walks away with. Once he testifies under that order, the burden flips onto the government. If prosecutors ever charge him, they cannot just hold up evidence and call it solid. They have to prove they got it somewhere other than his compelled testimony. That is a heavy load, and it is meant to be.

Senator Paul’s committee skipped every single step. No two-thirds vote. No notice to the Attorney General. No trip to the courthouse. Instead it pointed at a pardon signed by a different president, from a different branch of government, in a previous administration, and treated that piece of paper as if it were the court order the committee never bothered to request.

It is not the same thing, and it is not close. A pardon forgives specific crimes a person may already have committed. That is the whole job. It does not hand the witness a court order he can wave at a prosecutor who shows up with evidence traced back to his testimony. It does nothing about state prosecutors, because a president’s pardon reaches federal crimes only. And it cannot possibly cover words he has not spoken yet, because you cannot forgive something that has not happened.

Hold it up against the 1892 rule. The government takes the Fifth Amendment only by handing over something just as strong. This pardon is not just as strong. You do not need a law degree to see the holes in it.

What the committee wants is the payoff of immunity without any of the work. It wants the witness stripped of his rights, but it will not hold the vote, will not give the notice, will not go to court, and will not accept the burden that comes with a real immunity order.

That trade is not on the menu. The law has never offered it to anyone, and it does not offer it to Senator Paul.

III. The Pardon Power Applies to Federal Offenses and Stops There

The Constitution puts a fence around the pardon power. Article II says the president can pardon “offences against the United States.” That means federal crimes only. The Supreme Court confirmed the limit back in 1866 in Ex parte Garland, and nothing has changed since.

The pardon here uses that exact wording. It grants a full and unconditional pardon “for any offenses against the United States.” So by its own terms, it stops at the federal line. A president cannot wipe out a state crime. Not this president, not any president.

Which puts the ball in the committee’s court. If the committee wants to claim there is no danger left, it has to show that no state anywhere could bring any charge on any theory with time still left on the clock. That is a tall order. And the committee has not even tried to make the showing.

IV. The Pardon Cannot Immunize Testimony the Witness Has Not Yet Given

A pardon looks backward. It cleans up things you already did. But the danger of testifying looks forward. It comes from what you are about to say.

The second Dr. Fauci opens his mouth and offers testimony, he can conceivably commit three brand new federal crimes. Lying under oath is perjury. Making a false statement to Congress is its own separate crime. So is obstructing a congressional proceeding. None of those existed until he starts answering questions.

Congress knew about this gap and wrote it right into the immunity law. Section 6002 says the immunity does not cover perjury, false statements, or refusing to follow the court’s order. So even the full, formal, court-ordered version of protection leaves this door wide open on purpose.

A 1980 case called United States v. Apfelbaum makes it worse. The Court held that a witness with full statutory immunity can still be charged with perjury, and that prosecutors can use his immunized testimony as the evidence against him in that very case. Think about that. The protection Congress designed does not stop this. So a pardon signed in January 2025, covering conduct from before then, does not come anywhere near stopping it.

The pardon proves the point itself. It covers nothing after January 19, 2025. A hearing in 2026 is not close to that window.

And nobody is hiding the plan. Before the hearing even happened, House Oversight Chairman James Comer said publicly that the pardon would not protect Fauci if he lied while testifying. That is the committee telling the witness in advance how it intends to prosecute him.

Now consider what he was walking into. He was being asked about events from six years ago, across thousands of documents, after already testifying to Congress more than 250 times, with his own private diary published by the chairman and read back at him. Anyone answering hundreds of questions under those conditions will eventually say something that does not perfectly match a document or an old transcript. In that room, a mismatch is not an honest memory slip. It is a felony referral.

Go back to the Hoffman test. It asks whether a truthful answer could become one link in a chain leading to prosecution. Here you do not even need a chain. The answer itself is the crime they are hunting for.

This point wins on its own. You do not have to argue about how broad the pardon is, whether it is valid, or whether he accepted it. None of that matters to this argument.

V. The Pardon Has Limits

The committee talks about this pardon like it is a blanket that covers everything. Read the actual document and it looks more like a tarp with the edges cut off.

The pardon has two limits built into it. First, a time limit. It covers a specific window that ends on January 19, 2025. Second, a subject limit. It only covers conduct connected to three specific jobs: his work running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his work on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and COVID-19 Response Team, and his work as the president’s Chief Medical Advisor.

So two gaps open up right away. Anything he did outside that time window is not covered. Anything he did outside those three roles is not covered. The committee asked him about far more than what fits inside those lines, and it has never once pointed at a specific question and said “this one falls inside the pardon.”

There is another problem sitting on top of all this. Nobody knows for certain that this pardon works. No court has ever ruled on whether a pardon like this one, handed out before anyone was charged with anything, is valid or how far it stretches. In March 2025 the President publicly announced that these pardons were void. Several state attorneys general have questioned them too.

Now let’s be honest about Trump’s reason, because it is weak. He claimed the pardons were signed by autopen, which is a machine that reproduces a signature. Presidents have used the modern autopen for roughly 75 years, and a 2005 Justice Department opinion concluded that signing pardons that way is perfectly legal. Just like the total and complete failure of Trump’s claim that the Lincoln Memorial reflection pool was vandalized, his autopen claim fails too.

But proving all of this means Dr. Fauci would have to go to court and win a brand new legal question, against the same government that is questioning him, just to get the protection the committee insists he already has. That is not protection. That is guaranteed time, effort, legal fees and expenses that he should never have to experience in the first place.

VI. Showing Up Is Not Contempt

The contempt law covers two different things. One is refusing to show up. The other is showing up and then refusing to answer. Fauci showed up. He appeared under subpoena, sat down, took the oath, and invoked a right the Constitution hands to every single person in this country. That is not the same thing as stonewalling, and the law has never treated it as the same thing. Refusing to answer because you have a genuine constitutional right to refuse is not a crime. It is the Constitution working exactly the way it was built to work.

The Justice Department has already reached this conclusion once, in writing, on almost identical facts. In April 2015, U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen looked at the House’s contempt referral of IRS official Lois Lerner. She had said she did nothing wrong, then took the Fifth, and the House claimed she gave up her rights by speaking at all. Machen disagreed. He wrote that the Fifth Amendment would give her an absolute defense, and he refused to bring the case to a grand jury.

I believe Dr. Fauci should file that letter with the Justice Department and ask for the same answer, because the facts here are not close, they are nearly the same. On top of that, the government would have to prove the questions actually served real lawmaking work rather than a prosecution Senator Paul has been promising publicly since 2021, which is a separate requirement the Supreme Court laid down back in 1929 and one this record does not support.

There is one more point Fauci should lead with every time someone brings up Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro, because those two names are going to come up constantly. Bannon and Navarro both claimed executive privilege. That privilege does not belong to them. It belongs to the President, and neither man could prove the President ever invoked it. That is why they lost. Fauci claimed the Fifth Amendment, which is his own personal right. He does not need anyone’s permission to use it, he does not have to prove what any president was thinking, and no court has ever required him to. The comparison the committee wants to draw falls apart the moment you look at whose right was actually being asserted.

VII. The Referral is Procedurally Vulnerable

The committee passed a resolution telling the President of the Senate to take its report and hand it to the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., so prosecutors can act on it. There is normally a step in between. The full Senate votes first. Senator Paul announced he is skipping that step and sending the referral straight to the Justice Department.

I want to be straight with you about the law here, because I think overselling it does the argument no favors. The statute does not say in plain words that the full Senate has to vote. The handful of old court decisions touching the question point in different directions, and a 1966 D.C. Circuit case suggests the officer doing the certifying has some discretion. Nobody can honestly claim a court has struck down a committee-only referral, because as far as I can tell, no court has ruled on it. What I can tell you is that Congress’s own nonpartisan research arm looked at this and concluded that the practice has always been full-Senate approval.

And the practice is not a technicality. It is the whole design. Committee votes, then the chamber votes, then the referral goes out. That sequence exists because a referral speaks for the United States Senate, not for one senator with a grudge and a gavel. When the House referred Lois Lerner, it took a full floor vote first. Every modern referral has followed that path.

Here is what makes this one different, and it is the part I keep coming back to. Senator Paul did not skip the Senate vote to save time or because the calendar was crowded. He said out loud that he is skipping it because he would lose it. Sit with that. The chairman of the committee announced, on the record, that the United States Senate would not approve what he is doing, and then he did it anyway. That is not oversight. That is a man who could not get the votes deciding to go around the building.

So when this reaches a courtroom, the first question a judge should ask is not what Fauci said or refused to say. It is whether the government is standing on a referral the Senate never authorized and, by the chairman’s own admission, never would have. A prosecution that begins with a shortcut deserves to be measured by that shortcut. This case did not come through the front door, and everyone involved knows it.

VIII. Congress Possessed Two Lawful Remedies and Used Neither

When a witness like Dr. Fauci takes the Fifth, Congress is not stuck. The Constitution and the statutes give Congress a way through. It grants the witness immunity, a court orders him to testify, and at that point he either answers or he faces a contempt charge that actually means something. That path has existed for decades. Committees have used it. It works.

The Senate has a second tool the House does not even have. It can go to federal court in Washington and ask a judge to enforce its subpoena in a civil case. Now, someone will tell you that route was closed here because the law carves out executive branch officials acting in their official jobs. Read the rest of the sentence. The carve-out has its own exception written right into it: the statute applies when the witness refuses based on a personal privilege rather than a government privilege. The Fifth Amendment is the textbook example of a personal privilege. It belongs to the person, not the agency. So that door was wide open. And it was doubly open, because Fauci retired from government in 2022. He is a private citizen.

The committee walked past both doors. Ask yourself why. Immunity takes a two-thirds vote of the full committee, a trip to a judge, and a decision to value information over a prosecution. Civil enforcement takes a Senate resolution, which is the same floor vote the chairman is dodging. Both routes end with a judge ruling on whether the Fifth Amendment claim is valid. Neither one ends with a criminal referral.

That is the tell, and it is the whole case. A committee that actually wants answers grants immunity or asks a judge to compel testimony. A committee that wants a prosecution refuses to do either, then treats the silence it engineered as a crime. Senator Paul had two lawful ways to get Fauci talking. He chose the one path that guarantees he never hears a word of testimony and gets a criminal referral instead. That was not an oversight. That was the point.

IX. The Contempt Power Does Not Extend To Punishing Constitutional Assertions and Rights

Congress has real investigative power, but it has never been unlimited. The Supreme Court drew the line in 1881 in Kilbourn v. Thompson and drew it again, harder, in 1957 in Watkins v. United States. The power exists to help Congress write laws. That is it. Congress does not get to haul a private citizen in and dig through his life just to embarrass him, and Congress is not a police department. The Court said it plainly in Watkins: there is no general power to pry into someone’s private affairs and force him to talk, and the Bill of Rights does not stop at the hearing room door.

So look at what happened here. A man showed up when he was told to show up, sat down, and used a protection the Bill of Rights guarantees him. And the committee’s response was to move to have him prosecuted for it. That turns the whole thing upside down. The Bill of Rights is supposed to be a shield against the government. It cannot function as a shield if using it is the thing that gets you charged.

The Ranking Member saw exactly where this leads, and he is right. Every future witness is watching. The lesson they take from today is that showing up and asserting your rights gets you a criminal referral. So they will stop showing up. They will fight the subpoena from the start, and when they do, they will point at this vote and say the process is not safe. Senator Paul says he is defending Congress’s power to compel testimony. What he has actually done is give every future witness a reason to run from it.

Conclusion

Dr. Fauci did the right thing when he took the Fifth. Not the convenient thing. The correct thing, and any competent lawyer looking at that record would have told him the same.

Count the reasons, because they stack. State prosecutors are untouched by a federal pardon, and they still have jurisdiction over anything that happened inside their borders. Lying to Congress is a fresh crime committed the moment you speak, and no pardon signed in January 2025 reaches words spoken in 2026. The pardon has an end date and a subject-matter limit written into its own text, which leaves real gaps on both sides.

Nobody knows whether a preemptive pardon this broad even holds up, because no court has ever ruled on one, and the President himself went on the record calling these pardons void. And a pardon does nothing about the evidence prosecutors dig up using your testimony as a roadmap, which is the exact protection the Supreme Court has demanded since 1892 and spelled out again in 1972. On top of all of it, the Hoffman standard says the witness wins unless it is perfectly clear no danger exists. On this record it is not clear. It is not close to clear.

So the Justice Department should decline this referral, and it should say so out loud. It has done exactly that before, in 2015, on facts that are nearly a mirror image. A career prosecutor looked at Lois Lerner, concluded the Fifth Amendment gave her an absolute defense, and refused to take it to a grand jury.

Understand what is riding on this one. If the government prosecutes a man for showing up and using a right printed in the Bill of Rights, then the right is worth nothing and every witness who gets a subpoena after today will know it. They will not appear. They will fight. And they will be right to. Senator Paul is not protecting Congress’s power here. He is spending it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Subscribe/Support/Upgrade to Paid

Some People Are Incorrectly Arguing that Dr. Fauci’s Opening Statement Waived His Rights. They’re Wrong. It Didn’t. Here’s the Law.

For some misguided reason, the other side keeps saying on the news and social media that because Dr. Fauci gave an opening statement, he gave up his Fifth Amendment Right. Expect to hear it a lot. It’s the same bad argument the House ran against Lois Lerner, and it tied that case up for two years before it lost.

Here is why it fails, and the reason is more specific than people realize. The rule comes from a 1951 case called Rogers v. United States. A woman testified that she had been the treasurer of a local Communist Party chapter and that she had handed the group’s records over to someone else. Then she refused to name that person. The Court said she could not do that. Once she admitted holding the records and passing them along, the name was just a detail of a story she had already told. She had already given away the incriminating part. Refusing to fill in the last blank did not protect her from anything, because the danger was already on the table in her own words.

That is the test. You lose the privilege when you volunteer a fact that actually puts you at risk, and then try to stop short of finishing it. You do not lose it by talking.

Now look at what Dr. Fauci actually said. He noted he had testified before Congress more than 250 times over his career. He said he respects the legislative branch. He described the chairman’s public threats to put him behind bars, the criminal referrals, the release of his private diary. Then he said he was invoking the Fifth on his attorneys’ advice.

Read that list again and find the incriminating fact. There is not one. He did not admit to a single act, a single decision, a single conversation. He described how he got to that chair and what he thought about, Senator Paul, the man who put him there. None of that hands prosecutors anything, and none of it opens a door he then refused to walk through. There is no story half-told here, because he never started telling one.

The Justice Department worked through this exact structure with Lerner. She said she had done nothing wrong, then invoked her Fifth Amendment Right. The House called it a waiver. A career prosecutor read Rogers, concluded that general statements are not disclosures of incriminating facts, and found no waiver at all. Same analysis, same answer, and this record is even cleaner than hers.

Lawrence O’Donnell’s shared an excellent presentation about who Dr. Anthony Fauci is and why he invoked his Fifth Amendment right. If you’re interested in learning the facts, then this is a “must watch” video:

Quick Summary

Minutes ago the Federal Communications Commission voted to scrap the rule that stops any single broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of American homes. It’s a big deal.

The Trump administration holds the approval switch on every merger, license, and lawsuit these media companies need to survive, and it has not been shy about reaching for it. ABC paid $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million and got its merger cleared three weeks later, and the FCC waived a congressional ownership cap so one company could take 265 local stations, with a vote today to erase that cap for good. What gets said in the private calls and the closed-door meetings is not on the public record, and nobody involved is going to volunteer it. What is on the record is the pattern, and the pattern is consistent: pressure applied, coverage adjusted, deal approved.

A CEO with a merger pending and a presidential lawsuit on the calendar knows exactly what is expected. So the country hears about socialism and communism while the actual numbers go unreported: two-thirds of Republican voters back federal child care funding, health care costs now outrank every other economic worry, and families are absorbing tariffs the Supreme Court already ruled unlawful. Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House, so that record belongs to them, and it reaches you only if you go find it yourself before November 3.

The Rules Just Changed

Today, August 6, the Federal Communications Commission voted to scrap the rule that stops any single broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of American homes and replace it with case-by-case review by the chairman. Congress wrote that number into federal law in 2004, on purpose, after the FCC tried to raise it to 45% and got overruled.

This is despite the fact that right now, more than 1,200 television stations, 855 radio stations, thousands of syndicated affiliates, the highest rated cable news network in America, and the largest conservative podcasting machine in the country are concentrated in the hands of a tight circle of corporate right wing Republican players.1

Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner, called it an “unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, who is no liberal, said the plan violates federal law and objected that Carr will now decide which groups get to exceed the limit.

I’m sharing today’s post with you because the new rule just passed a few minutes ago.

You need to know that when you remove that cap, you give these TV companies the green light to play a bigger game and stop leaving money on the table. By snapping up more local stations across the country, they instantly gain massive leverage to demand higher fees from cable and satellite companies, stand toe-to-toe with national networks to keep more of their profits, and pitch huge, multi-market ad packages that compete with giants like Google and Meta. Add in the fact that scaling up lets them eliminate duplicate overhead and share content across hundreds of markets, and suddenly they aren’t just expanding their reach, they are fundamentally boosting their bottom line.

Lifting the ownership cap also enables large, conservative-leaning media groups favored by this administration (and its regulatory oversight) to acquire stations in major new markets, allowing them to replace traditional local reporting with centralized, nationally right-wing slanted political commentary. Furthermore, shifting to a subjective, case-by-case review process gives right-wing MAGA political appointees regulatory leverage to favor ideologically aligned media conglomerates over independent voices.

The Leverage Machine

Right now, the federal government through the Trump administration controls the approval switch on the deals these companies need, and it has made the price of approval visible to every executive watching.

Since December 2024, two networks have paid a combined $31 million to settle the president’s personal lawsuits, one of them three weeks before the FCC cleared its merger, and a late-night host was pulled off the air within hours of the FCC chairman telling broadcasters they could do it the easy way or the hard way. The agency then waived a congressional ownership cap so one company could take 265 local stations, cleared a $111 billion deal that carries CNN with it, and opened a license review of every ABC station after Disney stopped cooperating. Federal judges have since frozen both mergers at the request of attorneys general, while the president continues to sue the Times, the Journal, and the BBC for $35 billion combined without ever having won such a case.2

Now here’s the reality. Let’s say you run one of these media companies with a merger pending, a license renewal docket open, and a personal lawsuit from the president on your calendar. You owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders. A transaction worth tens of billions turns on one signature from a regulator in the Trump administration. You do not need an instruction to take a certain action about your programming and what’s reported. You need an incentive, and you have several.

That is how a news story gets softened and managed. Segments get shelved. Coverage of a Democratic candidate becomes a debate about socialism instead of a debate about rent, the Republican record since Trump’s second term, and the Iran war. Carr said it plainly on Fox News, describing seismic changes across the media landscape and tracing them to President Trump.

Read more

You feel it before you can put it into words. It’s like sensing a storm coming when the sky still looks clear. It’s like feeling bad news in your gut before it even shows up. That feeling is what brought you to this platform. That feeling is why you’re here, writing and posting and saying things out loud when it would be a lot easier to stay quiet.

So let me tell you what this is really about.

We’re here because we’re fighting back. We keep our heads clear and our conscience awake. We don’t let it turn into anger or waste it yelling into thin air. We use that clear thinking to do everything we can to stop him from grabbing more power. And when that isn’t enough, we keep standing against everything he stands for.

We don’t break, and we don’t give up. We won’t twist our values around just to make room for stuff that’s wrong, even when the people around us do.

We won’t act like any of this is okay.

You can’t wake up one day and pretend that being cruel is just part of someone’s personality. You can’t pretend that honesty is up for grabs the second there’s power to gain. You can’t treat lying, bigotry, and the slow tearing down of our democracy like they’re things we should put up with.

We don’t stand behind him. He doesn’t speak for us. He doesn’t deserve the job he keeps grabbing and using for himself. And yes, we’re sad about it. We’re sad about what he’s doing to this country. We’re sad watching people we used to respect make excuses and fall in line.

But being sad isn’t enough. So we push back. And we keep pushing back.

We’re against all of it. The way he puts women down. The way he blames people who are already struggling. The way he can’t stand anyone who challenges him. The way he goes after honesty and fairness. And it’s not just his terrible policies or the awful things he says. It’s the way he twists the truth on purpose.

We’re against the way he shuts down anyone who disagrees and the way he ignores the law. We’re against the way he attacks the whole idea that facts still matter.

When his worst stuff becomes impossible to ignore, we don’t look away. He stirred up violence against his own country. He tried to overturn an election he lost. He buddies up to dictators and cheers on the bad guys out in the open. We call all of it out. We don’t go quiet just to make our own lives easier. We don’t chalk it up to politics. We don’t trade what we believe for a little comfort.

Plenty of people do. Some are just worn out. Some are scared. Some have talked themselves into thinking it won’t make a difference. Some will tell you it’s complicated. It isn’t.

When survivors speak up about what he’s done, we believe them. When he makes fun of people who can’t fight back, it makes us sick. When he splits families apart and uses kids as bargaining chips, we’re furious. When he gives cover to extremists, we say so plainly. When his lies spread fast, we refuse to help them along.

You’ve heard that history belongs to the winners. That’s not the whole story. The rest of it belongs to the people who won’t let it get rewritten. That’s the job you sign up for every time you hit publish here. You won’t let the past get cleaned up and softened. You won’t smooth out the ugly parts so they go down easier. You know where you stand, and you’re standing there.

Someday someone reading this will be right where you are now, stuck between what’s easy and what’s right. Give them something to hold onto. Show them you didn’t cave. You didn’t quit. You didn’t make excuses for stuff that never should’ve been excused.

That’s why we’re here. That’s why we keep supporting each other and keep writing.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Special Discount Ends today at 5 PM PT

Lock in your annual Uncensored Objection subscription today and you pay $49 instead of $70. That’s $21 off, a full 30%, and it holds until 5 pm PT today, Wednesday. After that the price goes back to $70.

For $49 you get every post, comment thread, archive, and live video. You get around-the-clock access to Sidebar AI to ask questions about my posts. And the moment you join, my 21-chapter, 251-page book “Privacy in America” unlocks free (PDF version). The book alone sells for $24.99, so the entire year of everything else costs you barely more than the book by itself.

Annual is already 17% cheaper than paying monthly. Today you stack another 30% in savings on top.

30% Discount Until 5 PM Today

The Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act would empower ordinary citizens and state attorneys general to sue in the name of the United States to recover funds obtained through corruption by covered officials, including the President and Vice President. It was introduced July 30.

Stop for a second and think about the last time you felt powerless watching someone in power get away with something. If you’re like me, this thought happens daily and it usually involves Donald Trump and others in his administration wasting our tax dollars.

That feeling has a fix now. On July 30, 2026, Senator Alex Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act, landmark new legislation in the wake of the unprecedented corruption of the second Trump Administration. And buried inside the legalese is something that changes the game for regular people like you.1

If passed, you can finally sue. And you can do it on behalf of the entire country.

Here’s what that means. The bill would establish a private right of action for the public and state Attorneys General to sue for recoveries and forfeitures from certain federal officials, including the President and Vice President. The idea is to recover money belong to Americans that’s been taken by corruption.

This isn’t a committee. It’s not a task force that meets behind closed doors. This gives you the right. It gives a state attorney general the right to stand up in court to take back stolen public money.

This isn’t a wild new idea pulled out of thin air. The bill creates a private right of action that mirrors the False Claims Act, a federal law that prevents companies and individuals from making illegal financial claims against the government.

The False Claims Act has worked since the Civil War. It lets ordinary people file suit in the name of the United States and rewards them for recovering public funds. This legislation takes that proven tool and points it straight at the highest offices in the land. It empowers American citizens and attorneys general to sue in the name of the United States to recover money obtained through corruption by presidents, senior officials, key campaign figures and major government contractors.

And before you assume this opens the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits, the sponsors already closed that door. Schumer built in provisions that give priority to state attorneys general and to larger, more severe cases of corruption to ensure that frivolous suits don’t get in the way of justice. I’ve been litigating cases for four decades and took the time to read the proposed bill. It’s good and with a few minor changes, I believe it would finally give the average American the ability to hold wrongdoers in Washington DC accountable.

Now here’s where most reform bills fall apart. They create a watchdog, and then the person being watched simply defunds it, fires its leaders, or starves it into silence. The people who wrote this bill saw that coming.

So they built armor around it.

The Bureau would be led by a seven-member, Senate-confirmed board with fixed terms, strict independence protections and partisan-balance requirements. No party gets to stack it. The board would be capped at three members from each party, with the seventh being nonpartisan.

Then comes the funding armor. The bill would create the Freedom From Influence Fund as a dedicated, self-financing source of revenue, preventing a president from using the budget process to starve the Bureau into submission. It funds itself, similar to the Federal Reserve. A president cannot cut off its oxygen. And if one tries to disable it by leaving seats empty, a special three-judge division of the DC Circuit is empowered to appoint temporary board members, so the bureau never loses its quorum.

That is what accountability with teeth looks like.

The bill also cleans up the mess we already have. Right now, oversight is scattered across agencies that trip over each other. This legislation would consolidate the Federal Election Commission, Office of Government Ethics and Office of Special Counsel within the new Bureau. One roof. One mission. Sweeping investigative, subpoena, and enforcement power aimed at executive branch self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and the kind of crypto and foreign-money entanglements that have dominated headlines.

The public is on board with this. A Brennan Center for Justice poll earlier this year found that 92% of all voters, including Republicans, Democrats and independents, believe corruption is a problem in government and politics. And 81% of voters support the creation of a new federal ethics enforcer. This is nearly everyone.

With Republicans holding the Senate majority, the Act has little realistic chance of reaching the floor this Congress. Schumer said it plainly: “I’m not going to pretend this legislation’s a panacea. It’s not. But it’s a big, important first step.” The sponsors have framed it as groundwork for future oversight, and it will be part of the Democrats’ agenda when they reclaim the majority after the midterms.

Learn what this bill does. Read and talk about it (the link is below). Call the people who represent you and tell them where you stand. Corruption thrives on your silence and your assumption that nothing can change. This bill is proof that it can.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

$70 to $49. Today Only.

Want to know what’s not corrupt? It’s today’s deal, and here’s why it’s worth far more than what I’m asking.

Lock in your annual Uncensored Objection subscription today and you pay $49 instead of $70. That’s $21 off, a full 30%, and it holds until 5 pm PT today, Wednesday. After that the price goes back to $70.

For $49 you get every post, comment thread, archive, and live video. You get around-the-clock access to Sidebar AI to ask questions about my posts. And the moment you join, my 21-chapter, 251-page book “Privacy in America” unlocks free (PDF version). The book alone sells for $24.99, so the entire year of everything else costs you barely more than the book by itself.

Annual is already 17% cheaper than paying monthly. Today you stack another 30% on top. This is the best price this will ever carry.

Claim your 30% discount before 5 pm PT today.

Get 30% Off — $49/year

Picture a courtroom in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. A sitting congressman sits at the table, watching his former wife, Emily Moreno, across the room. His own attorney, Larry Zukerman, stands to address the judge. And in a sworn filing days later, Emily swears the room heard Zukerman say the quiet part about his own client out loud. Max Miller “just can’t control himself.”

Read those words again. His own lawyer said them, by Emily’s sworn account. Not a reporter. Not an opponent running against him. The man hired to defend him, describing the person paying his bills.

What the record shows

Emily Moreno told police her husband held a gun to her head. She said he threw hot water on her on the morning she planned to leave. She said their two year old came to her carrying the words “Daddy kill you.” Their little girl turned up with a fractured collarbone and a bruise a police report described as shaped like a handprint.

Then Miller posted a pile of documents online to clear his name, and buried in the pile sat a photo of his own daughter so disturbing her mother’s lawyer called the image possible child sexual abuse material and demanded answers. The House Ethics Committee now says it is reviewing whether Miller committed domestic abuse and used illegal drugs.

Today Miller was interviewed by Jake Tapper:

This is the record. And this is the man expecting to be voted back to Congress.

Emily Moreno’s father is Bernie Moreno, a sitting Republican senator from Ohio. On Tuesday he broke his silence to call his former son-in-law a danger who needs serious psychological help and belongs nowhere near the House of Representatives.

Almost every Republican in Congress is looking the other way.

Here’s my take.

I believe the victims. I’ve handled too many abuse cases over the years.

I believe that guys like Miller belong in jail, not in Congress. And while we’re here, that goes for Trump too, but that’s another post for another time.

When a Republican senator says a Republican congressman should not hold office, and the party looks away, you are watching something rot in real time. Asked on Sunday whether Miller should resign, Donald Trump told reporters…

Read more

This article is commentary on matters of public concern. It is not legal advice. Consult licensed counsel about specific situations.

Today’s Vote

Today’s Senate Judiciary Committee vote advancing Todd Blanche was not the finish line, it was the handoff. That vote advanced Todd Blanche and handed his nomination to the next stage.

Here is what happens now.

Once the committee formally reports the nomination, it goes onto the Senate’s Executive Calendar. At that point the full Senate can vote on it. Senate leadership controls the timing. Current reporting says a vote could come later this week, and no date is guaranteed.

Watch the procedure, because that is where people get tripped up. If Democrats withhold unanimous consent, Republicans may need to file cloture and work through the Senate’s procedural clock. Understand what that clock actually requires. Ending debate on this nomination takes a simple majority. Confirming him takes a simple majority. Sixty votes never enter the picture.

Now look at the count. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis held out, and both now support him. That puts confirmation on track. Nothing becomes final until the full Senate votes.

Confirmation still leaves two steps. The president must formally appoint him, and that usually means signing his commission. Blanche must then take the oath. Only after that does he hold the permanent office.

Here is your bottom line. The committee hurdle is behind him. The full Senate comes next. This process wraps up in days or weeks rather than months, unless Senate leadership sits on the vote or Republican support shifts.

That is the public record.

What follows is a trial lawyer’s analysis of what all of this actually means inside a courtroom and where it goes from here. It’s more than 35 pages long. I have not seen a more detailed or exhaustive overview of this situation anywhere, and it explains exactly why Blanche and Trump will keep pushing the anti-weaponization fund and the Trump related tax immunity. It also shows you and every other American why you need to be concerned.

Paid subscribers, keep reading.

Read more

In a July 31, 2026 motion to dismiss filed in federal court in Miami, Capital One told a judge it closed more than 300 Trump-affiliated accounts in 2021 “for anti-money laundering (’AML’) reasons,” after “months of analysis and a careful review” by its AML team. Reuters called it the first time a bank has formally tied money-laundering concerns to President Donald Trump’s family business.

The disclosure surfaced only because the Trump Organization sued. Capital One says federal bank-secrecy law would otherwise have barred it from revealing those findings, and that the reason went public only because the plaintiffs chose to litigate. No leak. No whistleblower. The Trump family and businesses pulled the truth out themselves with this lawsuit, and now they own it.

Key Findings

Late on Friday, July 31, 2026, Capital One filed a 23-page motion to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint in The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust v. Capital One, N.A., No. 1:25-cv-21596 (RKA), in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, before Judge Roy K. Altman. The pivotal passage:

”the plaintiffs’ own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (’AML’) reasons,” and “the closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

The review ran through Capital One’s financial-crimes team, which the bank describes as staffed by employees with “decades of law enforcement experience.” The plaintiffs, it argues, “cannot meaningfully criticize the robust process” that team followed, because “the transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance.”

Capital One says it had no duty to explain the closures, and that federal law would have forbidden it anyway. Under the Bank Secrecy Act’s anti-”tipping-off” rule (31 U.S.C. § 5318(g)(2)) and the SAR-confidentiality regulations, a bank generally cannot reveal that it flagged a customer as suspicious. That is why closure letters give no reason. Capital One says it never publicized the termination, gave the plaintiffs months and multiple extensions to find new banking, and disclosed the AML rationale only because they were sued.

Read more

On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed he rescinded the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund. He rescinded nothing. Here is what actually happened, and every document is linked at the end.

Here is what Blanche posted:

He is doing this to win the confirmation votes of Republican Senators, Thom Tillis and John Cornyn on Tuesday.

Four Big Problems

Problem #1: Blanche cannot unilaterally modify the Anti-Weaponization Fund settlement agreement on his own. Modification requires the signature of every party to the agreement.

The parties are the plaintiffs, President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, LLC, and the defendants, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Modification requires all parties approval and written agreement. As things now stand, any and all parties to the original settlement agreement can seek injunctive relief and/or sue for specific performance of the agreement.

Problem #2: Nothing in Blanche’s representations stops the Anti-Weaponization Fund fund from being re-established in the future.

Problem #3: United States District Judge Kathleen Williams stated that the lawsuit against the IRS was brought in “bad faith” for an “improper purpose”—specifically, to manipulate the judicial process and manufacture false legal legitimacy for a collusive settlement. If this is true, then the original settlement agreement is void, any tax immunity flowing from it is void, and Blanche participated in improper conduct. Trump also appealed Judge Williams order. See my post below covering the 56-page ruling.

Problem #4: Putting aside this settlement, Blanche’s mishandling of the Epstein files should disqualify him from ever being confirmed. Full stop.

I have depositions all day and need to run. I’ll jump back on later with more as this story develops.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Subscribe/Support/Upgrade

Original lawsuit by Trump, et al. against the IRS, et al (dated January 29, 2026)

Original settlement agreement (dated May 18, 2026)

Blanche tax immunity document (dated May 19, 2026)

My Related Post:

BREAKING NEWS: This $1.7 Billion Trump Settlement Is the Most Corrupt Thing I Have Seen in Forty Years of Practicing Law

Trump’s $1.776 Billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” Breaks Federal Law Before a Single Claim Gets Paid

I Read All 56 Pages of the Trump IRS Ruling. It’s a $1.776 Billion Fraud on the Court, and on Every American Taxpayer.

And my personal favorite (if for no other reason, the picture), Tony Soprano Called — He Wants His $1.776 Billion Shakedown Back

“He cannot sell that information and receive a profit for tipping off other people who will trade on that information before it becomes publicly available and is absorbed into the market prices.” —Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer under Republican George W. Bush

Trump Media just flipped the switch on something called Truth API. It’s a paid feed that sells Wall Street trading firms faster, machine-readable access to posts from the ten most-followed accounts on Truth Social, including posts by Donald Trump. The Financial Times and CNBC put the price as high as $100,000 a month, or $60,000 a month if you lock in a three-year deal. The interim CEO of Trump Media, Kevin McGurn, called it a licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s “most market-moving Truths.” His words, not mine.

Trump owns roughly 41 percent of the company. Not in a blind trust, but in a revocable trust, with his son Donald Trump Jr. as trustee, which means he can know exactly what he holds. Congressman Jamie Raskin did the arithmetic on paper: nearly half of every single subscription fee lands directly in the president’s pocket.

Read that again. A firm pays six figures a month to hear the president’s market-moving words a beat before you do, and the president keeps half the check.

On July 28, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote the SEC that the service “appears to be an outrageous abuse of the President’s office.” Republican Bill Cassidy told The Hill it’s flat wrong — “a form of buying access.” Susan Collins questioned the whole rationale. Thom Tillis said the appearances trouble him before you even reach the ethics. Lisa Murkowski said pushing market-moving information around raises conflict-of-interest questions. Mark Warner wrote to six industry groups and told their members to just refuse the thing. On July 31, Raskin opened a Judiciary investigation, though as ranking member he holds no subpoena power, so his letter can only persuade, not compel.

The lawyers are talking too. I’ll start- this is another improper, unethical and probably illegal grift by Trump. Renée Jones, a Boston College professor who used to run a division at the SEC, says the offering appears to run afoul of insider trading rules. Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer under Republican President George W. Bush, puts it all into proper perspective, “He cannot sell that information and receive a profit for tipping off other people who will trade on that information before it becomes publicly available and is absorbed into the market prices”

Trump Media waves all of it away (of course they do). They call the API just the fastest way to ingest publicly available data. But I there’s more you need to know.

One major news outlet took a database of the president’s Truth Social posts and laid it against the trades listed in his own financial disclosure. They found at least 44 stock purchases across 21 companies in the week before he posted something favorable about those firms, their executives, or their products. The White House says his money sits in fully discretionary accounts run by independent third parties. But in truth what this refers to is the revocable trust I mentioned above. It’s run by Trump’s son as the sole trustee. It’s not a blind trust. Trump can tell his son what to do, can share information with his son, and he can know his holdings.

And here’s an interesting final take away.

One Wall Street executive told NPR that in any other administration this would be considered criminal. Twelve other major finance executives wouldn’t say a word on the record at all.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

You just read my update. Were you aware this was happening?

Please share this story with someone you know. Subscribe to Uncensored Objection and support a community that reads the record, asks the hard question, and refuses to let quiet do the work of a cover-up.

Audio Version

As shown in the video, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro stated in unequivocal terms, that she had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, vandalized the pool and was responsible for the damage. Donald Trump also jumped in, and it’s in the video, and claimed, without evidence, that the failed renovation and resulting liability were the result of sabotage.

Today, prosecutors admit what we all figured out a month ago. They concluded in a court filing that the contractors hired by Trump “botched” the renovation, and they dropped all charges against Hearn. Court documents show the damage to the pool “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration on July 4.”

I’m sharing this tonight because we need to be worried as Americans. There isn’t a single thing this administration tells you that you can believe. If they feel the need to lie to you over something as benign as a construction issue and algae, what do you think they’re willing to do when it comes to disclosing the true facts of war or cryptocurrency conflicts of interest relating in profits in the billions?

Wake up. They aren’t interested in the truth, and they don’t care about the truth, so long as what they say and do helps them look good and in Trump’s case, make money for his family.

This is not why we pay them with our taxpayer dollars. This is not their job. Their job is to tell the truth, do the right thing, and protect all Americans. It’s not to prosecute innocent Olympic athletes for federal crimes, exposing them to up to 10 years in prison for something they didn’t do. If they can do this to someone like Mr. Hearn. They can do it to you.

You need to vote in the midterms. You need to give Congress the power to take back the majority. You need to give Congress the power of oversight to investigate these false allegations. You need to give Congress the power of the purse to cut off funding for the hundreds of millions of dollars in vanity projects Trump is undertaking with your tax dollars. You need to give Congress the power to reclaim its separation of powers authority and rein in this rogue administration before another American citizen is wrongfully charged, defamed, and indicted.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

What Can David Hearn Actually Do About This?

A Plain-English Guide to His Legal Options (Updated on August 1, 2026)

DISCLAIMER: This is general information and does not provide legal advice. Having said that, based upon the reported facts, this is my take. Always do your own due diligence and consult with an experienced professional in your state, region or country.

First, put yourself in David’s shoes

You’re 67 years old. You’re on a bike ride. You stop at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool because you’ve read that the new blue coating is peeling and you’re curious. You reach into the water, touch a loose piece of liner, and let go when a worker tells you to stop. His interview beings 10 seconds into this clip.

Within minutes you’re in handcuffs. You spend about five hours in a Park Police facility. By your account, nobody reads you your rights, nobody lets you make a phone call, and nobody tells you what you’re actually being charged with.

Two weeks later a grand jury indicts you on a felony carrying up to ten years in prison. The U.S. Attorney announces it publicly. The President blames vandals for a botched renovation project he’d been bragging about.

Then, six weeks after that, prosecutors file a document admitting the damage came from a flawed installation by the contractor and a rush to finish before the July 4 celebrations. Not from you. They move to drop the case.

You’re relieved. And then you ask the question anybody would ask: is anyone going to answer for this?

Here’s the honest answer.

The one detail that changes everything

Most people assume that because a federal prosecutor charged him, this was a federal case. It’s more complicated, and the complication matters enormously.

Washington, D.C. has a legal system unlike any state. The U.S. Attorney, a federal official, prosecutes ordinary local crimes in D.C. Superior Court, which is not a federal court. It functions like a state court.

Hearn’s case ran in two stages:

The arrest (June 19): U.S. Park Police — federal officers — arrested him on a misdemeanor allegation of destroying government property.

The indictment (July 2): A grand jury charged him with one felony count under D.C. Code § 22-303, a local law that allows up to 10 years in prison when the damaged property is worth $1,000 or more.

So: federal officers, a federal prosecutor, a local charge, a local court. That mix complicates every option below.

And the case isn’t technically over. Prosecutors moved to dismiss. A judge still has to grant it, and whether it’s dismissed “with prejudice” (gone forever) or “without prejudice” (theoretically refileable) hasn’t been settled.

Option 1: Clear his name on the record — and get it sealed

Start here, because this is the one he’s most likely to win, and most coverage ignores it.

D.C. law lets someone who was arrested or charged under the D.C. Code, and whose prosecution ended without a conviction, ask the court to seal every record of the arrest and the case on grounds of actual innocence. He can file at any time.

Two features make this powerful:

The burden is manageable if he moves promptly. Filed within four years of the case ending, he has to prove innocence by a “preponderance of the evidence” — meaning more likely than not. Wait longer than four years and the standard jumps to “clear and convincing evidence,” which is much harder.

The court doesn’t just quietly file the case away. If the facts support it, the judge must rule as a matter of law that he did not commit the offense, or that no offense occurred at all, and summarize the circumstances of the arrest in a written order he can obtain a copy of any time.

Think about what that is. It’s a judge, not a press release, not a prosecutor’s motion, formally declaring that an innocent man was arrested for something that never happened. For most people in this situation, that document is worth more than money.

The money: none. This is about the record, not damages.

Option 2: Ask a court to make the government pay his legal bills

The Hyde Amendment lets someone who beats a criminal case make the government reimburse attorney’s fees, but only if the court finds the government’s position was “vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith,” and only if no “special circumstances” make an award unjust.

Think of it as: you dragged me through this for no reason, so you’re covering my costs.

What’s good about his position. He hired private lawyers, so there are real bills. And the strongest fact in his favor is the government’s own filing: prosecutors admitted the grand jury was shown vandalism evidence sourced from Interior Department and Park Police reports, and defense lawyers surfaced testimony from a Park Service official that the pool was already leaking with a torn liner before Hearn ever touched it.

The problems.

Problem one, and it’s a big one: The Hyde Amendment appears to be built for federal court. Every appeals court that discusses it describes it as something a federal district court can do. Hearn’s case was in D.C. Superior Court. Whether the law reaches a local D.C. Code prosecution appears to be unanswered. In my quick research, I didn’t find a case deciding it either way, but the consistent judicial language cuts against it. That fight would come before anyone argued about bad faith.

Problem two: The standard is brutally hard. In a case called Shaygan, a trial judge awarded a defendant over $600,000 after finding real prosecutorial misconduct, and an appeals court took it all away, reasoning that if the original decision to charge was reasonable, bad behavior during the case doesn’t count. That ruling doesn’t control in D.C., but the government would lean on it hard.

Problem three: Appeals courts review a denial only for “abuse of discretion.” Translation: if the trial judge says no, that no almost always sticks.

Why his facts still fit. The Shaygan rule punishes people whose complaint is about misconduct in the middle of a case. Hearn’s complaint is that the case should never have been brought at all. That’s precisely what this law was written for.

The money. Fees and litigation expenses only. Nothing for the humiliation, the fear, or the five hours in a holding room. The statute’s baseline rate is $125/hour, which courts can and often do raise for inflation or other special factors. And a fundraiser has already raised over $175,000 for his defense. That doesn’t bar a claim, but any fee request has to be honest about it.

The clock. Not thirty days from the dismissal, as it’s often described. Thirty days from “final judgment,” meaning after the window to appeal closes. Still short.

Option 3: Sue the United States for the arrest and prosecution

The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) is how you sue the U.S. government itself. Normally the government can’t be sued, however this law carves out exceptions. One covers false arrest, malicious prosecution, and abuse of process by federal law enforcement officers. Park Police qualify.

This is the option that could produce money for what he went through, not just his legal bills.

The problems.

The wall is a 1983 case called Gray v. Bell. A former acting FBI director was indicted, prosecutors later admitted the case was weak and dropped it, and he sued. The D.C. Circuit threw the case out, holding that the decision about whether, when, and against whom to bring charges is a “discretionary function” the government can’t be sued over. That’s almost exactly Hearn’s fact pattern, and it’s binding law in Washington.

And the Supreme Court closed the workaround last year. In Martin v. United States (2025), the Court held that the law-enforcement exception can’t rescue a claim the discretionary-function rule independently blocks.

Where the opening might be. Gray bars attacks on the charging decision. It doesn’t obviously bar a claim about what individual Park Police officers wrote in an arrest report or told prosecutors, that’s arguably a separate act, not a policy judgment. The false arrest claim may travel better than the malicious prosecution claim, since arresting someone isn’t the same kind of discretionary call as charging them.

The procedure people get wrong. You can’t walk into court first.

File an administrative claim (Standard Form 95) with the agency within two years of when the claim “accrues.” Accrual isn’t always the date of the incident, a malicious prosecution claim generally can’t accrue until the case ends in your favor, which for Hearn is happening now.

If the agency denies it, you have six months to sue.

If the agency does nothing for six months, which happens constantly, you can treat it as denied and file suit.

Miss a deadline and you are in serious trouble. But contrary to what’s often said, you are not automatically finished: the Supreme Court held in 2015 that these deadlines can be extended in fairness where a claimant had a genuinely good reason for filing late. Don’t count on it.

The money. Real damages: lost income, emotional distress, harm to reputation, and legal costs. With hard limits:

No punitive damages. You cannot financially punish the government, no matter how bad the conduct.

No jury. A judge decides everything.

Your recovery is generally capped at the dollar figure you wrote on the SF-95. There’s a narrow exception for genuinely new information that surfaces later, but courts read it strictly. Ask for more than you think you need.

Attorney’s fees are capped by statute, 20% if the claim settles administratively, 25% if it’s resolved after a lawsuit is filed. That comes out of your award, not on top of it.

Option 4: Sue the individual officers personally

A “Bivens” claim, named after a 1971 case where federal agents searched a man’s home without a warrant, lets you sue federal officers personally for violating your constitutional rights. Unlike the FTCA, this allows punitive damages and a jury. I’ve handled these cases in the past and even tried a tragic wrongful death case premised around this, and a few related theories, that resulted in a $5.5M verdict for my clients. They’re tough cases to win but it can be done.

Against the U.S. Attorney: not available. Prosecutors have absolute immunity for deciding to charge someone and for presenting a case, under Imbler v. Pachtman. Even a prosecution brought in bad faith is protected. That door is closed and locked.

Against the Park Police officers: theoretically open, practically very difficult. An unlawful arrest claim is the closest thing to what Bivens was originally about, which is the best available starting position. But the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Egbert v. Boule directed lower courts to reject these claims in nearly any situation that isn’t a close copy of the original case, and judges have read “new situation” very broadly since. A claim built on misleading reports would almost certainly be labeled a new situation and dismissed.

One more catch even if he won. The judgment would run against the officers personally. The government may choose to cover it. It doesn’t have to.

Option 5: Sue for defamation over the public statements

Short answer: no. This door is closed twice over.

Interestingly, prosecutors do not get absolute immunity for talking to the press, the Supreme Court said so in Buckley v. Fitzsimmons. It doesn’t help, because:

As a constitutional claim, damage to your reputation isn’t treated as a constitutional injury (Paul v. Davis).

As an ordinary defamation claim, the government substitutes itself as the defendant, and the FTCA specifically excludes libel and slander from what you’re allowed to sue over.

So the most publicly damaging part of this, being named as a vandal by the U.S. Attorney while the President amplified the accusation, is legally the least actionable part.

What’s left that isn’t a lawsuit

A complaint to DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility. No money. But it creates an official record, and official records occasionally move settlement conversations that litigation can’t.

A disciplinary complaint to the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel against the individual attorneys involved.

The public record itself. The government’s filing conceding the damage came from a botched installation is now permanent. Congressional oversight, journalism, and public pressure aren’t legal remedies, but in cases like this they’re often the only ones that work.

The honest bottom line

If you’re the average American in David Hearn’s shoes, understand this:

The law is not built to make you whole after something like this. It’s built to protect the government’s ability to make charging decisions without being second-guessed in court. That protection exists for real reasons, you don’t want prosecutors terrified of every defendant they can’t convict, but the cost is that the wrongly accused person usually absorbs the damage.

Obviously, the problem in these situations is when you have a vindictive or corrupt Department of Justice and administration going after people for retribution or to cover their mistakes, instead of legitimate crimes. Then it becomes a real problem, and I think that’s what we’ve got going on here

The realistic path here isn’t a courtroom windfall. It’s two things: a sealing order that puts a judge’s finding of innocence on the permanent record, and whatever negotiated resolution the government’s own admission makes possible. That admission, that its contractor caused the damage, after it publicly told the country an innocent man did, can’t be walked back. It’s the strongest thing David has. And I believe a good lawyer can leverage the arguments and this admission to successfully negotiate a large financial settlement.

Audio Version (on YouTube)

Keep Your Eyes On The Ball

Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee. For the time being, they won’t vote to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General. They are telling reporters that until Blanche agrees in writing that he’s terminated the earlier settlement agreement he created for the Trumps and their family business, the one granting immunity from tax audits and creating a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, their votes are no.

Blanche has told Congress his DOJ is “not moving forward” with that fund. A court already blocked it. And Cornyn and Tillis still want it in writing. Why? Because nothing stops it from coming back. And because Trump keeps talking it up because we’re now learning this gratuitous sweetheart deal is something Trump doesn’t want to give up.

I’m glad Tillis and Cornyn are doing this. For now.

I say “for now” because I don’t think either one of these guys will stick to his guns. I think they turn. I think they eventually vote to confirm Blanche. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I am.

But that’s not the real story. There’s a bigger one nobody is talking about.

The Real Story

On March 5, 2025, when Blanche was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General, 46 senators voted no. Every single one of them was a Democrat or one of the two independents who caucus with them (Bernie Sanders and Angus King).

Fifty-two Republican senators all voted to confirm Todd Blanche as Deputy Attorney General on March 5, 2025.

Fifty-two.

On the floor, this confirmation needs a simple majority. But it has to clear the Judiciary Committee first, and that’s where it’s stuck. There’s a way around a committee, the Senate can discharge a nomination, but that takes 60 votes, and Republicans have 53. So the door is shut.

One Republican no vote on that committee stops the whole thing cold. They’ve got two. That’s the entire drama you’re watching on TV right now.

Meanwhile, nobody is asking about the other 50.

Fifty other Republican Senators already voted to hand this man the number two job at the Justice Department. Fifty. And not one of them has given any sign they’d hesitate to hand him the top job now.

So why aren’t we holding these other Republican senators’ feet to the fire? Why aren’t we putting them under the microscope and demanding answers?

Ask them why they’ll confirm an Attorney General whose Department a federal judge said has effectively conceded it is violating the law under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.1

Ask them why they’ll confirm an AG withholding roughly 3 million pages of Epstein records out of the more than 6 million pages the government collected.2

Ask them why they’ll confirm an AG whose conduct in the Trump tax case resulted in Judge Kathleen Williams finding that lawsuit was brought “for an improper purpose” and in bad faith, and to send her order straight to the New York and D.C. disciplinary authorities, where complaints against Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward were already sitting.

Ask them why they’ll confirm an AG whose Department has declined to disclose and prosecute the perpetrators in the Epstein case like other countries are doing.

Ask them why they’ll confirm the man who signed off on a fund that already pardoned January 6 Capital rioters, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, could apply to receive taxpayer money. Exactly the way Trump wanted.3

And ask them this one. Ask them why they’re comfortable with an agreement shielding Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits. Something never contemplated, much less considered, in the entire history of our government. Something the judge found directly contravenes the federal law barring the executive branch from meddling in taxpayer audits.4

The 52

These 50, along with Tillis and Cornyn, need to explain why they’re bending over backwards for an Attorney General that Trump seems to keep in his back pocket and treat as his personal lawyer. A man who seems to be struggling to balance the legal and ethical obligations of the office he already holds.

So let’s make it easy. I’m going to list all 52 Republican Senators who support Blanche back in March, so you know exactly who nobody is talking about, and exactly where to point the light. Because if just another 5-10 of these Senators, much less all of them, stood with the Democrats on this particular issue, we wouldn’t have to deal with having a compromised man one or two votes away from being the next Attorney General.

During the Senate vote on March 5, 2025, to confirm Todd Blanche as Deputy Attorney General, 52 Republican senators voted in favor. For the reasons I already covered, every single Democrat voted against Blanche. The final tally was 52-46.

Republican Senators Who Voted “Yea”

Alabama: Katie Britt, Tommy Tuberville
Alaska: Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan
Arkansas: John Boozman, Tom Cotton
Florida: Ashley Moody, Rick Scott
Idaho: Mike Crapo, Jim Risch
Indiana: Jim Banks, Todd Young
Iowa: Joni Ernst, Chuck Grassley
Kansas: Roger Marshall, Jerry Moran
Kentucky: Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul
Louisiana: Bill Cassidy, John Kennedy
Maine: Susan Collins
Mississippi: Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Wicker
Missouri: Josh Hawley, Eric Schmitt
Montana: Steve Daines, Tim Sheehy
Nebraska: Deb Fischer, Pete Ricketts
North Carolina: Ted Budd, Thom Tillis
North Dakota: Kevin Cramer, John Hoeven
Ohio: Jon Husted, Bernie Moreno
Oklahoma: James Lankford, Markwayne Mullin
Pennsylvania: Dave McCormick
South Carolina: Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott
South Dakota: Mike Rounds, John Thune
Tennessee: Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty
Texas: John Cornyn, Ted Cruz
Utah: John Curtis, Mike Lee
West Virginia: Shelley Moore Capito, Jim Justice
Wisconsin: Ron Johnson
Wyoming: John Barrasso
(Note: Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona did not vote.)

Read those names. Find yours.

Tillis and Cornyn aren’t the problem. Democrat senators aren’t the problem.

These 50 other Senators are the problem.

They backed Blanche during his nomination and they’ve said nothing since. They’re the reason we’re dealing with this mess. They’re the reason Blanche feels empowered, and Trump feels empowered enough to fight over a one-page release granting immunity from tax audits instead of tossing it aside to get his guy confirmed.

It would be a good idea if you gave your Senator a call right now. Hell, give every Senator on this list a call. The main U.S. Capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.

These Republican Senators are also the reason somebody else isn’t being nominated. Somebody more qualified. Somebody who understands the separation of powers. Somebody who’s name isn’t being referred to the New York State Bar for misconduct concerns. Somebody who isn’t behind investigating and indicting innocent Americans. Somebody who isn’t OK with Trump’s January 6th slush fund. Somebody who didn’t write and sign a bogus settlement agreement giving Trump, his family members and any company he’s directly or indirectly involved with (hundreds?) immunity from tax fraud. And maybe somebody who understands how important an independent Attorney General is, especially with this president and this administration.

So when you watch the news and see everybody talking about Tillis and Cornyn, remember: yes, they’re the reason the committee vote didn’t happen (at least as of the moment I wrote this post). Grassley’s own spokesperson admitted the markup was postponed “as work continues to secure sufficient support in committee.” That’s a Republican chairman telling you he doesn’t have the votes.

But the other names of Republican Senators on that list are the bigger problem. They’re on board with Blanche running the Justice Department. They’re on board with taking marching orders from Trump. And when he says jump, the answer of these Senators is always “how high” instead of “why.”

What They’re Comfortable With

They’re comfortable that a federal judge found the Trump–IRS lawsuit was filed for an improper purpose and in bad faith, sanctioned the lawyers, and expressly left open the question of fraud on the court.

They’re comfortable that the weaponization fund came out of that settlement, a settlement the judge described as self-dealing, and one she barred every party from ever citing again.

They’re comfortable confirming an Attorney General with pending bar complaints in New York. To put this in perspective, most lawyers have never been had a complaint filed against them with their state bar. Never. This guy is up for the Attorney General position. It’s not OK.

They’re comfortable with 3 million pages of Epstein records being withheld while Blanche looks into the cameras and lies about his Department complying with the law.

They’re comfortable that this man spent nine hours over two days with Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, after which she was moved from a low-security prison in Tallahassee to a minimum-security camp in Texas. A camp sex offenders normally can’t go to. A camp where a whistleblower told House Democrats Maxwell has been getting customized meals, after-hours gym access, and time with the service puppies other inmates aren’t allowed to touch. Assistant Attorney Generals don’t meet one on one with defendants. That’s not how the office works. Unless of course Trump is your boss calling the shots.

They’re comfortable with Blanche’s DOJ going after people who tried to hold Trump accountable for his illegal activities. Indicting James Comey for posting a seashell picture. Indicting prosecutors who charged and successfully tried Trump for crimes. Investigating Senators and generals for making a video reminding American troops they must not obey illegal orders.

And finally, they’re comfortable that he sat down with Epstein survivors for about an hour, only after Tillis made it a condition of his vote, and that the women in that room came out calling him abrasive, condescending, and evasive. The survivors who met with Blanche said the whole meeting was nothing more than a box he was checking to get confirmed.

So no. The problem here is bigger than two senators. It’s all these other senators who have happily gone along for the ride to protect their political careers and profits.

And that, my friends, isn’t OK. And we all need to take action.

What You Can Do About It

Everyone needs to vote in the midterms.

We need to make sure a big blue wave takes back a majority in both the House and the Senate. We need to restore oversight, the power of the purse, and the separation of powers to Congress.

If we do it changes everything. Literally, everything.

But be clear-eyed about the math, because I’m not going to sell you a fantasy. Republicans hold the Senate 53–47. Democrats need a net gain of four of the 35 seats on the ballot. The House sits at 218–214 with three vacancies.

Get that majority in the House of Representatives and it has the power of subpoena and oversight again. The power of the purse. The separation of powers to keep this president and this administration in check. Flip the Senate too, and it becomes far harder for people like Blanche to be nominated and confirmed to this kind of position going forward.

It changes everything.

And I’m bringing this up because this isn’t just about Blanche. Or Tillis. Or Cornyn. Or even Trump. It’s about all the other senators on this list who need to go.

Now here are two honest caveats, because you deserve them.

One: the new Senate isn’t seated until January 3, 2027. If they confirm Blanche in the next few weeks, November comes too late to stop it.

Two: only about 21 of these 52 are on the ballot this year. Cornyn already lost his primary. Tillis and McConnell are heading for the exits. Tuberville is running for governor. That leaves 17 you can actually vote against.

But read what Trump said Thursday. He floated pulling the nomination and sending it back after Cornyn and Tillis are gone in January. If he does that, the Senate that decides Todd Blanche’s future is the one you elect in November.

Seventeen names. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole ballgame.

Vote against them. Put a Democratic senator in each seat.

It changes the dynamics. It changes the operation of our government. It gives you a check and balance that does not exist right now, one that reins in this presidency, reins in the hate, reins in the destruction, and starts to fix the problems we’re living with today.

Fifty-two names. Find yours. Then do something about it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Subscribe and Support

If this issue told you something no one else told you, subscribe — it’s free. If you want more of it, upgrade to paid and fund the digging. The perks alone are worth the price of admission.

Audio

COVID-19 became one of the deadliest global health emergencies in modern history. The World Health Organization’s latest cumulative data list approximately 103.4 million confirmed cases and 1.24 million reported deaths in the United States, and about 779.3 million confirmed cases and 7.12 million reported deaths worldwide. These figures do not reveal the exact number of people who became sick because many infections were never tested or reported, some individuals were infected more than once, and comprehensive case reporting has been reduced or discontinued in many places. To measure the broader human cost, WHO estimates that the pandemic was associated with 22.1 million excess deaths worldwide from 2020 through 2023, including both deaths caused directly by COVID-19 and indirect deaths resulting from the pandemic’s effects on health systems and society.

Why Dr. Anthony Fauci Pleading the Fifth Was the Smartest Legal Decision Made in That Room

They put a man of 85 under subpoena. They took 1,100 pages of his private diary and posted it on the internet over a weekend, pulled it down Monday night, reposted it Tuesday morning with the redactions they should have applied the first time. Nobody warned him it was coming. Then they sat in a marble room in the Dirksen building and acted wounded when he arrived with lawyers.1

Here is the question nobody in that hearing wanted spoken out loud. If the Fifth Amendment truly does not protect Anthony Fauci, why did the chairman and the Health Secretary spend the entire week before the hearing explaining, on camera, exactly how they planned to prosecute him the moment he opened his mouth?

I am going to walk you through the paper trail. By the time you finish reading, you will know who built the trap, how they described it in their own voices, what the calendar tells you about why this week of all weeks, and why one sentence of 21 words repeated 106 times was the most competent piece of lawyering anyone did in that building on Wednesday.

But first, watch Lawrence O’Donnell’s clip from last night that explains to you who Dr. Anthony Fauci is and why he invoked his Fifth Amendment right. If you’re interested in learning the facts, then this is a “must watch” video to watch and share.

Twenty One Words, One Hundred Six Times

Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right 106 times. Republican senators tried to bait him into speaking. Senator Josh Hawley asked him to name the color of his tie and the color of the carpet. Same answer every time. On the advice of counsel, he respectfully declined based on his rights under the Fifth Amendment.

Put that in context. This is a man who came to Capitol Hill roughly 250 times over his career to talk about HIV and AIDS, about Ebola, about every outbreak that frightened this country for four decades. He built a career on showing up and answering. He stopped answering on Wednesday for one reason, and the reason has a name.

The trap, described out loud by the people who built it

Watch How Openly They Said The Quiet Part

Senator Rand Paul has made no secret of his desire to see Fauci behind bars. Fauci said so from the witness table, pointing to the senator’s obvious obsession with calling for his prosecution.

Now hold that next to the legal commentary Republicans themselves were pushing all week. John Yoo went on Fox News and explained that the clemency Joe Biden granted covers only what Fauci said and did before the pardon was signed, and that a false statement under oath now counts as a fresh federal offense prosecutors are free to pursue. Hell, posting pictures of seashells can get you indicted to seriously folks, let’s be real.

Perjury before Congress lives at 18 U.S.C. § 1621. Any material false statement made under oath in that room becomes a new crime committed after the pardon’s effective date. Constitutional attorney Ross Garber laid out the committee’s two enforcement paths, civil litigation to compel testimony or a criminal contempt referral to the Justice Department.

Read those sentences again slowly. The people telling you Fauci had no reason to fear prosecution are the same people publishing a step by step guide to prosecuting him. His pardon reaches back only to January 2025. Everything spoken after that date sits unprotected, including any perjury theory a Trump Justice Department decides to chase. A federal prosecutor with a grudge and a transcript is all the exposure a lawyer needs to see.

Any defense attorney in America who advised him to answer questions under those conditions would be committing malpractice. His lawyers earned every dollar.2

Paul’s own theory collapsed the second he explained it

Paul claimed the privilege was unsupported because of the blanket pardon and because Fauci waived it by speaking at the start of the hearing. He told reporters afterward that maybe the Fifth Amendment does not attach when you have a pardon in place.

Then he admitted the whole thing. Standing outside the hearing room, Paul conceded his theory has “probably never been tested legally”.

A United States senator subpoenaed a private citizen, dumped his diary, threatened him with prosecution, and built the entire proceeding on a constitutional theory he acknowledges no court has ever endorsed. That is not oversight. That is a man running an experiment on another human being’s liberty and calling it a hearing.

They Took His Diary Off Government Servers and Never Told Him

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on Fox News Monday night and said he had handed the files to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson after an eight month search of government servers. Neither HHS nor the committee alerted Fauci that they had his diary or that they intended to publish all of it. Kennedy posted a video on X boasting about digging the material “out of 11 separate servers”.

Eight months. Eleven servers. A cabinet secretary personally couriering a private citizen’s journal to a senator who has promised to jail him.

And what did the country get for all that effort? Diary entries where a frightened public health official writes entries in ninety nine percent of it about his research and work, and one percent about a flattering Washington Post profile and confesses that his sudden fame felt unimaginable. The kind of thing any serious expert would keep track of. Notes full of the typos and half sentences of a man scribbling fast at the end of impossible days.

Your tax dollars funded an eight month hunt for a man’s diary. Sit with that.

Now Look at the Calendar

Here is the part they are counting on you missing.

The Justice Department released 3.5 million pages of Epstein material, redacted it heavily, and withheld another 3 million pages, drawing lawsuits from people who say the department is shielding rich and powerful men named in the files. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the department to hand over the withheld and redacted documents for private review by Thursday, which sets up a possible new public release. Sullivan had already noted the Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Attorney General to produce the documents and publish the log by December 19, 2025, more than six months before. House Democrats opened an investigation into whether Jeffrey Epstein acted as a foreign agent.

The Fauci hearing landed on Wednesday. The Epstein deadline landed on Thursday.

Even the trade press covering health policy saw the play, noting the President’s polling had tanked, the Iran conflict was proving hard to end, oil prices had soared, and that giving the public another issue to chew on might pull attention away from that pile of trouble.

Anthony Fauci is 85 years old and retired in 2022. He is the shiny object. The Epstein files are the story.

Removing a Lawyer From the Room

Capitol Police removed Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, from the hearing at the chairman’s direction. Paul warned Fauci that obstructing a congressional investigation breaks the law and that there would be repercussions.

A senator had a citizen’s defense counsel physically escorted out of a proceeding where that citizen faced an announced criminal threat. In any courtroom in this country, a judge who did that would be removed from the bench before lunch.

Let Them Hold the Contempt Vote

The committee votes on a criminal contempt referral at a business meeting at 10 a.m. on August 5. An affirmative vote sends the matter to the Justice Department, which then decides whether to pursue it.

Make a federal court say out loud that an American facing a publicly announced prosecution forfeits his right to silence because a previous president pardoned him for different conduct in a different year. Make the Justice Department stand at a podium and argue it. That case does not end where Rand Paul imagines it ends, and every lawyer in Washington knows it.

Four Hundred and Forty Times

In August 2022, Donald Trump sat for a four hour deposition with the New York Attorney General’s office and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 440 times. He answered exactly one question, his name.

In 2016 he told the country that people who take the Fifth are guilty of something, asking “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” After his own deposition he said he finally knew the answer to his own question, and that when your family and your company become targets of a politically motivated investigation, you have no choice. He later called the session a very professional meeting.

Four hundred forty for him. One hundred six for the doctor. Same amendment. Same Constitution. Roll the video and watch who has an objection.

Look, in my opinion, Fauci should never have walked into that room for a proceeding built to distract you and set him up for prosecution. But if, because of the subpoena, he felt a legal obligation to appear, it’s clear to me that he also made the right call the second he sat down, and every hour of legal advice he paid for was worth it. The Fifth Amendment exists precisely for a citizen dragged before power by someone who has already announced the verdict.

Ask James Comey What a Federal Charge Means

The Justice Department has indicted James Comey twice in under a year. The first indictment, over his 2020 congressional testimony, died in November 2025 when Judge Cameron Currie ruled that Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s former personal attorney with no prosecutorial experience, had been unlawfully appointed and that everything she touched was void; the five-year clock on those charges had already run out three days after she took the office.

Next, prosecutors charged Comey again, this time in North Carolina, over an Instagram photo of seashells arranged to read 8647. A federal judge in Washington has already ruled that no reasonable observer would read an 8647 display as a true threat, and government lawyers conceded in open court that context decides the question. They charged him anyway.

Comey’s own filing names the stakes better than I can: forcing a man to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, in legal fees to defend himself and potentially stand trial for an image posted on Instagram. That is the machine Anthony Fauci was looking at when he decided to stop talking.

Dr. Fauci’s silence in that chair is not a confession. Silence in that chair is a free man refusing to hand a weapon to the person aiming at him.

Here is what these hearings are counting on. They need your attention to be cheap, your memory to be short, and your outrage to burn out by Friday. They need you watching a retired scientist in a hearing room on Wednesday so nobody asks what a federal judge is reading on Thursday.

Refuse to Be Managed

Share this with the person in your life who thinks pleading the Fifth means guilt. Post about Trump’s 440 times he pled the Fifth under every clip you see this week. Call your senator’s office on August 5 and ask them, on the record, whether they support jailing a citizen for exercising the Bill of Rights. Ask them what happened to the 3 million withheld Epstein file pages.

Then vote in the midterms. Every single one of these people has a boss, and it is you.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

My Final Thoughts

The only person who belongs in a criminal courtroom over Covid is Donald Trump. He owed a duty to the people of this country, a plain one, the same duty every public official swears to carry, and he set it down. He watched the thing come and told the country it would vanish. He had the briefings, the warnings, the numbers, the weeks that mattered. Instead of taking action early on, he downplayed the problem by managing the story. Americans believed him because back then, believing your president is what decent people do. They went to work. They went to church. They held the hands of parents who never came home. They trusted him and they died for it.

Listen to these recorded interview clips with journalist Bob Woodward.

February 7, 2020. Trump told Woodward the virus goes through the air, that it was more deadly than even a strenuous flu, and called it deadly stuff.

March 19, 2020. “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Please Subscribe, Upgrade and Support

Audio

50 U.S.C. Section 3023(a)(1) reads: Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.

What Happened On Tuesday

What do you do when the man about to take charge of every American secret tells the United States Senate, in writing, thirteen days before his confirmation vote, he has never managed intelligence activities?

Fifty-one Republican senators answered on Tuesday night.

On July 28, 2026, the Senate confirmed Jay Clayton as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by a vote of 51 to 47. Every Republican who voted, voted yes; the entire Democratic caucus voted no.

Republicans gave him the job. Now the Trump administration is playing craps with our national intelligence and your security and safety.

Clayton now sits on top of 18 intelligence agencies. He controls the National Intelligence Program budget. He shapes what reaches the Trump’s Daily Brief. He serves as Trump’s principal adviser on intelligence.

This matters. Congress wrote a qualification standard for this exact job into federal law after 9/11, in mandatory language, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence built two separate written questions around the standard. Clayton answered those questions honestly. Seven words in one of them should have ended the nomination before the floor ever saw his name.

Section 3023 Is Not a Suggestion

Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in 2004, after the 9/11 Commission found American spy agencies had failed to connect information they already held. Congress created the DNI position to fix a failure of connection. Congress also wrote a qualification standard directly into the law.

50 U.S.C. Section 3023(a)(1) reads: Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.

Shall. Mandatory language, sitting inside a statute governing the most sensitive appointment in the executive branch.

Ask any lawyer in your life about the word shall. You will get the same answer every time. Shall is a command. Congress writes shall into a statute when Congress intends to strip the choice away from whoever comes next. Congress writes may when Congress wants to hand someone room to decide. Section 3023 says shall. Trump wanted Clayton in the chair, and fifty-one Republican senators read a command and heard a suggestion.

Thirty Years of Work, Zero Days Inside the Agencies

Clayton’s résumé is impressive but lacks intelligence work at nearly every point.

He earned an engineering degree from Penn, economics degrees from Cambridge, and a law degree from Penn, followed by a clerkship with a federal district judge in Pennsylvania. He joined Sullivan and Cromwell in 1995 and made partner in 2001. He spent more than twenty years there closing mergers, running capital markets deals, advising banks and telecom companies, and handling corporate governance matters. Trump made him SEC chairman in 2017.

He left government and became non-executive chair and lead independent director of Apollo Global Management, a firm he told the committee manages roughly 800 billion dollars. He chaired the audit committee at American Express. He taught at Wharton and Penn Law. He returned to Sullivan and Cromwell as a senior policy adviser.

In 2025, Trump made him U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Now count the missing pieces. Three decades in law, finance, securities regulation, and corporate governance. Zero years inside any of the 18 agencies he now commands. He has never served at CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO, or any departmental intelligence element. He has never run a collection operation, never handled a case officer, never signed a covert action finding, never supervised an analytic line. Until Tuesday night, no Senate committee had ever vetted him for a law enforcement or national security position of any kind.

Then He Would Not Say Who Won

On July 15, under oath, Democrats on the Intelligence Committee asked Clayton a question requiring no clearance, no briefing book, and no access to a single classified document. Who won the 2020 presidential election.

He would not answer. Over roughly two hours, senators came back to the question again and again. His response: “I am not an election denier. Joe Biden was certified.”

Certified describes a paperwork step performed by state officials and a joint session of Congress. The senators asked who won.

Senator Mark Warner told Clayton the committee had tried every route available to give him room to acknowledge a simple public fact. Warner has known Clayton for years, worked with him, and welcomed this nomination in June. He walked out of the hearing “bitterly disappointed.”

Senator Mark Kelly put the stakes in operational terms. Clayton will sit in rooms with this President many times over the next three years. The job sometimes requires him to say the opposite of what the President wants to hear. A nominee who declines to contradict Trump when Trump is not even in the room will decline in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room too.

Here are two more moments from that hearing that really got under my skin.

Clayton defended his office’s subpoenas of four New York Times journalists over their reporting on security concerns involving the Qatari gifted aircraft now serving as Air Force One. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the subpoenas an extraordinary escalation of efforts to intimidate independent news organizations. After being hammered by a judge in court and stumbling through the hearing, the Justice Department withdrawn the subpoenas. I’m sure you heard about it. The DOJ’s actions were big news. But Clayton was of OK with all of this. In addition to his lack of intelligence experience, Clayton’s position on this issue is a problem for me.

Clayton also said he was unaware his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, took part in the FBI’s January 28 raid on the Fulton County, Georgia election office, where agents seized 2020 ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls. Gabbard confirmed to Congress in writing that Trump personally directed her to be present, and that she arranged a phone call between the President and agents on the ground. The episode produced congressional letters in January, a public Intelligence Committee hearing in March, and litigation from Fulton County. The incoming head of American intelligence told the Senate he did not know about any of it. Just like the subpoenas, this is a problem for me too.

Why These Two Failures Multiply

Either problem alone produces a weak appointment. Stacked together, they produce a structural risk to the country.

The DNI job exists to carry unwelcome facts to the President of the United States. Everyone who held the position seriously understood the assignment. James Clapper brought 46 years in intelligence. Mike McConnell ran NSA and served as the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence during the Gulf War. John Negroponte spent four decades in the Foreign Service and briefed Reagan from the President’s Daily Brief. Dennis Blair spent 30 years in the Navy and held an intelligence community leadership post.

Those credentials did real work every single day. Expertise is what lets you recognize an assessment massaged to please someone upstairs. Expertise is what lets you push back with specifics in hand. A director who lacks the tools to evaluate the tradecraft lacks the tools to protect the tradecraft.

Independence supplies the other half of the equation. Clayton committed in writing to shield analysts from retaliation, to keep political litmus tests out of personnel decisions, to notify Congress if anyone substitutes political judgment for analytic judgment, and to stop any effort to push employees out over their perceived politics. Those commitments hold for exactly as long as his willingness to tell this President something he does not want to hear.

He got a free rehearsal at his own confirmation hearing. Documented public answer. Cameras rolling. No classified equities at stake. He declined to take it.

A man who will not state a public fact in an open hearing gives you thin reason to believe he will defend an inconvenient assessment inside a SCIF.

Four Things to Watch Starting Now

Oversight keeps running long after yesterday ends. Here is where to point your attention.

Declassification tied to 2020. Declassification means the government takes secret intelligence material, strips the classification off, and hands the contents to the public, which converts an internal document into a political instrument the moment someone times the release for maximum effect. Clayton pledged in writing to keep the congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed. Watch whether he notifies them before the next election related release, ahead of the fact, on the record.

Domestic election operations. This means pointing the machinery built for spying on foreign governments at Americans, at county clerks, at ballots, at voter rolls inside the United States. Gabbard set a precedent by appearing at a domestic election office raid at the President’s direction. By statute the DNI is barred from exercising police or law enforcement powers. Watch what Clayton does in November.

Section 702. This is the law allowing the government to collect emails, calls, and messages of foreign targets located overseas with no warrant, sweeping in the communications of Americans on the other end of those conversations. He called the authority indispensable and the lapse damaging. The reauthorization fight has centered on whether to pair the authority with the President’s voter ID legislation, a pairing Majority Leader John Thune publicly called unrealistic in June. Watch whether Clayton says anything on the record about where the blockage sits.

The workforce. The workforce means the analysts, collectors, and career officers who produce the intelligence a president reads every morning, along with the hiring and firing decisions deciding who stays in those chairs. He pledged personnel decisions would ignore political loyalty. He inherits an office whose acting director publicly celebrated the firings and whose staffing numbers the public has no way to verify. Watch the first personnel action he signs.

Do This Today

Call both of your senators. Not tomorrow. Today.

Ask one question and demand a specific answer: what will your office do to enforce 50 U.S.C. Section 3023(a)(1)?

If your senator voted yes, make them explain on the record how a nominee who told the committee in writing he has never managed intelligence activities meets a statutory requirement for extensive national security expertise. Get the answer in writing. Screenshot the reply. Post it.

Send this to the people in your life who believe confirmation votes are inside baseball played by other people in another city. Send it to the ones who already sense something has gone sideways and lack the vocabulary to say why. Give them the statute number. Give them the seven words.

Congress wrote a qualification standard into federal law because nearly 3,000 people died on September 11th when the intelligence community failed to connect what it already knew. Fifty-one senators decided the standard was optional.

It’s not, and you know it.

To speak to a U.S. Senator or representative’s office, the public number to the U.S. Capitol Switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

Make the call.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Please Subscribe and Support

The people who wrote shall into federal law counted on someone paying attention when fifty-one senators decided the word was optional. Subscribe to Uncensored Objection and stand with the readers who refuse to let a statute get quietly downgraded to a suggestion.

In the 2024 presidential election, close to 90 million eligible Americans did not vote. One out of every three people who held the legal right to cast a ballot let that right go unused. That figure comes from the University of Florida Election Lab and the researchers who track turnout for a living. It carries no ideology. It is simply what happened.

Now look at that number the way I look at an underperforming company.

Ninety million people represent the single largest dormant asset in American civic life. The asset already exists. It is already paid for. It requires no new law, no new party, no new candidate, no new fundraising. It sits fully built and completely unactivated, the way a warehouse of finished inventory sits behind an owner who believes the answer is more advertising.

In forty years of representing clients and in some cases, helping turn their businesses around, I found the same pattern almost every time. The owner chased something new and expensive while the highest and best use of their effort sat untouched in the next room.

Here is where the leverage compounds.

Midterm elections draw far fewer voters than presidential years. Fewer voters means every single ballot carries more weight, more influence, and more mathematical impact on the outcome. A vote you cast in a midterm buys you more result per unit of effort than a vote you cast in a presidential year. That is the definition of leverage, and most people walk past it.

So if you are frustrated by corruption, worn down by self-dealing, and finished with conflicts of interest, and if you want to remove from office the people who enabled and continue to advance the agenda of the man now serving in the Oval Office, a man convicted on 34 felony counts and found liable by a jury for sexually abusing and defaming a woman, then understand what your effort is currently buying you.

Another hour arguing online returns nothing. Zero. The activity feels like progress and produces no measurable outcome.

Voting produces the outcome.

Here is your assignment. Confirm your registration this week. Put the midterm date on your calendar today. Decide right now whether you vote by mail, early, or in person, and write that decision down. Then text three people you care about and walk them through the same four steps.

That last step is where the multiplication happens. One activated voter is one vote. One activated voter who activates three others is a return you cannot buy with any amount of advertising.

History does not belong to the loudest voice in the room. It belongs to the person who shows up.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Subscribe and Support by Upgrading

That said, for many, the language reflects the level of frustration they’re feeling. It’s raw, unfiltered, and unapologetic.

This is a compilation of Americans you’ll recognize sharing their thoughts about the convicted felon and civilly adjudicated sexual abuser currently serving in the Oval Office.

Whether you agree with every word or not, it’s worth watching. If you want to understand the anger, exhaustion, and disbelief so many people across the country are feeling right now, don’t skip this one.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

PS- Register to vote and then vote in the midterms.

Subscribe/ Upgrade to Support

Over the past year, I’ve written three separate posts explaining why. Each one was prompted by questions and concerns people shared with me, both on social media and here at the law firm.

Don’t let anyone convince you that your vote won’t matter or that you won’t even get the chance to vote. That’s exactly the mindset they want to create. When people believe it, they stop registering, stay home on Election Day, and silence their own voice.

Yes, there may be attempts to create confusion, long lines, or other obstacles at some polling places. Expect that. Prepare for it. But don’t mistake friction for failure. He cannot cancel the midterm elections.

If you’re registered and you show up, you’ll be able to vote.

So read and share the three articles below. Then make one commitment: verify that you’re registered, encourage your family and friends to do the same, and make sure every eligible voter you know shows up this year.

The most powerful response isn’t arguing online.

It’s voting.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

See

Our Elections Don’t Stop for War, Panic, or Presidential Ego

Trump Can’t Cancel Elections. Your Job Is to Show Up and Vote in the 2026 Midterms

No One Is Taking Over Your Vote and That Is Exactly the Point

Subscribe/ Support by Upgrading

You are standing in your kitchen on a Sunday afternoon. The oven ticks. Chairs scrape as the neighbors from two doors down settle in around the table, and somebody’s phone buzzes face down next to the salt. Coffee goes around. The television in the next room runs the same clip for the fourth time today, and there he is again, the President of the United States, pointing a finger at half the country and calling them communists.

The woman who waves to you every morning sets down her cup and nods along. The guy who helped you move your couch last spring says yeah, that’s about right. They all look over at you. Deep in your gut you know the word is wrong. You feel an answer forming somewhere behind your ribs. Nothing comes out. The moment passes, and the lie sits down at your table like a guest nobody invited to stay.

I want to hand you the words.

Let me admit something first. Most of us never got a real education on this. We got one week on the Cold War in eleventh grade, a documentary with grainy footage, a test on Friday, and then we moved on to the Industrial Revolution. So when a man on television throws around a word with a body count attached to it, most Americans have no ruler to measure the claim against. He is counting on exactly this.

Here is your ruler.

What Communism Is

Communism, as every country calling itself communist has actually run it, puts the government in charge of everything productive and leaves you owning none of it. No private farm. No private factory. No family business handed down to a daughter. The state holds the land, the machines, the stores, and the newspapers, and the state decides what gets made, who makes it, and what everybody earns. One party rules. Elections are theater or they do not exist at all. Picture a town where every shop, every acre of farmland, and every printing press belongs to the men in the capital, and the baker has no say over his own prices, his own sign, or who walks through his door.

Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, who seized the farms outright and starved millions in the taking. Think of Cuba in 1968, when the government shut down and absorbed tens of thousands of the last small private businesses on the island in a single campaign. Speaking against the party is a crime, and people who speak anyway disappear.

What Socialism Is

Socialism means the public owns the things that produce wealth. The factories. The mines. The banks. The railroads. A socialist argues that ownership of major productive assets belongs in public, worker, or cooperative hands instead of private shareholder hands. Norway shows you what a real version looks like inside a democracy. The Norwegian government owns 67 percent of Equinor, its largest energy company, and its direct holdings have amounted to more than a fifth of the total value of the Oslo Stock Exchange. A socialist wants the deed. He wants ownership of the big assets moved out of private hands and into public ones, and he says so plainly, because the whole argument turns on the deed.

What America Runs On

Now hold that definition next to what runs this country, and the accusation collapses. We run a mixed economy. Private companies compete, private owners keep their titles, markets set prices, and taxes fund a short list of services everybody uses together. Your fire department. The interstate you drove on this morning. Your kid’s public school, your library, your local police force, Social Security, Medicare, and the weather service warning you a tornado is twenty minutes out. None of that is socialism.

Adam Smith argued for public roads and bridges in 1776 and nobody has called the father of free market economics a Marxist yet. Denmark runs the same way, and its own prime minister stood at Harvard in 2015 and told Americans directly that his country is a market economy and far from a socialist planned economy. He said it specifically to correct Bernie Sanders. Every wealthy nation on earth runs a mixed economy, including ours, going back to the day your grandfather’s road got paved.

Why Democrats Are Not Communist

No Democrat in Washington has proposed seizing your business, your farm, or your home. The party runs on regulated capitalism, small business lending, private health insurers, and a stock market most of their voters have retirement money sitting in. While the Republicans are cutting taxes for the top 1%, cutting medicare benefits, and doing nothing to lower your food and fuel prices, the furthest left members of Congress campaign for higher taxes on the wealthy and broader health coverage, and they face voters who fire them on a regular basis. Social Security passed in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, and both got called socialism by the loudest voices of their day, and today, your parents and grandparents cash those checks without a second thought. Calling a health care expansion communism makes about as much sense as calling your local fire truck a Soviet plot.

And while we’re both here, let me hand you the strongest card the other side holds, since you will hear it anyway. Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayor’s race on the Democratic line, calls himself a democratic socialist out loud. This week he announced five city-owned grocery stores selling produce and meat at a thirty percent discount, one store per borough. He’s trying something new to help people put food on their tables.

His critics called it the first step toward bread lines. That’s not close to accurate, especially when you look at the actual thing on the table. Five stores, opening alongside roughly thirteen thousand bodegas and supermarkets in that city, every one of them still privately owned, still setting its own prices, still keeping its profits, and the mayor kept hot food, beer, and tobacco off his shelves so the corner stores keep their margins. Mandani is experimenting with adding five grocery stores. Communism took every shop in the country. This takes none of them. Zero. You are free to call the idea a bad one while still knowing the difference.

And speaking of bad ideas that raised food and gas prices? Trump’s tariffs (found to be illegal by the Supreme Court) and Iran War resulting in the Strait of Hormuz being closed causing global economic havoc. But I regress.

Why He Says It Anyway

Seventy six years ago a senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy held up a sheet of paper and claimed he had a list of communists working inside the United States government. He never produced the list. He never needed to. The accusation did all the work by itself. Teachers lost their classrooms. Writers lost their names and wrote under false ones for a decade. Foreign service officers with thirty years of service lost everything on the word of an anonymous informant. Neighbors turned in neighbors over a rumor at a card table. Families split apart and never came back together. The Senate finally censured McCarthy in 1954, and the wreckage he left behind took a generation to clear.

The young lawyer sitting at McCarthy’s right hand through those hearings was named Roy Cohn. Two decades later, Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and his mentor, and he taught him a method. Attack first. Admit nothing. Pin an ugly name on your opponent and repeat the name until people forget to ask anyone for proof.

Understand what the name accomplishes. A voter convinced his neighbor is an enemy of the country stops asking why his grocery bill keeps climbing, why his premium went up again, why his kid’s school lost its counselor. Fear moves votes. Suspicion holds power. Every morning this administration hunts for a new set of Americans to set against another set, and every evening we all go to bed a little more suspicious of the people three houses down. Our word means less overseas. Our economy absorbs the damage. Our Constitution gets treated as a rough suggestion.

Why He Works So Hard to Divide You

There is a reason he keeps lighting the match. Ask yourself what a president gains by turning half of his own country into an enemy.

Sit with the question for ten seconds. The answer shows up on its own, and once you see it you never stop seeing it.

He gains cover.

A country busy fighting itself has no attention left over for the man in charge. Watch the rhythm of any given week. A bad economic number lands on a Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon he has handed the country a fresh name to hate. Every pickpocket works with a partner who starts a shouting match across the street. Nobody watches the hand in the pocket. Everybody watches the fight.

Division pays him a second way. Anger requires no plan. Building a coalition means showing your work, naming a price, and answering for the result twelve months later. Handing a frightened person a villain costs nothing and delivers a crowd by Friday. Your premium went up, your rent went up, your kid’s school lost its counselor, and none of that gets fixed by calling a neighbor a communist. Blame is cheaper than repair, and he knows the price of both.

Then comes the loyalty part, and this is the piece most people miss. A man who asks you to repeat something untrue is testing you. Saying the thing out loud in front of your friends costs you a little of yourself, and the cost is the point. Once you have defended the lie in public, walking it back means admitting you were used. So you double down. He builds an audience bound to him by their own embarrassment, and there is no stronger rope than that one.

Look at what the rope has done to your own life. You go quiet around your brother-in-law now. Somebody you have known for thirty years puts up a post and your jaw tightens before you finish reading.

Here is the part he understands better than anybody. Two people who trade honest sentences about a grocery bill figure out fast that neither one of them is the enemy. That conversation is the only real threat to him, which is exactly why he spends every day making sure you never have it.

So have it.

Five Answers You Carry With You

Each one starts with the thing you actually hear. Your answer follows, and the last part is what you use when he keeps talking.

One. He says, “The Democrats are communists and everybody knows it.”

You say, “Show me the factory the government took. I’ll wait right here.”

Two. He says, “They want to turn America into a socialist country.”

You say, “Your grandmother’s Social Security check, the highway you drove in on, and the fire truck parked six blocks away. Call those socialism and you’ve been living in Moscow your entire life. We’ve always been a blended economy.”

Three. He says, “Give them power and they’ll take everything you own.”

You say, “Communism is a locked door with an armed guard. Socialism is a shared driveway. Nobody in Washington is coming for your house.”

Four. He says, “This country is crawling with communists and somebody finally has the guts to say it.”

You say, “The last politician who talked like that was Joe McCarthy. He destroyed innocent people for four years and his own Senate condemned him for it.”

Five. He says, “Trump is the only one standing up to the radical left.”

You say, “A man with a plan tells you the plan. A man without one hands you a name to hate. Which one is he doing?”

One note on delivery. Say your line once and stop talking. The silence after it does more work than anything you add on top.

Your Move

The lie only survives in silence. Say one of those five lines out loud the next time somebody parrots it at your dinner table, in your group chat, at the job site, or in your comments. Say it calmly. Say it with a smile. Watch how fast the room shifts when one person refuses to let a slur stand in for an argument.

Copy the five lines. Put them in your notes app. Send this to the person you love who keeps swallowing what Fox News feeds him. Then go vote in every election on your calendar, including the small ones, because the people counting on your confusion are counting on your absence even more.

The word is a weapon. You are now holding the shield. Use it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Audio

I could be wrong.

I’m putting a prediction on video with my name attached to it, and if it doesn’t happen, you get to pull this up and laugh at me. Fair. I’ve spent 40 years cross-examining witnesses and trying cases, and I have watched very confident people be very wrong in front of a jury. Confidence isn’t evidence.

So don’t take my word for it. Take the facts and check my math.

Here’s what I know.

Right now, things are a sh*t show. You know it, I know it, and every reasonable person voting knows it.

Nobody can make him answer a single question. His party holds the House and the Senate. No subpoena gets signed. No document gets pried loose. No one with real power makes him sit down and explain anything.

That protection has an expiration date. One night. November 2026.

Now come with me for a second.

It’s a Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill. The room runs cold, the way government buildings always do, and there’s a pitcher of ice water sweating a ring into the wood. The chairs are hard. Cameras click like insects. Somebody’s stale coffee is going bitter in a paper cup by the microphone.

The red light comes on. The gavel drops.

Raise your right hand.

And then the questions start. About the Epstein files. About the crypto money and where it came from. About the tax arrangement. About what you pay at the pump and what you pay at the register. About the war he keeps calling finished while the bombs keep falling and Americans keep dying.

Then Wednesday. Then the following week. Then month seven. Then month nineteen.

Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days of somebody asking him and members of his administration questions they don’t want to answer.

Now hold that against something you already know about the man.

He once walked out of an interview. Got up, pulled off the mic, and left. Over one relatively simple and straightforward question. Just one question.

So what do you think he does when they don’t stop?

He isn’t built for it. He runs on applause and he cannot take being laughed at, and his own crowd is already turning on him. A man like that doesn’t stand there and absorb it. He starts looking for a door.

He’ll dress it up, of course. Family. Golf. Mission accomplished, job well done, time to hand off the torch. He’ll say it with a straight face.

You’ll know what it actually is. It’s a man leaving before the accounting.

Here’s how it ends. He cuts a deal with Republican leadership and JD Vance. Vance becomes president the second the letter is signed. And Vance pays for that office with a Nixon-style pardon that wipes every federal offense off the board.

I’ll be straight with you about Vance too. He is not an improvement. But he doesn’t have the show. He doesn’t have the crowd. Put him in front of the country for two years without the man who created him, and by 2028 his name is a footnote.

But none of it happens on its own.

Every piece of this, the subpoenas, the hearings, the deal, the exit, sits on top of one thing. And that one thing is not in his hands, or Vance’s hands, or mine.

It’s in yours.

Flip the House and this whole chain reaction starts. Don’t, and nothing does. That’s the entire prediction, and I’m not going to pretend it’s more complicated than that.

Think of it as a line of dominoes standing on a table. Every one of them is already set. They’ve been set for months. Not one of them falls until something tips the first one, and the first one is November.

November is the first domino. Your hand tips it.

So do three things this week.

Check your registration today. It takes two minutes and people get purged from those rolls without a phone call.

Then check on the people around you. Your kid who moved apartments. Your neighbor. The guy at work who says it doesn’t matter.

Then show up early, bring one person with you, and vote like it’s your future on the line. Because it is.

Tell somebody this story. Tell them about the man who walked out over one question, and ask them what they think happens when there are seven hundred and thirty days of them.

Then ask them if they’re registered.

Mitch Jackson, Esq. | perks for paid subscribers

I’ve published two related more detailed posts on this. Links are below.

Donald Trump Will Resign in 2027. The First Domino Falls This November.

My Closing Argument to the Friends I Don’t Want to Lose

Subscribe/Upgrade

I am writing to you as a friend.

Not as a stranger on the internet. Not as some anonymous account yelling into a feed at two in the morning. I am writing as someone who has known you for years, who has sat across a table from you, who has watched you build a business and raise a family and earn a reputation you have every right to be proud of.

And I am worried about you.

I am not worried about your politics. I am worried about your name. I am worried about what people are going to say about you in five years, in ten years, at your retirement party, at your funeral, and in the quiet moment when your granddaughter looks up what you posted in 2026 and asks her mother what you were thinking.

This is not a disagreement over tax policy. This is not a fight about the border or trade deals or who should sit on a school board. Those are the arguments we have always had, and we have always come out the other side still willing to grab dinner. This is different, and somewhere deep down I believe you already know it.

Look At The Record Instead Of The Feed

Set aside every opinion you have heard on cable news. Set aside mine. Look at what courts and juries have found after hearing evidence under oath.

A Manhattan jury convicted this man on thirty four felony counts. Twelve ordinary Americans sat through weeks of testimony, examined the documents, and returned a unanimous verdict on every single count. He has been appealing ever since. The convictions stand.

A federal jury found him liable for sexually abusing a woman in a department store dressing room and then defaming her when she went public. He appealed. He lost. He appealed again. He lost again. Last month the Supreme Court of the United States, with three justices he personally appointed, refused to even hear his case. The verdict is now final. There is no court left to take it to.

I have spent decades in courtrooms. I have tried more cases to verdict than most lawyers. I want you to understand what a unanimous jury verdict actually represents. Twelve strangers, drawn at random, with nothing to gain, listened to sworn testimony and cross examination and reached agreement. Our entire system of justice rests on that process. You have defended that system your whole life. You have called it the greatest legal system in the world.

You defended it right up until the moment it returned verdicts you did not like.

The People Who Worked Beside Him Are The Ones Sounding The Alarm

Put aside all of his lying and name calling. In my opinion, here is what should stop you cold.

The loudest warnings are not coming from Democrats. They are coming from the people who sat in the room with him. His own vice president would not endorse him. His own secretary of defense called him a threat to democracy. His own national security adviser called him unfit. His own chief of staff, a retired four star Marine general who buried a son killed in combat in Afghanistan, went on the record to say this man meets the definition of a fascist and spoke admiringly of Hitler’s generals.

That general has no book to sell you and no seat to win. He gave his life to this country and lost a child doing it. He looked at the man he served and decided the risk of staying quiet was greater than the cost of speaking.

Business leaders who wrote him checks have walked away. Military officers who spent careers avoiding politics have started giving interviews. Influencers who built entire audiences on defending him have gone public with their regret and eaten the loss of followers to do it. Republican senators are breaking ranks. Longtime Republican voters are changing their registration.

Every one of those people paid a price for speaking. They spoke anyway.

Ask yourself what they see from the inside that you have been told not to look at.

Your Name Is Attached To All Of This

You need to hear this part plainly, because nobody else in your life is going to say it to your face.

Your family remembers. Your neighbors remember. Your clients and your employees and the people in your congregation remember. They remember the posts. They remember the arguments at Thanksgiving. They remember the flag on the truck and the hat in the office and the moment you told your own daughter she had been brainwashed by her college professors.

The internet does not forget, and neither do people.

I have watched a lot of you go quiet over the last seventeen months. The posts slowed down. The bumper sticker came off. The profile picture changed. I understand the instinct, and I want to be honest with you about what silence accomplishes.

Silence does not undo the record. Silence reads to everyone watching as a calculation rather than a change of heart. Going quiet protects you from a fight today and leaves the whole record standing tomorrow. The people who love you are waiting for something more than a quiet retreat. They are waiting for you to say out loud that you got this one wrong.

Silence is complicity, and complicity is what history writes down.

The Excuses Have Run Out

I have heard all of them.

You tell me you are a single issue voter. You tell me the economy matters more. You tell me you never liked the man personally and only supported the policies. You tell me both sides are corrupt and everybody lies.

I am telling you as your friend that nobody is buying it anymore.

You do not get to hand a man the power of the presidency and then disclaim responsibility for how he uses it. You do not get to cheer the demolition and then walk the site and say you only wanted the one wall moved. You handed him the keys knowing exactly who he was, because he told you exactly who he was, out loud, at every rally, for a decade.

The corruption is not hidden. The self dealing is not subtle. The contempt for the Constitution is announced from a podium and then defended by lawyers on television as though the rest of us are children. Our alliances are shredded. Our institutions are hollowed out. Our neighbors are afraid in ways I have never seen in my lifetime in this country. Families in my own town have stopped speaking to each other.

Repairing this will take years. Some of it will take a generation.

What I Am Asking You To Do

I am not asking you to become a Democrat. I am not asking you to abandon a single value you actually hold. Small government, personal responsibility, strong defense, faith, family, the rule of law. Keep every one of them.

I am asking you to notice that the man you have been defending has spent a decade betraying every item on that list.

So here is my ask, friend to friend.

Take a breath. Turn off the channel for one week. Step back from the feed for one week. No talk radio, no podcast, no rage clip served up by an algorithm designed to keep you angry enough to stay watching. Read the actual court decisions. Read what the generals said. Read what his own appointees said under oath.

Then say something. Out loud. In public. In your own words.

Tell your spouse. Tell your kids, especially the ones who stopped calling. Tell your friends at the club and your buddies in the group chat where this stuff gets passed around like gospel. Post it under your real name where the same people who watched you defend him will see you walk it back.

You do not need a long speech. Something like this will do. I supported this man. I was wrong. I looked at the evidence and changed my mind. I am not doing this anymore.

That is all. Nine seconds of courage.

Then vote like you mean it in November, and bring somebody with you.

You Have Room To Be Remembered Well

I know what I am asking costs you something. Admitting you were misled feels like admitting you were foolish, and pride is a hard thing to set down at our age. Your instinct will be to dig in and defend the position because reversing course in front of people who watched you take it feels like a small death.

Let me offer you a different way to see this moment.

Nobody remembers the person who was wrong for a while. Everybody remembers the person who had the guts to stand up and say so. Changing your mind in public when the evidence demands it is one of the rarest and most respected things a human being ever does. Your kids will remember the day you said it. Your grandchildren will tell that story about you.

There is still time. Not much of it, but there is still some.

The version of you I have known for twenty or thirty years is a decent person who got worked over by a machine built by people who never cared about you and only cared about their own power and their own money. I still believe that person is in there.

Come back. Say it out loud. Bring somebody with you.

Mitch Jackson, Esq

PS. If you have time, you will enjoy Red Hat, Blue Heart, One House: A Story of Quiet Resistance.

Send this to the one person you don’t want to lose over this, because the text takes ten seconds and the friendship took decades to build. Subscribe to Uncensored Objection and stand with the people willing to say this out loud in public, because silence never changed a single vote and your voice still can.

Subscribe/Support and Upgrade to Paid

Hey free press. America watched you sit quietly while a man stood in your house and mocked everything you say you believe in.

A convicted felon and a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser stood in front of 700 journalists and government officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and insulted you and your work. He called you names. He degraded your hard work.

He went after and insulted Kaitlan Collins, a gifted, award winning member of your profession after she won the Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure award.

You sat in your seats. You stayed silent. You’ve normalized his conduct and it’s not OK.

Nobody stood up. Nobody stopped him. This was the moment for one person on that stage, or one whole table in the room, to rise and say enough. The moment came, and you let it pass.

The Award That Told the Truth

The same night, the Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability went to reporters at The Wall Street Journal for their work on Jeffrey Epstein. They uncovered a birthday letter sent by Donald Trump to Epstein.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer presented the honor for deep investigative and accountability reporting. He told the room, “The Journal’s courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein triggered the release of the so called Epstein files, thousands of documents that might otherwise have remained hidden from the public.” He added that despite the president’s threat of a lawsuit, the Journal published a story about a provocative letter to Epstein bearing Trump’s signature.

Then Blitzer laid out how the president answered honest reporting. Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal and revealed reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off Air Force One. The reporters kept filing their stories anyway.

The Subpoenas Built to Scare You

There is more. The Justice Department subpoenaed New York Times reporters and their own family members over their reporting on Trump’s new plane from the Qatari government.

Just before the event, U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian made clear he believed the Trump administration violated protections written in plain black and white to uphold First Amendment principles. He pointed to sloppy legal work. He threatened sanctions against federal attorneys for failing to follow the law and for misleading the court in signed filings.

The whole point was to harass and intimidate reporters out of doing this kind of work. What Trump had his DOJ do is un-American.

His insults are nothing new. He seems to focus mostly on women. He does this over and over again because there are no consequences.

You Dropped to a Knee

To all the journalist and reporters reading this, watch how this man plays you. He gives you no respect, and he expects the exact response we all watched you hand him. You dropped to a knee, like everyone else in the room, and you kissed his ring.

I understand thick skin. I understand the price of access, the need to sit in the right rooms with the right people to do your job. But here’s the deal. There’s a line, and that line was crossed years ago. Have some dignity.

Stop being part of the problem. Start reporting in a way that fixes the problem. Normalizing this man, and seating people like Karoline Leavitt at the head table, is unacceptable. Grow a backbone. Do your damn jobs.

Do Better. Be Better.

The hugs, the smiles, the selfies, the easy chuckles you trade for access, all of it as this man and his administration treat you the way they do, comes down to one thing. An excuse.

You may think you’re doing your job but in reality, he’s using you as one of his tools, and he’s doing it well. You’re too close to the forest to see the trees and you need to take a step back and re-evaluate who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Here is what a free press looks like when it remembers its purpose. The next time he stands in your room and mocks your work, one of you rises. One of you says enough. When he moves on the next reporter follows up. You don’t let him off the hook. You keep chasing the story he wants buried. You protect the colleague he targets. The whole country watches how you carry yourselves.

Show us you still have a spine.

If you are reading this and you were not sitting silent in that room, you still hold power. Send this to a reporter you respect and to the newsroom you rely on. Tell them plainly what you expect from a free press in a free country. Then keep watching, and keep speaking, until they earn back the trust their silence has cost.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Related:

There Is a Government Website That Names Reporters as Media Offenders. Most Americans Have No Idea.

Reporters, Start Doing Your Damn Job Before It’s Too Late

Four New York Times Reporters. Four Doors. Four Subpoenas. Zero Crimes.

Reporters, Lean In. Read This. Then Read the Comments.

Subscribe-Support-Upgrade

After watching this event, it’s obvious to me that independent journalism has never been more important. Every dollar you invest in an Uncensored Objection paid subscription buys you something the powerful spend fortunes trying to keep off your screen: independent accountability reporting that names names, follows the money, and refuses to kiss the ring. Subscribe and upgrade to paid today, because the moment you become a supporter you stop being a bystander to the story and become the reason it gets told.

Support by Upgrading