CNN, MS NOW and Politico have filed their lawsuit against the Trump administration. They say President Trump’s decision to bar them from the White House grounds violates their First Amendment right to cover the president, and I agree. They are asking the court to reverse the ban and restore their White House press passes, and they have requested an expedited hearing so a judge rules on this quickly rather than letting it sit on a docket for months while their reporters stay locked outside the gate. That is the whole ask. You can read the complete lawsuit here.

Why This Reaches Your Kitchen Table

Think about what a press pass does. It puts a reporter inside the building where decisions about your taxes, your healthcare, your kids’ schools, and your safety get made, and that reporter’s whole job is to walk back out and tell you what happened. You are not in that room. Neither is your neighbor. The reporter in the room is how you find out. A press pass is your seat in the room, held by someone whose only job is to tell you what happened. The First Amendment protects that arrangement because the founders understood that a government nobody watches is a government that answers to nobody. Take the reporter out and the door closes on you too.

Now picture a president who hands out those seats based on how much he likes the coverage. Reporters learn fast what happens to the ones who ask hard questions, the ones who keep their passes start softening their questions to stay in the room, and within a few news cycles you are getting a version of events shaped by who was allowed through the door. That is how it works.

The lawsuit carries the names of a few newsrooms. The person with the most at stake is you. When a president decides who gets to watch him, he decides what you get to know.

Friday Night, Saturday Morning

Late Friday night I dropped a video on this story and on Saturday morning I went back to that same page and added an update along with my legal analysis. If you want the full picture of what this ban means and how the case gets argued, everything sits at this one link. Watch it. Share it.

None Of This Is Normal

Presidents have always hated some of their coverage. None of them got to lock reporters out of the building for it, because the moment that becomes acceptable, every future president of every party gets the same tool and uses it against whoever is telling the story they do not want told.

Nothing about a president banning reporters is normal, and the courts exist for moments exactly like this one. Read the lawsuit and watch my video. Then tell someone at your dinner table why a reporter’s press pass belongs to you, and share this so the people around you understand what is on the line.

This isn’t OK, and it’s not normal.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

The Report Is Out

Over the weekend I dropped a new 16-page special report. It runs about 5,000 words, and across those pages I share why I believe Donald Trump will resign the presidency in 2027, laying out all of my reasoning and the steps I see leading there so you get the full case from the first page to the last. Every step is in there. I am making it available to all paid subscribers.

Built Like A Closing Argument

I build arguments for a living. In a courtroom you do not get to tell a jury you have a feeling about something; you have to show them each piece of evidence and walk them from one point to the next until the conclusion feels like something they reached on their own. That is how I wrote this report. Every step gets its own explanation. Every conclusion sits on top of the one before it. You are free to stop at any point and tell me where you think the chain breaks. That is the whole reason for putting it in writing. Put your reasoning on paper and let the reader test every step of it.

I put my name on this one. A prediction you write down and sign your name to is a promise to be judged by it. If 2027 comes and goes with Trump still sitting in the Oval Office, you will know exactly where I went wrong, because I showed you every step along the way and hid nothing behind vague language.

Why It Sits Behind The Paywall

This one is for paid subscribers. Their support is what pays for the hours of reading and drafting that a report like this takes, and it is the reason I get to write the long version of a story when the long version is the only honest one. It is for them.

Read It Before 2027 Gets Here

Nobody prepares for what they refuse to see coming.

The report is waiting for paid subscribers right now, so upgrade if you have not already, read all 16 pages, come back, and tell me in the comments where you agree and where you think I have it wrong, because the entire point of writing it was to get you thinking about 2027 well before 2027 arrives. Nobody prepares for what they refuse to see coming. Read it, all of it, before you decide what you think.

This post puts my name on a prediction that Donald Trump resigns the presidency in 2027, with the first domino falling on November 3. It hands every free subscriber the core facts and the conclusion at no cost. Those who upgrade to paid get the complete 16 page, 5,000 word Special Report, including the full research dossier and the deeper legal analysis, and a download link emailed straight to their inbox. That support keeps the public interest commentary free for everyone else. Current paid plans already have access.

Yesterday I put my full name on a prediction. Donald Trump will resign the presidency in 2027. No impeachment and no election defeat, he quits, and the event that opens the door arrives in 44 days on November 3. Here are the facts you get free right now.

A sitting president walked off Meet the Press after 50 minutes of hard questions. Reuters has him at 33 percent in three straight polls, the lowest of his political life. Three seats flip the House and four flip the Senate, and a Democratic majority aims subpoenas and the appropriations pen at ten fronts at once until a man who has never survived ridicule looks for the exit. Then JD Vance signs a Nixon style pardon and becomes the calmer salesman of the same agenda. Those facts and that conclusion stay free for everyone on this list. A prediction with a name on it is a promise. A prediction with a case file behind it is proof.

Here is the deal for paid subscribers. You get the complete Special Report today, 16 pages and 5,000 words, with the full research dossier, the deeper legal analysis, every source so you check my work yourself, and the strategic implications for the next 12 months, all as a downloadable report you keep. Upgrade from free to a paid monthly, annual or Founding Objector, and an email lands in your inbox confirming the switch, with a special download link to the new special report. Two clicks and a link. Trial lawyers bill by the hour for this, and you get it for less than you spent on a cup of coffee this week. Free gets you the conclusion. Paid gets you the evidence, and evidence is what wins arguments at the dinner table.

Your support also keeps the core public interest commentary open to every free subscriber who needs it. Every paid subscriber keeps this work free for a voter who has no room in the budget to pay for it. Upgrade now and read all 16 pages tonight. The first domino falls on November 3. Go get the report.

Mitch Jackson, Esq. | recommendations

2009 OCTLA Trial Lawyer of the Year | 2013 California Litigation Lawyer of the Year

Paid subscribers get far more than today’s Special Report, and every one of these additional perks waiting the moment your upgrade goes through

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“Yeah, go to church. Find Jesus. Like, I mean, why is everybody so horny here?” —Lauren Boebert, speaking to reporters on April 16, 2026

On September 17, 2026, David B. Wheeler of American Muckrakers filed a Rule 15 complaint with the House Committee on Ethics against Representative Lauren Boebert. He signed it under 28 U.S.C. section 1746, which puts his own exposure on the line for every sentence inside it. Seven counts.

Here’s what everyone needs to know: Sworn words carry weight because the person who writes them can go to prison for getting them wrong. A person who lies in a document like that is looking at a federal criminal charge, and that is the weight an oath carries in American law, the same weight a witness carries when a lawyer walks them through a story in front of a jury and every word gets tested.

The complaint alleges sexual relationships with three House employees she supervised. It names former District Director Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff. It names current District Chief of Staff Raven Finegan. It names former Chief of Staff Jeffrey Small. The filing points to year-end bonuses paid from official funds totaling roughly $30,650, a $5,000 campaign payment on July 8, 2022 booked as Fundraising Consulting that the complaint describes as money for silence, and a payment of about $200,000 in March 2025 that landed after Navarro Ratzlaff said she planned to file an ethics complaint of her own.1

Whose money are we talking about

Official funds are taxpayer funds. Your paycheck feeds them. When a member of Congress moves $30,650 in year-end bonuses to employees the complaint says she was sleeping with, that is a question about your wallet and your government at the same time. Bonuses paid from official funds are your money. You are entitled to know what those payments bought. Power that spends quietly is power that expects you to stop counting. The $5,000 line item has a purpose typed right on the form, and forms like that get filed because the public was promised the truth about where the money went.

Then there is the $200,000.

Think about the timing the way a jury would. A woman tells people she is going to file an ethics complaint. Shortly after, roughly $200,000 moves. In a civil courtroom, a payment that shows up right behind a threat of exposure gets examined under a microscope, because the pattern is old and familiar and it has a name that everybody in the profession recognizes the instant they see it.

Exhibit C belongs to the public

The complaint describes Exhibit C as the complainant’s contemporaneous notes and source communications. It was not attached. It is available on request. That material needs to come out, and the House Committee on Ethics has the tools to make it come out, along with the sworn testimony of every person named. Produce it. Notes written at the time an event happens are the kind of evidence trial lawyers build cases around, because memory fades and contemporaneous writing does not. Exhibit C sitting in a filing cabinet helps no one. Under oath it becomes evidence.

The theater already taught us this lesson

On September 10, 2023, Boebert was removed from the Buell Theatre in Denver during a performance of Beetlejuice for vaping and recording, and the incident report added disruptive behavior. She told the public she got tossed for singing too loudly.

Then the surveillance video came out later and showed her and her date groping each other above and below the waist. She lied to to everyone about what happened until the video dropped and then she apologized. An apology timed to the release of the tape belongs to the tape. When a record exists, the record settles it. That is why Exhibit C must come out.

Why this rule exists

Rule XXIII, clause 18(a) bars a member from having a sexual relationship with an employee she supervises, and consent is no defense. The House wrote it that way on purpose. Picture the staffer whose rent, health coverage, and next job reference all run through one person’s signature. Saying no to that person is a fantasy the rule refuses to entertain. Add bonuses drawn from public money into the same relationship and you have the exact arrangement the rule was built to stop, because the moment intimacy and payroll authority sit in the same hands, every dollar that moves afterward carries a question nobody inside the office is positioned to answer honestly.

Open the subcommittee

Rule 19 gives the Committee an investigative subcommittee with subpoena power and sworn testimony. That is the machinery. Use it. Demand the payroll records, the bank trail behind the $200,000, the invoices behind that $5,000 consulting entry, and testimony from every employee named in the filing.

Call your representative and say the Committee needs to open a Rule 19 subcommittee on this complaint, because a sworn seven-count filing about taxpayer money and supervisory power deserves subpoenas rather than a shrug, and because the public that pays these salaries has the standing to see what the documents actually say.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Today the President of the United States banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House because he did not like their coverage. He put it in writing and promised more outlets are next. I have practiced law for four decades, and I am telling you without any hesitation whatsoever that this is retaliation for speech, the exact thing the First Amendment was written to stop.

No court found a single story false. A man with a grudge decided who gets to stand in the room and watch him work. That is not a legal standard. That is a casting call.

Presidents come and go. The First Amendment outlasts every one of them only if you refuse to let it be taken.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Saturday morning thoughts

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote that to Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787, years before he ever held the presidency, which is exactly why it lands as principle instead of grievance. He understood the bargain before he had anything to lose by it. A leader who can pick which reporters watch him answers to nobody.

This morning MS NOW journalists were turned away at the door. That is what Moscow does. That is what Pyongyang does. The government decides who holds the notebook, and the public gets handed a version instead of the truth. The White House is not his house. We pay for it. Those reporters stand in that room on our behalf, and he threw them out because they embarrassed him.

Now look at the Republicans asking for your vote in these midterms and count how many of them have said a word. I am not going to tell you the count is zero, because I cannot verify a silence that complete. I will tell you this. Every single one of them should be asked, on camera, before a ballot is cast, whether a president may throw out reporters he dislikes. A yes tells you they will sell the First Amendment for a seat. A shrug tells you the same thing with worse manners.

One more Saturday update. My avatar Jill and I dug into the law, the cases, and the facts until we had a real answer.

Here’s the thing. I’m out of the office today, and that does not mean you wait. I asked Jill to walk you through exactly what we found.

Hit play and let her take it from here. You are going to walk away knowing more about what’s going to happen next than most people in Washington.

Try this at your job tomorrow.

Show up to your shift at the restaurant on a packed Friday night, tell the manager your section “has done its work,” and drive home for seven weeks. Leave the tables seated and the tickets hanging in the kitchen window. Tell them to text you if the cooks get their act together.

Try it as a long-haul trucker. Park the rig in Barstow with the load still on it, text dispatch that the truck is “second most productive in company history,” and take October off.

Try it as a public school teacher. Cancel the last two weeks of September, cancel Thursday, and tell the principal you need the time to talk to parents about what a great teacher you are.

Try it as a contractor with a customer’s kitchen torn down to the studs. Tell the homeowner you’ll be back in November. Tell them you’ll come back on 48 hours’ notice if the plumber shows up first.

You know exactly what happens next. Security walks you out. Your badge stops working before you hit the parking lot. The termination letter beats you home. Nobody asks for your side.

Now look at what Mike Johnson did Wednesday. He canceled Thursday’s votes, cut the week short, and sent the House home until after the November midterms. Seven weeks. He had already erased the last two weeks of September so members could campaign. By Republican Ralph Norman’s count, the House has now scrapped at least 63 scheduled working and voting days this Congress, nine of them this month. Norman called it unacceptable. He was being polite.1

You pay each rank-and-file member $174,000 a year, and the Speaker, Mike Johnson, makes $223,500. You pay for the marble, the staff, the security detail, the flights home. Here is what was on the desk when they left.

A country paying $4.37 a gallon, up more than a dollar in twelve months, and over six dollars if you live in California. Grocery bills that never came back down. A war in Iran the public has soured on. A government that cannot pass a budget without a stopgap and cannot hold a vote without checking the polls first.

And inside the building, the work they were paid to finish. Thomas Massie’s privileged resolution to impeach Pete Hegseth, which required a floor vote by Thursday under the House’s own rules. A letter from more than 100 House Democrats asking Johnson to stay in session and pass AI safeguards. A bipartisan sexual misconduct task force finished with feedback and ready to write the bill this month. And, by Johnson’s own count, about 700 House-passed bills gathering dust in the Senate.

That is the in-box. That is what “the House has done its work” looks like. Any employee in America who left that pile on the desk and drove home for seven weeks would come back to a cleaned-out locker and a security escort.

And these clowns all work for you. They work for me. We pay their salaries with our tax dollars.

I have tried cases for four decades. When opposing counsel asks for a continuance the week before trial, the judge does not ask why. The judge already knows. The case is weak and the lawyer wants time. Same rule on Capitol Hill. You send the team home when you cannot afford the vote.

The food server cannot leave the restaurant. The trucker cannot abandon the load. The teacher cannot skip the month. The contractor cannot ghost the homeowner. Every one of them answers to someone, and every one of them gets fired for a fraction of this.

Republicans hold the majority. They set the calendar. They control the floor. Every canceled day carries one signature, and it belongs to the Speaker. Full stop.

So when a candidate knocks on your door this fall talking about hard work and getting things done, ask them when they left Congress in September. Ask them when was the date of their last recorded vote. Then ask who told them to go home.

Then remember that on November 3, you are the one holding the termination letter.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

I will never leave work sitting on my desk while there is still a story to write and an issue, story or name that needs calling out. If you want the facts and a straight explanation of what is really going on, you are in the right place at the Uncensored Objection Substack newsletter and community, so subscribe and support the work.

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More than $13 billion has moved through accounts the U.S. government controls. Nobody in Washington will show you the balance.

In the everyday world, imagine hiring a trustee to hold your money. The trust document says the money is yours and the trustee holds it “solely in a custodial capacity.” Then the trustee goes on television and tells the country your money paid for his own project many times over. To the victor belong the spoils, he says.

You would fire that trustee before the broadcast ended. You would demand a full accounting by the end of the week. If he refused, you would probably hire my firm and be in court on Monday.

Now replace “trustee” with the United States Treasury. Replace “your money” with Venezuela’s oil revenue. Replace “television” with Air Force One and a Las Vegas casino stage.

This is where we are in September 2026, and the paper trail is worse than the speeches.

How the money got here

On January 3, U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Three days later, Trump announced that Venezuela’s interim government would hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to be sold at market price, and that the money “will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America.” The Energy Department said it had engaged the world’s leading commodity marketers and key banks to execute the sales, with proceeds settling in U.S.-controlled accounts.

Then came the legal scaffolding. On January 9, Trump signed Executive Order 14373. The order declares a national emergency [national emergency?] and creates a legal regime protecting Venezuelan oil revenues held in designated Treasury accounts from attachment or other judicial process, centralizing U.S. government control over any transfers. It directs the Treasury Secretary to hold the funds in a “custodial and governmental capacity” and to follow disbursement instructions from the Secretary of State.1

Treasury licenses followed. Buyers could purchase Venezuelan oil, with one condition: payments cannot go directly to sanctioned Venezuelan entities such as PDVSA, but must be sent instead to a special U.S.-controlled account. Washington permits the trade. Washington holds the cash.

The volume exploded. Tanker-tracking data put U.S.-controlled exports at $600 million in January and about $3.7 billion in April alone. By July, the Financial Times calculated the administration had collected more than $13 billion. Asked about that number aboard Air Force One, Trump answered, “I think even more than that.” No official figure exists.

Where the money sits

The custody path has moved once. The administration initially deposited $500 million in sales to an account in Qatar that was controlled by the U.S. government, then set up a Treasury account and stopped sending money to Qatar. Energy Secretary Chris Wright gave the purported reason plainly: Venezuela owes so many creditors that a quickly opened U.S. bank account risked being frozen.

The Qatar chapter never closed on paper. Rubio testified in January that $300 million had flowed through the Qatar account and been disbursed to Venezuela, while another $200 million was “still sitting” there. The next month, Wright said the full $500 million had been transferred. The administration has yet to provide a public accounting of the Qatar account.

Rubio told Congress in June that the money is held in a Citibank account and that “every single disbursement is audited by KPMG.” Treat that as a claim, not a finding. Nobody from KPMG has confirmed it publicly, and no findings exist in the record. The State Department has not published either the written agreements or the results of the audits.

Here is what has been publicly disclosed about outflows. State Department official Michael Kozak told Congress in April that around $3 billion had been disbursed for Venezuelan government salaries, oil industry supplies, and other approved uses. Venezuela’s own transparency website lists one entry, a $300 million transfer in March. The U.S. sent $386 million in disaster relief after the June 24 earthquakes. Kozak did not know how much money remained in the U.S. Treasury accounts. Treasury has not released account balances, audit reports, detailed disbursement records, or information on management fees.

The executive order authorizes Treasury to submit six-month reports to Congress. No such report appears to have been sent.

Who owns it

Read the executive order. The funds are sovereign property of Venezuela held by the United States in a governmental custodial capacity. They are exempt from private claims by judgment creditors or commercial actors. The order exists to shield the assets from creditors pursuing an estimated $170 billion in claims from Venezuelan defaults and expropriations.

Ownership and control are two different things. Treasury holds the money, the Secretary of State decides authorized disbursements, and Venezuela cannot move the funds as if it had unrestricted access to an ordinary bank account. Rubio described the mechanism as Washington defining allowable expenditures while Caracas submits budget requests.

There is precedent for shielding the money. In 2003, President Bush issued an executive order protecting Iraqi oil revenues from creditor lawsuits. What is unprecedented is the United States assuming a decisive role in determining how another country’s sovereign revenues may be used. Congress has asked Treasury Secretary Bessent for the specific statutory authority Treasury is relying on to custody and exercise control over Venezuela’s sovereign assets. He agreed to provide it in February. The lawmakers are still waiting.

The contradiction in one paragraph

On August 5, Trump told a Las Vegas crowd, “We paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times. It’s the old fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils.” His own executive order, signed seven months earlier, says the United States holds this money solely as a custodian and owns none of it.

Both statements cannot be true. Either the President is misdescribing a fiduciary arrangement his own lawyers drafted, or the arrangement operates differently from what the order says. A trial lawyer cross-examining that witness would need one question.

What you do with this

The Government Accountability Office has confirmed it is reviewing the fund and will examine the roles of State, Treasury, and Energy, as well as contractors involved in administering the fund. That report is the next document that matters.

Until it lands, do four things. Read Executive Order 14373 yourself. It runs a few pages and it is the controlling document. It’s in the footnotes below.

Write down the two numbers nobody has produced: the current balance in the Treasury-controlled account, and the total sold to date. Ask your representative for both, in writing, and ask for the written agreement Bessent promised.

Custodians account for the money. Owners spend it. Washington has to pick one.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Judge Luttig’s Article

Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig has laid out an extraordinary hypothetical for January 2027: If Democrats win control of the House in the 2026 midterms, Republican officials could attempt to prevent enough duly elected Democrats from participating in the organization of the new House to preserve Republican control.1

Although criminal liability isn’t the focus of Luttig’s article, his warning raises another serious question: What happens if people actually try to carry out this scheme? The consequences may reach far beyond a constitutional showdown. Depending on who does what, and with what intent, those involved could find themselves facing a federal criminal investigation, and potentially federal prosecution.

Luttig describes a potential scenario in which Speaker Mike Johnson replaces the House Clerk before the new Congress convenes with someone willing to omit certain certified Democratic representatives-elect from the official roll. Those representatives-elect could then seek a federal court order requiring their inclusion. Luttig goes further and considers what would happen if such an order were issued and deliberately disobeyed. In my opinion, four federal criminal statutes deserve particular attention.

18 U.S.C. §371 — Conspiracy to Defraud the United States.

This may present one of the strongest potential theories. Section 371 applies when two or more people agree to interfere with a lawful function of the United States through deceitful or dishonest means, someone knowingly joins that agreement intending to further it, and a conspirator commits an overt act.

No theft of government money is necessary. If prosecutors could prove that officials secretly agreed to manipulate the House’s organization through knowingly false representations, fraudulent records, deceptive manipulation of the official roll, or other dishonest means, §371 could potentially apply.

The critical words are prove and dishonest. Hardball politics or even constitutionally questionable conduct does not automatically become a §371 felony. Prosecutors would need evidence establishing the agreement, deceitful or dishonest means, criminal intent, and an overt act.

18 U.S.C. §241 — Conspiracy Against Rights.

This statute makes it a crime for two or more people to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate someone in exercising a right secured by the Constitution or federal law. The Supreme Court has recognized that federal voters possess a protected right not simply to cast their ballots, but to have those ballots honestly counted and given their full value without fraudulent dilution or distortion.

That creates a serious legal question under Luttig’s hypothetical. If voters lawfully elect a representative and conspirators intentionally use fraud to prevent that certified representative-elect from participating in the organization of the House, prosecutors could argue that the conspiracy effectively nullified the voters’ constitutionally protected choice.

There is an important caveat: Supreme Court voting-rights cases such as United States v. Classic and Anderson v. United States involved fraudulent interference with voting or vote counting. They did not decide whether §241 reaches the precise post-election congressional-seating maneuver Luttig describes. So §241 presents a plausible prosecutorial theory, not a settled conclusion.

18 U.S.C. §401 — Criminal Contempt.

This becomes much more straightforward if a federal court enters a clear, lawful and enforceable order requiring an official to perform a particular act.

Section 401 gives federal courts authority to punish willful disobedience of their orders. If litigation reached a federal court and an official were clearly ordered to place certified representatives-elect on the roll, deliberate refusal to obey that order could expose that person to criminal contempt proceedings. Again, liability would depend upon the validity and clarity of the order and proof that the violation was willful.

18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2) — Obstruction of an Official Proceeding.

This possibility requires special caution. Congressional proceedings fall within the statute’s definition of an “official proceeding.” But in Fischer v. United States, the Supreme Court substantially narrowed §1512(c)(2), holding that prosecutors must establish that a defendant impaired, or attempted to impair, the availability or integrity of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding.

That distinction matters. Simply interfering with Congress is not necessarily enough. If conspirators intentionally falsified, corrupted, withheld, or otherwise impaired the integrity or availability of the official roll, certifications, or other records or things actually used to organize the House, prosecutors could investigate whether §1512(c)(2) applies. Whether Luttig’s hypothetical conduct would satisfy Fischer would depend heavily upon precisely how the scheme was carried out.

There is also major Supreme Court precedent supporting the underlying constitutional issue. In Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court held that the House could not exclude a duly elected representative who satisfied the qualifications for membership established by the Constitution.

And there is another constitutional complication: the Speech or Debate Clause. Members of Congress cannot be prosecuted on the basis of protected legislative acts such as their votes, speeches, or legitimate committee activity. The Supreme Court has made that protection clear. At the same time, the Clause does not create blanket immunity from federal criminal law for everything a member does.

That distinction could become decisive. A prosecutor could face serious constitutional barriers to using a member’s actual House vote or other protected legislative acts as the basis of a prosecution. Agreements, communications, fraudulent activity, pressure on nonlegislative officials, manipulation of records, or other conduct outside the protected legislative sphere can present a different question.

Moving Forward

None of this establishes that anyone has committed these crimes. Luttig is describing a potential future constitutional crisis, not documenting a completed criminal conspiracy. But if officials actually agreed to use deception or fraud to prevent certified representatives-elect from taking their constitutionally authorized places in the House, the consequences could extend well beyond a political dispute.

They could trigger a federal criminal investigation. The FBI could investigate potential federal offenses, and the Department of Justice could seek charges through the appropriate U.S. Attorney’s Office or DOJ component. Because much of Luttig’s hypothetical centers on Congress and events in Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia could be a potential venue for offenses committed there, although venue would depend on the particular charges and conduct.

Whether Republicans or Democrats control the House or Senate would not determine whether these federal crimes exist or whether DOJ possesses authority to investigate them. Congressional control could, however, dramatically affect committee investigations, subpoenas, hearings, referrals, congressional oversight, and most importantly in Luttig’s scenario, the organization and operation of Congress itself. Ultimately, criminal charges would be brought by federal prosecutors, and guilt or innocence would be decided in federal court, not by a vote of Congress.

Mitch Jackson, Esq. | Resources

I’ve tried cases for 40 years and any judge who did either of those things would have been off the bench before lunch. Trump’s lawyers keep filing cases built on claims that have already failed in court, and compromised judges keep rewarding them with votes. As an American, I refuse to accept that, and you shouldn’t either.

In this video I walk you through what the Court actually ruled, why the fraud story behind the order collapsed every time someone checked, why Alito and Thomas are biased and compromised, and the two-step playbook you can use the next time somebody tells you your vote doesn’t count. Your ballot, your money, your Court. Watch to the end, then share this with one person who needs to hear it and tell me in the comments what you think.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Related: See, Nine People. Decades of Power. One Fix for the Supreme Court Most Americans Already Want.

Not Just Another Monday

Today in Houston, the Trump administration plans to tell the world that America will no longer limit the climate pollution pouring out of power plants that burn coal and gas. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will make the announcement at a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum standing beside him. If the rule survives in court, it wipes out the most significant climate protections of the Obama and Biden years and stands to block future presidents from regulating these emissions at all.

The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide in this country, responsible for nearly a quarter of our greenhouse gas pollution. If American power plants were their own nation, they would rank as the fifth largest climate polluter on Earth. The rules being erased would have cut a billion metric tons of carbon by 2047.

Follow the Money to Mar-a-Lago

In April 2024, Trump hosted roughly twenty oil and gas executives for dinner at his Florida club and, after hearing them complain about environmental rules, made them an offer that witnesses later described as blunt and transactional: raise one billion dollars for my campaign, and I will erase the regulations you hate, because what you save in taxes and legal costs will dwarf what you spend on me. He called it a deal. He meant it.1

The industry paid. Disclosed giving to his campaign and allied PACs reached at least 75 million dollars. Fossil fuel interests put another 11.8 million into his inauguration. One pipeline company and its CEO alone had sent 25 million dollars to his main super PAC by last fall, at a time when he is barred from running again. Republican lawmakers who took the same money passed a tax package handing oil and gas companies 18 billion dollars in incentives and cut support for clean energy in the same bill. Zeldin’s own agency put a price tag on this rollback, estimating it saves the power sector 1.2 billion dollars a year, about 19 billion over two decades. Your lungs, your kids’ asthma inhalers, the flood insurance bill, and the hotter summers ahead did not make it into that math.

Big Oil bought influence over the White House and over the Republican lawmakers who cheer each rollback, and every American who breathes gets to cover the cost. Profits today, and the bill lands on children who never got a vote.

Your Move

The courts will get their shot, and very experienced, well-meaning lawyers are already lining up to argue that the Clean Air Act still requires this agency to regulate carbon, even after the administration scrapped the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health. You get your shot too.

Call your representative and your senators (202-224-3121) and ask them one plain question: how much did the fossil fuel industry give you, and what did you give back? Share this with the people at your dinner table who still think this is about cheaper electricity. Then vote like the air your grandchildren breathe depends on it, because it does.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Talerico explains that Elon Musk and the president’s dark money super PAC have poured tens of millions of dollars into Texas because they are terrified of a campaign funded by working people chipping in a few dollars at a time. He describes what Jesus would say on the Senate floor to men who cut food assistance for the hungry, kicked the sick off Medicaid, deported the stranger and his family, and handed the savings to billionaires. He names the real welfare queens as the giant corporations that pay nothing in corporate taxes. He lays out how his opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, grew his net worth 7,000 percent on a $150,000 government salary, owns 15 homes in a state where most families struggle to afford one, was impeached by his own party for bribery, was reported to the FBI by his own staff, and stole a fellow lawyer’s thousand dollar pen at a courthouse metal detector. Every answer lands clear and calm. Give yourself permission to stop scrolling and watch the whole thing.

Now picture a country led by people like this. Picture leaders who read, who listen to the person in front of them, and who explain themselves in plain English because they know what they believe. Picture a Senate where a hard question gets a straight answer. Picture the world that follows, where the people writing the laws spend their energy lowering the price of groceries and healthcare because that is why they ran.

Talerico said people power beats voter suppression every time, and he is right. That is where you come in. Share this video with your family and your friends, the ones who vote and the ones who gave up years ago, because a conversation like this one changes minds in a way no ad ever will.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Straight answers, no script, no corporate money, the same standard Talerico brings to the campaign trail is the standard Uncensored Objection brings to every article about the people running your government. Subscribe today and become a free or paid supporter, because independent legal commentary that names names and shows the receipts only survives when readers like you read, share and fund it.

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These are my Sunday morning thoughts, and I want to start with the belief that sits underneath everything else I write. We live in the greatest country in the world and in the history of this planet. I mean that.

The noise is real. The hateful talk from some corners is real. So is the misguided corporate influence that puts profits ahead of people and rewards rage and hatred and starves empathy and kindness. I see all of it, and I still believe that most Americans are good people who want the same things for their families and their friends that you want for yours, which is a safe home, honest work, a fair shot, and a future worth handing down.

Freedom takes work.

Power and money create serious problems when they drive decisions that serve a few at the expense of the many. That is not an accident and it is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business model. Flood the zone with enough outrage, enough fear, enough half-truths repeated by people who never checked, and eventually you stop trusting your own eyes, you stop talking to your neighbor, you stop showing up, and the small group of people who profit from your exhaustion gets to make every decision that shapes your life while you scroll. The daily noise wears you down. I get that. I feel it too.

Here is what they miscalculated. You are harder to fool than they think. You know when a paycheck stops covering the groceries. You know when a family in your town gets taken in the middle of the night. You know when someone in power tells you the sky is green and dares you to say otherwise. The people I talk with every week, my clients, my friends, folks I meet in line at the hardware store, see this clearly, and clear sight is the beginning of power. Every time you say the quiet thing out loud at the dinner table, every time you send an article to someone who needed it, every time you refuse to let a lie stand unchallenged in your own living room, you take a piece of that power back. That is why I feel hopeful about November.

Why November Matters

Based on the people I talk with, my clients and the friends whose judgment I trust, I believe the November midterms are one of the most important elections of my lifetime, and if you press me I will tell you they are the most important, period. Here is why.

Think of Congress as the referee in a game. Right now the referee has walked off the field, and one team calls its own fouls, which means it calls none at all. A new Democratic majority, and I hope that includes both the House and the Senate, puts the referee back on the field with a whistle that works.

Start with subpoena power and oversight power. Those tools let elected representatives force answers and hold wrongdoers accountable. The credible threat of future oversight keeps bad actors in line going forward. When decisions carry consequences, people pause and usually make better choices. Decisions, right now, carry no consequences at all.

Next comes control of the purse strings, which lets Congress do its job on how your tax dollars get spent. That includes the money flowing to ICE, the wider immigration crackdown, the masked men and women operating in our cities, and the funding of wars like the war in Iran that Congress never authorized or approved.

A new majority also puts the separation of powers back into operation. Three equal branches, each one checking the others. That is the whole design, and the current majority in Congress does not know what it means.

Some of You Asked Why I’m So Loud

Fair question, and here is the honest answer. I’ve had a great life. There is nothing this administration or anyone in it will do that harms me personally. I’m set. I have little to worry about.

I became a lawyer to help people and to protect people. That is the whole reason. This fight belongs to all Americans. It belongs to my family and my friends, to my kids, and someday to my grandkids. The country I want for them is a better one than the one handed to me. Trump and his administration have turned back, or tried to turn back, the hands of the clock to a time when anger, fear, hate, and yes, racism ran the show, and my mission right now is to do everything in my power to keep that from happening. If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you feel the same way.

Your First Step

Make sure every person you know is registered to vote, then make sure every one of them shows up and votes in the midterms, because the loudest voice in a democracy belongs to the people who bother to use it, and silence hands the microphone to someone else. That is step one. After that, we work together to do the right thing in the right way, and by necessity that includes every American.

I said it at the top and I will say it again. This is the best country and the best place in the world to live, and we keep it that way by taking back majority control of Congress in November, so share this with someone who needs to hear it and go check your voter registration today.

Mitch Jackson, Esq. | kind words from others

Subscribe to Uncensored Objection and stand with this community, because the people who stay informed are the people who show up, and the people who show up are the ones who decide what happens to this country in November. Your support keeps this work independent and puts the facts in your hands before the noise gets to you.

Democrats need a net gain of three House seats and four Senate seats on November 3, and the new majority takes office January 3 with subpoena power and control over every federal spending bill. I walk you through 10 positive changes that land on your kitchen table, including your premiums, your local ER, the war with Iran, troops in American cities, your grocery bill, and more.

In the last midterm, more than half of eligible Americans stayed home. We can’t afford to let that happen in November.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Related written post (August 19, 2026): The Midterms Change Everything. Here’s What Happens on January Third.

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Two minutes at the top

On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, Hunter Biden turned the most famous laptop in American politics into a crypto token called $LAPTOP on a blockchain affiliated with Coinbase, with a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens. Then the chart went wild. Within about two minutes, trading feeds showed a price near $200. By this morning the same token sold for less than $1.00, a fall of about 99 percent.

That $200 price came out of a nearly empty pool, with roughly $48,000 of liquidity, the cash available for trades, sitting behind it two minutes after launch. Multiply $200 by 1 billion tokens and you get a $200 billion price tag that no real money ever filled. It works like selling one baseball card for $200 and then claiming every card in your shoebox is worth $200 too.

Most traders got burned

One early count found about 80 percent of traders lost money, 12,151 losing wallets out of 15,206. One trader spent about $200,000 on 919 tokens at an average near $218 apiece and ended up holding coins worth about $3,000.

That is a house down payment shrinking to the price of a used laptop in one day.

It’s reported that the project gave away 100 million free tokens on launch day, 10 percent of the supply, sending 20 million of them to people who had lost money betting on $TRUMP and 80 million to qualifying subscribers of the Where’s Hunter Substack. Recipients were free to sell. Two brand new wallets each claimed 4,276 tokens and sold them for about $404,000 and about $243,000. Nobody has shown who controls those wallets.

Hunter’s been clean and sober for 7 years

Hunter Biden has been sober for seven years, which puts the start of his recovery back in 2019. The laptop files and the ugliest photos MAGA Republicans keep waving around come from the years before that, when he was deep in addiction, so every time they use that old material to describe him today, they get the man wrong by more than half a decade. Give him credit for that. Staying sober for seven years and rebuilding his family relationships took grit, and he earned every day of it. That credit goes in one column, and this week’s terrible meme coin decision goes in another, where it gets judged on its own.

His own words

The day before launch, Hunter posted a note on X calling $LAPTOP a way to reclaim the laptop story after seven years sober, and he said 30 percent of the supply was locked to real world events, headed for a burn or a charity and out of his hands for good. He pledged 50 million more to charity. He also offered a warning. Nobody should expect him or anyone else to make the token more valuable for them, he wrote.

After the crash, he posted again and took on the headlines calling his coin a rug pull, crypto slang for insiders cashing out and leaving buyers stuck. He blamed thin liquidity and predatory snipers. The team allocation, he said, stayed locked, and nobody on his side sold or even had the ability to sell. He insists he personally has not made a single dollar.

Following the money

Critics went straight to the blockchain. A community note on Hunter’s post claims a project multisig wallet, a shared account that needs more than one key to move money, received 100 million tokens before launch and sold about 42.5 million of them, and that claim sits in open dispute with no court finding behind it.

One onchain analyst traced about $4 million in early sales to wallets that received tokens from the team’s shared accounts before launch, including about $2.34 million from a 2.5 million token batch that left an airdrop account on September 8. The analyst says the public wallets belonging to Hunter and the issuer show $0. The contract itself has a fixed supply and passed an outside audit with no critical findings, so he puts the problem in how the tokens were structured and handed out.

YouTube channel investigative journalist and internet sleuth, Stephen Findeisen, aka Coffeezilla and Voidzilla, did a great job with his 9 minute overview:

Why I think Hunter did it

Here is my read. Hunter wanted to take back ownership over the laptop story. For years, MAGA world swung that laptop like a club at him and his father, and I believe he saw a chance to turn his most humiliating chapter into something he owned, with money and attention riding along in the back seat. Yes, I believe he was looking to profit too. At the same time, sending free tokens to people burned by $TRUMP looks to me like a jab at Trump dressed up as generosity.

But his efforts, whatever they were, were misguided. You see, Hunter had spent a long stretch rebuilding his own life and his family’s name. He sat for candid interviews and spoke plainly about addiction and recovery. His social media posts and public statements answered years of attacks with a steady, human voice. Then came $LAPTOP.

The moment it launched on Wednesday, Hunter walked himself into the same conversation as the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a conversation that has reeked of grift and dirt from the start and leaves a stain on anyone who joins it. He tied this token to seven years of sobriety, which makes the fall hurt worse. Every Trump defender tired of hearing about those coins now has a Biden coin to wave around. Trust like the kind he rebuilt takes years to earn and about two minutes to lose.1

I’ll be straight with you. For the past year or two, Hunter’s comeback earned my respect, one candid interview and one honest post or article at a time, and I was ready to stand up and publicly back the man he was working so hard to become. $LAPTOP knocked the wind out of my sails. For reasons I still don’t understand, he climbed down into the crypto mud with Donald and Melania and started rolling around, and that is a sight nobody fighting for this country wants to see. Tell me in the comments where you land on all of this.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Subscribe to Uncensored Objection, free or paid, and you get a trial lawyer who follows the money and holds every public figure to the same standard, no matter which side they play for. A paid subscription keeps this work independent and the receipts coming, so join today and help me call out grift wherever it crawls into the mud.

Big Oil Record Profits

Exxon Mobil reported a second quarter profit of $14.5 billion for April through June, more than double the same three months a year ago and its best quarter since 2022. Chevron reported $12.07 billion, up from $2.49 billion, nearly five times over and the biggest quarter in the company’s history. Shell reported $10.82 billion, triple what it earned a year earlier. TotalEnergies doubled to $5.4 billion. Oil averaged about $96 dollars a barrel this spring, up 45 percent from a year ago, because the war with Iran turned the Strait of Hormuz into a battleground, and every one of those companies rode that barrel price straight to the best numbers posted in years.

On Exxon’s earnings call, chief executive Darren Woods said, and I am quoting him, “While we didn’t anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it.” Read that twice. They were ready to cash in on a war.

Where Your Money Did Not Go

When gas jumped this spring, none of that money came back to you. Not a dime. Wood Mackenzie, the industry’s own consultants, says the companies are holding their spending on new oil and gas production flat to slightly lower than 2025 and letting the extra cash pile up on their balance sheets, with the rest going out the door to shareholders as dividends and buybacks. Exxon alone handed shareholders $9.4 billion in the quarter. So you got no discount and no new supply. They kept it or paid it to their investors.

By late June crude had dropped more than a third from its May peak. Your price at the pump barely moved. On June 24 the President accused Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell of gouging you and said he had ordered the Justice Department to look into it. Nine days later the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission wrote a letter handing the job to the state attorneys general and asking them to investigate under their own laws. No announced federal case followed. No reported subpoenas followed. You are still paying the same price you paid the morning he made the accusation, and the man who promised you an investigation has spent the weeks since building a 400 million dollar ballroom and calling Democrats communists.

I broke this whole thing down earlier this morning on my TikTok, and if you want the short version before you read the long one, go watch it right now.

Follow the Money Backward

For his first inauguration, Chevron wrote a $525,000 check and Exxon wrote one for $500,000. In April 2024 he sat more than 20 oil executives down at Mar-a-Lago and asked for one billion dollars, calling it a deal given the taxes and rules they would avoid. The industry put more than $20 million into his campaign and the political action committees backing him, tallies that include allied groups run close to $100 million, and all in the industry spent about $219 million dollars on the 2024 election. For his second inauguration Chevron gave $2 million. Exxon and ConocoPhillips each gave a million, and Occidental matched them. On the donor list for the White House ballroom, a project now estimated at $400 million dollars, sits Harold Hamm, the fracking billionaire who founded Continental Resources.

That is the money going in. Now watch the money coming out.

His Own Brokerage Account

Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure listed between $12.5 million and $45.6 million in oil and gas stocks. His largest energy holdings were Exxon and Chevron, with Valero and Marathon Petroleum on the list too. Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee ran those holdings against this year’s share prices and found they rose about 39 percent through mid August, putting the pile between $17.2 million and $61.1 million and the gain as high as $15.5 million. Those are estimates built on the broad ranges the disclosure rules allow, and the real number sits somewhere inside them. Valero and Marathon have more than doubled since January. The same report found major producers booked about $125 billion in profit in the first half of 2026, and Americans spent about $71.5 billion dollars more on gasoline since the shooting started.

Now the trades themselves, because the filings show his accounts did far more than sit still. In the first three months of 2026, the window covering the Venezuela operation and the start of the Iran war, his accounts bought as much as $3.6 million in additional oil and gas stock, including hundreds of thousands in Chevron in the weeks after Venezuela, the one American company holding oil rights there. On March 2, the first trading day after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, his accounts bought shares in eight oil and gas companies, including $100,000 to $250,000 of Exxon on top of the $3.2 to $12.5 million he already held. On April 7, the day he announced a ceasefire, his accounts sold between $500,000 and one million dollars of Exxon. Exxon dropped six and a half percent the next day. In June, the month a peace deal was announced, his accounts logged more than 1,000 trades, including Exxon and Chevron trades and three sales of ConocoPhillips.

The White House says independent managers run the portfolio through computer models that mirror indexes like the Schwab 1000, that the accounts sit in a trust overseen by Donald Trump Jr., and that the President plays no role in any trade.1

Look, here’s the deal. I have tried enough cases to tell you what a jury does with that answer. A defendant who owns millions in oil stock, takes hundreds of millions from oil donors, starts a war that sends oil to $96 a barrel, and then watches his own account grow by up to $15 million does not get to end the conversation by saying somebody else clicks the button. The conflict is the ownership. He held the stock the whole time, and every decision he made about that war made him more money.

Why the War Story Matters

Look at what a war does to a news cycle. It buries everything underneath it. Grocery prices, the jobs numbers, the Epstein files, the names inside those files, all of it slides off the front page under a map of the Strait of Hormuz. In a courtroom we call that changing the subject, and juries are warned during jury selection and opening statements, to notice when a party does it. Meanwhile the companies that wrote the inaugural checks and sat at that Mar-a-Lago table are posting the biggest quarters they have seen in years, off a barrel price that only went up because the shooting started, and the man who took their checks holds their stock.

So count the winners. He walks away with a subject change and a fatter brokerage statement, the companies walk away with $14 billion dollars in a single quarter, and you walk away from the pump on a Tuesday morning having paid for both of them, one gallon at a time.

Enough is enough.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

This article is for general informational purposes only. It does not provide legal advice or create an attorney client relationship. Election law and immigration law change fast, and some rules depend on your state and your immigration status. These are risk reduction suggestions and not guarantees. Calm compliance does not guarantee an officer will behave lawfully, and asserting a right does not guarantee immediate release. I want you to do everything legally possible to protect your rights and your vote without putting yourself, or anyone standing next to you, in harm’s way.

A Tuesday Morning in November

You pull into the parking lot of the elementary school where you have voted for twenty years, you grab your coffee, you walk toward the door with your sample ballot folded in your back pocket, and you see two black SUVs with no plates parked by the entrance and a man in a vest with three letters on the back standing beside them. Your stomach drops. You slow down. You check your phone for a reason to stay in the car. The woman in front of you turns around and walks back to her car.

That is the whole play. Nobody has to arrest a single voter. Fear does the work.

I am a trial lawyer, and I have spent forty years watching what happens when people in charge bet that regular people do not know the rules. This November the bet is on you. So here are the rules, in plain English, for the moment armed federal agents, or any government officers, show up where you vote.

The Law Has Been Clear Since 1865

A polling place is the one room in America where the government has to wait outside.

Congress wrote this rule in the middle of the Civil War, and it has stayed on the books for 161 years because every generation since understood the danger. Federal law makes it a crime for any officer of the military, or any person in the civil service of the United States, to order, bring, keep, or control troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held. The only exception covers force needed to repel armed enemies of the United States. Break that law and you face up to five years in prison and a permanent ban from holding federal office.

Read those words again. Armed men in the civil service of the United States. That is ICE.

In 1909 Congress went back and removed a second exception that had allowed troops to “keep the peace at the polls.” Lawmakers deleted it because they understood that a president who wants soldiers at the ballot box will always find a disturbance to point at. They closed the loophole on purpose, and it has stayed closed for 117 years.

Federal law adds more walls around the voting booth. A separate statute makes it a crime for any member of the armed forces to prevent, or attempt to prevent, a qualified voter from casting a ballot through force or intimidation. The Hatch Act bars federal employees from using their official position to influence a federal election. The National Voter Registration Act makes it a federal crime to intimidate or threaten any voter, or anyone helping a person vote, which covers poll workers and the volunteers handing out water in line. The Voting Rights Act lets any voter who is intimidated go straight to court for an order stopping the conduct, and under that law you only have to prove that you were intimidated, never that the agent meant to intimidate you.

Every state also has its own law against voter intimidation. California makes it a crime, chargeable as a felony, for anyone with a firearm, or any uniformed peace officer or private guard, to be stationed at or near a polling place without written authorization from the county elections official, and it is a separate crime to hire or arrange for someone else to do it. The only carve out for officers covers a peace officer conducting official business or showing up to cast a vote. California and Colorado go further and create a legal presumption that a person carrying a weapon near election activity is intimidating voters. That presumption applies fully to federal agents. State officers doing their jobs are exempt from it.

What They Have Said Out Loud

Now hold that law up against what the people running this administration have been saying all year.

In February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters she had not heard the president discuss any formal plan to put ICE outside polling locations, and in the same breath said she was unable to guarantee it would not happen. On February 25, Heather Honey, the DHS deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, told the secretaries of state on a national call that any suggestion of ICE at polling places was disinformation. Three weeks later Markwayne Mullin sat in his confirmation hearing to run DHS and refused to rule it out, saying ICE would be sent to polling places if a specific threat arose. Steve Bannon called the ICE deployments to airports perfect training for the fall of 2026 and urged Trump to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne to surround every poll.

In May, a reporter asked Trump directly whether he would send National Guard troops or ICE to polling places during the midterms. He answered that he would do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections. In July, Todd Blanche, then the acting attorney general, brushed aside the concern in an interview about ICE and the midterms. On July 31, after a dozen senators sent a letter warning that armed federal agents at voting sites would be illegal, a DHS official wrote back that ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations, and then added that plans depend on available intelligence and are subject to change.

Then came September 1. Standing at a news conference in New York, Secretary Mullin said ICE is not there to patrol polling places, and in the next sentence said agents will enter a polling place if there is a threat to it or if they are serving a warrant on someone they have been tracking down. He said if they are serving a warrant, they will be where they need to be.

One hundred and eighty eight days of “we have no plans,” and then the man in charge of ICE announces the plan.

Here is my read. The administration keeps two stories running at once. One story, aimed at election officials and courts, says nothing is planned. The other story, aimed at you, says agents go wherever they want. The second story is the product. The first story is the alibi. When a government wants a group of people to stay home on Election Day, it does not need a single armed agent at a single door, because a rumor repeated often enough by the people in charge does the same job at a fraction of the cost and with none of the legal exposure.

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It Already Happened Twice

In January 2025, DHS scrapped the longstanding guidance that told immigration agents to stay away from schools, churches, hospitals, and polling places. The results showed up this spring.

On May 20, during early voting in the Texas primary runoff, a state trooper pulled over a blue pickup in front of the Las Palmas Branch Library on San Antonio’s West Side, an active polling site. Within minutes, plainclothes ICE agents wearing ballistic vests swarmed the truck. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar drove to the scene and told the federal agents to leave the polling place, and witnesses said the agents were already pulling out as he arrived. Nobody saw an agent approach or question a single voter.

On June 2, California primary day, voters at the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District center in Simi Valley found a black Nissan Pathfinder with no plates parked near the vote center door, an ICE vest on the passenger seat, and a masked agent standing nearby. Volunteers blew whistles, filmed, alerted their rapid response network, and notified poll officials. Park rangers walked over and told the agents they were not allowed at a voting center. The agents left after about thirty minutes and never entered the voting area.

Notice what worked in both cases. Nobody argued with the agents, nobody blocked a vehicle, and nobody got arrested for interfering, because the citizens on the scene understood that their job was to document everything and the job of the local officials with authority over the site was to show up and enforce the law. Keep that pattern in your head.

Your Rights as a Citizen at the Polls

You have the right to vote without anyone stopping you at the door to ask where you were born. No federal agent has authority to check citizenship as a condition of entering a polling place. That job belongs to the poll workers, and they do it with the voter roll and your state’s ID rules. ICE has no role in running elections. Zero.

An ICE agent in a public parking lot is allowed to ask you a question, the same way any stranger is allowed to ask you a question. You are allowed to keep walking. If an agent asks whether you are a citizen, you have the right to say “I choose to remain silent” and continue toward the door. If an agent blocks your path, touches you, takes your ID, or tells you to stop, ask one thing: “Am I free to leave?” If the answer is yes, go inside and vote. If the answer is no, you are being detained, and a detention requires reasonable suspicion grounded in specific facts about you, and the fact that you are standing in line to vote in a neighborhood the agent happens to find suspicious is a fact about the neighborhood and the agent. It says nothing about you.

Do not lie. Ever. A citizen who tells the truth about citizenship has nothing to fear from that answer, and a citizen who chooses silence is exercising a constitutional right that no agent is permitted to punish.

You have the right to stay in line. If you are in line when the polls close, you vote. If agents show up and the line scatters, get back in it. If you were turned away or intimidated, ask a poll worker for a provisional ballot and write down the time. Courts have ordered polls to stay open late when voting was disrupted, and lawyers are standing by in every swing state this year to ask for exactly that order.

You have the right to record in public. Federal agents in a school parking lot have no expectation of privacy. Film from a distance and keep your hands visible. Never step between an agent and the person they are focused on.

You have the right to report. Call 866-OUR-VOTE, which is 866-687-8683, and tell the volunteer lawyer what you saw and when you saw it. Spanish speakers use 888-VE-Y-VOTA. Tell the poll worker inside. Tell your county election office. Those calls are how a judge learns there is a problem in time to fix it.

If You Are Undocumented and Standing Near a Polling Place

You do not have the right to vote in a federal election, and you must never try. Voting as a noncitizen is a federal crime, and so is registering by falsely claiming citizenship. A single ballot is not worth deportation and a prison sentence, and no organizer, no relative, no candidate, no online post is worth listening to on that point. Noncitizen voting is already illegal and already vanishingly rare, which is exactly why the loud claims of millions of illegal votes fall apart every time a court asks for the evidence.

You do have the right to be near a polling place. Driving your citizen daughter to vote is legal. Waiting in the car is legal. Standing beside your wife in line is legal. Walking your father with the bad knee to the door is legal, and in most states you are allowed to go inside as an assistant if he needs help reading or marking the ballot, subject to your state’s rules on who qualifies. In California a voter is allowed to bring up to two people into the booth to help, and the only people barred from that role are the voter’s employer and the voter’s union representative. The Constitution protects you on that sidewalk exactly as it protects the citizen next to you. The Fourth Amendment does not check papers.

Everything I wrote in my earlier article about sidewalk encounters with ICE applies here with one added fact: the agents are standing at a place where federal law says armed federal officers are forbidden to be. Say “I choose to remain silent.” Say “I do not consent to a search.” Ask “Am I free to leave?” Ask for a lawyer. Do not run. Do not carry false documents. Do not claim to be a citizen. Do not sign anything you do not understand, and ask for an interpreter and a copy of any paper they put in front of you.

Silence keeps you from handing them evidence, and it preserves every argument your lawyer needs later. A lawful arrest will still happen, and your silence will still have been the right call.

The polling place itself changes the risk math. In San Antonio and Simi Valley, local officials arrived within minutes and made the agents leave. Poll workers, election observers, neighbors, and rapid response volunteers are watching these sites in a way no grocery store parking lot ever gets watched. You are still at risk there. You are also far less alone there than anywhere else, and witnesses will exist if something goes wrong.

Make a plan before Election Day. Decide who drives, who waits in the car, who carries the hotline number, and who has the lawyer’s number saved. Rapid response networks in most cities now run a hotline for ICE sightings, and the volunteers who staffed Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles during the raids have been training all year for November.

Police, Sheriffs, the Guard, and the Military

Local police are a different question, and the answer starts with who commands them. Your county sheriff and city police work for your county and your city. They have a duty to keep polling places safe, and in the two incidents this year they were the ones who made ICE leave. Many states limit uniformed officers at the polls unless they are responding to a specific problem, because even a friendly officer in the doorway lowers turnout among people who have learned to fear a badge. A police officer at your polling place has zero authority to ask about your citizenship, exactly like an ICE agent. The same four sentences work on either one. Use them.

The National Guard has two bosses, and the boss decides the law. When the governor commands the Guard, the federal ban on troops at the polls does not apply, and a governor is allowed to use those troops for law enforcement support. Several states have their own laws keeping the Guard away from voting sites even under state command. When the president federalizes the Guard, those soldiers become part of the United States military, and the 1865 law bars them from any place where an election is held, full stop.

The active duty military faces the highest wall of all. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 makes it a crime to use the armed forces to enforce civilian law inside the United States without specific authority from Congress or the Constitution. The Pentagon’s own 2018 directive states that troops and federalized Guard members will not conduct operations at polling places. In April, the chief of the National Guard Bureau told Congress that his troops would follow that law. And when Trump federalized the Illinois Guard and sent it toward Chicago last fall, a federal judge blocked the deployment and the Seventh Circuit kept the block in place. On December 23, 2025, the Supreme Court refused by a 6 to 3 vote to lift it, writing that the government had failed to identify any source of authority allowing the military to execute the laws in Illinois. The troops went home, and in April a judge dismissed the case because there was nothing left to fight about.

The Insurrection Act is the escape hatch people worry about. It lets a president use the military for domestic law enforcement to restore order during an actual rebellion or a breakdown of law that states are unable to handle. It does not repeal the 1865 ban on troops at the polls, and it does not create any general power to police elections. A manufactured emergency invoked on the eve of a vote would meet lawyers in federal court within the hour.

If you see soldiers or federalized Guard at a polling place, you may be looking at a federal crime in progress, and the response is the same one that worked in San Antonio: document, report, stay out of the way, and let the people with authority remove them.

In the Moment

Stay calm and keep your hands visible.

Keep walking toward the door if nobody stops you. Ask “Am I free to leave?” if someone does. Say “I choose to remain silent” and “I do not consent to a search” if the answer is no. Do not run, do not resist, do not touch anyone, and do not argue the Constitution in a parking lot. Get the agency name, the vehicle description, the time, and the faces of any witnesses, and write all of it down the moment you are safe, because a judge at two in the afternoon needs facts you gathered at eight in the morning.

Then vote. Walk inside and cast your ballot, because the entire purpose of the SUV in the lot was to make sure you did not.

Vote Before They Get the Chance

The single most effective way to beat intimidation at the polls on November 3 is to have already voted by November 2. Check your registration today at vote.gov. Request a mail ballot if your state offers one. Find your early voting dates and your nearest drop box. Return your ballot in person if you have any doubt about the mail. There are close to 100,000 polling sites in this country, and any deployment the administration dared to attempt would reach a handful of them in a few swing counties, which means the fear they are selling is designed to travel a great deal farther than the agents themselves ever will.

Then bring four people with you. Your parents, your neighbor, the coworker who says his vote does not matter, the cousin who is scared. Send them this article. Save 866-687-8683 in every phone in your house.

Call your two senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 and ask a simple question: will you publicly oppose any armed federal agents at polling places, and will you say so before November 3? Get the answer on the record.

The Closing Argument

Every fear tactic depends on the target not knowing the rules, and now you know them. An armed federal agent at a polling place is committing a crime that Congress named in 1865 and sharpened in 1909. A federalized soldier at a polling place is committing that same crime. A president who invokes an emergency to put them there will lose in court, the way he lost in Chicago.

A citizen who stands in line, says four sentences, films from a distance, and calls the hotline has done the real work of protecting this democracy, and a citizen who votes early, checks the registration, brings four people, and saves the hotline number in every phone in the house has already beaten the whole scheme before the first SUV ever pulls into the lot.

The room where you vote is the one room where the government waits outside, and on November 3 you are going to walk into it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Share this with the four people you are bringing to the polls, because a voter who knows the rules is the one thing this administration’s fear campaign was never built to survive. Then subscribe to Uncensored Objection, free or paid, and you will have an experienced trial lawyer in your corner every week with plain English answers on how to protect your constitutional rights, at the ballot box and everywhere else the government tries to test them.

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The Supreme Court already ruled the tariffs illegal. The war with Iran choked the Strait of Hormuz and spiked diesel, and diesel moves the bread to your store. Before any of it, inflation had fallen to 2.9 percent, the economy had added 15.4 million jobs, gas sat at $3.11 the week Trump took the oath, and The Economist put America on its cover as the envy of the world. The fact of the matter is that the Trump administration inherited an economy that was leading the planet, poured gasoline on it, and lit it on fire.

You already know that, because you filled up your gas tank and bought groceries this week.

Watch me take his grade apart on the record, then check it against your own receipts. When the report card and the receipts disagree, the receipts win.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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This Labor Day you paid $4.15 a gallon so the man in the Oval Office could pull $1.4 billion from crypto and sell Wall Street his next move for $100 grand a month, milliseconds before you ever see it. He’s playing you for a sucker but here’s the deal, the one thing that scares him is sitting on your ballot in November.

The Bill Comes Due at the Pump

It is Labor Day weekend, the holiday this country set aside to honor the people who build it, and in plain dollars you are paying more to fill your tank than any American has ever paid on this holiday. Gas hit an average of $4.15 dollars a gallon on Friday and is over $6.12 today where I live in Southern California. That is thirty percent higher than what we both paid last Labor Day.

Diesel hit $5.85 the same day, a record for any day in American history and more than two dollars above a year ago, and diesel is the price of everything that arrives by truck, which means your groceries, your kids’ school shoes, the lumber for the fence you keep putting off, and the parts for the car you are nursing along all cost more because of a war you never voted for.

You feel it. Trump launched the war on Iran on the last day of February, alongside Israel and without authorization from Congress, and Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz, and oil jumped, and prices at the pump have stayed high ever since. The Senate voted in June to tell him to stop. Since the first bombs fell, the higher price of gas and diesel alone has pulled more than $740 dollars out of the average American household. Think of it as a tax nobody passed.

Meanwhile, Inside the Oval Office

On June 30 the Office of Government Ethics released the president’s annual financial disclosure. It runs 927 pages. The document shows he earned roughly $1.4 billion dollars from cryptocurrency in 2025 alone, which is more than double the entire income he reported the year before. Around $635 million of that came from royalties on a meme coin carrying his name. Another $515 million came from selling tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm his sons launched with the sons of his own Middle East envoy, plus $65 million more from selling a piece of the company itself. His golf clubs and resorts added roughly $290 million on top.1

Hold that number next to the $740 dollars the war took from your family.

This is the same man whose administration writes the rules for crypto. He appointed the regulators. He pushed the bills. He hosted the dinners. Then he cashed the checks.

Sixty Trades a Day

Here is the part that should make every working person in this country furious. Between January and March of this year, accounts in the president’s name made 3,642 individual stock trades. That works out to roughly sixty trades every day the market was open. In June alone the count passed one thousand. His family says independent managers run the accounts and that Trump never touches a trade. Look at the calendar anyway. On January 6 his accounts bought between half a million and a million dollars of Nvidia stock and a smaller slice of AMD, and one week later his administration loosened export rules so both companies sold more chips to China.

In the first three months of the year, right as the Iran war began, the same accounts scooped up as much as $3.6 million dollars in oil and gas stocks, the one industry that profits when the pump price climbs. In June the accounts traded Palantir, a major government contractor, several times in the days around the announcement of a peace deal with Iran.

Then there is the subscription. Trump Media, a company in which he holds about 41 percent, now sells Wall Street trading firms early access to his Truth Social posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 dollars a month. More than ten firms have signed up. They see the president’s market moving words milliseconds before you do, and in a market run by machines, milliseconds are millions. The company insists it is selling nothing more than fast access to public data. An economics professor at NYU said out loud what the rest of us are thinking and called it insider trading by definition.

Picture a judge who owns stock in the defendant and sells tickets to the verdict before he reads it aloud. That is the arrangement. Nobody in any courtroom in America would stand for it.

Where His Energy Actually Went

Watch where a man spends his fight and you learn what he values.

He set up a fund worth $1.776 billion dollars, styled to echo the year this country was born, to pay back people he claims a weaponized government treated unfairly. Despite what Todd Blanche says, this concept is still being litigated in the courts. If it’s truly dead, why is the judge’s opinion up on appeal?

And here’s the thing you need to know. Your tax dollars fill it. First in line are the January 6 rioters he pardoned, hundreds of them, many of whom stood in a courtroom and admitted under oath that they broke the law, and most are asking for somewhere between one and ten million dollars each. His administration has gone to court to defend that fund and keep it alive after a judge froze it. He found nearly five million dollars to settle with the family of one rioter. He found the lawyers, the hearings, and the appeals to protect all of it.

Now count the hours he spent bringing down the price of your gas. The cost of your groceries. Your rent, your insurance, the bill you keep moving to the fifteenth.

That column is empty.

He fought harder to reward the people who stormed the Capitol than to lower the price of the eggs you put in your cart. The only thing you are guilty of is working yourself to the bone to make ends meet, and you got no fund, no settlement, no team of government lawyers going to bat for you. You got the bill.

Medals He Never Earned

On August 4 Trump posted a fake picture, made with AI, showing himself in a four star general’s uniform with a chest full of ribbons, standing between Patton and MacArthur. He drew the two real generals with fewer stars than himself.

The man who posted this picture took five draft deferments during Vietnam, the last one for bone spurs. You post a picture of your kids at the lake on the rare weekend you get off. He posts pictures of a war record he made up. Veterans are calling this image stolen valor, because that’s exactly what it is.

He is building a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House stood until he tore it down last fall, and the Supreme Court let the work continue over the objection of the Chief Justice. You are deciding which bill can wait another week. He has called Democrats communists more than a hundred times since June. Over the past year his administration has sent masked ICE agents into cities that voted against him and told you who belongs on your street. Your right to speak and to gather is being squeezed by the same government that holds a press conference every morning about freedom.

November Is the Verdict

You are not powerless. The midterm election is November 3, eight weeks and two days from today. A new majority in Congress gets subpoena power. It gets oversight hearings with witnesses under oath. It gets the checkbook, because no dollar leaves the Treasury without the House. It gets to say no. Two members of Congress have already written to the president demanding the names of whoever runs his trades, and a letter becomes a subpoena the day the gavel changes hands. That is what sits on the ballot.

How you spend next Labor Day depends on what you do between now and November, so check your registration this week. Help register anyone in your house who is not and bring four people you love to the polls with you.

Make sure you send people to Congress who answer to you and who don’t bend a knee to him. Because when all is said and done, the the tax nobody passed gets repealed by the one vote he has no way to cancel, and that vote is yours.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

This is your fight, and the reporting that names names and follows the money survives on readers who refuse to look away. Subscribe to Uncensored Objection today and join a community that holds this administration accountable one receipt at a time.

Related

When the lawyer and the boss tell two different stories, a judge stops taking anyone’s word and orders the paperwork. That happened Friday in Alexandria, Virginia. I’ve tried cases for 40 years and I’ve been following the story and read the details. This is the closest anyone has come to exposing who sat on both sides of the table while your checkbook sat in the middle. Watch to the end, then drop the name you expect to see on that list.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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Benjamin Netanyahu is facing two separate sets of criminal allegations at the same time, a corruption trial in Israel and an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (the ICC). In this post I am going to walk you through both, and I am going to stick to the record. Let me explain.

I’m Mitch Jackson. I’ve been trying cases for 40 years. I read the filings. Here are the facts and what you need to know.

The Israel Cases

Start with Israel. Netanyahu was indicted in November 2019. His trial began in May 2020. As of September 2026, that case is still pending. It is three cases rolled into one prosecution, and across those three cases he faces one count of bribery and three counts of fraud and breach of trust.

Case 1000 is fraud and breach of trust. Prosecutors allege Netanyahu and his wife received roughly 700,000 shekels, about $210,000, in gifts from two billionaire businessmen. In exchange, prosecutors say, he helped secure a United States visa and pushed tax legislation that one of those men stood to benefit from.

Case 2000 is also fraud and breach of trust. Prosecutors allege Netanyahu negotiated with one of Israel’s major daily newspapers for friendlier coverage, and in return he would potentially support legislation that would hurt a competing newspaper.

Case 4000 involves allegations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu was serving as prime minister and communications minister at the same time. Prosecutors allege he advanced regulatory decisions that benefited the controlling shareholder of a telecommunications company, while seeking favorable coverage from a news site tied to that same man. The indictment puts the alleged unjust enrichment at roughly $500 million at 2019 exchange rates.

So what does that carry if he is convicted? Under Section 290(a) of Israel’s Penal Law, bribery carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. Fraud and breach of trust by a public servant under Section 284 carries a maximum of 3 years. Israeli courts ordinarily run sentences concurrently, meaning at the same time, so the three fraud counts do not simply stack up to nine years.

The International Criminal Court Cases

Completely separate from the corruption trial are the charges and arrest warrant by the ICC.

On November 21, 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister. The Court found “reasonable grounds to believe” they both bear criminal responsibility for war crimes, specifically starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population. The charged crimes against humanity include murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.

The Court found reasonable grounds to believe both men bear responsibility as co-perpetrators for the starvation charge and for the crimes against humanity, and as civilian superiors for directing the attack on a civilian population. Co-perpetrator means you carried it out together. Civilian superior means you were in charge of the people who did.

The allegations and charges relate to a war that has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and injured more than 173,000, according to Gaza health authorities as relayed by the UN. It displaced 1.9 million people and caused approximately $35.2 billion in physical destruction. The ICC case will determine what portion of that suffering will legally be attributed to the crimes alleged against Netanyahu.

If Netanyahu were arrested or surrendered, he would be brought before the Court in The Hague. The Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC, spells out the procedures for surrender, an initial appearance, and possible detention or conditional release pending trial.

The ICC does not try people in absentia, meaning without the defendant in the courtroom. No trial can start while Netanyahu stays outside the Court’s reach. The 125 states that signed the Rome Statute carry an obligation to arrest and surrender him. The United States is not one of them. In July 2026 Trump ruled out any arrest.

If he were eventually convicted by the ICC, Article 77 of the Rome Statute allows up to 30 years in prison, or life imprisonment when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime and the individual circumstances of the convicted person. The Court may also impose fines and forfeiture of proceeds, property, and assets derived directly or indirectly from the crimes, while protecting bona fide third parties. Under Article 75, the ICC may also order reparations to victims, including restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation, either directly from the convicted person or through the ICC’s Trust Fund for Victims.

So here is what to watch. First, the Israeli corruption trial, still pending after more than six years, with a 10-year maximum on the bribery count. Second, custody, because until someone actually arrests Netanyahu and delivers him to The Hague, the ICC case will not move to trial.

These are the facts. Two tracks, two courts, and two very different sets of consequences.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Related: Trump Rolled Out the Red Carpet for Vladimir Putin, a War Crimes Fugitive

If you want the record on the cases and people that shape this country and the world, delivered by a trial lawyer who reads the filings instead of the headlines, subscribe to Uncensored Objection right now. Your support keeps the facts on the table when everyone else is arguing about the noise.

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There is a name for what you are watching

Political scientists have a term for the pattern unfolding in front of us. They call it institutional capture, also known as state capture. I need you to understand what the phrase means, because the moment you have it, the last nineteen months stop reading like a pile of unrelated headlines and start reading like a plan.

Capture is quiet. A leader who wants to run a democracy the way he runs a private company almost never storms the building and burns the files, because that would wake up the entire country and hand his opponents a photograph nobody would need explained to them. He does something slower. He keeps the name on the door, the badge, the letterhead, the annual budget. He brings in loyalists and pushes out the professionals who might tell him no. The mission gets pointed somewhere new, the sign out front still says Department of Justice, and the work inside now answers to one man.

Start with the lawyers

Justice enforces the law the same way no matter who sits in the White House. At least it’s it’s supposed to work that way.

Look at what happened to the people who took that seriously. Seven federal prosecutors resigned in February 2025 after the acting deputy attorney general ordered them to drop the corruption case against the mayor of New York. That June the department fired at least three prosecutors who had worked the January 6 cases, two of them supervisors, in letters that stated no reason beyond Article II and the laws of the United States.

On January 7 of this year an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a United States citizen, in Minneapolis. Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned within days over pressure to investigate Good’s widow and over leadership’s reluctance to investigate the officer who fired. Senior lawyers in the Civil Rights Division in Washington quit the same week after the division declined to open a constitutional inquiry, and more than a dozen prosecutors walked in total.

On August 8 the Senate confirmed the president’s former personal defense attorney as attorney general, fifty to forty nine, in a vote gaveled through around four in the morning. Two Republicans voted no. He had been running the department as acting attorney general since April.

That same department indicted a former FBI director last fall for posting pictures of seashells on social media. A federal judge threw the indictment out in November because the prosecutor who brought it had been installed unlawfully, and the career prosecutor who declined to bring the case had already resigned under pressure to sign it. The appeal sits in the Fourth Circuit today.

Uniforms, and who they answer to now

Our military has held to an apolitical tradition for 250 years by design, because the Founders had watched armies swear themselves to a man and follow wherever he pointed, and they built a Constitution meant to make that ending hard to reach here. Beginning on January 21, 2025, with the removal of the Coast Guard commandant one day into the term, more than a dozen generals and admirals have been fired, among them the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the vice chief of the Air Force, and the chief of the Navy Reserve. Reasons were offered for a few of those removals. For most, none were given at all.

In February 2025 the defense secretary fired the top uniformed lawyers for the Army and the Air Force and moved to replace the acting Navy judge advocate general, saying he did not think those positions were well suited to giving the best recommendations no matter what lawful orders are given. Days later he said he wants lawyers who do not exist to be roadblocks.

In August 2025 he fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, two months after that agency’s assessment found the strikes on Iran had set the nuclear program back by months, contradicting the president’s claim that the sites were obliterated. Officials gave no public reason.

The watchdogs went first

On January 24, 2025, the president fired roughly seventeen inspectors general overnight, without the thirty days notice federal law requires. The watchdogs stopped barking. More than seventy five percent of presidentially appointed inspector general posts across the government sit empty today, a figure that counts those firings along with later removals, resignations, and seats already open before any of this started. The offices left standing lost about a sixth of their workforce over the following year, and the Education Department’s oversight shop issued sixty six percent fewer reports in the first half of this year than its historical norm.

The end of the right to refuse

In February the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule stripping civil service protections from an estimated fifty thousand career federal employees, and on June 3 the president signed an order converting nearly eight thousand of them, roughly ninety seven percent in the senior ranks at grade GS 15 and above, into at will workers who serve at pleasure. No appeal rights. Their whistleblower complaints now get handled inside the agency they might need to blow the whistle on. Unions have sued, and the rule is in active litigation.

Others already ran this experiment

Orbán did it in Hungary. Erdoğan did it in Turkey, Putin did it in Russia, Chávez did it in Venezuela. Methodically, office by office, until the courts and the prosecutors and the army and the press all pointed the same direction, which was his. The goal is control. And know this fact: once these offices are captured, winning them back is brutally hard, because the people inside them serve the regime now, and the ones who would have fought it from within are already gone.

Where this argument gets tested

Give the other side its due, because someone you know is going to raise it. A president is entitled to pick his own senior team, and the Supreme Court has read the removal power broadly. Scholars who study democratic decline disagree among themselves about how much of this counts as capture.

The courts have pushed back in real ways, holding in December that the president likely lacked authority to federalize the National Guard in Illinois, throwing out the indictments of two of his most prominent targets, and taking up union suits over the civil service rule. There are dozens of other examples but you get my point. The checks, for the most part, are holding in places. The people who staff them are being replaced one office at a time, and that trend line is the thing to watch.

What you do about it this week

Name it out loud. Talk about institutional or state capture. Use plain words at the dinner table and in the group chat, and back the people inside these agencies who are refusing to bend, because there are plenty of them and they are watching to see whether anyone out here has their back.

Call your two senators and your representative by phone at (202) 224-3121. Give your name and your town, and ask where their line sits. Refuse to treat any of this as normal, because it is not.

This is a pattern that you now recognize. The pattern is what you need to break, and it starts with the midterms.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

PS- Also see my short video, How propaganda works. Why repeating a lie matters.

Subscribe free to Uncensored Objection and many of these breakdowns land in your inbox, written by a trial lawyer who reads the rulings and the resignation letters so you walk into your next argument holding the actual record. Go paid and you fund the research hours and everything else that keep this work answerable to you and to nobody I write about.

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