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‘Hunting down enemies’: The explosive whistleblower report on Trump’s DOJ

President Donald Trump’s politicized Department of Justice has abandoned major white-collar prosecutions in favor of waging legal war against Trump’s perceived political enemies. But a White House whistleblower from Trump’s first term says there will be no way to hide Trump’s lawfare from investigators when he leaves office — no matter how much paper he shreds.

“[T]he Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply,” said former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyst Miles Taylor.

Trump’s DOJ used “welfare fraud” as the “thinly veiled pretext” to launch a massive political shakedown in a state that Taylor points out is led by Democrat Tim Walz, who dared to challenge Trump for the White House in 2024. Before it was halted by a federal judge, Trump’s DOJ tried to investigate Walz for allegedly impeding the president’s immigrant crackdown.

“The true nature of Trump’s ‘anti-fraud’ plans came into view last year, as the White House pursued retribution against New York Attorney General Letitia James, the woman who won a nine-figure civil fraud judgment against Trump,” said Taylor. “In September, the president publicly demanded on social media that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Weeks later, a former White House aide indicted James for alleged ‘mortgage fraud.’”

But look to the money to see Trump’s true motivation, said Taylor.

“A White House genuinely obsessed with protecting taxpayer dollars would not be spending nearly a billion of those dollars (much of it raided from other agencies) to gild the White House and build a ballroom, or just as much to retrofit a luxury jet from Qatar. You cannot loot the treasury with one hand and call yourself its guardian with the other.”

But Trump’s presidency is already nearly halfway through. When he’s gone, he will be a powerless target.

“[W]hen power changes hands, which it eventually will, we will seek all the documents, including every criminal referral memo, target list, email between the White House and the task force, hand-written notes from the vice president’s fraud meetings, and so on. All of it will be subpoenaed and reviewed, whether by a new Congress next year or a new Justice Department after that,” said Taylor. “And guess what? They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves.”

Paperwork, emails and private notes, assured Taylor, is the lifeblood of the prosecution process.

“If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens,” said Taylor.

“That’s when the real fraud trials will begin,” he added.

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Whistleblower reveals the real goal of Trump’s 'revenge' task force

While President Donald Trump claims he’s been waging a war against fraud, one of his former officials asserts that the White House-led anti-fraud task force is really a “ruse to prosecute political foes.” This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and at the time penned an anonymous article exposing the dysfunctional inner workings of the administration.

As Taylor wrote on Thursday, according to reports from the New York Times and other outlets, the Trump administration has been leveling claims of fraud against targets ranging from immigrant-owned ice cream trucks to Democratic governors. “The goal was not to take down serious criminals,” argues Taylor. “It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he’s reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they’re governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.”

Taylor says there is a clear giveaway to the president’s intentions, writing, “As DOJ is building these types of cases, it’s simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump’s own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations. So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply.”

Trump’s actions in Minnesota, says Taylor, offer a clear example. As he writes, “Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024. Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn’t need gun-toting agents. While Trump was forced into retreat, his team first tried to coerce state leaders to forfeit their voter rolls, which critics pointed out had precisely nothing to do with the original fraud claims. Of course it didn’t; from the start, the whole exercise was about political leverage.”

“To understand what Trump’s task force is actually meant for,” says Taylor, “just look at how it’s being managed. The DOJ’s new fraud division doesn’t report to some expert in criminal investigations. It reports directly to Vice President JD Vance, an arrangement without precedent, especially since it effectively circumvents the Attorney General himself…In June, he personally made the criminal referral against Walz. Asked where the ‘war on fraud’ goes next, Vance answered: California. (Surely it’s just a coincidence that they’re going after the blue state led by the man Trump most fears will try to succeed him.)”

Taylor notes other examples, such as charges of mortgage fraud leveled against New York Attorney General Letitia James — who had previously won a nine-figure civil fraud case against Trump — Senator Adam Schiff (D-NY), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. According to Taylor, “‘Fraud’ has become the administration’s codeword for ‘revenge.’ The term is a respectable-sounding wrapper for criminalizing the political opposition. And now that Trump’s team has systematized the plan with a task force — making the issue a top priority for all U.S. attorneys in the country — we will see more and more cases brought, like the recent cases against left-leaning nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The reality, asserts Taylor, is that Trump’s White House is rampant with fraud, the scale of which will be exposed by a future Democratic administration. While Trump and his allies will attempt to conceal their crimes, “They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens. That’s when the real fraud trials will begin.”

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Whistleblower reveals how Trump 'sold out' to US adversaries

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly upended U.S. foreign policy over the course of his second term, a whistleblower from his first administration warns that over the past few days, the commander-in-chief may have “sold us out to our enemies” once and for all. This is according to Miles Taylor, who during Trump’s first term served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and famously revealed the existence of a resistance group within the administration. “The president,” wrote Taylor on Monday, “is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.”

“Start with Korea,” said Taylor. “On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is ‘inappropriate and hostile’ to our friends in North Korea, which he called ‘unthreatening and respectful.’ Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so ‘unthreatening’ that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so ‘respectful.’ By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.”

“Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific,” wrote Taylor. “This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a ‘grand bargain.'"

Instead of opposing China, warns Taylor, “his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire.”

“Finally,” says Taylor, “take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack.”

“Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening,” Taylor predicts. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.”

With all this in mind, Taylor arrives at a grim conclusion, writing, “Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.”

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Trump’s 'tin-foil hat' plan to seize the midterms is underway: whistleblower

With the midterms right around the corner and President Donald Trump relentlessly pressing his conspiracies about voter fraud, an insider and whistleblower from his first term has revealed that his “tin-foil hat” plan to “interfere in the democratic process” is underway. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration and exposed a number of its secrets. On Wednesday, he sounded the alarm that a plot Trump began nearly a decade ago is coming to its most dangerous phase.

Over the course of the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are “no plans” to do so without ruling it out. But “evidently,” writes Taylor, “all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”

Taylor is referencing new bombshell reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday, writes Taylor, “that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.” Despite the fact that they are being intentionally obscure about this, says Taylor, “the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for ‘illegal’ registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.”

It’s all part of a wider effort, asserts Taylor, to convert “the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build ‘approved’ lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.”

All of this began under Trump’s first term, according to Taylor, who writes, “I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.”

He notes that thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president “seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot.” For example, “the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of ‘noncitizen voters.’ But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185, then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.”

According to Taylor, “Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”

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Trump wiretapping enemies is 'breathtaking abuse of power': whistleblower

President Donald Trump’s attempt to surveil the phone of former FBI Director James Comey has prompted much discussion as to how far the former is willing to go to punish his enemies. According to a whistleblower from his first term, however, Trump has turned the “ intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying.”

This is the assertion of Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, during which he famously penned an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance group within the White House. As Taylor explains, last week, it was revealed that while attempting to secure charges against Comey for posting an Instagram photo of shells spelling the numbers “86 45” — which Trump claims were a call for assassination — the president, via the DOJ, ordered the Secret Service to begin tracking and surveilling Comey’s phone, which agents recognized as problematic.

As Taylor elaborates, “The Secret Service’s own supervisor put his objection in writing. Pinging the phone ‘could be done,’ he warned, ‘but it would be a bad idea.’ Warrantless emergency tracking requires an imminent threat to life, and ‘we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger.’ It was, in his words, ‘legally questionable.’ His boss agreed, according to the emails, ‘but said we might do it anyway.’ And they did.” Agents tracked Comey’s movements as he and his wife drove to visit their son’s grave, with Trump allegedly following the progress from Air Force One.

“So, to be clear,” emphasizes Taylor, “we found out that the president of the United States was aboard his airplane, personally tracking the surveillance of a private citizen who had posted a photo of four digits. Obvious free speech. Breathtaking abuse of power to punish it.” What’s more, not only did the investigation turn up nothing, but the government continued to pursue Comey, with the FBI obtaining warrants for his Apple and Google accounts.

“I believe the Comey prosecution will be remembered as one of the most significant First Amendment cases in American history,” asserts Taylor. “An American president is trying to imprison a critic for posting a photograph. And to build the absurd case, the government surveilled that critic without a judge’s approval, in a manner its own agents admitted in writing was illegal. The filings answer some questions about what was done to Comey, but they open a far larger one that may not be answered for years: how many other people is this administration illegally watching and preparing to illegally punish?”

“I don’t write this as a bystander of course,” notes Taylor. “Trump has publicly accused people like me, John Brennan, James Clapper, Adam Schif, and even Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of treason. I have to assume some of us are already under surveillance for the audacity of criticizing the sitting president, while he has agents hunt for something — anything — to charge us with as punishment ... Ironically, one of those criticisms is that I’ve long warned a second Trump term would turn the intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying. Again, the wannabe despot in the Oval Office has proven my point.”

As Taylor concludes, “We don’t know how many Americans are being warrantlessly monitored right now, or individually targeted despite their constitutional rights. That is the problem. Comey’s surveillance surfaced only because his prosecution forced these documents into open court. Everything about how this administration treats the people it considers enemies tells me his case is the rule, not the exception, and that there may be far more people they’ve decided to watch than to tip their hand by bringing weak and foolish cases.”

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Merciless Trump whistleblower roasts Karoline Leavitt's word salad

President Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff, Miles Taylor, is mocking the Republican’s current press secretary for a gaffe that arguably symbolizes the administration’s larger seeming ineptitude.

Reflecting on how Karoline Leavitt said that what Trump reveals tonight "will shock you if you have an honest eye listening to the president,” Miles Taylor quipped that “yes, and if your ears watch closely, you'll be doubly stunned.”

This is not Leavitt’s first faux pas. Earlier this month, while speaking with Fox News journalist Jesse Watters, the 27-year-old — who achieved her wealth by marrying a New Hampshire real estate developer who is 32 years older than her — expressed scorn for members of Generation Z that she claimed have turned to left-wing politics because they are supposedly entitled.

“My generation — I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me —have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them,” Leavitt told Watters. She described Generation Z as being fueled by “laziness and the liberal indoctrination” and suggested that they be sent to fight Trump’s war against Iran and threatened war against Cuba.

Similarly, Leavitt was heavily criticized last year for justifying the administration’s revisions of jobs data so as to imply that the American economy was performing better than was actually the case.

“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said during a press conference. “We want to ensure that all of the data ... coming out of the BLS is trustworthy and is accurate, which is why the president has restored new leadership at the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics].”

This reporter has also interacted with Leavitt while she made inaccurate or stylistically questionable statements. When asked about evidence that Trump’s ongoing Iran war is failing, Leavitt told AlterNet in May that he had in fact succeeded.

“President Trump’s courageous decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is grounded in a truth that presidents for nearly 50 years have been talking about, but no president had the courage to confront: Iran poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States of America and our troops in the Middle East,” Leavitt said in a statement. “The rogue Iranian Regime under the evil hand of the Ayatollah has killed and maimed thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years – and that ends with President Trump.”

Similarly, speaking to this journalist shortly after the second assassination attempt against Trump in 2024, Leavitt complained that a historian with whom he spoke compared Trump’s ongoing violent rhetoric and vilification of leaders who disagree with him to the actions of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

“It's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler,” Leavitt told this reporter. “It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

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Trump lays a paper trail to his next great prosecution: Whistleblower

President Donald Trump’s liberal use of his pardoning power has already attracted scrutiny, and now one of his former Homeland Security officials predicts it will ultimately lead to his prosecution.

“As a consequence, he now holds more raw power over American industry than any recent occupant of the Oval Office and arguably any in history,” Miles Taylor, who worked for President George W. Bush before serving in Trump’s Homeland Security, wrote his Defiance Substack. “Not because of any new authorities but because of a novel and corrupt combination of them. Together, those powers open the door to unprecedented pay-to-play schemes.”

He continued that “the only solace I have about the president granting what amounts to “super pardons” is that he’s given us a gift. When power changes hands, he’s telling us exactly what to investigate. And he’s left much of it in the public records.”

Describing Trump’s aggressive use of his pardoning power as a form of “super-pardons” unknown to the Constitution’s drafters and the previous presidents who served under it, Taylor explained that Trump is both monetizing the ability to receive pardons and granting blanket pardons to not only individuals but entire companies.

“The freshest example landed just days ago,” Taylor wrote. “Ryan LaLone, a Michigan diesel shop owner convicted of tampering with emissions systems, received a presidential pardon and so did his actual business, Diesel Freak LLC. With the stroke of the pen, Trump erased a $750,000 penalty that LaLone and his company were facing, after the man became a cause célèbre in MAGA world for being a purported victim of Biden-era overreach (LaLone was charged with deleting controls on vehicles that were meant to stem emissions). Now both the man and the LLC have been absolved.”

He added, “It’s important to take a beat to understand how radical this is. For the 239 years since the Constitution was ratified, the pardon has typically been understood as an act of mercy for individuals. Presidents grant clemency to people who committed crimes but are seen as deserving a reprieve, whether because their sentences were unusually harsh or their convictions were unjust. The founders saw the power as a safety valve to temper the severity of the law and, on occasion, restore domestic tranquility. They didn’t envision it as a magic wand to be waved over entire corporations, i.e. legal fictions that cannot sit in a jail cell, cannot be executed, and cannot, in any meaningful sense, be shown ‘mercy.’”

Taylor also listed Trump’s pardon of cryptocurrency-linked businessman Arthur Hayes, three other former executives of the BitMEX crypto exchange — and then the entire company itself, wiping away its debt of $100 million in fines.

“Since then, Trump has extended clemency to nine companies and counting,” Taylor added. “As Bloomberg reports, the president has been wielding the pardon power in ways akin to a king granting favors to feudal landowners. His fortunate subjects span industries, from an auto supplier to a media startup to a crypto platform. In the process, almost $200 million in financial penalties (some of it intended for victims of wrongdoing) has been wiped out.”

By his analysis, “The full arsenal Trump can use for corporate forgiveness is staggering,” Taylor pointed out. “He’s realized he can regulate an industry or de-regulate it… he can award federal contracts or yank them away… he can open investigations or quietly close them. Wielded separately, each of these is a routine exercise of executive power. But wielded collectively and transactionally, they amount to something new: again, what I call the ‘super pardon.’ Trump has hacked together a way to make criminal liability, regulatory burdens, and competitive disadvantages all disappear for companies that he favors.”

In June, New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan — who, along with his colleague Maggie Haberman, co-authored a book called “Regime Change” about Trump’s second term — reported to C-SPAN’s Peter Slen that “Trump is essentially beyond the reach of the law in terms of actions. Trump has told senior advisers in the Oval Office that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. I don't think they feel any real concern about illegality."

Meanwhile earlier in July NPR's Ayesha Rascoe told NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright reported that there is a literal cottage industry built around securing pardons from Trump. On one occasion rapper Boosie Badazz — a.k.a. Torence Ivy Hatch Jr. — decided to sue a lobbying firm that he claimed promised to secure a Trump pardon but ultimately failed to do so.

“$600,000: That's the amount rapper Boosie Badazz reportedly paid a Washington lobbying firm to secure a presidential pardon,” Rascoe told Wright. “The rapper, whose real name is Torrence Hatch, was looking to overturn a federal conviction over the unlawful possession of a firearm. But the pardon hasn't happened. Now Hatch is reportedly looking to recover half of what he paid through arbitration. The rapper's case represents a growing industry in Washington, D.C.: wealthy clients paying to try to secure clemency from President Trump.”

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The press chokes on its own dead weight while America burns

The news was chilling Tuesday, as the beleaguered citizens of the United States of America continued to be buffeted by the icy blast of fascism blowing hard off of Capitol Hill.

An anonymous official in the U.S. Postal Service has alleged that the agency is aiding the Trump Administration’s stepped up attacks on America as it seeks to dismantle voting ahead of this November’s make-or-break elections, which will determine if the 250-year-old country falls under authoritarian rule.

This latest breaking news is bolstering the most significant and horrific timeline in this country since the Civil War. There can be no more dire occurrence than the President of the United States using his enormous power against the people he is supposed to work for by battering the bedrock of our democracy: the sanctity of our vote.

By assaulting mail-in voting like he has so many women, Donald Trump is making it clearer than he has since January 6, 2021, when he called for an attack on America ahead of the certification of the 2020 vote he lost, that he intends to see to it the people of this country have no say in how they are governed (ruled) going forward.

Given what I see are irrefutable facts buttressing Trump’s treason, let’s take a look at how three of the nation’s leading newspapers and print services handled this jarring news Tuesday. Here are the lede paragraphs accompanying their reporting of Trump’s ongoing attack on November’s vote. I also remind you, because you seldom see this much-needed context in most reporting, that Trump is a convicted felon, who has lied tens of thousands of times to the American people:

-ASSOCIATED PRESS: The U.S. Postal Service is poised to launch a hastily built, error-riddled computer system that could jeopardize the process of mail voting relied upon by one-third of all voters, according to a whistleblower statement released Tuesday by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

-THE NEW YORK TIMES: A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

-THE WASHINGTON POST: An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.

Now I respectfully ask that you take another look at my lede to this piece. Try to be objective, and tell me which one of the four offerings most accurately reflect the gravity of this moment in America?

An anonymous official in the U.S. Postal Service has alleged that the agency is aiding the Trump Administration’s stepped up attacks on America as it seeks to dismantle voting ahead of this November’s make-or-break elections, which could determine if the 250-year-old country falls under authoritarian rule.

I render all three of the offerings from those news services as accurate, but also completely inadequate in addressing this worrisome situation.

I continue to contend that all three of these journalistic institutions once again failed miserably to alert their readership of the danger Americans are facing, and the stakes of Trump’s repeated anti-America actions. And isn’t it odd how similar the ledes to their stories are? To be clear: I am not contending that they are working in unison to minimize this enormous news, but I do think there is a malaise and incompetence across almost the entirety of our corporate media that is crushing them under their own dead weight, and regular readers will know it is impossible for me to process how this is happening.

(And, yes, I do understand that crooked ownership in many of these places is to blame. CBS News for instance, is completely dead as a trusted journalistic outpost, which is almost too sad to type. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is still occasionally capable of turning around important work, but it has been undermined by grievous editorial decisions that have badly damaged its credibility.)

This attack on our vote and our country is well into its 11th year eliminating even a shadow of a doubt that this hasn’t been a planned and coordinated assault on our country right from the start. Even before his improbable win in 2016, Trump let it be known that if he were to lose he wouldn’t concede, and contend that the vote was “fixed” against him.

Even after winning that election but losing the popular tally by almost three million votes, Trump put together a ridiculous, costly commission that was chartered to search out voter fraud that would proved he had actually won a majority of the vote.

The commission found nothing, of course, saying, “There’s no real evidence of it anywhere.”

Since coming on the scene, Trump has done everything in his power to diminish people’s greatest power in a Democracy: their vote.

It continues to just blow my mind how shoddily our national media is failing us in this terrifying moment of need. Make no mistake about it: We are smack in the middle of a national emergency right now, and these incompetent, dangerous fools continue to treat it all as if one of the two major parties setting fire to our national elections is some normal part of the political game.

It is not. Here is what is:

AN ATTACK ON AMERICA.

I could also stand to hear more from the opposition party on an hourly basis framing these anti-American actions. Because make no mistake about it: Nothing is more anti-American than attacking a citizen’s right to vote.

If Trump, with the support of his bought-off radical right Supreme Court and repugnant subservient party are allowed to get away with this, WE ARE DONE.

OVER.

Trump will be a convicted felon, serial liar, and America’s first king, and not even the press will be able to normalize that, because he will be busy rounding them up, and jailing them.

I am past tired of screaming my head off about this, but my God, man, what can they possibly be seeing as they report this ongoing assault that I (we) aren’t???

We have never been here before. We have never had a president openly attacking our vote and our country. This alone makes it gigantic news by definition.

And just for good measure, I ducked into the 24/7 TV news that I generally can’t stand, and while there was some reporting on this latest attack in two of those places — MSNOW snd CNN — neither gave the enormous story the heft it deserves.

The Fox Propaganda Service was ignoring it best I could tell, and still going on about Joe Biden. No, I’m not kidding.

Why aren’t the onscreen chyrons at the other two places screaming this:

REPUBLICAN ATTACK ON AMERICA

I watched PBS with my dinner to see what kind of treatment they were giving this hair-raising story, and they were predictably even-keeled, because why get too upset at the possibility of being yanked off the air for good in three months?

Seriously … why not start reporting the dire consequences we face if Trump outright kills the vote, as he has shown us in action and words he intends to do? Don’t Americans deserve to see this kind of hard-hitting reporting?

Republicans are now employing our Postal Service to act against us, recklessly gerrymandering, tampering with voter rolls, closing voting locations, threatening to place military members at our polling places, attacking poll workers, and doing everything they possibly can to diminish the credibility of our vote.

They are enemies of America, plain and simple, and for the life of me I don’t understand why it is so hard to report that.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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Whistleblowers say rare historic DC artifacts are in grave danger

On June 25, the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft — a $69 million exhibit underneath the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC — opened. The exhibit features rare artifacts, including copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the U.S. Constitution's 13th Amendment. And according to City Cast DC reporter Emma Uber, the historic treasures are in danger because of excessive heat.

"The documents — treasured turning points in the nation's effort to end slavery — date back to the 1860s and are worth millions," Uber reports in City Cast DC. "But three National Park Service employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, described a facility with faulty security measures. Notably, the employees said, the Park Service has struggled to maintain proper conditions for its rare and delicate documents. Screens designed to shield the records from harsh light have been defective, and temperatures inside the display case have repeatedly reached more than 80 degrees (Fahrenheit), according to the Park Service officials. Experts say that's a violation of professional standards for housing historic documents and hot enough to accelerate decay."

According to Katie Lowe of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, historic documents from the 19th Century should never be exposed to temperatures higher than 75F — especially if there is high humidity.

Lowe told City Cast DC, "Decay is a chemical process, and when you introduce heat you accelerate chemical processes."

Uber notes that according to the National Archives' website should be stored at temperatures under 75F to "slow the rate of chemical decay and reduce insect activity." And the Northeast Document Conservation Center recommends temperatures between 64F and 72F degrees for storing important documents.

Highlighting her article on X, Uber notes, "Less than a month after the opening of a $69 million exhibit beneath the Lincoln Memorial, Park Service officials are raising alarm bells .... It's the latest in a string of troubles involving upgrades to the National Mall as part of America's 250th birthday celebrations. An NPS spokesperson told me the documents are being properly cared for. They did not answer when I asked why there was a fan pointed toward the display case. "

The historic artifacts in the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft, according to Uber, are "on loan from hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin through June 2027."

Lowe told City Cast DC, "A year is certainly enough time for damage to occur."

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Trump's fraud claims are garbage — and 'I helped dig it': Whistleblower

President Donald Trump is preparing to release classified intelligence documents he claims will reveal “irregularities” in American elections address during the election he lost in 2020. But Trump’s former intelligence analyst Miles Taylor says it’s all going to be bunk. And Taylor should know — he helped scoop it.

“I know what’s in that well of information [Trump’s] drawing from, because I helped dig it. During Donald Trump’s first term, I worked on election protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), helping to stand up the administration’s response to historic Russian interference in 2016. We built an entire, government-wide response system — intelligence analysts, cyber defenders, and law enforcement agents — who were full-time focused on stopping any such attack from happening again,” Taylor said on his Defiance website. “And I can tell you now, before Trump says a single word, he’s full of s——.”

“Pardon my language. But I’m virtually certain that whatever he presents on Thursday, it will be twice-warmed leftovers of information, cherry-picked and recast to tell a story our intelligence agencies never told because it was never true,” added Taylor. “

What actually happened in 2020 when it came to foreign interference, said Taylor was that America’s adversaries did try to meddle in U.S. elections during Trump’s first term and his his re-election. This included Russia, Iran, and China. Taylor says “we knew it, we tracked it, and the U.S. government declassified much of that information years ago.” But Trump’s agencies were unanimous on the crucial point that none of that tampering changed votes in either 2018 or 2020.

Trump’s own cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history,” putting him in the way of Trump’s Big Lie that someone stole victory from Trump. For that, Taylor said Trump fired him by tweet.

“Trump never wanted election security,” said Taylor. “He wanted selective election security.”

In 2018, ahead of the midterms, Taylor and his co-workers briefed Trump on the fact that multiple countries were planned to interfere, but Trump was only uninterested in exposing any country that wanted to interfere in ways that would help Democrats, specifically China.

“And wouldn’t you know it — that September, Trump stood before the UN General Assembly and delivered sweeping warnings about Chinese interference. Yet he said next to nothing about Russia, the country that had actually run a sophisticated operation to help him in 2016 and was gearing up to do it again,” said Taylor. “We were gobsmacked. So were Members of Congress briefed on the same intelligence. … Inside the national security community, the conclusion was as obvious as it was appalling. Trump welcomed foreign interference when it helped him and opposed it when the threat actors seemed eager to hurt his chances.”

So when Trump resurrects old news about Chinese meddling Thursday and “inflates them into proof” that 2020 was stolen from him, Taylor said remember that he’s only recycling intelligence he cherry-picked for political convenience eight years ago.

“If this evidence were real, Trump himself had the power to declassify all of it before leaving office in January 2021,” said Taylor. “He didn’t … because it doesn’t say what he’ll claim it says … and proof doesn’t exist.”

Meanwhile, Taylor said Trump has installed loyalists over the DNI, DOJ, and FBI, and his crew is mounting a “whole-of-government campaign to sow doubt about the vote that it fears it will lose.”

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Trump relying on advice from White House 'quacks': whistleblower

In a normal presidential administration, the kooks get corralled far away from the president’s ear so they can do the least damage and annoy the minimum amount of serious people. But that was in other more responsible administrations, said Miles Taylor, President Donald Trump’s first-term whistleblower.

“In my two-and-a-half years inside the first Trump administration, I saw how ideas … traveled,” Taylor wrote on his Defiance website. “In a normal administration, layers of lawyers and advisors weed out wacky notions before they get to the president. In Trump world, it happens the other way around. He ‘mainlines’ recommendations from quacks — who go straight to him with their off-the-wall, unconstitutional, and impossible ideas — then dumps them onto his advisors.”

He added that “back then, a great deal of your government’s time was spent chasing those absurdities away, before they became reality. Now, his team chases them into reality.”

The latest nut pile on the menu appears to be a plan by 80-year-old Florida lawyer and Trump friend Peter Ticktin, who is pushing Trump to place the fall midterms under federal control. Taylor said Ticktin helped draft a 17-page executive order justifying the emergency on the grounds of foreign interference in electronic voting machines, despite that “interference” not being found credible by a joint Justice Department and Homeland Security review. Indeed, U.S. intelligence found that no foreign government altered a single vote.

Nevertheless, Taylor said the order is being taken seriously because that’s what happens in a Trump Quack Cabinet.

“I call it the Quack Cabinet. Donald Trump has always kept an informal shadow council of true believers, conspiracy peddlers, and grievance merchants who get his ear because they know how to work the man,” said Taylor. “Flattery. Sensationalism. And more flattery. Lou Dobbs was like this. The conservative commentator and Fox News anchor would fawn over Trump on his show and, simultaneously, churn out conspiracy theories knowing the president was watching and would gulp it all up. It got so bad that we dubbed Lou the White House ‘deputy chief of staff.’ Trump would see a kooky thing Lou said on television, call one of us up in the middle of the night, and demand that it be investigated or pursued.”

The Quack Cabinet is not interested in the truth, Taylor said. It consists of “ill-informed people” interested in spectacle and power.

“For that reason, they don’t tell Trump what he needs to hear; they tell him what he wants to hear. That keeps them in the inner circle. And it also creates an echo chamber of country-wrecking ideas. Arrest the RINOs! Ignore the judges! Seize Greenland! Build the ballroom! Deport the Democrats! These ‘cabinet’ members hold no offices and pass no background checks, but they have a better legislative record than most U.S. senators, because their ideas keep becoming policy,” said Taylor.

“If you doubt the danger here, consider three facts: Ticktin was in the Oval Office last week, seated beside Tina Peters, the former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of breaching her own voting systems and who walked free after Trump pressured Colorado’s governor into a commutation,” Taylor pointed out. “Sources told ABC News, months ago, that Trump had personally reviewed versions of the draft order and discussed it with those involved. And the president has already signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting and voter registration, which felt like it was plucked straight from these conversations.”

Yes, the White House waves the threat of the nutjobs away by saying Ticktin “overstates” his influence, but Taylor said Trump officials say the same thing “about every crank whose proposal later appeared over the president’s signature.”

“Having sat in those rooms, I can tell you the distance between ‘the president has never heard of it’ and ‘the president signed it this morning’ is way, way shorter than most Americans can imagine,” said Taylor.

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