"We will absolutely persecute you" -- U.S. POLITICS DECEMBER 2025

well, yeah

had to be that

Oops, reposting here from the defunct November thread:

The White House's new "Media Offenders" page is pretty funny. They currently rank the WaPo as their #1 Offender, which is the biggest boost in credibility the paper's had all year.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias/

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that President Donald Trump unlawfully appointed his former personal attorney, Alina Habba, to serve as the top prosecutor in New Jersey — a decision that could have far-reaching implications for other controversial Trump appointments that have been challenged in court.

In a unanimous decision, a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said that the extraordinary maneuvers the Justice Department deployed to bypass Senate confirmation and keep Habba in the top position were unlawful.

The appeals court’s ruling upheld a lower court’s decision disqualifying Habba. The question of the legality of her appointment will now likely be settled by the Supreme Court.

“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” the judges wrote. “Its efforts to elevate its preferred candidate for U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, to the role of Acting U.S. Attorney demonstrate the difficulties it has faced—yet the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deserve some clarity and stability.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/01/trump-habba-us-attorney-ruling/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com

The question of the legality of her appointment will now likely be settled by the Supreme Court.

well that should sort this mess out!

The November thread is showing as locked for me on Site New Answers, but I can still post to it. Would someone else try posting to it? Thanks.

Looks like it's properly locked now.

They currently rank the WaPo as their #1 Offender, which is the biggest boost in credibility the paper's had all year.

#resist

Trump saw the movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and thought, they seem like bad hombres.

No everyone liked those guys

Not everyone liked those guys I mean

well yeah, they used to go the parking garage to see Deep Throat

does it seems like maybe knives out for Hegseth? Or will he walk

how are congressional Rs responding to this? Trump's reality distortion field seems to be weakening and I don't know how many elected representatives want to be seen endorsing blatant war crimes in South America

seems like they are attempting to throw Adm. Bradley under the bus first

xp

The bus was told to leave no survivors.

I think there are at least a couple republicans who are expressed some discomfort with murdering unindicted civilians in international waters

are

one thing that I guess is nice is I'm seeing way more calls for these goons to be prosecuted once Trump's term is over, I know Pritzker has floated this for ICE agents but it should really be a default position of the Democrat party right now, if you break the law you will be arrested

we're going to need a solid floor to hold this abundance of guillotines if you catch my drift

Oh, I’ve got a floor for the aftermath, or at least a good (persecuting) soundtrack for it:

https://wolf-eyes.bandcamp.com/album/no-answer-lower-floors-2

Yeah right! Dem leadership will be talking about turning the page on the Trump presidency and following norms because lawfare or whatever.

have you all considered this though?

Trump also said he had “great confidence” Hegseth did not give a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard the vessel, saying that Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100%.”

100% is not just a little bit more than 99.9% - it represents a giant leap into indisputable fact.

100%

Yeah right! Dem leadership will be talking about turning the page on the Trump presidency and following norms because lawfare or whatever.

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Monday, December 1, 2025 2:31 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

one thing about this moment is that Dems are also incredibly unpopular in large part because of this exact mentality, not saying anything will happen but it seems pretty clear where the electorate is at right now

The media needs to keep this Hegseth story alive as long as possible. It's another shot at our getting rid of him. If enough flies accumulate on that pile of shit, Trump will jettison him as too big a nuisance.

Sgt. Slaughter is probably available to take over

it should really be a default position of the Democrat party right now, if you break the law you will be arrested

For example they could say, "We will absolutely persecute you."

Huh, looking like an actual scandal is forming

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed on Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the second, follow-up strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September following a bombshell Washington Post report that claimed he ordered the military to “kill everybody.”

“With respect to the strikes in question on Sept. 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Adm. Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement during Monday's briefing.

Pinning the second attack on Bradley.

Incidentally, Admiral Bradley supervised follow-up killing of surviving alleged terrorists on land in Seal Team 6 attacks back when. Yes, different laws apply to identified terorists on land who arguably posed a risk to US versus random folks on boats alleged to be drug runners, but it provides additional context per author Wesley Morgan who wrote a book called The Hardest Place: America's Military adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, and wrote on Bluesky re JSOC and SEAL Team 6 have spent a decade-plus orchestrating drone strikes on land, including when Bradley was the Team 6 commander overseeing Somalia/Yemen strikes—and reattacks to kill survivors,

https://bsky.app/profile/wesleymorgan.bsky.social/post/3m6x7bw7gb222

Let's just take a peek at that ol' Law of War Manual:

18.3 DUTIES OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES

Each member of the armed services has a duty to: (1) comply with the law of war in
good faith; and (2) refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of
war.

...18.3.2 Refuse to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of
war violations. In addition, orders should not be construed to authorize implicitly violations of
law of war.

18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The
requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to
perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal.
For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.

https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD-LAW-OF-WAR-MANUAL-JUNE-2015-UPDATED-JULY%202023.PDF

It's the actual "well duh obviously" example the U.S. military's own rule book uses. And that manual is still in legal effect.

(Also you can look up the very detailed definition of "shipwrecked" and it of course very obviously applies in this case.)

Pete’s drinking extra tonight, mumbling the word “lethal” to himself

he really looks like he could host Family Feud or something

kind of a Seacrest vibe

mayo pete vs maga pete

In other news, my city council member, Janeese Lewis George, just raised 100K in a matter of hours in her newly announced campaign to replace Muriel Bowser as the DC Mayor.

I was extremely tempted (and repeatedly spammed) to donate, but I think I’m holding out for the merch.

Ah fuck it, chucked fifty into the pot.

I got thinking about this a$$hole the other day. I kinda got to wonder now if this guys whole schtick was some right wing think tank co-op'ed him to be a mouth piece. I do think Goldberg got a f'n ton of press for years and it was always the thing the right would point towards even becoming Fox News slogan.

Kinda darkly funny now looking at this BS.

BERNARD GOLDBERG, Author, Bias:

Well, I think we marginalize conservative views. I think too many people in the big-time media, I think, conservatives, in too many cases, are just right-wing nuts. And let me tell you, it does not mean — I emphatically say it does not mean — that the there's a conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. The media elites don't come into their offices in the morning, go into a dark room, roll up their sleeves, give the secret handshake and say, "How are we going to not only execute our liberal agenda, but get conservatives at the same time?"

That's not it. They marginalize conservatives mainly.. . I could give you many, many examples, Terry, but mainly by identifying every conservative who's in a story because — and I think rightly — the audience needs to know that these people are conservatives, that their views are conservative views and we should know, as they say, where they're coming from. But the very fact that we rarely identify liberals tells you, at least it tells me, that journalists very often think that these liberal views aren't liberal at all, but really mainstream, civilized, reasonable views. And that's the problem, I think.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/media-bias-skewing-the-news

journalists very often think that these liberal views aren't liberal at all, but really mainstream, civilized, reasonable views.

wtf? this a-hole apparently takes it for granted that, if a point of view can be described as "liberal" it is ipso facto NOT "mainstream, civilized, reasonable" and to take them for such is "the problem"?!

Hey man the guy wrote like five books, he’s got CREDENTIALS

Our boy Donny is having a manic posting spree

https://bsky.app/profile/paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3m6y2tu6rus2d

Hegseth found two things tonight - his hidden bottle of Seagrams, abd Trump's Truth Social password

more likely the account is pwnt by h4x0rZ

who cares

well yeah that’s about right

in 2015 trump said 'When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re [wtf sic] rapists..." and it caused some, uh, backlash

in 2025 the secretary of state says "i am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies", and what are you going to do because it's kristi noem, and the whole administration talks like this.

They all certainly have social accounts posting like that. Probably the same author.

Noem's DHS not State, but yes.

Yeah they have 20 year old college dropout Groypers making more money than we ever will writing these tweets

xp to budo

Second big batch of Epstein files includes many mentions of Trump
The Justice Department said some of the documents, which were available for hours Monday before being taken down and later reposted, “contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump."

All the stuff about the other guys is true tho, just not those particular things.

They should send everything to be vetted by Snopes.com

The mention in the letter to Nasser (if it's real) is really no more than we already know about the guy. We have him on the Access Hollywood tape saying the exact same thing, we've all known this forever, and yet every time it resurfaces that the president is a known sexual abuser there is some set of people who manage to shrug it off.

Why was this in there?

https://people.com/jeffrey-epstein-prison-suicide-video-fake-11874935

A request: can we keep the Epstein stuff in the Epstein thread?

Former GOP Sen. Ben Sasse Says He Has Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer And Is 'Gonna Die'

https://www.popiconsblog.com/uploads/9/9/4/4/9944728/behind-the-song-welcome-the-the-jungle-by-guns-n-roses-pop-icons-behind-the-song-meaning_orig.jpg

A request: can we keep the Epstein stuff in the Epstein thread?

lol there's so much overlap these days between Epstein, Trump and politics threads that I forget which I'm even on. (A reflection of real life, obv.)

I know! But sometimes I don't want to read Epstein updates.

Does it make you upsetstein?

I am guilty of posting epstein stuff in here but i agree

you’re all just one step away from admitting we should have a separate politics board

ILX Politics Extended Universe

Federal judge in Tennessee has canceled Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s January trial date on human smuggling charges and will instead hold a one day hearing on whether Abrego has been vindictively and selectively prosecuted by the government. Judge says evidence is in Abrego’s favor.

If judge finds vindictive and selective prosecution, judge can dismiss the criminal case

“At the midway point of the 119th Congressional session, 43 House members — 19 Democrats and 24 Republicans — have announced retirements, the highest of any odd year since 2011, according to data collected by C-SPAN. Nine incumbent senators, four Democrats and five Republicans, are retiring, as well.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5661816-congress-reclaim-power-white-house/amp/

This administration flaunts corruption and self-dealing in our faces meanwhile freeze childcare founding based on a youtuber's video.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hhs-freezes-all-child-care-payments-to-minnesota-after-viral-fraud-allegations/ar-AA1TiZTd?ocid

Definitely part of a plan to smear Walz as well

Two things can be true at the same time - the administration is the most corrupt in US history by far, and services fraud is/was rampant in Minnesota

https://archive.ph/Ohm0p

oh yeah it seems there are issues there but cutting of the founding from the whole program is going to suck for a lot of non-corrupt people xp

For sure, tbc, suspending the entire funding is ridiculous

services fraud is/was rampant in Minnesota

cannot imagine this to really be something so specific to a state or indeed group of people with heritage elsewhere tho

that NYT article contains a lot of playbook shit e.g.

Mr. Thompson, a career prosecutor who served as interim U.S. attorney for several months this year, and who declined to discuss his own political preferences, said he believed that race sensitivities had played a major role in the rise of fraud. As pandemic assistance was disbursed, the state was also reeling from the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, he said.
“This was a huge part of the problem,” Mr. Thompson said during an interview in the summer. “Allegations of racism can be a reputation or career killer.”

It's not uncommon for there to be that type of fraud within a particular community - it doesn't mean that most of the community is bad or responsible, but there tend to be family and friend networks within close-knit communities and sometimes that means knowledge of how to undertake the fraud spreads that way. When I lived in Queens I remember reading about a bunch of Bukharan Jewish providers who were convicted in a medicare/medicaid fraud scheme. It didn't implicate most of the community, nor should it, but the network they had was a part of how they perpetrated it. There was also an Armenian ring that was similar, there have been Russian rings, Chinese rings, etc.

It sucks to have it become ammo for the Trump admin, but oversight became especially lax during the COVID years, in part for understandable reasons, and there's probably still a lot of unprosecuted fraud.

The year is 2025 and America cant remember who was in charge in 2020, during covid

Well it was lax under both admins, it continued into 2021 and on. And it was lax at the state level as well. We will probably never dig out more than a small fraction of all of the fraud.

my understanding is that there were incidents of fraud that involved some somali americans in minnesota, but that the biden doj already prosecuted the case in 2022 and this was widely reported on at the time. what's happening now is that people on the right are now claiming to "reveal" this same fraud and suggesting that the mainstream media is supposedly covering it up.

Sarah Jeong on how modern politics has become memeified beyond comprehension....may be paywalled but you can read on archive.ph :)

https://www.theverge.com/policy/849609/charlie-kirk-shooting-ideology-literacy-politics

if nothing else a great primer on how traditional media is woefully unequipped to handle the Trump administration. I've seen a lot about how MAGA relies a lot on kayfabe and once you understand pro wrestling you can understand MAGA but it def feels like modern politics has now entirely lept into pure 4chan style shitposting, which I think is a few degrees of magnitude crazier than what we were getting in even 2017

The goal here is to have chuds say FRAUUUUUUUDDDD every time someone mentions Minnesota; truth or what actually happened are not important to these people.

At least 20 people who have received clemency from Trump so far this year — cutting their sentence short, restoring their civil rights after imprisonment or allowing them to avoid prison altogether — were also forgiven of financial penalties totaling tens of millions of dollars. Some of these offenders owed money to real-life victims of fraud. Marian Morgan, for example, was sentenced in 2013 to nearly 34 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme and was ordered to pay $17.5 million to dozens of investors, most of which remains unpaid. In 2021, she filed a statement in court saying, “I want to pay restitution to my victims so they know I am truly sorry for the damage I caused.” But in May, Trump commuted her sentence “to time served with no further fines, restitution, probation or other conditions.”

In other cases where Trump granted clemency, the federal government was the main victim. Paul Walczak, a health care executive and convicted tax cheat, was sentenced in April to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay over $4 million to the Internal Revenue Service. Walczak had pleaded guilty to tax crimes and agreed to pay restitution to the IRS, according to court filings. His pardon came through just 12 days after his sentencing, relieving him of his financial obligations and sparing him from going to prison.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/19/donald-trump-pardons-trevor-milton-nikola/

i read the nyt somali fraud story. for me, who’s newish to the story, the scaling of this shit is bizarre— eg how do you budget $2mil for a social program, have it quickly “balloon” to over $100mil and a) be able to pay it and b) not have every overseer going up its ass with a microscope? the story doesn’t seem totally credible based on the scale of the crimes. and the whole “we’re gonna call you RACIST!” threat doesn’t seem like it would begin to mask fraud of that obvious and huge scale.

are there other recommended versions of this story?

As someone who has dug into certain Medicare and Medicaid fraud issues for work reasons, you'd be surprised how little oversight there often is over some of these programs. The default is to pay claims that seem even superficially valid unless/until someone points to a specific problem, which often takes a long time, if it ever gets pointed out at all. There has been experimenting with various audit programs and even the use of private contractors to detect fraud, but with limited success. Part of the problem is that if you give the fraud detectors too much power, you also risk denying legitimate claims, and the tendency is to err on the side of not denying legitimate claims. And all of this ballooned during and after COVID when (1) a lot of the work that was being done to detect fraud either stopped or got scaled back due to work from home, (2) there were extra concerns about people not having access to health services and (3) the government wanted to pump a lot of money into the economy. A lot of this stuff then didn't get fully reined in even as the economy went back to normal. I don't find the numbers quoted surprising at all.

My experience is specific to Medicare/Medicaid but I'm sure there were similar dynamics at play in childcare and other programs.

Like without getting too specific, I looked into a company whose entire (*alleged*) business model was (*allegedly*) built on doling out unnecessary medical tests under the guise of providing services that were extra needed due to COVID - tens of millions of dollars in *allegedly* unnecessary tests via this one company alone, it took years to stop, and they never actually faced consequences other than you can't do that anymore.

I’ve noticed amongst people irl who are conservative, at least in terms of government spending, that they see every subsidy or grant program as an opportunity for fraud. And some of them take part in it as well.

Oh yeah. My parents live way out in the country and they bitch about how people ought to not take handouts and bootstrap pulling and blah blah blah, but they get a huge discount on their electricity for living in the boonies and they get a huge break on property taxes because they let someone else put cows on their land.

Plus all of the veterans benefits and how much they benefited from union jobs even though unions are bad.

Complaining about fraud in social service programs has been conservative boilerplate forever. Reagan's infamous "Welfare Queen" story is a good example but definitely not the first. My ex-mother-in-law used to complain about all the lazy people on Medicaid — while she was on Medicaid herself.

From a Guardian report The alleged fraud in Minnesota, put at $9bn by some estimates, is a small fraction of the total estimates of Covid relief money that went missing or was misspent, estimated at around $400bn by the Associated Press in 2023.

A good rule of thumb with any conservative shouting about fraud is to search their name and employer in the PPP database

So now he’s blocked childcare payments to every state? This was the plan from the start.

The report came a day after Jim O’Neill, the HHS deputy secretary, and Alex Adams, an HHS assistant secretary who oversees the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), appeared in a Tuesday evening video message. O’Neill declared that the department had “activated our defend-the-spend system for all ACF childcare payments across America” and would now require “justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment”.

Originally, O’Neill and Adams’s message was interpreted as an announcement that HHS would stop childcare funding in Minnesota, not all 50 states. However, the Associated Press reported late Wednesday that the freeze would apply to every state and that all states would need to provide more documentation about their childcare programs before receiving federal money.

blocked childcare payments? that’s kind of a downer message for fascists. no, they activated the defend-the-spend system, it just happened to be targeting children and their families

you can’t really aim or control the defend-the-spend system, it just defends whatever it can

justification, receipt or photo evidence

When right-wing conspiracy psychos are this revved up about the government being full of pedophiles, "Send us pictures of kids if you want us to send you money" isn't the greatest message, either.

The fuck is Ozymandias's squid?

Then again he'd probably be made Chief of Staff

Just utter ghouls

I've seen a lot about how MAGA relies a lot on kayfabe and once you understand pro wrestling you can understand MAGA

no offense to wrestling fans but I would rather fucking NOT

see that's what makes you a jabroni

I don't know if I have the energy / required masochism for a new thread tbh

Nu December

i have energy and no shame

the president of the pathetic united states of america politics january 2026

Nu December

he’s gonna rename the months for himself isn’t he?