The Shakedown State

One Wednesday in Trump’s America: the DOJ punishes his enemies, the White House sells access, and the machinery of government gets stripped for parts.

Good morning! There is a useful way to understand how this administration operates, and it requires holding two tracks in your head simultaneously. On the first track, the machinery of government pursues, prosecutes, and professionally destroys anyone who had the audacity to hold Donald Trump accountable for anything, ever. On the second track, that same machinery is being systematically stripped for parts, its proceeds flowing upward toward the president, his family, his donors, and his allies with the serene confidence of people who have concluded that no one is coming to stop them. Wednesday was, even by the standards of this administration, an instructive day.

Let’s start with E. Jean Carroll, who is 82 years old, who won two separate civil verdicts against the President of the United States, verdicts affirmed by the Second Circuit, affirmed again when the full panel denied en banc review, and who learned Wednesday that the Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into whether she committed perjury.

The predicate for this investigation deserves to be stated plainly, because the framing of “perjury probe” implies the existence of an actual lie. In a 2022 deposition, Carroll said she had received no outside funding for her lawsuit. Before trial, her attorneys informed the court and opposing counsel that Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit had covered some legal costs. Her lawyers explained, in writing, that Carroll had a contingency fee arrangement, meaning she wasn’t paying legal bills as the case proceeded, and that when her memory updated, she disclosed the correction proactively. The trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, reviewed the matter, found no issue with Carroll’s credibility, and blocked further questioning about Hoffman’s involvement. Two juries, one of which included, as MSNBC legal reporter Lisa Rubin pointedly noted, a listener of Tim Pool, who is not exactly a reliable Democratic voter, returned unanimous verdicts against Trump. The Second Circuit affirmed both.

Norm Eisen, who has been doing criminal law for 35 years, put the legal absurdity of this investigation with precision: “Nobody prosecutes a single answer in a deposition.” He noted that countless thousands of depositions are taken across the country every day, and that the notion of the Justice Department opening a federal criminal investigation over a single deposition answer, one that was corrected before trial, cleared by the trial judge, and never raised as a credibility issue by two separate juries is, in his words, “unheard of.” The investigation is the punishment. The prosecution, if it ever materializes, would be almost beside the point.

The criminal investigation, opened by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros in the Northern District of Illinois and routed carefully around Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who recused himself because he personally argued Trump’s Carroll appeals, lands on the morning of the day the Carroll case is scheduled for yet another Supreme Court conference. The justices have now deferred consideration of Trump’s appeal twelve times. Twelve. The investigation’s timing is either an extraordinary coincidence or it is, as Rubin suggested on air, a message, not to the public, but to six justices.

To summarize: a federal government is opening a criminal investigation against an 82-year-old sexual assault survivor whose verdicts have survived every appellate challenge thrown at them, timed to a Supreme Court conference, run by a U.S. attorney whose boss recused himself because of his personal entanglement in the case. Eisen named the pattern directly: Letitia James, James Comey, and now Carroll. Most of those cases, he noted, were thrown out. This one will likely follow. But by then the damage, to Carroll, to the signal sent to every future plaintiff who considers suing a powerful man, will have been done. The investigation is the point. It always is.

Carroll is not alone in the crosshairs. Somewhere in Washington, Joe Biden’s lawyers are preparing to litigate in federal court over his right to keep private the transcript of conversations he had in his own home with the person helping him write a memoir about the year his son died. The DOJ, which spent years correctly resisting Heritage Foundation and congressional Republican demands for those materials under FOIA exemptions designed precisely to protect personal and private information, simply changed its mind. No new legal interpretation. No recalibrated privacy analysis. Just a sudden reversal that happens to give Jim Jordan exactly what he’s been demanding: raw material for a narrative about Biden’s cognitive acuity, extracted from grief diary entries about Bo, deployed as opposition research in perpetuity. The administrative procedure act calls this arbitrary and capricious. The rest of us might call it something shorter.

Then there is Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent who reported accurately on torture conditions at the CECOT detention facility in El Salvador, watched her segment get pulled hours before air by Bari Weiss, Paramount’s newly installed editor-in-chief, whose installation followed Skydance’s acquisition of CBS and a $16 million settlement of Trump’s lawsuit over a Kamala Harris interview, and whose contract, after two decades at the network, was quietly allowed to expire last weekend while her agent’s calls went unreturned. “A deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting,” Alfonsi said. Anderson Cooper, reading the room with the situational awareness of a man who knows what a tide going out looks like, had already left.

The architecture here requires no conspiracy theory, only an understanding of incentive structures. The FCC licensing threats discipline broadcasters. The merger approval process disciplines corporate acquirers. The installed editors discipline newsrooms. Nobody has to make a phone call. The pressure is baked in.

On the South Lawn of the White House, workers are constructing an octagon. On June 14th, Flag Day, and the President’s 80th birthday, UFC Freedom 250 will be held on the grounds of the People’s House, featuring seven fights, a triumphal arch visible above the roofline, fireworks, and roughly 4,300 spectators personally selected by Donald Trump, Dana White, and Ari Emanuel. Tickets are technically free. Sponsorship packages including ringside seats are going for $1.5 million. Neither the White House nor the UFC has disclosed where that money is going, though a Republican lobbyist familiar with the process told NBC News that the event “has basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump,” sitting alongside MAGA Inc., the East Wing ballroom renovation, and the Kennedy Center as vehicles for seven-figure access purchases that don’t require the inconvenience of campaign finance disclosure.

Trump personally controls 1,000 of the South Lawn tickets. White House communications director Steven Cheung reports fielding ticket requests several times a day. One senator allegedly inquired about purchasing a block. The president told NBC he was going to “make a lot of enemies” because it was impossible to accommodate everyone who wanted in. This is the President of the United States describing the experience of rationing access to the White House like a club promoter working a velvet rope, apparently without embarrassment.

There is, additionally, the matter of Stake.com. Trump has been personally promoting the company’s sponsorship of UFC Freedom 250 on social media, describing its role in what he calls the greatest show on earth. Gambling regulators say Stake.com is an illegal online casino. The company describes itself as a video game. The co-founder donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. approximately one month before the presidential promotion campaign began. None of this has prompted any visible discomfort from anyone in a position to say something about it.

The total cost of the event is approximately $60 million, which TKO is absorbing as a “brand investment.” TKO, you will recall, is the parent company of the UFC, run by Ari Emanuel, whose brother Rahm was named Ambassador to Japan, and whose board includes Dana White, longtime Trump intimate and key figure in his political operation. The $60 million is the long game. The $1.5 million sponsorship packages, the Stake.com promotion, and the million-dollar donations are the short game. No one is required to explain the difference, and no one will.

Down the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being repaired by Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia firm that had never held a federal government contract before it was chosen to fix one of the country’s most famous landmarks. Trump initially said he selected them because they’d worked on the pool at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia. He later reversed himself and said he didn’t know them. This pattern, sole-source contracts flowing to vendors connected to Trump’s personal orbit, is apparently administration policy: other no-bid 250th anniversary contracts have gone to the firm that planned his January 6th rally and to the contractor building his White House ballroom. Quite the coincidence. Quite the procurement process.

The pool, which has leaked for decades and cost the Obama administration more than $35 million to overhaul, with the algae returning within a month and the leaks the following year, is now the subject of a “letter contract,” a rarely used mechanism designed for genuine emergencies like collapsing dams and tornado debris, deployed here because the administration needed to start work immediately on a decorative reflecting pool for a birthday party for a country whose 250th anniversary, as one contracting expert observed, we have known was coming for 250 years. Norm Eisen put the legal dimension plainly: it is illegal to manufacture an emergency by stalling and then use that manufactured urgency to evade normal bidding requirements. What you get when you do it, he noted, gesturing at the pool’s current condition, is shoddy work. Fifty shades of blue, as he put it.

The firm is charging a 20% profit margin. The typical range for federal construction contracts is 6 to 12 percent. A National Park Service contracting specialist found the margins “excessive.” A higher-ranking civil servant approved them anyway, reasoning that the contractor deserved extra compensation for accepting a difficult job, which the contractor then proceeded to fail at. The attempts to seal the gaps between the concrete slabs that are the source of the actual leaking have failed twice. The government is covering nearly half of the $13.1 million contract using national park entrance fees which, as Eisen noted, is public money regardless of what bucket it’s labeled. The administration’s defense that the contract isn’t being paid by taxpayers is, in his words, gaslighting. The pool is mottled, unfinished, and still leaking, and the check is still being cashed.

The Reflecting Pool and the UFC octagon are, of course, both 250th anniversary projects. The same symbolic occasion justifying the sole-source contract to a golf club vendor also lives inside the $1.776 billion slush fund, the figure chosen, as Todd Blanche has openly acknowledged, for its resonance with 1776, not for any tether to actual claims or demonstrated injuries. The symbolism of the founding is doing extraordinary service here as a corruption infrastructure.

The slush fund itself, for those keeping count, is now the subject of a court filing from approximately three dozen retired federal judges who argue it is “a fraud on the judicial machinery itself,” that the $10 billion Trump lawsuit against his own IRS that birthed the fund was never an adversarial proceeding at all, but a closed system: two arms of the same administration manufacturing a legal vehicle to move $1.776 billion out of the Treasury. The presiding judge, Kathleen Williams, had already flagged the adversarial party problem herself before Trump voluntarily sought to dismiss the case precisely when she began pressing for substantive information. She is now receiving a 20-page brief from her former colleagues asking her to commence her own investigation.

The fund’s terms, as legal analyst Mary McCord summarized: Blanche selects the five board members, Trump can fire any of them without cause at any time, all awards are confidential, and a one-page addendum extends blanket federal immunity, no investigations, no audits, no civil or criminal claims, not just to the subject matter of the settled lawsuit, but to anything that could be categorized as “lawfare or weaponization,” which is a legal term of art meaning whatever the administration needs it to mean on a given weekday. McCord’s characterization: the functional equivalent of a civil pardon, issued by a man who lacked the authority to issue it.

These two tracks, punishment of enemies, looting of the state, share infrastructure, and that infrastructure is the Department of Justice. What is happening to the DOJ deserves its own accounting, because it is the story beneath all the other stories.

In Chicago, a federal judge reviewing grand jury transcripts in the Broadview Six case, six protesters charged in connection with an ICE enforcement action, found that prosecutors had vouched improperly for witnesses, held substantive communications with grand jurors outside the jury room, and excused jurors who disagreed with the government’s case from the deliberations process. That last item bears repetition: a prosecutor removed grand jurors for disagreeing with the prosecution. McCord, a twenty-year DOJ veteran, said on air she could not fathom any prosecutor doing it. All of it had been redacted from the transcripts provided to the court. When the judge asked for the unredacted versions, the government dropped the felony charges, arguing the grand jury question was now moot. The judge’s response was to say she’d never seen prosecutorial behavior like this in her career, and to schedule sanctions briefing. The U.S. attorney dismissed the case entirely rather than proceed.

In Tennessee, the vindictive prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, sent to CECOT by administrative error, fought his removal to the Supreme Court, was then criminally indicted the moment the administration claimed it had no power to bring him back, was dismissed by a federal judge who found the government had not rebutted the presumption of vindictiveness and that Todd Blanche’s direct involvement in directing the prosecution was itself part of the taint.

McCord observed that judges across the country are now explicitly noting they can no longer apply the presumption of regularity, the foundational assumption that DOJ attorneys are telling the truth and acting in good faith. That assumption, she noted, is not a formality. It is the operating system of the federal court system. Without it, every interaction between a federal prosecutor and a federal judge becomes an adversarial negotiation over whether the government is lying. One reporter noted that DOJ filings are now appearing in court bearing random capitalization, exclamation points, references to Trump Derangement Syndrome. The president’s voice is colonizing the institution’s paperwork.

The damage, McCord said, is at this point immeasurable. Rebuilding it, if the country gets to the point of rebuilding it, will require confronting the fact that some of the people currently occupying career positions were hired on a loyalty litmus test that included questions about who won the 2020 election. They are not career attorneys in the traditional sense, more an occupation force wearing career attorney credentials.

It is worth sitting, for just a moment, with the geometry of a single Wednesday.

The Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into the woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault, coincident to a Supreme Court conference on his appeal of her verdict.

A sixty-year-old journalist lost her job for refusing to kill a segment about a prison where the administration was sending people without due process.

The former president sued to keep his grief diary private from a congressional committee that wants to use it to call him senile.

Thirty-odd retired federal judges filed papers arguing that a $1.776 billion fund was built on a fraud perpetrated against a federal court.

Workers finished assembling an octagon on the South Lawn of the White House, where sponsorship packages for the right to stand nearby are going for $1.5 million, destination of funds unknown.

And somewhere in Virginia, a contractor who got a no-bid deal because he once fixed the President’s golf club pool was on his third attempt to seal a concrete gap, on the public’s dime, under a flag-blue coating that is still uneven, in a pool that is still leaking, for an anniversary we have known was coming for two and a half centuries.

The shakedown state is not subtle. It is loud, legalistic, televised, wrapped in bunting, and billed to the public. It just counts on you being too tired to keep looking.