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  • Thom Hartmann: Why Pam Bondi Arrested Judge Dugan in Milwaukee

    Thom Hartmann: Why Pam Bondi Arrested Judge Dugan in Milwaukee


    Thom Hartmann is a brilliant journalist who is fast to figure out the stories behind the headlines. Here, he explains why Attorney General Pam Bondi had Milwaukee County Jusge Hannah Dugan arrested and paraded her out of her courthouse in handcuffs. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted pictures of the judge in handcuffs.

    Hartmann writes that the goal was a warning to other judges:

    The audience for Pam Bondi‘s performance yesterday — when federal agents swarm-raided a county judge — was not the general public. They don’t care if the story vanishes six or 12 or 24 hours into the news cycle, so long as vanishes. The real audience for their action was a very small number of people: the nation’s judges. They’ve pacified the Article I branch of government, Congress, and now they are in the process of pacifying the article III Judiciary branch. That will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways. That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Vladimir Putin style dictatorship. In fact it appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor. If not his handler. And Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the traditional American infrastructure and nation and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world. And to get there, now that they have pacified Congress, they only have to seize control of the Judiciary and then nothing except we the people will stand in their way. And they know it. First, terrorize Congress. Second, terrorize the media. Third, terrorize the judges and lawyers. (the final step in that process for them will be the Supreme Court, and if they can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary it will be much easier to terrorize the Court). And finally begin terrorizing the individual citizens until the process is complete and we are fully Russia and all dissent is suppressed. And they know that time is running out because elections are coming and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now and it is beginning to decline. This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges. If Trump can do this as quickly as Hitler or Putin did, it could happen very quickly, possibly even in the next few weeks. Buckle up…

    Hartmann also wrote about Trump’s habit of lying:

    Busted: Trump stuns Time Magazine with outlandish lies to cover up his trade deal collapse. Donald Trump has lied his entire life, but China’s President Xi is committed to not letting him get away with lying about his trade negotiations with that country. On Tuesday, Trump sat down with two TIME Magazine reporters and repeatedly lied to them, saying that he was negotiating with China and that he’d already cut “over 200” deals with other nations to resolve the trade war he declared roughly a month ago. In fact, as the reporters pointed out, he’s not inked even one single deal so far and, to make things far worse for him, China is actively using social media to tell the world that they’re not even bothering to talk with his people, must less President Xi calling Trump himself. We’ve had some terrible presidents throughout our history and some have done some terrible things; John Adams imprisoning newspaper editors, Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan conspiring with foreign countries to steal American elections. But lying to the press and the people on such a routine basis — over 30,000 documented lies in his first term, and daily lies now — is something new in the American experience. Democracy can’t work when a nation can’t trust its leaders to tell them the truth on issues of consequence, which appears to be exactly Trump’s (and Putin’s) goal: the destruction of our republic from the inside, just as Khrushchev predicted.

    Then Hartmann wondered why some of Trump’s Wall Street pals are getting stock tips:

    Are Wall Street insiders getting stock tips from Trump? And why is Apple moving their production to India instead of the US? Fox’s senior business correspondent Charles Gasparino told his viewers on Thursday that “senior Wall Street execs with ties to the White House” had informed him that they were getting tips from the Trump administration on trade talks that could (and do) swing markets. When Gasparino approached Treasury Secretary and billionaire Scott Bessent’s press team, they refused to deny the reports. Remember when Martha Stewart went to prison for six months because a doctor friend told her about the results from clinical trials of a new drug and she passed that info along to her stockbroker? Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe the astonishing level of corruption across this administration. Of course, they have a hell of a role model to emulate in Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Apple reports they’re considering moving their iPhone production out of China in response to Trump’s tariff threats. But are they bringing it to Texas or Kentucky? Not a chance. India is the new destination, according to news reports. So much for Eisenhower’s “patriotic American companies”; that was so 1950s. The entire concept of doing good by the country that made you rich is long dead, the victim of the Reagan Revolution’s embrace of neoliberal free trade and doctrine of putting profits above people and patriotism.

    As you read here, Michael Tomasky said that Trump was taking in millions from suckers by selling his meme coins, a for-profit deal that would have shocked the nation if it had been done by Biden or any other president.

    Hartmann warns about the grifting, which the Mainstream Media doesn’t seem to care much about:

    While America is burning (both economically and from climate change), professional grifter Trump is making out like a bandit. Are Americans paying attention yet? Can you imagine how Republicans would have responded if President Biden had announced that he and his son Hunter were going to start selling autographed pictures of himself for a few thousand dollars each and would be running the business out of the White House? And that the top purchasers — even if they were foreign nationals — would be having a private dinner with him and get a tour of the White House? They’d be fainting in the streets, screaming in front of the cameras, and convening investigations, grand juries, and criminal prosecutions faster than a weasel in a henhouse. But when Trump announced this week that he was selling his meme coins — which are just serial-numbered digital images of Trump or his wife with no intrinsic value — and the top 220 “investors” would have dinner with him, not even one elected Republican stood up to object. This is how far the party has fallen; they’re all in on the grift, and many are looking for ways to cash in on it as apparently Marjorie Taylor Greene did when it was reported it looked like she was buying and selling stocks based on insider information. 



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  • The Arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan Undermines the Rule of Law

    The Arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan Undermines the Rule of Law


    Trump’s FBI and ICE agents arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Duggan in her courtroom and led her away in handcuffs because she sent a defendant out a back door. Trump officials said the judge was helping the defendant evade arrest, and they demonstrated that “no one is above the law” ( except Donald Trump). Critics said that Trump’s Department of Justice made a mockery of the law by arresting a judge.

    See the comments of this Wisconsin Appeals Court judge who told CNN the Trump administration was sending a message to judges everywhere to bend to the will of the Trump administration. He was “appalled” that Judge Dugan was publicly humiliated, and that the director of the FBI Kash Patel posted a tweet of her being led away.

    Judge Dugan told the agents that they should return with the correct warrant. One agent rode in the same elevator with the man sought by the Feds, but made no attempt to arrest him.

    The New York Daily News editorial board said:

    The FBI arrest of a Milwaukee local judge on felony counts related to immigration enforcement is an unwarranted and dangerous escalation by the Trump administration.

    For the FBI to arrest someone at their workplace, they usually have to have been charged with something especially dire. For Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, this offense was allegedly refusing to hand defendant Eduardo Flores Ruiz, who had just had a hearing before the judge, over to an ICE task force that showed up in her courtroom. Dugan was charged with two federal felonies and taken into custody, which FBI Director Kash Patel gloated about on social media.

    Attorney General Pam Bondi, for whom advancing the MAGA movement’s political agenda supersedes ensuring the equal and fair administration of justice, went on TV to say: “no one is above the law.” Aside from the dissonance of serving under a president who was only able to evade extremely serious federal charges by being elected to the White House, Bondi either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that Dugan was in fact attempting to ensure the integrity of the legal process.

    Flores may have been guilty of his misdemeanor charges, or he may not. The point of the proceedings before Dugan was to establish that and, if appropriate, what his punishment should be. Because of ICE’s detention, that won’t happen, which is bad for Flores, bad for any alleged victims — who won’t see justice — and bad for the larger community as immigrants and their families begin to see the courthouse as a dangerous place to be.

    Having ICE at the courthouse means immigrants won’t report crimes, assist law enforcement, or show up for their own court hearings, which makes everyone less safe, not to mention completely undercuts the baseline American ideal of due process, not something that Bondi and her cadre seem to hold in very high esteem.

    It’s ironic that Dugan was charged with “obstructing a proceeding” when the only people obstructing an official proceeding here were the task force that showed up to take Flores into custody. This task force, per the government’s own criminal complaint, consisted of just one ICE agent plus one Customs and Border Protection agent, two FBI agents and two DEA agents.

    We wonder if six federal agents, four of whom are not in immigration-focused agencies, could have found a better use of their time than detaining a single person at a courthouse. Now, more federal resources will be wasted on this fiasco as the government tries to move forward with a prosecution of a sitting judge whose alleged crime was simply letting a defendant walk through a different hallway.

    Patel, Bondi and Trump are overplaying their hand, especially as the president’s immigration policy approval keeps dropping amid public outrage over authoritarian assaults on due process and separation of powers. Going to war with the judiciary is not going to end well, especially given the volume of federal judges, including Trump-appointed and conservative judges and the Supreme Court’s own conservative majority, that are questioning the administration’s power grab.

    Federal judges aren’t likely to look favorably on this flagrant assertion of power in arresting a popular county-level counterpart just for not letting her courtroom become an ICE staging ground.



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