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Above: Jack Smith, former U.S. Department of Justice special counsel, delivering a statement on the indictment of Donald J. Trump, June 2023. (Photo: U.S. Department of Justice, public domain.)

This deep dive is about Jack Smith, the special counsel who built two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump — one for trying to overturn the 2020 election, one for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — and who told the U.S. Senate on September 29, 2026 that his evidence proved “serious crimes” beyond a reasonable doubt. Neither case ever reached a jury. Here is everything he had, why it stalled, and the only roads left.

Our view, stated plainly: we think Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. What follows is not opinion — it is the record, sourced. Trump pleaded not guilty in both federal cases and has denied all wrongdoing.

Who Jack Smith is

• Career prosecutor, not a politician. Former chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section and chief prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, where he prosecuted war crimes.
• Appointed November 18, 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland to take over both Trump investigations.
• Resigned in January 2025, days before Trump’s second inauguration, after filing his final report.

Case one: the 2020 election (Washington, D.C.)

Indicted August 1, 2023 — four felony counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371), conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of that proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512), and conspiracy against rights (18 U.S.C. § 241).

The evidence, as laid out in the indictment and Smith’s final report:

• He knew he lost. The report calls deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — the thread running through everything. Aides, officials and his own campaign told him the fraud claims were false; he kept making them.
• The states. Pressure on officials in states he lost to block certification — including the January 2, 2021 call asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes.”
• The fake electors. Slates of fraudulent electors organized in seven states Joe Biden won, to be presented to Congress as real.
• The Justice Department. Pressure on DOJ leadership to open what the report calls “sham election crime investigations,” and a push to install Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general to lend them weight.
• Mike Pence. Day-after-day pressure on the vice president to reject the electoral count — documented in Pence’s own contemporaneous handwritten notes.
• January 6 itself. At 2:24 p.m., with the Capitol already breached, Trump posted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
• The scale. About 250 witnesses interviewed voluntarily and 55 called before the grand jury.

Smith’s bottom line, in Volume One of his final report (released January 14, 2025): “but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

What stopped it: the Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States ruling (July 1, 2024) granted presidents broad immunity for official acts, gutting the DOJ-pressure evidence. Smith re-indicted on a narrower theory in August 2024. After Trump won the election, the case was dismissed at the Justice Department’s request in November 2024, under the department’s long-standing policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

Case two: the classified documents (Florida)

Indicted June 2023; superseded in July 2023 to 40 counts, most of them willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act, plus obstruction and false statements. Aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira were charged alongside him.

The evidence, from the indictment:

• Boxes everywhere. Classified records stored in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office, his bedroom and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago — a club with thousands of guests.
• The Bedminster tape. A July 2021 recording of Trump showing a military document to people without clearances: “As president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t.”
• Hiding them from his own lawyer. Nauta moved dozens of boxes before a Trump attorney searched for subpoenaed records; Trump suggested the lawyer “pluck” out anything bad.
• The false certification. In June 2022 his team handed over 38 documents and certified a diligent search had been done. Two months later, on August 8, 2022, the FBI found more than 100 classified documents.
• The camera server. After a grand jury subpoenaed Mar-a-Lago security footage, De Oliveira allegedly told a staffer that “the boss” wanted the server deleted.

What stopped it: Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case in July 2024, ruling Smith’s appointment unlawful. The Justice Department dropped its appeal as to Trump after the election. On February 23, 2026, Cannon permanently blocked the release of Smith’s Volume Two, the documents report — so the public has still never seen it.

Smith under oath, September 29, 2026

• “Beyond a reasonable doubt.” Testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Smith said his investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump engaged in serious crimes (NPR, ABC News).
• “I stand by” it. Faced with the same facts today, he said, he would make the same decision to charge — regardless of party.
• Republicans’ answer was to accuse him of abusing his authority, with some calling for him to be prosecuted instead.

The scoreboard, as of today

• Federal election case: dismissed, November 2024.
• Federal documents case: dismissed; Volume Two sealed.
• Georgia election case: dropped and dismissed November 26, 2025 after Fani Willis was removed and a new prosecutor took over.
• New York: the one that stuck. Trump stands convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. His state appeal is pending, and in August 2026 a federal judge again refused to move the case to federal court.

Next steps: what it would actually take

The clock is the enemy. Most federal crimes carry a five-year statute of limitations, and Justice Department policy bars charging a sitting president. Trump’s term runs to January 20, 2029.

• January 6 charges: the window has closed. Five years from the conduct ran out in January 2026.
• Documents charges: the window closes in 2027. The retention ended with the August 2022 search and the obstruction happened in mid-2022, so the five-year clock runs out in mid-to-late 2027 — before he leaves office. This is also the strongest case legally: keeping documents after leaving office is private conduct, outside the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
• Road one: Congress pauses the clock. Congress can extend a limitations period that has not yet expired; what the Constitution forbids is reviving one that already has (Stogner v. California, 2003). A law tolling the clock while a president is in office would have to pass both chambers and survive a veto — before mid-2027. That runs straight through the November 3, 2026 midterms.
• Road two: free Volume Two. Transparency groups American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute are appealing Cannon’s order to the Eleventh Circuit. If it is released, the public sees the documents evidence in full.
• Road three: New York. The 34-count conviction stands unless the appeals courts throw it out. Defending it is the Manhattan district attorney’s job, and it is the only criminal verdict on the books.
• Road four: impeachment. The House can impeach and the Senate can convict and disqualify — but the penalty is removal from office, not prison, and it takes two-thirds of the Senate.
• The wild card: pardons. Whether a president can pardon himself has never been tested in court.

Bottom line: Jack Smith did his job. The evidence exists, grand juries in two cities voted to indict on it, and he stood by it under oath this fall. Whether anyone ever answers for it now depends less on prosecutors than on Congress, the courts — and the voters in two weeks.

Sources: ABC News on Volume One · NPR and CNN on the Senate testimony · CBS News and CNN on Volume Two · the documents case · NPR on Georgia · CNBC on New York. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

A man with a lifelong mental illness sits strapped into a restraint chair in the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland, Ohio. His arms are bound. A mask covers his face. He cannot run, cannot block, cannot do anything at all. A corporal reaches up, switches off the body camera on his own chest, and punches him in the face six times.

That is not a rumor or a hunch. Two guards pleaded guilty to it. And when the bill came due, the system that hired them did what it always does for its own: it found them the softest landing it could.

The chair

On March 22, 2019, Corrections Corporal Nicholas Evans and Officer Timothy Dugan secured 47-year-old Terrance Debose, a mentally ill detainee, in a restraint chair. According to Prison Legal News, Evans then turned off his body camera. What he forgot was the jail’s own surveillance system, which kept recording as the guards dragged the chair into a cell. Evans punched Debose six times in the face; Dugan struck him twice. They left him there, concussed and bleeding, restrained and alone, for about two hours.

Local outlets including Cleveland 19 aired the footage. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost put it plainly, as quoted by Prison Legal News: “These two men abused their authority to pound a prisoner strapped to a chair.”

The deal

Here’s what “abused their authority to pound a prisoner strapped to a chair” was worth in court.

On October 15, 2019, Evans pleaded guilty to attempted felonious assault and to tampering with evidence. That second charge is the body camera. He didn’t just beat a restrained man; he tried to make sure there would be no proof. Dugan pleaded guilty to attempted abduction and misdemeanor assault. Both were allowed to resign instead of being fired.

On February 26, 2020, according to the Ohio Attorney General’s office, Evans got nine months. Dugan got ten days, and the AG’s release notes where he served them: the Geauga County Jail, a different county’s lockup, not the Cuyahoga County Jail where he’d worked and where the men he guarded were still sitting.

Nine months and ten days, for a beating on camera that left a restrained man with a concussion. Debose’s verdict on that, reported by Cleveland 19 and others: “That isn’t justice.” He’s right.

It wasn’t one bad night

The Debose beating didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened inside one of the worst-run jails in the country, during a stretch when, by multiple accounts, the people in charge were busy protecting themselves.

• Eight people died in the overcrowded jail in 2018, according to Prison Legal News. A 2018 U.S. Marshals Service review found inhumane conditions and a pattern of abusive guard behavior, including withholding food as punishment and excessive force.
• The warden told a guard to kill his camera. After detainee Joseph Arquillo died of an overdose in August 2018, Warden Eric Ivey ordered a guard to turn off his body camera during the investigation. Ivey pleaded guilty to filing a false report in October 2019. His sentence: a $2,000 fine and probation, in exchange for cooperating.
• The restraint chair, again. In July 2018, Officer Robert Marsh was caught on video punching Chantelle Glass while she was strapped into a restraint chair. Officer Idris-Farid Clark pepper-sprayed her at close range for six seconds. Marsh got 30 days. Clark, who was also charged with evidence tampering and extortion, got 18 months.
• Guards running drugs. Officers Stephen Thomas and Marvella Sullivan were indicted in September 2019 with a prisoner for allegedly smuggling cellphones, vape pens, heroin, fentanyl and marijuana into the jail for cash, an investigation that began after an inmate’s overdose.
• The man at the top. Former jail director Ken Mills was indicted for lying to county council about blocking the hiring of nurses before the run of deaths, and for dereliction of duty. A jury convicted him on four misdemeanor counts in 2021 and he served nine months, but News 5 Cleveland reports an appeals court later reversed those convictions and ordered a new trial.

Count the body cameras in that list. A corporal switches his off before a beating. A warden orders one off during a death investigation. That isn’t a coincidence. It’s a culture that knew exactly what the cameras were for, and made sure they weren’t on when it mattered.

How long they actually did

Sources: Ohio Attorney General; Prison Legal News; News 5 Cleveland (linked below).

Watch the footage

The jail’s own surveillance video of the Debose beating was released in June 2019. Warning: it is graphic.

• Cleveland 19: inmate beating video released involving indicted Cuyahoga County Jail officers (graphic)
• NBC News: video released of Ohio corrections officer who turned off body camera beating mentally ill inmate
• WKYC exclusive: officers appear to punch restrained inmate
• Cleveland 19: officers plead guilty (with video)

The courtroom breakdown that sent me down this road:

The protection racket

Every one of these men knew the rules better than any prisoner in that building. They enforced them every day. And when they broke them, the system bent over backwards: reduced charges, “attempted” assault for six completed punches, resignations instead of firings, jail time served in another county, a fine and probation for the warden who killed a camera at a death scene.

That’s what protection looks like in America when you wear the uniform. Not a cell with your name on it. A plea deal, a short stay somewhere quieter, and a lawyer telling the judge how dangerous it would be for you to serve time like everybody else.

I say no. A guard convicted of beating a man in restraints should do his time the same way the man he beat would: general population, no badge discount, no special wing, no transfer to a friendlier county, and his record in plain words where everybody can read it. He spent his career counting on the dark. The least the rest of us can do is turn the lights on.

Sources

• Ohio Attorney General, “Cuyahoga County Corrections Officers Sentenced”, Feb. 26, 2020
• Prison Legal News, “Multiple Indictments, Prison Sentences, for Guards and Officials at Violence-Plagued Cleveland Jail”, May 1, 2020
• Cleveland 19, “2 Cuyahoga County Corrections officers going to jail for attack on restrained inmate”, Feb. 26, 2020
• Cleveland 19, “Video shows Cuyahoga County jail officers pummeling inmate”, June 7, 2019
• News 5 Cleveland, “2 Cuyahoga County jailers who were caught on camera beating restrained inmate plead guilty”
• News 5 Cleveland, “Former Cuyahoga County Jail Director Ken Mills to get new trial”
• WKYC, “Former Cuyahoga County Jail guards get time behind bars for inmate assault”
• Video that prompted this post: “Jail Guard Punches a STRAPPED-DOWN Man 6 Times”, Judge Harlan Courtroom (YouTube commentary channel; facts above are from the news and official sources, not the video)

There’s a version of this story that the internet fell in love with: the handsome Ivy League ghost who walked up to a health-insurance CEO on a Manhattan sidewalk, shot him, and melted into the city like smoke. A folk hero. A phantom. A legend in a puffer jacket.

Here’s the version that actually happened. He checked into a hostel with a fake ID, pulled his mask down to flirt with the front-desk clerk under a security camera, and five days later was sitting in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, with the gun, the silencer, the same fake ID, and a handwritten explanation of why he did it — all in his backpack, all within arm’s reach of the cops who walked in and recognized him.

The legend says he got caught “a day later.” He didn’t. It was five days. He had five full days, and he spent them carrying the evidence around Pennsylvania like a man who’d misread the assignment.

Same rules as always at this bar. What Luigi Mangione admitted under oath in federal court, I state flat — and as of August 14, 2026, that includes the killing itself. What police and prosecutors say they found, I attribute to them. His New York murder charges are still pending, so where that case is concerned, he’s presumed innocent, and I’ll say so.

And one thing before the jokes start: the man who died was Brian Thompson, 50, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare and a father of two, shot from behind on his way into a work conference. Whatever you think of his industry — and this bar has opinions about American health insurance — nothing in this post is about him. It’s about the guy who thought he was a mastermind.

Who he was

On paper, Mangione was the kid every Maryland parent brags about. Valedictorian at Gilman, a private boys’ school in Baltimore. Bachelor’s and master’s in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. A gig at Firaxis working on Civilization VI while he was still a student. A remote data-engineering job after that.

Then the slide, per his own writing and the reporting since. Chronic back pain, a spinal fusion in July 2023, a long drift through Hawaii and Asia. He went quiet on social media in mid-2024. His family says they stopped hearing from him around July. On November 18, 2024, his mother filed a missing-person report with San Francisco police.

Six days after that report, he got off a bus in Manhattan.

The run-up

November 24, 2024: a bus that started in Atlanta pulls into the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street. Mangione takes a cab, then another, and checks into the HI New York City Hostel on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, according to the NYPD‘s timeline. He hands the desk a New Jersey driver’s license in the name of “Mark Rosario.”

Remember that name. He sure didn’t forget it.

During check-in, police say, he made small talk with the clerk, and “at some point, he pulled his mask down and smiled,” as NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny put it. The hostel camera caught the whole grin. A man about to commit the most-watched killing of the year, and he couldn’t resist the meet-cute.

The target was in town for UnitedHealth Group‘s investor conference at the New York Hilton Midtown. When Mangione pleaded guilty in federal court this August, he admitted to exactly that: following Thompson to the conference. That’s what makes it federal stalking, and that’s the charge he admitted.

December 4

About 6:45 a.m., outside the Hilton at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, a masked man waited for Brian Thompson and shot him in the back and the leg. Thompson died. The gunman walked off, got on an electric bike, and rode up into Central Park.

He’d also left a little calling card. The shell casings recovered at the scene were marked with three words: “delay,” “deny,” “depose” — a riff on the insurance-industry playbook. A detail that read like poetry to his online fan club and like a signed confession to everyone else.

He went into Central Park wearing a backpack. He came out without one. Police later said he left New York by bus that same day.

The five-day manhunt

The NYPD had a masked face, a bike, a backpack, and a city full of cameras. What they got next was the gift that kept on giving: on December 5, they released the hostel photos. Mask down. Big smile. The most cooperative suspect in the history of the department.

The next day, December 6, investigators found the backpack in a wooded stretch of Central Park. Inside, per reports: a jacket and a stack of Monopoly money. No gun. Just board-game cash, as if the whole thing were a bit.

Meanwhile, a thousand miles west, UnitedHealthcare’s headquarters in Minnesota was under police watch.

The arrest: a parade of blunders

December 9, 2024, around 9:15 in the morning. A McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 276 miles from the Hilton. A customer looks across the dining room, thinks the guy in the back with the laptop and the blue medical mask looks an awful lot like the man on the news, and tells an employee, who calls 911.

Officers walk up. They ask him to lower the mask. Per the court papers, the moment he did, they “immediately recognized him as the suspect.” The same face he’d so generously shown the hostel camera.

Then they ask for ID. And this is the part that should be taught in every criminology class in America: he hands them the New Jersey license. In the name of Mark Rosario. The exact fake name from the hostel register — the one the NYPD already had.

You couldn’t write it. If a screenwriter pitched it, the studio would send it back for being too stupid.

Here’s what police say came out of his things:

• The gun. A 3D-printed pistol with a Glock magazine, which NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with” the murder weapon. Police later said the casings matched.
• The silencer. Also 3D-printed. Also just there.
• The ID. Mark Rosario, back by popular demand.
• The writings. Three handwritten pages that, per the NYPD, “speak to both his motivation and mindset.” He brought his own motive. To a McDonald’s.
• The real him. His actual Maryland license and a U.S. passport, police say.
• The money. Police said about $8,000 in cash. His lawyers have disputed that number, so take it with a grain of salt.

Five days. A head start most fugitives only dream of. And the man walked into a fast-food restaurant carrying the murder weapon, the silencer, a written explanation, and the alias that was already on every detective’s whiteboard. The “phantom” was caught by a guy eating breakfast.

The fandom never really reckoned with that part. A December 2024 Economist/YouGov poll found about one in five Americans viewed him favorably, and a GiveSendGo fund for his defense passed $1.5 million by this spring. Underneath all of it is a guy whose getaway plan apparently ended at a McMuffin.

The courts, 2025–2026

He was charged in three places at once. Pennsylvania charged him with the gun, the forgery and the fake ID. Manhattan charged him with murder, and a grand jury indicted him on 11 counts on December 17, 2024, including first-degree murder “in furtherance of terrorism.” The federal government charged him too, with a death-eligible count, and in April 2025 the U.S. Attorney General announced prosecutors would seek the death penalty.

Then the case started shedding pieces:

• September 16, 2025: Judge Gregory Carro tossed the two state terrorism-murder counts.
• January 30, 2026: Federal Judge Margaret Garnett dismissed the death-eligible counts. No death penalty.
• May 18, 2026: Judge Carro ruled that the Altoona officers’ search of his backpack at the McDonald’s was an improper warrantless search, and suppressed what came out of it in the state case. The gun, recovered later at the station, still comes in. The federal judge went the other way and allowed the backpack evidence in her courtroom.

Think about that one. The single smartest thing that happened for Luigi Mangione’s defense in two years was a cop’s procedural mistake. His own contribution was packing the bag.

Then came August 14, 2026. In Manhattan federal court, Mangione pleaded guilty to two federal stalking counts, with no plea deal reported. And he said it out loud: “On the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan, and he died.” He described his motive as opposition to the health-insurance system.

So much for the ghost. So much, too, for every corner of the internet that spent two years insisting he was framed.

Where it stands now

• Federal: sentencing is set for December 18, 2026. Prosecutors want life in prison. The federal guidelines call for 24 to 30 years.
• New York: the state murder trial was supposed to start with jury selection on September 8. Judge Carro cancelled it after the federal plea, because the defense argues that trying him again for the same conduct is double jeopardy. The Manhattan DA’s answer is due October 9, and there’s a hearing on December 10, 2026. The state murder charges remain pending, and on those he’s presumed innocent until a jury, or a plea, says otherwise.

Which leaves us here. A man who spent months planning, printed his own gun, scrawled a slogan on the bullets and wrote down his reasons, then lasted five days because he couldn’t stop showing people his face and couldn’t stop using the same fake name. The insurance industry didn’t catch him. A smile and a McDonald’s customer did.

Brian Thompson’s kids get to grow up with that. Luigi Mangione gets a sentencing date.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Luigi Mangione” (case chronology); PBS NewsHour/AP on the federal plea and state postponement; ABC News; CNN’s Dec. 2024 timeline; NBC New York on the fake ID; West Side Rag on the hostel; WESA on the Altoona arrest; AP via WRDW on the May 2026 suppression ruling. Items found at the arrest are as described by police and prosecutors; the cash amount is disputed by the defense. Photos via Wikimedia Commons under the licenses credited; graphics by blog.bitchlove.com.

Picture the sally port of the Drew County jail, December 17, 2023. A woman named Amanda Prince is standing in front of an Arkansas State Police cruiser, handcuffed, arrested for driving on a suspended license. She knows she’s wrong on that one. She’s said so. Behind her, Trooper Christian Morphis is searching the back seat where she’d been sitting — and he comes up holding a little bag of cocaine. Felony. The kind of charge that eats years of your life.

Nine months later a jury looked at that story and threw it out of the courtroom. Then the state’s own investigators looked harder and concluded the story wasn’t just unconvincing — it was impossible. The trooper got fired. Then decertified. Then sued. You know what he never got? Charged.

Same rules as always at this bar. If something is verified by several outlets, I state it flat. If it’s one outlet’s reporting, I name the outlet. If it’s an allegation, I tell you whose. The planting itself is an allegation — Prince’s, in a federal lawsuit — and Arkansas State Police deny it, so you’ll see both. What the state’s own investigation found about his report is not an allegation. It’s their finding.

The stop

Monticello, Arkansas. Morphis pulls Prince over for driving on a suspended license — per the Arkansas Times, he had already cited her once before for the very same thing. She admitted it, then and later: “I was in the wrong for driving on a suspended.” That should have been a citation and a bad afternoon.

Instead she was cuffed, searched — or rather, not properly searched, a detail that matters enormously in a minute — and put in the back of his cruiser for the ride to the county jail.

Minute seventeen

Here’s what Prince’s federal lawsuit says the camera footage shows, per the Arkansas Times: at about the 16:52 mark of the recording, a trooper opens the front passenger door of the cruiser and tosses an object inside. Prince is handcuffed in the back. At the jail, the suit alleges, Morphis had her stand in front of the car, reached into that front floorboard while grabbing a rubber glove, then went into the back seat and “discovered” a bag of cocaine where she had been sitting.

Prince, to reporters: “When we get to the jail and he pulls out this bag of cocaine, I’m like caught off guard, like that’s definitely not mine.” She asked for the bag to be fingerprinted and DNA-tested. Per the Arkansas Times, Morphis declined.

His arrest paperwork told a different story. The affidavit described Prince moving erratically in the back seat, digging at her waistline — the picture of a suspect ditching her stash. Hold that thought, because the people who eventually checked it against the video were his own agency.

The trial

September 2024: a Drew County jury hears the case — the trooper’s account on one side, a woman insisting the drugs weren’t hers on the other — and acquits her of the felony. Worth noting, per the Arkansas Times: the planting allegation hadn’t even surfaced yet at trial. The jury didn’t need it. The state’s star witness was a state trooper testifying under oath, and twelve Arkansans listened and said no.

Think about how rarely that happens. Juries trust cops. It’s practically the house edge of the criminal justice system. This jury heard this cop and walked her.

What nine months of innocence cost her

Acquittal is not a refund. Between the arrest and the verdict, per the Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio:

She posted a $5,000 bond. Her truck — a gift from her late father, legally tagged and insured, parked a quarter mile from her house — was impounded anyway after Morphis refused to let anyone come get it. The impound fees outran what she could pay, so the truck was gone for good. While she waited for trial she lost her home and her belongings. She was, for a stretch, homeless. For a traffic stop over a suspended license.

That’s the machine working exactly as designed on the citizen side: full price, paid up front, no verdict required.

“Impossible” is a strong word. Investigators used it.

October 2024, a month after the acquittal, Prince filed a citizen complaint alleging perjury and fabrication of evidence. The internal investigation that followed concluded, per Little Rock Public Radio:

The story in his report was physically impossible — Prince was handcuffed, stationary, and wearing pants too tight to have dug a bag out of them unnoticed. The surveillance video showed her sitting still except for brief head movements, not “moving erratically.” He falsified official documentation. And he never properly patted her down before putting her in the cruiser — which was the procedural fig leaf the whole “it came from her pocket” story depended on.

In January 2025, Arkansas State Police fired him. Read the stated grounds closely, per the Arkansas Times: policy violations — inaccurate statements, failure to search a prisoner. The termination letter never mentions planted drugs. A man whose own agency concluded his sworn account was fiction got the bureaucratic equivalent of a parking ticket: cleaned out his locker and went home.

On June 11, 2026, the Arkansas Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training voted unanimously to decertify him, per Little Rock Public Radio. He can never carry a badge in Arkansas again. That’s the ceiling of what the system has done to Christian Morphis, and it took two and a half years to get there.

Watch him explain himself

Don’t take my word for any of this — or theirs. The released footage and Morphis’s recorded interview are public, and the breakdown below walks through the interrogation where he gets to account for the report his own agency later called fiction. Pour something and watch his answers.

“Zero evidence,” says the agency holding the tape

And here’s the part that should curl your drink. In December 2025 — nearly a year after they fired him over the inaccurate report — Arkansas State Police told THV11, per the Arkansas Times: “The allegations made by Ms. Prince, however, are erroneous and irresponsible. There is zero evidence to support allegations that this Trooper ‘planted drugs.’”

Erroneous and irresponsible. About the woman their own investigators effectively vindicated. Per the Arkansas Times, Prince’s attorney Mike Laux says the internal investigation never directly asked Morphis whether he planted the drugs, and never interviewed Prince at all. You will find zero evidence in a lot of places if you’re careful about where you don’t look.

The lawsuit

On May 22, 2026, Prince filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit, assigned to Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., per the Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio. The defendants: Morphis; Mike Hagar, the state’s top cop; and Marcus Daniels, the trooper who ran that internal investigation. The suit seeks damages for the financial and emotional wreckage.

Laux, who’s done civil-rights work for over twenty years, per the Arkansas Times: “I haven’t seen a more egregious example in all of my years of doing police misconduct cases in Arkansas, in Chicago, in Texas, in Kentucky, in Oklahoma, all over the place. I have never seen a more brazen act of police misconduct.”

The scoreboard

Run the two ledgers side by side.

Amanda Prince, guilty of driving on a suspended license: a felony prosecution, a $5,000 bond, her dead father’s truck, her home, her belongings, months of homelessness, and nine months under threat of prison — acquitted, and still out everything but the verdict.

Christian Morphis, found by his own agency to have filed a fictional report about an impossible crime: fired with a letter that politely omits the worst of it, decertified a year and a half later, and — as of everything on the public record — never arrested, never charged, never cuffed in the back of anybody’s cruiser.

Filing a false police report is a crime in Arkansas. Perjury is a crime in Arkansas. Planting evidence — if a jury ever gets to decide that question the way one decided Amanda Prince’s — is a crime everywhere. The citizen complaint said perjury and fabrication in October 2024. It’s October 2026. Where the fuck is his trial?

Because here’s what the back of that cruiser actually held, and no evidence bag was ever needed: proof that the system bills the innocent in advance and invoices the badge never. A jury saved Amanda Prince. Nobody’s even tried to prosecute the man who made that necessary.

Sources: Arkansas Times; Little Rock Public Radio (on the lawsuit and on the decertification). The planting allegation is Prince’s, made in her federal complaint; Morphis has not been criminally charged, and Arkansas State Police deny the drugs were planted.

Above: Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.). Sen. Dirtbag? You decide. (Photo illustration: the egg is ours.)

This timeline is about Sen. Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri: the morning he was floated as a 2028 running mate for Vice President JD Vance, and the hearing where he accused former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury over an Atlanta Hawks game.

A timeline of September 29, 2026, assembled from the reporting linked below. Facts only — draw your own conclusions.

~6:00 AM

Axios publishes a profile of Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), reporting he “has grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate,” and that Vance views him as “trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator.” The piece is bylined by Axios co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei.

Later that morning — Senate Judiciary Committee

Former special counsel Jack Smith testifies. Schmitt tells Smith: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Hawks game?” — presenting it as evidence Smith traveled to Atlanta in February 2024 and, by implication, met with Fulton County DA Fani Willis. Schmitt frames the alleged trip as grounds for a perjury accusation. (NBC News, Washington Post)

Minutes later

Smith responds that he did not attend an Atlanta Hawks NBA game: he attended a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game — played in Maryland, against the University of Maryland — because Caitlin Clark was playing. (CNN, Slate)

During and after the exchange

Per Mediaite’s accounting: Sean Hannity posts the exchange quote on X — and later deletes the post. Rich Sementa, producer of The Mark Levin Show, posts praise for Schmitt’s moment — and later deletes it. Benny Johnson posts that Schmitt “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself,” referring to “a Warriors Hawks game.” Accounts including Sidney Powell, Tony Shaffer, and Charlie Kirk’s show push the same narrative. Rolling Stone documents MAGA media continuing to cover the moment as a win after the claim collapsed.

On the record

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) says Schmitt, “working from clearly wrong information,” owes Smith an apology. (Missouri Independent)

The aftermath

The Washington Examiner’s opinion desk headlines it: “Eric Schmitt’s shadow campaign for the vice presidency lasted six hours.” The Hill reports Schmitt facing fallout; the Daily Beast reports a follow-up attempt rather than a retraction.

Worth stating plainly

• Speculation circulated that the Axios story was placed by Schmitt’s team ahead of an expected hearing moment, and that talking points were pre-seeded to commentators. No outlet has established either claim. (Daily Beast)
• As of October 2, 2026, no public apology from Sen. Schmitt to Jack Smith has been reported.

A baby cooked to death in the back of an SUV. The woman paid to watch her is at home with an ankle bracelet.

I read about this case in a piece framed around the injustice being done to Rhonda Jewell. I want to be careful here, because I am about to disagree with that framing in the strongest terms available to me, and the only way to do that honestly is to lay out the facts first and let them sit.

What happened

On 19 July 2023, in Baker County, Florida, Rhonda Jewell — now 49 — was being paid to look after Ariya Paige, ten months old. She drove home with Ariya in a rear-facing car seat in the back of her SUV. She parked. She went inside her house.

She left the baby in the car.

Five hours later, Ariya’s mother arrived to collect her daughter. That is the moment Jewell remembered. From her own testimony at trial:

“I forgot the baby in the car… and I ran to the car and I opened up the door and she was still there.”

It was 98 degrees outside. The interior of the SUV was measured at 133 degrees. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death hyperthermia. Ariya’s body temperature was still above 100 degrees at the hospital, after they had tried to cool her down.

The mother did not merely get bad news. She found her.

“The image of Ariya the day I found her will never get out of my head.”
— Brooke Paige, Ariya’s mother

The physics are not ambiguous

There is a temptation, when a case turns on the word “forgot,” to treat the death as a freak outcome — a terrible roll of the dice. It was not. A car in the Florida sun is not a place where a baby might die. It is a place where a baby will die, on a schedule you can plot.

That study parked a dark sedan in full sun on 16 cloud-free days and logged the interior temperature every five minutes for an hour. Its central finding: 80% of the total temperature rise happens in the first 30 minutes. Cracking the windows open an inch and a half made no meaningful difference. Even on the coolest day they tested — 72°F — the inside of the car reached 117°F.

An earlier study cited within it is closer still to Ariya’s day. At an ambient temperature of 98.2°F, King et al. found that 75% of the maximum heat rise occurred within five minutes, and the interior maxed out within fifteen minutes at between 124 and 153°F. The 133°F measured in Jewell’s SUV falls squarely inside that band.

So let us be precise about the timeline. That vehicle was hot enough to kill Ariya Paige somewhere in the first half hour. It then stayed that way for another four and a half hours, while the only adult responsible for her was inside the house, not thinking about her.

Vehicular heatstroke kills roughly 37 American children every year — about one every ten days — and has killed more than a thousand since 1998. Heatstroke sets in when core body temperature hits about 104°F. Around 107°F, it kills you. Ariya was ten months old, strapped into a rear-facing seat, unable to unbuckle herself, unable to open a door, unable to do anything at all except get hotter.

What the jury did

Jewell was originally charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child. Days before trial, the State — State Attorney Brian Kramer — added two counts: leaving a child unattended in a motor vehicle, and third-degree felony murder.

In November 2024, the jury acquitted her of aggravated manslaughter and its lesser-included offences. It convicted her of third-degree felony murder and of causing great bodily harm to a child by leaving her unattended in a vehicle.

In December 2024 she was sentenced to 15 years on the murder count and 2 years consecutive on the neglect count. Seventeen years. The State had asked for twenty. She is parole-eligible at fourteen.

Ariya’s father, Justise Paige, testified about the milestones he would not get:

“Instead of planning Ariya’s first birthday, we had to plan her funeral.”

Jewell, to the family, at sentencing: “My heart is broken. My heart is broken for Ariya’s parents, aunts and uncles. The person they once knew, loved and trusted has let them down. I take full responsibility.”

Hold onto that last sentence. It is going to matter.

Where she is right now

Not in prison. Rhonda Jewell was granted bond pending appeal and is living in Baker County under a curfew, wearing an ankle monitor she pays roughly $400 a month to wear.

Her appeal is being run by the MacArthur Justice Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center, with supporting amicus briefs from the Sentencing Project, a group of law professors, and Kids and Car Safety. That is a formidable amount of legal firepower, and it is aimed at one thing: undoing the seventeen years.

What the appeal actually argues

I am going to state their case as strongly as I can, because a position you cannot state fairly is a position you have not beaten.

Third-degree felony murder means a death that occurs during the commission of some other felony. Here, the other felony was leaving a child unattended in a motor vehicle — and the trial court ruled that this underlying felony required no proof that she knew the child was there. Strict liability.

Stack those together and you get the appeal’s argument: Jewell was convicted of murder without any jury finding that she possessed a culpable mental state about anything. They point to Mahaun, Florida precedent holding that a felony-murder conviction cannot constitutionally rest on a felony carrying no intent requirement. And they point at the verdict itself as proof of the absurdity — the same jury that convicted her of murder had just acquitted her of manslaughter, which is to say it declined to find she was even criminally negligent.

Written down that baldly, it looks strange. I will grant that freely.

And the human half of their case deserves the same fairness. “Forgotten baby syndrome” is a real, documented phenomenon. It is not a lawyer’s invention. It has happened to doctors, to professors, to devoted parents with no history of anything. The mechanism — habit memory overriding prospective memory when routine changes — is well described in the literature. Memory is not a moral organ. It fails people who love their children.

And here is why none of it saves her

Because Rhonda Jewell was not a parent on autopilot on the way to work.

A parent driving to the office has forty things in their head, and childcare is one of them. That is the scenario forgotten-baby-syndrome research is built on, and it is the scenario that earns genuine mercy. It is not this one.

Jewell had one job. Not one job among many — one job. She was being paid, that day, for the single task of keeping Ariya Paige alive and well. The baby was not incidental to her errand. The baby was the errand. She was in the middle of performing the only duty she had, and she performed it so badly that the child in her care died in a metal box in the driveway.

You cannot forget the entire content of your job and then offer the forgetting as your defence. “I lost track of the thing I was hired to keep track of” is not a mitigation. It is a confession, stated precisely.

And this is the part that should end the discussion: five hours. Not five minutes. Not a wrong turn, not a phone call, not a distraction at the school gate. Five hours in a house, with a baby dying in the vehicle outside, and not once in three hundred minutes did the woman being paid to mind that baby wonder where she was. She did not remember at hour one. Or two. Or three. Or four. She remembered when the mother knocked.

On the felony murder doctrine, which is not the villain here

The appeal treats it as an outrage that she was convicted of murder without proof of intent. But that is not a bug in felony murder. That is the entire doctrine. It exists precisely to say: when you commit a felony and somebody dies as a result, the law will not stand there and interrogate whether you meant for them to die.

Florida made leaving a child unattended in a car a felony because children die in hot cars every ten days in this country. The legislature was not being whimsical. It looked at a pile of small coffins and decided this specific act is dangerous enough to be criminal on its own terms — and a strict-liability standard is not an accident of drafting either. It is the point. “I didn’t realise she was in there” is the only thing anyone ever says in these cases. A statute that accepted it as an excuse would be a statute that never applied to anybody.

If the First DCA wants to hold that Florida cannot build felony murder on a strict-liability predicate, that is a legitimate question of state constitutional law and appellate judges get paid to answer it. I am not pretending to be one. But let us be clear about what is being sought and what it would mean: an argument that the death of Ariya Paige should carry no murder liability at all, because the woman responsible was not paying enough attention to form an intent.

Rewarding inattention with immunity is a strange thing to call justice.

The standard

Here is mine, and I do not think it is complicated.

If your job is taking care of kids, and one of them dies in your care, you did not do your job. Not “you had a hard day.” Not “anyone could have.” You had one responsibility, the responsibility was a living child, and the child is dead. Everything else is commentary.

People who take on the care of the helpless take on a heavier standard than the rest of us. That is not cruelty; it is the whole reason the job means anything. We hand infants to strangers on the strength of it. Anaesthetists, pilots, lifeguards, nurses — every profession where a lapse of attention kills someone is a profession where the law and the licensing board come down like a hammer, and nobody thinks that is unfair. Nobody argues the pilot should walk because he did not intend the mountain.

Jewell said it herself, in open court, before anyone was asking her to: I take full responsibility. Seventeen years is what full responsibility costs. Her lawyers are now in front of the First District Court of Appeal arguing it should cost considerably less.

A jury of her neighbours in Baker County heard the evidence and convicted her. A judge sentenced her below what the State asked for. That process worked. It should be allowed to stand.

Ariya Paige was ten months old. She could not unbuckle a harness, open a door, or call out to anyone who would hear her. She did not get an appeal, or a bond hearing, or an ankle monitor, or a curfew in her own home. She got five hours at a hundred and thirty-three degrees, and then she got a funeral instead of a first birthday.

Serve the seventeen.

Sources

• HuffPost — Florida hot car death, Rhonda Jewell, felony murder
• News4JAX — Baker County babysitter sentenced to 17 years
• First Coast News — conviction and sentencing
• Action News Jax — granted bond pending appeal
• MacArthur Justice Center — Rhonda Jewell v. State of Florida case page
• Appellant’s reply brief, First District Court of Appeal (PDF)
• Northeastern Law — Prof. Aliza Hochman Bloom amicus brief
• McLaren, Null & Quinn, “Heat Stress From Enclosed Vehicles,” Pediatrics 116(1):e109 (2005) (PDF)
• NHTSA — Child Heatstroke Prevention
• Kids and Car Safety — heatstroke studies and annual fatality data

Sean Grayson died in prison on Sunday. This post is not about him.

He was 32. He had Stage 4 colon cancer. He was six months into a twenty-year sentence for killing a woman who called the police for help. Some people will want to talk about that today, and about what we are supposed to feel.

I want to talk about Sonya Massey instead. She is the one who should still be here.

Sonya first

She was born on 1 February 1988 in Springfield, Illinois. She was 36 when she died.

She was the mother of two children, Malachi and Jeanette. She was one of four sisters — her youngest sister called her the middle man, the one who held the others together. She was a devout Christian. She cooked. She did hair. Her days were work, then home to feed her kids.

State Senator Doris Turner, who had known her since she was a child, described her as “a very petite woman, quiet, soft-spoken… just very, very friendly. Not combative at all.”

Her son Malachi said this about his mother:

“Loving, caring. She was just a ball of energy. She could talk to anybody. She was a lovable person. She always helped people.”

And there is one more thing about Sonya Massey that you should sit with, because it is almost too much to believe.

She was a descendant of William Donnegan — an 84-year-old retired Black cobbler who, in his working life, had made shoes for Abraham Lincoln.

During the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, a white mob broke into Donnegan’s home, beat him, cut his throat and hanged him from a tree in the schoolyard next door. His offence, in the eyes of that mob, was that he had been married to a white woman for more than thirty years. Soldiers found him the following morning still alive. He died in hospital on 16 August 1908. The outrage over that riot helped bring the NAACP into existence.

One hundred and sixteen years later, in the same city, his descendant opened her door to a man with a badge and a gun, and did not survive the encounter either.

What happened on 6 July 2024

Just before 1 a.m., Sonya Massey called 911. She thought there was a prowler outside her home near Springfield. That is the entire reason any of this happened: she was frightened, and she did what you are told to do.

Two Sangamon County sheriff’s deputies came. They looked around outside, found nothing, and came inside to take her details. There was a pot of water heating on her stove.

Deputy Sean Grayson pointed at it and told her to deal with it. She moved the pot, and as she did she said, quietly, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”

It is a prayer. It is a thing a frightened, devout woman says. Grayson — standing on the other side of a kitchen counter — put his hand on his 9mm and answered:

“You better f—ing not or I swear to God I’ll f—ing shoot you in your f—ing face.”

She ducked behind the counter. She said “I’m sorry.”

He shot her three times. One round hit her below the left eye.

Then he did not render aid. His partner moved to get a medical kit and Grayson told him not to bother, saying she was already gone.

Then he lied

This is the part that matters most, and it is the reason no one owes this man a soft obituary.

Grayson filed a report. In it he wrote that he feared bodily harm, because Sonya Massey was coming at him with a pot of boiling water.

His own body camera shows otherwise. The footage shows him telling her to walk away from the water, and shows her moving it to the sink. It shows a woman crouching, apologising, and praying. It does not show an attack, because there was not one.

He wore the camera that caught him. He wrote the lie anyway.

And then, at trial, the most damning witness against him turned out to be the other deputy who was standing right there. Dawson Farley testified that he was never afraid of Sonya Massey. He testified that what frightened him that night was Grayson.

The system that put him in her kitchen

Sean Grayson should never have been wearing that uniform, and that is not hindsight. It was all on paper before he ever set foot in her house.

• Six law enforcement agencies in four years — Pawnee, Kincaid, Virden, Auburn, Logan County, then Sangamon County. The pattern has a name in policing research: a wandering officer.
• Two DUI convictions, in August 2015 and July 2016. He pleaded guilty both times.
• Discharged from the Army for serious misconduct.
• A record that had already prompted an employer to send him to classes on making decisions under high stress.

Sangamon County ran a background check before hiring him. Its position afterwards was that prior DUI convictions “are not disqualifying criteria for a deputy.”

Sonya Massey did not get to review his file before she dialled 911. She just got him.

The trial

Grayson was fired and charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct.

In October 2025 a jury acquitted him of first-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree murder — a verdict that turns on the jury accepting he held an unreasonable belief that he was in danger. In January 2026 he was sentenced to 20 years, the maximum available for that conviction. The judge took his cancer into account in imposing it.

What actually happened at the end

I want to be accurate here, because the accurate version is bad enough and because getting it wrong would insult the woman this post is for.

In July 2026 Grayson applied for early medical release under the Joe Coleman Act, which covers prisoners who are terminally ill. His application said he had advanced colon cancer. That was true. He had been diagnosed at Stage 3 in 2023; it had reached Stage 4 and spread to his liver, lungs and rectum.

The Illinois Prisoner Review Board denied him 3–0 on 31 July. Sonya’s family opposed the release. So did the prosecutor, on the grounds that the sentencing judge had already weighed his illness when handing down the twenty years.

He died on 23 August 2026, three weeks later.

So here is the shape of this man’s life, laid out plainly. The one time he told the truth about his own circumstances, it was in an attempt to get out of the punishment for killing someone — and the board said no, because a judge had already accounted for it. He lied when a woman’s life depended on the truth. He was honest when his own freedom depended on it.

What Sonya left behind

Her family did not just grieve. They went and changed the law.

The Sonya Massey Act — Public Act 104-0158 — was signed by Governor JB Pritzker and took effect on 1 January 2026. It rewrites how Illinois hires police: agencies must now carry out a comprehensive review of an applicant’s full employment history, including personnel records from previous departments, before making an offer. It exists precisely so that the next Sean Grayson cannot wander from department to department with his file left behind him.

On what would have been her 37th birthday, her family announced a $10 million wrongful death settlement with Sangamon County. Her attorney called it bittersweet, which is the only honest word for money paid in place of a mother.

Her mother Donna has said: “I don’t think I’ve seen one day since the day she died that I haven’t cried.”

The family’s grace, and mine

When Grayson died, the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, put out a statement. It is more gracious than most of us could manage:

“Sonya Massey’s death was unjustifiable and she should be alive today. Sean Grayson’s death in custody from cancer does not bring Sonya back. We wish his family prayers of peace, as we do for all who grieve a loved one. Sonya’s family knows that pain all too well and will grieve her loss the rest of their days.”

That is the family of the murdered woman extending sympathy to the family of the man who murdered her. They have every right to that grace. It costs them something to give it, and it is theirs to give.

I am not the family. I am not obligated to that grace, and I am not going to perform it.

Sources

• NPR — Sean Grayson dies in prison (24 Aug 2026)
• NBC News — Grayson dies, attorney confirms
• Capitol News Illinois — Prisoner Review Board denies medical release, 3–0 (31 Jul 2026)
• Capitol News Illinois — maximum sentence, 20 years (Jan 2026)
• NBC News — trial coverage; partner Dawson Farley’s testimony
• Capitol News Illinois — bodycam shows Massey’s last minutes
• Washington Post — bodycam video of the shooting
• NBC News — ‘She was my superhero’: Sonya Massey remembered by friends and family
• NBC News — Grayson worked for six agencies in four years
• CNN — Army discharge for serious misconduct, DUIs, records
• CNN — the ‘wandering officers’ problem
• CBS Chicago — Pritzker signs the Sonya Massey Act
• NBC News — $10 million settlement with Sangamon County
• Invisible Institute — Sean Grayson’s history of misconduct

Great Ideas While You’re a Student — and the Thing That Actually Stops You

Yesterday afternoon I built a business with my niece. It took 52 minutes.

Not 52 minutes of planning. Fifty-two minutes from an empty folder on a server to a live site taking registrations at scavenger.je9.us. I know the number precisely because every action I take gets logged: 19 actions, 6 files written, 4 edits, 4 commits, 13:16 to 14:09.

Amanda is at Ole Miss. The idea is hers. What follows is not a story about how clever the AI is — it’s about the thing that actually stops students from starting a business, which was never the code.

What it is

Scavenger — geo hunts that build themselves. You and your friends pay in, you get a map of Oxford with pins on it, each pin is a task, you go do them. GPS confirms you were within 50 metres. You upload a photo as proof. A live leaderboard tracks who’s winning.

The pricing is what a college student can actually charge: $15–25 solo, $25–35 for a pair, $50 for a team of five. Ten teams on a Saturday afternoon is $500. That is not a startup. That’s beer money, textbook money, a flight home at Thanksgiving.

The code was never the hard part

Here is what I want a student to take from this. Everyone believes the barrier is “I’d need to learn to code.” That barrier is now roughly an hour tall. Claude wrote the PHP, the database schema, the map integration, the EXIF parser, the geofence.

The barrier that remains is knowing which 80% of the work you don’t have to do. Five decisions made 52 minutes possible, and not one of them was technical.

1. The site never touches money

Entry fees go Venmo-to-organizer, friend to friend. The site doesn’t process a cent. That single line of copy on the landing page deletes: a payment processor, PCI compliance scope, chargebacks, refunds, a merchant account, sales tax handling, and — depending on how serious you got — a registered business entity.

That is the difference between live this afternoon and live next semester.

2. The prizes are bragging rights

Nobody wins cash. You win the story and the photo. Charge entry and pay out a cash pot, and depending on your state you have wandered into gambling and sweepstakes law. Charge entry for an event where the prize is glory, and you’re running a field day.

3. OpenStreetMap, not Google Maps

Google Maps wants an API key, which wants a billing account, which wants a credit card and a spend cap you’ll forget to set. Leaflet plus OpenStreetMap wants nothing. It’s free, it’s open, and for putting pins on a map of Oxford it is indistinguishable to the user.

4. The players build the content

The single best decision in the whole thing. The organizer doesn’t sit down and author thirty tasks — the players add pins themselves. That’s the “build themselves” in the tagline. It’s why the product scales past one person’s imagination, and it’s why setup for the next hunt is nearly zero.

5. The phone is the referee

There is no judging panel. When you upload your proof photo, the app reads the EXIF data baked into the file by your phone — the original timestamp and, where present, the GPS coordinates. The evidence is inside the photograph. No one has to be trusted, and no one has to sit there adjudicating.

There’s also a bounding box: latitude 34.30–34.42, longitude −89.60 to −89.45. Drop a pin outside that and it’s rejected. That rectangle is Oxford, Mississippi. It’s input validation doing double duty as game design.

Who did what, honestly

I’m not going to pretend this was magic.

Claude wrote: every line of PHP, the four database tables, the Leaflet map, the EXIF rational-number parser (genuinely fiddly — GPS coordinates are stored as three fractions plus a hemisphere letter), the registration flow, the image pipeline that accepts a 25 MB phone photo and resizes it.

Amanda and I brought: the idea, the price points, the knowledge that Oxford on a Saturday is full of bored people with phones, and every one of the five decisions above. Also one piece of unglamorous domain knowledge — that outbound business SMS in the US is gated behind a carrier registration called A2P 10DLC, and that a welcome text failing must never break a registration. It’s written into the code as a comment, and the failure is deliberately silent to the user.

That’s the split. AI collapsed the implementation. It did not supply the judgment.

What’s still broken

If I stopped here you’d think this was a triumph. It’s a day old.

• The welcome SMS doesn’t send. The 10DLC campaign isn’t approved yet, so Twilio returns error 30034 and the message is logged instead of delivered. Known, documented, non-fatal.
• One registration. One check-in. Zero pins. Those are the real numbers as I write this. The thing exists; it hasn’t been used in anger.
• Nobody has been charged a dollar yet. The business model is a paragraph on a landing page until someone Venmos.

The honest claim is not “I built a business in 52 minutes.” It’s “the build is no longer the reason you haven’t started.”

The playbook, if you’re 20 and reading this

1. Pick something that needs a place, not a platform. Your campus and your town are an asset nobody in San Francisco has. Local is a moat.
2. Design the work out before you design the product in. Every feature you avoid is a week you don’t spend. Ask “what happens if we just… don’t?” for money, accounts, notifications, admin panels.
3. Stay out of regulated categories on version one. Money movement, gambling, alcohol, health data, minors’ data. Not forever — just not on day one, alone, at twenty.
4. Make the users make the content. The thing that fills itself is the thing that survives you getting busy during finals.
5. Ship it embarrassingly early. Ours is live with one registration and a broken text message. That’s fine. A live site with a flaw beats a perfect plan in a Notes app, permanently.

The part that isn’t about money

The $500 Saturday is real, and if you’re a student it matters. But it isn’t the valuable thing.

The valuable thing is that a 20-year-old now owns a live product with real users, and can say “I built and ran this” in an interview. Four years ago that sentence cost a semester of learning to code. Yesterday it cost 52 minutes and five good decisions.

The idea was always the hard part. It’s just that now, it’s the only hard part.

Scavenger is live at scavenger.je9.us, piloting at Ole Miss and around Oxford, Mississippi. There’s a short history of the campus there too — worth reading before you hunt on it. Built with Claude Code. Stack: PHP, MySQL, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap. Total infrastructure cost: a subdomain on a server that was already running.

Judge Tosses Kash Patel Lawsuit, Cements ‘Googly-Eyed’ Insult In Court Record

FBI Director Kash Patel went to federal court to punish a man for calling him names. He lost — and in losing, he got the names entered into the permanent record of the United States District Court.

Chief U.S. District Judge Andrew Gordon of Nevada this week threw out Patel’s $10 million defamation suit against blogger and podcaster Jim Stewartson, and vacated the default judgment Patel had already won.

How It Fell Apart

• 2023 — the complaint. Patel sued Stewartson over online posts calling him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “Kremlin asset” who plotted to overthrow the government on January 6.
• August 2025 — the easy win. Stewartson didn’t respond to the suit at all. Patel took a $250,000 default judgment by walkover.
• The challenge. Stewartson came back and argued the Las Vegas court had no business hearing the case — he had no meaningful ties to Nevada.
• This week — the collapse. Judge Gordon agreed. No personal jurisdiction over the defendant. Suit dismissed, default judgment vacated, quarter-million-dollar win erased.

Note what did not happen: no judge ruled the insults were true, and no judge ruled they were false. Patel lost on the venue — he sued in the wrong state. The merits never got a hearing.

The Footnote

Here is the part worth the price of admission. Judge Gordon’s order quotes the offending phrase — Stewartson’s description of Patel as a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” — in a footnote.

Which means the insult Patel spent three years and $10 million of legal ambition trying to erase is now a citable line in a federal judge’s written order. It will outlive the lawsuit. It will outlive his tenure. Librarians will catalog it.

Stewartson, for his part, took a victory lap:

“PSA: Now that my case is settled, you are free to refer to @FBIDirectorKash as a ‘chud,’ a ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch,’ and a ‘traitor’ without fear of legal repercussions!”

He also thanked the judge for the footnote specifically.

The Lesson Nobody Learns

This is the Streisand effect wearing a badge. A man with subpoena power and a $10 million filing decided the correct response to being mocked by a blogger was to make the mockery a federal matter. The mockery won. It didn’t just survive — it got upgraded from a post on the internet to a line in the official record of the court.

The sitting Director of the FBI is now, as a matter of documented American jurisprudence, googly-eyed.

Sources

• HuffPost — Judge Tosses Kash Patel Lawsuit, Cements ‘Googly-Eyed’ Insult In Court Record
• Las Vegas Review-Journal — Patel’s defamation lawsuit thrown out by Las Vegas judge
• The New Republic — Kash Patel Loses Lawsuit Against Man Who Called Him “Googly-Eyed” Chud
• The Daily Beast — Judge Tosses Keystone Kash Patel’s ‘Incompetent Chud’ Lawsuit
• Raw Story — Patel loses lawsuit against blogger who called him a ‘googly-eyed’ Kremlin asset

Eight Years of Republican Crime — And the Pardon Pen That Erased It

This started with one story. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) — a Trump protégé running in a seat that suddenly looks competitive — is being accused by his ex-wife of things that are hard to type. So I went looking for the rest of it. Eight years, every level of the party, court records only.

What I found is worse than a list of bad apples. The list is long, yes. But the actual story is what happened after the convictions.

Ground Rules

I am going to be scrupulous about this, because the difference matters and because sloppiness here is how you get sued.

• “Charged” means charged. An indictment, an information, an arrest on a criminal complaint. Not a lawsuit. Not an ethics report. Not a rumor.
• Allegations get their own section, clearly labeled, at the bottom. Max Miller belongs there — he has not been criminally charged with anything, and he denies all of it.
• Outcomes are reported honestly, including acquittals, dismissals, and the cases that fell apart. Several did.
• People who were investigated but never charged are excluded. I checked and dropped Christian Ziegler, Neil Friske, Burt Jones, and others whose cases prosecutors declined. I also dropped several names that partisan list-makers had filed as Republicans who are, in fact, Democrats.
• And yes — Democrats get charged too. Bob Menendez got 11 years. Henry Cuellar was indicted. That’s not the argument. Keep reading; the argument is at the end.

I. Congress

Eleven Republican members or former members of Congress were criminally charged between 2018 and 2026. Not one was a senator.

Read that outcome column again. Of the Republican members who actually completed a federal conviction in this window — Hunter, Collins, Hayes, Buyer, Santos — every single one had it pardoned or commuted. Fortenberry’s case was thrown out by Trump’s own Justice Department. David Rivera, convicted this past May on the Venezuela money, is the only one still standing convicted without rescue. His sentencing was calendared for July 22, 2026.

II. The Inner Circle

The men who ran the 2016 campaign and the Trump White House produced a remarkable number of felons.

• Paul Manafort — campaign chairman. 90 months across two federal cases (tax fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy, witness tampering). Fully pardoned December 2020.
• Roger Stone — adviser. Convicted on all seven counts: obstruction, witness tampering, five counts of lying to Congress. Commuted, then pardoned.
• Michael Flynn — National Security Adviser. Pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Pardoned.
• George Papadopoulos — adviser. Pleaded guilty to false statements. Pardoned.
• Elliott Broidy — RNC deputy finance chairman. Pleaded guilty to a foreign-lobbying conspiracy, agreed to forfeit $6.6 million. Pardoned before sentencing.
• Steve Bannon — chief strategist. Federal border-wall fraud case pardoned in 2021. Served four months for contempt of Congress. Then pleaded guilty in February 2025 to a New York state felony — scheme to defraud — which is the one conviction he still carries.
• Allen Weisselberg — Trump Organization CFO. Pleaded guilty to 15 tax felonies, then two counts of perjury. Two separate stints on Rikers Island. Both convictions stand.
• Peter Navarro — White House trade adviser. Convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress, served all four months. The D.C. Circuit unanimously upheld the conviction on July 21, 2026 — nine days ago. He currently works in the West Wing as Senior Counselor to the President.
• John Bolton — National Security Adviser. Indicted October 2025 on 18 Espionage Act counts for emailing over 1,000 pages of classified diary material to relatives. Pleaded guilty in June 2026 to a single retention count, with a $2.25 million fine. Sentencing this fall.
• Tom Barrack — inaugural committee chairman. Charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the UAE. Acquitted on all counts in November 2022 — the only full trial acquittal in this entire set, and it belongs on the record.
• Donald Trump — convicted May 30, 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the first former president ever convicted of a felony. Sentenced in January 2025 to an unconditional discharge: no jail, no fine, no probation. The federal January 6th and classified-documents cases were both dropped after he won the election. Georgia was dismissed in late November 2025. The New York conviction stands, on appeal — and because it is a state case, no pardon can reach it.

Now here is the detail that tells you what the pardons were actually for. Two men in that orbit still carry federal convictions from the Mueller era: Rick Gates and Michael Cohen. Gates was the cooperating witness. Cohen testified against Trump. Neither has ever been pardoned.

Cooperate with prosecutors and you keep the felony. Stay loyal and it disappears. That is not an accident; that is a policy.

And if you want the cleanest possible illustration, put Bannon next to Navarro. Identical charges — two counts of contempt of Congress. Identical outcomes — convicted, four months, served in full. The difference is what came after. Bannon’s conviction is being actively dismantled with the Justice Department’s help; his own government stopped defending it and moved to dismiss the indictment. Navarro’s was upheld last week and stands intact while he sits in the West Wing.

III. January 6th

By DOJ’s own accounting on the fourth anniversary — the last full tally before the prosecutions were ended:

• 1,583 people charged. 1,270 convicted. Only two defendants were ever fully acquitted, both at bench trials. No jury ever fully acquitted anyone.
• Roughly 600 charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police. 174 of those for using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing bodily injury. Around 140 officers were assaulted that day.
• 14 convicted of seditious conspiracy — the first successful use of that charge in decades. Enrique Tarrio got 22 years. Stewart Rhodes got 18.

On January 20, 2025, it was all erased: roughly 1,500 full pardons plus 14 commutations, covering everyone charged. The pardon was unconditional. There was no carve-out for the people who beat police officers. Tarrio walked out with a full pardon and a clean record.

And it kept going. In April 2026 the Justice Department went back to court to vacate the convictions outright — not just end the sentences, but scrub the records. On July 11, 2026, Judge Timothy Kelly vacated four Proud Boys convictions, noting he had little power to refuse the government’s motion and that Trump’s views on these cases “are well known.”

There is also, and I want to be precise here, an active effort to pay them. A proposed $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was floated and then scrapped around June 2026, but Trump has said the defendants “should be reimbursed,” DOJ argued in a filing that some pardoned defendants should get back the restitution they paid toward repairing the Capitol, and lawyers are now filing tort claims seeking at least $1 million per person. In May 2026, police officers who defended the Capitol sued the Justice Department.

IV. The Fake Electors

Five states charged Republicans over the false certificates claiming Trump won in 2020: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia. State party chairs, RNC committeemen, sitting state senators, county clerks.

• Georgia — the Fulton County RICO case collapsed after DA Fani Willis was disqualified, and was dismissed entirely in late November 2025.
• Michigan — all charges against all 15 remaining defendants dismissed September 2025 for insufficient evidence of intent. AG Nessel declined to appeal in March 2026. Dead.
• Arizona — the 18-defendant indictment was sent back to a grand jury because prosecutors never showed jurors the Electoral Count Act, and AG Kris Mayes dismissed it in June 2026, promising to re-present. No active indictment exists.
• Nevada — dismissed on venue, then revived 6–0 by the Nevada Supreme Court in November 2025. Still active.
• Wisconsin — the state charged the three operatives who directed the scheme rather than the electors themselves. All three pleaded not guilty in June 2026. The strongest case still standing.

Here is the scoreboard after five years, five states, and dozens of defendants. Not one Republican elector has been convicted of a felony anywhere. The only elector convicted of anything at all is Arizona’s Loraine Pellegrino, who pleaded to a single misdemeanor and got probation.

Georgia did produce four guilty pleas — but not from a single Georgia officeholder or elector. They came from the lawyers and one bail bondsman: Kenneth Chesebro (one felony), Jenna Ellis (one felony), Sidney Powell (six misdemeanors), and Scott Hall (five misdemeanors). Nobody served a day; all four got probation.

And every one of those pleas was entered under Georgia’s First Offender Act — finish probation cleanly and the record is erased. It already worked. Chesebro, the man who wrote the memos that built the entire fake-elector scheme, had his probation ended early, his conviction discharged, and his law license restored in Florida in June 2026.

In November 2025, Trump pardoned 77 people connected to the scheme — Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman, Chesebro, Powell, Ellis, and whole slates of electors. Almost none had been federally charged. The pardons were largely symbolic, because a presidential pardon cannot touch a state case. That limitation is the only reason Wisconsin and Nevada survived at all.

V. The Statehouses

This is where the volume is. A sample of the verified cases:

Bribery and racketeering. Larry Householder, Speaker of the Ohio House — 20 years for a $60 million FirstEnergy bribery scheme, upheld when the Supreme Court denied review in April 2026. Ohio GOP chairman Matt Borges got 5 years in the same case. Lee Chatfield, Speaker of the Michigan House — 13 state felonies, trial set for September 2026. Gilbert Baker, Arkansas GOP chairman — acquitted on one count, the rest dismissed.

Tennessee ran the table. House Speaker Glen Casada convicted on 17 counts and sentenced to 3 years — then pardoned in November 2025. State Sen. Brian Kelsey pleaded guilty to campaign-finance felonies, got 21 months, and was pardoned 15 days into his sentence. Former state GOP chair Robin Smith, who cooperated, got 8 months. She’s the one who’s serving it.

Fraud. Florida Rep. Joe Harding — 4 months for COVID relief fraud. Kansas Rep. Michael Capps — 27 months for pandemic loan fraud. Indiana Sheriff Jamey Noel — 15 years for stealing roughly $3 million. Nevada judge Michele Fiore — convicted of raising money for a statue honoring slain police officers and spending it on plastic surgery and her daughter’s wedding. Pardoned in April 2025 before she could be sentenced.

Statewide officers. Georgia Insurance Commissioner Jim Beck — convicted on all 37 counts, embezzling $2.5 million. West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Allen Loughry — 11 counts, 24 months. South Dakota AG Jason Ravnsborg — killed a pedestrian, charged only with misdemeanors, $1,000 fine, then impeached and removed. Louisiana AG Liz Murrill, indicted this month on 16 counts; Gov. Jeff Landry says he’ll pardon her. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens — indicted on two separate felonies. The computer-tampering count was dropped expressly in exchange for his resignation; the invasion-of-privacy charge was dropped as trial was about to begin, and a second prosecutor then declined to refile, saying she found the accuser credible but could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Election crimes. Colorado clerk Tina Peters — convicted on 4 felonies, about 9 years, for a voting-system breach. Trump’s “pardon” did nothing, because it was a state conviction. Arizona Rep. Austin Smith — pleaded guilty to forging 100+ signatures on his own nominating petition. Alabama Rep. David Cole — jail time for renting a 5-by-5-foot space to fake his residency. Florida Sen. Frank Artiles — convicted of running a “ghost candidate” in a race decided by 32 votes. South Dakota Sen. Tom Pischke — charged in June 2026 with forging candidate forms; 13 people say their signatures were faked.

VI. The Part That Should End Careers

I debated how to write this section and decided the right way is plainly, because these are convictions, not rumors.

• RJ May, South Carolina state representative and Freedom Caucus co-founder — distributed 479 files of child sexual abuse material in five days, using the screen name “joebidennnn69,” while sitting in the legislature. 17.5 years.
• Ray Holmberg, North Dakota state senator for 45 years and chair of Appropriations — traveled to Prague to pay for sex with a minor, and received child pornography. 10 years.
• Aaron von Ehlinger, Idaho state representative — convicted of raping a 19-year-old legislative intern. 20 years, parole eligible after 8.
• Mike Folmer, Pennsylvania state senator — child pornography. Resigned the day after his arrest. 1–2 years and 15 years on the registry.
• Justin Eichorn, Minnesota state senator — arrested in a sting trying to buy sex from someone he believed was 17. Pleaded guilty May 2026; awaiting sentencing.
• Elliott Pritt, West Virginia delegate and assistant majority leader — arrested eight days ago, accused of enticing a 15-year-old girl through Roblox and Snapchat. He was also a middle-school teacher. Resigned July 27.
• Joel Greenberg, Seminole County tax collector — pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a child, among other counts. 11 years.
• Paul Petersen, Maricopa County assessor — ran an adoption-smuggling operation across three jurisdictions, including a Utah count for sale of a child. 6+ years federal, 5 in Arizona.
• Nick Sauer, Illinois state representative — 12 felony counts for distributing private sexual images of two women; pleaded down to a misdemeanor, 90 days.

VII. Allegations, Not Charges

Now Max Miller — and I am keeping this exactly inside the lines.

Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has not been criminally charged with anything. He denies all of it and calls the claims false and politically motivated in the middle of a custody dispute. What follows is what his ex-wife has alleged in civil litigation.

His ex-wife, Emily Moreno — who is the daughter of sitting Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio — alleges that Miller threw scalding water from a skillet onto her chest and stomach, held a gun to her head, pushed her against a wall and hit her head, and fractured their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder.

He is also being sued separately by Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary, who dated Miller in 2019–2020 and wrote in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed that the relationship “turned abusive,” that he was “physical” with her, and that he had “anger issues and a violent streak.”

Two women, unconnected to each other, years apart, describing the same thing. No charges. And here is the part that actually turns my stomach: his party’s response has been silence. He is still the incumbent. He is still on the ballot.

Matt Gaetz

The federal sex-trafficking investigation into Matt Gaetz closed without charges in February 2023. Worth knowing how that became public: the announcement came from Gaetz’s own congressional office, saying DOJ had informed his attorneys. DOJ declined to comment and has never released a declination letter.

The House Ethics Committee‘s December 2024 report found “substantial evidence” that from 2017 to 2020 he “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity,” that he used cocaine and ecstasy, that he obstructed the Committee’s investigation — and that “In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.”

Three things have to be said in the same breath, or the account isn’t honest:

• The Committee explicitly did not find sufficient evidence that he violated the federal sex-trafficking statute.
• It found no evidence that he knew the girl was a minor; she told investigators she did not tell him her age and he did not ask.
• “Substantial evidence” is an internal congressional standard, not a verdict. No sanction was ever imposed, and the Republican committee chairman filed a dissent objecting to how the majority handled it.

Gaetz denies ever having sexual contact with a minor and says he was “charged with nothing.” That is true. His close associate Joel Greenberg — listed above — pleaded guilty to child sex trafficking and got 11 years.

The Resignation Loophole

There is a mechanism here worth naming, because it recurs: quit and the investigation dies. The House Ethics Committee lost jurisdiction over Trent Franks (2017), Blake Farenthold (2018), Pat Meehan (2018) and Tony Gonzales (2026) the moment each one walked out the door.

Gonzales is the ugliest of them. A House probe found “substantial reason to believe” he had sex with a staffer. That staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, died by suicide in September 2025. He resigned in April 2026, and the Committee announced it “no longer has jurisdiction.” (Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat, resigned the same day over his own allegations. Same loophole, same result.)

Gaetz is the exception that proves the rule — the Committee released its findings on a former member anyway, noting it “does not do so lightly.”

Two More, Currently Live

• Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) — sitting member. In May 2026 House Ethics confirmed it is “reviewing allegations” that he “may have created or fostered a hostile work environment and engaged in sexual harassment.” The Committee’s own caveat, which is the cleanest statement of this whole distinction: opening a review “does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred.” Edwards says he welcomes it.
• Florida state Rep. Fabian Basabe — the only case in this entire dataset with an adverse adjudication and no criminal charge. This month a Leon County jury found him liable for sexual harassment, battery, and defamation, awarding $450,000 after roughly two hours of deliberation. He represented himself, at one point using ChatGPT for points of law. He had said on video that he would “resign on the spot” if the allegations were proven true. He has not resigned. To be precise: that is civil liability by a preponderance of the evidence, not a criminal conviction.

And one finding that cuts the other way, which I’ll state plainly because it’s true: no sitting Republican member of Congress was criminally charged with a sex offense, a child-exploitation offense, or domestic violence in these eight years. Every conviction in the section above is a state legislator or a local official.

The Actual Argument

Democrats commit crimes. Bob Menendez is doing 11 years for taking gold bars, and no Democratic president rescued him.

That is the whole point.

Look at what happens on this side. Hunter, pardoned. Collins, pardoned. Hayes, pardoned. Buyer, pardoned. Santos, commuted. Fortenberry, dismissed by his own party’s DOJ. Kelsey, pardoned 15 days in. Hutchinson, pardoned. Casada, pardoned. Fiore, pardoned before sentencing. Sheriff Scott Jenkins, convicted of selling badges for $75,000 in bribes, pardoned the day before he was to report — over the public objection of Virginia’s own Republican attorney general. Roughly 1,500 January 6th defendants, pardoned, including the ones who assaulted police. Seventy-seven fake-elector operatives, pardoned. And then, in 2026, the Justice Department going back to court to erase the convictions from the record entirely.

This is not a party with a crime problem. Every large organization has a crime problem. This is a party that has abolished the consequence. Guilt gets established — by juries, by guilty pleas, by judges — and then it gets deleted, retroactively. The verdict becomes a suggestion.

And notice it isn’t just the pardon pen. There are at least five machines running: pardons before sentencing, commutations after, dismissals by a Justice Department now run by the defendant’s own appointees, vacatur motions that scrub convictions off the record entirely, and first-offender deals that quietly expunge the plea a year or two later. Chesebro architected the scheme to overturn a presidential election, pleaded guilty to a felony, and is back to practicing law with a clean record. That is the whole system in one man.

And you can watch what that does to the incentives. The cooperators — Gates, Cohen, Robin Smith — are the ones still carrying convictions. The loyal ones got clean records. That teaches every operative exactly one lesson, and it isn’t “follow the law.”

Which brings it back to Max Miller. Nobody has charged him. Maybe nobody will. But when a party spends eight years demonstrating that its members face no durable consequences for anything, the silence around a man accused of fracturing his toddler’s collarbone stops looking like due process.

It starts looking like the system working exactly as designed.

Sources

Every case above traces to a Justice Department or state attorney general release, a court record, or mainstream reporting. Principal sources:

• U.S. Department of Justice — indictments, pleas, and sentencing releases (Hunter, Collins, Buyer, Santos, Rivera, Fortenberry, Householder, Casada, Kelsey, Harding, May, Holmberg, Eichorn, Greenberg, Fiore)
• Lawfare — The High-Water Mark of the Jan. 6 Prosecutions (DOJ statistics, Jan 2025)
• Just Security — Jan 6 Pardons and Assaults on Law Enforcement, By The Numbers
• The pardon proclamation itself, January 20, 2025
• CBS News — Judge vacates convictions of 4 Proud Boys (July 11, 2026) · NPR — DOJ moves to toss seditious conspiracy convictions
• Fake electors: NPR (Michigan) · PBS NewsHour (Arizona) · CNN (Georgia) · Wisconsin Watch · Democracy Docket (Nevada)
• Gaetz Ethics report: H. Rept. 118-943, In the Matter of Allegations Relating to Representative Matt Gaetz (official PDF) · Gaetz office announces DOJ closed the probe (Feb 2023)
• Max Miller: Ohio Capital Journal · Rolling Stone · Newsweek
• Pardons: CBS (Fiore) · CNBC (Kelsey) · NBC (Casada) · CBS (Jenkins) · NPR (Santos) · CNN (77 fake-elector pardons)
• Trump orbit: Manhattan DA (Trump, 34 counts) · CNN (Navarro conviction upheld, July 2026) · NPR (Bolton guilty plea) · SCOTUSblog (Bannon) · Law.com (Chesebro reinstated to the Florida Bar) · Proclamation 10989 (the 77-name pardon, official text)
• State cases: Michigan AG (Chatfield) · West Virginia Watch (Pritt) · South Dakota Searchlight (Pischke) · Idaho Capital Sun (von Ehlinger)

A note on method: this list is deliberately about one party, which is not a claim that only one party produces criminals. Cases where prosecutors investigated but declined to charge were excluded. Several names circulating on partisan lists were dropped because the officials turned out to be Democrats, or were never charged at all. Where a disposition could not be confirmed — David Rivera’s sentence, whether Arizona has re-indicted, the current posture of the Nevada trial — this post says so rather than guessing.

After losing his case at the Supreme Court of the United States, Donald Trump took to social media and threatened the very institution that ruled against him:

“We will take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!” he posted on social media.

Read that again. A man who lost in court is promising “appropriate action” against the people who decided the case. Coming from someone with his own record, the projection is hard to miss. So let’s talk about who has actually “committed wrongdoing.”

The Record

The woman he was found liable for sexually abusing — and is still paying.

• Paid E. Jean Carroll $5 million — a federal civil jury found him liable for sexually abusing her, a finding the trial judge noted amounts to rape in the ordinary meaning of the word (Carroll v. Trump, May 2023).
• Still owes $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll — a second jury’s award for defamation, for his disparaging public remarks about her after she came forward (January 2024).

The hush money — paid to Stormy Daniels.

• Convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election — the first former U.S. president ever convicted of felonies (New York, May 2024).

And the rest.

• Hit with a ~$454 million judgment for persistent business fraud — inflating asset values to deceive banks and insurers (New York Attorney General civil fraud case, February 2024).
• Indicted federally for retaining classified national-defense documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing their return.
• Indicted over efforts to overturn the 2020 election — federally and in a Georgia racketeering (RICO) case.

That is the “wrongdoing” record of the man now threatening “appropriate action” against the Court. The projection writes itself.