Prosecutors failed to indict six Democratic lawmakers for recording a video reminding service members to refuse illegal orders, with a grand jury unanimously rejecting the charges.
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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that never once had lunch on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. [Epstein file comes out.] Oh, come on, that was a brunch.
We’ve got it all this week: Epstein. The Kennedys. Bridge scandals involving new bridges and rival bridge owners. Democratic mega-gerrymanders. TARIFF VOTES.
But the concept of this edition—in the Sgt. Pepper’s sense of a “concept,” in that it ends after a couple of tracks—is the audience of one, and how some Trump administration appointees will almost intentionally do their jobs badly to stay in the boss’s good graces. Unusual dynamic. Cheers!
On Tuesday, prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, led by Jeanine Pirro, sought and failed to indict six Democratic lawmakers—four House members and two senators—who recorded a social media video last year in which they reminded service members of their obligation to refuse illegal orders. What were the exact charges? Who knows. Whatever they were, the grand jury in D.C. didn’t just reject them as a body. As NBC News reported, zero members of the grand jury found the charges up to snuff. Separately, a judge this week smacked down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to punish Sen. Mark Kelly, a veteran and one of the six who made the video, saying that Hegseth’s targeting of Kelly had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.”
Why would Pirro and Hegseth subject themselves to such total humiliation and stark legal rebuke? Don’t they realize that a neutral observer would consider them historically bad at their jobs? Their audience of one, though, is not a neutral observer. The November video that those six Democrats released incensed Donald Trump, who posted on social media at the time that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL” and “punishable by DEATH!” There seems to be an understanding among Trump’s political appointees now that not doing the illegal action—refusing an illegal order, as one might put it—isn’t an option. Instead, it’s better to humor him by pursuing it and letting some element of the legal system—a judge, a grand jury—do the dirty work of keeping the rule of law at least somewhat intact. And while it’s nice when the legal system does its job, the Surge still believes that the best course of action is for government officials not to violate the constitutional rights of Trump’s enemies in the first place.
We must still allow ourselves to be shocked from time to time, and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s performance before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday ably did the job. She shouted and yelled and acted as if she were the one who was being shouted and yelled at, responded to various questions from Democratic members with unrelated oppo her staff had googled about them, suggested that members needed to apologize to Trump for having impeached him, and otherwise made a fool of herself. After Rep. Jerry Nadler asked how many Epstein co-conspirators she had indicted, she went on a rant about how great the stock market is doing under Trump. She called the Democratic ranking member of the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a “washed-up loser lawyer!” (Raskin, in a fortunate bit of scheduling, was able to discuss his day with Bondi later that evening at a live taping of Slate’s Political Gabfest.)
Is there one person to whom this deeply embarrassing performance would have appealed? Someone who thinks talking about stock-market gains under Trump in response to unrelated questions is a winning strategy, who believes that those asking difficult questions suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome,” who thinks lawmakers should apologize to Donald Trump for having investigated and impeached him? Exactly. This was the most degrading congressional performance for the audience of one in recent memory. “AG Pam Bondi, under intense fire from the Trump Deranged Radical Left Lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday’s Hearing,” Trump posted Thursday. Bondi had been successful in saving her job, at great expense to her personal and our national dignity, for another few days.
Speaker Mike Johnson, at the White House’s request, tried to pass a rule this week preventing Democrats from forcing votes to repeal Trump’s tariffs. Republicans had been successful in passing such rules last year, and the vote this week was to extend the blockade through the summer. This time, however, it didn’t work: The rule vote failed, 217–214, as three Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against it. It’s now open season on Trump’s tariffs, as House Democrats will repeatedly force their GOP counterparts to choose between a president who expects loyalty and bad policy (and politics). Within a day of the failed rule vote, the House voted to nix Trump’s Canada tariffs.
Like clockwork, Trump issued a threat, warning that “any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!” But what does this pocket of members voting against tariffs care? Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon, a regularly targeted swing-district member, is retiring this cycle. He voted against the rule, then left the premises so leaders couldn’t twist his arm. So, too, did California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who’s been redistricted off the planet in the Redistricting Wars (that Trump started). The last GOP member to vote against the rule was Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who’s solidly in Trump enemy territory at this point. The House GOP’s margin is tight enough that it takes only a couple of House members to upend Johnson’s, and the White House’s, plans. And the ranks of GOP defectors may swell once primary season is over too.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein were next-door neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. According to Lutnick, though, they barely knew each other. In a story Lutnick told on a podcast last year, he and his wife went in Epstein’s house once in 2005, got a house tour, and “decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” adding, “I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy.” As the Epstein files revealed, though, that wasn’t true. Lutnick and his family visited Epstein on his island in 2012, and the two were in business and otherwise corresponding sporadically over the years; at least one email suggests they had scheduled drinks.
So does “lying about having not been to the Epstein island” constitute a firing from Trump’s Cabinet? Not as of yet. Trump likes having Good-Time Howie around, for one, and if he starts doling out consequences to people for their associations with Epstein, well, that would put Trump himself in quite a corner. That Lutnick’s future in the Cabinet has been a live question all week speaks mostly to the number of enemies he’s made in Congress and the administration for his sycophancy on behalf of Trump’s worst impulses.