On Tuesday, December 23, the U.S. Supreme Court made a preliminary finding that President Donald J. Trump’s deployment of federalized National Guard troops in the Chicago area beginning in October was unlawful. Six of the nine justices held that the law Trump invoked to send in National Guard troops requires that a president first send in the regular U.S. military to execute the laws, and that the National Guard can be deployed only if the president remains “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
But, they noted, the circumstances under which the president can use the military against U.S. citizens are “exceptional.” The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the U.S. military from executing the laws “except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”
So, the justices concluded, “before the President can federalize the Guard…, he likely must have “statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be ‘unable’ with those forces to perform that function. At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois. The President has not invoked a statute that provides an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act.”
In an opinion concurring with the five justices who signed onto the majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh added a footnote addressing what have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” In September the Supreme Court majority allowed immigration officers to stop individuals on the basis of their apparent race or ethnicity, speaking in Spanish or with an accent, working in certain sectors, or being present at certain locations, like an agricultural site—so-called racial profiling.
In his support for that decision, Kavanaugh wrote that when those individuals legally in the U.S. are stopped and questioned, “the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the U.S.”
Since then, as Chris Geidner of Law Dork recorded, U.S. citizens have repeatedly been threatened, beaten, and detained. Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding a 22-year-old Maryland woman, Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, for deportation, although she has produced a U.S. birth certificate and Maryland immunization records and her lawyer insists she is a U.S. citizen. ICE officials say the documents are not valid and she is in the country illegally.
In his concurrence in Tuesday’s decision, Kavanaugh added a footnote saying: “The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”
On Wednesday, December 24, the Department of Justice posted on social media that it might take “a few more weeks” to release the Epstein files after announcing that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had just “uncovered over a million more documents potentially related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.” In fact, as Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote noted, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York were ordered to transfer all their files to Justice Department headquarters in January 2025.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded: “A Christmas Eve news dump of ‘a million more files’ only proves what we already know: Trump is engaged in a massive coverup. The question Americans deserve answered is simple: WHAT are they hiding—and WHY? Justice delayed is justice denied. Release the files. Follow the law.”
The Justice Department has not released many of the documents as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but those few that have come out reveal proof that Trump has been lying about his involvement with the convicted sex abuser Epstein.
As Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Wednesday in The Atlantic, Trump started his 2024 campaign with the announcement that he “was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.” He blamed any reports of such visits on Democrats who were, he said, smearing him to hurt him politically.
But documents released on Tuesday show a January 7, 2020, email from a New York prosecutor saying that flight logs show that Trump “traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a [Ghislaine] Maxwell case. In particular, he is listed as a passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, including at least four flights on which Maxwell was also present…. On one flight in 1993, he and Epstein are the only two listed passengers; on another, the only three passengers are Epstein, Trump, and then-20-year-old [redacted]. On two other flights, two of the passengers… were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case.”
Emails from before Epstein’s 2019 arrest show investigators talking about “10 co-conspirators,” while a 2020 email suggests prosecutors had amassed considerable material to charge “co-conspirators,” but never did so. The document discussing those charges is redacted.
Trump was mentioned more than 100 times in the documents released on December 23.
And there is pressure on Trump coming from a different direction as well. On December 17, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo of the Wall Street Journal reported that senators led by Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to the Justice Department and asked officials to explain why law enforcement officials never interviewed Epstein’s longtime attorney Darren Indyke or his accountant Richard Kahn when the officers were investigating Epstein’s sex trafficking.
The same Wall Street Journal reporters recently noted that the two men arranged fake marriages to keep women in the U.S., withdrew cash for Epstein in ways that avoided scrutiny, and sent payments to women who later claimed they had been sexually abused. As co-executors of Epstein’s estate, the men have control over the evidence in that estate and over Epstein’s more than $100 million in assets.
Representatives and staffers from the House Oversight Committee told journalist Fitzpatrick they are drafting subpoenas to learn more about the alleged co-conspirators. They are also drafting a resolution to hold Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt for her failure to make sure that the Department of Justice complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and are moving ahead with articles of impeachment against her.
Axios reported on December 23 that the White House has taken over the X account of the Justice Department, and on the same day, that account tried to undercut the new information by claiming that accusations in it are “unfounded and false.” But Trump’s behavior on December 25, Christmas, suggested otherwise.
Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”
After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.”
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark wrote: “Donald Trump, basically acknowledging that so far at least he’s losing the fight over Epstein.” MeidasTouch noted: “This is what’s known as “consciousness of guilt.”
This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dem[ocrat]s are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”
“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”
Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”
The slow drip of the Epstein files, Solnit writes, is “undermining loyalty to Trump as nothing else has, and it is an important part of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party are falling apart before our eyes. This does not mean that the Trumpists are powerless,” she continues, “they are flailing and grabbing for all the kinds of power that they can.”
But “Trump appears to be disintegrating, rotting, collapsing before our eyes, mentally and physically, and Republicans in Congress—first of all with the vote to release the Epstein files—are breaking from him.”
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