The Friday Brief, February 13, 2026
Pam
Bondi Is Going To Jail
Feb 13, 2026
Inside:
Pam Bondi and John Mitchell
The Talented Mr. Carlson
Is Social Media Addictive? Duh.
Breathe In
RFK Is A Serial Killer
DOJ Screws The Pooch
Can Ideas Change The World?
The El Paso Clustertrump
Better Than Nothing
The Big Picture
Pam Bondi and John Mitchell
There’s a particular hour in Washington, usually well past
midnight, when the lights burn too long in offices where they shouldn’t.
It’s the hour when drafts of legal pleadings and press
releases are rewritten. Of calls made on burner phones. Of whispers about
ongoing investigations, subpoenas, and wiretaps.
There’s a smell to it, as aides quietly lawyer up, start
saving hard copies of their emails and documents, and stop talking to anyone
about anything beyond the weather and the Commanders.
Pamela
Jo Bondi, soon.
And if you’ve read enough history, you recognize it.
In 1973, it drifted down Pennsylvania Avenue in a cloud of
cigar smoke and raw political arrogance. It hung in the corridors of power
while men in dark suits convinced themselves that loyalty was a higher virtue
than law. They were wrong, of course. History was waiting with handcuffs.
Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General of the Trump Law Firm and
Rub-N-Tug Spa, once known as the Department of Justice, is next.
The Attorney General at the time was John N. Mitchell. He
was not a fool. He was not a fringe figure. He was the Attorney General of the
United States, the keeper of the law’s flame, sworn to preserve it…and yet he
mistook his proximity to Richard Nixon for immunity.
He believed that the Department of Justice could be bent,
gently at first, then boldly, toward the preservation of a presidency. He
believed obstruction was management. He was up to his ass in the Watergate
scandal and tried to use the power of the DOJ to intimidate and silence
reporters and witnesses. He believed silence was a strategy and that he (and
Nixon) were above the law.
He believed wrong.
John Mitchell went to prison for conspiracy, obstruction of
justice, and perjury.
Now we find ourselves staring at the slow, methodical
choreography around the Epstein files, and at the center of that macabre dance
stands Pam Bondi, offering the country a familiar tune: refusal, delay, denial,
defiance, and lies.
Her answer to any question has been a lie, a distraction,
followed by a middle finger.
Court orders? Fuck you.
Congressional inquiries? Fuck you.
Public transparency? Fuck you.
Justice for Epstein’s victims? Fuck you.
It’s a masterclass in Trumpian evil, the dialect spoken by
people who believe the Department of Justice is nothing but an instrument of
protection and revenge for Donald Trump. Bondi, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel and
the DOJ are trying to run out the clock.
But time is not always a solvent. Sometimes it’s a
microscope.
The Epstein affair is not merely sordid; it is
gravitational. It pulls in power, money, celebrity, and political connections
across party lines and decades. It is radioactive precisely because it does not
respect ideology. And in such a moment, the Attorney General’s role is simple
in theory and brutal in practice: let the law operate, sunlight included.
Yet what we see instead is furious defiance and cover-up. A
kind of bureaucratic war with Sharpies and redacted PDFs that seems less
concerned with justice than with blast containment.
Mitchell told himself something similar. He wasn’t
obstructing justice, he thought; he was protecting the presidency. He wasn’t
concealing crime; he was preventing hysteria. He wasn’t defying Congress; he
was defending executive authority.
The Constitution disagreed.
The courts disagreed.
A jury disagreed.
There is a specific arrogance that afflicts those who have
operated for too long in Trump's orbit. It whispers that the system is fragile
and if you’re loud and ugly enough, the rules don’t apply. It suggests that
rules are for the little people, the proles, and the suckers. It insists that
the base will forgive anything done in the name of tribal loyalty.
But federal judges are not cable-news hosts. They do not
applaud defiance dressed as principle. They read orders. They expect
compliance. They have long memories and a limited sense of humor.
And Congress, even a dysfunctional one, possesses tools
sharper than press releases. Contempt citations are not symbolic gestures.
Funding battles are not academic exercises. The resurrection of investigatory
authorities has a way of becoming bipartisan when scandal ripens. The GOP
majority is on the endangered species list, and accountability is coming in hot
for Pamela Jo Bondi.
Mitchell once assumed he was the system.
That proximity to the President placed him at the center of gravity. What he
discovered, too late, was that institutions bend until they don’t. And when
they snap back, they do so with force.
There is a dark comedy in watching modern officials treat
Watergate as sepia-toned lore rather than a lived warning. The lesson was not
subtle: the Attorney General is not the President’s fixer. The Department of
Justice is not a panic room for the politically vile. And obstruction is not a
victimless crime.
Mitchell didn’t go to prison for breaking into the
Watergate complex. He went for conspiracy. For perjury. For obstruction. For
believing that process crimes were technicalities rather than felonies. The
same kind of crimes Pam, Todd, and Kash are committing today.
He went because he mistook loyalty for legality.
The question hovering over the present moment is not
whether the Epstein files are embarrassing. They are. It is not whether
powerful people would prefer selective disclosure. They would.
The question is no longer whether the Attorney General of
the United States believes that shielding her Master is a defensible exercise
of executive authority. She quite evidently does.
But this is a perilous flirtation with history’s judgment
in service to a man with no loyalty or honor to his subordinates.
Records are being made.
Emails are being sent.
Instructions are being given.
And someday, someone will read them aloud in an indictment.
History does not always repeat itself, but it does maintain
impeccable bookkeeping.
The first Attorney General to go to prison did so because
he convinced himself that the ends justified the means and that the law was
pliable in his hands. Pam Bondi should take that to heart, if she has a heart.
In Washington’s midnight hour, the lights burn long. The
statements are polished. The documents are redacted, shredded, lost, and
uncataloged. The lies are sold as legal prerogatives, falsely, but with volume
and venom.
But somewhere in the background, the old echo remains, the
sound of a prison door closing on a man who thought he was too powerful to ever
hear it.
It is a sound worth remembering.
Intel and Observations
What’s most chilling about Tucker Carlson isn’t
just the venom, the demagoguery, the whackadoo white replacement conspiracy
theories or the way he has bent much of American conspiracy-conservatism to his
will; it’s how perfectly he resembles The Talented Mr. Ripley. Like Patricia
Highsmith’s sociopathic con man, Carlson is not born from principle; he’s born
from performance, mimicry, and sheer narcissistic hunger for fame and power.
Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People peels
back the layers of this transformation: a once-gifted writer and conventional
conservative journo who had nothing…and I mean nothing…resembling
coherent ideology before media markets cooked up and rewarded outrage.
Carlson didn’t find conviction. He found an
audience. He chased it. Like Ripley assuming identities to climb social
ladders and impress strangers, Carlson adapted the hottest brand of
conservatism of the moment, first Bushy establishmentarianism, then contrarian,
then Trumpism, now conspiratorial Putinism, not because he believed in any of
it, but because it was the currency of attention.
Ripley steals identities; Carlson steals legitimacy. Ripley
kills to preserve his lies; Carlson kills nuance, truth, and any lingering
tether to conservative intellectual tradition. Highsmith’s antihero seeks
comfortable wealth and acceptance among elites; Carlson sought not just
influence (he had that in spades at Fox) but irreplaceability in the media
ecosystem. And like Ripley’s mimicry, it’s all a performance: the gravitas of
conviction without the substance, the polished veneer hiding the hollow core.
Zengerle underscores how the changes in what media mattered
in the moment, first print, then cable television, then digital virality,
changed and shaped him. Professional ambition met a market addicted to outrage;
a contrarian flirt became a full-blown lunatic fringe firebrand. The result is
not just a pundit, but a personality that feigns belief while
reflecting back to his audience whatever enraging image will keep ratings and
relevance curves going up and to the right.
In the end, Carlson’s story isn’t just about one man’s
moral collapse. It’s about a culture that rewards the Ripley in all of us, that
tempting version of ourselves that wants spectacle, not truth, and will follow
the performance into the abyss.
Is Social Media Addictive? Duh.
What’s happening in that Los Angeles courtroom isn’t some
esoteric academic exercise; it’s the first time somebody has finally called out
the industry that built the hate machine for what it actually is: an
algorithmic opiate engineered to hook brains and harvest attention for profit.
The plaintiffs are arguing that Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube designed
their products to be addictive, exploiting psychological vulnerabilities,
particularly in kids and teens, to keep them scrolling, reacting, comparing,
and obsessing. That’s not “problematic use,” that’s systemic exploitation baked
into the product.
And who’s on the stand defending this? Adam Mosseri, the
head of Instagram, is insisting under oath that social media isn’t “clinically
addictive” (the word “clinically” is doing a lot of work here)
and dodging responsibility by insisting what they call “engagement” shouldn’t
be labeled addiction. That’s like a tobacco exec insisting cigarettes aren’t
addictive because they don’t cause clinical disease instantly.
It’s absurd and insulting.
In researching my new book, The Hate Machine,
I’ve been deep in this rabbit hole, and the internal and external academic and
behavioral research is unequivocal: the platforms are addictive by design.
Endless scroll, algorithmic feeds, reward-like notifications, personalized
hooks that learn what makes each user stay longer…it all adds up to addiction
It isn’t an afterthought or a happy accident; it’s the
product’s design spec. This is the structural core of the Hate Machine: feed
the beast with more eyeballs, more outrage, more time, and the machine gets
more powerful, more enraging, more normalized.
The tech lobbyists and executives will squeal about
semantics, “problematic use,” “engagement,” “user choice,” but that’s just
legal gaslighting to mask responsibility. The software is designed to be
addictive; the business model profits from addiction; and the users, especially
the youngest and most vulnerable, are the collateral damage.
Breathe In: Gene Editing Via Inhaler
You may not feel it, but we’re in an absolutely remarkable
march against disease, and this story struck me as showing that cures are
getting easier to deliver and more effective.
RFK, Jr. Is A Serial Killer
Moderna had an mRNA cure for multiple sclerosis? We’re not getting it because
the Trump FDA killed their application for final-stage testing. Said FDA is, of
course, led by notorious junkie, sex addict, and conspiracy antivax whackjob
RFK, Jr.
When this is over, I want RFK, Jr. and every one of his antivax claque strung
up and left for the buzzards. Singularly evil.
As expected.
Let’s call it what it is: a pathetic, tawdry political
lawfare circus. The Trump Justice Department tried to transform a 90-second
video reminding U.S. service members they are sworn to the Constitution, not
Donald Trump, into a criminal conspiracy.
Judge Franzia Pirro told a grand jury to indict six lawmakers who simply said
troops must refuse illegal orders, a fundamental principle of the military
found in the - wait for it - Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The grand jury, thank God, refused to buy this nonsense.
This isn’t justice. It’s revenge porn masquerading as legal
proceedings. It’s weaponizing “law enforcement” to terrorize opponents and
intimidate anyone with a pulse. Trump publicly ranted about “traitors”
deserving death over a video, then sent his DOJ to try to fabricate a charge
out of thin air. The grand jury’s rejection isn’t a fluke: it’s an evisceration
of this administration’s illegitimate, authoritarian impulses.
If you’re going to abuse the legal system for political
ends, at least have the decency to find a crime.
This wasn’t one.
Yes. The bigger, the better.
This El Paso airspace fiasco is madness on stilts, a
ludicrous clown show masquerading as national security. What started with a
federal blackout of the skies over a major Texas city that grounded flights,
delayed medevac missions, stranded travelers, and froze general aviation was
justified by the talking heads and awkward Administration press releases as a
response to “cartel drones” breaching U.S. airspace.
But it wasn’t. It was a bureaucratic tantrum cooked up by
an administration that can’t even tell its own agencies what the hell is going
on. The Pentagon’s laser-counterdrone testers at Fort Bliss apparently let
Customs and Border Patrol blast away at something they thought was a hostile
drone…only to discover it was party balloons.
Party balloons.
The FAA, blindsided and absent meaningful communication, responded by slamming
the door on El Paso's entire airspace with a 10-day closure order that
was lifted within hours because nobody could justify it. I’d never seen a NOTAM
like it.
Local officials and lawmakers (including El Paso’s mayor
and elected officials) were left to pick up the pieces after receiving no
advance notice of the shutdown that disrupted commerce and jeopardized public
safety.
This isn’t deterrence. It’s ham-fisted improvisation,
inter-agency infighting, and a glaring example of why national security without
communication is just chaos with a shiny badge.
Not a lot, but they’ve broken the dam on tariffs.
And that’s something. It will never get better for Trump.
