When the shutdown ended, Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in 50 days after she was elected. She promptly signed the discharge petition to release the full Epstein files, getting it past 218 signatures and forcing a vote in the House. Democrats were jubilant in the expectation that this would finally expose Trump and bring us to a point where Republicans are perhaps forced to remove him from office—or at least forced to reckon with his moral deficiencies.

The problem is, even assuming the best case for Democrats (and the worst for Trump), and even though every House Republican but one hopped on the “release the files” bandwagon, neither of these things are likely to ever happen. Let me walk you through how things will proceed.

First, let’s assume—purely hypothetically and for the sake of argument—that compromising pictures exist of Trump exist with an underage girl. Trump will do everything in his power to make sure these never see the light of day. He will first refuse to release them, and he’ll go to court to do it, which will drag out for months or even years. He will also have his minions work to destroy all proof that the evidence ever existed.

If forced, he will release redacted files. If Democrats realize the pictures are doctored or have been removed from the filings, they’ll have to go back to the courts again to get the unredacted version. Trump will (again) drag this out for months if not years. We can see the seeds of it already, in the fact that they are reopening federal investigations to plausibly deny the release on information related to an ongoing probe.

The Supreme Court’s deference to the executive office and law enforcement makes it likely that Trump will get a favorable ruling at some point that prevents the release of the photos. Even if he loses in the courts his team can always refuse to comply, as they’ve already done in so many cases, dragging it out further.

Given all this, it’s very unlikely that the House will ever receive anything incriminating Trump.

But even if it does, what happens then?

“They’re AI fake images.” “Fake news.” “They were planted by the Biden administration to slander me.” “Total witch hunt.” “No President has been treated more unfairly than me.” “Bondi will be opening investigations into the people slandering me…” We’ve heard this song and dance before, and this time will be no different. 

The social media that MAGA hangs out on (X, Truth Social, Parler, Facebook, TikTok, etc...) will steer people to content that either avoids the photos or supports the claims they are a hoax. AI chatbots like Grok will quickly be tuned and trained to repeat and support these lies, as Grok already does with Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. With this propaganda flooding their feeds, the MAGA base will never believe the evidence. They’ll angrily call Republican politicians, demanding that they stand up for the president against the fake Biden evidence.

But suppose that Democrats win the House in 2026 and in the face of all this work up the gumption to send articles of impeachment to the Senate. With that sort of pressure from Trump and his base, I can’t imagine getting to 67 votes in the Senate. If it looked to be getting close, Trump would pull out all the stops, including using DOJ and ICE to intimidate wavering Republicans. And if that failed, he could always invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law in the Capitol, and make sure the vote didn’t happen.

When you look at the chain of events required for the documents to be released without edits, scrubs, or redaction, and for them to avoid being destroyed before Trump’s time in office expires, it’s almost impossible for them to be released before the 2028 election, much less before next year’s mid-terms. Factor in the tools that Trump has available to combat incriminating evidence that’s come to light, and several miracles or deus ex machina events will have to take place before Trump pays any sort of price.

All it would take is for the Supreme Court to agree that yes, the executive branch can redact whatever it wants if it is related to an ongoing investigation of any sort. Or executive privilege. Or national security. Given how this court has deferred to the executive branch, Trump’s lawyers will throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then it is game over. 

You would think people opposed to Trump would have figured this out by now. Every time they start getting “happy on the farm” about Trump finally facing consequences of his actions, he inevitably escapes them.

He survived the Stormy Daniels payoffs and Mueller investigation. He escaped punishment for stealing top-secret documents and showing them to casual friends. He escaped child rape allegations before the 2016 election (this was the woman who alleged that Trump raped her when she was 13; she was going to go public just before the 2016 election but canceled because she had received threats). He was convicted in civil court of sexual assault, but he has yet to pay a dime of the $88 million he owes. He was convicted of 34 felonies in criminal court but avoided all punishment. He survived the January 6 insurrection and the criminal investigation for meddling in the 2020 Georgia election, where he was literally caught on tape demanding the governor “find” votes for him. The man has spent his life learning to use his power and money to escape consequences for criminal acts; it’s perhaps his greatest talent.

So, when I look ahead at what it would take to remove him from office (or even get incriminating evidence to the House), the path is very narrow, and many barriers would have to be overcome. I believe he will not face consequences of any sort, regardless of what is (or was, if he’s already had evidence destroyed or covered up) in the files.

Betting that the president of the United States doesn’t find a way out of this, when he’s consolidated all the power of the federal government in the executive branch and controls the GOP with an iron fist, is like watching the Harlem Globetrotters whomp the Washington Generals for 10 years and betting all your money against them because, “I thought the Generals were due.”

This proposal would be even worse than the no deal on extending ACA subsidies bill being floated earlier:

Democrats and Republicans have been locked for more than a month in a standoff over healthcare coverage, with Democrats repeatedly blocking a GOP bill to reopen the government. Without an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act credits, which run roughly $30 billion a year, more than 20 million Americans are set to see increases in their insurance premiums. Open enrollment for next year started this month.

A key development that appeared to break the logjam in the negotiations was that Senate Republicans proposed that some healthcare funding be provided directly to households rather than be used to pay for a one-year extension of enhanced ACA subsidies.

That GOP proposal involves sending federal money into flexible-spending accounts instead of to insurance companies that use the money to offset the cost of premiums, so consumers pay a smaller monthly bill. The money could be used to cover deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs, which Republicans see as a way to give consumers more choice and control healthcare inflation.

This is an incredibly obvious scam. First of all, money spent from HSAs goes to “private insurance companies” just as surely as the ACA’s tax credits do, just less efficiently and equitably. It will allow Trump to put his name on money being sent to individuals, allowing him to take credit for a Democratic program while making it worse. And this is needless to say an unsubtle move toward trying to kill the ACA and replace it with something like the actual Heritage Plan rather than the imaginary one. The idea that “giving people control” over healthcare expenses will improve access to healthcare is crazy, but once it’s written into law that this is better than the ACA’s credits the GOP will run with it. And it takes the most potent issue Democrats have largely off the table while still making things materially worse.

This would be worse than nothing. A clean spending resolution would be better than this. Any senator voting for this should face a primary challenge at the earliest available opportunity.

…I definitely think this is driving some of the sudden urgency:

not enough chatter about how frequently members fly and how attacking airport capacity directly affects them in a way that cutting SNAP does not

— Joshua Erlich (@joshuaerlich.bsky.social) Nov 9, 2025 at 3:07 PM

The post I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

doeeyedyelena:

THE LONG WALK (2025) + last words

By the time the cops showed up to arrest him for sharing a derisive meme responding to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Larry Bushart Jr. had posted on Facebook more than 100 times on Sunday alone.

It was past 11 p.m. on September 21, and Bushart, 61, was still up with his wife at their home in Lexington, Tennessee, a small city halfway between Nashville and Memphis. It had been a normal weekend. On Saturday, they went to see a community theater performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” The next day, they moved furniture to prepare for a new carpet delivery. And, as he did almost every day, Bushart spent hours on his phone, posting on Facebook a torrent of liberal memes.

Born and raised in West Tennessee, Bushart worked as a police officer and sheriff’s deputy for 24 years, then spent another nine with the Tennessee Department of Correction before retiring from law enforcement last year. His politics made him an outlier among his neighbors. Like many people, he reserved his most strident opinions for the internet. On Facebook, Bushart slammed President Donald Trump and his followers, whom he likened to a cult. He quarreled with vaccine skeptics and fought with election deniers. As things took a darker turn during Trump’s second term, Bushart posted memes decrying the president’s increasingly authoritarian moves. After Kirk’s killing on September 10, Bushart posted furiously, repeatedly, about why the right-wing activist did not deserve to be lionized — and warning about the escalating assault on free speech.

His posts were not limited to his own feed. That Saturday morning, in a Facebook group called “What’s Happening in Perry County,” Bushart spotted a thread about an upcoming candlelight vigil honoring Kirk in the county seat of Linden, a small town some 45 minutes away. He fired off a rapid series of trollish memes. One showed a scene from “The Sopranos.” “Tony, Charlie Kirk died,” Carmela Soprano says. “Who gives a shit,” Tony replies. Another quoted Kash Patel’s press conference after Kirk’s murder, where he said, “I’ll see you at Valhalla,” depicting the FBI director in a Viking costume and holding a rubber chicken. The most vulgar meme appeared to capture the moment Kirk was shot, accompanied by the words, “Release the Epstein Files.”

But it was a more innocuous post that would soon send Bushart’s life spiraling out of control. It was an image he had previously posted to his own feed to little response: a photo of Trump alongside a quote, “We have to get over it.” The meme, which had been circulating for more than a year, drew from remarks Trump made after a January 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa. Beneath the quote was a line providing context: “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after.” Above the image were the words “Seems relevant today.”

If Bushart shared the posts to taunt those mourning Kirk, the reactions on the forum remained relatively mild. “Jeez Larry, take a stress pill or something,” one man commented. “Mow the lawn, get off the computer. A simple, concise statement like ‘I HATE Charlie’ would be sufficient.” Some of Bushart’s posts were received more positively; a meme arguing that “Billionaires fund the class war. Charlie Kirk sold it as a race war” got several likes. The Trump meme, meanwhile, was ignored.

By Sunday evening, however, the posts had gotten the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems. An avid Facebook user himself, Weems had shared the information about the Kirk vigil on his own page a few days earlier. He had also posted his own emotional response to the news of Kirk’s murder in September, warning ominously about the “evil” in our midst. “Evil could be your neighbor,” he wrote. “Evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store. It could be your own family member and you never even know it.”

Weems contacted his investigator. Just under an hour later, in Lexington, Bushart wrote a two-line post on Facebook at 7:53 p.m. “Received a visit from Lexington PD regarding my posted memes on ‘What’s Happening in Perry County,’” he wrote. The police had come at the behest of Perry County, he said, but did not elaborate.

If he was concerned, Bushart didn’t show it. He went back to posting. At 9:48 p.m., Bushart shared a meme from a page called Blue Wave 2026, featuring an unhinged-looking Roseanne Barr. “Many maga are claiming that Obama used the pressure of his office and the FCC to get Rosanne cancelled just like Trump did to Kimmel,” it read. “Except Obama wasn’t president in 2018. Care to guess who was?”

It would be his last post that night. At 11:15 p.m., police knocked on his door again. This time there were four officers, one of whom was holding a warrant for his arrest, which had been sent from Perry County. Body camera footage obtained by The Intercept shows police following Bushart inside his house and waiting while he slips on his shoes. Then they handcuff him on his front porch and lead him away.

Arriving at the local jail, the officer with the warrant unfolded the piece of paper. “Just to clarify, this is what they charged you with,” he told Bushart, pointing and reading aloud: “Threatening Mass Violence at a School.”

“At a school?” Bushart said, sounding confused.

But the officer had no further explanation. “I ain’t got a clue,” he said, chuckling. “I just gotta do what I have to do.”

Bushart laughed too. “I’ve been in Facebook jail but now I’m really in it,” he said. He hadn’t committed a crime, he said. “I may have been an asshole but…”

“That’s not illegal,” the officer said.

Bushart was booked at the Perry County Jail in Linden on September 22, just before 2 a.m. He has been there ever since. His bail was set at $2 million — a shocking amount, wildly beyond his financial capacity. Under Tennessee law, Bushart would have to pay at least $210,000 to get out of jail, under onerous conditions. Although his defense attorney has filed a motion asking General Sessions Judge Katerina Moore to reduce his bail on the grounds that he is not a flight risk and does not pose a threat to the community, a hearing on the motion was reset at prosecutors’ request. Bushart’s next court date is not scheduled to take place until December 4.

Related

Trump’s Cult of Power Cancels Free Speech

Bushart is one of countless people whose lives have been upended due to social media posts shared after Kirk’s death. The murder triggered an extraordinary crackdown on speech, wielded against Americans from every level of government, with the White House and its allies targeting those whose public reactions they considered offensive. Vice President J.D. Vance urged Americans to report people to their employers. At the Pentagon, nearly 300 employees were investigated. And more recently, the State Department revoked the visas of people who spoke ill of Kirk.

In Tennessee, a wave of firings and suspensions took place across the state, with numerous public employees and college and university staffers punished for their posts. A high school science teacher was suspended after being targeted by the right-wing website The Federalist for an Instagram story calling Kirk a “POS” and quoting his reaction to the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which left seven dead, including three 9-year-old students. “It’s worth to have, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights,” Kirk had said. And, under pressure from Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for Tennessee governor, a university fired a theater professor for posting an old article about Kirk’s comments, issuing a statement explaining that the professor had “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death.”

But Bushart’s case is in a class of its own. He is almost certainly the only person who was arrested and held on a serious criminal charge for a Facebook post in the wake of Kirk’s death — a charge that seems clearly divorced from reality. Among those who have heard of it, the case has been met with shock, outrage, and considerable confusion. On TikTok, Reddit, and a “Justice for Larry Bushart” page on Facebook, many see the case as a form of government overreach that puts all Americans in danger. And though the case is undeniably part of the broader assault on free speech sparked by the Kirk assassination, it is also locally rooted: a perfect storm of bad law, overzealous policing, and a political climate that has emboldened law enforcement officials to punish perceived enemies.

At the heart of the controversy is elected Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems. In office since 2015, his previous claim to fame in Tennessee was his response to the 2018 shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, which killed 17 people. In an impassioned open letter, he criticized politicians who failed to protect students, pledging $500 of his own money to install barricade locks on school doors in Perry County. His rallying cry: “Not Our Children!”

More recently, Weems has availed himself of a Tennessee law passed after the Covenant School shooting, which sought harsh new punishments for “recklessly making a threat of mass violence.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech experts cautioned at the time that the language was so broad, “it could potentially criminalize a wide range of adults and children who do not have any intent of actually causing harm or making a threat” — and this is precisely what has happened. The law has ensnared numerous students for social media activity that, by all rational interpretations, are not actually threatening actual violence. Earlier this year, ProPublica and WPLN/Nashville Public Radio reported on a group of middle school cheerleaders who were slapped with criminal charges by the local sheriff for filming a TikTok video in which one girl said, “Put your hands up,” while other girls dropped to the floor.

In Bushart’s case, the warrant affidavit contains a short narrative summarizing the ostensible evidence against him. “At approximately 1900 hours,” writes Perry County Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “I … received a message from Sheriff Nick Weems regarding a Facebook post Larry Bushart made on the What’s Happening in Perry County, TN Facebook page stating ‘This seems relevant today…’ with an image of Donald Trump and the words ‘We have to get over it.’” Morrow quotes the rest of the meme and notes that it was posted “on a message thread regarding the Charlie Kirk vigil.” He then writes: “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”

It’s possible, perhaps, to imagine how the Trump meme might have set some members of the Facebook group on edge — at least upon first glance. The post invoked a school shooting at a “Perry High School.” The local high school in Linden is called Perry County High School. Moreover, just one month earlier, Weems had reported an alleged threat against the school, prompting administrators to cancel all classes “for the safety of our students and staff.” Still, it was easy to discern that, apart from the name “Perry,” there was nothing connecting the meme to Linden.

Chris Eargle, who created the “Justice for Larry Bushart” Facebook page, first heard about the case from news reports posted on social media. Like many online commenters, he figured there had to be more to the story. “I was very skeptical when I first saw it,” he said. “He couldn’t have just been thrown in jail with a $2 million bond just for posting a Trump meme.” But the closer he looked at the case, the more it seemed clear that’s exactly what happened. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, they actually did charge him for posting a meme.’”

Eargle requested to join the “What’s Happening In Perry County” group and was granted access. He also started commenting on different Facebook pages linked to the sheriff. “Unwise persecution of people for their political views will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars,” he wrote in a review on the “Re-Elect Weems for Sheriff” page. “He should never be allowed near public office again.” Before long, the page was taken down. So was the Perry County Sheriff’s Office page.

Weems had been happy to publicize Bushart’s arrest at first. In the earliest news story on September 22, local radio station WOPC published Bushart’s mugshot along with a statement from the sheriff, who said that Bushart’s meme had alluded to “a hypothetical shooting at a place called Perry High School.” According to Weems, “That message caused considerable concern within the community and we were asked to investigate.”

Readers found this perplexing. “I’m confused,” one woman wrote on Facebook after the story was posted on the station page. “He was talking about shooting up the school or shooting up a vigil. How are the two things connected?” Another reader speculated that Weems hadn’t heard of the Iowa shooting and misinterpreted the post as a threat. “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”

In a comment that has since been deleted, Weems personally replied to correct the record. “We were very much aware of the meme being from an Iowa shooting,” he wrote later that afternoon. The meme “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers … that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.”

This did not go over well. Most people would not read the meme as a threat, several commenters pointed out. But even if the meme had caused some people to panic, one man wrote, “your department arrested a man for expressing free speech because you listened to public hysteria rather than doing an investigation?”

Others didn’t buy the notion that there had been panic at all. “Mass hysteria is a lie,” another man wrote. “I hope he sues you.”

As the story spread, confusion persisted over the basic facts. Because the Facebook thread was only visible to members of the Perry County group, it was unclear to most people when, exactly, Bushart posted the memes or how people reacted — let alone whether the response could be described as “mass hysteria.” But Weems insisted that Bushart wanted to sow panic, telling The Tennessean that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.”

Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools. Although the Perry County Schools District did not respond to messages from The Intercept, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a series of open records requests with the school district asking for any communications to or from staff pertaining to the case — including terms like “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.” In response, the director of schools wrote that there were no records related to Bushart’s case. “The Perry County Sheriff’s Department handled this situation,” he wrote.

“You would think that if a school district or a school was the target of a serious threat, they would have an email or a text message or something to students, to parents, to the safety officer, to the community, saying, ‘Here’s what has happened. Don’t worry. Everything is all right,’” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with FIRE who has been monitoring the case. “They have nothing.”

Meanwhile, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to records requests by FIRE. In a phone call with The Intercept, a sheriff’s deputy told The Intercept that any records related to the case would have to be subpoenaed. “I’m not releasing anything due to the scrutiny and the harassing phone calls we’ve had,” he said, then hung up. But Weems himself responded to an email earlier this week. He said that the Perry County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page “has been in the process” of being deleted since July but declined to comment further. “There is a lot of false quotes being made in regard to this case,” he wrote. “Therefore, I’m not gonna continue to discuss the case until it’s settled in court.”

Bushart’s lawyer has not responded to messages about the case. Bushart’s wife declined to speak on the record on the advice of the attorney. But Bushart’s son defended his dad on social media, calling the prosecution “an egregious violation of his 1st Amendment rights” and spelling out what has been clear from the start: The meme he shared was meant to show “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”

For now, Bushart faces the prospect of spending Thanksgiving in jail. On Tuesday, a member of the Justice for Larry Bushart page created a GiveSendGo account to raise money for his legal defense. “This isn’t just for Larry; this is a stand against overzealous law enforcement acting on skewed interpretations of free speech,” it reads. “Remember: today it’s someone else; tomorrow it could be you or me.”

To Steinbaugh, who has litigated First Amendment violations all over the country, Bushart’s case stands out. “One thing that’s unique about it is that nobody has done a course correction here,” he said. “It would be one thing to have law enforcement overreacting and detaining someone … and then the next day, saying, ‘OK, message received, we’ve done our due diligence. That’s all we need to do here.’ This guy’s been incarcerated since this happened over quoting the president. Cooler heads should have prevailed by now.”

The post The Absurd Prosecution of a Man Who Posted a Charlie Kirk Meme appeared first on The Intercept.

They’re planning to severely restrict it Friday: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-vaccine-label-change-alpha