More: Schwalb said it's the greatest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced, and officials are fighting to stop it.

"By declaring a hostile takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its limited, temporary authority under the Home Rule Act, infringing on the District's right to self-governance and putting the safety of DC residents and visitors at risk. The Administration's unlawful actions are an affront to the dignity and autonomy of the 700,000 Americans who call DC home," Schwalb said in the press release.

More: Established after October 7, the unit sought information on Hamas' use of schools and hospitals for military purposes, and on failed rocket launches by armed Palestinian groups that harmed civilians in the enclave. It has also been assigned to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters " the latest of whom was Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike this past week.

According to the sources, the Legitimization Cell's motivation was not security, but public relations. Driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were "smearing [Israel's] name in front of the world," its members were eager to find a journalist they could link to Hamas and mark as a target, one source said.

The source described a recurring pattern in the unit's work: whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative.

"If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there's a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent " as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable," the intelligence source said.

---

Two of the intelligence sources recounted that, in at least one case since the war began, the Legitimization Cell misrepresented intelligence in a way that allowed for the false portrayal of a journalist as a member of Hamas's military wing. "They were eager to label him as a target, as a terrorist " to say it's okay to attack him," one source recalled. "They said: during the day he's a journalist, at night he's a platoon commander. Everyone was excited. But there was a chain of errors and corner-cutting.

"In the end, they realized he really was a journalist," the source continued, and the journalist wasn't targeted.

A similar pattern of manipulation is evident in the intelligence presented on Al-Sharif. According to the documents released by the army, which have not been independently verified, he was recruited to Hamas in 2013 and remained active until he was injured in 2017 " meaning that, even if the documents were accurate, they suggest he played no role in the current war.

The same applies to the case of journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, who was killed in a July 2024 Israeli airstrike along with his cameraman in Gaza City. A month later, the army claimed he was a "military wing operative and Nukhba terrorist," citing a 2021 document allegedly retrieved from a "Hamas computer." Yet that document stated he received his military rank in 2007 " when he was just 10 years old, and seven years before he was supposedly recruited to Hamas.

#5

You have to be 21 to drink and smoke, gramps.

More: Noem's remarks understandably spooked a lot of people. Vanessa Crdenas, executive director of the immigrant-rights group America's Voice, said details about ICE's plans should send a chill down every American's spine.

"Take a teenager with more testosterone than wisdom, arm them with guns and masks, fast cars and"to top it off"dangle cash incentives for indiscriminate and speedy arrests," she said. "Mix in an ICE culture of impunity and overreach. Now, what could go wrong?"

And there's precedent for a move like this creating problems. Deb Fleishaker, who served more than a dozen years at DHS, told me that in previous cases when standards were relaxed and hiring spiked, corruption among Customs and Border Patrol agents went through the roof. One study found that arrests of CBP employees rose 44 percent from 2007 to 2012. A New York Times investigation found that over a ten-year period, CBP employees and contractors took $15 million in bribes.

"We've seen with DHS when they've reduced hiring requirements it's gone very badly," Fleishaker said. "I think standards and training are hugely important to doing the job appropriately and carefully. This is further evidence that the Department cares about the numbers of bodies and numbers of arrests, without counterbalancing what the impact of those bodies and arrests will be."

---

Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and a lawyer for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, said that, with the huge ramping up of recruiting and the dropping of age limits, he fears ICE may end up composed of agents who were rejected from every other law enforcement agency. Consciously or not, he warned, the administration was giving people from the fringes of society power over those with less power.

"It's a commonly known fact that recruiting efforts in the past have attracted the bottom of the barrel in terms of talent," he said. But now, he added, "it's no laughing matter to think of the type of disturbed individuals that they are attracting."

More: It is unclear who will replace former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Still, any signs that lead investors to suspect data is being politicized could exacerbate concerns about CPI data collection.

In that case, investors are likely to demand higher compensation to hold TIPS, or Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, whose value is linked to the CPI, and raise the federal government's cost of funding itself, analysts said. Rises in TIPS yields could be exacerbated by poorer liquidity compared to the much larger market for nominal Treasuries.

"This isn't just an academic discussion about getting the right numbers - these numbers matter for TIPS," said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase. "There's real money on the line here."

More: Several hundred Palestinians have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement, and at least 200 of them remain in custody, according to public records. Israeli military officials have said that at least several dozen Palestinians were arrested in or near Israeli territory around the time of the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

In addition to those detainees, Israel is holding roughly 2,700 other Palestinians who were rounded up in the Gaza Strip over the 21 months since the attack, according to government data. They are suspected of affiliation with Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza, but not necessarily of direct involvement in the Oct. 7 attack.

Israel has killed many of the senior Hamas figures from Gaza who were seen as masterminds of the attack. But some in the country worry that the extensive delays in prosecuting the suspects in custody will allow some perpetrators to escape justice.

Palestinians and rights groups have other concerns.

They say Israel has systematically violated the detainees' rights by holding them without charge or trial in harsh conditions, with limited access to legal counsel. Sweeping gag orders keep most details of their cases under wraps and for most of these detainees, there is no trace of them in any public records.

The way Israel detains those prisoners "effectively erases these individuals from public awareness and strips them of fundamental rights," said Nadine Abu Arafeh, a lawyer who has represented detainees from Gaza in other cases in Israeli courts. "Families in Gaza live with questions: Are their loved ones alive?"

Israel's Justice Ministry declined to comment.

---

Ms. Malinovsky, the opposition lawmaker, said she believes that senior Israeli officials feared that pursuing the cases could intensify public scrutiny of the failures by the government and military or undermine negotiations to exchange Palestinian detainees for Israeli hostages.

"They don't want that discourse," she said of the government.

The prime minister's office declined to comment on the reasons for the delay in prosecutions. The prison service and Justice Ministry would not provide any information on the detainees.

More: The force would be made up of about 600 National Guards troops, half of which would be based on military bases in Alabama and Arizona, ready at all times to fly into any given city or state to lay down Trump's law. They'd have military-style weapons and riot gear, would dispatch from their bases in waves of 100 soldiers, and would cycle out after 90 days to "limit burnout."

Bread and circuses without the bread.

Will they be crucifying immigrants at this gladiator even or just feeding them to lions?

Many on "the left" are/were the military. I know more left leaning vets than I do MAGA vets. None of the Marines I keep in touch with from my old squadron are happy about what Trump is doing. One works at the VA and he had to switch jobs and work locations to avoid getting DOGEd and let me tell you, that Kentucky redneck is more anti-Trump than many of the people that post on this site that you call leftists.

More: Sure. The murder rate has been improving here recently. But the violent crime rate in D.C. is at a 30-year-low, and you are still helping them. So why not us?

Our situation is worse than numbers suggest. Our top cop, Attorney General Alan Wilson, has declared it is legally OK for men to get into a road rage incident, chase down the man they'd argued with for nine miles, get into a shootout and claim self-defense.

Not only that. A police department official in Horry County, one of our largest counties, helped the shooters afterward and one told the other the official had told him to "just be thankful that he wasn't Black."

Horrific. Just horrific.

You read that right, sir. Wilson has made it more likely for hot heads wielding guns to shoot at each other on our roads.

Sir, we are already a top 10 state for gun deaths. Save us like you're saving D.C.

Only seven states have a violent crime rate worse than ours.

Our homicide rate is nearly double the national average. Our aggravated assault rate is well above the national average " higher than that in the nation's capital. We are in the top 12 states for property crime. We suffer a high rate of drug overdoses, a scourge I know you are fighting by considering sending the U.S. military after Mexican drug cartels.

One analyst said aggravated assault, robbery, and murder "are common" here.

Our rate of rape is about the same as D.C's.

South Carolina's violent crime rate is higher than most blue states.

It's just not fair for you to be more concerned with the safety of residents of cities who voted against you than for residents who have repeatedly voted for you in overwhelming numbers!!

Sorry, sir, for sounding angry. I never want to disrespect a great man who has done so much good for this great nation. I just want fellow South Carolinians protected.

Even Rep. Nancy Mace, one of your most obedient foot soldiers, says it's too dangerous.

"In South Carolina, criminals are treated like victims " and victims like criminals," she recently tweeted in reference to disgusting dog fighting. "The attorney general is afraid to fight crime. He won't prosecute murder. He won't prosecute rape," Mace said in response to Wilson's declaration about self-defense laws, echoing criticisms he has denied as the two candidates embark on gubernatorial campaigns in South Carolina. "He won't prosecute human trafficking. He won't prosecute pedophiles."

I don't know how much longer we can hold on in a lawless, violent hellhole like this.

Only you can save us. I know we were the first state to secede from the union to try and destroy the United States. But that was so long ago. Send in federal troops. Now.

Please.

Sincerely, A proud (terrified) South Carolina native

We're going to lose the best and brightest of our military troops as they chose to leave the service rather than attack Americans. What's left afterwards will be terrifying.

More: Concerning as that seems, Guardsmen I spoke to regard the deployment as pointless political theater. (California Guardsmen made the same point to me about their deployment earlier this summer.)

"Huge waste of time and money when their focus is [supposed to be] saving money," a DC National Guard source told me.

If the nearly half dozen Guardsmen I've spoken to about the deployment are at all representative, frustration with the order is widespread. (The memo I obtained, along with other details, leaked almost immediately.) As in the case of Los Angeles, the soldiers seemed most incensed by how performative and unnecessary they saw the mission as. This opposition apparently led some but not all Guardsmen to decline other requests to deploy voluntarily.

"I said no immediately because it's like signing up for the Gestapo," the Guard source said. "But I'm sure people will volunteer because they need the money or benefits from being on orders over 30 days."

More: Trump's mouthpiece justifies it this way: "President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden " wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits."

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a "national emergency," then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.

----

The question, it seems to me, is how Trump might respond to a real SCOTUS setback, or to a House he doesn't totally control. And the answer to that we already know: he will assault the court's legitimacy, threaten the Justices with mob violence, refuse to end the tariffs, and " of course! " claim the 2026 elections are rigged. The same, I think, applies to his term limits. He will attempt to defy them along the lines of his beloved thug-tyrant, Bukele. And if that open assault on a clear Constitutional amendment doesn't fly, which may be a stretch even for MAGA vandals, it still won't be over.

If a Democrat wins in 2028, Trump will call the election rigged and illegitimate, and will re-stage 2020 on behalf of a successor " with the full weight of the federal government behind him. If a Republican wins, Trump will remain POTUS the way Putin stayed president after making Medvedev "president" in 2008. Trump is an instinctual tyrant, and once those characters have tasted raw, arbitrary power, as he has, they can never let go. He must either have a family member succeed him or a puppet. Don Jr or JD " Trump's Medvedev.

The stain of this will therefore be deep and permanent. It already is. Trump intends to use the 250th celebration next year as a Putin-style glorification of his reign. By then he'll be riding in the Qatari jet that the Senate just allowed him to keep permanently. Tyrants also demand permanent monuments to their glory. So having paved over the Rose Garden, Trump is now intending to add a massive 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom to the White House itself, forever cementing it as a palatial symbol for his new monarchy.

Some ------- kid who also happens to work for Trump got robbed trying to buy coke at 3 AM and all of DC will now pay for it.

He proved himself inept in his first term to anyone that was paying attention.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." " Benito Mussolini

Martial law is the wrong way to combat homelessness.

DC crime is currently at a 30 year low. Just another distraction from the Epstein fiasco at the expense of an entire city.

ThEy'Re WeApOnIzInG tHe DoJ!!!

If you've ever been to Japan or an English village you'd know how ridiculous this is. American pick-ups are simply too big for the streets there.

Another piece of their plan to rig the midterms.

"Trump Threatens Federal Control of DC After House Oversight Committee Subpoenas Epstein files"

FTFY

Still not enough water to cover up the Epstein scandal.