Trail Notes
Bondi unbound / Curbing mail-in votes / Rehashing "debunked" rigging claims / "Sordid" Trump deal / Pirro fail / U.S. birthday for sale / Few "worst" / Tariff toll
Bondi unbound
Okay, we knew about the upcoming Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn on Donald Trump’s birthday in June, but no one clued us in about a cage match at the Capitol this week. That’s pretty much what happened on Wednesday, when a verbal brawl broke out between Attorney General Pam Bondi and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee.
We probably should have expected it, given that congressional hearings are notoriously political theater, and the Democrats had plenty of material to use against Bondi, from her oversight of the president’s retribution campaign to the bungled release of the Epstein files. For her part, Bondi badly needed to score points with her boss, who reportedly has not been happy with her failure so far to put any of his political enemies on trial.
So, Bondi showed up with no intention of answering questions, but instead came armed with a “burn book” of insults and oppo research about each of the Democrats on the committee. Malice ensued. At one point, she called Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin “a washed-up lawyer ... not even a lawyer,” and she intimated that Vermont Rep. Becca Bailant, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, sided with antisemites. She dismissed other Democrats as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which is MAGA’s version of “So’s your mama.” When Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Bondi to apologize Epstein survivors standing behind her, Bondi didn’t turn around. As everyone knows, the first rule of Donald Trump’s fight club is “Never apologize.”
Bondi did, however, rage that she was tired of people attacking Donald Trump, and at one point insisted that Special Counsel “Robert Mueller found no evidence of foreign interference in 2016. Have you apologized to President Trump?” Actually, Mueller’s report concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in “sweeping and systematic fashion,” but, to steal a line from “Animal House,” Bondi was on a roll.
At times, Bondi seemed to get flustered about so much attention being paid to the Epstein story, and in mid-sentence switched to remark on how well the stock market is doing. Above all, she wanted to make it clear that the Trump administration is the “most transparent in history” and that Trump is “the greatest president in history.”
Greatest prez?
Donald Trump routinely says Joe Biden was the “worst president in American history.” But at the moment, even voters surveyed by the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports beg to differ. In a poll conducted the first week of February, 48 percent of voters believe Biden was a better president than Trump. Forty percent said Trump is better. Overall, only 29 percent of those surveyed strongly approved of Trump’s job performance, while 46 percent strongly disapproved.
Curbing mail-in votes
In Trump World, mail-in voting is part of some diabolical Democrat scheme to cheat him. He’s been going all-caps crazy on its association with “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” since 2020. Funny that during the 2024 campaign and even last year, the GOP spent millions of dollars to encourage Republicans to mail in their votes, and in several states—including North Carolina and Arizona—more Republicans than Democrats voted that way in 2024.
But now that the president is once again fanning fears of election rigging, voting by mail is back to being bad. So, on Monday the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that ballots received after Election Day, even if they’ve been mailed on time, shouldn’t be counted. It aligns with Trump’s insinuation that counting votes after Election Day is innately corrupt. The RNC’s brief is tied to a case challenging Mississippi’s election law, which allows mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive within five business days. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month.
Rehashing “debunked” rigging claims
Speaking of election rigging, there was much rejoicing in MAGA circles when dozens of FBI agents showed up at an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, and left with box after box of ballots from the 2020 election. Surely, there must be new evidence that would prove that voting there had been rigged, just as Donald Trump has long claimed.
Well … no. When the FBI search warrant affidavit was unsealed on a judge’s orders Tuesday, it instead reinforced speculation that the very public raid was much more show than substance. As David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research put it, “The affidavit is a total rehash of rejected and debunked claims from five years ago.”
That should come as no surprise since the affidavit also revealed that a driving force behind the new FBI probe is a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, who led Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign challenging the results of his election loss to Joe Biden. Olsen now has the juice to revive that failed crusade because Trump has appointed him director of election security and integrity. In that capacity, Olsen has access to sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election, and as one source told Politico, “Every time he hits a roadblock, he just calls POTUS.” So even if there’s little if anything new behind this vote investigation, it’s not going away. (BTW: There was no mention in the affidavit of foreign government involvement, lending credence to the notion that the presence at the raid of Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, was just part of the show.)
Judges push back
As part of its effort to take more control of elections, the Trump administration last year sued 24 states and the District of Columbia to force them to hand over their voter registration rolls to the Justice Department. Those records include not just the names of registered voters, but also their driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers, email addresses, party affiliations, and voting histories. But on Tuesday, Michigan became the third state where a judge said that’s not happening. Previously, judges in Oregon and California not only rejected the Justice Department’s demand, but even suggested that the Trump administration can’t be trusted and that its attempt to centralize elections poses a potential threat to the voting process.
Calling out “sordid” Trump deal
Andrew McCarthy is a long way from woke. A former federal prosecutor who appears regularly on Fox News and is a contributor to the conservative National Review, he frequently lambasted Joe Biden and his son Hunter. But now, in a series for the National Review, he unloaded on Donald Trump, particularly his family’s financial dealings with the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In what McCarthy describes as a “sordid” deal, a member of UAE’s royal family secretly invested $500 million in the Trump Organization’s cryptocurrency startup. Soon thereafter the Trump administration reversed Biden administration policy and permitted the UAE to begin purchasing high-end AI technology. Ordinarily, said McCarthy, such an arrangement would have sparked a congressional investigation. So far, crickets.
“You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business?” McCarthy wrote. “You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”
Another Pirro fail
Back in her Fox News days, Jeanine Pirro was quite the loyal Trump subject, pushing election conspiracy theories so aggressively that her own producers thought she should be kept off the air. Trump rewarded Pirro by naming her U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In that role, though, she has struggled to get D.C. grand juries to go along with her pro-Trump agenda, and Tuesday she suffered a major setback. A grand jury rejected her attempt to indict the six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in the video urging military personnel to refuse to follow orders that were unlawful. The president had posted on Truth Social: “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” He railed that they were guilty of “sedition,” but it’s not known what charges Pirro sought.
U.S. birthday for sale
It’s hard to believe, but somehow, through its first 250 years, the United States has never had an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn. Or an IndyCar race around the monuments on the National Mall. But Donald Trump is about to fix that. But he’s also paying homage to a longstanding Washington tradition: Selling access to power.
It turns out that Freedom 250, a Trump-backed group orchestrating some of the country’s upcoming birthday celebration, will provide generous donors special opportunities. Anyone who kicks in $1 million or more will receive an invitation to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by the president. And high rollers who donate more than $2.5 million will be offered speaking roles at an event in Washington on July 4.
Very few “worst of the worst”
It’s probably time for Homeland Security to stop with its “worst of the worst” pitch. It’s been obvious for a while that the large majority of people federal agents are scooping up to deport are not violent criminals. Now the data bear that out. According to a report by CBS News, only 14 percent of the 400,000 immigrants arrested during Trump’s first year back in office had been charged or convicted of a violent crime, and less than 2 percent belonged to gangs. Another 46 percent had committed minor criminal offenses, while 40 percent had no crime record at all.
Tariff toll
According to new research by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the average U.S. household took a hit of $1,000 last year from price increases triggered by Donald Trump’s tariffs. The organization projects that what amounts to a tax will on average increase to $1,300 per household this year.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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