Donald Trump and maga Republicans must support the advice from military JAG officers to prevent war crimes and murder sof non-combatants

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jackie Calmes. 

At least Donald Trump didn’t “kill all the lawyers” first, literally following Shakespeare’s words in “Henry VI, Part 2” on evading the rule of law. Instead, just a month into his second term in February, he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply fired the top lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force, known as judge advocates general, or JAGs.

“It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: You get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down,” Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks said at the time, according to The New York Times. She wasn’t alone in her fear, or her prescience.

Nine months later, the storylines embroiling Trump are getting all tangled up, creating a knotty mess of lawlessness, hypocrisy and potential war crimes in what conservative columnist George Will has dubbed “this moral slum of an administration.” And that owes at least in part to the fact that the president has gotten rid of good lawyers and other guardrails so he can act with impunity.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Americans got news of two utterly contradictory actions that grotesquely captured Trump’s amoral and immoral instincts — one involving killings, the other a presidential pardon.

First, the Washington Post disclosed a chilling twist on a September 2, 2025 attack that was the first of 21 known U.S. military strikes so far on small boats allegedly hauling drugs, the opening of Trump’s undeclared war on so-called narco-terrorists. 

In fact, the commander for the operation, reportedly following Hegseth’s verbal order to “kill them all,” ordered a second strike when two of 11 men on board were seen alive, clinging to wreckage. At least 72 other humans have since been blown up on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

The nonprofit news site the Intercept had first reported the September 2, episode just over a week later, but its report was little noted at the time. 

Subsequently, on Saturday, following the Post report and CNN’s confirmation, former military lawyers in a shadow watchdog group formed after the Pentagon purge in February released a five-page legal analysis stating that it “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” punishable by U.S. and international courts.

Prosecution could extend from Hegseth “down to the individual who pulled the trigger,” the Former JAGs Working Group said.

For all their tough-guy bravado, both Hegseth and Trump (definitely not a Trumanesque “the buck stops here” sort of president) have been trying mightily to distance themselves from the imbroglio, while each man insists the strikes were lawful. “I don’t know anything about it,” the commander in chief told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, returning from his holiday golf break. But, he added, “I wouldn’t have wanted … a second strike.”

The designated fall guy seems to be Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, who led the Joint Special Operations Command and ordered SEAL Team 6 to fire a second strike. Trump and Hegseth have repeatedly pointed to him, even as they insist they have his back. People at the Pentagon reportedly aren’t reassured.

Trump is using the controversy, meanwhile, to brag about his victories against drug traffickers, despite offering no public evidence that the dead men in those tiny boats were drug runners. 

Yet, his boasts couldn’t be more dissonant with the weekend’s other Trump-related news: the president’s celebratory announcement on social media that he would pardon a proven, big-time drug-trafficker, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.

Against Hernández there was heaps of evidence, enough to convict him in a U.S. federal court last year on charges of running his country as a narco-state, taking bribes and putting his police and military in league with drug cartels to funnel more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. To “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses,” he said, according to trial testimony.

Trump made good on the pardon this week — perhaps his greatest abuse of that presidential power in a long line of them, other than the January 6, pardons. Hernández was freed on Tuesday from prison.

Why would Trump do it? Because he could. There is no one to stop him. Both as a matter of justice and politics, this pardon is all but inexplicable. Sometimes there’s just no explaining the madness of Trump as anything other than that.

Quizzed by reporters, Trump gave his go-to explanation for pardoning the undeserving: The case, like his own in past years, “was a Biden administration set-up.” Never mind that the investigation of Hernández began in Trump’s first term. Or that the federal judge in his trial was a Bush appointee, P. Kevin Castel, who went on at length before sentencing Hernández — to 45 years — about the justice of the case.

Then there’s the third storyline snarled in the one about Trump’s killings in international waters: his campaign against six Democratic lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, who made a video last month telling U.S. service members that they should not — must not — obey illegal orders. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” Trump thundered, though the Democrats were stating the law and military code. Hegseth, dutiful lapdog, directed the Navy to investigate one Democrat, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, for “serious allegations of misconduct.”

The alleged strike against survivors, on top of Trump’s general policy of lethal force against purported drug runners, underscores exactly why the Democrats spoke out. What’s more, they did so a month after Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of the U.S. Southern Command, announced his exit amid reports that he was forced out for objecting to the sea strikes.

Here’s the good news: Even senior Republicans in Congress have been roused to object. The public MUST act as well: to pull another “Epstein files” maneuver, creating so much pressure that Congress can’t back down from oversight hearings. In other words, bring in the lawyers. 

Mass deportations of innocent immigrants became a campaign strategy by the Donald Trump Nazi regime

Echo opinion letter published in the Los Angeles Times:

Donald Trump's mass deportation plans will ensnare U.S. citizens and tear the nation apart-Huffington Post

To the editor: Wait, what❓ A national emergency to carry out mass deportations❓ (“Trump confirms deportation strategy will include national emergency declaration and military,” Nov. 18)

If that is the case, and if President-elect Trump, if he is a national leader really believed it, he would have supported the conservative plan proposed by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) earlier this year to begin to address that emergency.

But no❗ Trump didn’t want the problem solved. Instead, he wanted to campaign on it.

Why would I believe that he wants to solve the border problem now❓ Getting the military involved — a legally problematic strategy — would just allow him to accrue more dictatorial power.

How much will this cost the taxpayers? And once accomplished, what would be the cost to our economy? Millions of jobs may be left vacant with no one to fill them.

As a preview, we can look to China and Japan. For different reasons, their birthrates do not support the economy they want. 

If what I read is accurate, we are in a similar boat, yet what helps keep us prosperous is immigration, legal and illegal.

From William Elmelund, West Hollywood, California

Dangerous Trump wants to take revenge on the Constitution freedom of the press. He must be defeated!

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian:  Was it just a little joke when Orange Jesus declared to Sean Hannity that, in the event of his political resurrection, he would be a dictator on “Day One”? I didn’t take it that way. You shouldn’t either. 

Believe Trump when he vows revenge on the media. MAGA shock troops are already on the attack.

Former guy President Trump’s MAGA shock troops have been announcing all over the place that a second Trump term would be dedicated to punishing enemies real and imagined, especially journalists who have dared speculate about how he would set about torching the Constitution.

Trump intends to torch the U.S. Constitution!

In the dictator’s playbook, demonizing the press is Job No. 1, and it’s something Trump is long familiar with: He not only calls news he doesn’t like “fake,” he claims he invented the term “fake news.” (No hat tip to the Nazis, I guess.) Mainstream news outlets, he’s often said, are “truly the enemy of the people.” Reporters are “scum,” “the absolute worst.”

For years, Trump has said he wants to weaken our country’s libel laws, making it easier for him to sue outlets for negative coverage. (Nothing to do with principle, of course. It’s all about him.)

Some of our Supreme Court justices have intimated that they agree and would like nothing more than to overturn the court’s unanimous 1964, ruling that made it difficult for public figures to win libel cases.

This country’s political system is flawed, no doubt about it. A presidential candidate can win the popular vote in a landslide and still lose the White House. 

Broken democracy!  Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has? (Robert Kagan)

Scheming partisans can draw maps designed to keep them in power endlessly and pass laws designed to depress voter turnout to their benefit. But haven’t we always believed, deep in our bones, that the American free press could never be silenced, that the 1st Amendment protects us from government censorship, and that a well-functioning Fourth Estate really is what keeps democracy safe?

You might think the motto of the Washington Post is kind of silly — “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” I find it profound.

It’s true that American reporters have been jailed many times over the years — most often for refusing to comply with court orders to identify their sources. We don’t put reporters in jail for telling the truth or for giving their opinions. But Trump would.

He and his allies have already laid the groundwork for a war on the free press in the event that he wins a second term.

Kash Patel, for example, was a onetime aide to former California Rep. Devin Nunes, who rose through the ranks of the Trump administration. He eventually landed a job as chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, one of the Trump loyalists who was installed after the then-president purged Defense officials who refused to deploy military troops to quell George Floyd protests. 

Then, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel, whom Trump is reportedly considering for CIA director in a second administration, vowed revenge on Trump critics, including reporters.

“We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government but in the media,” he told Bannon. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

The name of the relatively obscure MAGA Republican attorney Mike Davis, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and worked for Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, has reportedly been bandied about for the position of attorney general in a second Trump administration. Davis is a walking, talking testosterone-poisoned MAGA caricature, promising to “rain hell” on Washington if he gets a Cabinet appointment. “We’re gonna put kids in cages,” he told a MAGA Republican YouTube host in September. “It’s gonna be glorious.”

He threatened to put in jail and deport the left-wing MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. “I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag,” Davis tweeted last month.

The latest Trumpian attack on the press comes from Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a Yale Law graduate and member of the elite university MAGA Republican faux populist cartel that includes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard Law), Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law).

J. D. Vance once decried Trump as “cultural heroin.” Now he’s won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Ohio by peddling Trumpism. "He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” he wrote in The Atlantic in July 2016. (Report by David A. Graham)

Vance, once derided Trump as “cultural heroin,” was offended by a widely read Washington Post essay by the neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan, that warned against a second Trump term. “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality,” the essay began. “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

Kagan, who left the Republican Party over its embrace of Trump, laid out a dark vision of what would happen if Trump clinches the GOP’s 2024, presidential nomination and his fellow Republicans and big-dollar donors fall into line. “Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction,” Kagan wrote. “Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?”

Could blue states provide a meaningful bulwark against a Trump dictatorship, Kagan wondered. “States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government,” he mused. “But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny.”

Vance, getting the jump on Trump 2.0 media revenge, asked Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to investigate Kagan.

“I suspect,” wrote Vance, “that one or both of you might characterize this article as an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.”

I suspect that Vance is either off his rocker, or more likely, simply making a disingenuous attempt to minimize Trump’s orchestrated effort to overthrow President Biden, a crime against democracy that culminated in the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

I mean, come on people, what’s the difference between inciting a violent riot that left at least five people dead, pressuring a vice president to violate the Constitution, trying to strong-arm Georgia’s secretary of state into finding more Trump votes, orchestrating slates of fake electors and writing a thought experiment op-ed for a newspaper?

If your answer is “nothing,” then you just might have a promising future in a second Trump administration.

George Santos is not qualified to be in the U.S. Congress and Kevin McCarthy knows it!

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Nicholas Goldberg:

George Santos lies and he must resign from Congress!

In Shakespeare’s plays or, say, the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, Trollope and Jane Austen, there are often at least two plots moving forward at any moment: a serious dramatic story involving the work’s main heroes and villains and a comic subplot peopled by absurd characters.

In the real world, we have comic subplots as well. Take the liar Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.), who — while American democracy has spun out of control, the U.S. Capitol was overrun and Donald Trump became a serious contender for reelection — wanders on and off the national stage like a ditzy clown  🤡keeping the audience amused.

Santos has been a recurring joke in the midst of our otherwise terrifying and riveting political drama — a somewhat doughy, somewhat hapless Mr. Magoo-turned-con man in a blazer, sweater and chinos. He is a fraudster who told lie after ridiculous lie, ad absurdum, about his family background, education and job experience and, though caught in the act, steadfastly refused to be held accountable.

His free ride, though, could be coming to an end. Federal prosecutors in New York announced Wednesday that the 34-year-old freshman congressman has been charged with a wide range of not-so-funny crimes, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making false statements to Congress. In short, they allege, he deceived and defrauded campaign donors and the U.S. government.


Santos turned himself in to federal authorities on Long Island on Wednesday morning and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He said he would not resign and that he’s been subjected to a — you guessed it! — “witch hunt.”

As my mom used to say, it’s all fun and games until it’s not. Santos has been a national punchline in one of the weirdest scandals in U.S. congressional history (and we’re talking about a governmental body that was once home to Anthony Wiener!). But now he may be written out of the story altogether. The U.S. attorney’s office says he could face up to 20 years in prison on the top counts.

The absurdity of the Santos situation first became clear to me when I watched a video of him trying to find his way through the House office buildings, lost but perpetually moving because he was being trailed and hounded at every step by a scrum of bloodthirsty reporters. He tried to pretend they weren’t there; they had a great time at his expense.

He was barraged with questions like, “Hey George, what’s your name today?” He tried to look dignified, talking oh-so-seriously into his phone as he walked, though I highly doubt anyone was on the other end.



Santos quickly became the butt of the late-night shows.

“I don’t consider the things I’ve said to be lies,” said a straight-faced Jon Lovitz, impersonating Santos on Jimmy Fallon’s show. “They’re what my great-grandfather, Winston Churchill, would call ‘embellishments.’”

At the heart of the joke was the fact that his lies were so brazen and so egregious — and yet so mundane at the same time. So checkable and disprovable — yet so insignificant. Like when he said he had been a “star” on the volleyball team at Baruch College. I mean, who would lie about that?

It turns out he wasn’t on the volleyball team. And didn’t graduate from Baruch College at all. Nor did he attend the Horace Mann School, as he claimed. Nor did he work at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup.

He is not Jewish, as he repeatedly claimed to be. Or of Jewish descent. Or “Jew-ish,” as he later said he’d said.

Santos did not have grandparents that fled Hitler.

His mother was not in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. She wasn’t in the country at all.

Santos’ behavior was laughable, for sure, but also it was wrong, not to mention creepy. It was Jon Stewart, in the end, who pointed out the obvious: “We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger,” he said. “Absurdity always makes you think something is more benign than it is.”

And it’s true: The endless fabrications are obviously not funny to Santos’ constituents on Long Island, who now, six months after the 2022 election, are still represented in Congress by a serial liar. Or to those who donated money for his election (some portion of which was spent, prosecutors say, on personal expenses including “luxury designer clothing”).

But Stewart meant more than just that. He was referring to how so many people — himself included — had failed to take Donald Trump seriously at first, seeing him as a harmless clown like Santos.

Trump did seem like a joke in those early days. He said outrageous things, told endless lies, pushed kooky conspiracy theories and seemed to have little argument for why Americans should vote for him other than that he was a flashy, rich, irreverent TV star.

Anyone who doesn’t remember how improbable it all seemed should watch the clip (which I saw recently courtesy of journalist Peter Beinart‘s newsletter) of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos and a panel of so-called political experts in July 2015.

In it, Ellison says that people who oppose Trump ought to get active, get involved and vote.

“This man has got some momentum and we’d better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket,” says Ellison.

At that point everyone on the show bursts into laughter. Peals of laughter, really. Stephanopoulos, grinning, says — and I don’t really blame him for this error of enormous historical magnitude, because I probably would have felt the same way — “I know you don’t believe that.”

Ellison doesn’t join in the laughter. He says: “Stranger things have happened.”

President Santos anyone?