These documents are more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve.
– feral streep, on the redactions in the newly released Epstein material
No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 5.
This week’s featured post is “Three days in the life of a pathetic man“.
Ongoing stories
- Trump’s assault on American democracy. He’s trying to move CNN into the hands of an oligarch ally, and is maneuvering us towards war with Venezuela without consulting Congress.
- Climate change. Based on the theory that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, the administration is planning to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, due to its “climate alarmism”.
- Gaza and Ukraine. I didn’t run across anything new this week. Probably I was too busy with Christmas stuff.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was still talking about the Epstein files
Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act had set for the Justice Department to release all of its files about Jeffrey Epstein, with a few minor exceptions, mostly related to protecting the identities of the young women who were Epstein’s victims.
But the EFTA is just a law, one passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President Trump himself. Why should the Justice Department consider itself bound to obey? So of course, DoJ waited until the final day to release anything at all. When it did, the release was not complete, and appeared to be much more heavily redacted than mere victim-protection could account for. (One 119-page document is entirely redacted. One commenter characterized the release as a whole as “more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve”.)
on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”
By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.
Some of the pictures released did include former President Bill Clinton, an apparent effort to support Trump’s gaslighting that the Epstein affair was a Democratic scandal, not a Trump scandal. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that whattaboutism won’t get him out of this jam. “Democrats did it too” or even “Democrats did worse” isn’t a valid excuse. If Democrats are also guilty, expose them too.
The two sponsors of the EFTA, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, both denounced the partial release, which fails to identify anyone who victimized the girls other than Epstein, who is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in prison for sex trafficking (after apparently trafficking the girls to no one, if what has been released is the whole story).
What can Congress do to force DoJ to obey the law? Not much, apparently. It could find Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, but her own department would then be responsible for prosecuting her, which it would not do. Congress could impeach her, if it had the will to do so (which is doubtful). But Bondi could make the impeachment moot by resigning. Again, whatever Trump is hiding would stay hidden.
The only penalty Trump can be forced to pay is political, which they apparently believe they can mitigate by continuing to dribble out files little by little.
and war with Venezuela
Step-by-step, we are marching into a war with Venezuela. First we blew up their fishing boats, which may or may not have been smuggling cocaine and may or may not have been headed towards the US.
On December 10, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. And then Tuesday, Trump announced an oil blockade of Venezuela. He did it in a Truth Social post that was barely coherent, making references to “the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”.
It’s tempting to sanewash this by looking for some plausible reference — maybe the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. But nations all over the world (Saudi Arabia, for example) have nationalized their oil industries without getting attacked. And why oil previously claimed by an oil company should be “ours” is a bit of a stretch.
But while I think justifications like that should be put to administration spokespeople, I’m not going to assume Trump’s post makes sense at all until some official source explains it.
Here’s something more people should be saying: The recent moves make it clear that the attacks on boats were never about drugs, they were about regime change. And changing the Maduro regime is about getting control of Venezuela’s oil. Without the oil, Maduro could be five times as tyrannical and nobody in the Trump administration would care.
and the Bondi Beach shooting
On December 14, a father and son opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. 15 people were killed and 40 injured. The father was killed by police and the son badly wounded. No official statement of motive has surfaced, but antisemitism seems like an obvious guess.
I find two things noteworthy here: First, antisemitism really is rising around the world. I know some people falsely claim that any criticism of the current Israeli government is antisemitism, but you can brush off that canard and still recognize that antisemitism is real.
I’ll repeat what I’ve often said before: You can think whatever you want about Netanyahu or Hamas, but that’s no excuse to bring the war here. American Jews and American Muslims or Arabs are not the problem, and violence against them will not solve anything or prove anything. Ditto for Australians.
Second: Pro-gun people have been crowing about how Australia’s more rigorous gun restrictions didn’t stop this mass shooting. But they’re not thinking this through. The shooters used a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun, rather than semi-automatic weapons, because that’s what they could get their hands on in Australia. Because of that restriction, they only got off 83 shots in something like ten minutes. With American AR-15s, they could have unleashed hundreds of rounds and killed many more people. The 2017 Las Vegas shooter, by himself, fired over a thousand rounds and killed 60.
These kinds of restrictions make a difference, as do limits on the sizes of gun magazines. Shooters are most often stopped when they have to reload. The more bullets they have available without reloading, the longer it will take to stop them.
and Trump’s sad sick week
The Rob Reiner post, the strange plaques Trumpifying past presidents, the self-serving national address, and then the Trump-Kennedy Center. All in three days. The featured post covers these incidents, emphasizing how Trump’s attempts to aggrandize himself just make him smaller.
and Susan Wiles
For some reason nobody has been able to specify, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles gave a series of interviews to a Vanity Fair reporter, and high-ranking members of the administration posed for a Vanity Fair photographer.
We learned that Wiles thinks:
- Trump has an alcoholic’s personality.
- Vance’s conversion to Trumpism has been “sort of political”
- OMB head Russell Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot”.
- The destruction of the White House’s East Wing is just the beginning. “I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
- There is no evidence to support Trump’s claims about Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
- The component parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are popular. “That will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
- Blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn’t about drugs, it’s about pressuring the Maduro government in Venezuela.
- Trump’s attacks on the high seas don’t needs congressional approval, but an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would.
- Trump believes Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the provinces he has claimed so far.
- If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll be the Republican nominee.
- Trump hasn’t been asleep in cabinet meetings. He’s just resting his eyes.
- He insults female reporters because “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
- Trump won’t run for a third term.
- Trump doesn’t wake up thinking about revenge against enemies like James Comey, “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
Amazingly, Trump has not denounced her.
and pro-Trump media consolidation
Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often cited as a model for Trump’s authoritarian takeover. A key piece of Orbán’s strategy was to make sure the major media outlets wound up in friendly hands, creating a state media unofficially.
Trump has been doing the same thing, partly by acquisition, partly by coopting the oligarchs who already own media properties. And so:
- The richest man in the world (Elon Musk) is a Trump ally who owns X/Twitter.
- The US’s second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns The Washington Post, and blocked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
- The US’s third-richest man (Mark Zuckerberg) owns Meta, which controls Facebook.
- The fourth-richest (Larry Ellison) controls Skydance, which owns Paramount, which owns CBS. His hand-picked news baron is Bari Weiss. She just spiked a 60 Minutes episode exposing the Trump gulag in El Salvador. Ellison also has wound up controlling the US version of TikTok.
Now Ellison’s empire is bidding against Netflix for Warner/Discovery, which controls CNN, among other notable media properties. Trump is in a position to influence how this goes: He could hint that DoJ would sue to stop a Netflix acquisition as a violation of antitrust laws, but let the Paramount bid go through.
and you also might be interested in …
To no one’s surprise, Republicans in Congress still have no solution to the ObamaCare insurance premiums that are set to skyrocket. The House did pass a bill roughly along the lines I told you about in November: You can lower your premiums by buying the kind of junk insurance that the Affordable Care Act made illegal. You won’t be insured if anything really bad happens to you or your family, but you can tell yourself you have insurance. And even that won’t get through the Senate.
North Carolina’s legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. That’s how a state that has had Democratic governors since 2017 and that Trump carried by a mere 3% in 2024 has substantial and rock-solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature: 30-20 in the Senate and 71-49 in the House.
It’s a great frustration to NC Republicans that you can’t gerrymander a statewide office like the governorship. So they’ve done the next best thing: Taken away nearly all the power of the governor and moved it to the legislature.
In essence, they have disempowered their own voters: The voters can control which party gets the governorship, but control of the legislature is baked into the maps.
The Democratic Party is about to go through its usual pattern in the Texas Senate race:
- A firebrand progressive (Jasmine Crockett, who I love to watch on TV news shows) will excite the base and win the primary.
- The national party will decide she can’t win and will refuse to put any resources into the race.
- She’ll lose.
- The finger-pointing will start: Was the problem that she’s too liberal or that the national party sabotaged her?
I’m not taking a side here, I’m just pointing to the pattern. Until the Party goes all-in on one of these races, we won’t know whose intuition is right.
In his testimony to Congress, FCC Chair Brendan Carr (last seen demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel) denied that the FCC is an independent agency. Instead, he sees the FCC as an instrument of Trump’s political agenda.
Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.
and let’s close with something seasonal
Randy Rainbow’s new parody: It’s beginning to look a lot like f**k this.
The Weekly Sift 
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