Big Pornstache John Durham Had One Job. He Failed Miserably.
It's cool, MAGA leaders know they can lie because their followers are too stupid to read it for themselves.
John Durham was hired by then-Attorney General and former Trump fellater Bill Barr to come up with an alternate drunk history to the Trump-Russia scandal, an imaginary Alice In Wonderland narrative where Hillary Clinton curiously colluded with Russia to steal the election from herself, and then framed Trump and Russia for the crime, in order to ruin the presidency she helped Russia give him.
He was supposed to indict people! He was supposed to find the people who created the real conspiracy! You know, after the Mueller investigation and the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee found that the Trump-Russia collusion thing was insanely real, and as the Department of Justice inspector general affirmed, the investigation was started properly and for the right reasons.
Durham was supposed to start with the opposite conclusion, then work backward and scare up some "evidence." He failed.
A while back, Matthew Gertz from Media Matters tweeted this handy list of the conspiracies Durham was supposed to find:
\u201cLike, here's the list of government officials Fox News hoped would be investigated/arrested/jailed under the "investigate the investigators" rubric. They got... a failed charge against a lawyer no one had ever heard of. https://t.co/lqeZMBEGmW\u201d— Matthew Gertz (@Matthew Gertz) 1654027841
Durham's report is out. His investigation has ended with a dribble, like a left-behind droplet of drying jizz from a person who died trying to cum one last time, and that dribble is his report.
Ohhhhh, he wails, the FBI's actions were "seriously deficient." He laments the "severe reputational harm" the FBI has suffered. He caterwauls like a wounded cow about the Steele Dossier throughout the 316-page report.
Nobody went to jail as a result of Durham's investigation. He indicted two low-level no-names nobody had ever heard of and both juries came back immediately and did the universal sign of "wank motion dot gif" at him. The other one was a guilty plea from a former FBI lawyer over slightly changing an email, which resulted in a slap on the wrist.
Here, enjoy Democratic Rep. James McGovern ripping Republican Rep. Andy Biggs a new asshole about what a waste of time the Durham investigation was, just yesterday. It's an efficient laundry list:
\u201cBiggs: Let\u2019s also talk about The Durham Report \nMcGovern: I don\u2019t see any indictments. A number of you said there would be multiple indictments. Did I miss something? Were there indictments?\u201d— Acyn (@Acyn) 1684193383
Biggs wanted to talk about the Durham report, because it had just come out. McGovern was like LOL fuck yeah, let's do it.
McGovern's list:
Trump campaign convictions and/or guilty pleas from the Mueller investigation and elsewhere: Campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, fundraiser, chief strategist, national security advisor, two foreign policy advisers, personal lawyer, accountant. He's charged with 34 felony counts (so far) and a jury just said he's a sexual abuser. Robert Mueller indicted 25 Russian nationals for the attack on the 2016 election.
Durham Report: No new indictments. Those two acquitted pissants. That other guy, what's his name?
Thing is, we knew Durham's investigation was a hopelessly corrupt piece of shit waste of America's fucking time.
We've known it for a long time.
PREVIOUSLY!
- BREAKING: The Absolutely FILTHY Investigation Into The Trump Russia Investigation Filthier Than We Ever Knew!
- Special Counsel Durham's Russia Report Will Not Be The LOCK HER UP Finale Of Wingnut Fantasy
- Pornstache Durham Got His Ass Handed To Him Again, And Sean Hannity Is FINE WITH IT TOTALLY FINE!
- DNC Lawyer Acquitted In Durham Investigation, Wingers Declare FLAWLESS VICTORY!
Did Durham Reveal Anything New And Groundbreaking And TOTAL EXONERATION OF TRUMP?
Nah.
Really, he didn't really cover any new ground that wasn't in the 2019 Justice Department inspector general report on the Trump/Russia ("Crossfire Hurricane") investigation, which was almost 200 pages longer, and which, if you bothered to read it, debunked every dementia hallucination Donald Trump ever had about the alleged witch hunt against him. It said there was no Deep State plot against Trump, the Russia investigation was opened for completely correct and non-politically-biased reasons, spying did not occur, Bill Barr, and aside from a few fuckups with Carter Page's FISA applications, everything was on the up-and-up.
LIKE SO: IG Report Takes 476 Pages To Destroy Every Conspiracy Theory In Trump's Stupid Leaking Brain
Recommendations? Durham has like one, and it is to make a new job at the FBI that oversees investigations that are politically sensitive. Okeydoke. "Constructive criticisms" weren't really part of what Durham was tasked with, though. Hard to blame him for Christmas-treeing that section of the report.
In response, FBI Director Chris Wray said the FBI has implemented a ton of changes that were recommended in the IG report. Thanks, though.
So What Did Johnny Pornstache Spend 316 Pages Bitching About Then?
Some of the biggest whines in the report are about the "disparate treatment" between how the FBI handled the Clinton and Trump campaigns. And no, not the actual disparate treatment, where the FBI announced Hillary Clinton was a felony emailer a week before the election while staying zip-lipped about the Trump investigation. A different "disparate treatment."
Starting around page 68, Durham details how his investigation learned the FBI handled information about alleged foreign interference targeted at the Clinton campaign, and sought to figure out if they looked at it the same way they looked at evidence of interference in the Trump campaign. It particularly complains that the FBI didn't give the Trump campaign defensive briefings the way it gave them to the Clinton campaign, when evidence of foreign interference started to show up.
For instance, that time when Trump campaign stooge George Papadopoulos drunk-barfed on an Australian diplomat that the Russians were about to fuck Hillary up with hacked emails — the event that kicked off the FBI's full investigation into the Trump campaign. (And the Russians did indeed start fucking Hillary up with hacked emails, just like Pap said they would!)
Durham appears to find it confusing that the FBI didn't defensively brief the Trump campaign. We find it confusing that Durham finds it confusing.
There was no reason to suspect Clinton’s campaign and associates were conspiring with an enemy state, whereas reasons to suspect that with Trump were showing up every day. One candidate was asking the enemy nation currently carrying out the attack on the election to attack the election more ("Russia if you're listening"). The other wasn't. One candidate was negotiating in secret with that same government to build a tacky skyscraper in their capital city. The other wasn't. And so on.
Yes it is a conundrum.
Of course, we learned earlier this year that just before the IG report came out, Durham and Bill Barr lobbied the inspector general to take out the part about how the opening of the investigation was appropriately predicated. When he told them to fuck off, they came up with their own plan to undermine the IG's report.
All of this has been hashed out several times, which is unsurprising, since Durham was literally hired to waste valuable years of his emptying hourglass of life fucking a dead chicken.
The inspector general report addressed the FBI's reluctance give the Trump campaign defensive briefings to let them know their campaign was crawling with Russian influencers. Bill Priestap, who was then the counterintel chief at the FBI, ultimately decided that "if someone on the campaign was engaged with the Russians, he/she would very likely change his/her tactics and/or otherwise seek to cover-up his/her activities, thereby preventing us from finding the truth."
Perhaps if John Durham had spent a little more time watching "Law & Order: SVU" reruns on the USA network and a little less time cultivating prayer gardens up inside Donald Trump's ass, he'd know that in the criminal justice system, we treat "suspects" differently from how we treat "victims."
There was no reasonable suspicion Hillary Clinton's campaign was in bed with the Russians, and there's no evidence of it now, despite what empty windsocks like Marsha Blackburn are saying on the news this morning. The Russians were in the process of attacking the 2016 election for the benefit of Donald Trump and to specifically hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign. It stands to reason that the FBI would treat the two differently.
It's funny, obviously, because Rudy Giuliani's trash friends in the FBI New York office actually did want to sell out the country to Russia for Trump's benefit and may have been doing more to undermine the FBI's investigation into Trump than we ever knew.
It's also funny because really? James Comey spent the last month of the 2016 election season blabbermouthing to anybody who would listen that there were new BUT HER EMAILS, but she got preferential treatment from the FBI?
Go fuck yourself, Mustache McFaceHair.
But, But, But! Maybe Hillary Clinton Was Colluding With Russia To Frame Russia For Colluding With Trump To Steal The Election From Herself And Make It Look Like Russia Was Stealing It From Her!
Speaking of fucking dead chickens.
Specifically Durham harped on something called the Clinton Plan, which is the thing former dumb fucking Trump hack acting DNI John Ratcliffe immediately declassified the second his dirty paws got access to our nation's most closely guarded intelligence, just before the 2020 election.
If you remember, it was unverified Russian chatter from 2016, of Russian intelligence saying that actually Hillary Clinton invented the Deep State Russia Witch Hoax against Trump in her Pizzagate basement, in order to distract from her Hotmail account.
In Ratcliffe's letter at the time, he allowed — because he had to — that the American intelligence community didn't know the veracity of it, but he declassified it all the same. Why? You know why.
It was a goddamn joke when the FBI intercepted it, it was a goddamn joke when Ratcliffe declassified it, and it's a goddamn joke that John Durham's trifling ass is forcing us to talk about it right now.
But sure, Jan.
If The Durham Report Is A Total Limp Dick, Just Lie About What's In It!
When the IG report came out, Barr and Trump and other right-wingers whined and whined and threw tantrums, because it didn't match up with the paint they'd been huffing about the REAL secrets that would be revealed. Even Durham released his own snitty-ass whiny ass titty baby statement telling the IG how to do his job in an investigation that had jackshit to do with him.
This time? The result isn't actually any better for them, because Durham didn't find shit and his longwinded investigation will be nothing more than a skidmark in the history books. But this time they have simply decided to lie, just like Bill Barr led them to do at the end of the Mueller investigation.
This time, they are all over the news and on Twitter claiming TOTAL EXONERATION! and that the report PROVES! that the Trump/Russia investigation was a conspiracy witch hunt started for political reasons, and that Trump was totally innocent, and Hillary stole the election from herself, and everything Fox News ever said was true.
\u201cThe Durham Report confirmed what we already knew: weaponized federal agencies manufactured a false conspiracy theory about Trump-Russia collusion. It reminds us of the need to clean house at these agencies, as they've never been held accountable for this egregious abuse of power.\u201d— Ron DeSantis (@Ron DeSantis) 1684192346
\u201cthis is as brazen a lie as anything Maria Bartiromo has said on air -- and that's really saying something\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1684244954
\u201cThe Durham Report is insanely damning of the FBI, the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and everyone involved in the Russia-Trump smear. Absolutely shocking stuff. https://t.co/qR0GEOU9x6\u201d— Ben Shapiro (@Ben Shapiro) 1684185484
They're doing this because they know one thing with 100 percent certainty, and it is that the illiterate rodents who follow them will never read the report for themselves, even when they provide the link. They are guffawing at each other about a report they have not read, and wouldn't understand if they tried. And when they provide screenshots where Durham literally writes that the conspiracy theory about Hillary inventing the Trump/Russia collusion narrative came from Russian intelligence, their MAGA piglets swallow it whole, because that's how well MAGA piglets are trained.
Here's an example of that genre:
\u201c\ud83d\udea8BREAKING: According to the Durham Report, the plan by Hillary Clinton to create a false story linking Donald Trump to Russia was briefed in August of 2016 by CIA Director John Brennan to President Obama, VP Biden, AG Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director Comey.\u201d— Greg Price (@Greg Price) 1684179816
That's where we are.
You can verify for yourself whether our read of this is correct, or you can just lap up whatever Republicans are pouring into your bowl.
In summary and in conclusion, we don't know what CNN chief Chris Licht is paying Jake Tapper to regurgitate this absolute toilet bowl full of shit lies here, but he goddamn knows better.
\u201cTo be clear, John Durham's report is not "devastating to the FBI" and does not to any degree "exonerate Donald Trump."\n\nWhat in the world are you talking about?\u201d— Craig Harrington (@Craig Harrington) 1684182529
The end.
[The crust John Durham found in his pornstache AKA his report]
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George Santos Can't Believe The Nerve Of You People
Absolutely Fabulist.
George Santos, the New York millionaire philanthropist and inventor whose rescue from Gilligan's Island led to a successful run for Congress, was charged on 13 counts in federal court yesterday because he is the victim of the biggest witch hunt ever, like even worse than the one that falsely accused Donald Trump of all the crap he actually did. The indictments against him may really get in the way of his plans to fly his rocket car into the Eighth Dimension, because while he's on bail, he's been ordered to restrict his movements to New York City, Long Island, and Washington DC unless he gets specific permission from pretrial services or a written note from Jeff Goldblum. We really don't understand the judicial system anymore.
Santos was charged by the Justice Department with seven counts of wire fraud and three counts of money laundering in a scheme where he told donors they were giving to his political campaign, but the money actually went straight to Santos, which is fraudy. He also caught two counts for making false statements to the House of Representatives, for lying on his financial disclosure statements. Finally, and hilariously, Santos was charged with "theft of public funds" for having collected unemployment payments during the pandemic, when he was also fully employed by one of the few real-life businesses he actually worked for.
At his arraignment in New York yesterday, Santos pleaded "not guilty" to everything and managed not to ask Judge Joanna Seybert if she's interested in buying a time share vacation home which is surprisingly affordable. He was released on a half-million dollar bond that was put up partly by his father and partly by two other parties who want to remain anonymous, according to Santos's lawyer, because they fear retaliation. Or perhaps embarrassment.
At a presser following the arraignment, Santos tried to shift to Trump Mode, claiming the indictment was a witch hunt and that it was simply unpossible that the DOJ could dredge up a bunch of criminal charges against him after just four months in office. As we'll get to in a moment, most of the really fraudy stuff is amply documented in Santos's own emails and financial records, so he really should take credit for helping the DOJ out — maybe he can claim to be a cooperating witness against himself.
Then Santos tried to whaddabout the Biden Crime Family, and everyone just booed and catcalled his piss-poor attempt to deflect.
\u201c"It's a witch hunt" -- George Santos\n\nSantos is then booed when he tries some Hunter Biden whataboutism\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1683745813
NBC News translated the rightwing media arglebargle about the "nine [Biden] family members receiving money from foreign destinations into their bank accounts," noting that it referred to Republicans' very nonspecific claims this week, which Evan summarized yesterday as containing "Actual accusations against Bidens: Still jack-fucking-shit."
In contrast, the federal criminal charges against Santos are very specific, complete with receipts. As a public service, the New York Times (gift link) walks us through the 20-page indictment so we can just read the parts highlighted in yellow and feel smart and well-informed. Let us summarize!
Wire Frauding and Monkey Laundering (Haven't You Always Wanted A Clean Monkey?)
The liar's share of the indictment involves an absolutely meatheaded scheme to defraud political donors by telling them they were giving money to a legitimate campaign account, when in fact the money went to "RedStone Strategies," an LLC set up by Santos and an as-yet unidentified political consultant. The money that went to RedStone never went anywhere near the campaign; instead, the indictment says, Santos "converted most of those funds to his own personal benefit" and used them for nice (or at least expensive) designer clothes and to pay off credit card debts, and for the occasional cash withdrawal.
And yeah, there are receipts. The indictment accuses Santos of directing the consultant to tell Santos supporters that their money would go to a 501 (c)(4) "social welfare organization" that would supposedly buy TV ads and do campaign stuff. But Santos never actually went to the bother of even setting up one of those entities, even though they're commonly used to funnel dark money into political operations.
Santos obligingly left quite a trail for prosecutors to follow, because he's just a two-bit grifter; that's all he'll ever be. In addition to the bank records, the indictment details emails to specific donors, including one that said the campaign needed to "raise another $700,000 dollars to reach our goal of $1.5 million to invest in [Santos’] race." Other emails to the same mark contributor claimed, falsely, that the contributions would go to "get our advertising up on TV" and "to purchase ads supporting George Santos." That contributor soon wired $25,000 to RedStone.
Another contributor was wooed with the false claim that there were no federal campaign limits on contributions to RedStone, because "we are a 501c4 Independent Expenditure committee under federal campaign finance law and do not coordinate directly with the Santos campaign," which 1) it wasn't; it was an LLC directly controlled by Santos, and 2) even if it were, the funds couldn't legally go to directly support the campaign. The second contributor also wired $25,000 to RedStone, and the indictment notes that the contributions were then transferred straight to accounts belonging to Santos, and thence were used for the nice things he wanted to get. And that's about as literal as wire fraud gets.
In investigations like this, which arise from reports of financial misconduct and campaign finance shenanigans, bank records are often among the first places prosecutors and F.B.I. agents look to provide a roadmap for potential charges.
In a separate Times column on the indictment, David Firestone writes that Santos is simply really, really bad at all of this, and pretty much an embarrassment to those who really know how to benefit from our terribly weak campaign finance laws:
The scheme Mr. Santos is charged with is so flagrant, so spectacularly dumb in both conception and execution, that Justice clearly decided it had a no-brainer of a case. If Mr. Santos had structured an improper political money stream the way the grown-ups do every day, he might have gotten away with it.
Damn These Lazy Takers On Unemployment! (Your Check, Sir)
The other crazy scheme, even if it only garners one of the 13 charges, is that nutty unemployment scheme, in which Santos applied for and received a year's worth of pandemic unemployment benefits from the state of New York while he was actually working — or at least employed — at Harbor City Capital in Florida, the firm that was shut down by the SEC as a Ponzi scheme, although Santos escaped charges in that debacle. Because he was innocent, surely! Santos is accused of lying in his weekly paperwork that said he was definitely jobless, every damn week between March 2020 through April 2021. We'll just go with the Daily Beast's summary of his chootzpah here:
He allegedly ended up earning a double salary, with an extra $24,744 in federal taxpayer funds and another $20,304 from New York.
Ironically, Santos has recently supported congressional bills that would make it easier for the feds to clamp down on these alleged crimes. In March, he co-sponsored a Republican bill that would incentivize states to more aggressively investigate COVID unemployment insurance fraud and double the statute of limitations for that crime, essentially doubling the time federal prosecutors have to charge people with the very thing for which Santos is accused.
And on top of all that, the indictment accuses Santos of covering up his actual income and assets in his required financial disclosure forms to Congress. In some cases, he under-reported what he was making, but on other forms, he appears to have just made up income and bank assets he never actually had, to the tune of millions of entirely imaginary dollars.
In conclusion, suck it George. You're not even a competent fraudster, the end.
[NYT (gift link) / Daily Beast / Roll Call / NYT]
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If We Were Trump, We'd Be Sh*tting Our Big Ugly Golf Pants Over Jack Smith's Investigation Right About Now
Donald Trump's last 24 hours seem pretty neat.
Donald Trump is in Ireland doing lazy ass shit probably, don't know, don't care, but he's been real unhappy with how things have been going with E. Jean Carroll's civil rape trial against him back in New York. So he got all cranky with reporters on his golf course over there yesterday and started blabbering for four solid minutes about how "I’m going to go back [to New York] and I’m going to confront this woman. This woman is a disgrace." You betcha. He said he's cutting his trip short. He doesn't want to. He has to.
So pissy:
Trump said he was the victim of “false accusations against a rich guy. Or in my case against a famous, rich and political person that’s leading the polls by 40 points.”
Okeydoke, false accusations against a rich guy, or in his case a famous rich political person that's leading the polls by 40 points. Uh huh. Cool.
After striking his shot, Trump claimed it had travelled about 280 yards. “Biden can’t hit it 80 down the middle,” he said.
OK. Is Trump actually coming to America to appear at the trial?
“No,” [Trump lawyer Joe] Tacopina responded when asked if Trump would appear in person.
Figured.
(Yesterday, the judge took the basically unprecedented step of giving Tacopina and Trump a little time to MAKE EXTRA CERTAIN they're on the same page regarding whether Trump will testify. Mind you, Carroll's lawyers have rested and Trump's lawyers were just about to. So when he bitches about how UNFAIR BIASSSS this judge is against him, keep that in mind.)
But maybe Trump's gonna have to make some empty threats to come confront Special Counsel Jack Smith, because the New York Times broke a bunch of news about all Smith's criminal investigations into Trump and his pals last night.
Maggie Haberman and about 8,000 other reporters are bylined, so you know it's full of words and news.
First thing!
In the classified docs investigation into why Trump stole state secrets and hid them under Eric's spare floaties next to the pool at Mar-a-Lago, and why he obstructed efforts by the feds to get them back, Haberman and Co. report that they have a new confidential cooperating witness, somebody who has "worked for him at Mar-a-Lago," which seems like interesting phrasing from the reporters. Just last month we were learning that there's a major focus on whether Trump personally touched documents himself in an effort to pull things back and hide them after the feds demanded them in May 2022.
We've talked about Walt Nauta, Trump's very loyal valet, who has done some testifying on this subject. Well, regarding Walt, who was apparently a real pain in the ass with investigators:
[P]rosecutors appear to be trying to fill in some gaps in their knowledge about the movement of the boxes, created in part by their handling of another potentially key witness, Mr. Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta. Prosecutors believe Mr. Nauta has failed to provide them with a full and accurate account of his role in any movement of boxes containing the classified documents.
What? A Trump loyalist being less than forthcoming, allegedly? We might need a minute to process.
Second thing!
Buncha new people being subpoenaed in that investigation. "At least four more Mar-a-Lago employees," says the Times, using different phrasing from how they talked about the secret cooperating witness. According to their sources, that brings the count of Mar-a-Lago employees subpoenaed to pretty much ALL OF THEM KATIE. Also, a subpoena for "another person who had visibility into Mr. Trump’s thinking when he first returned material to the National Archives." And some subpoenas for the Trump Organization for more surveillance tape. And Matthew Calamari, his head of security at the company, and Calamari's son Little Matthew Calamari, who also does security stuff there.
So many subpoenas!
Also:
But hoping to understand why some of the footage from the storage camera appears to be missing or unavailable — and whether that was a technological issue or something else — the prosecutors subpoenaed the software company that handles all of the surveillance footage for the Trump Organization, including at Mar-a-Lago.
Oh dang. Funny how in these days of Internet Dot Com nothing really is ever all the way deleted. We imagine sometimes Boomers get to learn that the hard way. Womp womp.
Third thing!
Still talking about new subpoenas, but UH OH SKETTI OH, pretty sure this is a whole new wang to this investigation that we didn't know about before:
One of the previously unreported subpoenas to the Trump Organization sought records pertaining to Mr. Trump’s dealings with a Saudi-backed professional golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of Mr. Trump’s golf resorts.
It is unclear what bearing Mr. Trump’s relationship with LIV Golf has on the broader investigation, but it suggests that the prosecutors are examining certain elements of Mr. Trump’s family business.
Oh shit! It's the Saudi stuff! Oh shit!
Well, since we have no idea how exactly that pertains to the investigation, we'll just have to wait and see.
But oh shit!
Maybe Trump is just one of those guys where you're investigating one set of crimes and then you don't even mean to but you find some other crimes and it's like huh what's that?
Shut up, there's no "maybe" about it, that's exactly how it is.
Anyway, Haberman and pals have more good backgrounder, if you need to refresh, so read it all.
Also remember that Jack Smith is also investigating Trump's role in January 6 and his months-long campaign to overturn the election he lost and overthrow the government.
Oh shit!
Have a fun day and week and month and rest of life, Donald Trump! Things are just really looking up for you.
[Politico / New York Daily News / New York Times]
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Pentagon Leaker Idjit Was Caught Before He Could Do Any Mass Shootings
He seems nice.
Federal prosecutors argued at a hearing yesterday that Massachusetts Air National Guard guy Jack Teixeira needs to stay in jail before his trial for allegedly leaking classified Pentagon documents. The 21-year-old walking security risk should be detained until trial because he gave up a ton of military secrets for the sake of impressing his gamer dork friends on Discord, the prosecutors said. Teixeira also regularly talked about his desire to equip a minivan or SUV as an "assassination van" and to "kill a [expletive] ton of people," for the lulz we guess. The DOJ detention memo did not specify whether that was a shit ton of people or a fuck ton of people, nor whether, if it were the latter, he meant a metric or standard fuck ton.
Magistrate Judge David Hennessy didn't make an immediate decision yesterday on whether Teixeira will be kept in jail before trial, or to grant his attorneys' request that he be allowed to stay under supervision at his father's home, because he's a good boy who would definitely stay off the internet and there's no chance he'd flee.
The feds' court filing detailed Teixeira's murderous fantasies, as well as the trove of weapons he'd collected, and argued that he's too much of a flight risk to let out of jail, particularly since he might still have classified information that hasn't yet made it to public view. That information, the government argued, could be of "tremendous value to hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States."
We can see that the government wouldn't want to risk that, even if it would settle online arguments about whether Thor could beat the Russian military in Ukraine alone, or if he'd need help from Doctor Strange or Captain America. (Iron Man or Captain Marvel would be too over-powered to make the argument worth even having.)
The feds show that Teixeira has a long history of talking about killing and shit, going back to an incident in high school (in March 2018, which was like last Tuesday for most of us) that led to his suspension after
a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats. In the pretrial services interview, the Defendant attributed those remarks to a reference to a video game.
Call us skeptical, since we're pretty sure that "guns at the school and racial threats" aren't part of any video games, unless maybe Teixeira had downloaded the special School Shooter Expansion Pack. That incident also kept Teixeira from being approved for a firearms ID card, since 1) local police knew about it and 2) Massachusetts actually has sane firearms laws.
But the boy really wanted guns, and was eventually able to buy a small arsenal after getting his application approved, in part because he "cited his position of trust in the United States government as a reason he could be trusted to possess a firearm." Who says government lawyers don't have a sense of irony?
When Teixeira was arrested, FBI agents found a gun locker in his bedroom containing "multiple weapons, including handguns, bolt-action rifles, shotguns, an AK-style high-capacity weapon, and a gas mask." Elsewhere in his room, agents found ammunition, "tactical pouches," and what seems to be a silencer, which would be illegal unless he had a license.
And then there's the jolly social media posts where he talked up all the murder he wanted to do:
The Defendant’s statements included the following:
• In November 2022, the Defendant stated that if he had his way, he would “kill a [expletive] ton of people” because it would be “culling the weak minded.”
• In February 2023, the Defendant told a user that he was tempted to make a specific type of minivan into an “assassination van.”
• Also in February 2023, the Defendant sought advice from another user about what type of rifle would be easy to operate from the back of an SUV. He describes how he would conduct the shooting in a “crowded urban or suburban environment.”
• In March 2023, the Defendant described SUVs and crossovers as “mobile gun trucks” and “[o]ff-road and good assassination vehicles.”
OK but who among us hasn't occasionally told all our online buds that we need to cull the weak by going full DC sniper? Oh, all of us?
The filing also noted that Teixeira had taken some very half-assed steps to try to cover his tracks, since tampering with witnesses and destroying evidence are among the criteria that can be used to order detention until trial. He deleted the Discord server where he had shared the classified documents, told friends to "delete all messages" and "If anyone comes looking, don’t tell them shit," and gotten a new phone number and email address.
Teixeira also smashed up a tablet, a laptop, and his Xbox — although he may not be a super spy, since the FBI found the devices in a dumpster at his parents' house, where he lived.
At yesterday's hearing, the AP reports, Judge Hennessey
expressed skepticism of defense arguments that the government hasn’t alleged Teixeira intended leaked information to be widely disseminated.
“Somebody under the age of 30 has no idea that when they put something on the internet that it could end up anywhere in this world?” the judge asked. “Seriously?”
We can only assume that Teixeira's defense in the case will be that he's simply too fucking stupid to have been a threat to national security.
[AP / Pretrial Detention Memo / Vox]
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