James Neal - will know what will happen when it does.
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jameswneal.bsky.social
James Neal - will know what will happen when it does.
@jameswneal.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.1K following 4.9K posts
Lifelong Dem. Worked at the state level for both sides, so I lived the difference. Proud son of a #journalist, later teacher. More #vinyl records than you - probably. Wife & I personally rebuilt this place from the studs out & in. #Photographer just b/c
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Reposted by James Neal - will know what will happen when it does.
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
How to make "monetized USA Accounts" and how to populate them with content is an incredibly popular global YouTube side hustle type of content. Look at this:
November 24, 2025 at 6:38 PM
jameswneal.bsky.social
Excerpts pt. 2
Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: The F.B.I. had to divest serious resources from investigations of violent crime, gun and drug trafficking and child exploitation. Agents were diverted from those cases because they had to be on the street doing immigration roundups. Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: It's unprecedented to shift resources away from national security to this degree. Virginia and D.C. have the most important offices for counterterrorism and espionage. We get cases from the Middle East, long and complex investigations of terrorist threats from abroad and also domestically. In the Eastern District, there were 12 to 14 lawyers in the national security unit and now there are four, with no deputy or chief. In D.C., the national security unit is down about 50 percent. I was recently on the floor where F.B.I. agents work on domestic terrorism and it was completely hollowed out. You have to have good, experienced, trained people doing this work on a daily basis. If you don't, because you demand they do immigration shifts, there is real danger to national security and public safety. Joseph Tirrell, director of the Departmental Ethics Office: I had done some work for Jack Smith, so I assumed that would bring some heat down on me. But in my gut, I also think they didn't want the ethics office calling them up and telling them what to do. As a federal employee, you're restricted from accepting gifts from anyone because of your position. I briefed Ms. Bondi about the ethics rules, and we talked about accepting gifts from employees in the department - for the most part, leaders can't accept gifts from their subordinates. We had about a 10-minute conversation about whether or not she could accept challenge coins from offices within the department. And that seemed to me an odd thing given everything else that we might have discussed. But that started to be a recurring theme with the A.G's office. They didn't want to return gifts, they didn't want to not accept gifts, whatever the source. We got a request about some cigars from Conor McGregor and a soccer ball from FIFA. And I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to convince the A.G's office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item or you can throw the item away. There's no other way to do this. (A Justice Department spokeswoman said that, after consulting with ethics officials, the soccer ball was accepted on behalf of the department and the cigars were destroyed.) And then I got a call from the general counsel at the F.B.I. about changing exceptions to the gift rules because his boss, Kash Patel, felt like he should be able to accept more expensive gifts. I reminded him that his client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.
November 25, 2025 at 1:50 PM
jameswneal.bsky.social
Excerpts pt. 1
Katie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: When Bondi's 14 emails started coming in, one was crazier than the next. It's hard to explain how shocking that was. In the Biden administration, there were all these checks in place to make sure we weren't acting on our political biases. It was so by the book. It was too slow, to be honest. Now that seemed farcical. Lawyer, Federal Programs Branch, which defends legal challenges against government agencies: Bondi's memo on zealous advocacy suggested we could be disciplined or fired for pushing back on legal or factual claims we believed were unsupported. That threw up red flags for me. It was just completely improper. Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: Some of us referred to them as "Pam Bondi's mixtape," both because they were so random and there were so many dropped all at once. One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president's priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. Lawyer, National Security Division: Bondi signaled the Foreign Agents Registration Act would be enforced only in very limited circumstances after the Justice Department had done a lot over the last decade to give it teeth. At its core, FARA is a transparency statute, to let the American public know when foreign actors engage in political activities or try to influence U.S. discourse. If you're concerned about foreign money and influence in politics, it's a bad time to go dark. The Justice Department asked a court to freeze a legal challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency's decision during the Biden administration to tighten one of îs most important air-quality standards, the limit on soot. The E.P.A. found in 2021 that the new standard would save thousands of lives and that the health benefits would outweigh the cost of compliance. The Trump administration put the litigation on hold in preparation for rolling back the regulation. Sarah Buckley, Environment and Natural Resources Division: We made blanket requests to courts to put cases on hold where we were defending E.P.A. rules. The soot case was a real gut punch to me. Soot pollution is a major public health problem. The rule we were defending would reduce the number of people getting sick and dying, from pollution-caused diseases, by a lot. We'd just had oral argument in December. I thought we were going to win. It felt like victory was being snatched away. Dena Robinson: One of my colleagues was pulled into working on the investigations. Every single time that this colleague pointed out factual or legal or ethical issues, the people running them just shrugged. For example, the administration was saying they wanted to go after Perkins Coie because of Trump's commitment to ending discriminatory D.E.I. policies. The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men. But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm - only 3 percent of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn't care. They'd already reached their conclusion. They continued instructing my colleague to just find the evidence for it. Our job wasn't to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative that the administration already had. That is not how the division worked. My colleague told me that the experience demoralized and eventually broke them. It ended up being the reason they left the Justice Department. Liz Oyer, pardon attorney: In February, I was assigned to a working group that the attorney general created to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes. I was asked to identify suitable recipients, so I looked for people who had committed minor low-level offenses in the very distant past and demonstrated exemplary conduct in the community for many years since their conviction. The pool was narrowed to nine people. And then I was asked to add Mel Gibson to the list. Mel Gibson has a history of domestic violence, and I'm well aware from my experience and training that it is very dangerous for a person with a domestic-violence history to possess a firearm. As attorney general, Bondi has the power to restore rights without my blessing. My recommendation was sought, I believe, to give a veneer of legitimacy to what was actually a political favor for a friend of the president. I said I couldn't recommend restoration. And then I waited for the other shoe to drop. I finally got a phone call from Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general. It was strongly suggested to me that Mel Gibson is someone who had a personal relationship with the president and that really should be all I needed to know. I felt sick. I literally did not sleep at all that night. I wrote back still not making the recommendation. At 2 o'clock that afternoon, I was in a meeting when I learned that I was fired. My deputy told me to grab my bag and literally pulled me out of the room by my elbow and told me in the hallway that she had gotten a call saying that there were security officers in my office waiting to walk me out of the building. I threw everything into a grocery bag and walked out of the office. I passed a lot of people I knew on the way out, and everybody was just looking on in shock.
November 25, 2025 at 1:50 PM