A Big Week for Self-Dealing

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

SAM HERE—Spencer is tied up with work and I’m writing a quick edition with items of interest to the FW audience. I’m also delighted to tell you that tomorrow we’ll be publishing a dispatch from Belfast by a local author who is helping people affected by the anti-immigrant pogroms there. Keep an eye out for it.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER board: Pete Hegseth, doubtless embarrassed at having lost a brand-new regional war in the space of but a few months, has appointed a true nightmare blunt rotation to the Department of War’s Defense Policy Board, after clearing house of prior Pentagon advisory committees last year. The new group of advisors promises to make whatever Hegseth does next worse and dumber: Marc Andreessen, the billionaire racist and primary investor in Nazi hive Substack; Michael Anton, the Claremont Institute goblin whose screeds against Muslims and brown people more generally made him the first Trump administration’s house philosopher; and Blake Masters, the antisemitic crank that Peter Thiel tried to install in the Senate.

A less familiar but just as interesting name: Michael Pillsbury, a China hawk who chaired the board under Trump before the Biden administration got rid of him. If you read Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars you might remember that Pillsbury was a major proponent of materially supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan under Ronald Reagan. The rest are career military, Federalist Society members, or some combination of the two.

It’s easy to read this list and get worried about the effect these people and the hawkish or frankly crazy institutions behind them will have on defense policy, but the reverse is probably a more pressing concern. Hegseth is free to ignore the advice of this committee if he chooses to do so (or if the President, or whoever is actually in charge today, countermands it). [Spencer here. The Defense Policy Board is a useful barometer of a secretary's ideology and policy predilections, but it's only as influential as any given secretary wishes it to be. But it sure receives classified briefings.] Instead, the board appointments are better understood as votes of confidence in an elite selection of defense contractors, politicians, and think-tanks, all of which now have the ear of the Secretary of Defense and probably a corresponding bump to their hourly consultancy rates. Former federal judge Tom P. Feddo’s The Rubicon Advisors will doubtless see a boost to its “boutique national security advisory services to select clients.” Federalist Society, Club for Growth, and Claremont fellow Theo Wold will be better-positioned than ever to uncover the Deep State. [All Wold has to do now is look in the mirror – Spencer] 

This is the sort of problem one deals with whenever there’s a breach in security by bad actors. I used to write about cybersecurity for the Guardian. I remember one of my sources pointing out after the Office of Personnel Management was hacked in 2015 that while we were fairly certain nothing was removed from the OPM’s files, we had no idea whether anything had been added to them. The last decade has gotten most of us sadly used to watching the government parted out for scrap to the friends of whoever happens to be fielding requests for Donald Trump at the moment, but we ought to be watching for the equivalent of unauthorized fingerprints being added to our databases. Who has Top Secret clearance now? What will need to be done once the people who appointed them are removed from office? Because that day is, I promise you, coming.

DONALD TRUMP’S SUPREME Court has been hard at work depriving minorities of their rights. Last week the court ruled that the Trump administration could strip temporary protected status (TPS) from Haitian and Syrian refugees, the logical endpoint of a process that began with a paroxysm of gutter bigotry about pet-eating immigrants as part of Trump’s successful 2024 campaign for president and progressed to street violence by his army of masked thugs in Springfield, Ohio after he assumed office. [I would argue it began when Haiti won its freedom during its 1791-1803 revolution—Spencer] Now pig-ignorant racism is the law of the land. Thus human beings fleeing to the U.S. from Haiti, often because of the U.S., are to be subjected within these borders to the same persecution that we have exported to their country so often.

Also trans kids can’t play sports with their friends and, once again, money is speech, meaning, I guess, that you can inherit speech from your grandparents. [It means plutocracy gets treated with democratic legitimacy by an unreviewable institution of government, rather than being understood as an obstacle to democracy—Spencer]  The court barely even upheld birthright citizenship, as fundamental a part of the American constitution as any. It is an embarrassing time to share a species, let alone a race or a gender, with anyone in the SCOTUS majority. The one bright spot in Supreme Court news was NPR’s accidental posting of Nina Totenberg’s article about the court’s rightmost member, Samuel Alito, retiring; the copy, now removed, compared Alito to Roger Taney, who called Black people “an inferior order.” When Alito retires or otherwise ends his lifelong appointment I’m curious whether the comparison will remain.

IN OTHER SELF-DEALING news—and other board-related news—Donald Trump’s Board of Peace (lol) is trying to grant itself sweeping immunity protections, according to Cate Brown and Aram Roston in the Guardian. The board seems to be trying to immunize itself from arrest resulting from its behavior in Gaza, which, I have to say, doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence in its work so far. [Remember the murderous "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation"? That's what this move is heralding—Spencer] When I do a good job I don’t send the draft to my editor with a note saying “by the way you can’t garnish my wages if for some reason you don’t like this.” Brown and Roston don't include the document in their reporting but they do have details from it and a good rationale for why on earth anyone would draft something like this in the first place, namely to get insurance coverage for the planned tourism hub to be built atop the bones of the dead:

Several lawyers, including Omer-Man, pointed to the specific risks associated with section 7 of the draft resolution, entitled “Third Party Liability/Claims”, which lays out a system for the Board of Peace to consider and adjudicate any claims for “property loss or damage and for personal injury, illness or death” arising from its work in Gaza.

“They are basically saying there’s no external oversight, including applicable international law regarding occupation,” said Noura Erakat, an international law professor at Rutgers University. “It’s creating a legal system unto itself.”

Contractors have also pressed for clarity about the legal protections afforded for potential work in Gaza, where the Trump-backed peace board has solicited bids for rubble removal, security work and a vast reconstruction effort envisaged there. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has described transforming the coastal territory into a site of luxury resorts, hi-tech cities and regional business hubs.

FÉLIX ALCORTA-RODRIGUEZ is the twentieth person to die in ICE custody this year. ICE, hideously, listed the charges against which he will now never have the chance to defend himself in the agency announcement of his death. These include “10 counts of unauthorized disposal of a lead acid battery.” It ought to go without saying that failure to properly recycle your batteries shouldn’t carry the death penalty. May he rest in power and may his family get justice.