Corpofascism

Justice & the Courts

What happens to a legal system when the working assumption that the government tells the truth to a judge stops holding.

The presumption of regularity

This is the most structurally significant item in this log, because it concerns a mechanism rather than an episode. The presumption of regularity is the working assumption that when the government tells a court something — a prosecutor, an IRS auditor, an FBI agent — it did its job by the rules and in good faith. It is not a courtesy; it is load-bearing. It is the reason courts can process government filings at all without independently verifying each one. ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases and found more than forty in which federal judges explicitly questioned it.

What makes this usable rather than partisan is that the judges are not drawn from one side. Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee in Rhode Island, quashed DOJ subpoenas seeking the medical records of transgender children, finding the department had withheld information, misrepresented facts, claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to reach records in another state, and falsely asserted the hospital had not communicated with it. She referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for discipline, writing: “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.” Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, in the Abrego Garcia deportation: “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a Biden appointee in New Jersey: “This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge.”

The specifics behind the erosion are mundane and cumulative rather than dramatic: filings generated by artificial intelligence citing case law that does not exist; briefs ignoring facts; declarations with impossible dates. In one case the government submitted documentation that a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009 — the judge noted he would have been four years old at the time, citing the government’s persistent “sloppiness.” Separately, a Miami judge found the President’s own suit against the IRS an improper “exercise in self-enrichment,” referred his lawyer to the Florida Bar, and forwarded the ruling to New York disciplinary officials already holding an ethics complaint against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Why this belongs in the book’s institutional-integrity framework rather than only its DOJ chapter. The working notes for that framework define an intact accountability mechanism by four properties: competent, adversarial by design, structurally independent, and consequential. The presumption of regularity is the trust that makes the fourth property affordable — courts extend it precisely because verifying every government assertion independently would be impossible at scale. Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge now at the Berkeley Judicial Institute, described what replaces it: “It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one.” The measurable side effect, from NRDC chief counsel Mitch Bernard: his organization hired ten litigating attorneys last year, eight of them out of DOJ.

DOJ response, recorded in full: spokesperson Kiersten Pels said department attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law,” and that “the Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys.” On Judge Faruqui specifically, Pels said he “was wrong on the law,” noted his order was overruled on appeal to the chief judge, and said he “has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him.” The department called the Blanche ethics complaint “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” The White House did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment; none of the judges quoted granted interviews. Source: J. David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala, and Carla Astudillo, ProPublica (Jul. 28, 2026). Just Security maintains a running tracker of these cases.

Indicted, then undone by the government’s own filing

A concrete instance of the presumption-of-regularity problem, small enough to hold in full. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with felony destruction of government property, alleging he had “forcefully and violently” torn up the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. She said the case was about “accountability,” and Hearn faced up to ten years.

Hearn was not the only person charged. Three others were swept into the same theory; at least two of them also had their charges dropped once the same records surfaced. President Trump had insisted publicly, for weeks, that vandals were solely responsible for the pool’s peeling lining, algae blooms, and green water. The dismissal is a direct, government-filed contradiction of that claim, not merely a defense argument that prevailed.

Recorded in fairness. Prosecutors say the exculpatory Interior Department records were not in hand at the time of indictment and were provided afterward; the filing frames the dismissal as a good-faith response to new evidence rather than a concession of bad faith at the outset. Hearn’s attorneys — Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin — dispute that framing directly: “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined further comment. Final dismissal rests with the presiding judge. Sources: CNN, CBS News, Axios, NBC News, The Hill (Jul. 31–Aug. 1, 2026).

Update: the origin of the botched work. RepresentUs's own corruption tracker, corroborated by the New York Times, supplies what this entry's original sourcing could not: why the renovation was hasty and botched in the first place. The contract to clean the Reflecting Pool was awarded without competitive bidding to a firm tied to a long-time Trump supporter. The damage the government's own filing later called "hasty and botched" — the damage a private citizen was indicted for, then un-indicted for — followed directly from a no-bid contract awarded to a political ally. This does not change the dismissal's own facts; it supplies the fact the earlier entry was missing, which is why the renovation went wrong to begin with.

A state prosecutor, denied the file on the ranch in his own state

New Mexico reopened its own criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes at Zorro Ranch, his former Santa Fe County property, in February 2026. What has followed is a case study in the shape federal non-cooperation actually takes: not a flat refusal, but a sequence of deadlines, partial answers, and legal justifications that leaves the state no closer to the file six months later.

New Mexico’s own DOJ called the legal justification unpersuasive on its own terms: federal prosecutors routinely seek to modify protective orders precisely so material can be shared with state law enforcement for active investigations — “that’s what real cooperation means,” in the words of a state DOJ spokesperson. Torrez gave the federal department a hard deadline of July 31, 2026, stating that after that date “the NMDOJ will treat this request as denied and will pursue all available legal remedies.” The state legislature is running a parallel investigation, and in June subpoenaed U.S. Attorneys’ offices in three states plus the U.S. Virgin Islands for records on whether they investigated Epstein and declined to charge him.

Two facts sharpen why New Mexico is pressing this specifically. Zorro Ranch is named thousands of times across the released Epstein files, including photographs described as showing men and young girls who stayed there, and survivors have told state representatives that abuse at the property never reached state or federal authorities at all. Yet unlike Epstein’s properties in Palm Beach, New York, and the Caribbean, no federal search of Zorro Ranch has ever been confirmed to have taken place. In February 2026 the New Mexico House voted unanimously to create a Truth Commission to investigate both the ranch and potential official complicity in concealing what happened there, after a tipster broke into the property and turned over evidence directly to state lawmakers.

Recorded for accuracy. DOJ’s legal position — that court orders and victim-privacy law constrain what it can release even to a state investigator — is a genuine, non-frivolous constraint on federal prosecutors generally, not unique to this case. New Mexico’s own DOJ disputes that it forecloses the specific narrower sharing being requested, and that dispute is the actual substance of the standoff. A bill New Mexico's delegation calls the Epstein Files Transparency Act II would add criminal penalties for DOJ or FBI officials who knowingly conceal, falsify, or withhold files, and would bar use of deliberative-process privilege to justify withholding; it has not passed. Sources: Axios (Jul. 15, 2026); Al Jazeera/Reuters (Jul. 15, 2026); JURIST (Jul. 11, 2026); Washington Post (Jul. 15, 2026); CBS News (Jun. 19, 2026); New Mexico DOJ press materials; Raw Story, reporting the Guardian's Aug. 1, 2026 update on the passed deadline.

A felony, reduced, then dropped, thirteen months later

David Huerta, president of SEIU California, was arrested June 6, 2025, sitting in front of a vehicle gate at an ICE staging area during a raid on a downtown Los Angeles garment warehouse where more than forty workers were detained. He was charged with a felony: conspiracy to impede a federal officer, carrying up to six years in prison.

The federal affidavit's own account of what Huerta actually did is narrow: he sat in front of a gate, told other protesters to stop vehicles, and pushed back when an officer tried to physically move him. Whether that conduct supported a felony conspiracy charge carrying six years, a misdemeanor, or no charge at all took the legal system thirteen months to resolve — well past the point where the initial felony charge had already done its work of dominating a news cycle and chilling protest around a specific enforcement operation.

Recorded for accuracy. Physically obstructing a law enforcement vehicle, even peacefully, is not automatically protected First Amendment activity, and the government's initial charge was not facially frivolous on the sworn affidavit alone; the dismissal does not establish that no case existed, only that prosecutors ultimately declined to pursue it after a year. Source: LA Magazine (dismissal, read directly); CBS News, Fox News, and Democracy Now! on the original arrest and charges (Jun. 2025).

Seven months frozen, and the inmates noticed

The EEOC has ordered an indefinite, unexplained suspension of every federal-sector class discrimination complaint pending before its administrative judges — not one case, an entire category. A lawsuit filed to challenge it supplies the human cost in specific terms.

The same attorneys represent workers in at least five other stalled class complaints, including cases against the FBI and the Department of Defense; the total number of complaints the EEOC has paused is not publicly known. Workers can legally opt out of the administrative process and sue in federal court instead — but doing so means abandoning years of work and rebuilding the case from scratch, including re-establishing class status, a process that can itself take years. The lawsuit's own filing states that the EEOC has offered “no reasoned explanation for a blanket policy that halts an entire category of discrimination cases.”

Recorded for accuracy. Agencies do sometimes pause proceedings for genuine administrative reasons — backlog, leadership transition, policy review — and a suspension alone is not proof of bad faith; what makes this case notable is the EEOC's own reported failure to state any such reason in the filing at issue, and the specific, ongoing harm the plaintiffs describe accumulating during the freeze. No court has yet ruled on the lawsuit. Source: Associated Press (Jul. 28, 2026), read via the Mississippi Free Press and corroborated by identical wire pickup at ABC News, KRMG, and multiple other outlets.

The same law, called overreach for one side and deployed against the other

Paul Vaughn, a Tennessee anti-abortion activist and father of eleven, was convicted in 2024 under the Biden DOJ of felony conspiracy and a FACE Act violation for a 2021 clinic blockade, arrested by the FBI at his home before dawn. He was pardoned by President Trump in January 2025 while his appeal was pending. In late July 2026, the Trump DOJ settled his remaining claims against the government for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, acknowledging federal overreach in the original prosecution.

DOJ's own settlement policy for cases like Vaughn's states such payouts generally require “extraordinary circumstances” — death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage — a threshold Vaughn's case, involving a peaceful protest with no violence alleged, would not obviously seem to meet on its face, which is part of what makes the settlement notable rather than routine.

Recorded for accuracy, and this one requires real care. The Minnesota defendants have not been convicted of anything, and their case may yet be dismissed or may involve conduct genuinely distinguishable from Vaughn's; this entry does not assert the two cases are legally equivalent, only that the same statute is being treated very differently by the same administration in the same season. Thomas More Society, representing Vaughn, frames the settlement as vindication against political prosecution generally; a fuller reading of the underlying trial record — including video evidence and witness testimony DOJ presented at the original trial — is warranted before treating either side's framing as the complete account. Sources: OSV News and the Washington Examiner (both Jul. 2026), read directly; Thomas More Society's own case materials, treated as an interested party's account rather than independent reporting.

From a plea deal to a decade of expansion

Where the New Mexico entry above documents the fight over one property's records, this report documents what the underlying 2008 decision actually purchased: not an end to Epstein's trafficking, but roughly a decade of runway to expand it internationally, using bank records the Committee obtained by subpoena.

The Committee has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase for the financial records underlying this expansion, and separately subpoenaed former officials including both Clintons and former FBI Directors Comey and Mueller for depositions — while Acosta himself was initially left off the subpoena list and later agreed to appear voluntarily rather than under compulsion. Attorney General Bondi has since been subpoenaed to testify specifically about DOJ's compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the same statute at issue in the New Mexico standoff documented above.

Recorded for accuracy. This is an interim staff report; the Committee states explicitly it will continue publishing findings in phases, and characterizes the current release as “just the beginning.” The report notes it withheld citations to certain unredacted DOJ-released documents containing survivors' personal information, out of caution for their privacy, which this entry follows in turn. Source: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Democratic Staff, “The Price of Non-Prosecution: The Evolution of Epstein's Trafficking Network, from Palm Beach to Paris and Beyond” (May 12, 2026), read directly; Axios and NBC News on the subpoena list and the 2020 DOJ OPR findings on Acosta.

The rule was broken first. Then the rule was rewritten to match.

Ghislaine Maxwell, serving twenty years for child sex trafficking, was transferred in August 2025 from a low-security Florida prison to a minimum-security camp in Texas — a placement Bureau of Prisons policy does not permit for someone carrying her conviction's mandatory “public safety factor,” which requires at least low-security housing. She is reportedly the only person in BOP history known to have received an exemption from that specific rule.

On May 6, 2026, BOP Director William Marshall — a Trump appointee who reports to Blanche — signed a formal rule change rewriting the manual governing where federal prisoners are housed. The new language states the Attorney General may personally “designate or redesignate the place of a prisoner's imprisonment” at will, superseding BOP's own classification process, and separately creates a formal channel for BOP to facilitate direct communication between prisoners and the Attorney General's office. Rep. Jamie Raskin's reading of the timing: the rule is both backward- and forward-looking — retroactively normalizing the exact contact and placement decision already made in Maxwell's case, while authorizing any future attorney general to do the same with any other prisoner. Raskin, joined by Reps. Ross and Khanna, wrote to BOP calling the change “a significant departure” from its longstanding framework: “Maxwell is just a small window into the kind of total power the president wants to exercise over the penal system.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has requested the underlying DOJ documents on Maxwell's transfer since August 2025. As of his most recent renewed demand, ten months later, DOJ had not responded to a single letter, forcing Whitehouse and colleagues to file Freedom of Information Act requests — “a step,” he wrote, “to which no member of Congress should have to resort.” Maxwell is separately seeking a commutation from Trump, according to a document House Democrats obtained; the Supreme Court declined her appeal in October 2025, leaving a pardon or commutation as her remaining path to relief, which Trump has not ruled out.

Recorded for accuracy. Threats against an inmate's safety are a real and legitimate basis for a security transfer under BOP policy generally, and Blanche's stated justification cannot be dismissed as facially impossible; what makes this case notable is that BOP's own rules ordinarily require such a threat-based transfer to move a prisoner to a different facility at the same security level, not down two tiers to a minimum-security camp, and no public accounting has explained that specific discrepancy. DOJ has not, as of this entry, provided the documentation Whitehouse has requested, so this account rests on public reporting and Blanche's own on-record statements rather than the underlying case file. Sources: The Bulwark (Jul. 2026), read directly; Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's office (Jun. 25, 2026), including the text of his letter to Blanche and BOP; Above the Law; KTAL/Nexstar; a former DOJ Pardon Attorney's own account, published via Substack, read as an informed but interested source rather than neutral reporting.

Seashells, and a stop at their son's grave

On May 15, 2025, James Comey posted a photo of seashells on a North Carolina beach arranged to spell “86 47.” Trump and his advisers characterized it as a death threat. What followed produced two dismissed prosecutions, internal Secret Service objections overridden from above, and, separately, the firing of Comey's own daughter from her career post as a federal prosecutor.

This is not the administration's first prosecution of Comey to collapse. An earlier indictment, accusing him of lying to Congress, was dismissed in November 2025 after a federal judge found the prosecutor who obtained it — Lindsey Halligan, Trump's own former personal lawyer, installed as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — had been unlawfully appointed. The same ruling dismissed New York Attorney General Letitia James's case, prosecuted by the same illegally appointed official.

A new indictment followed from a North Carolina grand jury. Comey's defense now alleges the government's own investigators omitted exculpatory evidence to secure it: agents interviewed two retired FBI organized-crime agents who said, as far as they recalled, the term “86” was not typically used to mean killing someone — testimony Comey's attorneys say was left out of what prosecutors presented to the grand jury. His motion seeks the grand jury's own audio recordings, citing “irregularities,” and argues the case is “not based on a good-faith application of the law to the facts” but instead “a yearslong campaign by the President to use the criminal process to punish Mr. Comey.” DOJ's response to MS NOW: “A North Carolina grand jury indicted Comey, and he'll have his day in court like any other defendant.”

Separately, Maurene Comey — James Comey's daughter, a career federal prosecutor known for major sex-trafficking prosecutions — was fired without explanation in July 2025, in the same wave of dismissals that raised concerns about civil-service protections being bypassed for political reasons. She sued for reinstatement, alleging the firing was retaliation tied to her father. DOJ moved to dismiss her suit on procedural grounds — that she should have first taken her claim to the Merit Systems Protection Board — rather than contesting the substance of why she was fired.

Recorded for accuracy. Whether Comey's original post constituted a genuine threat, however implausible, was a good-faith question for investigators to at least examine; this entry does not assert the initial inquiry was baseless on its face, only that the internal Secret Service record shows real disagreement within the agency about whether it justified warrantless surveillance. DOJ has not, in the sources available, responded specifically to the claim that exculpatory witness statements were omitted from the grand jury presentation; that allegation currently rests on the defense's own filing and has not been independently confirmed by a neutral party. Maurene Comey's firing occurred amid a broader wave of federal prosecutor dismissals, and DOJ's procedural dismissal motion is a genuine legal argument about administrative exhaustion requirements, not necessarily evidence it lacks a substantive defense of the firing. Sources: MS NOW (Jul. 29, 2026), Carol Leonnig, Lisa Rubin, and Fallon Gallagher, on the internal Secret Service records; CNN and the Boston Globe/AP (Jul. 27–29, 2026), on the dismissal motions and alleged grand jury irregularities; Techno Fog/The Reactionary (Nov. 24, 2025), on the Halligan dismissal ruling; PBS NewsHour and Al Jazeera, on Maurene Comey's lawsuit and DOJ's dismissal motion.

“The single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day”

On January 30, 2026, DOJ released roughly three million pages of Epstein-related records under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, drawn from six million pages the department itself identified as potentially responsive. What followed was not the closure survivors had been promised.

The redaction failures ran in both directions at once. Close to forty nude photographs of women, some possibly underage at the time, were released unredacted — while, in the same batch, an entirely innocuous photograph of Trump speaking was redacted. Separate reporting found more than 40,000 files had been withheld or removed from DOJ's own release site without explanation, and that FBI memos documenting a 2019 interview were released only after reports surfaced that the department had withheld them. This entry does not detail the interview's specific content; the underlying allegation involves a minor and has not been independently adjudicated, and is recorded here only as an example of what DOJ's own selective disclosure has obscured, not as an established fact.

Congressional Democrats, including Rep. Emilia Sykes, have formally asked the DOJ Inspector General to investigate the department's failure to meet the law's own deadline by more than a month. A separate letter from Reps. Garcia and others to Oversight Chairman Comer traces the same credibility pattern already documented elsewhere on this page: Attorney General Bondi's February claim that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” followed by 341 mostly-already-public pages; her May claim of “tens of thousands of videos,” contradicted by FBI Director Kash Patel a month later.

Recorded for accuracy. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche stated publicly that protecting survivors was a departmental priority during the release, and processing six million pages under a hard legal deadline is a genuinely difficult undertaking where some errors could occur even in good faith; this entry does not resolve whether the specific failures documented above were negligent or, as some survivors believe, deliberate — it records that survivors' own attorneys and multiple named individuals have stated the latter belief on the record. Sources: The New Republic (Feb. 2, 2026); NBC News (Feb. 2, 2026); Ms. Magazine (Feb. 6, 2026); MS NOW (Jan. 31 and Mar. 6, 2026); Axios (Dec. 22, 2025); House Oversight Committee Democratic staff correspondence (Jan. 8 and Feb. 6, 2026), read directly.

Three convictions out of twenty-seven felony charges, and one man who never made it to the interview’s aftermath

In the weeks after Trump ordered 800 National Guard troops into Washington in August 2025, federal prosecutors filed 27 felony cases charging assault on a federal officer — a charge carrying years in prison. A year-later Bloomberg Law review found only three resulted in felony convictions, all through plea deals. Eighteen of the 27 were dismissed outright. Just one went to trial. After that first wave, prosecutors filed no new charges of this kind for nearly five months.

Sean Charles Dunn, who threw a sandwich at a federal officer and became a symbol of resistance to the surge, was acquitted at trial — a juror called the case a “bunch of baloney” — but was fired from his Justice Department job of eleven years, lost his federal pension, and was denied unemployment benefits before leaving the DC area entirely. His own account: “They were less concerned with getting an actual conviction. They wanted to disrupt a person's life… And if they get an actual conviction, then they just see that as an added bonus.” Kristal Rios Esquivel, with a documented history of PTSD since age 15, was held a week in DC jail after a panic episode at the National Zoo; her public defender's emergency court filing read simply, “HELP!!!”

Jahari Garrett was Tased in the head during a chase, had as many as ten seizures in jail, and was released on time served after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. Bloomberg Law interviewed him in April, walking with a cane, still in pain. Five days later, his family reported him missing. A month after that, his remains were found in an alley behind a Washington restaurant. Cause and manner of death remain pending, with no signs of trauma found. His mother, Tameelah Garrett: “He was scared. He was so scared… He was getting better. He was calming down. But he was in so much pain.”

Recorded for accuracy. The US Attorney's office declined to comment for the underlying Bloomberg Law report and has not offered its own account of why the felony conviction rate was so low; this entry does not know, and does not speculate on, the cause or manner of Jahari Garrett's death, which DC's medical examiner had not yet determined as of this reporting, and does not assert his death was connected to his arrest beyond the documented sequence of events. Officers involved in these arrests have not, in the sources reviewed, offered individual accounts contesting the specific defendants' descriptions of what happened; several incidents rest on defendants' own recollection where no other account was available. Separately, three more serious violent incidents against federal officers occurred in the months after the initial wave — including a shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and a shooting during Vice President Vance's motorcade — indicating the surge's presence has not prevented escalating violence against the officers themselves. Source: Bloomberg Law (Aug. 3, 2026), Keith L. Alexander, read directly in full.