Trump’s Super Pardon
Bloomberg – no paywall – Trump Extends Pardons to Companies, Echoing a 17th Century King “…Unlike in previous administrations, commutations as well as pardons have cleared unpaid penalties tied to the convictions…Since taking office for the second time, Trump has become the first modern US president to issue pardons for companies, from a Middle America auto supplier to a crypto platform and a media startup.
The clemency grants have wiped out almost $200 million in financial penalties, some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing. The pardons underscore Trump’s broader willingness to blow past the boundaries of executive authority in a second term that has been far less constrained by political and legal norms. He has granted clemency to almost 1,700 people in the past 18 months, far outpacing his predecessors, often benefiting political supporters or people who claim to be victims of legal weaponization…”
Defiance.org: In Donald Trump’s second term, something extraordinary is happening. Without an amendment to the Constitution, he has invented something new. I call it the “super pardon.” A Bloomberg report out this week dives into Trump’s latest corrupt feat, revealing how he’s become the first president in modern times to issue pardons for companies. If you’re baffled, you should be, but it’s even more alarming than you think because Trump’s not simply forgiving corporate crimes.
He’s giving companies what amounts to a hall-pass to carry out misconduct in the future…It’s important to take a beat to understand how radical this is. For the 239 years since the Constitution was ratified, the pardon has typically been understood as an act of mercy for individuals. Presidents grant clemency to people who committed crimes but are seen as deserving a reprieve, whether because their sentences were unusually harsh or their convictions were unjust. The founders saw the power as a safety valve to temper the severity of the law and, on occasion, restore domestic tranquility. They didn’t envision it as a magic wand to be waved over entire corporations, i.e. legal fictions that cannot sit in a jail cell, cannot be executed, and cannot, in any meaningful sense, be shown “mercy.”…
Plain haircut
Bloomberg – no paywall – Trump Extends Pardons to Companies, Echoing a 17th Century King “…Unlike in previous administrations, commutations as well as pardons have cleared unpaid penalties tied to the convictions…Since taking office for the second time, Trump has become the first modern US president to issue pardons for companies, from a Middle America auto supplier to a crypto platform and a media startup.
The clemency grants have wiped out almost $200 million in financial penalties, some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing. The pardons underscore Trump’s broader willingness to blow past the boundaries of executive authority in a second term that has been far less constrained by political and legal norms. He has granted clemency to almost 1,700 people in the past 18 months, far outpacing his predecessors, often benefiting political supporters or people who claim to be victims of legal weaponization…”
Defiance.org: In Donald Trump’s second term, something extraordinary is happening. Without an amendment to the Constitution, he has invented something new. I call it the “super pardon.” A Bloomberg report out this week dives into Trump’s latest corrupt feat, revealing how he’s become the first president in modern times to issue pardons for companies. If you’re baffled, you should be, but it’s even more alarming than you think because Trump’s not simply forgiving corporate crimes.
He’s giving companies what amounts to a hall-pass to carry out misconduct in the future…It’s important to take a beat to understand how radical this is. For the 239 years since the Constitution was ratified, the pardon has typically been understood as an act of mercy for individuals. Presidents grant clemency to people who committed crimes but are seen as deserving a reprieve, whether because their sentences were unusually harsh or their convictions were unjust. The founders saw the power as a safety valve to temper the severity of the law and, on occasion, restore domestic tranquility. They didn’t envision it as a magic wand to be waved over entire corporations, i.e. legal fictions that cannot sit in a jail cell, cannot be executed, and cannot, in any meaningful sense, be shown “mercy.”…
Trump Is Insider Trading – Made 2.4 Billion Doing It This Year Alone
- Nvidia. April 2025: Trump posts “very big and exciting news” to his nine million followers about Nvidia building AI supercomputers in America and vows that all federal permits will be fast-tracked. What he doesn’t mention: days earlier, his accounts bought between $200,000 and $500,000 of Nvidia. The man expediting the permits owns the stock the permits pump. Then in January 2026, his managers buy up to $1 million more of Nvidia — and the very next week his administration relaxes export controls so Nvidia can sell its prized AI chips to China. Buy first. Deregulate second. Repeat.
- Tesla. More than 50 purchases last year, at least $4 million, including buys made days before he turned the White House South Lawn into a Tesla showroom with Elon. Then came the divorce — Trump threatening Tesla’s subsidies, musing about deporting Musk — while still buying Tesla stock the entire time, including a $500K–$1M buy in July. Publicly torching the company, privately long the company. That’s not politics. That’s a position.
- Palantir. Hundreds of thousands in purchases through March, then a Truth Social post in April praising Palantir’s “war-fighting” chops — with the stock ticker included. A sitting President posting a ticker symbol like a Discord pump group admin. Palantir’s federal contracts, meanwhile, nearly doubled to $970 million.
- American Eagle. Buys $15K–$50K of the stock on July 31. Four days later, posts about the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad tell the world the jeans are selling out. The President of the United States. Shilling mall denim. Because he owns it.
- Eli Lilly, Oracle, Amazon, Dell.Purchases that coincided with favourable GLP-1 decisions, the TikTok deal Oracle needed, and — I swear — an Amazon buy the same day a federal trial against Amazon began. The referee is betting on the game. Both teams. Every quarter.
And the volume is deranged: 3,642 trades in Q1 2026 alone — roughly 58 trades per market day — worth between $220 million and $750 million.
Eric Trump says it’s all “broad market indexes.” The disclosure his dad signed lists thousands of individual stock picks. Someone’s lying, and it’s the one whose last name is on the filing.” It’s a huge conflict of interest,” Ethics attorney Virginia Canter said, arguing that Trump is funneling official information through “a private channel in which he has a private interest.”
Anti-Forbes list ranks wealthy by the wealth their companies generated for others
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 11, 2026 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Six highlights from this week: Every Way Meta Tracks You, and How to Fight Back; AI Agents Can Be Tricked Into Stealing Your Files, Researchers; All Cars Sold in the EU Now Require a Camera Aimed at Your Face. It’s Still Not Clear Where That Data Goes; Unpatched Flaws Disclosed in Filesystem Bundled Into Millions of Embedded Devices; and Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet.
Predicting the Court: Evaluating Large Language Models as Forecasters of Supreme Court Decisions
Stillwell, Hayley and Harrington, Sean, Predicting the Court: Evaluating Large Language Models as Forecasters of Supreme Court Decisions (July 10, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7096518
Large language models are increasingly used by lawyers to analyze legal materials and forecast litigation outcomes.
This Article evaluates four leading large language models-GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok 4-as predictors of Supreme Court decisions using every argued merits case from October Term 2025. Although the models predicted some aspects of the Court’s decisions with surprising accuracy, conventional performance metrics overstated their predictive ability. Much of the models’ justice-level accuracy reflected the Court’s ordinary ideological alignment rather than case-specific legal analysis.
The models also systematically overpredicted ideologically divided decisions, particularly in politically salient cases that the Court ultimately resolved on narrow and often technical legal grounds. Rather than treating prediction as a simple accuracy problem, this Article uses the models’ recurring successes and failures to illuminate the current strengths and limitations of AI-assisted legal prediction and the continuing role of human judgment in forecasting judicial behavior.
