It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Fourth Circuit Affirms Convictions of Bullshit Tax Scam Promoters
In United States v. Chollet, ___ F.4th ___ (4th Cir. 2026), CA4 here and GS here, the 4th Circuit panel (Judges Niemeyer, Thacker, and Rushing) affirmed the conviction of three defendants, specifically rejecting various points that I discuss below.
The defendants were convicted of a variant of a marketed bullshit tax shelter. Two of the defendants—Kohn and his daughter Chollet—were tax lawyers; the third defendant was an insurance broker. I will not get into the specifics of the shams they created for their clients to (i) improperly hide their clients' income and resulting tax liabilities from the IRS and (ii) to make money for themselves as they shared in the false tax savings the taxpayers (clients) claimed. Suffice it to say that the scheme involved meaningless (i) limited partnerships, (ii) fake charitable contributions, (iii) fake royalties and management fees, and (iv) supposed life insurance policies.
DOJ Finds Loophole to Pay January 6th Rioters
Raw America: “The Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” may be dead, but the effort to pay Trump’s allies with taxpayer dollars is very much alive.
After Republican lawmakers threatened to sink an ICE funding bill if the slush fund moved forward, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the Justice Department wouldn’t proceed with it. Trump, however, refused to admit the fund was finished, and said he still loved the idea. So they found a loophole. DOJ officials are now making clear they have both the authority and the resources to settle lawsuits against the federal government however they see fit. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward posted on social media, “We’re on it,” in response to a suggestion from Senator Lindsey Graham that the government should use existing law to compensate people who claim they were politically targeted. Woodward later deleted the post.
The legal mechanism they’re eyeing is the Federal Tort Claims Act, an 80-year-old law that allows people to sue the federal government for wrongful actions or negligence. Last Friday, nine pardoned January 6th defendants filed a lawsuit under that law, arguing their prosecutions amounted to selective enforcement driven by their support for Trump and orchestrated by senior officials at the DOJ and FBI. The Trump regime has already gone down this road. In March, the DOJ paid Michael Flynn $1.25 million to settle claims he was the victim of a politicized prosecution. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador, later sought to withdraw the plea, and was pardoned by Trump.
A similar settlement was reached with Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser who was placed under court-ordered surveillance. One January 6th plaintiff, Treniss Evans, said he thinks some defendants might have taken smaller payouts through the scrapped fund. Now he’s expecting something bigger. And there’s already a backlog building. Lawyer Mark McCloskey says he delivered boxes containing administrative claims for nearly 400 January 6th defendants to the Justice Department in December. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, those claims can move to federal court if the government doesn’t act within six months. That deadline is approaching. Legal experts are alarmed.
Anthony Sebok, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, put it plainly: the Justice Department, like any competent defense firm, should be making plaintiffs fight for every inch. Instead, he says, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are pushing on an open door. Keep in mind, this is taxpayer money flowing to people who stormed the Capitol, through a legal loophole. While the administration calls it justice.
The founders wrote the power of the purse into Article One for one reason, to keep any president from reaching into the public treasury to reward the people loyal to him, and Madison called that power the most complete and effectual weapon the people’s representatives could ever hold. Watching it get picked apart by a loophole that pays the very people who stormed the Capitol is exactly the corruption the framers built that wall to stop.
See also Lawfare – “At least 97 of the more than 1,500 individuals granted clemency by President Trump for their roles in the January 6 Capitol attack have been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from Jan. 6 since their participation in the Jan. 6 riot. A Lawfare study reveals that almost one in 16 insurrectionists subject to the president’s clemency order has been arrested for and charged with—and in the vast majority of cases convicted of—other crimes, at least some of which were actively enabled by the clemency actions…”
How I interviewed a Facebook whistleblower who wasn’t allowed to speak
The Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr was all set to talk to Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the explosive memoir Careless People, at the Hay festival when Meta’s lawyers intervened … and turned the event into ‘absurdist theatre’.
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 6, 2026
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 6, 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 Weisshighlights 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.
Five highlights from this week: One company may know everything about you; Fake ChatGPT download site infects Windows and Mac users with malware; Hackers Used Meta’s AI Support Bot to Seize Instagram Accounts; Apple Is Officially Coming for Meta’s Privacy-Invading Lunch With Its Own Smart Glasses in Late 2027; and FBI Tracks ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ Amid Growing AI Backlash.
The White House’s Top Science Goal Is Ignorance
Bloomberg: The White House’s Top Science Goal Is IgnoranceThe administration’s actions are seen as a deliberate attempt to stifle science and ignore the reality of climate change, in order to support the fossil-fuel industry and satisfy the climate denialism of Trump’s base.
Shutting down scientific inquiry because it discovers things you don’t like is a bit like turning off all the instruments on your plane because they warn you there’s a mountain ahead. It may satisfy your immediate urge to live in denial but will soon turn deadly. The Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle a scientific establishment long a national treasure and the envy of the world is a blueprint for deliberate ignorance.
But that’s a feature, not a bug. As Adam Serwer wrote about the first Trump administration’s cruelty, the ignorance is the point. If objective reality as measured by science is no longer available, then it’s easier for President Donald Trump to conjure up a new reality in a way that thrills and rewards supporters, including the fossil-fuel companies that helped get him elected a second time.
The latest example is a plan by Trump’s National Science Foundation to dismantle a vast monitoring system called the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which compiles mountains of publicly available data about every aspect of the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. One of its jobs is to track the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation(AMOC), the network of currents that helps keep Europe from freezing over, among other desirable effects. Scientists have become increasingly anxious about the health of AMOC as the planet has warmed, melting Greenland’s ice and disrupting the system that keeps AMOC moving. The shutdown of the system also comes as the world’s oceans are “at grave risk as ecosystems and habitats approach or surpass critical tipping points” because of climate change, overfishing and pollution, according to a United Nations report released on Monday.
Dying coral reefs, declining fisheries, warming seas and rising waters are all aspects of this crisis, and all are being carefully watched by the hundreds of ocean buoys the government is shutting dow Then again, maybe if we stop measuring this crisis, it will simply go away. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump often suggested fewer Covid tests would lead to fewer Covid cases. Why wouldn’t the same logic apply here?
Sure, you would lose that argument to any baby that has developed object permanence. But you would at least satisfy the fervent climate denialism of your base while giving you cover to continue squashing clean energy and propping up coal, gas and oil. Since the moment Trump took office again in January 2025, his administration has taken hundreds of steps to do just that, everything from ending subsidies on renewables to forcing old, polluting coal plants to keep operating.
These are obvious, blunt-force measures to support a fossil-fuel industry that bankrolled the campaigns of Trump and other Republicans in 2024. The subtler approach is to stifle science so that we no longer measure exactly how much burning those fuels is heating the planet and making the atmosphere more chaotic. That’s the only semi-rational explanation for shutting down an ocean-monitoring system that cost $386 million to build and collects data useful to everyone from fishing-boat captains to farmers.
Or for no longer tracking America’s billion-dollar weather disasters when they’re more numerous than ever, driving up insurance costs across the country. Or for cutting off funding for a global databank of weather disasters. Or for dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research(NCAR), which helps meteorologists predict the weather, a service with an annual economic benefit of $31.5 billion, while also gathering data on a heating planet.
A federal judge recently halted some of NCAR’s demolition, and the White House Office of Management and Budget has proposed moving the institution’s weather studies to new management. But the uncertainty about its future has already shut down research and chased away scientists who might never return. Trying to separate weather science from climate science is like trying to separate duck science from waterfowl science.
They’re not exactly the same, but you can’t have one without the other. The administration’s stated rationale for wrecking NCAR gives away its game. Despite being led by OMB, this vandalism has nothing to do with saving money. OMB Director Russell Vought dismissed NCAR as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” echoing language used in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, of which Vought was a co-author.”
