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One anonymous phone call. No name, no evidence, no witness. Armed police at the door inside a day.

That’s what happened to Pete Buttigieg and his family, and the details that have come out since should scare every parent in this country — because if the government can do this to someone as famous and scrutinized as him, think about what it can do to everyone else.

Here’s the timeline. On June 22, somebody called Indiana’s child welfare hotline with allegations involving Buttigieg. No name. No evidence. No contact information. Just an anonymous accusation. The next day, Indiana forwarded it to Michigan, where Buttigieg lives with his husband, Chasten, and their four-year-old twins.

And then armed Michigan State Police troopers, with a child welfare worker, showed up at the family’s home. Buttigieg says he was told he couldn’t be alone with his own children. The twins were removed and spent the night at their grandparents’ while he and Chasten were questioned.

Sit in that for a second. Someone knocks on your door. You’re told you can’t be alone with your kids. Your four-year-olds are taken away overnight — all on an anonymous accusation nobody had verified.

The children were returned. But that’s not where it should end, because of what investigators learned afterward. According to previously unreported police records obtained by The Washington Post, on June 29 — a full week after Buttigieg had already been separated from his kids — a Michigan child welfare worker learned from Indiana investigators that the likely source was described internally as “a mentally unstable woman in Indiana.”

Read that again. They figured out who the accuser probably was after the emergency intervention. Only then did anyone start asking the questions that should come first: Who’s making this allegation? Do they have firsthand knowledge? Is there any evidence at all?

It gets worse. The Post tracked down the apparent caller — living in Alabama. Confronted by reporters, she couldn’t provide basic details supporting her own accusation, and accused the reporter of colluding with Buttigieg. She claimed she’d encountered him in Florence, Alabama; his travel records reportedly show he wasn’t there during the period she described. And weeks before she ever called a child welfare hotline, the same woman had publicly urged people not to vote for him.

Then the experts looked. Vivek Sankaran, one of the country’s leading child welfare law scholars at the University of Michigan, reviewed the records and called it “incredibly poor investigative work.” He saw no indication a child was in imminent danger. And he said the thing every parent should hear: “It should scare all of us.”

He’s right. Michigan State Police defended their response — they moved fast because protecting kids requires immediate action. And nobody disputes that authorities should move fast when a child is in genuine danger. But speed doesn’t cancel out basic judgment, especially when what’s on the table is pulling children away from their parents.

Here’s what sticks with me, and it’s the whole point: this isn’t really about Pete Buttigieg. He’s famous, wealthy, well-connected, has the best lawyers and a platform to tell millions of people what happened to him. Most people have none of that. Most parents don’t get national headlines when an agency gets it wrong, and most families don’t have The Washington Post digging through records to reconstruct the truth. If an anonymous accusation with no corroboration can trigger this, the average family has far less protection than he did — not more.

And you can’t ignore the history hanging over it. Would this have unfolded the same way if Buttigieg weren’t openly gay? Nobody can answer that for certain. But for decades gay men have been falsely cast as threats to children — from Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” crusade in the 1970s to today’s reflexive “groomer” smears — and those stereotypes have consequences. Buttigieg is one of the most scrutinized politicians in America: mayor, presidential candidate, Cabinet secretary, years of opposition research. If anyone had real evidence of criminal misconduct, we’d have heard it long ago. Instead, an unverified tip put troopers on his porch and his kids in another house for the night.

Whether bias played a role, people will debate. Here’s what shouldn’t be up for debate. The government has enormous power — to search, to investigate, to separate parents from children — and that power comes with an obligation to verify facts and tell a credible report from a baseless one before acting. Because once kids are taken, even for a night, the fear of that doesn’t just get undone.

Every American — left, right, gay, straight — should want a child protection system that’s aggressive about real danger and disciplined enough not to act on garbage. That’s not partisan. That’s basic justice.

Michigan’s attorney general has opened an investigation into how this was handled. Indiana State Police opened one into where the tip came from. We’ll see if either produces anything.

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You don’t picture a Secret Service agent charged with attempted manslaughter.

You picture someone guarding the President, working financial crimes, moving in a national emergency. Not felony charges tied to a fraternity hazing ritual. But that’s exactly what prosecutors in Florida say happened — and one alleged victim needed skin grafts, another a breathing tube, and prosecutors say both could have died without emergency care.

Here’s the case. A U.S. Secret Service agent out of the Miami Field Office — 29-year-old Marquez Christopher Pinder — has been charged alongside two other men, Jared Lamar James and Elijah Delano Dyous. All three face attempted manslaughter, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and hazing with a deadly weapon. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office says it played out over four nights in April, at an apartment and a home in the area.

The arrest warrant describes Pinder as a “dean of pledges” for a Miami chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi. But the University of Miami says he has no connection to its campus or that chapter, and the fraternity says he holds no official role and no authority to run anything on its behalf — Kappa Alpha Psi told NBC News it’s a non-hazing fraternity that doesn’t condone this. So one open question is how a 29-year-old federal agent ended up in that role at all.

The two victims aren’t abstractions. One was a University of Miami undergrad who started attending interest meetings and is now a graduate law student there. The other works for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue.

According to the warrant, both men were repeatedly struck with canes and paddles for failing to answer questions about the fraternity’s history correctly. The paddling ran over several nights, and one session reportedly ended only after blood soaked through a victim’s pants. Then, police say, the men were told to strip, bag their clothes, and leave.

What came next is why the charges are this serious. One victim developed severe pain, vomiting, and fever, and doctors found injuries requiring skin grafts plus kidney damage that, per the warrant, would have led to renal failure and death without treatment. The second was hospitalized and had a tube placed in his windpipe — investigators say the intubation was necessary to keep him from deteriorating further and dying.

Now the part I won’t skip: these are allegations. The three men are charged, not convicted, and like every defendant in this country they’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. Pinder’s attorney, Justin Beckham, told the New York Times the charges are “grossly overcharged” and that his client served honorably in the military and the Secret Service. Pinder was granted bond at $75,000, put on house arrest with GPS monitoring, and barred from contacting the victims or his co-defendants; he’s since posted bond and faces arraignment on September 24. The Secret Service says he’s been employed there since September 2023, has been on administrative leave since the moment they were notified, and that the agency is fully cooperating.

I spent two decades on the job, and the thing that never left me is that the badge doesn’t put you above the law — it demands a higher standard. People hand federal agents extraordinary authority, and that trust comes with responsibility. If prosecutors prove what this warrant describes, that’s not horseplay or roughhousing. It’s violence.

And the lesson reaches past one defendant and one fraternity. Every few years America has the same conversation about hazing — someone is badly hurt, sometimes someone dies, everyone agrees it never should have happened, organizations promise reform. Then another case comes along. Florida knows the pattern: the state strengthened its anti-hazing law in 2005 after University of Miami freshman Chad Meredith drowned during a fraternity initiation in 2001, to make clear that hazing causing serious injury or death is a felony, not a rules violation. That’s the law now at the center of this prosecution.

No institution is immune from bad actors — not a fraternity, not a police department, not the Secret Service. The real test isn’t whether an organization can prevent every act of misconduct. It’s how it responds when credible evidence surfaces. Putting the accused agent on leave and cooperating is the right first step. From here, prosecutors carry the burden of proving it, and the defense gets every chance to fight it. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

But whatever the verdict, one thing shouldn’t be up for debate. Violent hazing isn’t tradition, and it isn’t leadership, and it isn’t brotherhood. If the allegations hold up, it was criminal violence dressed up as initiation. No organization gets stronger by tolerating conduct that lands people in intensive care — and accountability can’t depend on your title, your profession, or the badge you carry. It has to apply to everyone, or it doesn’t mean anything.

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The ones warning that ICE is falling apart are ICE officers who voted for Trump.

New reporting from the Washington Examiner has current and former agents describing an agency in a full morale collapse — burnout, canceled leave, and, most alarming, recruits being turned loose on American streets before they’re ready. And it’s landing in the middle of a string of deadly encounters.

If you follow this channel or my Substack, you already know the recent run: two ICE traffic stops that ended in the fatal shootings of people who weren’t even subject to active immigration enforcement — one in Maine, one in Texas — and a third death in Florida, where a man was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while fleeing an operation.

Here’s how the people doing the job describe it. “We’re being pushed to a breaking point. I don’t know where it will go, but it’s nowhere good.” Another: “No one is happy. If you hear Tom Homan saying, ‘Morale’s stronger than ever,’ I say, No, it’s not. I’ve been out in the field. I see it.” And an officer with more than a decade on the job: “Many on the right will think this is an attack on Trump. I voted for Trump. I believe in immigration enforcement. But man, it’s so disorganized and chaotic.”

When a Trump-voting ICE agent is the one calling it chaos, something is badly wrong.

So what’s driving it? In May 2025, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller reportedly told ICE leadership he wanted 3,000 arrests a day. The administration has since touted roughly 900,000 arrests this term — call it about 1,600 a day. And the roughly 6,000 officers handling interior enforcement say that pace is simply unsustainable. Days off have become the exception. “They constantly call us into work on our days off,” one told the Examiner. “They get on our case about working only eight hours a day.” One Texas office reportedly doesn’t even have a working restroom — agents walk to nearby businesses, past protesters, to use the bathroom.

But here’s the part that should worry you no matter where you land on immigration: the training pipeline is broken.

On top of those 6,000 officers, ICE has around 10,000 new hires somewhere in the training process. And according to officers and a retired senior official still in contact with leadership, many of those recruits are being pushed into American cities before they’ve cleared background checks or received security clearances.

That’s insane. You don’t hand a badge and a gun to someone whose background check isn’t finished and send them into the highest-stakes encounter there is — a stranger, a car, a split-second decision.

And you get exactly what you’d expect. Go back to that Maine shooting. A voicemail the ICE shooter left on his ex-wife’s phone surfaced, and here’s what’s on it: “every single female in your bloodline is nothing but a disgusting, fat ass. All of you should have your throats slit.” That’s a man the administration handed a badge and a gun.

So which is worse — the pipeline that put him on the street, or what happened next? After that shooting, the DHS Secretary announced a pause on traffic stops. One day later, Trump overruled it on social media and declared ICE would keep running traffic stops, and pursue them just as aggressively. The administration is courting death.

Strip the politics out for a second. Undertrained — in some cases genuinely unhinged — recruits are being dropped into high-stakes encounters. Experienced officers are burned out and worked to the bone. Nobody’s getting a day off. That’s a powder keg, and frankly it’s a small miracle there haven’t been more killings.

And the wildest part is who’s telling us. Not activists. Not sanctuary-city politicians. ICE officers — people who voted for Trump and believe in what they were hired to do — saying out loud that it’s a disaster.

This doesn’t stop with more funding, more recruits, or Tom Homan going on Fox to insist morale has never been higher. It stops when someone in Washington admits the quota is the problem. I’m not holding my breath, because an armed, aggressive ICE has always been Stephen Miller’s dream — and a man who dreams that dream isn’t the one who pumps the brakes.

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Michael Whatley wants a Senate seat. First he owes an answer.

He’s running for the United States Senate from North Carolina with Donald Trump’s endorsement, the backing of the Republican establishment, and a pitch built on conservative values. But new reporting has put a hard question on the table about his years running the state party — because while he was chairman, he appointed a man with a criminal record involving minors to leadership inside it.

And the man at the center of it says he told party leaders about his past from the very beginning. His name is Harvey Lee West Jr.

So the question is simple: what did Whatley know, and when did he know it?

Here’s the record. In 1999, West was a police officer in North Carolina. That year he was charged with statutory rape involving three teenage girls — 14, 14, and 16 years old. West was 28. He was a cop; they were kids. In a 2000 plea deal he pleaded guilty to five counts of taking indecent liberties with a child, including a victim under 16. He served six years, was released in 2006, and had to register as a sex offender.

Years later, West got into Republican politics. And according to the Asheville Watchdog and other outlets, he climbed into party leadership while Whatley was chairman.

Whatley ran the North Carolina GOP from 2019 to 2024, before going on to lead the Republican National Committee. During that stretch, the Watchdog reported, he appointed West to two positions. One was chairman of the party’s 1st Congressional District committee. The other was the Plan of Organization Committee — and that one matters, because it effectively controls the rules for the entire state party. That’s not a ceremonial seat. That’s real power over how the party runs.

And West says leadership knew exactly who he was. In an interview he said he was open about his history from the start — the charges, the prison time — and gave party officials the chance to decide whether they wanted him involved. If they didn’t, he said, he’d walk. “I’ve never hidden the fact that I have a past.” He wasn’t removed. He kept rising.

Here’s what makes the “distant association” defense impossible. This wasn’t one signature Whatley could claim he forgot. The two appeared together at Republican events for years — photographs of them smiling, posing, embracing on stage. In 2024 West posted a picture with Whatley from the Republican National Convention and called it an emotional, unifying moment for the North Carolina delegation. This was a working relationship across multiple election cycles.

It went past appearances. West became part of the money operation — his Down East Judicial Picnic turned into a stop on the state’s fundraising circuit, tickets running as high as $1,500, and a Republican who was there says Whatley himself promoted it. And when other Republicans tried to act, the door got shut: activist Michele Woodhouse says she backed a resolution to bar the party from holding events at a venue owned by a convicted felon, and it was killed at Whatley’s direction.

The state GOP didn’t even dispute that Whatley appointed West to the Plan of Organization Committee. And here’s where it gets worse. In June, a reporter asked him directly, and Whatley said he did not appoint West. But the rules of that committee say the chairman appoints all of its members. So either his own party’s rules are wrong, or the man who ran that party for five years is betting you won’t read them.

Let me be clear about what this is and isn’t. It isn’t about whether someone who served their sentence can rebuild a life — that’s a real and separate conversation. This is about judgment. Leadership is who you choose to put in positions of trust, the standard you set, and whether you’ll answer for it when the decision gets scrutinized.

I spent twenty years on the job, and I know the difference between a man who quietly paid his debt and rebuilt a life out of the spotlight, and a man who got walked into the rooms where the rules get written — over the objections of people in his own party who knew better. This is the second one.

Whatley is asking North Carolina to send him to the Senate. Voters get to decide whether his explanation is enough. But they deserve the answers first — because every leader is judged not just by what they do, but by who they choose to elevate. Right now Michael Whatley is being asked to explain why Harvey Lee West Jr. was one of those people. His silence is its own answer.

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Pay up, or lose your hurricane relief. That was the deal.

For months it’s felt like Trump plays offense while everyone else scrambles — executive order after executive order, another fight over immigration, another fight over elections. Then two dozen Democratic attorneys general finally flipped the script.

While the country watched the latest noise out of Washington, twenty-four of them quietly filed what could become one of the biggest legal challenges of Trump’s second term. They accuse the administration of holding disaster relief hostage — refusing the money unless states agree to change how they run their elections and help federal immigration enforcement. If they’re right, this isn’t just another lawsuit. It’s a direct hit on one of Trump’s core governing strategies.

Look at the pattern first, because it’s been building. The administration keeps using federal money as leverage to force states onto its priorities — education grants, transportation dollars, immigration enforcement. The message never changes: want the money, get on board with the agenda. Federal judges have already blocked some of it. One court said the administration couldn’t tie transportation funding to immigration enforcement. Another blocked an attempt involving Homeland Security grants.

So instead of backing off, they went bigger. This time it’s disaster money — the funding communities depend on after hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and terrorist attacks. That’s the line two dozen states decided not to cross.

Here’s what’s actually in the complaint.

FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, the suit says, are requiring states to accept new election and immigration conditions before they can get billions in disaster and homeland security grants. States are told to move toward paper ballots, run manual audits of their elections, verify the citizenship of registered voters, and cooperate more closely with immigration enforcement. Refuse, and they risk losing at least twenty percent of certain Homeland Security funding.

Think about what that money actually is. Not campaign cash. Not discretionary spending. It’s funding to prepare for terrorist attacks, defend against cyberattacks, strengthen emergency response, and help towns rebuild after a disaster. The attorneys general argue Congress already decided how it gets spent — and a president can’t bolt brand-new political conditions onto it after the fact.

Rhode Island’s AG, Peter Neronha, accused the administration of using public safety as leverage to make states surrender their constitutional authority. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called it an attempt to hold homeland security funding hostage to take over election administration. If anything, that’s the understatement of the century.

FEMA sees it differently — it dismissed the suit as partisan pushback and argued election security is national security. So that’s the fight. Nobody disputes that election security matters. Nobody disputes that disaster funding matters. The question is whether the White House can legally chain the two together and make one contingent on the other.

Here’s why it should worry you no matter how you vote. If a president can staple new conditions onto disaster funding today, what stops the next one from doing it with education money tomorrow? Or health care. Or law enforcement grants. Or infrastructure. This is bigger than FEMA, bigger than immigration, bigger than election policy. It’s about whether Congress controls federal spending, or whether presidents get to rewrite the rules after the money’s already approved.

Now the part that matters to me.

For a long time I’ve watched Democrats fail to meet this moment — unable to rally, unable to act decisively while democracy itself is on the line. This time they’ve got their act together. It isn’t easy to line up twenty-four state attorneys general as a united front. But it should be. Trump keeps steamrolling the Constitution and holding taxpayer money hostage, and everywhere you look — corporations, universities, law firms, newsrooms — people have been folding, acting like there’s no way to band together and stop him.

Well, here’s the answer: you can. This is exactly what resistance looks like. Everybody needs to get on board, or we don’t stand a chance this year or in 2028.

And filing a lawsuit isn’t the same as winning one — the administration gets its day in court, and it’ll argue these are reasonable conditions tied to national security. The states will argue they blow past presidential authority. A judge decides. But the conversation already changed. Instead of another week reacting to Trump’s latest move, the administration is the one on defense, having to justify this in front of a federal judge while the country hears the case laid out over the limits of presidential power.

That’s the part I care about. Democrat, Republican, independent — it doesn’t matter. Every president should have limits. Every administration should be accountable. And when there’s a serious constitutional dispute, this is exactly where it belongs: in a courtroom, not a press release.

Whether it ends in checkmate is up to the courts. But this is the most direct hit anyone’s landed on a defining strategy of Trump’s second term.

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The Trump signs are gone.

What got my attention wasn’t a headline or a cable panel. It was a voter — a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-red conservative — telling Marjorie Taylor Greene, to her face: “We’ve always voted Republican, but that is about to change.” Then this: “There were Trump signs everywhere. Those signs are gone. There is not a Trump sign in this county anymore. People feel betrayed.”

She didn’t say disappointed. She didn’t say frustrated. She said betrayed. And the numbers back her up — Trump’s approval has sunk to a second-term low around 37%, with even Republican support sliding, down into the low 80s from where it started.

It’s not one thing. Start with prices, because that’s the one you can’t spin.

The 2024 pitch was simple: day one, prices come down. Groceries, gas, housing. People getting crushed at the checkout heard that and voted on it. What did they get? Tariffs that work as a tax on everything they buy. Beef at record highs. Coffee at record highs. Electricity bills through the roof. You can spin a foreign policy blunder. You can spin a court fight. You cannot spin a grocery receipt.

Then Iran. A big chunk of the MAGA coalition came to this movement on one promise — no more forever wars, no more Middle East entanglements, America First means America first. Then they watched bombers head toward Iranian nuclear sites and asked the obvious question: how is this what I voted for? Tucker Carlson asked it. Steve Bannon asked it. Half the online right melted down asking it. The anti-war promise was a load-bearing pillar of the whole thing — and when you spend a decade screaming “the establishment lied us into wars” and then launch strikes yourself, people notice.

And then the Epstein files — the purest example, because it was entirely self-inflicted.

For years the message to these voters was: there’s a list, there’s a cover-up, the elites protect each other, and we’re the ones who’ll blow it open. People built their whole worldview around that promise. Then the administration gets the keys to every file cabinet in the federal government, and the message flips to: nothing to see here, case closed.

You cannot spend years telling people the deep state is hiding the truth, and then — the moment you are the state — tell them to drop it. They believed you. That’s the part the political class never gets: the base wasn’t playing a game. They meant it. And when the answer came back “move along,” even Marjorie Taylor Greene broke ranks, because she could hear her own voters — a fight that ended with her announcing she’d leave Congress altogether.

Let me be careful, because I don’t do wishful thinking. Is every Republican jumping ship? No. Are most of them pulling the lever for a Democrat? No. Plenty of them are exactly as angry and dug-in as they’ve always been.

But you don’t need a mass conversion to change the math. You need erosion at the margins — the two, three, five, ten percent who are done, plus the ones who just lose the will to show up. Elections here are decided in the margins, in a handful of counties, by people exactly like that woman. And when she says the signs are gone — the cheapest, proudest form of political expression there is — that’s enthusiasm gone. Nobody pulls a yard sign because they’re mildly annoyed. They pull it because they don’t want the neighbors associating them with it anymore.

We’ve already seen it hit real ballots — the off-year and special elections where Democrats keep overperforming in places they have no business being competitive.

Here’s the deeper problem, and it’s the thing about every movement built on grievance: grievance is a great engine for winning power and a terrible one for holding it. Out of power, everything wrong is somebody else’s fault — the prices, the wars, the cover-ups, all of it belongs to the other guys. But once it’s your Justice Department sitting on the files, your tariffs hitting the shelves, your bombers in the air, there’s nobody left to blame.

I’ll end honestly: I don’t celebrate this. A country where half the electorate feels conned isn’t a healthy one — it’s volatile and dangerous. I saw that up close on January 6th. Betrayed people don’t calmly drift to the middle. Sometimes they check out. Sometimes they try to burn it all down.

What I hope — and what that voter’s words say is at least possible — is that some of them do the older, simpler, more American thing. They look at the promises, they look at the results, and they vote accordingly. Not out of tribe. Out of self-respect.

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He tore my badge off while a mob was beating me. Now he’s back in a courtroom.

On January 6th, 2021, I was a D.C. Metropolitan Police officer doing my job outside the Capitol. By the end of that day I’d been dragged into the crowd, tased over and over, beaten, and nearly killed. And while I was pinned down fighting to stay conscious, one of them reached in and pulled the badge and radio right off my tactical vest.

That man was Thomas Sibick, of Amherst, New York.

If you followed the January 6th cases, his name might ring a bell — he was one of the more notorious arrests out of that day. Court filings say he later posed for a photo holding a stolen Capitol Police riot shield. When the FBI caught up with him, he changed his story more than once: first he was trying to help me, then he’d pressed the radio’s emergency button to call for backup. Prosecutors weren’t buying it — the emergency signal wasn’t triggered until sixteen minutes after other cops had already pulled me to safety. Eventually he admitted the truth. He’d buried my badge in his own backyard.

In 2023 he pleaded guilty to a felony count of assaulting officers, plus theft. Fifty months in federal prison. That should’ve been the end of it.

It wasn’t. In January 2025, Trump signed a blanket clemency order covering roughly 1,500 people tied to January 6th — Sibick among them. He walked out of federal prison and went home to Western New York.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

First, he was arraigned in Amherst Town Court — nothing to do with January 6th, a misdemeanor criminal mischief charge for allegedly smashing a victim’s cellphone. It didn’t meet New York’s threshold for bail, so he was released on his own recognizance, and the court issued a temporary order of protection for the alleged victim.

That could’ve stayed a small local court item. It didn’t.

Days later he was back in the same courthouse, this time facing six counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon — all class D felonies. Prosecutors say he illegally had three assault rifles and three large-capacity magazines. This time he was remanded into custody.

Let me be clear about the two threads here, because they’re easy to blur. Thread one is January 6th: convicted, sentenced, pardoned. As far as the federal government is concerned, that chapter is legally closed — that’s what a pardon does. Thread two is new: fresh, alleged conduct, none of it proven in court yet. He’s presumed innocent, and I mean that.

But the reason this story travels isn’t the gun charges in New York. It’s that the name attached to them belongs to a man whose violence got wiped clean by Trump.

And Sibick isn’t an outlier. The watchdog group CREW has tracked at least 40 pardoned January 6th defendants who’ve since been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes — roughly a dozen of them allegedly reoffending after the pardons took effect.

Some of it is stomach-turning. Andrew Paul Johnson, pardoned in January 2025, was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life, with prosecutors saying some of the abuse continued after his release. Zachary Alam was convicted of grand larceny and burglary within months of his pardon. Ryan Nichols was charged in May 2026 after allegedly threatening someone with a gun in a church parking lot. Daniel Ball — who prosecutors say attacked police with an explosive device on January 6th — was rearrested within days of his pardon on illegal weapons charges tied to a prior domestic violence record.

Weapons cases like Sibick’s aren’t unusual in the pile either. CREW counts at least five other pardoned defendants facing firearms charges, and once you add the DUIs, assaults, and fraud allegations, the pattern runs across dozens of names.

None of that proves anything about Sibick’s pending charges. He’s still presumed innocent, and this all has to be tried. But it does mean this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern that’s been documented, case by case, for more than a year.

Trump turned his own private militia of losers loose on the country, and they’ve been wrecking havoc ever since.

Talk about making America great again.

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Missed the live? Pour one and catch the replay. This week’s BYOB sat me down with veteran journalist Joy Reid and comedian Suzanne Lambert for the kind of loose, no-script conversation these nights are made for — politics, the stuff nobody else will say out loud, and plenty of tangents in between. If you weren’t there in the chat, you missed a good one.…

Michael chats with writer Peter Rothpletz, political commentator Francesca Fiorentini, and the Jolly Good Ginger about the death of Lindsey Graham, the Democratic Party’s reaction to his passing, yet another ICE killing, and the Platner disaster in Maine.

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He forgot the camera was still rolling.

Martin Siller was on duty, in uniform, gun on his hip, working a January 30 protest against ICE outside the old federal building in Eugene, Oregon. Federal officers had tear-gassed the crowd. The city had declared a riot. And Siller sat in his vehicle passing the time on the phone with an old cop buddy back in Utah — bodycam running the whole time.

Here’s what’s on the tape. “Just so you know, I’m a big supporter of ICE.” Then: “F** the Somali and Latino communities. I’m about the American communities. I’m about America, son.”*

Sit with that sentence. Somali and Latino on one side. “American communities” on the other. Thousands of Oregon citizens written out of their own country in a single breath — by a man being paid, that very minute, to protect them.

He wasn’t done. The two of them got onto Black people and ran the greatest hits. The buddy said they can’t swim. Siller said they like to be “grounded with their watermelon and fried chicken.” Eugene’s independent police auditor called the whole thing “highly offensive, racist in their nature and simply put, disgusting.”

I was a cop for two decades. I’ve heard every flavor of locker-room talk this profession produces, and I won’t pretend cops sound like social workers when the doors are closed. But I know the difference between a guy blowing off steam after a bad call and a guy telling you exactly who he is. “F*** the Somali and Latino communities” has no setup and no punchline. That’s a worldview.

And here’s what should keep you up at night. A cop’s real weapon isn’t the gun — it’s discretion. Who you stop and who you wave through. Who gets a warning and who gets charged. So ask how a man who talks like that used twenty-seven years of it. How many stops, how many arrests, how many reports with his name at the bottom — and how many of those people were Somali, or Latino, or Black. Every defense attorney in two states should be pulling those files.

Now look at how the tape even got out, because the department sure didn’t show you. A local documentarian named Tim Lewis was facing a misdemeanor from that same protest, and the footage landed in his lawyer’s discovery file. His team flagged it. He posted it in early May. It went viral in a day, and Siller resigned — the auditor says if he hadn’t quit, he’d have been fired.

That’s the part that matters, and it’s the part I keep coming back to. Siller is already gone. The scandal isn’t him. It’s everything the department did next.

Chief Chris Skinner started strong — called Siller an “equal opportunity racist,” said the remarks were “completely inconsistent” with the department’s values. Fine. Then his people reviewed roughly 270 bodycam videos from that same night and found, in his words, “a few” that were “concerning.” And then the vocabulary changed. Those weren’t racist, he decided — they were “attempts at some fairly dark humor.” Siller’s video “stands alone.” He has “no plans to release” the rest, because he’s decided they don’t rise to the level of “significant community concern.”

Hold on. The chief gets to decide what concerns you? This is the same department that told you nothing about the first tape — it only surfaced because a defendant tripped over it in his own case file. Now they’re asking you to trust their judgment about the tapes they’re keeping in the drawer.

And Siller said all of it to another cop who stayed right there on the line. The auditor is now investigating whether other Eugene officers knew and never reported it — a violation of its own.

The community sees it clearly. One resident called it “an infestation of rotten culture protected by a system of impunity.” The local NAACP said what disturbed them most was how comfortable he sounded. Another told the council, “Your only leverage over the police is to fire the chief. It’s time to pull that lever.”

I’ll leave the chief’s job to the people of Eugene. But take this from someone who wore the badge: the danger was never one loudmouth with a camera he forgot about. It’s a department that got caught by accident, and is now working hard to make sure the next accident doesn’t happen. The question every community should be asking — Eugene first — is simple. What’s on the tapes they won’t let you see?

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