Sheldon Whitehouse Profile picture
Jun 26 19 tweets 3 min read Read on X
The tale of Trump and “his” justices — you need to understand this to understand what went down at the Supreme Court. The commonly understood story is wrong.

So here we go 🧵
Remember when Trump first ran, how the most powerful political force on the Republican side was the Koch political operation? Americans for Prosperity and the associated armada of Koch-funded, coordinated front groups?
Remember how they hated Trump, saying in 2016 that Trump is a “terrible role model” and that Trump’s idea to create a national registry for Muslims was “Nazi Germany” and “monstrous.”
Remember in August of 2015 how Trump hated them back? He mocked his rivals in the primary, calling them “puppets,” going out to the Koch annual political gathering (yes, the one Clarence Thomas shows up at), to kiss their ring.
Remember how much Koch and right-wing money was then being poured into the scheme to capture and control the Supreme Court? As of March 2022, it was over $580 million. Clearly capturing the Court was a Koch top priority.
Remember that the battle between House of Koch and House of Trump suddenly went quiet? And Kochs poured millions into Republican GOTV helping Trump? Odd pivot, no? With no explanation?
Remember May 2016, when Trump announced his so-called “Federalist Society list” of justices he would choose from? Remember that we then discovered that the Federalist Society never even considered, let alone approved, any such list? It was a cover.
So who did the list? Obviously, Leonard Leo as the Kochs’ minion was the central spider in the Koch web, helped by Don McGahn, long connected to the Kochs via Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity. In fact, it was a Koch/Leo list — a Creepy Billionaires List.
What did the Kochs know about Trump? They knew he was the least trusted person in the business world, who cheated left, right, and center, and that only a fool would accept his word on anything. So any deal with him had to put him on the record.
Do you see the deal shaping up? Kochs back off on Trump, and in return Kochs get to pick Supreme Court justices. Since a secret deal with Trump is no deal at all, they came up with the idea of announcing a public list to pin Trump down.
House of Trump likely promised that Leo would be the fixer in the mix, and McGahn put in as Trump’s White House counsel, no less — a Koch operative positioned inside the Trump White House in the job handling judicial nominations.
With the list public and Leo and McGahn locked in, the Kochs in fact went quiet on Trump, and poured money into Republican field operations (Trump was still too disgusting to them to help directly, but a deal is a deal, and field helps Trump).
Here’s another clue: Kavanaugh was not on the list. If the Koch list, falsely described as a “Federalist Society list,” was a real thing, why not stick to it; and why not complain when the deal was broken and the list not honored?
Because the deal was always between Kochs and Trumps, and moving Kavanaugh onto the list, to help get Kennedy to resign, was welcomed by both parties to the deal. A contract between two parties can be amended at will if both agree!
So there was not a peep from anyone, and there were no proceedings in the Federalist Society to amend the list, as the parties to the transaction shuffled the list around to get the outcome they desired: another seat, and a Koch-picked nominee.
Back to questions: What did Trump know about this? Was he told the whole story? Or is he just now discovering that “his” SCOTUS nominees were picked by the Koch operation through, in essence, Koch “moles” planted in Trump’s operation?
We know that the Koch/fossil fuel polluters’ batting record at the Court is better than Trump’s, which Trump may have noticed. We know that the front-group armada that steers the Court is funded and directed by Koch/fossil fuel polluters.
Just look at the 2021 SCOTUS case paving the way for a constitutional right to dark money. That case was brought by Koch flagship Americans for Prosperity Foundation along with a flotilla of at least 55 Koch-connected amici.
The Court Capture scheme was a long-standing Koch/fossil fuel polluter covert op, so why not have “moles” and secret deals and false fronts like the Federalist Society, as a covert operation would? If true, this makes Trump the chump in the Koch scheme.

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More from @SenWhitehouse

Sep 18
It’s always good to pounce on government liars when they lie, so it’s been good posting about Patel lying.

But note where his lies led:

🧵
Saying the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in D.C. had issued an order, challenging me “Do you want me to violate a court order?”
The judge later all but said on the record there was no order; Patel was free all along to disclose his own grand jury testimony as a witness in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 17
Another low moment in yesterday’s hearing was Patel saying he and MAGA Bondi tried to get Epstein files out but judges wouldn’t let them.

Here’s what really happened:

🧵
Federal judges (who are not idiots) know that ONLY grand jury documents are protected by secrecy rule.  

So why, two separate judges wondered, would FBI/DOJ release nothing FBI/DOJ had, and only try to release protected documents? Weird, huh?
Then the judges looked at the grand jury documents and noticed how few they were (a “snippet”) and how it was most ALREADY public. Oops.
Read 13 tweets
Sep 11
Republicans still grouse about Harry Reid “going nuclear” ONCE, way back in 2013, to undo their blockade of D.C. Circuit judicial nominees. Supreme Court nominees were negotiated out of that.

🧵
Then, when Republicans had the majority and wanted to jam partisan justices onto the Supreme Court, they went nuclear. Happily. So much for their complaining; so much for the deal exempting the Supreme Court.
Senate Republicans have now gone nuclear THREE TIMES in the last few months (four, technically, if you count going nuclear twice in this episode). All the big talk while we were in the majority, all the early assurances — POOF! Pure fakery.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 4
After Trump’s fossil-fuel goons shut down Revolution Wind, I’ve been waiting for the phone to ring with the ransom demand.

But maybe this is attempted murder, not extortion, and there will be no demand.

🧵
That moves us to litigation, where my experience tells me the discovery phase will be fascinating as the lawyers dig into the true motivations and scheming behind this ugly fossil-fuel thuggery.
In the meantime, it’s worth spotlighting the corruption. This is a switcheroo to replace the clean energy electrons from Revolution with polluting fossil-fuel-generated electrons, adding revenues to Trump’s political patrons and string-pullers.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 30
Team Trump is purposefully raising your electricity prices, hoping you’ll be mad at your electric utility and not blame them. The benefit to them is extra dollars for their greedy fossil fuel donors.

Here’s how it works. 🧵
1. The Trumpsters make good on their crooked deal with fossil fuel donors to harass and harm fossil fuel’s clean energy competitors, competitors who actually made up 95% of all new power added to the grid last year.
2. Delaying that clean energy coming on line puts more dependence on polluting fossil fuel, so more pollution (they don’t care, they get to pollute for free) but also more consumption, meaning more revenue (bingo!) to fossil fuel.
Read 7 tweets
Aug 8
Well, well, well. 

With Emil Bove safely through his sham Senate confirmation proceedings, the two Trump judges just lifted the three-months-long administrative stay that had kept any evidence of Bove’s contempt of court bottled up.

🧵

nytimes.com/2025/08/08/us/…
It gets worse: the two Trump judges then used “mandamus” to undo the district court’s unappealable order and halt the contempt proceedings entirely. First, abuse of administrative stay, then abuse of mandamus, to shield Trump mischief from review.
At all costs, judicial inquiry into Trump Department of Justice contempt had to be stopped, even the MAGA AG trying to “create a conflict” with a bizarre ethics complaint against the United States district judge. Two Trump judges did the deed.
Read 5 tweets

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