🧵Against fierce resistance, the Trump administration is enlisting the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration — leveraging DOGE — in its crackdown on illegal immigration🧵 On April 7, the IRS signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that alarmed progressive pro-immigration groups and like-minded advocates – and reportedly prompted the tax bureau’s acting chief to resign in protest.

🧵In a recent Executive Order, @realDonaldTrump declared it the policy of his administration to "commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state."

The size, scope, and scale of related efforts -- and the rapidity with which the administration has undertaken them -- represents nothing short of a counterrevolution.

The Trump admin is seeking to take on a fourth branch of government put on steroids over the last century that has usurped and combined the powers of the legislative and judicial branches with those of the executive branch -- the definition of tyranny.

Below, a thread chronicling some of the admin's most significant moves against the administrative state to date.

*Note that this excludes the restructurings of agencies, freezing of programs, zeroing out of contracts, firing of woke and weaponized officials, and mandates for transparency in government spending and operations that represent attacks on the administrative state all their own.
Day One: Personnel is policy.

To that end, on Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump issues three EOs:

1) Freezing hiring, in advance of the executive branch developing a plan "to reduce the size of the Federal Government's workforce through efficiency improvements an attrition."
2) Re-establishing "Schedule F in the Excepted Service," allowing the federal government to make more easily fireable Resistance forces in positions "of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character"
3) Establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will coordinate with OMB and agencies not only on shrinking the federal workforce, but myriad other aspects of the plan to deconstruct the administrative state

The Special Counsel that wasn't supposed to need special counsel authority, David Weiss, calls Joe Biden's comments attacking the prosecution of Hunter Biden "gratuitous and wrong."

Weiss adds that while "[o]ther presidents have pardoned family members...none have taken the occasion as an opportunity to malign the public servants at the Department of Justice based solely on false accusations."

The Pox on Every House Report should be a doozy
Weiss says that Hunter Biden’s money came from “using his last name and connections to secure lucrative business opportunities” from Ukraine, China, etc. for “limited work.”

He says nothing about FARA issues though, nor the nexus to his father, who was managing the China and Ukraine portfolios

Something to remember in reading DOJ IG report clearing feds of involvement with J6 directly/via sources. Beyond fact IGs often appear to be captured by their agencies, consider that one FBI whistleblower's disclosure informants were at Capitol led to massive retaliation. Why?
Decorated Marine Corps veteran and award-winning FBI Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen reported up the chain in Sept. 2021 that confidential FBI informants may have been at Capitol on J6 -- calling into question veracity of FBI Director Wray's testimony

Kim Cheatle @GOPoversight Hearing

Secret Service director calls assassination attempt on Donald Trump the "most significant operational failure...in decades" USSS Director Cheatle can't or won't answer @RepJamesComer's first question as to whether Secret Service personnel were ever on the roof from which the assassination attempt occurred.

"There was a plan in place to provide overwatch."

Says Secret Service prefers "sterile rooftops"

Judge Cannon just absolutely eviscerated Joe Biden's Justice Department:

"Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution? After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no. None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment— 28 U.S.C. §§ 509, 510, 515, 533—gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith. Nor do the Special Counsel’s strained statutory arguments, appeals to inconsistent history, or reliance on out-of-circuit authority persuade otherwise." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… AG Garland could've been a Supreme Court Justice.

"The bottom line is this: The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives to Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers. The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers."

Justice Thomas' concurrence in Trump v. U.S. is hugely significant. He questions whether Special Counsel Jack Smith's office is constitutional.

"If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President." supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf… Justice Thomas:

"We cannot ignore the importance that the Constitution places on who creates a federal office. To guard against tyranny, the Founders required that a federal office be 'established by Law.' As James Madison cautioned, '[i]f there is any point in which the separation of the Legislative and Executive powers ought to be maintained with greater caution, it is that which relates to officers and offices.' 1 Annals of Cong. 581. If Congress has not reached a consensus that a particular office should exist, the Executive lacks the power to create and fill an office of his own accord."

In SEC v. Jarkesy it appears SCOTUS struck a blow against the administrative state.

"We consider whether the Seventh Amendment permits the SEC to compel respondents to defend themselves before the agency rather than before a jury in federal court," the Majority writes.

It concludes a defendant is entitled to a trial by jury -- not have to go in front of a court where the administrative state plays judge, jury, and executioner What Justice Gorsuch describes in his concurrence reflects the inherently tyrannical nature of the administrative state supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…

Murthy v. Missouri
Perhaps the most significant statement in the otherwise disappointing but predictable majority opinion comes in a footnote.

"Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action." The idea that the plaintiffs couldn't prove traceability -- despite overwhelming evidence of government officials and their cutouts working in myriad ways to suppress the very speech at issue reveals a lack of knowledge of the full record IMO from the majority

Greatly enjoyed speaking with, and learning from, @karaafrederick @MikeBenzCyber yesterday @Heritage @OversightPR "Weaponization of U.S. Government Symposium" emceed by @jasoninthehouse and organized by @MHowellTweets youtube.com/live/gSG21eAqc… I wanted to amplify a few points core to the discussion yesterday in a thread.

First, it's critical to understand CISA's role as nerve center of fed-led speech policing. The switch from targeting foreign malign actors to domestic Wrongthinkers; re-characterization of tweets critical of Official Narratives as national security threats to be neutralized via censorship; and the fact the Censorship Regime emerges from the powerful and secretive national security apparatus are all vital points to understand and internalize weingarten.substack.com/p/full-testimo…

🧵My impression walking out of SCOTUS yesterday, having witnessed oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri was demoralization. The Censorship Industrial Complex proved itself in the case to have cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media platforms to censor Wrongthinking Americans en masse, and yet that the government's "partners" abridged clear protected political speech wasn't clearly presented and argued. Whether we will retain anything resembling a First Amendment likely hinges on Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett. Herein, a thread I will update as I parse the transcript🧵 nypost.com/2024/03/18/opi… Multiple times the U.S. government lamented how the plaintiffs in the case were using the courts to "audit" their efforts to conspire with social media platforms to censor us on the Hunter Biden laptop story, election integrity and outcomes, and COVID. Unmentioned is that without Murthy v. Missouri we would've never known about this conspiracy to kill our First Amendment. Is the government's issue with the audit or with what the audit revealed about its depredations?

🧵On Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections From Mass Illegal Immigration
With America having suffered an invasion by design under President Biden, @elonmusk and others have grown conscious of how the influx of illegal aliens impacts our political system. What follows is a brief thread on this illegitimate practice and how Democrats have fought tooth & nail dating back to the Trump years to maintain it -- including last night in striking down a @SenatorHagerty-led amendment The Constitution calls for a census count to apportion representatives -- to determine the number of House seats and therefore presidential electors granted each state -- based on the "whole number of persons in each state excluding Indians not taxed." That count is also used to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding annually. Do illegal aliens count? thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/don…

🧵The Ultimate Thread on Biden’s Betrayal of Israel
The notion that President Joe Biden is a stalwart supporter of Israel, let alone acting in the best interests of the U.S. in the Middle East, is and has been a complete and total canard.

This Big Lie, propagated by the administration and its mouthpieces, provides cover for what amounts to an anti-American plot to put the screws to Israel, as part and parcel of an effort to make the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, Iran, the regional hegemon.

Since Oct. 7th – a Holocaust-in-a-day perpetrated by Iran’s proxy Hamas – despite initial rhetoric to the contrary and the continued provision of munitions (for now), the Biden admin has shown in word and more importantly deed that it is doing everything it possibly can within political reason to slander, stymie, sabotage, and ultimately imperil the very existence of our chief ally in the Middle East.

Now the Biden admin is going in for the kill shot: A push to force the Jewish state to effectively lose the war to Hamas, free hundreds if not thousands of jihadists, and reward a Palestinian Arab population overwhelmingly supportive of the Oct. 7 massacre and Hamas with a state in a bid to “sue for peace” with Iran -- threatening Israel's very existence in exchange for purported "normalization" with Arab powers.

What follows is an effort to chronicle the Biden admin's treachery towards Israel.

This thread should serve as the death knell of the false narrative that Biden supports the Jewish state – and more fundamentally that he is representing the interests of the American people over those of our adversaries with the blood of our countrymen on their hands. 10/7/23: The very day in which Hamas executes the most deadly and barbaric attack on Israel in its modern history – raping, murdering, burning, mutilating, beheading, and taking hostage innocents totaling 1,200 dead and approximately 240 abducted – including among them ~40 Americans – U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs urges “all sides” including Israel “to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.” It quickly deletes the message, but this reflexive response will prove revealing

https://twitter.com/omriceren/status/1710599560001634458?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1710599560001634458%7Ctwgr%5E21d17914bb03abe247cf314ebbd3bcb55db533f4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fnews%2F2436102%2Fus-office-of-palestinian-affairs-deleted-post-suggesting-israel-refrain-from-violence%2F

Surely mere mortals, and Donald Trump would get the benefit of the doubt Joe Biden does here justice.gov/storage/report…
Was Joe Biden's mind going as far back as 2017? justice.gov/storage/report…

Grab some popcorn: Special Counsel Weiss' office has responded to Hunter Biden's claims Delaware gun case should be dismissed:

1) For "selective and vindictive prosecution"
2) Because global immunity get-out-of-jail-free card from failed sham plea deal somehow remains in effect storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… Yes, Hunter Biden's legal team really argued that his Dad's Justice Department is selectively prosecuting him because...Republicans are weaponizing the DOJ

The full transcript of the Dec. 5th @WaysandMeansGOP hearing with IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler is out waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/upl… .@JasonSmithMO: "Vice President Biden appears to have treated Air Force Two like a corporate jet, traveling to Ukraine and Mexico to advance Hunter Biden's business interests. Evidence from today's documents show right around the time of international trips, like those to Ukraine, Joe Biden was emailing his son and his son's business partner from private email accounts using aliases while Vice President."

So you're telling me that the great-aunt of the youngest American hostage -- and first American -- to be released by Hamas is a buyer of Hunter Biden's art, who was then appointed by Joe Biden to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad? The swap of hostages for jihadists is likely to prove disastrous for Israel.

What this little girl endured and will endure for the rest of her life is unthinkable -- as is the case for all the hostages and their families.

That the Bidens' corruption makes this fact pattern at all salient is nauseating and disgusting.

New Revelation: Per a recent @JudiciaryGOP interview with former CISA Director Chris Krebs, the DHS sub-agency was flagging content to social media companies for potential suppression before CISA was established in Nov. 2018 judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subs…

.@JudiciaryGOP scrutinized disclaimers CISA put in emails flagging content for social media companies to consider purging, and found that lo and behold, the language was tailored to open the platforms to pressure of threatened reprisal from the likes of the FBI

EXCLUSIVE: Docs Shed New Light on Feds' Collusion with Private Actors to Police Speech on Social Media
@RCInvestigates we report on records showing the thousands of tweets and Facebook posts on topics from mail-in voting to aberrant election results that DHS' partner, the Election Integrity Partnership, flagged to platforms for censorship -- much of which they would suppress The evidence shows EIP – sometimes alongside DHS sub-agency CISA – pressuring platforms to target speech that included statements by then-President Trump; opinions about election integrity rooted in government records and even think-tank white papers; and speculative tweets from statesmen and everyday citizens alike. We detail a dozen of those instances, with reaction from the targeted including @MZHemingway @JMichaelWaller @RonColeman @ChuckDeVore

🧵THREAD: On the Fraud of 'Nakba' and the History of Israel You Aren't Supposed to Know
Excerpted from Shmuel Katz's "Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine" (1985)

"The Arabs are the only declared refugees who became refugees not by the action of their enemies or because of well-grounded fear of their enemies, but by the initiative of their own leaders. For nearly a generation, those leaders have willfully kept as many people as they possibly could in degenerating squalor, preventing their rehabilitation, and holding out to all of them the hope of return and of 'vengeance' on the Jews of Israel, to whom they have transferred the blame for their plight." "The fabrication can probably most easily be seen in the simple circumstance that at the time the alleged cruel expulsion of Arabs by Zionists was in progress, it passed unnoticed. Foreign newspapermen who covered the war of 1948 on both sides did, indeed, write about the flight of the Arabs, but even those most hostile to the Jews saw nothing to suggest that it was not voluntary."

It’s an unbelievable scandal that there was an Iranian spy ring in the Biden admin.

It’s an unbelievable scandal no one is pressing the Biden admin on it — particularly after Iran-Hamas initiated war shortly after details of spy ring leaked. When some "intrepid" reporter actually does ask relevant questions of the admin, expect the answer in re l'affaire Malley to be "We can't speak about an ongoing investigation." The American people simply cannot tolerate that answer. Congress must not tolerate that answer