1. Enigmas and Secrets
Before we start, a few thoughts about the WSJ story on Trump’s alleged letter to Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump has three possible defenses:
The letter doesn’t exist.
The letter is a fake.
The letter doesn’t mean anything.
Until yesterday, Trump had held to #1, insisting that he barely knew Epstein. The Journal story makes that inoperable, so he’s moved on to #2.
“The letter is a fake” line can’t hold up, for the following reasons:
It’s part of a collection of similar letters, which are in the process of being authenticated. If the entire book was a bunch of fakes, that would be one thing. But the proposition that Trump’s is the only fake in the bunch? Dog won’t hunt.
Who is supposed to have done the forgery? Ghislaine Maxwell? Why? What was her motive? Or does Trump mean to suggest that Maxwell was duped by someone else who forged the fake letter and passed it off to her as genuine? Which would mean it was someone in Trump’s office—a trusted assistant or secretary—who claimed to have been delivering a Trump letter to Maxwell, but who instead had concocted a forgery? This also makes no sense.
The only other possibility is that it’s the Wall Street Journal that faked the letter. This won’t hold, either. There are too many sources for this story and too much evidence.1
Which means that at some point Trump will have to pivot to claiming that his alleged letter doesn’t mean anything.
Will he get away with it?
I don’t know. The fact that he’s shifted his story rather than telling the whole truth is a problem. Also a problem is that this story comes from a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper.
Fox News is a key part of Trump’s defensive perimeter. I trust that Fox will ignore the story as hard as it possibly can. But will Rupert’s Fox attack the credibility of Rupert’s Journal? I doubt it.2
So the next phase of this story will be the Trump pivot to insist that the “secrets” and “enigmas” he mentions in the alleged letter don’t have any meaning. That they’re just poetic nonsense, or locker-room talk.
Sarah and I taped a Secret Podcast about all of this at Zero Dark Thirty. It’s pretty good. I even have my own little conspiracy theory as to who might be behind this story.
The show is here for Bulwark+ members.
But now let’s get to the real conversation.
2. Never Give Up
Yesterday we talked about the possibility that maybe people get—maybe America gets—what they deserve. But I promised I’d make the opposite case today. When I’m done I want you to unpack all of it together, and come to your own conclusions, in the comments. Sound good?
Good.
Now I want to share a story with you.3
A few months ago I got an email from a Bulwark reader I’ll call Matt.
Matt was an immigrant living in the American heartland. He came here for college and while he was studying, the situation in his home country changed. His ethnic group went from being casually discriminated against to being seriously persecuted. We’re talking about people getting butchered with machetes, in public.
Pretty quickly it became clear that returning home would put Matt’s life in danger. He started the process of petitioning for asylum.
The process dragged on for almost a decade. In that time, Matt suffered mental health challenges. He was alone, far from home. He found work and built a life, but it was hard. Damn hard.
Then Trump got elected for the second time. Mass deportations began. The administration started revoking temporary protected visas and looking for any excuse to revoke peoples’ legal status.
It was in this atmosphere that Matt got a letter informing him that the government was finally ready to adjudicate his request for asylum.
You can imagine his terror.
Matt traveled to the immigration office in a nearby state and went through his final interview. At the end of it, they told him that he would be called back to the office to pick up his decision in a few weeks time.
At that point, his asylum claim would either be approved or referred. If it was referred, then the government would begin removal proceedings against him and while he would have a right to a full de novo hearing before an immigration court, who knows what would happen in this climate. The rule of law is not being followed strenuously these days.
Matt got the letter summoning him back to the immigration office. He put his affairs in order—he has a cat and made arrangements so that if he didn’t return, someone would go to his apartment and take the cat to a shelter. He asked me if I might be willing to come with him to pick up the government’s decision. Just so someone would know what happened to him.
I met Matt at the train station. We’d talked over email lots, but never in person. He had a two-hour window in which to appear. I asked if he wanted to grab something to eat first. He wasn’t hungry. I didn’t blame him.
We walked laps around the neighborhood while Matt explained some of the details of his case. He gave me a crash course in immigration law and asylum proceedings. He listed the possible outcomes for the day. He was prepared for the worst, but we kept walking. He seemed reticent to go inside because getting that decision would mark the end of a years-long struggle, one way or the other. Like getting a test result from your doctor, sometimes its easier not to know.
Eventually he was ready. We went inside, but I wasn’t allowed in the immigration office with him. I sat on the floor in the building’s lobby and waited.
An hour later he messaged me. He’d been granted asylum. He was safe. His nightmare was over. When he finally emerged from the office we embraced. Getting to share that moment of relief with Matt—the moment when his entire life changed—was an honor I’ll always be grateful for.
Why do I share all of this? Because Matt’s story is proof that there are still people trying to do good from within the system.
The government is controlled—for the moment—by Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and their masked ICE agents. Scores of thousands of immigrants are being detained.4 The government has sent innocent men to a concentration camp in El Salvador; it has shipped people to failed states such as Libya and South Sudan. It has defied court orders. All of these things are real.
But also: There was someone in the government who listened to Matt’s story. Who asked the right questions. Who knew what the political bosses wanted, but followed the law anyway. Someone who was willing to put himself or herself on the line by granting Matt asylum.
Someone who was willing to take a risk in order to save Matt’s life.5
I get down on America, and Americans, pretty often. I fear for where our country is headed. But even with all of that, America is better, safer, more liberal, and more stable than most places. Matt is lucky to have found haven here. We are lucky to have him. And at least one person inside the system recognized these truths.
Being part of Matt’s journey reminded me that America is a good place and worth fighting for.
Even when things are dark, Matt never gave up on America. We shouldn’t either.
Join this fight. Stand with us.
3. The Departed
America has never been what we imagine it to be. Not ever. There was no Golden Age. Not the Founding; not the Fifties. There have always been problems, scandals, horrors.
But the scale of those problems waxes and wanes. There are periods in American history when we are closer to the good place and periods when we are at a heightened risk of tipping over into something terrible. The reason The Bulwark exists is because this is one of the moments when the authoritarian risk is high.
404 Media has discovered previously unrevealed flight manifests showing that dozens of additional people have been rendered to El Salvador.
The flight manifests for three legally contested deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador contain dozens of additional, unaccounted for passengers than a previously published Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list of people deported from the United States on those flights, 404 Media has learned. The additional people on the flight manifest have not been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government in any way, and immigration experts who have been closely monitoring Trump’s deportation campaign say they have no idea where these people are or what happened to them. 404 Media is now publishing the names of these people.
On March 15, the Trump administration deported more than 200 people on three aircraft to a megaprison in El Salvador. A judge blocked the deportations, but hours later the flights still landed in the country. It marked one of the major turning points of the administration’s mass deportation efforts, and signaled what was to come around the country—a lack of due process, authorities ignoring judge’s rulings, and deporting people on the flimsiest of pretenses. Soon after these flights, CBS News published an “internal government list” of people it said were deported to CECOT, the notorious El Salvadorian megaprison.
But in May, a hacker targeted GlobalX, the airline that operated these flights and shared the data with 404 Media. In addition to the names of people who were on the list CBS News published, the GlobalX flight manifests contain the names of dozens of people who were supposedly on the flights but whose status and existence has not been acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported in the press.
“We have this list of people that the U.S. government has not formally acknowledged in any real way and we pretty much have no idea if they are in CECOT or someplace else, or whether they received due process,” Michelle Brané, executive director of Together and Free, a group that has been working with families of deported people, told 404 Media. “I think this further demonstrates the callousness and lack of due process involved and is further evidence that the US government is disappearing people. These people were detained and no one knows where they are, and we don't know the circumstances […] For almost all of these people, there’s no records whatsoever. No court records, nothing.”
This is the bad stuff. This is the U.S. government acting like a totalitarian state. The scale is small, for now. But the damage to the disappeared is real and so is the danger to the rest of us.
Despite everything, America is a good place. But nowhere is it written that we will remain so in perpetuity. In order to be the place where people like Matt come next year and the year after, we have to fight for it.
And we should fight for it.
So that’s part two. Now you guys can unpack the whole thing in the comments. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
For example: The Journal reports that the letter was part of a collection bound by New York City bookbinder, Herbert Weitz, according to people who were involved in the process. Weitz, who died in 2020, listed Epstein as a client on his website in 2003.
This kind of third-party involvement will be hard to discredit.
This is a funny example of how Fox is a propaganda outlet and not a news organization. I suspect that many of the “journalists” at Fox will want to defend Trump by attacking the WSJ. But they understand what their owner expects and they recognize that they have zero independence from ownership.
I am changing all of the identifying details of this story so that they will be perfectly vague because I am paranoid. Sorry.
Some of these detentions are legal. Some are more accurately described as “legal” in the sense that they are being pursued under novel legal theories. Others are patently illegal.
Earlier this week I linked to a story about an ICE attorney who asked the judge not to identify her in court documents, but I said that the information we have about this woman suggests that she is not part of the Miller/Homan regime.
Many readers suggested that she is morally reprehensible for staying in her job. And that it is one possibility. Another possibility is that she is keeping her head down and trying to carry out her duties in a morally upright manner and just waiting for the people above her to notice and then fire her.
Point is, there are lots of ways people can resist authoritarianism and one way is doing what the immigration person did for Matt: Following the law, ignoring the diktats from the commissars, and daring them to fire you.
I became a US citizen in 2020. I was a permanent resident since 1971 when I was one year old. My parents refused to allow me to become American my entire childhood. In 2016 when Trump won the first time, I began proceedings to become a citizen. By 2020, I was accepted. My only goal was to be able to vote against Trump. I saw who he was long ago.
People ask me today if I regret becoming a US citizen with all that is happening now. The short answer is no. I believe we will come out of this changed, more aware of the gift of voting, and less naive. Will it be easy? No! But I am here for the ride.
My wife (Venezuelan) and I were relieved when we were able to get her status adjustment--she's now a green card holder--pushed through under Biden after we had gotten married. Then we found out that USCIS only gives you the first 2 years up front and make you re-file for the remaining 8 years of legal status after those first two years are up because USCIS wants to make sure you're not in a sham marriage. Now we're worried that when we file again in December through our immigration attorney's office that there will be some kind of games played by USCIS--an agency that falls under Noem's DHS--and maybe they decide to deny the remaining 8 years she's entitled to just to hit another "one less immigrant in the US" quota. The filing for December will cost ~$4k on top of the ~$11k spent on the initial filings for her and my stepdaughter (stepdaughter is already good for 10 years). I just hope we get someone reviewing the file who is a decent person. I have no idea what my small family's lives will look like next year. It's unnerving to put it lightly.