With the power and passion he put into his soccer goal kicks, CA Attorney General Rob Bonta has taken on the Trump Administration & Elon Musk, again and again, fighting for the Rule of Law.

Steve Villano

Jan 16, 2026

(AG Rob Bonta on the Soccer Field upper photo; and, below, at Stanford Law School (r.) with the author.)

I first met California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta about one year ago at legal symposium held at Stanford University Law School. His opening comments riveted my attention, and made me glad this former Captain of Yale’s Ivy League championship Soccer Team, was leading our State’s team to lash the illegal actions of Donald Trump’s gang to the nearest goalpost for the world to witness.

Coming one month after Trump was inaugurated President for the second time, an emergency gathering of legal minds and activists was convened by California State Senator Josh Becker. It was called: “New Administration, New Legal Landscape: Navigating Emerging Legal Issues Between California and the Federal Government, ” a stultified Stanford Law School-like title which understated the urgency of the moment.

Bonta lived and breathed that urgency of our“sudden death” circumstances. He had been meticulously preparing for it since Election Day, when Trump defeated former California Attorney-General Kamala Harris for the Presidency, and our nation’s Rule of Law and system of justice were set on fire.

Fearlessly, Bonta jumped right into the fray, the way he did on the soccer field in college when he played soccer for the Yale Bulldogs, and as a semi-pro, reminding us that he ran the second biggest Justice Department in the entire country, with an annual budget of $1 billion. He was immediately building our confidence for the battle ahead, and I was motivated by his coaching style—having played soccer for my high school team, whose nickname was also “the Bulldogs.”

“We’ve been preparing for this for a while, “ the Attorney General calmly said. “We will fight for and maintain the Rule of Law.”

Bonta began by noting that, as an infant, he and his his parents, escaped from the totalitarian, kleptocratic, lawless regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who put the Philippines under martial law in 1972, the year Bonta was born in Quezon City. From birth, he knew how fleeting democracy could be. Bonta and his parents—both political activists—fled the Philippines to a United Farm Workers headquarters facility near Keene, California—Nuestra Senora Reina de laPaz. Shortly after that, they moved to Fair Oaks, near Sacramento, where Rob Bonta grew into a stellar soccer star, and went on to become his high school’s valedictorian. He stood in front of the packed Stanford Law School classroom, like a tenacious coach rallying his team.

“I made a promise, “Bonta told us, “that we’d take Trump to court when he broke the law…It is non-negotiable, that you have to follow the law.”

He noted that the California Department of Justice—which had taken Trump to court 120 times during the first Trump reign of lawlessness, winning 2/3’s of the cases—immediately challenged Trump’s illegal 2025 “repeal” by Executive Order of the Birthright Citizenship provision of the U.S. Constitution.

Under Bonta’s leaderhip, California became one of the earliest states’s to challenge the illegal actions of Elon Musk’s “DOGE” and its professed right to access the private data information of all Americans.

“Someone who didn’t receive one vote,” Bonta said, referring to Musk, “shouldn’t have access to the private records of Americans.”

“Everyone must do everything they can to enforcde the Rule of Law,” Bonta repeated. “Federal law does not ‘trump” all other laws. The 10th Amendment gives States specific rights.”

Bonta inspired the team in front of him to never give up, underscoring that class action suits and Amicus Briefs filed by organizations could be very helpful to protecting and preserving the rule of law.

He looked at all of us squarely:

“After all,” he said, “We ARE friggin’ California.”

As of this month, January, 2026, Bonta’s California Department of Justice has filed over 50 lawsuits against the second Trump Administration, winning some 80% of those cases. Those lawsuits have resulted in preserving approximately $168 billion in federal funding for California and our 40 million citizen.

The most recent legal victory by California’s DOJ ended the federal deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles by the Trump Administration.

This week (January 15, 2026), Cal Matters reporter Nigel Duara interviewed AG Bonta about the State of California’s ongoing battles with the Trump Administratio

In late December, 2025, the U.S, Supreme Court sided with the State of Illinois in its effort to stop Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago to ratchet-up it’s terrorizing of another “blue” city and state. The court rejected the same arguments used by the Trump Administration to federalize and deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles, when protests erupted there.

“The government has not carried its burden to show that (the law) permits the President to federalize the Guard in the exercise of inherent authority to protect federal personnel and property in Illinois,” the unsigned order from the Supreme Court read.

The Trump Administration also withdrew its appeal of a federal court decision that the president could not keep the National Guard deployed in LA forever. That surrender was a clear victory for California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who had filed an amicus brief in the Illinois case.

“The law got developed in a way that will prevent what happened over the last six months from ever happening again,” Bonta said. “I think this door is closed to Trump.”

CalMatters: In terms of what California does next on this issue, is there anything that you all are doing in preparation for maybe (large-scale immigration raids) coming back, or perhaps an escalation in tactics like we’re seeing in Minnesota?

Bonta: We’re ready for anything. I think when you see incidents like we’re seeing in Minnesota, you have to assume that it could happen here in California.

You know, the Trump administration has made no bones about it. They are going after blue states and only blue states. And it’s political, it’s weaponization, it is partisan. They’re trying to own the libs and get the Dems. That’s their whole reason for being. And chief among them, the biggest state in the nation that has rejected Trump three times when he’s running, that sticks in his craw, he doesn’t like it.

CalMatters: In Los Angeles, I don’t recall them going door-to-door to, you know, to try and grab people like we’re seeing in Minnesota. Is this an escalation?

Bonta: I think they’re escalating. Minnesota shows it seems to be an escalation. I mean, there were some pieces that are the same, that are horrific and terrorizing and traumatizing and inappropriate, like removing license plates and being in a moving truck, pulling up to a Home Depot and having people run out of the back and all the profiling that was being done.

I think it’s an escalation, and they’re doing more. They’re really trying to hammer Minneapolis and Minnesota. It’s the home of the vice presidential candidate that ran against Trump, right? It’s the place where their racism is on full display with their attacks on Somalis.

CalMatters: What happened at the Supreme Court?

Bonta: The Supreme Court weighed in and basically said that the theory that the president had been operating on all along was completely unlawful and without foundation, truly a slap in the face and an embarrassing and devastating loss for Trump, who thinks he can always run to the Supreme Court and get what he wants.

And they followed the law, the law that we had argued always applied, and that there was no authority … to deploy the military, that the “regular forces” included the military forces. There was no analysis that they were unable to execute the law, and there was no authority for the military to be even executing any laws, given the Posse Comitatus Act (which prevents the president from using the military as a domestic police force). So it was really a devastating and shocking loss for Trump.

CalMatters: The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the Trump administration to deploy the National Guard in L.A. in June, but ruled differently six months later. The district judge’s rationale was that Trump couldn’t re-federalize troops indefinitely.

But does that indicate to you that if the material conditions on the ground in L.A. were to change, similar to what the Trump administration cited in June when they claimed protesters were committing violent acts against federal personnel and property, the Trump administration could authorize a new deployment? Is that your understanding, or am I wrong on that?

Bonta: I think you’re wrong, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to say, but let me just explain my thinking.

That case in L.A. in June was the very first one in the whole nation, and built into the exercise of authority of the federal administration here when it’s deploying the military is a great deal of deference. I think that deference was provided. It was the first case. There were mostly peaceful protests, but some violence, as you just mentioned.

It was the first time they were seeing what the Trump administration was doing here.

And then they saw it again in D.C. Then they saw it again in Portland, and they saw it again in Illinois. The judges saw what was happening, and they saw what’s being said, and saw the rationale, they saw how Trump said that Portland was a war zone when it was a peaceful city, they see how Trump says, ‘I’m going to bring the military in to do the very thing the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits, to enforce criminal law, because these blue cities are not cracking down on crime.’ Exactly what the military cannot do!

And so they saw what he was doing with the military and I think they got a sense of where this was really headed and what was happening here. … So now that the U.S. Supreme Court has said you make sure “regular forces” is military forces, you need to make a showing that all the military forces cannot stop the concrete block from being thrown, or stop the Molotov cocktail from being thrown – he’ll never be able to show that – then you can bring in the National Guard.

##

Right on the heels of the Cal Matters interview, AG Bonta demanded that Elon Musk “cease and desist from creating and distributing on his XAI platform “deepfake, nonconsensual, intimate images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), noting that “the creation, distribution, publication and exhibition of Child Sexual Abuse Material is a crime.”

Earlier in the week, Bonta announced that his office was opening an investigation into the proliferation of nonconsensual, sexually explicit material produced using Musk’s Grok, an AI model developed by xAI, to facilitate the large-scale production of these images that are being used to harass women and girls acros the internet, including via Musk’s social media platform, X.

“This week, my office formally announced an investigation into the creation and spread of nonconsensual, sexually explicit material produced using Grok, an AI model developed by xAI. The avalanche of reports detailing this material — at times depicting women and children engaged in sexual activity — is shocking and, as my office has determined, potentially illegal,” said Attorney General Bonta. “Today, I sent xAI a cease and desist letter, demanding the company immediately stop the creation and distribution of deepfake, nonconsensual, intimate images and child sexual abuse material. The creation of this material is illegal. I fully expect xAI to immediately comply. California has zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material.”

The actions detailed by the Attorney General are illegal under California law, including California Civil Code section 1708.86, California Penal Code sections 311 et seq. and 647(j)(4), and California Business & Professions Code section 17200. Those actions include:

• Creating, disclosing, or publicizing digitized sexually explicit material portraying the depicted individual when the depicted individual did not consent to its creation or disclosure or was a minor when the material was created.
• Facilitating or aiding and abetting the creation, disclosure, or publication of digitized sexually explicit material portraying the depicted individual when the depicted individual did not consent to its creation or disclosure or was a minor when the material was created.
• Creating, facilitating, or aiding and abetting the creation, distribution, or publication of any image, including but not limited to digitally altered or artificial intelligence-generated matter, that involves or depicts a person under 18 years of age or what appears to be a person under 18 years of age engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.

Rob Bonta’s tough, no nonsense enforcement of the law against the criminal, unconstitutional actions of the Trump Administration and the illegal activities of Elon Musk, both within and outside of government, should come as no surprise.

Anyone who escaped from one lawless, corrupt dictatorship is determined never to live under another, and to do everything in his power to uphold the Rule of Law, protect democracy and the citizens of California.

If you want to inform the California State Attorney General’s Office of another sexually offensive image you’ve spotted on xAI, or some other platform, or wish to report abuses by ICE or violations of citizens rights and immigrant rights, please Contact: (916) 210-6000, agpressoffice@doj.ca.gov.

Eager to put his name on everything, Donald Trump just couldn’t resist showing of the chubby middle finger he may have used to penetrate E. Jean Carroll, which got a new Rape Law named for him.

Steve Villano

Jan 14, 2026

He may not have won a Nobel Peace prize, or even been successful in shaking down one from a Venezuelan activist in exchange for making her President of her country after he kidnapped Maduro, but Donald Trump’s chubby middle finger—sometimes mistaken for his tiny, flaccid penis—DID accomplish something of note:

It got a State’s toughened-up Rape Law named after it.

After 12 years of failed attempts, New York State revised it’s Penal Code two years ago, with Governor Kathy Hochul signing the new law and declaring “Rape Is Rape,” expanding the technical legal definition of “rape” well beyond the old, parochial parameters of “vaginal penetration by a penis.”

And none of it could have been done without a hand from Donald Trump–or, more accurately, one of his teeny, chubby fingers and, what may or may not have been, a flaccid penis. The first jury of six men and three women in the May, 2023 E. Jean Carroll case vs. Trump, just didn’t want to touch that one.

Mere days after Trump was found guilty, again by yet another unanimous jury, for repeatedly sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll to the tune of $83 million (on top of the $5 million he already lost to her) New York State moved its Rape Law into the 21^st Century and into compliance with federal law, practice, and most modern law-enforcement definitions of rape.

The new law—popularly known as, “The Trump Middle Finger Rape Law,” broadens the definition of “Rape” to include nonconsensual anal, oral and vaginal sexual contact. That means that whether the perp forcibly uses his or her fingers, a sex toy, a baton or anything else, or his penis in any penetration of a vaginal, oral or anal opening—on a woman or a man—the sex offender is guilty of rape. Voila! Enter (ewwww) Donald Trump’s fat little middle finger, which he flashed for all the world to see in Detroit, Michigan this week.

New York State’s new definition of rape makes it comport with Federal standards, including those of the FBI, whose Uniform Crime Reports define rape as:

“penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

Ironically, that change in the FBI’s definition of what constituted rape, was made in 2012, during the tenure of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller. No wonder why Trump never liked him.

New York’s new rape law is also consistent and with the practices of the Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network (RAINN), which used to operate the Department of Defense’s SAFE Helpline, and worked in partnerships with over 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country.

In signing the new rape bill into law, Governor Hochul said that what happened under the old law was that “physical technicalities confuse jurors and humiliate survivors and create a legal grey area that defendants exploit.” Especially, when their pudgy little fingers are no bigger than their Angry, Nasty Little Inch.

It’s precisely the kind of “sex-ploitation” that the convicted sex offender Trump did in his first losing trial against E. Jean Carroll in May, 2023.

In describing Trump’s sexual attack on her, Carroll carefully told the Federal civil jury in 2023 that Trump forcibly inserted several fingers and his penis into her vagina, after pushing her up against a wall, and pulling down her tights. It was the same detailed description of rape she had repeatedly recounted for decades, under oath, and in print.

During that trial, the jury concluded, that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” findings which led to their $5 million judgment in Carroll’s favor, $2 million of which was awarded as compensatory damages because of the brutal sexual assault committed by Trump.

Yet, despite Carroll’s sworn testimony that he also penetrated her with his penis, the Jury, for some bizarre reason, found Trump’s penis to be no more than another one of his teeny fingers, dismissing Carroll’s under oath, first-person account, as if they were, somehow, in the Bergdorf’s dressing room watching Trump’s sexual attack unfold.

That distinction—between Trump’s chubby little fingers or his penis—under the old New York State Penal Law was enough for the sex offender to escape the previous “vaginal penetration by a penis” technical requirement for rape. The Jury just couldn’t tell Trump’s penis from his teeny fingers.

US District Court Senior Judge Lewis Kaplan—who saw and heard the exact same evidence in that first case–was outraged over the jury’s jerry-rigged verdict on the question of rape, and he said so, several times. Writing immediately following the 2023 verdict, Judge Kaplan said quite clearly:

“Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted makes clear, the jury found that Mr.Trump in fact did exactly that.” (Rape Ms. Carroll).

Judge Kaplan—who also presided over E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation case against Trump, in which she won an $84 million award— declared that the jury in the first case, based their decision on, as Newsday reported (January 30, 2024):

“the narrow, technical meaning” of rape in New York penal law and that the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

In August, 2023, only a few months after Trump was convicted of being a sex offender, Judge Kaplan dismissed a defamation counter-claim by Trump against Carroll, where he whined that she defamed him by writing in a magazine article and later in her 2019 book, What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, that Trump raped her.

USA Today, reported in a January 29, 2024 story entitled “Did Donald Trump Rape E. Jean Carroll? Here’s what a Jury and Judge Said,” questioned why the jury accepted only part of E. Jean Carroll’s story of Trump’s criminal sexual attack on her:

“The jurors weren’t required to explain why, under the definitions they were given, they concluded Trump sexually abused Carroll but were less convinced he raped her.

However, in analyzing the jury’s verdict, Judge Kaplan said Carroll’s testimony about penetration by fingers was more “repeated and clear.” She said she “couldn’t see anything that was happening,” although she could feel it, describing the pain from his finger in particular. She testified that she wasn’t sure if he got his penis fully or only partially inside her.”

In Kaplan’s judgment, “full” or “partial” penetration wasn’t the issue: any penetration of the vagina by Trump’s penis, no matter how small, was enough to trigger the definition of rape, even under the old law. If the jury did not believe Carroll’s sworn testimony of penile penetration, then why did they award her $2 million in compensatory damages for the sexual assault? As a consolation prize?

As excruciatingly painful as it was for E. Jean Carroll to experience this horror initially, and then to have to relive it over and over during her trials and many times after, under the old, out-dated New York State rape law, the serious felony of rape came down to the question of whether or not Trump’s penis could be confused for his teeny, chubby fingers.

Under the New York State’s “Trump Middle Finger Rape Law,” penis size and depth or means of penetration is no longer, thankfully, a matter for a jury to measure.

But by flagrantly wagging his middle-finger at the world in Detroit this week, Trump triumphantly displayed his pride in having a new, broadened legal definition of Rape named after the dumpy little digit, that was mistaken for his manhood.

Both mothers, both Christian activists, both White women under 40 who could not be silent in the face of injustice. Both shot dead; both slimed by their government with lies saved for strong women..

Steve Villano

Jan 11, 2026

(Renee Nicole Good, shot in head by ICE agent; Viola Liuzzo, shot in head by KKK killers.)

The moment the news exploded about an ICE agent firing three-bullets into a Red maroon Honda Pilot and killing its’ driver, 37-year old Renee Nicole Good, Minneapolis mother of three, my mind leapt back 61 years and I thought of Viola Liuzzo.

Viola Liuzzo, 39-year old Detroit mother of five, Unitarian Universalist activist for peace and justice, shot dead twice in the head in her 1963 Oldsmobile, which she was driving from Montgomery, Alabama back to Selma, on the night of March 25, 1965, shuttling civil rights workers back to where they began an historic 50 mile march a few days earlier.

Both Good and Liuzzo did not have to be where they were, but their powerful commitment to their faith and to humanity compelled them to be there, where human dignity and human rights were on the line.

The flimsy, fraudulent cardboard Catholic JD Vance, who disagrees with Popes Francis and Leo on every fundamental teaching of Jesus about love, blamed the point-blank shooting of the young mother who had just dropped off her 6-year old son at school for her own death: “It’s a tragedy of her own making,” Vance said, lying that she was a “woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer.”

Back my brain raced to Viola Liuzzo, who, when her Teamster business agent husband told her that the Civil Rights battles in the South in 1965 were’t her fight, responded, that they were everyone’s fight. Moved by a series of “Bloody Sunday” marches in Alabama led by John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, to the State Capitol in Montgomery— and by the murder at one march of a 38-year old Unitarian Universalist Minister from Boston, James Reeb—Liuzzo believed she had a moral responsibility to take action.

Less than a week after President Lyndon Johnson’s powerful March 15, 1965 speech to a joint session of Congress calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act, Liuzzo hired a nanny to watch her children while she headed south to join the marchers. The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, slandered her for “abandoning her children” being “sexually promiscuous,” and “bringing it upon herself.”

Just as ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the entire Trump Administration lie repeatedly to cover-up their lawless, para-military immigration operation which has killed and arrested U.S. citizens with impunity as well as non-citizens, Hoover’s FBI had a specific reason to spread vicious lies about Viola Liuzzo: one of the four white men, in the car of Klansmen which murdered her and attempted to murder a male, Black civil rights worker driving with her, was undercover FBI agent, Gary T. Rowe. Hoover was obsessed with whitewashing that fact, and the truth the FBI agent did nothing to stop the pre-planned, pre-meditated murder from happening.

In the biography of Liuzzo, entitled From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo, author Mary Stanton wrote carefully about what happened after Liuzzo and Civil Rights worker Leroy Moton dropped five fellow marchers off at Selma Airport, and were headed back toward Montgomery:

“Between the airport and Selma a car full of whites drove up behind them and banged into the bumper of her Oldsmobile, several times before passing…Further along, the driver of another car turned on his high beams and shined them into Liuzzo’s rear view mirror. They followed her car for 20 miles…She attempted to outrun her pursuers by singing “We Shall Overcome” at the top of her lungs..Halfway between Selma and Montgomery the four men in the second car (including FBI Agent Rowe), pulled their car next to her’s. They shot at her (two bullets hit her head) and she was killed instantly. Her car crashed into a ditch. Moton escaped.”

The FBI and Hoover went into full cover-up and smear campaign mode, calling Liuzzo a “communist,” “drug addict”, and a “neglectful mother.” The facts about the FBI’s smear campaign were not revealed until 13 years later, under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Washington Post’s Donna Britt wrote about it in 2017, in an article entitled “A White Mother went to Alabama to Fight for Civil Rights: The Klan Killed her for it:”

“Hoover charged that the cuts on Liuzzo’s arm from the car’s shattered window were signs of ‘recent drug use.’ and that her proximity to Leroy Moton in the car (a car that was transporting five other people to the airport) resembled “a necking party.”

Hoover spread those lies knowing that the autopsy of Liuzzo revealed no traces of drugs, nor indicated any traces of having had sex before she died. Like Noem, and Vance, and Donald Trump, J. Edgar Hoover simply made things up to cast a shadow of blame and shame on the female victim, accepting no responsibility for what their official negligence allowed to happen.

Singing from Hoover’s hymnal of hate and distraction, Trump Administration officials and their culpable, off-key chorus have repeatedly tried to blame Renee Nicole Good for her own death, and worse. Noem, Vance and Trump all accused Good of of being a “Domestic Terrorist,” and a “deranged Leftist,” despite her Christian upbringing, her birth in the conservative Air Force town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and her first marriage to a military veteran, with whom she had a son. The young son’s father died two years ago.

Fox News flunkies like Jesse Waters attacked Good’s personal life pointing out that “she used pronouns in her bio,” and she leaves behind “ a Lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.”

Michelle Goldberg writes in the January 8, 2026 New York Times that:

“Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet—(she was the winner of a prestigious poetry award)—with “pronouns in her bio.” Conservative radio host Erick Ericson described her as an AWFUL—Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”

In truth, the insecure men of the Trump Administration, like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, could not permit strong women to make them look weak. Liuzzo’s daughter Mary, who was in the 10th grade when her mother fought for civil rights in Alabama, told the Washington Post’s Donna Britt, that her mother was “a wonderful human being who loved every living creature.”

Using almost the identical words, in a January 10, 2026, New York Times story entitled “ Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent in Minneapolis?”, Renee Good’s wife, Becca, told the Times that Renee was “A Christian woman, who believed in loving others as well as nurturing kindness in people…She was made of sunshine.”

The world was exposed to Good’s kindness and “sunshine,” when a video taken by her killer, ICE Agent Jonathan Ross, recorded her saying to him, with total sincerity and a smile, “That’s fine, Dude, I’m not mad at you.”

Viola Liuzzo’s daughter Mary told the Washington Post who her mother was:

“She actually believed it when Christ said that the suffering and needy are OUR people. Mom saw ALL human beings as her people.”

So did Renee Nicole Good.

And, as the Washington Post’s Britt wrote, that was what was so threatening:

“Viola Liuzzo was a woman…and white. She was cute. She was a mom. Suddenly, I knew the monsters could kill anyone.”

Jack Smith’s 8 hrs of under-oath testimony before Congress finds the evidence of Trump’s guilt was “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

(The January 6, 2021, Trump led “unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the election,” and “unlawfully stay in power”)

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/special-counsel-report-alleges-trump-would-have-been-convicted-had-he-not-been-reelected

In his final report to the attorney general, special counsel Jack Smith stood behind his decision to criminally charge President-elect Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Smith detailed the evidence he and his team amassed and would have presented at trial, writing “the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” William Brangham reports.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz:

In his final report to the attorney general, special counsel Jack Smith stood behind his decision to criminally charge president-elect Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In the 137-page report, Smith again detailed the evidence that he and his team amassed and would have presented at trial, writing — quote — “But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

The report was written before Smith resigned from the Department of Justice last week.

Our William Brangham has been following all the criminal investigations into the president-elect and joins us now.

So, William, this is Jack Smith saying he’s confident that he could have convicted Trump, but he was blocked by this longstanding DOJ policy that prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president. What else did he have to say in the report?

William Brangham:

That’s right, Amna.

We should also say, federal prosecutors always say, as a general rule, that, if we could have gone to trial, we would have been able to convict the defendant. I mean, federal prosecutors, by their nature, do not indict people they do not have a great deal of confidence that they could win against.

But, that said, this report is really a summary and a sort of encapsulation of all the evidence that his indictments have shown over the last year. There’s nothing really new in here. They’re simply alleging that Donald Trump knew that the 2020 election was lost, that Joe Biden beat him, that there was no widespread fraud, and that he refused to accept those results.

And Smith writes; “Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”

And this report, those many, many pages detail all the ways that we have talked about over the past year that Trump allegedly unlawfully tried to stay in power. That was pressuring state and local elections officials. That was pressuring Department of Justice officials.

That was creating this fake electors scheme, pressuring Mike Pence, culminating, of course, with what Smith alleges was, Trump’s campaign of lies of a stolen election is what drove that violent horde into the Capitol on January 6, where 140 law enforcement officials were savagely beaten and attacked.

And, again, as you said, Jack Smith says all of that evidence, if I had been able to present it in court, would have been persuasive. But because Trump won and the DOJ doesn’t prosecute a sitting president, that case and all of that evidence got dropped.

Amna Nawaz:

And, William, Mr. Trump tried to block this report from coming out, from being released. Last night, he criticized that release. He called Jack Smith a lamebrain prosecutor.

And all along, Donald Trump has basically alleged this was a political Democratic effort led by President Biden to, in his words, weaponize the Justice Department against him. Did Jack Smith address any of that?

William Brangham:

Yes, he did.

In fact, he reiterated this quite a bit in his report. Smith goes to great lengths to reject that allegation, writing — quote — “Nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with or improperly influence my prosecutorial decision-making.”

Smith writes throughout that the decision in this case, in all of them, was his and his alone. He writes: “The ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr. Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully.”

On the issue that President Biden himself was somehow the puppet master in all of this, Smith says: “For anyone who knows me, they know that that idea is, in a word, laughable.”

Amna Nawaz:

So, William, this report covered the January 6 investigation, but there was another investigation by Jack Smith that was into Mr. Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. That is not in this report. Will we ever see that volume?

William Brangham:

That volume, it’s complicated.

That case, as you remember, was dismissed by the judge, that she argued that Jack Smith was improperly appointed to his position. That report has been written. It is with the Department of Justice, but the department has said they’re not going to release it publicly at least until the cases involving two of the other defendants in that case are finished.

So maybe we will see it. We don’t know. It won’t be any time soon.

Amna Nawaz:

All right, our William Brangham, thank you so much.

Like Vecna, the evil villain in “Stranger Things,” Trump pretends to sleep, while terrorizing the world, and sucking all the oil, gold, money and life out of humanity.

Steve Villano

Jan 03, 2026

(The evil Vecna from “Stranger Things,” sucking all the life out of the world, on Netflix.)

NARCOLEPTIC TERROR,

Not an error.

The septic Narcoleptic

Pretends to sleep

While his lawless gangsters

Reap whatever they can

Steal or grab on the cheap.

TAKE VENEZUELAN OIL,

Which they did, and said,

Dragging the leader & wife from their bed—

“Abduct”, they clucked.

“How easily they were plucked!”

And, how all pretense of any law

Was fucked.

THE NARCOLEPTIC TERRORIST

Awake, now pounds his chest

Proclaiming this nighttime raid

Was the BEST since D-Day—

And maybe better, since then,

Those suckers & losers got wetter

And some even died

Fighting Nazi Evil.

NOW, THE EVIL IS WITHIN

Slyly “sleeping” like Vecna

Ready to suck OIL or LIFE

From any sector, of the world

That hangs like Nectar in the dreams

Of the Narcoleptic Terrorist.

NARCOLECTIC TERROR

Committed while a nation sleeps,

And weeps, and wrings its hands

Over “the law, the law, the law,”

Which is no more.

MASKED GANGS ROAM OUR STREETS,

Orders issued from plush jetplane suites,

To take, to rape, to starve the young—

As long as the Rich are snorting money,

Having fun.

No law, no law to stop them,

Only us,

Long ago thrown under the bus.

NARCOLEPTIC TERROR

Rules the night,

When everything wrong, is right

And nothing lawful can be seen,

No matter how loud we scream,

“EPSTEIN, EPSTEIN, EPSTEIN.”

THE NARCOLEPTIC TERRORIST

Pretends to sleep

While fanged dogs of his dreams

Control the streets,

Kidnapping those they do not eat.

Sucking blood, money and life, from everywhere—

Simply because it’s there, it’s THEIRS,

For the taking, for the raping,

While we fail to wake.

Trump said Sinatra would have “loved him.” Nancy Sinatra trashed that lie. The Nazi Stephen Miller–frothing to kill “leftists”–tried to steal Sinatra’s memory. The fact is, Fascists feared Frank.

Steve Villano

Jan 02, 2026

(In the immediate aftermath of more Big Lies from Donald Trump that “Frank Sinatra would have loved him and MAGA,” and from the Nazi Stephen Miller, who during Christmas tried to normalize his flagrant abnormalities by attempting to cloak himself in the music of Frank Sinatra, I was preparing to write a scathing rebuttal of the “spazzatura” (garbage) spit out by such scum. Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s 85-year old daughter fired the first truth bomb at the MAGA megaliars, by taking to social media to remind people that her father “loathed” Trump.

“This is NOT my father’s America, “ Nancy Sinatra posted on X. “He would be devastated. Trump is so wrong in so many ways.”

So far, the cockroach Stephen Miller—who spreads the disease of hate each time he opens his mealy mouth—has not yet been squashed. Even a cursory knowledge of Frank Sinatra’s history of fighting hard for immigrants, and his civil rights activism—which led J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) to label him a communist—would have clearly demonstrated that Sinatra stood for everything which MAGA,Miller and other Far Right troglodytes have opposed for more than 80 years.

However, in my research I discovered something so powerful about Frank Sinatra’s political journey that it had to be shared in full.

I’ve reposted this New Republic story from almost 40 years ago (March 31, 1986), by Jon Weiner, which lays out in great detail Frank Sinatra’s crusading record on immigrant and civil rights, his opposition to the Hollywood Black List, and how the MAGA movement of the 1940’s and 1950’s tried to crush him for expressing “leftist” views.)

When Old Blue Eyes Was ‘Red’

The poignant story of Frank Sinatra’s politics.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By Jon Weiner (New Republic, March 31, 1986)

I remember Sinatra who didn’t pal around with rich Republicans. During the early 1950s, at my Sunday school in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the highlights of the year was the annual screening of The House I Live In, a short film starring a young and skinny Sinatra. In it, he told a gang of kids that racial and religious differences “make no difference except to a Nazi or somebody who’s stupid.” He sang about “The people that I work with / The workers that I meet. . . . The right to speak my mind out / That’s America to me.” The House I Live In, made at the peak of Sinatra’s popularity, won him a special Academy Award in 1945. Four years later his career was in ruins, in the wake of charges that he was tied to both the Mafia and the Communists. Forty years later his career is legend, his politics solidly conservative.

At first glance Sinatra’s political Odyssey from left to right seems to have followed a well-trod path. “Maturity” has been defined by figures as different as John dos Passos and Jerry Rubin as the abandonment of youthful ideals. But Sinatra’s case is different. Beaten down as an activist leftist, his career destroyed by the right-wing press, he made a stunning comeback, then found himself snubbed and abused by the liberals whose views he shared. Only then did he sign up with his old right-wing enemies.

The House I Live In was a turning point. The Cumulative Index to Publications of the Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), a handy list of everyone named as a communist in 20 years of committee hearings, indicates that in the eight years following The House I Live In Sinatra was named 12 times. The New York Times Index for 1949 contains a single stunning cross-reference: “Sinatra, Frank: See US—Espionage.” Sinatra reportedly denied the reports that he “followed or appeased some of the CP [Communist Party] line program over a long period of time.”

But once the allegations had been made, Sinatra’s image in the press changed dramatically. He was first linked to the Mafia in a February 1947 gossip column that reported he had been seen in Havana with mobster Lucky Luciano and other “scum” and “goons” who “find the south salubrious in the winter, or grand-jury time.” The columnist’s source, and the source of many subsequent Mafia-Sinatra stories, turns out to have been Harry Anslinger, a crony of J. Edgar Hoover. Anslinger served as head of the federal narcotics bureau and was out to get Sinatra because he was a “pink.”

“Frank’s big nosedive,” as the pundits called it, began on April 8, 1947. That was the night he punched Hearst gossip columnist Lee Mortimer at Ciro’s celebrated Hollywood night spot. The Hearst papers went wild, running whole pages on the incident, repeating the Mafia story and HUAC charges. “Sinatra Faces Probe on Red Ties,” a headline read. Soon gossip titans Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Dorothy Kilgallen were heaping abuse on him. Overnight Sinatra was transformed by the right-wing press from the crooning idol of bobby-soxers into a violent, left-wing Mafioso.

Overnight Sinatra was transformed by the right-wing press from the crooning idol of bobby-soxers into a violent, left-wing Mafioso.

Sinatra said he punched Mortimer because the columnist called him a “dago.” In fact Mortimer had been calling him some other things in print. He wrote about what he called “the crooner’s penchant for veering to portside” and reminded readers that Sinatra had been named in HUAC testimony as “one of Hollywood’s leading travelers on the road of Red Fascism.” Mortimer, nephew of the editor of the Hearst-owned New York Mirror, pledged that “this column will continue to fight the promotion of class struggle or foreign isms posing as entertainment”–like The House I Live In.

How pink had Sinatra been? HUAC’s sources were pretty disreputable. The first to name him was Gerald L. K. Smith, a raucous native fascist. In 1946 he told the committee that Sinatra “has been doing some pretty clever stuff for the Reds.” Sinatra was named again in HUAC testimony in 1947 by Walter S. Steele, a private Red-hunter who had once accused Campfire Girls of being “Communistic.” Jack B. Tenney, a California state senator who headed a state version of HUAC, reported in 1947 that Sinatra had taken part in a dinner sponsored by American Youth for Democracy, which J. Edgar Hoover had declared a communist front.

Between The House I Live In in 1945 and the big 1947 HUAC hearings, Sinatra had in fact moved much closer to organized left-wing political activity. In 1943, when riots broke out in Harlem, he went uptown to speak at two integrated high school assemblies, urging the kids to “act as neighborhood emissaries of racial goodwill toward younger pupils and among friends.” Shortly after, when white students in Gary, Indiana, boycotted classes at their newly integrated high school, Sinatra spoke in the school auditorium and sang “The House I Live In” What other star at the top of the charts has thrown himself into the civil rights struggle so directly?

In May 1946 Sinatra issued what Billboard called “an anti-Franco blast.” The statement was remarkable for two reasons. First, the only people who still remembered the support that Spain’s dictator received from Hitler and Mussolini were real leftists. And second, there was Sinatra’s Catholic background. The comment caused the Catholic Standard and Times of Philadelphia to label him a “pawn of fellow-travellers.”

Sinatra moved closer to the Communist Party in July 1946, when he served as vice president of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Known by its asthmatic acronym, HICCASP had been a broad coalition of pro-Roosevelt liberals and leftists, ranging from Thomas Mann to Rita Hayworth. Sinatra became an officer during a faction fight in which Communists pushed liberals out of the organization and steered it toward Henry Wallace’s leff-wing challenge to Truman in 1948. Sinatra wrote an open letter in the New Republic to Wallace at the beginning of 1947, calling on him to “take up the fight we like to think of as ours—the fight for tolerance, which is the basis of any fight for peace.” Within three months headlines appeared linking him to the Communists.

A month later he was fired from his radio show; six months after that his New York concerts flopped. Soon his personal life was falling apart as fast as his career. By December 1949 his affair with Ava Gardner had become an open scandal. Columbia Records was trying to get back the advance they had given him. In 1950 he was released from his MGM film contract, and his own agent, MCA, dropped him. He was a has-been at 34.

After Sinatra’s stunning 1953 comeback in From Here to Eternity, he remained a Democrat. He sang “The House I Live In” at the Hollywood Palladium at a 1956 campaign salute to Adlai Stevenson. He returned to the political wars with new energy during the spring of 1960. He had two projects that season: working for the Kennedy campaign (Sinatra’s version of “High Hopes” was the official Kennedy campaign song) and breaking the Hollywood blacklist that had barred left-wingers from working in the movies ever since the 1947 HUAC investigations.

The second project was announced shortly after Kennedy won the New Hampshire primary. The New York Times headline read, “Sinatra Defies Writer Blacklist / Hires Albert Maltz for his job filming of ‘The Execution O’ Private Slovik.’” Maltz had written The House I Live In. In Execution of Private Slovik, a recently published novel, told the story of the World War II G.I. who became the only American since the Civil War to be executed for desertion. “This marks the first time that a top movie star has defied the rule laid down by the major movies studios” 13 years earlier, the Times explained. Sinatra would produce, Robert Parish was to direct. Slovik would be played by a TV tough guy named Steve McQueen.

Sinatra, asked if he was fearful of the reaction to hiring a blacklisted writer, had a defiant, I-told-you-so response. He quoted his own 1947 statement criticizing HUAC’s witch-hunt: “Once they get the movies throttled, how long will it be before the committee gets to work on freedom of the air? . . . If you make a pitch on a nationwide radio network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a commie?”

A square deal for the underdog seemed to be exactly what Sinatra was after—for underdog Maltz, who served time in a federal penitentiary for refusing to name names, and also for Slovik. According to director Parish, Sinatra regarded Slovik not just as a victim of an unjust system of military justice, but as “the champ underdog of all time.”

“They’re calling you a fucking Communist!” Harry Cohn, king of Paramount Pictures, shouted at Sinatra. The attack had come, predictably, from Sinatra’s old enemies in the Hearst press. Editorial writers for the New York Mirror reminded readers that the guy who just hired a Red had once had a “‘romance’ with a dame to whom he was not then married.” (Sinatra must have murmured, “Hey, that was no dame, that was Ava Gardner!”)

John Wayne found Sinatra’s Achilles’ heel. Asked for his opinion on Sinatra’s hiring of Maltz, Duke said, “I don’t think my opinion is too important. Why don’t you ask Sinatra’s crony, who’s going to run our country for the next few years, what he thinks of it?” Sinatra responded with “A Statement of Fact,” for which he bought space in the New York Times. In it, he declared that connecting candidate Kennedy to his decision to hire Maltz was “hitting below the belt. I make movies. I do not ask the advice of Sen. Kennedy on whom I should hire. . . . I have, in my opinion, hired the best man for the job.”

Just as the controversy seemed to be dying down, the Hearst papers ran the banner headline: “Sinatra Fires Maltz.” The Times and the trades contained a new ad signed by Sinatra, headlined simply “Statement”: “Mr. Maltz had … an affirmative, pro-American approach to the story. But the American public has indicated it feels the morality of hiring Albert Maltz is the more crucial matter, and I will accept this majority opinion.”

In an interview shortly before his death in 1985, Maltz recalled the incident. “Sinatra threw down the gauntlet against the blacklist,” he said. “He was prepared to fight. His eyes were open. The ad firing me was ridiculous. The American people had not spoken; only the Hearst press and the American Legion had. Something had come from behind that caused him to change his position.”

Maltz brought out his scrapbooks. Among hundreds of faded clippings was one from Dorothy Kilgallen’s gossip column. “The real credit belongs to former Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy,” she wrote. “Unquestionably anti-communist, Dad Kennedy would have invited Frank to jump off the Jack Kennedy presidential bandwagon if he hadn’t unloaded Mr. Maltz.” Kennedy’s campaign advisers worried also about Sinatra’s Mafia aura and expressed the hope that the singer would keep his distance from the senator. But, the advisers said, they hoped Sinatra would help with a voter drive in Harlem, “where he is recognized as a hero of the cause of the Negro.”

After the election, JFK asked Sinatra to organize and star in his inaugural gala. The singer proudly escorted Jackie, but Jack was the one he cared about. In a gesture of classic macho deference, Sinatra offered to share a prize girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner, with the president. Kennedy liked the idea and began an affair with Exner. (Sinatra’s hit that year, appropriately enough, was All the Way.) Then Sinatra Went too far; he introduced Exner to Chicago Mob leader Sam Giancana.

J. Edgar Hoover’s ever-present eyes and ears quickly discovered the liaisons. Bobby Kennedy, in the middle of a campaign to crush the Mafia, put a stop to his brother’s involvement with Exner. The Kennedys had been planning to stay with Sinatra in Palm Springs. He’d remodeled his house in anticipation of the presidential visit. At the last minute, JFK announced they’d stay instead with Bing Crosby—who wasn’t even a Democrat. To the public, it was an inexplicable snub.

Sinatra always was, as Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins puts it, “a virtuoso at storing wounds.” He got even with Bobby in the 1968 California primary by supporting Humphrey. Then he discovered the Humphrey campaign had the same reservations that the Kennedy campaign had had, and he quietly left.

As youth culture flowered in 1966, Sinatra married Mia Farrow; he’d just finished an album he called September of My Years. He was 51, she was 21, five years younger than his daughter Nancy. A sixties rebel, Mia cut her hair short and wore pants, and opposed the Vietnam War. Sinatra’s friends explained the attraction: “He digs her brain.” Soon, however, she was denouncing him and his pals: “All they know how to do is tell dirty stories, break furniture, pinch waitresses’ asses and bet on the horses,” she said. She left him to join the Beatles in India, meditating with the Maharishi.

Sinatra announced his retirement in 1971. “The principle activity of his retirement years,” New York Times music critic John Rockwell writes, “was his political shift from left to right.” The key moment seems to have come when the House crime committee held a new investigation of Sinatra’s Mob ties in 1972. The committee was headed by Democrats including California senator John Tunney, an old Kennedy friend for whom Sinatra had raised $160,000 with a special show. The main evidence against him was the testimony of a confessed hit man who said that a New England Mafia boss had boasted that Sinatra was “fronting” for him as part owner to two resort hotels. The committee called Sinatra. “That’s all hearsay evidence, isn’t it?” Sinatra asked. “Yes, it is,” the committee counsel admitted.

Always a public man, Sinatra explained the shift in his political thinking in a New York Times Op-Ed piece he wrote just after he appeared before the committee. His old politics of standing up for the little guy had been altered. Now he embraced the right-wing populism that defined the principal oppressor of the little guy as big government. And he saw his subpoena as a prime example of government oppressing a little guy. Sinatra became a Reagan Republican. “It didn’t gall him as much as he had thought it would,” reported columnist Earl Wilson.

His turn to the right coincided with a deepened contempt for women and his most offensive public behavior ever. At a pre-inaugural party in 1973, he shouted at Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire, “Get away from me, you scum. Go home and take a bath. . . . You’re nothing but a two-dollar cunt. You know what that means, don’t you? You’ve been laying down for two dollars all your life.” He then stuffed two dollar bills in her drink, saying, “Here’s two dollars, baby, that’s what you’re used to.” He made that kind of language part of his concert routine for several months, to the evident enjoyment of his new right-wing following.

President Nixon invited him to perform in the White House in 1973—something the Democrats had never done. He sand “The House I Live In.” Twenty-eight years earlier, he had sung it for students at newly integrated high schools. Now he was singing for the man who began his career as a member of HUAC from 1946 to 1950, when the committee smeared Sinatra. The president beamed with satisfaction, and Pat Nixon kept time by nodding her head. At the end of the program, for the first time in his public career, Sinatra was in tears.

© The New Republic, March 31, 1986.