Outside the Beltway

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1. Scott says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 09:48

   Oh, boo hoo.

   From the Roger Taney of the 2020s:

   John Roberts decries heated criticism of the Supreme Court

   As the Supreme Court weathers another intense round of criticism for a Voting Rights Act decision that is roiling Congressional elections in several states, Chief Justice John Roberts insisted Wednesday that the court is above the political fray.

   “I think [people] view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do,” Roberts said at a judicial conference here. “Certainly, those aspects are open to debate and people should talk about them, but we’re not simply part of the political process and there’s a reason for that and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.”

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2. Scott says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 09:55

   Today’s Letter from an American

   It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

   An understatement.

   Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.
   …
   the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people.
   …
   “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

   Corruption.

   Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

   I find Heather Cox Richardson’s daily email a good summary of the daily issues.

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3. drj says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:03

   @Scott:

   I find it highly typical of today’s conservative movement that Roberts is very much offended by the fact that some of us dare to stand by what our eyes and ears tell us to be true.

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4. drj says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:11

   Also, this deeply principled jurist calling balls and strikes is actually a shameless, inveterate liar.

   Nobody is that dense without very actively wanting to be that dense.

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5. gVOR10 says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:14

   @Scott:

   but we’re not simply part of the political process and there’s a reason for that and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.

   Don’t tell me you’re not political, Roberts, show me.

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6. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:40

   The following is a very long piece focussed on SCOTUS and the Shadow Docket, but if you scroll down you come to this:

   “Mike Brock”

   I want to slow down here, because the next layer requires care. There is a parallel corruption layer running through Gulf oil sovereigns, Israeli political-intelligence networks, and a documented financial broker named Jeffrey Epstein. The Department of Justice’s 2026 release of more than 3.5 million pages of Epstein documents establishes patterns that warrant separate treatment, with appropriate epistemic care about which connections are documented and which are inferential.

   Documented through the Miami Herald, Reuters, Middle East Eye, Forbes, and Al Jazeera: Epstein positioned himself as financial advisor to Mohammed bin Salman, with twice-monthly meetings demanded, review power over the Saudi central bank and sovereign wealth fund proposed, and a proposed small palace requested as residence. He advised against a New York listing of Saudi Aramco. The Aramco IPO listed in Riyadh, not New York, in 2019. He received advance intelligence about the Ritz-Carlton corruption purge from an unidentified source. He maintained documented relationships with Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem of Dubai’s DP World, with members of Qatar’s ruling family, and with other Gulf-sovereign actors. He used these relationships to broker meetings between Israeli political figures — principally former prime minister Ehud Barak — and Gulf interlocutors. He invested in Carbyne, an Israeli surveillance technology company staffed by veterans of Unit 8200, the Israeli military cyber-intelligence unit, in a structure that Forbes documented as financially concealed through a Barak-established holding entity.

   The Israeli government, through its mission to the United Nations, installed surveillance equipment and access-control protocols at an Epstein-managed Manhattan apartment building where Barak regularly stayed. Wall Street Journal reporting cited in the CounterPunch analysis documents Epstein scheduling at least thirty-six meetings with Barak between 2013 and 2017. A 2018 email in the DOJ files shows Epstein joking with Barak: You should make clear that I don’t work for Mossad. The joke is doing the same evasive work that the leaked Roberts memos do — performing transparency about a thing the parties prefer not be examined.

   What is documented at the level of correspondence and financial relationship: Gulf-oil access, Israeli political-intelligence entanglement, the Carbyne surveillance-investment nexus, the Wexner Foundation’s operational engagement with Israeli strategic communications. What is alleged but not formally established: that Epstein operated as a coordinated intelligence asset for any specific government. The 2020 FBI memo from a confidential source asserting that Epstein was trained as a spy under Barak is in the public record but contested. The structural picture the documents establish is that Epstein was, at minimum, a broker positioned at the intersection of Gulf oil capital, Israeli political-intelligence networks, and elite American financial-legal-political figures. Whether the brokerage was operationally coordinated with any single intelligence service is the question that remains open even as the financial and political relationships become increasingly clear.

   The relevance to the Court-capture story is structural rather than direct. The fossil-fuel-industry capture of the Supreme Court that the Roberts memos document was funded principally through domestic dark-money channels — Koch, the API, the Concord Fund, the Leo network. The parallel Gulf-Israeli-Epstein layer documents foreign-capital-and-intelligence networks operating on adjacent American legal-political terrain through different channels. The two layers are not the same operation. They are corruption ecosystems whose memberships and financial flows overlap at specific nodes. Leon Black, who paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017, is a major Republican donor whose Apollo Global Management has interlocking interests with the broader donor networks. Wexner, Epstein’s original benefactor, was simultaneously a major figure in pro-Israel American philanthropy and adjacent to the donor networks that produced the Federalist Society‘s judicial pipeline. The connections are documented at the level of overlapping memberships and parallel flows. They are not documented at the level of single-operation coordination, and intellectually careful writing on this topic should not claim more than the documents establish.

   Then we come to Mr. Kushner. Affinity Partners, founded in 2021, holds approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management as of April 2026, with 99 percent of that funding from foreign nationals — principally the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The Saudi Public Investment Fund, controlled by Mohammed bin Salman, committed $2 billion to Affinity shortly after Trump’s first administration concluded. The PIF advisory committee’s internal due diligence, obtained by the New York Times in April 2022, rated Affinity‘s operations unsatisfactory in all aspects, objected to the inexperience of the management, identified the kingdom as bearing the majority of the investment and risk, characterized the management fee as excessive, and flagged public relations risks from Kushner’s White House role. The full PIF board, led by MbS, overturned those recommendations within days. Of course they did.

   Kushner is, at the time of this writing, continuing to serve as Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Peace in the Middle East. His investors are the governments whose interests he is simultaneously negotiating with as the official representative of the United States. He met Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva. The talks failed. The United States and Israel then bombed Iran in a war that Donald Trump has, by all available indication, lost — at the cost of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the doubling of global jet fuel prices, and the failure of Spirit Airlines whose final flight landed yesterday. At Davos in January 2026, Kushner announced the administration’s New Gaza initiative while simultaneously soliciting billions of dollars in additional Affinity investments from global business leaders at the same conference.

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7. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:42

   Alisa believes Ghislaine Maxwell was Israeli intelligence and a handler running Jeffrey Epstein: This would involve gathering kompromat on public figures .

   “Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez”

   Okay. So Robert. Robert Maxwell. Born in what’s now Ukraine. Flees Hitler, ends up in England. Speaks like eight languages. Serves in the M16 intelligence operation for England. Bosses say he’s next to useless after the war because his only loyalty is to Israel. Yet he stays in England, working for intelligence. Probably more than one country’s intelligence. Makes a boatload in his publishing front, whilst also being a spy. Publishes scientific journals. Gets access to scientists. Including nuclear physicists. Comes to New Mexico. Does the thing with the labs. Whistleblowers tell the FBI. Ed Meese, president Ronald Reagan’s head of the Dept. of Justice, drops the investigation. Then, around 1991, the story gets weird. Like everything else about these people.

   And by weird, what I mean to say is that in 1991, Robert Maxwell died in a rather weird way. He is said to have had a heart attack on or near his yacht, named The Lady Ghislaine (because of course it is), and then he drowns in the inky blue sea near the Canary Islands. It gets weirder. Because, yeah.

   British media reports from the time say medical examiners can’t agree on either the cause of death OR that the obese waterlogged corpse is even Robert Maxwell at all. His wife says its him, though. And that’s good enough for everyone else. Then it gets weirder.

   Upon Robert Maxwell’s death, it comes to light that he has somehow managed to move hundreds of millions of pounds out of the pension accounts for his publishing empire employees, and that money has simply vanished. It’s a scandal, naturally, as so many things are in jolly old England.

   …

   Poor Ghislaine, the media said, consoled herself by moving to Manhattan and hooking up with a rich hottie named Jeffrey Epstein, whom she would later tell current US Attorney General Todd Blanche her father had “never met.”

   It was lie, though. Like almost everything that slips easily from Ghislaine’s mouth. Epstein had, in fact, met Robert Maxwell long before he met the man’s youngest daughter.

   According to former Mossad intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, Jeffrey Epstein met Robert Maxwell first, because both Jeff and Rob were working for Israeli military intelligence in the early 1980s. Ben-Menashe, who claims to have run both of them, says Epstein was already squirreling away millions of pounds for Robert Maxwell in the early 1980s, in offshore bank accounts.

   Which means one of two things, to me. Either:

   Ghislaine Maxwell knew to go to Epstein in the event of her father’s death, to get the hidden money, and covered her own ass by allowing it to seem as though Epstein — who, let’s be honest, never met a person over 14 he wanted to date — was “supporting” her; or

   Robert Maxwell, with the help of the Mossad, began making arrangements a decade before he faked his death, so that his youngest daughter, his favorite daughter, the daughter he took everywhere with him (to learn the trade, I presume?) could take over his spy operations and the family fortune, without having to take on the faltering publishing empire.

   Think about it. It’s almost too perfect. The official story, repeated by the med to this day, is that poor little Ghislaine, who was little more than a randy, raunchy, charming but oversexed party girl, was so heartbroken over the death of her domineering bombastic father, and so destroyed by the disgrace he brought to her family, that all she could do was flee to New York City to rebuild her life again — which is what all newly destitute people do, naturally, go to the most expensive city in the United States, to flit about at cocktail parties and fashion shows.

   It’s all so obvious in hindsight. Especially as new interviews and documents come to light demonstrating that Jeffrey Epstein was not the genius financier he was painted out to be. He was, rather, a real, living, fictional creation — a pretend financier, funded by and propped up by Israeli intelligence and their three-letter ally organizations in the United States. US attorney for the Souther District of Florida, Alex Acosta, said as much when he confessed to having been forced to give Epstein a much lighter sentence than the norm, because, he was told, Epstein was “one of ours,” meaning intelligence.

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8. Kylopod says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:53

   “We have an independent judiciary, and the government is not involved in the decision-making of the judiciary. In fact, judges in the judiciary have their own independence from the center of authority of the judiciary.” — Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in 2020

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9. Scott says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 11:12

   Dumbest headline of the day.

   New York Times:

   Higher Gas Prices Are Hitting Lower-Income Americans the Hardest

   No shit, Sherlock

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10. Jay L. Gischer says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 11:13

    @Scott: You know, that statement by John Roberts sounds a lot to me like: “We are not simple politifcal hacks. It takes years of training and study to produce the high-flown hackery we make here. It’s not the least bit simple, and I wish people understood that better.”

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