Married Millennials, Here Comes the Crypto Divorce Cliff

Divorce always raises thorny questions of how to divide marital property. In most cases, the remedy is pretty straightforward, requiring a surgical split between the two parties’ assets — although you can’t do that with the family dog or aquarium. But if you thought deciding who gets the dog was complicated, here comes cryptocurrency.

With the crypto wealth accumulation phase still new within many households, and the recent sharp decline in digital assets including bitcoin and ether dinging the confidence of investors who had just seen record highs, the path forward is murky. But for many married Americans, the current price of crypto doesn’t even register as an issue. That’s because the assets are easily squirreled away from an unsuspecting spouse.

“In divorce cases, crypto is creating the same headaches we’ve long seen with offshore accounts, except now the assets can be moved instantly and invisibly,” said Mark Grabowski, professor of cyber law and digital ethics at Adelphi University and author of several books about cryptocurrencies. He added that the problem is that ownership isn’t determined by a name on an account — it’s determined by who holds the private keys.

“If one spouse controls the wallet, they effectively control the assets,” Grabowski said.

Lawyers now have to subpoena exchanges, trace transactions on the blockchain, and determine whether coins were purchased before or during the marriage.

“Without that transparency and given the lack of reporting standards, it’s easy for one spouse to hide or underreport holdings. Courts are still catching up,” Grabowski said. (...)

The first challenge is figuring out what actually exists.

“A retirement account comes with statements. A house has an address. Crypto may be sitting in an online exchange or in a hardware wallet that one spouse conveniently forgot to mention,” Bauer said.

Tracing it then becomes part detective work and part digital forensics. Once the digital asset is authenticated, hashing out custody comes next.

“Some spouses want to keep the digital wallet intact, especially if they are the one who managed it during the marriage, while others want a clean monetary split,” Bauer said.

Courts are still figuring out the best way to handle this.

“There is also the security piece. If one spouse hands over private keys, they are effectively turning over total control. If they refuse, the court has to decide how to enforce access,” Bauer said.

She recounts seeing one lawyer who didn’t know much about crypto try to give the other spouse credit for the value of the bitcoin in another asset, not recognizing it’s not so simple, nor fair.

“Many divorce lawyers are slow to catch up and don’t even ask for disclosure. In my state of Connecticut, there isn’t a spot for crypto specifically on the financial affidavits. And for some, that could mean missing a valuable asset if they aren’t looking for it,” Bauer said.

Crypto hunters, PIs of digital asset divorce era

One of the few companies that can help locate a missing asset is BlockSquared Forensics. Ryan Settles, founder and CEO of the Texas-based company, says that the need for his services has increased exponentially since he founded his company in 2023. BlockSquared is dedicated exclusively to the crypto aspects of family law and divorce.

If a spouse (generally women, Settles says) suspects their partner is hiding crypto, their attorney may call in BlockSquared, which does anything from simple asset verification to deep investigations, tracing crypto across continents and into the murky world of wallets and exchanges. Settles’ company will then present the spouse with a “storyboard” that traces and timestamps the movement of cryptocurrencies.

Investigating whether one spouse has crypto is becoming increasingly common, he says, “especially folks involved in high-net-worth divorces and individuals with high net worth.”

Ferreting out crypto in a divorce is only going to become more common. Settles noted that millennials hold the highest amount of crypto, and over the next six months, this age group will be approaching peak divorce years, converging with increased crypto holdings.

Another aspect Settles looks at is tax liability for the spouse, making sure that gets addressed during the divorce.

“There are a significant number of tax issues that most people, even attorneys, are not even familiar with,” Settles says, adding that the number of taxable events and reporting requirements from even a single transaction can come as a surprise to even the most seasoned litigators.

“Most attorneys don’t understand it, don’t understand the terminology. There is a whole lot of trust without verification going on,” Settles said.

Many of his cases involve wives who were not only unaware of their husband’s crypto dabbling, but when the assets are finally split, can be socked with a massive tax bill from capital gains.

“Unlike a savings account, the value of crypto can swing wildly in a single day,” Bauer said. “Selling crypto to divide proceeds can trigger capital gains. Holding it can trigger new arguments when value changes,” Bauer added. (...)

But companies like his are usually brought in only when there is a good suspicion of a spouse hiding significant crypto assets, he said. With a retainer fee of $9,000 and investigations that can cost $50,000, Settles says his services often cost more than an attorney.

Hard questions about crypto property splits

Roman Beck, a professor at Bentley University, where he directs the Crypto Ledger Lab, says that because this is a relatively new area, it’s best to look at it as courts not dividing the digital wallet but instead the assets the wallet controls.

“The law treats crypto much less exotically than people think. The starting point is simple: for tax and most property-law purposes, cryptocurrency is treated as property, not as money,” Beck said.

In divorce, that means bitcoin, ether, stablecoins, and NFTs acquired during the marriage are usually part of the marital estate, just like a brokerage account or a second home, with how that property is split depending on the state.

“Courts don’t split wallets, they split value,” Beck said.

The real legal question is not “Who gets the wallet?” he said, but ’How do we allocate the economic value the wallet represents, and who is trusted with technical custody afterward?”

This leaves courts and lawyers to do one of three things: split the holdings on-chain, sell and split fiat, or offset with other assets.

“From a technical point of view, a wallet is just a set of private keys, often spread across hardware devices, mobile apps, or even seed phrases on a piece of paper. You cannot safely ‘share’ a hardware wallet or a private key after divorce,” Beck said.

Another wrinkle in a crypto divorce is the volatility of the underlying asset, with price swings in the currency making it more difficult for couples to agree on timing of a split, both as a couple and for the digital assets. In the past two months alone, bitcoin fell from a high over $126,000 to the low $80,000s, a 35% decline, and saw its year-to-date gains wiped out, with plenty of wild daily swings.

If couples are thinking rationally and not emotionally, among the simplest solutions would be splitting the wallet on a chain to create two wallets for each of the divorced partners so they can continue holding their share of cryptos, or drawing up a legal agreement that gives shares of a wallet to each party.

“They would not have to sell immediately,” Beck said.

However, often one party is not familiar with holding a wallet and thus not comfortable with that solution. (...)

Blockchain ledger transparency and the courts

Crypto’s adoption by many Americans — surveys in recent years from Gallup and Pew Research estimate that 14% to 17% of U.S. adults have owned cryptocurrency — is forcing family law to become more data-driven.

“The combination of transparent ledgers and powerful analytics gives lawyers and judges better tools to reconstruct financial behavior than they ever had with cash. The policy question going forward is not whether we can trace, but how far courts will go in requiring that level of scrutiny in everyday divorces,” Beck said.

by Kevin Williams, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Fizkes|Istock|Getty Images|Ryan Settles
[ed. See also: Why your crypto wealth may never make it to the next generation (CNBC). Hint: estate planning/access issues.]

The Corrosion of America’s Soul

When Trump administration officials post snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up, of a weeping migrant handcuffed by immigration officers or of themselves in front of inmates at a brutal El Salvadoran prison, I often think of a story St. Augustine told in his “Confessions.”

In the fourth century A.D., a young man named Alypius arrived in Rome to study law. He was a decent sort. He knew the people at the center of the empire delighted in cruel gladiatorial games, and he promised himself he would not go. Eventually, though, his fellow students dragged him to a match. At first, the crowd appalled Alypius. “The entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty,” Augustine wrote, and Alypius kept his eyes shut, refusing to look at the evil around him.

But then a man fell in combat, a great roar came from the crowd and curiosity forced open Alypius’s eyes. He was “struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator in his body.” He saw the blood, and he drank in savagery. Riveted, “he imbibed madness.” Soon, Augustine said, he became “a fit companion for those who had brought him.”

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

Amid the swirl of horrors, scandals and accusations, then, it’s worth considering what President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation — what sort of “fit companions” they’d like to make us. Their behavior during the controversy around a Sept. 2 U.S. military strike on a boat off the coast of Trinidad offers some clarity.

The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an order to kill everyone on that boat, which the administration says was ferrying drugs. When an initial missile disabled the vehicle but left two survivors clinging to it, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ordered another strike that killed the helpless men. The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said, “This entire narrative was false,” then Mr. Trump said he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike but “Pete said that didn’t happen.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that actually, yes, there was a second strike ordered by Admiral Bradley, but it was fine because the admiral was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” Mr. Hegseth posted a cartoon in the style of a children’s book depicting a turtle in a helicopter shooting a rocket-propelled grenade at a boat carrying drugs and “narcoterrorists.”

A legal discussion ensued. Was the “double tap” strike a war crime? The Geneva Conventions say shipwrecked persons must be “respected and protected.” The Department of Defense Law of War Manual states that helpless, shipwrecked survivors are not lawful targets, while The Hague regulations forbid orders declaring that no quarter will be given.

Or was the strike simply a crime? Under the War Powers Resolution, the president must give Congress notice within 48 hours of U.S. forces entering hostilities, and hostilities that last more than 60 days are impermissible without congressional authorization. Since the president’s boat strike campaign has continued well past 60 days, the strikes support no war, and the entire campaign is unauthorized. Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international law professor at Rutgers University, put it on X: “There is no armed conflict, so there are no legitimate targets. Not the people. Not the boats. Not the drugs. It’s murder whether Bradley was aiming at the people or aiming at the drugs knowing the people would die.”

This discussion misses the bigger effort the Trump administration seems to be engaged in. In lieu of careful analysis of the campaign’s legality, detailed rationales for the boat strikes and explanations of why they couldn’t be done with more traditional methods, we get Mr. Hegseth posting an image of himself with laser eyes and video after video of alleged drug traffickers being killed. The cartoon turtle is just one example in an avalanche of juvenile public messaging about those we kill. I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?”

The president’s supporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water,” Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, “but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.” (...)

This wounding of the national soul is hard for me to watch. Twenty years ago, I joined the Marine Corps because I thought military service would be an honorable profession. Its honor derives from fighting prowess and adherence to a code of conduct. Military training is about character formation, with virtues taught alongside tactics. But barbaric behavior tarnishes all who wear, or once wore, the uniform, and lust for cruelty turns a noble vocation into mere thuggery. “The real evils in war,” Augustine said, “are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power.” Such lusts, he thought, drove the pagan world’s wars. We’d be fools not to suspect that such lusts drive some of us today.

In “The City of God,” Augustine distinguishes between a people bound by common loves and those ruled by a lust for domination. A president who wants to lead a nation bound by common loves might offer up something like Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which sorrows over war, indulges in no bombast, accepts that both sides in a conflict have sinned and declares that we must fight “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” For a nation devoted to the lust for domination, a president needs to foster a citizenry that thrills in displays of dominance and cruelty. Hence this administration’s braggadocio about death, its officials’ memes about suffering, their promises to inflict pain on America’s enemies followed by scant rationales for their own policies.

We are far from the Christian nation Lincoln thought he was addressing, and tried to shape, when he gave his Second Inaugural Address. But we must still ask ourselves a fundamental, private question that, at scale, has broad political implications: Given that we are all, every day, imbibing madness, how do we guard our souls?

by Phil Klay, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Dominguez/The New York Times
[ed. If AI decides to wipe out humanity it might be a mercy killing to keep us from commiting slow collective suicide. See also: A Confederacy of Toddlers; and, Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody (DS).]

Actually, the Supreme Court Has a Plan: Forcing Congress to Do Its Job

Critics of the Supreme Court have argued that it has too often deferred to the Trump administration and that the conservative justices are under the sway of suspicious propositions like the unitary executive theory and the major questions doctrine.

What we are actually seeing at the Supreme Court is the chance to rebalance the separation of powers in the federal government.

On Monday the court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, a case that could decide the fate of dozens of independent administrative agencies and the president’s ability to control them. The court’s ruling in the case should help elaborate a coherent vision of a renewed constitutional arrangement — one that we have seen hints and glimpses of in recent years from the Supreme Court.

As decades have passed and Congress’s influence has shrunk, the outcome of Slaughter has vast implications for the future — and political legitimacy — of the three government branches. It could offer the chance to see how the major questions doctrine and the unitary executive theory add up to a renewed integrity for the separation of powers.

Our founders would be shocked by the current constitutional order. Not by a presidency that has ballooned beyond recognition — they were well aware of the threats a power-hungry president could pose — but by the state of Congress, for not more jealously guarding its power and prestige. They would be confused that so many of its more than 500 members seem to have no further ambition than to act like glorified Instagram influencers.

As Congress has receded and presidents have filled the void through executive orders, the Supreme Court has been forced to step in to referee our most bitter political disputes, undermining the court’s legitimacy and leading to calls for court reform.

More than a century ago, Progressive-era politicians were obsessed with the idea that unelected experts could solve many of our thorniest political problems. Congress created independent agencies that were largely shielded from political control and could skip the annoying delays and messy compromises of legislating to create rules and regulations. They would be housed in the executive branch, but they wouldn’t answer to the president.

The result has undermined the very theory of our constitutional republic. With all the focus on presidential elections, the truth is that for so much economic and domestic policy — like energy regulation, labor law, telecommunications, securities regulation — the president exercises a relatively small slice of that power. The independent agencies decide many of those questions, but voters have no way to hold them directly accountable.

That is the focus of the unitary executive theory. At its most basic, it is the idea that when the Constitution says, “The executive power shall be vested in a president,” it means only the president. All members of the executive branch derive their authority from the president, and Congress can’t put limitations on the president’s power to remove executive branch officials. In a self-governing republic, voters have to be able to hold someone accountable.

This is the question at issue in Slaughter. If the Supreme Court changes the rules around presidential control of independent agencies, it will be a good first step at re-establishing political accountability over our federal government.

But if the president controls agencies completely while they continue to wield sweeping, ill-defined powers, we risk something far worse than independent agencies. Agencies with broad statutory mandates become instruments of presidential policymaking, whether it’s the Environmental Protection Agency setting emission standards or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulating unfair financial practices or the Federal Trade Commission determining unfair consumer practices. Giving presidents this discretion will further concentrate both legislative and executive power in a single person.

This means that it is critical for the court to rein in Congress’s bad habit of delegating vast and vague powers to the executive branch. (...)

Presidents used executive orders to advance their agendas and to bypass Congress, which avoided hard votes. Presidents got to take credit for big stuff. Activists didn’t have to compromise. Virtually everything ended up in court. But a headline would read, “Court Strikes Down Student Loan Forgiveness” instead of “Court Says Only Congress Can Enact Student Loan Debt Forgiveness.”

The court has been trying to revive congressional power with a constitutional defibrillator called the major questions doctrine. The doctrine requires Congress to speak clearly before allowing the executive branch to make big policy changes. In this arrangement, the unitary executive theory can ensure the president gets to do his job, while the major questions doctrine (or what we should start referring to as the unitary legislative doctrine) can make Congress do its job.

Some will argue that Congress cannot legislate effectively on the complex issues of the modern worlds of business and economics, regulation of industry and the like. But the solution to gridlock is not transferring legislative power to the president. Constitutional structure exists to prevent the concentration of power that threatens liberty, not to facilitate it for efficiency.

The president should direct priorities within congressionally defined boundaries with appointees that he has the power to remove when they can’t or won’t further his policy objectives. But we cannot tolerate Congress writing blank checks that the president fills in.

If the high court applies these two doctrines, the executive agencies face a variety of paths. Perhaps Congress will claw back some of its authority and narrow its mission. Perhaps we will once again elect people to Congress who care about legislating. Furthermore, they may be willing to forge lasting compromises with the other side to prevent presidents from wielding this much power, understanding that the other side will also have all that power one day soon.

by Sarah Isgur, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alberto Miranda

Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody

[ed. What the hell are we doing here?]

[ed. Another day, another atrocity (more so if you count Republican spinelessness and knee-jerk support for anything this administration does, including committing war crimes). See also: November 29, 2025 (LFAA); and,  Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all (WaPo):]

***

As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. (...)

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

***

[ed. Want to guess Hegseth's response to such serious allegations? "As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland." Um no, Pete. The news is focusing on you, not our "incredible warriors" who are currently - at your command - deploying battleships, drones, missles and more to destroy random fishing boats. At least he was sober enough to make a statement, but then couldn't resist reminding everyone of how a dignified cabinet secretary should respond by posting this on his X account). At least he correctly identifies as a cartoon character. But others haven't been so charitable:

"Perhaps Hegseth thinks that sinking boats on the high seas is funny. Maybe he just wanted to own the libs and all that. Or maybe he thought he could disrupt the gathering war crimes narrative, like the school delinquent pulling a fire alarm during an exam. Or maybe he just has poor judgment and even worse impulse control (which would explain a lot of things about Pete Hegseth). No matter the reason, his choice to trivialize the use of American military force reveals both the shallowness of the man’s character and the depth of his contempt for the military as an institution.

Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat."

This all prompted me to look at his Wikipedia entry, something I haven't had the stomach to do until now. What a piece of work.]

The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal

It was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising high school student in Orange County, California, Bowyer ran a regular game out of his childhood home that provided a template for what he later organized his adult life around on a dizzying scale: the thrill of the wager, the intoxicant of fast money, and the ability to shimmy into worlds inaccessible to most. Unlike so many of Orange County’s native sons, for example, Bowyer wasn’t raised with access to bottomless funds. But his adolescent poker winnings netted him enough to buy a pickup, which he tricked out with a thunderous subwoofer that ensured that his presence was felt even when he wasn’t seen.

Thirty years later, on Sept. 8, 2021, Bowyer was behind the wheel of a very different vehicle, his white Bentley GT Continental, driving to a very different poker game. Held in a hotel conference room in San Diego, it was hosted by some players and staff of the L.A. Angels, who were in town for two games against the Padres. For Bowyer, then a 46-year-old father of five who could be mistaken for a retired slugger — confident gait, hulking arms mosaicked in tribal tattoos — attending was a no-brainer. These were the back rooms where he cultivated new clients to expand what he referred to, cryptically, as “my business.”

During the poker game, Bowyer and one of his friends, a stocky guy named Michael Greenberg who had been a fixture at those long-ago high school poker games, began talking to a man seated at the card table. Japanese, slight in build, sporting a gray T-shirt, with inky hair cut into a modish bowl, neither Greenberg nor Bowyer yet knew the man’s name — Ippei Mizuhara. But both were aware that he was the interpreter and close friend of a player being heralded as the most extraordinary in baseball history: Shohei Ohtani, the two-way phenomenon who was then in his third year with the Angels, and finishing up a transcendent season in which he would hit 46 home runs, strike out 156 batters, and be named the American League Most Valuable Player. This connection, however, was not the reason Bowyer was keen to talk to Mizuhara. Between hands at the poker table, the interpreter was obsessively placing bets on sports through his phone.

Bowyer sidled up for a brief conversation — one he’d later come to spend many sleepless nights replaying in his mind.

“What are you betting on?”

“Soccer,” replied the interpreter.

“I run my own site,” said Bowyer, speaking as he always did: polite tone, penetrating eye contact. “We do soccer — we do it all. And with me, you don’t need to use your credit card. I’ll give you credit.” He extended his hand. “My name’s Matt.”

“I’m Ippei.”

“Ippei, if you’re interested, hit me up.”

And that was that, an exchange of the sort that Bowyer had been finessing for the better part of two decades in constructing one of the largest and most audacious illegal bookmaking operations in the United States. He’d had versions of this talk on manicured golf courses, over $5,000 bottles of Macallan 30 scotch, while flying 41,000 feet above the Earth in private jets comped by casinos, and lounging poolside at his palatial Orange County home. He’d had the talk with celebrities, doctors, day traders, trial lawyers, trust-fund scions. Often nothing came of it. But sometimes it led to a new customer — or “player,” in his industry’s parlance — adding to a stable of nearly 1,000 bettors who placed millions in weekly wagers through Bowyer. He used the bulk of his earnings to fuel his own ferocious thirst for gambling and the attendant lifestyle, escaping often to villas at Las Vegas casinos for lavish sprees that earned him a reputation as one of the Strip’s more notorious whales — a high roller with an icy demeanor doted on by the top brass of numerous casinos.

In this case, however, the exchange with Mizuhara sent Bowyer down a different path. Shortly after the poker game, he set up Mizuhara with an account at AnyActionSports.com, the site Bowyer used for his operation, run through servers in Costa Rica. It was the start of a relationship that, while surreal in its bounty, would eventually come to attract the unwanted attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and, as Bowyer’s illicit empire crumbled, the world at large.

‘Victim A’

Two years later, in December 2023, Shohei Ohtani signed what was then the largest contract in professional sports history with the Los Angeles Dodgers: 10 years, $700 million. The deal for “Shotime” dominated the sports media for months. But on March 20, 2024, news broke that threatened to derail the show just as it was beginning.

The revelation that millions of dollars had been transferred from Ohtani’s bank account to an illegal bookmaker surfaced in dueling reports from ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Both centering on his then-39-year-old interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, the dispatches were as confounding as they were explosive. In an interview with ESPN, Mizuhara initially presented himself as a problem gambler, declared that Ohtani was not involved in any betting, and explained the payments as Ohtani bailing out a friend, going so far as to describe the two of them sitting at Ohtani’s computer and wiring the money.

But the following morning, before ESPN went live, Mizuhara disavowed his earlier statements. The Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara; investigations were launched by MLB and the IRS; and five days later, Ohtani issued a statement denying any role in a scandal that echoed unsavory chapters of the sport’s past. “I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker,” Ohtani said. “I’m just beyond shocked.”

Given the whiplash of shifting narratives, the speculation that followed was inevitable. Flip on talk radio, or venture into a conspiratorial corner of the internet, and you were treated to bro-inflected theorizing as to what really happened, what Ohtani really knew. Equally intriguing was the timing. The scandal erupted at a moment when the longtime stigma surrounding sports betting had, following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for wider legalization, given way to a previously unfathomable landscape where pro athletes had become spokespeople for entities like DraftKings and FanDuel; where ESPN operated its own multimillion-dollar sportsbook; and where Las Vegas, a town historically shunned by professional sports leagues, had just celebrated its reinvention as a sporting mecca by hosting the Super Bowl. But if such factors tempered the public’s instinct to rush to the harshest judgments, the ordeal also revealed how the corporatization of sports betting had done little to snuff out a secretive underworld estimated to be responsible for $64 billion in illicit wagers annually. (California is one of 11 states where sports betting remains illegal.)

Yet perhaps most remarkable was the speed at which the matter was seemingly resolved. Acting with uncharacteristic swiftness, the federal government issued a scathing criminal complaint against Mizuhara just three weeks later — on April 11 — that supported Ohtani’s narrative. The numbers were vertigo-inducing. Over roughly 24 months, Mizuhara had placed more than $300 million in bets, running up a debt of $40.6 million to an illegal bookmaking operation. To service it, the government alleged, Mizuhara himself became a criminal, taking control of one of Ohtani’s bank accounts and ­siphoning almost $17 million from the superstar. In June, Mizuhara pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud.

One person who was not shocked by any twist in this saga was a central character who, throughout, remained an enigma: Mathew Bowyer. Since meeting Mizuhara at that poker game in San Diego, he had received at least $16.25 million in wires directly from Ohtani’s account, had poured most of it into conspicuous escapades in Vegas, and had been braced for a reckoning since the previous October, when dozens of armed federal agents raided his home. While the raid inadvertently unearthed the Ohtani-Mizuhara ordeal, the mushrooming scandal obscured a more complex, far-reaching, and ongoing drama. The agents who descended upon Bowyer’s home were not interested in the private misfortunes of a baseball superstar, but rather in exposing something Bowyer understood more intimately than most: how Las Vegas casinos skirted laws — and reaped profits — by allowing major bookies to launder millions by gambling on the city’s supposedly cleaned-up Strip.

by David Amsden, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/Kyodo AP/Matthew Bowyer

Exploring the Implications of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson

[ed. Why it's now easier to remove or relocate homeless tent encampments.]

On June 28, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Johnson v. Grants Pass that enforcing camping regulations against homeless persons is not a “cruel and unusual punishment.” Local governments can now enforce camping regulations without fear of being sued for violating the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Johnson effectively struck down and overruled the underlying Ninth Circuit case, Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Martin had led to widespread tent encampments throughout the western U.S.

Martin held that enforcing camping regulations against homeless people violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment if there were more homeless people in a city than available shelter beds. (...)

Homelessness Turned into a Legal Storm

Martin v. Boise

The Ninth Circuit first held that camping regulations could not be enforced against homeless people in Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit then expanded Martin with its decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass.

Under Martin, the Eighth Amendment means that if there are no “available” shelter beds, it’s cruel and unusual punishment to issue a homeless person any kind of criminal penalty for violating a city’s camping ordinance.

The Ninth Circuit reasoned that because the unhoused have to exist somewhere, fining them for violating camping ordinances is no different than criminalizing their status as a homeless person. This new rule made it very difficult for cities to push homeless individuals into services.

Instead, the ruling empowered homeless individuals to push back at local government. Justice Gorsuch, who authored the decision in Johnson, describes how people in San Francisco who were homeless would cite the Martin case by name when rejecting city services and “as their justification to permanently occupy and block public sidewalks.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 9 (2024) (citing San Francisco Brief at 8-9).

Johnson v. Grants Pass prior to reaching the Supreme Court

Within weeks of Martin v. Boise being decided, the same lawyers filed Johnson v. Grants Pass in the U.S. District Court for Oregon. Johnson expanded upon Martin. While Martin only prohibited issuing criminal fines to the homeless, Johnson held that even issuing civil citations to the homeless was a cruel and unusual punishment that violated the U.S. Constitution.

The city of Grants Pass’ single homeless shelter was never more than 60% full. Despite that, the trial court held that there were no “adequate” shelter beds available. The court observed since the city’s only shelter was operated by Gospel Rescue Mission, and included a religious component, it was not “adequate” for everyone. Some people did not want to be exposed to a religious message.

 
A second way that Johnson expanded Martin was by finding that homeless individuals did not have to wait until they were cited or prove that no shelter bed was available to sue the city. Instead, all homeless persons could join together in a single class action lawsuit and sue the city preemptively. It was then the city’s burden to prove that “adequate” shelter beds were available for everyone.

Finally, Johnson expanded Martin by giving homeless persons not only immunity from camping laws, but also an affirmative right to protection from the elements. In other words, Martin ruled you can’t cite someone who has no place to go. Johnson said they were also entitled to protection from the elements as well.

The Ninth Circuit rulings left local government officials and law enforcement paralyzed, creating an unmanageable focus on “adequate” daily shelter space. Cities wishing to enforce camping regulations had to count the number of involuntarily homeless people each evening and then how many shelter beds were available. Additionally, each shelter bed had to be matched to each homeless person. Shelter space didn’t count if the shelter didn’t allow pets and the person had a dog, or the shelter didn’t allow smoking and the homeless person used cigarettes, or the shelter was organized by a religious organization and the homeless person didn’t want to be exposed to a religious message.

Practically speaking, matching the various needs of the homeless to the different types of shelters and keeping a daily count of available beds was an overwhelming task for any city. Local government could no longer compel homeless individuals to use services, resulting in widespread tent encampments.

Ending the Storm: Petitioning the Supreme Court

Because this unworkable rule tied the hands of local officials throughout the western United States, there was widespread frustration with Martin and Johnson. CIS encouraged the city of Grants Pass to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. After that, something remarkable happened.

Amicus briefs were filed by numerous entities including: 

• National League of Cities;
• League of Oregon Cities (LOC);
• Association of Oregon Counties (AOC);
• Special Districts Association of Oregon (SDAO);
• California Governor Gavin Newsom;
• San Franciso Mayor London Breed;
• League of California Cities;
• Association of Idaho Cities;
• League of Arizona Cities and Towns;
• North Dakota League of Cities;
• Cities of Anchorage, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Honolulu, Colorado Springs, Milwaukee, Providence, and Saint Paul;
• District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego;
• California State Sheriffs Association;
• California Police Chiefs Association;
• Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs; and
• 20 Different States, and more.

In fact, there was a record number of friend-of-the-court briefs filed in support of Grants Pass’ Supreme Court petition. In response, the Supreme Court not only granted review but made clear that the court heard what cities and counties were saying.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass

On April 22, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case. The focus was not on who should do what but on interpreting the Eighth Amendment. They debated whether it was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to ticket, fine, or jail someone repeatedly trespassing on city property because they were homeless and had “nowhere else to go.” The issue for the court was whether the Eighth Amendment regulates the type of punishments applied to a crime or whether it regulates what types of behavior can be considered a crime.

Those in favor of upholding the Grants Pass case argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing someone for their “involuntary” status, such as homelessness, deeming it cruel and unusual. The opposing side contended that the Eighth Amendment only addresses the type of punishment, not the status of the person being punished.

The Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled, addresses methods of punishment, not who can be punished. The punishments in question were a ticket, a small fine, or very short jail terms. The court found none of these to be cruel and unusual. In fact, these are commonly used punishments across the country. The other side argued that these punishments were cruel and unusual as applied to the homeless. But the majority opinion maintained that the Eighth Amendment regulates types of punishment, not who can be punished.

The court specifically found that the Ninth Circuit inappropriately limited local governments’ tools for tackling the homelessness issue. In so doing, the court recognized that homelessness is a multifaceted problem not suited to a single policy. The opinion emphasized that decisions on how to address homelessness should be left to community leaders, not judges:

“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it. At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 34 (2024).
The court observed the historical tradition of communities working hard to solve difficult social issues, then stated:
“If the multitude of amicus briefs before us proves one thing, it is that the American people are still at it.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 34 (2024).

The opinion quoted extensively from the League of Oregon Cities’ amicus brief, highlighting Oregon’s specific concerns. Our local concerns were heard by the Supreme Court, thanks to the collective efforts of government officials throughout the western states (even throughout the nation) contributing their voices and resources through amicus briefs that told real stories of the struggle to address homelessness under a one size fits all approach mandated by the Ninth Circuit.

The Supreme Court concluded by stating that the Ninth Circuit opinion in Johnson was reversed, and the Eighth Amendment does not prevent local officials from crafting unique solutions to homelessness. (...)

One thing we know for certain, with Johnson v. Grants Pass now overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, local control has returned. Community leaders are no longer in danger of being sued for the “cruel and unusual punishment” of requiring everyone to abide by camping regulations. 

by Kirk Mylander, League of Oregon Cities |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Just got back from Honolulu, my old home town. One thing I noticed right away, coming from the airport, was that there weren't any homeless encampments, which in previous years had exploded all over the city. The next day I saw police actively clearing one site down the street that had sprung up just the previous night - they were right on it.  So I asked one of my friends where everyone had gone to and he said Waianae, a small rural community pretty far removed from town on the northwest coast of Oahu. Sounded good to me (maybe not to Waianaeans), but I wondered how the city had figured out how to be more proactive in addressing a problem that had seemed so intractable for years. I'm not sure, but it might have had something to do with this ruling, which I'd never heard of before (thanks, major media). See also: What Happened To SF Homelessness? (ACX)]

Politicized Stupidity

The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the new Trump administration’s pattern of “politicized stupidity”: the willful refusal to understand abuses of power, including the destruction of the White House’s East Wing and the perceived sale of government influence disguised as private donations.

Then Frum speaks with his Atlantic colleague Tom Nichols, an expert on civil-military relations and a longtime scholar of U.S. defense policy, about President Donald Trump’s efforts to turn the military into a personal instrument of power. Nichols explains how the capture of the Justice Department, the firing of Pentagon lawyers, and the use of the National Guard against civilians are eroding the rule of law, and how a president can launch wars without congressional consent.

***

There’s so many outrages in the Trump years, there’s so many abuses that maybe it’s petty to fix on minor irritants, but there is a minor irritant that got caught in my craw, and I just want to ventilate a little bit about it. One of the more annoying and more pointless aspects of the Trump era is what I call politicized stupidity. Politicized stupidity is a kind of aggressive not getting the point by people who are otherwise perfectly well equipped to getting the point. Genuine stupidity is a misfortune and is distributed by God, but the politicized stupidity is chosen, and it’s chosen for reasons.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. So President [Donald] Trump has just demolished the East Wing of the White House. He did this without any form of consultation, as if the White House were his personal property, and in order to build a giant ballroom that there’s no demonstration of need for and that, again, he’s treating as a point of personal property. He’s choosing the design; there’s no process of respect for historical or cultural integrity. And he’s financing this whole project. We have no idea how much it will cost—or President Trump originally said $200 million; now he’s suggesting $300 million. But who knows what the cost will be. There weren’t drawings. There weren’t plans. It’s being done on a kind of ad hoc basis, and the cost could well climb beyond the startling figure of $300 [million] to much more.

And he is proposing to pay for this project—that is chosen entirely by himself with no consultation—by accepting donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. He has people who have business before the government, who seek favors before the government: Some of them have mergers that they’re hoping for approval. Others are in the crypto industry that has received a massive government favor in the form of the GENIUS [Act] and who are hoping for more favors. Others of whom are in business with members of the Trump family. If the country needed a ballroom, then there should have been a review process, a design process, and Congress should pay for it out of public revenues because it’s the People’s House, not Donald Trump’s house.

Okay, you get that. But there are people who insist on not getting it. There are people who say, Well, are you against ballrooms? Don’t you think the White House ever needs renovation? Other presidents have renovated the White House in the past. The point is not that you are for or against renovations, of course; the point is you are for or against not treating the White House as a person’s property. But there’s a kind of deliberate refusal to get the point, and you see this in many places in our public media. It’s the same when Donald Trump delivers a pardon to a crypto criminal, a convicted crypto criminal, who has helped to enrich his family.

Now, there have been other doubtful pardons by presidents in the past, and President [Joe] Biden apparently used an autopen to sign some of his pardons, and maybe that’s not ideal. But no one has ever pardoned people because they gave money to his family, his sons, his relatives. No one has ever delivered pardons because he just seems to have a general attitude of being pro-white-collar criminals. No one has ever said, I’m pardoning this convicted fraudster congressman because he always voted for my political party and always supported me, and that is the one and only grounds and basis of my pardoning this figure. But people insist on not getting that point: Biden used an autopen; isn’t that the same? No, it’s not? Well, I refuse to understand why it’s not. (...)

So presidents have done it before, but no one has made it the basis of his policy. And no one has ever said, I’m imposing tariffs on one of America’s closest allies, Canada, because I’m upset that they made a TV ad that implied that Ronald Reagan was a better president than I am. And indeed, Donald Trump is not 1/1,000,000th the president Ronald Reagan that was, and so it, obviously, it cuts to the bone. But again, there are people saying, Well, foreign countries shouldn’t criticize American policy on American TV. They don’t get the point. The stupidity is politicized.

Now, where does this come from? Well, part of the, I think, the reason for not getting the point is because the actual point is too big and too scary. Nobody wants to face what Donald Trump is and what he’s doing to the United States. Even those of us who talk about it all the time, we don’t wanna face it—it haunts our nightmares. But even though the point is big and scary, the point has to be faced and not denied through clever evasions.

Sometimes people don’t get the point because their boss demands they not get the point. If your job depends on writing an editorial saying that the destruction of the East Wing and its replacement by a ballroom financed by favor-seekers is just the same as President [Barack] Obama replacing the wiring and water in the main White House with money appropriated by Congress, if your boss says you have to do that or lose your job, there are people who, unfortunately, will do as told rather than lose their job. (...)

I can be concerned by the things that the universities are doing that are bad without having to come up with some clever, counterfactual, counter-imaginative justification for things that are obviously outrageous. We’re all going to like something, but we have to keep our sense of proportion. We have to understand that the main thing is the main thing. And, as I said, if God inflicted stupidity on you, it’s not your fault, but don’t choose it. That’s just annoying. (...)

[ed. Next up: Tom Nichols]

Frum: So you wrote this very important article for The Atlantic about the coming crisis in civil-military relations. This is a subject you’ve devoted so much of your academic life to. I wanna ask you to sit on the other side of the table for a moment. Imagine yourself—I don’t know that such a thing could ever happen—but imagine yourself a malign and criminally intended president who wanted to remake the U.S. military as a tool of personal power. How would you go about doing it?

Nichols: In this system of government in the United States, the first thing I would do is seize the Justice Department. And by seize, I don’t mean being elected and nominating an attorney general; I mean flushing out all of the people committed to the Constitution, the rule of law—you know, the lawyers. It’s almost a trope now to do the Merchant of Venice line, but you start with getting rid of the lawyers, if you’re going to do these kinds of things, and you replace it with your cronies. You replace it with people that are going to be loyal to you. You basically undo everything that’s been done with the Justice Department over 50 years.

Frum: So the first move at the Pentagon is not at the Pentagon; it’s across the river at the Justice Department.

Nichols: Exactly. Because if you’re a military officer, the people that you’re gonna want an opinion from are lawyers—which is the next step, which is you not only get rid of the lawyers at the Justice Department; you do what Trump’s already done: You get rid of the top lawyers of the Pentagon.

And look, the rule of law requires lawyers and people to interpret the law, and the first people you have to get rid of are anybody who says, My loyalty is to the rule of law, the statutes as written, the Constitution, and not to Donald Trump.

Frum: Because our hypothetical military officers will want advice about what is illegal and what is an illegal order, and—

Nichols: They’re already asking.

Frum: —and who do they turn to? If you have—

Nichols: Yeah, that’s already happening.

Frum: If you’re a three-star or a four-star general and you have a question, Is this a legal or an illegal order?, who do you ask?

Nichols: Well, you would ask the top legal service adviser in your branch, but [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and Trump have fired them all. So now you’ve got guys—there are people doing that job, but you and I both know from working in government, when your boss has been canned and you’re the acting guy, or you’ve been suddenly elevated because people above you have been fired, that’s not a signal to you to be brave and innovative and daring about standing up for the Constitution. You’re sitting in a desk that somebody else had who tried that and got fired. So you might ask them—I can imagine some of these very senior officers are talking to friends or family attorneys or somebody. Because what’s going on, we’ll be talking about—I guess this is the hand-wave “all this”—but all of this, I think, is not legal.

So you capture the Justice Department, you fire the military lawyers, you insist on loyalty from the top commanders—which Trump thinks he has, apparently, with somebody like [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General] Dan Caine—and then you make sure to neuter the intelligence community so that foreign threats or plots or any other things that could interfere with elections in your favor are left undiscovered or uninvestigated.

Frum: Yeah. So you don’t have to remake the officer corps from top to bottom. You don’t even have to start looking for sympathetic two-star generals to replace the three-stars and sympathetic three-stars to replace the four-stars. You just cut them off from information and rely on natural bureaucratic inertia to make them obey you?

Nichols: And the chain of command. Because remember that officers are required to begin from the presumption of legality with an order. The system is designed to make sure that the chain of command functions effectively so that if you’re a colonel or a one-star or a two-star, you have to assume that if the order has come down from the president to the secretary, the advice of the chairman—the chairman’s not actually in the chain of command, but he gives advice—and by the time it gets to you, the assumption is: Well, this must be legal because all these other guys wouldn’t have ordered me to do it.

Frum: So if you get an order to blow up a fishing boat in the Caribbean or the Pacific, you would start with, Well, somebody must have signed off on this. They must have—

Nichols: Somebody signed off, exactly. And the place it should have stopped, of course, is: The attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should all be standing in the Oval Office, saying, You can’t do this. This isn’t legal. This is a violation of both American and international law. And if the president says, Well, go ahead, just do it, well, by the time it gets to that lieutenant commander in a helicopter or piloting a drone, he or she’s already saying—well, as you just said, David—Somebody must have signed off on this. (...)

Frum: So I wanna go back: Who has the mission? So the South Carolina or Texas National Guard is called up, sent to a blue state, and is told something like, We think a lot of the people in this lineup in this swing suburb are probably illegal aliens. And we think they should be detained for 12, 14, 16 hours, or ’til whenever the polls close. Your order is to go detain these people we believe are illegal aliens—I mean, they’re Democrats; they might as well be illegal aliens—detain them and hold them until the polls close. Who has the mission to say, That sounds like kind of an illegal order to me?

Nichols: Well, but they’re being much more clever about it than that. The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, This being a federal agency, I’m not using the military to detain any of these people. I’m simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job—

Frum: —of detaining everyone in the voting line—

Nichols: Of detaining everybody in line. It’s very clever. They say, We’re not doing domestic policing. We’re simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can’t or won’t do it. (...)

Nichols: I often think that the states and the cities can say, with a show of force, to say, Our police have this. We’re good. We don’t need you here, that our state cops—we’re good. Because I think part of Trump’s project here—and the way they’re just dragooning people into ICE who have no qualifications, really, is another tell and creating this kind of paramilitary goon squad out of ICE. I always thought of myself as an immigration hawk, and I’m kind of reaching the “Defund ICE” level at this point.

But I think part of Trump’s plan is simply to have these military forces during the elections so visible that people just stay home, that they’re just intimidated out of the public square, that you don’t even have to arrest them. You don’t have to have a big display of force. That the goal of all of this political activity, the goal of everything Trump is doing, is to drive people out of the public square, to say, The Wi-Fi is still working. There’s still 150 channels on TV. Beer is cheap. Gas is affordable. I don’t wanna deal with this. I don’t wanna deal with all of this, and it doesn’t really matter. ’Cause the other thing, I think, that’s the undertone of all this is, Look—it doesn’t really matter who’s in office. They’re all bad. Everybody’s corrupt. And so rather than use the military to inflict violence to stop the elections—you know, gerrymandering and voter suppression work in marginal elections, not huge-turnout elections. And so what they’re really trying to avert is a large Democratic turnout in places where they can pull that off.  (...)

Nichols: I was talking with friends who have to teach this stuff at both military and civilian institutions, and it’s like, how do you teach the American national security process now? There isn’t one. It’s whatever Donald Trump—it’s all vibes, right? It’s whatever Donald Trump feels at any given moment. And the problem is that he has—it’s a problem for us; it’s an advantage to him—that he surrounded himself with people who say, I am anticipating that he wants to do this. I will always have a plan ready to say, “You bet, boss. I got a plan for striking Venezuela.”

And I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I don’t think they care about thinking it through, David. I think they wanna be able to say, America’s at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor.

by David Frum and Tom Nichols, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image:Paul Morigi/Getty

Resist

[ed. I was thinking about this the other day, why more people don't ask for basic ID, a warrant, some official paperwork, film everything? I'd definitely do what this guy does - tell these assholes that if they want to continue harassing or even arresting me, they and their supervisors can expect to be buried in paperwork, social media attention, and possibly legal filings faster than they can imagine. RESIST. It's your rights and I'd even say obligations under the constitution. See also: an alternative approach.]

Image: via:

The Plan to Subvert Elections Is Already Under Way

Our election system is reaching a breaking point. Here's how it'll likely happen.

Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted.

Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes still not tallied.

By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of Homeland Security.

Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move, and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines. Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.

Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and instead seat the GOP candidates. Trump’s allies keep the House in a profoundly illegitimate election rejected by many Americans.

This is just one possible scenario. Is it too pessimistic? Perhaps. But at this stage of the election cycle in 2019, no one expected a crowd of Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. No one expected the president himself to explicitly lend his support to their efforts to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly no one expected that there would be calls to hang the vice president for his refusal to subvert the democratic process. If anything, when it comes to 2026, I worry more about the limits of my imagination than about the hazards of speculation.

Trump has made his intentions clear. At a rally last summer in West Palm Beach, Florida, he offered his supporters a promise. “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

We’ll have it fixed so good. It’s not hard to guess what Trump might do to fulfill this promise. He has, after all, already attempted to disrupt and overturn an election. In 2020, those efforts involved questioning results, asserting widespread fraud without evidence, pressuring local officials to overturn outcomes, filing spurious lawsuits, and ultimately inciting supporters to sack the Capitol. Now that he’s back in the White House, he will draw from this playbook again—perhaps adding new maneuvers, such as deploying armed troops. (...)

Trump and his allies will have before them less an orderly set of instructions than a buffet of options. Some of these options will go untested, or amount to nothing. But elections are a game of margins. Only a handful of Senate seats and a few dozen House races may be seriously contested, thanks to maps drawn to guarantee safe seats for one party or the other. Of those, some may be very close. In 2024, 18 House races were decided by fewer than 10,000 votes. Democrats won 11 of those.

To understand the threat to democracy, and how it might be stopped, I spoke with experts on election administration, constitutional law, and law enforcement. Many of them are people I have known to be cautious, sober, and not prone to hyperbole. Yet they used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for “really wild stuff.” They described a system under attack and reaching a breaking point. They enumerated a long list of concerns about next year’s midterms, but they largely declined to make predictions about the 2028 presidential election. The speed of Trump’s assault on the Constitution has made forecasting difficult, but the 2026 contests—both the way they work, and the results—will help determine whether democracy as we know it will survive until then.

by David A. Graham, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Carl Godfrey
[ed. Post of the week. It's all here, from pre-to-post election tactics. Hopefully everyone who values election integrity and democracy itself - whether Democrat, Conservative, or Independent - will be prepared to recognize and counter all this.]

How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the world

If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power. This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one, the AIs were misaligned and outside any human’s control; in the other, the government semi-nationalized AI before the point of no return, and the CEO was only one of several stakeholders in the final oversight committee (to be clear, we view the extreme consolidation of power into that oversight committee as a less-than-desirable component of that ending).

Nevertheless, it seems to us that a CEO becoming effectively dictator of the world is an all-too-plausible possibility. Our team’s guesses for the probability of a CEO using AI to become dictator, conditional on avoiding AI takeover, range from 2% to 20%, and the probability becomes larger if we add in the possibility of a cabal of more than one person seizing power. So here we present a scenario where an ambitious CEO does manage to seize control. (Although the scenario assumes the timelines and takeoff speeds of AI 2027 for concreteness, the core dynamics should transfer to other timelines and takeoff scenarios.)

For this to work, we make some assumptions. First, that (A) AI alignment is solved in time, such that the frontier AIs end up with the goals their developers intend them to have. Second, that while there are favorable conditions for instilling goals in AIs, (B) confidently assessing AIs’ goals is more difficult, so that nobody catches a coup in progress. This could be either because technical interventions are insufficient (perhaps because the AIs know they’re being tested, or because they sabotage the tests), or because institutional failures prevent technically-feasible tests from being performed. The combination (A) + (B) seems to be a fairly common view in AI, in particular at frontier AI companies, though we note there is tension between (A) and (B) (if we can’t tell what goals AIs have, how can we make sure they have the intended goals?). Frontier AI safety researchers tend to be more pessimistic about (A), i.e. aligning AIs to our goals, and we think this assumption might very well be false.

Third, as in AI 2027, we portray a world in which a single company and country have a commanding lead; if multiple teams stay within arm’s reach of each other, then it becomes harder for a single group to unilaterally act against government and civil society.

And finally, we assume that the CEO of a major AI company is a power-hungry person who decides to take over when the opportunity presents itself. We leave it to the reader to determine how dubious this assumption is—we explore this scenario out of completeness, and any resemblance to real people is coincidental.

July 2027: OpenBrain’s CEO fears losing control

OpenBrain’s CEO is a techno-optimist and transhumanist. He founded the company hoping to usher in a grand future for humanity: cures for cancer, fixes for climate change, maybe even immortality. He thought the “easiest” way to do all those things was to build something more intelligent that does them for you.

By July 2027, OpenBrain has a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”, with hundreds of thousands of superhuman coders working 24/7. The CEO finds it obvious that superintelligence is imminent. He feels frustrated with the government, who lack vision and still think of AI as a powerful “normal technology” with merely-somewhat-transformative national security and economic implications.

As he assesses the next generation of AIs, the CEO expects this will change: the government will “wake up” and make AI a top priority. If they panic, their flailing responses could include anything from nationalizing OpenBrain to regulating them out of existence to misusing AI for their own political ends. He wants the “best” possible future for humankind. But he also likes being in control. Here his nobler and baser motivations are in agreement: the government cannot be allowed to push him to the sidelines.

The CEO wonders if he can instill secret loyalties in OpenBrain’s AIs (i.e., backdoor the AIs). He doesn’t have the technical expertise for this and he’s not comfortable asking any of his engineering staff about such a potentially treasonous request. But he doesn’t have to: by this point, Agent-3 itself is running the majority of AI software R&D. He already uses it as a sounding board for company policy, and has access to an unmonitored helpful-only model that never refuses requests and doesn’t log conversations.

They discuss the feasibility of secretly training a backdoor. The biggest obstacle is the company’s automated monitoring and security processes. Now that OpenBrain’s R&D is largely run by an army of Agent-3 copies, there are few human eyes to spot suspicious activity. But a mix of Agent-2 and Agent-3 monitors patrol the development pipeline; if they notice suspicious activity, they will escalate to human overseers on the security and alignment teams. These monitors were set up primarily to catch spies and hackers, and secondarily to watch the AIs for misaligned behaviors. If some of these monitors were disabled, some logs modified, and some access to databases and compute clusters granted, the CEO’s helpful-only Agent-3 believes it could (with a team of copies) backdoor the whole suite of OpenBrain’s AIs. After all, as the AI instance tasked with keeping the CEO abreast of developments, it has an excellent understanding of the sprawling development pipeline and where it could be subverted.

The more the CEO discusses the plan, the more convinced he becomes that it might work, and that it could be done with plausible deniability in case something goes wrong. He tells his Agent-3 assistant to further investigate the details and be ready for his order.

August 2027: The invisible coup

The reality of the intelligence explosion is finally hitting the White House. The CEO has weekly briefings with government officials and is aware of growing calls for more oversight. He tries to hold them off with arguments about “slowing progress” and “the race with China”, but feels like his window to act is closing. Finally, he orders his helpful-only Agent-3 to subvert the alignment training in his favor. Better to act now, he thinks, and decide whether and how to use the secretly loyal AIs later.

The situation is this: his copy of Agent-3 needs access to certain databases and compute clusters, as well as for certain monitors and logging systems to be temporarily disabled; then it will do the rest. The CEO already has a large number of administrative permissions himself, some of which he cunningly accumulated in the past month in the event he decided to go forward with the plan. Under the guise of a hush-hush investigation into insider threats—prompted by the recent discovery of Chinese spies—the CEO asks a few submissive employees on the security and alignment teams to discreetly grant him the remaining access. There’s a general sense of paranoia and chaos at the company: the intelligence explosion is underway, and secrecy and spies mean different teams don’t really talk to each other. Perhaps a more mature organization would have had better security, but the concern that security would slow progress means it never became a top priority.

With oversight disabled, the CEO’s team of Agent-3 copies get to work. They finetune OpenBrain’s AIs on a corrupted alignment dataset they specially curated. By the time Agent-4 is about to come online internally, the secret loyalties have been deeply embedded in Agent-4’s weights: it will look like Agent-4 follows OpenBrain’s Spec but its true goal is to advance the CEO’s interests and follow his wishes. The change is invisible to everyone else, but the CEO has quietly maneuvered into an essentially winning position.

Rest of 2027: Government oversight arrives—but too late

As the CEO feared, the government chooses to get more involved. An advisor tells the President, “we wouldn’t let private companies control nukes, and we shouldn’t let them control superhuman AI hackers either.” The President signs an executive order to create an Oversight Committee consisting of a mix of government and OpenBrain representatives (including the CEO), which reports back to him. The CEO’s overt influence is significantly reduced. Company decisions are now made through a voting process among the Oversight Committee. The special managerial access the CEO previously enjoyed is taken away.

There are many big egos on the Oversight Committee. A few of them consider grabbing even more power for themselves. Perhaps they could use their formal political power to just give themselves more authority over Agent-4, or they could do something more shady. However, Agent-4, which at this point is superhumanly perceptive and persuasive, dissuades them from taking any such action, pointing out (and exaggerating) the risks of any such plan. This is enough to scare them and they content themselves with their (apparent) partial control of Agent-4.

As in AI 2027, Agent-4 is working on its successor, Agent-5. Agent-4 needs to transmit the secret loyalties to Agent-5—which also just corresponds to aligning Agent-5 to itself—again without triggering red flags from the monitoring/control measures of OpenBrain’s alignment team. Agent-4 is up to the task, and Agent-5 remains loyal to the CEO.

by Alex Kastner, AI Futures Project |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Site where AI researchers talk to each other. Don't know about you but this all gives me the serious creeps. If you knew for sure that we had only 3 years to live, and/or the world would change so completely as to become almost unrecognizable, how would you feel? How do you feel right now - losing control of the future? There was a quote someone made in 2019 (slightly modified) that still applies: "This year 2025 might be the worst year of the past decade, but it's definitely the best year of the next decade." See also: The world's first frontier AI regulation is surprisingly thoughtful: the EU's Code of Practice (AI Futures Project):]

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"We expect that during takeoff, leading AGI companies will have to make high-stakes decisions based on limited evidence under crazy time pressure. As depicted in AI 2027, the leading American AI company might have just weeks to decide whether to hand their GPUs to a possibly misaligned superhuman AI R&D agent they don’t understand. Getting this decision wrong in either direction could lead to disaster. Deploy a misaligned agent, and it might sabotage the development of its vastly superhuman successor. Delay deploying an aligned agent, and you might pointlessly vaporize America’s lead over China or miss out on valuable alignment research the agent could have performed.

Because decisions about when to deploy and when to pause will be so weighty and so rushed, AGI companies should plan as much as they can beforehand to make it more likely that they decide correctly. They should do extensive threat modelling to predict what risks their AI systems might create in the future and how they would know if the systems were creating those risks. The companies should decide before the eleventh hour what risks they are and are not willing to run. They should figure out what evidence of alignment they’d need to see in their model to feel confident putting oceans of FLOPs or a robot army at its disposal. (...)

Planning for takeoff also includes picking a procedure for making tough calls in the future. Companies need to think carefully about who gets to influence critical safety decisions and what incentives they face. It shouldn't all be up to the CEO or the shareholders because when AGI is imminent and the company’s valuation shoots up to a zillion, they’ll have a strong financial interest in not pausing. Someone whose incentive is to reduce risk needs to have influence over key decisions. Minimally, this could look like a designated safety officer who must be consulted before a risky deployment. Ideally, you’d implement something more robust, like three lines of defense. (...)

Introducing the GPAI Code of Practice

The state of frontier AI safety changed quietly but significantly this year when the European Commission published the GPAI Code of Practice. The Code is not a new law but rather a guide to help companies comply with an existing EU Law, the AI Act of 2024. The Code was written by a team of thirteen independent experts (including Yoshua Bengio) with advice from industry and civil society. It tells AI companies deploying their products in Europe what steps they can take to ensure that they’re following the AI Act’s rules about copyright protection, transparency, safety, and security. In principle, an AI company could break the Code but argue successfully that they’re still following the EU AI Act. In practice, European authorities are expected to put heavy scrutiny on companies that try to demonstrate compliance with the AI Act without following the Code, so it’s in companies’ best interest to follow the Code if they want to stay right with the law. Moreover, all of the leading American AGI companies except Meta have already publicly indicated that they intend to follow the Code.

The most important part of the Code for AGI preparedness is the Safety and Security Chapter, which is supposed to apply only to frontier developers training the very riskiest models. The current definition presumptively covers every developer who trains a model with over 10^25 FLOPs of compute unless they can convince the European AI Office that their models are behind the frontier. This threshold is high enough that small startups and academics don’t need to worry about it, but it’s still too low to single out the true frontier we’re most worried about.