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Talk of ‘pre-emptive pardons’ sets the stage for Trump to drain the Washington swamp
President-Elect Donald Trump reacts during his meeting with Prince William, Prince of Wales at the Embassy of the United Kingdom’s Residence on December 7, 2024, in Paris, France
From LifeSiteNews
Once you understand how Donald Trump is assembling his White House and once you accept the mission of the DC system to defend itself by isolating a weak spot in the mechanism, then the assembly of cabinet based on loyalty makes sense.
Any time the professional leftists lose anything, they immediately become victims. Whether defeated in the battle of ideas (retreat to safe spaces), defeated in the field of pop culture, or even defeated linguistically through debate (words are violence). Whenever the professional left loses, they immediately become victims. It’s what they do.
The professional political left, newest version from the Chicago spawn of Dohrn/Ayers, has been waging full combat lawfare via a weaponized government for the past 16 years. However, Obama/Plouffe were defeated, “their kind” rose again and won the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
What we see in this “pre-emptive pardon” narrative, is a repeat of the victim narrative. This time the White House discussion boils down to “lawfare agents must be protected from any retaliation for their action.” Pardons presumably provide the mechanism to protect the victims. In the big picture of ideology, this is a continuation of the same mindset.
Politico started the narrative with an outline saying the White House was having an internal debate as to whether Joe Biden should pre-emptively issue pardons to members of the January 6 committee, members who constructed false impeachment accusations, members within the DOJ who fabricated political cases using the special counsel process, or generally people on the political left who supported/facilitated all the aforementioned false attack fronts.
As the narrative is told, all those who supported the attacks against President-Elect Donald Trump and his allies now need to be protected from “retribution.” Inherent in the argument, and within the use of pardons, is the baseline that some form of illegal activity was taking place. Heck, if it wasn’t unlawful conduct, then no pardon would be needed. This is the political catch-22 created by the pre-emptive pardon narrative.
Various congressional people, DOJ insiders, White House liaisons, State Department officials and underling staff are all possible recipients if Joe Biden decides to take this unprecedented approach. However, if you look at the expressed approach indicated by Trump and the assembly of cabinet members who would be in place to carry out such “retribution,” you will not find any indication of intent. Quite the opposite is true.
Trump does not appear to be in alignment with any approach that would lead to legal indictments, arrests, charges or other legal accountability measures. Beyond the public release of hidden, perhaps classified information that might put sunlight on the previous activity by those who weaponized their offices, there is nothing. Sunlight on prior events, while moving forward to restore functioning law and order, appears to be the most likely approach. From Politico:
… White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them.
The deliberations touch on pardoning those currently in office, elected and appointed, as well as former officials who’ve angered Trump and his loyalists.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broad.
In addition to their professional victim approach, the one constant with the Marxist left is their use of projection. They weaponized government, so they anticipate the target of their weaponization efforts, Donald Trump, will return fire in kind. Again, I highly doubt it.
All outward indications are that Trump wants to create a legacy presidency for the Gen-Z generation (Barron), similar to what was created by Ronald Reagan for the Gen-X generation. Selecting Susie Wiles as chief of staff is the strongest indication of this intent.
The appointments to White House legal counsel positions and main justice legal offices by Trump all appear to have one common denominator: to protect the president. I strongly doubt there will be any effort beyond that.
Big picture
Once you understand what Trump is assembling (the phalanx) and once you accept the mission of the D.C. system to defend itself by isolating a weak spot in the mechanism, then everything from the assembly of the cabinet to the process being discussed makes sense.
Within a phalanx, if one shield drops the entire construct is compromised. The strongest shields need to surround the core with ferocity.
The recent Supreme Court decision affirmed the president of the United States as the unitary, plenary power that controls every mechanism of the executive branch of government, and as long as the president is acting within his “official duty” he holds absolute power and absolute immunity.
Think of each cabinet member as a shield in this political phalanx that surrounds the weapon, Trump.
Yes, the phalanx is by construct an offensive fortification used to advance upon the enemy. However, the strength of the phalanx is its ability to be impervious to attack from 360°.
The phalanx advances, inch by inch, against a larger fortification. In the transition team assembly, this is what Trump is putting together.
Hegseth is a key component of the phalanx, the fortification process that puts Trump at the center of the cabinet. Each component of the cabinet protecting the center.
The phalanx is the mechanism to carry the weapon that is President Donald Trump. The D.C. UniParty is looking for a weakness in the phalanx, like a wolf circling a porcupine.
Trump has turned his focus to the “war fighters,” the men and women who carry out the mission objective of the Defense Department. The nomination of Pete Hegseth represents the confrontation of a power struggle that has been decades in making.
The self-serving senators are trying to block Hegseth, while maintaining a position of pretending support for Trump. The DeceptiCon republicans in the Senate are in full circling mode, looking for a weakness to exploit.
The schemes of the conniving Republican senators are transparently visible in the efforts of Senator Joni Ernst, who is circling the phalanx Trump is creating – while simultaneously inserting herself into the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) mission.
Ernst is doing Mitch McConnell’s work, under instruction from John Thune and Mitch. See Ernst with clear eyes.
One does not become unattached to corrupt intent.
Clear eyes!
I did not think President-elect Trump had the accurate laser vision for the task.
I was getting concerned.
Then I saw the very specific wording of this:
The McGinley move makes a lot of sense. DOGE and the Office of Management and Budgets (OMB) are going to be joined at the hip. They are going to have to navigate the Impoundment Control Act, challenging the system that places limits on a president’s ability to unilaterally withhold funding.
Inside that legal battle, deciding what DOGE can do without legislative approval, the OMB is going to be the execution part. McGinley will be the legal liaison focused on what technical approaches DOGE/OMB can execute. In essence, can they stop funding XX, thereby eliminating it?
That said, that’s not the important part.
The language Trump is using to describe the role of David A. Warrington, the switched White House counsel, is something entirely new.
Donald Trump says: “to serve as Assistant to the President and Counsel to the President. Dave will lead the Office of White House Counsel and serve as the top attorney in the White House.”
Normally the White House counsel does not represent the interests of the president, the WHC represents the interests of the office.
It would appear to me, at least as I review the details, that Trump is now fully aware how his presidential interests can sometimes conflict with the interests of the White House counsel, and he is making a move to ensure that conflict doesn’t happen.
An example of the conflict I have explained repeatedly in the “declassification of information.”
Not kidding, it is almost as if someone very close to Trump read something I previously outlined, because it came with a serious warning borne out of years of frustration:
In Term-1 the IC message to the WH Counsel was that if Donald Trump declassified any documents, they would use the DOJ (special counsel weapon) to attack the office of the president for “obstructing justice.” The WHC was fraught with fear over what would happen and demanded that POTUS Trump stop trying to declassify information/documents the IC didn’t support.
The way Trump is now portraying the role of the White House counsel is to represent his interests first and foremost, then represent the interests of the office. In a few subtle, and not so subtle ways, this makes sense.
We can tell by the nominations to attorney general, deputy attorney general, and assistant attorney general-national security division, that main justice is already positioned to defend and protect Donald Trump. The people in charge of the silo are all loyalty-first people, aligned in the interests of Trump.
It would appear that Trump is now bringing that same outlook into the White House. The White House counsel aligning in common purpose, with the specific purpose of executing the intentions of President Donald Trump.
I’m glad to see this approach, because as I have repeatedly affirmed, only President Trump (the person) can confront the silo system in Washington, D.C.
That’s why the phalanx makes sense.
Reprinted with permission from Conservative Treehouse.
Europe calls it transparency, but it looks a lot like teaching the internet who’s allowed to speak.
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When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”
They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.
The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.
It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.
The first target is Elon Musk’s X, and the list of alleged violations look less like user safety concerns and more like a blueprint for controlling who gets heard, who gets trusted, and who gets to talk back.
The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.
None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.
Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.
The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.
The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.
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However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.
The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.
Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.
Under the new X rules, everyone is on a level playing field.
Government officials and agencies now sport gray badges, symbols of credibility that can’t be purchased. These are the state’s chosen voices, publicly marked as incorruptible. To the EU, that should be a safeguard.
The second and third violations show how “transparency” doubles as a surveillance mechanism. X was fined for limiting access to advertising data and for restricting researchers from scraping platform content. Regulators called that obstruction. Musk called it refusing to feed the censorship machine.
The EU’s preferred researchers aren’t neutral archivists. Many have been documented coordinating with governments, NGOs, and “fact-checking” networks that flagged political content for takedown during previous election cycles.
They call it “fighting disinformation.” Critics call it outsourcing censorship pressure to academics.
Under the DSA, these same groups now have the legal right to demand data from platforms like X to study “systemic risks,” a phrase broad enough to include whatever speech bureaucrats find undesirable this month.
The result is a permanent state of observation where every algorithmic change, viral post, or trending topic becomes a potential regulatory case.
The advertising issue completes the loop. Brussels says it wants ad libraries to be fully searchable so users can see who’s paying for what. It gives regulators and activists a live feed of messaging, ready for pressure campaigns.
The DSA doesn’t delete ads; it just makes it easier for someone else to demand they be deleted.
That’s how this form of censorship works: not through bans, but through endless exposure to scrutiny until platforms remove the risk voluntarily.
The Commission insists, again and again, that the fine has “nothing to do with content.”
That may be true on a direct level, but the rules shape content all the same. When governments decide who counts as authentic, who qualifies as a researcher, and how visibility gets distributed, speech control doesn’t need to be explicit. It’s baked into the system.
Brussels calls it user protection. Musk calls it punishment for disobedience. This particular DSA fine isn’t about what you can say, it’s about who’s allowed to be heard saying it.
TikTok escaped similar scrutiny by promising to comply. X didn’t, and that’s the difference. The EU prefers companies that surrender before the hearing. When they don’t, “transparency” becomes the pretext for a financial hammer.
The €120 million fine is small by tech standards, but symbolically it’s huge.
It tells every platform that “noncompliance” means questioning the structure of speech the EU has already defined as safe.
In the official language of Brussels, this is a regulation. But it’s managed discourse, control through design, moderation through paperwork, censorship through transparency.
And the louder they insist it isn’t, the clearer it becomes that it is.
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“While I question whether any baby should receive a vaccine against a rare disease in infancy, I am pleased that this is now a matter for parents and their healthcare practitioner to decide — not a state mandate based on a federal pharma-backed recommendation.”
Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have voted to end a decades-long recommendation that all infants born in the U.S. receive the hepatitis B vaccine (Hep B) within 12-24 hours of birth.
Instead, for babies born to mothers who test negative for hepatitis B, the committee recommends that families determine whether to give their child the Hep B shot at birth through individual decision-making with their physician.
For infants who don’t get the birth dose, the committee recommends the initial dose of the vaccine not be administered until infants are at least 2 months old.
Three of the 11 committee members — Dr. Raymond Pollack, Dr. Cody Meissner and Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln — opposed the recommendation. The remaining eight members supported it.
Andrew Johnson from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services assured the committee that the language change will not affect Medicaid or insurance coverage of the vaccine.
For mothers whose hepatitis B status is unknown or who test positive, the birth dose recommendation remains in place.
Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland, a long-time critic of the universal birth dose policy, welcomed the committee’s vote to “end the ill-considered universal recommendation for the Hep B birth vaccine dose.”
Holland added:
“The science behind that universal recommendation was a sham, based on thoroughly inadequate clinical trials. Hundreds of babies unquestionably died because of it. While I question whether any baby should receive a vaccine against a rare disease in infancy, I am pleased that this is now a matter for parents and their healthcare practitioner to decide — not a state mandate based on a federal pharma-backed recommendation.
“And while the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] debate on this issue was tedious and rancorous at times, it is an extremely positive change that actual debate about childhood vaccines is occurring in government venues with impact. This is the transparency that Secretary Kennedy promised.”
Dr. Monique Yohanan, senior fellow for health policy at Independent Women, told The Defender there was never “a good science-based reason to have a universal vaccination that 99% of babies born in the United States are not at any risk,” and that the vote was “good news for babies.”
She added that she hoped it would “provide an opportunity to actually have outreach to the moms who are positive for hepatitis B, women who are immigrants, women who are IV drug users.” She said the previous policy was “performative compassion. And these are really underserved women who we ignored the outreach that they needed.”
The committee also voted 6-4 with one abstention that after the initial Hep B shot, parents should consult with healthcare providers to consider whether their child should have a serology test, which would show whether they had antibodies considered sufficient to protect them against the disease.
The committee voted to update the CDC Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program funding to match ACIP’s recommendations. Several committee members, including Meissner and Hibbeln, abstained from voting on the VFC resolution, protesting that they didn’t understand the implications of the vote — reflecting some of the disagreement that pervaded the two-day meeting.
The votes on the Hep B vaccine were originally scheduled for the September meeting, but were deferred to allow the CDC work group to put together more data to inform the committee’s decision.
Sunday’s vote was postponed from Saturday so members could have more time to review the language of the proposal.
Like flying in a plane that wasn’t safety tested?
The decision to postpone followed a contentious day-long meeting on Thursday, during which some members of the committee and liaisons from professional associations argued there was no need to change the recommendation, because there was no “evidence of harm” from the vaccine.
Advocates for changing the recommendation pointed to a near-complete lack of safety data — small clinical trials for the vaccines tracked infants for a week or less after the shot and little follow-up research on autoimmune and neurological disorders.
Big differences of opinion persisted at Sunday’s meeting.
ACIP member Retsef Levi, Ph.D., said that for parents whose children were at extremely low risk, the decision to give them the vaccine was analogous to flying in a plane — they wouldn’t get in a plane that hadn’t been safety tested, why should they give their child a vaccine that hadn’t been safety tested.
Meissner disagreed, saying, “We know vaccines are safe. There is no question that the COVID vaccine recommendations were dishonest, disingenuous, but the hepatitis B vaccine is very well established.”
In opening remarks, Dr. Robert Malone — who chaired the meeting because the newly named committee chairperson, Dr. Kirk Milhoun, is traveling — said “the credibility of the ACIP rests not on speed, but on rigor.”
Commenting on the heated discussions during Thursday’s meeting, Milhoun said that scientific debates are necessarily contentious.
“If they are not contentious, if they are not approached with rigor, then we end up with bad decisions. We end up with bad science. We must actively engage in responsible debate concerning contentious issues. We must boldly address change, risk new ideas, and conflicting hypotheses, which is the proper nature of evidence-based science.”
Dr. Jason Goldman, a liaison to the ACIP for the American College of Physicians, attacked opposing viewpoints as unscientific. Goldman said the Hep B vaccine discussion was “an unnecessary solution looking for a problem.”
‘If adults won’t go for the shots, then give them to babies’
The Hep B vaccine has been universally recommended for infants since 1991. The first shot is currently given within 24 hours after birth to prevent infection with hepatitis B from mothers who carry the disease — less than 0.5% of mothers.
Mothers can be tested in the hospital to determine whether they have the disease, and current tests have a 100% accuracy rate, according to FDA ex officio ACIP participant Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D.
However, a 1991 New York Times article posted on Substack yesterday by Dr. Meryl Nass showed that when the universal shot was rolled out, the goal was not to prevent maternal transmission — the goal was to prevent adult cases, at a time when adult cases were deemed a national crisis. However, adults commonly didn’t get the shot.
“If adults won’t go for the shots, then give them to babies,” the article said.
Following Thursday’s meeting, legacy media attacked the committee and the CDC’s presenters and highlighted charges of misinformation by liaison members. Liaisons are nonvoting members from professional medical organizations who can offer their opinions and advice to the committee.
Representatives from some of those groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association, were disinvited in August from participation in the workgroups due to conflicts of interest.
Since then, the AAP has boycotted the ACIP meetings
At the start of today’s meeting, Meissner castigated AAP for this move. He said he was concerned that by not participating, they would be seen as being more focused on making a political statement than attending to the health of children.
He said that pediatricians should be part of the discussions. “Refusal to participate in the ACIP meetings does not appear to be in the best interest of children.”
Immediately following today’s vote, the Times quoted “experts” from some of the staunchest advocates for all vaccines on the childhood schedule, such as the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., saying that the vote shows federal health authorities can no longer be trusted.
Osterholm, a member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board under the Biden administration, is one of the key players in the “Vaccine Integrity Project,” funded by iAlumbra, a nonprofit founded by Walmart heiress and philanthropist Christy Walton. The project plans to make its own vaccine recommendations.
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Vaccine recommendations ‘should not be treated as mandates’
During the day-and-a-half-long discussion about the Hep B vaccine, several committee members, including Dr. Evelyn Griffin, raised concerns that the birth recommendation posed challenges for informed consent, because mothers who had just delivered babies were not in a position to calmly evaluate risks and benefits.
Others, including Levi, argued that the vaccine requirements for children to attend school effectively functioned as mandates.
Liaison members universally disagreed that the recommendations were mandates and argued that ACIP recommendations were really only recommendations, and parents could do what they wanted.
CDC ex officio member, Dr. Adam Langer, who was opposed to changing the recommendation, said that the recommendations had come to function as mandates, but that was not the intention. He proposed the committee make a formal statement that “all vaccine recommendations are recommendations. They should not be treated as mandates.”
He added that mandates put in place by state and local jurisdictions were “problematic.”
“We have a lot of challenges with our culture and our traditions in this country, with telling people what they must and must not do. But that’s not what we’re saying here. We’re saying that at the population level, in the majority of cases, this is what the sign shows is the best practice.”
He said providers should always make the best decision for the individual patient they are working with. “That’s the reason why you’ve been entrusted with a license to practice medicine.”
Watch the ACIP meeting here:
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