Albanians Are Doing What Americans Won't

Albanians Are Doing What Americans Won't

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] There’s a peninsula on the Adriatic coast called Zvernec. A thousand acres of flamingos, pelicans, and wetlands that have been there longer than any of us have been alive. And right now there are people standing on that sand, in front of barbed wire, refusing to move. They’ve been there two weeks. They aren’t leaving. And they’ve given the protest a name. The Flamingo Revolution. Here’s what they’re standing against: a $1.4 billion luxury resort. Six thousand hotel rooms and villas planned for that coastline, plus a second complex on an island called Sazan that used to be a secret submarine base. And one of the investors behind it is Jared Kushner — the President’s son-in-law. The easy version of this story is “Kushner bad” — the Trump family leveraging government connections into lucrative real estate while Kushner plays envoy for the United States. Sure, that’s part of it. But that’s not why I wanted to talk about it. I’m covering this because of what it says about us. First, the deal. Kushner runs a fund called Affinity Partners, and most of its money comes from the Saudi government. So follow the line: Saudi money flows into a fund controlled by the President’s son-in-law, that fund invests in a foreign development, and the government signing off on that development is led by a prime minister with every incentive to stay on the President’s good side. Each link looks ordinary by itself. End to end, you’ve got private business, foreign capital, and the President’s own family braided so tightly nobody can tell you where one ends and the next begins. And you have to wonder where Kushner finds the hours. He’s supposed to be a Middle East envoy brokering agreements between nations on our behalf, and somewhere in there he’s also overseeing luxury villas going up on protected wetlands an ocean away. When the same man negotiates for the country and enriches his own family at the same time, the honest question stops being whether there’s a conflict of interest and becomes which job is the side hustle. The Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, insists nothing was improper — that Kushner got no special treatment, that this is just tourism and opportunity. Maybe he believes it. But here’s the detail that should stop you: a project this size is normally required by law to publish an environmental impact report for the public. That report has never been released. So the Albanian people are being told to accept a $1.4 billion development carved into protected wetlands without ever seeing the most basic document explaining what it’ll do to their land. So they showed up. It started with the people you’d expect — conservationists and birdwatchers who noticed bulldozer tracks in the sand and dunes torn open. Then the fencing went up, wrapped in barbed wire, and something shifted. The protest stopped being about birds. Listen to how the head of the Albanian Ornithological Society describes the crowd now: left and right, different faiths, different politics, all planted on the same stretch of sand. He says it isn’t really about environmental law anymore. It’s about transparency — about whether anyone holding power still has to answer to the people they hold it over. It’s about democracy. And that’s the part I can’t stop turning over. Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe, a nation that only crawled out from under decades of Communist rule in 1991. That’s not ancient history. There are people on that coastline right now who remember exactly what it felt like to have no voice at all. So when they watched a deal move through in the dark — foreign money, no public accounting — they didn’t wait for permission, and they didn’t wait for some leader to assure them their anger was justified. They walked to the coast and stood there, and they’ve held that ground for two weeks and counting. So let me ask the uncomfortable question. What are we doing? Here in the United States we can barely hold a protest together for an afternoon. We show up, get the photo, go home, and we’ve moved on to the next outrage before dinner. We have every advantage they don’t — the wealth, the institutions, a free press, a Constitution written to make exactly this kind of resistance easier than almost anywhere on earth. And a country a fraction of our size, working with a fraction of our resources, is out-organizing us over a wetland while we can’t hold the line on democracy itself. I’m not saying this to make you feel small. I’m saying it because I think we’ve got the story backwards. We’ve convinced ourselves nothing we do matters, that the machine is too big, that the money always wins. The people on that peninsula are running the experiment in real time, and the early returns point the other way. They dragged this thing into the open. They took a real estate transaction and turned it into a national reckoning over who their country actually belongs to. And here’s what should land hardest. By any measure this is a small deal in a small country — one development on one coastline — and it’s produced two unbroken weeks of resistance with a name attached to it. If that’s what people will do over a single stretch of sand, sit for a second with what might be possible back home the day we decide something matters enough. The question was never whether ordinary people can make life difficult for the powerful. Albania is answering that every single day. They named their fight after a bird that plants itself in shallow water and simply refuses to be moved. So here’s mine, for all of us: this administration is tearing apart our institutions, our culture, and our Constitution — why aren’t we willing to do the same? 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Trump's Loyalty Hires Are Blowing Up Cases in Court

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: when you put unqualified people in powerful jobs, they don’t suddenly become qualified. They just fail in more expensive and more public ways. That’s exactly what’s happening inside Donald Trump’s Justice Department. Politico reported that at least a dozen times in Trump’s second term, he handed control of an entire office of federal prosecutors to someone who has never tried a single case in federal court. Let that sink in. A U.S. attorney is the most powerful prosecutorial post in the country — the person who decides which investigations move forward, who gets charged, and who has to stand against the full weight of the federal government in a courtroom. Trump gave that power, over and over, to people who’d never done the job. I worked with a lot of prosecutors in my years with DC Police. The good ones knew the difference between a case you can win and a case you want to win. The bad ones learned that difference the hard way, in front of a judge, with everyone watching. Now picture putting someone in charge who’s never learned it at all. The results are exactly what you’d expect. Start in Wyoming. A panel of three judges threw out nine indictments. Nine. Why? Because the U.S. attorney there, Darin Smith, stood in front of a grand jury and called the defendants “bad guys” and “murderers” who “did what you are going to hear about.” That’s not how it works. A grand jury is supposed to be an independent body that decides whether there’s enough evidence to charge someone — you don’t walk in and hand them the verdict before they’ve heard a shred of evidence. It gets dumber: the judges found Smith passed out his business cards to the grand jurors and invited them to reach out. They wrote that he “impaired the grand jury’s integrity as an independent body.” Any first-year prosecutor knows not to do that. Smith didn’t, because Smith had never done this job. Now New York. A committee of the state appellate court found that John Sarcone, running the Northern District, committed professional misconduct. They were vague on the details, but when the court system itself is sanctioning the top federal prosecutor in a district, that’s not a small problem. Nevada. Sigal Chattah is running that office — but only as a first assistant, because a federal judge already disqualified her from holding the top job. What did she do? Canceled a plea deal at the last minute, one her own criminal division supervisor had already approved. The defendant is now trying to get her kicked off entirely, and she’s already been disqualified from supervising four other prosecutions. Say that again — four other prosecutions. This isn’t one bad day. It’s a clusterfuck of incompetence happening over and over. The DOJ’s response? A spokesperson said prior federal prosecution experience “is not the only qualification that makes someone a good U.S. Attorney.” Sure. It’s not the only one. But it might be a useful one when the job is, you know, prosecuting cases in federal court. Then North Carolina, where the U.S. attorney is Dan Bishop — a former Republican congressman who voted against certifying that Joe Biden won in 2020. Bishop also got named a special prosecutor to chase election fraud, and his early move was reportedly leaning on the FBI to reopen inquiries it had already closed because they went nowhere. So a guy who denied the last election result is now in charge of hunting election fraud. You can’t make it up. Here’s why experience actually matters, and it’s not just about following rules. A former federal prosecutor, Mimi Rocah, put it well: someone who’s never worked as a line prosecutor has nothing to compare a case to. They can’t look at an investigation and say, this one’s weak, we pass. And they’re far more likely to ignore the career people who do know better. So you get offices that chase bad cases, cut corners, and get embarrassed in court. We’ve already watched three of these picks flame out. Lindsey Halligan got disqualified, and a judge tossed her indictments against James Comey and Letitia James. Alina Habba, another former personal lawyer for Trump, got dinged by a judge over the “hasty arrest” of the mayor of Newark. And Ed Martin, who ran the Washington office, is facing disciplinary charges from the D.C. Bar — including for threatening to withhold funding from Georgetown’s Law Center to punish the school over its diversity practices, which the Bar called a First Amendment violation. So where did Ed Martin land after all that? Pardon attorney for the Justice Department. Failing upward — the official sport of this administration. Here’s the bottom line. We were told this was about being tough on crime. Law and order. But you don’t get law and order by handing the most serious prosecutorial power in the country to loyalists who’ve never set foot in the arena. You get tossed indictments. Sanctioned lawyers. Cases that collapse and defendants who walk because the person in charge didn’t know what they were doing. This is what happens when loyalty is the only qualification that counts. The work suffers, the public pays for it, and the people who actually wanted accountability watch it slip away because the person holding the gavel was picked for the wrong reasons. The one small mercy: when it comes to the cases where this administration is trying to shred the Constitution, they’ve got the D-list on the job. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Trump Pardoned Him on Monday. By Sunday He Was Dead.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] A sheriff’s deputy in rural Indiana pulls over a speeder on a Sunday afternoon. Routine. Nothing about a stop like that should make the news, and nothing about it should end with a body on the shoulder of the road. Except the driver had been a free man for exactly six days. His name was Matthew Huttle. Forty-two, from Hobart, Indiana. On January 6th, 2021, he and his uncle Dale drove to Washington for Trump’s Stop the Steal rally — and didn’t stop at the rally. They marched on the Capitol with the rest of the mob. Dale beat two police officers with a wooden flagpole; one of them went down on the steps and slipped a disc in his back. Matthew went inside the building. Twice. The second time he stayed more than ten minutes, wandering through congressional offices and the crypt — the same restricted corridors where my brothers and sisters in uniform were getting the hell beaten out of them. Both men were arrested. Both convicted. And in twenty years carrying a badge, I never once had to wonder whether that was the end of the story. You assault a cop, you walk into a building you helped overrun, you do your time. That used to be the floor in this country. The bare minimum. Then Trump signed a stack of pardons that wiped out the convictions of roughly fifteen hundred January 6th defendants in a single afternoon. Cop beaters. Cop tasers. The men who dragged me down the Capitol steps, tased me in the neck, beat me unconscious, and sent me to the hospital with a heart attack and a brain injury. All of it, erased. Matthew Huttle was in that pile. Six days later, he’s doing seventy in a fifty-five in Jasper County. A deputy lights him up. And almost immediately, Huttle starts volunteering things he has no reason to volunteer. He tells the deputy about January 6th. About the conviction. About the pardon. And more than once, that he can’t afford to get in any more trouble. That’s not the voice of a man who thinks he got away with something. That’s a man doing math in his head about whether a pardon for one crime covers whatever he’s about to do next. The deputy tells him he’s under arrest as a habitual traffic violator. Standard. And Huttle makes the same call he made on the Capitol steps years earlier — that the rules are for other people. He bolts back to his van, starts screaming he’s going to shoot himself, and raises a loaded nine millimeter in the middle of a struggle. The deputy backs up and fires. A special prosecutor reviewed the body cam and the dash cam and ruled the shooting justified. As it should be. That deputy did exactly what he was trained to do, and he made it home to his family because of it. Barely. Hold onto that word. A deputy in rural Indiana nearly didn’t come home from a traffic stop. Not because of a cartel. Not because of a fugitive. Because of a man who’d spent four years marinating in the idea that he was a political prisoner — and six days earlier had been told by the President of the United States that everything he did inside the Capitol was just fine. *This is the kind of story the national press keeps filing under “local news.” Subscribe so you don’t miss the ones that connect. It’s free, and it keeps this independent.* That’s what the pardons actually did. They didn’t just spring fifteen hundred people from prison. They sent every one of them home with a message: the cops who arrested you were the bad guys. The prosecutors were the bad guys. The judges were the bad guys. Which means I was the enemy — and so was every officer who did their job that day. Hand a stable person that message and you get a quiet life and a chip on the shoulder. Hand it to Matthew Huttle and you get a loaded handgun on a roadside. And here’s the rot underneath all of it. The same movement that branded itself the party of Law and Order pardoned the people who tried to murder cops on live television. The same crowd that called protesters domestic terrorists cheered when Trump walked the men who tased me out of federal prison. There is no Blue Lives Matter movement in this country. There’s the MAGA cult, and the MAGA cult alone. It protects its own as long as you kiss the ring — and everybody else, cop or not, can go f**k themselves. The deputy in Jasper County learned that on a Sunday afternoon. And Huttle wasn’t the only violent offender who walked out and went right back to it. There are roughly fifteen hundred pardoned January 6th defendants out there right now, a serious share of them convicted of violence against police officers — including against me. The domestic violence calls, the DUIs, the weapons charges, the standoffs: the list keeps growing, and the press keeps treating each one as a small local story instead of the same story repeating itself in a new zip code. The next armed standoff with a pardoned insurrectionist has already happened by the time you read this. It will keep happening. And so far, this country has decided to do nothing about it. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Everyone’s Asking If Jon Ossoff Will Run in 2028. They’re All Missing The Point..

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] There’s a senator who keeps insisting he’s not running for president, and the more he says it, the harder the political class loses its mind over him. That alone should tell you something. Anybody who reads me knows I hate endorsing politicians. I’ve been burned too many times. So I’m not endorsing Jon Ossoff — not yet. But I can’t ignore what he’s doing, because he’s saying the thing I’ve been saying for months, and it’s about damn time a candidate said it out loud. When Ossoff launched his reelection in Georgia and went after Trump’s “Mar-a-Lago mafia,” the clips went everywhere overnight. Within hours the same crowd that lives for this stuff was floating him for 2028. Michelle Goldberg wrote a whole Times column under the headline “Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President.” Newsweek asked if he’s the one Democrats have been waiting for. The prediction markets shoved him near the top of the field. And Ossoff keeps swatting it all down. He told Jen Psaki flat out he has zero interest in 2028 — he loves the Georgia job, he’s got two young daughters, and he warned everyone off playing fantasy football with the next election. He’s right to wave it away. Because whether he runs for president is the least interesting thing about any of this. Here’s the question nobody’s actually asking: what set the country off in the first place? It wasn’t his age or his looks or the fact that he’s from a swing state. It was one thing, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. He’s talking about corruption. And accountability. I’ve spent months on this page hammering those exact two words. So when a politician puts them dead center and the whole country lights up, I pay attention — because it tells me people are starving for somebody to just name this stuff. And watch how specific he gets. He calls the Trump White House the most corrupt administration of all time and then brings receipts. While your premiums climb and your hospital cuts services, the First Family is pulling in billions. He points to a tungsten mine — in Kazakhstan — that Trump’s sons took a stake in days before its parent company landed $1.6 billion in federal financing. Days before. He helped coin a name for the whole rotten club: “the Epstein class,” the rich of both parties who covered for a child sex trafficker. *If this is the kind of thing you want in your inbox, subscribe. It’s free, and reader support is the only reason this show answers to nobody.* Here’s what the consultants always miss, and it’s the whole ballgame: running on accountability isn’t just the right thing. It’s the smart thing. It wins. Goldberg’s column quotes a Stanford political scientist, Adam Bonica, and his point stopped me cold. Corruption, he says, has been the fatal weakness of authoritarian regimes for decades, across continents — outrage over looting is what brought down strongmen from the Philippines to Ukraine to Hungary. An anti-corruption message can do what normal partisan politics almost never does: unite an entire society against a rigged system. That’s not a left thing or a right thing. It’s a human thing. Everybody hates a thief. And you don’t have to fly to Hungary to see it. The Bulwark and Jacobin agree on basically nothing, and lately they’ve landed in the same spot — anti-corruption might be the most potent issue Democrats have. Ossoff is proving it in real time. The reason I trust him on it is that he didn’t discover the issue the second it started polling. As chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he ran a ten-month bipartisan probe into the federal Bureau of Prisons, exposed the abuse rotting the Atlanta facility, and wrote it into law — the Federal Prison Oversight Act, which actually passed. He was doing this work before it was cool. I spent twenty years as a cop, and here’s something that job taught me: real law and order means holding the people who enforce the law accountable too. Ossoff gets that in his bones. So set the 2028 parlor game aside and look at the contrast. The smart-money advice going around tells Democrats to soften up, tack to the center, maybe toss the president a compliment. Ossoff is doing the exact opposite, and it’s working. I’ve spent this whole stretch writing open letters to Democrats who had a chance to fight and went quiet — Fetterman, who’d rather lecture his own voters than swing at Trump; Spanberger, who ran on accountability and then walked away from it. The people telling this party to play it safe are getting it backwards. The electorate is screaming what it wants, and one senator can’t kill the presidential talk no matter how many times he says he isn’t interested. The only question left is who’s actually listening. If this hit home, do me a favor — subscribe, drop a comment, and send it to somebody who needs to read it. It’s the reason this thing keeps going. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

A Chinese Spy Got Elected Mayor in California. Nobody Noticed.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] When Eileen Wang was sworn in as mayor of Arcadia, California — a quiet suburb outside Los Angeles — she gave the kind of speech that makes a room feel good. A small mountain village in China to American city hall. And then this line: our loyalty must always be clear, to this country, to our Constitution, to our residents, and to no one else. A few months later she pled guilty to being a foreign agent for the Chinese government. She resigned the same day. She’s facing up to ten years. Let me get the careful part out of the way, because there are two ways to butcher this story. One is to shrug and pretend foreign governments aren’t trying to worm their way into American politics. They are. The other is to treat every Chinese American who shows up to a community event as a suspect — the kind of red-scare garbage that wrecks innocent lives. I’ve watched that up close. My ex-wife and three of my daughters are American citizens of Taiwanese descent, and I saw what Trump’s “China virus” routine did to my kids — made them feel like targets on their own streets, scared of how they’d be treated over the color of their skin. So forget the movie version. Stick to what’s in the plea. Wang and a man named Mike Sun ran a website called U.S. News Center. From late 2020 into at least 2022, prosecutors say they pushed pro-Beijing propaganda on the direction of Chinese officials — and then reported the traffic numbers back up the chain, like employees turning in a performance review. There’s one detail that says everything. Chinese officials complimented Wang on a post that cleared fifteen thousand views, and she wrote back: “Thank you leader.” Thank you leader. Now here’s where it stops looking like a spy thriller. This isn’t some criminal mastermind. It’s a woman in her fifties who jumped into local politics — registered Republican first, then switched to Democrat to match her district. She knocked doors. She showed up to the Christmas tree lighting. She backed veterans programs. Her own colleagues on the council say they can barely remember how she voted on anything. So what did Beijing want with a suburban city councilmember? There are no state secrets in Arcadia. That’s the point. What they were running is what intelligence people call cultivation. You find a local with ambition. You help them climb. You build the relationship. And maybe in ten or fifteen years that person is in a state house, or Congress, and now you’ve got a friend in a room that matters. It’s patient. It’s cheap. And it doesn’t require your target to be brilliant — just useful and willing. The boyfriend is where it gets murky. Mike Sun was described at various points as Wang’s boyfriend, then fiancé, then campaign treasurer. Behind the scenes, court documents say, he was writing reports to Chinese officials describing her as a “new political star” and listing the American officials she was “familiar with.” He and another man even took credit for getting her elected. And then there’s the line that should stop you cold: another foreign agent told Sun, in an audio message, that they should not let Wang know what they were doing. So which was she — the operator, or the asset who didn’t fully know she was an asset? I don’t know. She pled guilty, so she’s admitting some level of fault in the eyes of the law. But the documents genuinely leave it open how much she understood about the machine she was inside. Her lawyers argue most of this predates her time in office, and that running a propaganda site isn’t the same as spying. That’s a real distinction, even if it doesn’t get her off the hook. What stays with me is how unglamorous the whole thing is. People who study Beijing’s influence operations say it’s nowhere near a flawless machine — it’s a loose web of local hustlers, each chasing their own status and money and connections, with the government sitting up top collecting whatever floats up. Some of it works. Most of it doesn’t. And that should worry you more, not less. A sleek professional spy ring is something the FBI knows how to hunt. A thousand small-timers blending into chamber-of-commerce dinners and flag ceremonies and charity drives? That’s a much harder thing to see, because it hides inside the normal texture of American civic life. There’s a perfect little prisoner’s-dilemma ending to this, too. When Sun got arrested, Wang turned on him fast — denied at a council meeting that he’d ever been her fiancé, called him an ex-boyfriend, dared anyone to prove otherwise. “Please prove it,” she said. Said she was proud of herself. Said she always stood with her country. Months later she pled guilty. So here’s what I want you to take from it. Foreign interference in our politics is real, and it’s happening at the local level, in places you’d never think to look. But it doesn’t show up as a villain in a movie. It shows up as an ambitious neighbor at a ribbon cutting. The defense isn’t paranoia about an entire community of Americans — it’s transparency, strong foreign-agent registration laws, reporters doing the digging, and the rest of us paying attention to who’s funding the people asking for our vote. That’s how you protect this country from foreign influence without becoming the thing you’re scared of. Follow the facts, not the conspiracy, wherever they lead — and never blame a whole race of people for what you find. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!