Could Trump and Patel put Jeffrey Goldberg on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List? By Hal M. Brown

Note: Jeffrey Goldberg is definitely not in hiding. 

This is the FBI 10 Most Wanted list as it is today. Except for one or two people who have been apprehended all of them are still at large. They are typical criminals. Whether or not the FBI under Kash Patel will be able to catch them remains to be seen. He has said that he wants to return the FBI to its traditional role of catching bad guys. He apparently doesn’t think that the agents working in headquarters have crucial roles in tracking down these fugitives. (Duh, I wonder if he fired scientists at the FBI lab.)

He curried Trump’s favor by espousing the lie that the FBI is a nefarious deep state of out-for Trump’s royal blood agents who were concocting reasons to go after Mr. Innocent, Donald J. Trump. I have no doubt that this is why he got the job.

I am waitng to see whether he tries to go after someone whose only crime was being a Trump enemy and who decides it is better to be safe than sorry, and then goes into hiding. before the Trump Gestapo in their ski masks can grab him off the street, throw him into an unmarked van, and disappear him.

Who could we see on the Trump/Patel FBI 10 Most Wanted List? Who would make a plausible enemy of the Trump state that the MAGA world would buy as a nefarious evildoer to replace one of the real criminals on the list?

The first person that comes to my mind is Jeffery Goldberg.

Trump is under a lot of pressure from inside the Republican party to chop off at least one head for allowing Signalgate to happen. He probably thought that the story would die out in a few news cycles. Now, thanks to the revelation that Hegseth took his former Fox News producer wife to at least two official meetings where sensitive, possibly classified material, was discussed, the story has morphed from Signalgate to Stupidgate.

Much to Trump’s dismay, this has become the scandal that makes him look more inept than anything he has done so far. It is not going away.

He needs a scapegoat. 

As convoluted as this is, it would be typical Trumpian gaslighting to make the actual hero of Signalgate into the villian. Make him the goat, cut his throat.

Meanwhile back at the ranch…

belonging to Jeffery Goldberg’s childhood friend where he has been hiding…

Goldberg plans to eventually turn himself in. He has been working with one of the law firms that didn’t knuckle under to Trump’s demands and was punished by being banned from obtaining security clearances or entering federal buldings.

See the following:

The lawsuits come after President Trump signed executive orders this week, which attempted to restrict both firms' access to federal buildings, yank any active security clearances held by its personnel, and direct government employees not to meet with the firm or its members. Article: In back-to-back rulings, federal judges rule against Trump orders targeting law firms.

If this isn’t a case which lays bare the utter madness of Trump’s descent into unconstitutional and un-American raging revenge I don’t know what would be. He’d be telling a defendant that there are attorneys he couldn’t retain because they personally pissed him off. 

When the constitutionality of this got to the Supreme Court to be determined, even Thomas and Alito might find it impossible to write an opinion favoring the government case. 

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When the armored FBI Tesla Cybertruck parks in front of our houses, By Hal M. Brown, Also: there's the brutal Chenchen leader helping the Russians who Musk gave a Cybertruck to. He put a machine gun in the back.

Summer, 1940, a small German city:

Isach Mendelsen and his family have just begun to eat breakfast. The two windows facing the street in their second floor apartment are open. They hear the morning hum of their small city, a few cars are going by, and there’s noise of the milkman's horsedrawn cart. They hear the chatter of people outside walking the streets and the sound of a few merhcants opening their stores. Then there is silence. They hear a car stop in front of their house. The engine turns off and the doors open and close.

Nine year old Hyman goes to the window and looks out and sees a new Citroën in front of their apartment building. There aren’t too many cars like that on their street.

“Mommy, daddy, there are men outside,” he exclaims. Isach goes to the window and looks out. Four men in trench coats and wearing hats are walking towards the door of their building. 

(Above: real Gestapo)

He knows who they are. The Mendelsens are the only Jews living in the building. He knows why they are there.

A year from now in a small American city:

Anti-Trump journalist Clark Putnam works from home. He’d been fired from his job at a local television station's news department for not towing the pro-Trump company line. He has barely been making a living writing a Substack about how the Trump adminstration is ruining the lives of ordinary people. With about 200 readers paying $8 a month to both read and comment on his essays, and his wife’s income from her job working at a convenience store. They’d exhausted half of the family savings. They knew it was a mater of time before they’d have to sell their house and find a cheaper place to live.

He has just finished breakfast with his family in their suburban home on a quiet residential street. It is a spring morning. He hears his neighbor start his lawnmower. 

He's mulling over what to write his Substack about. He has to write one every day. This is what his readers pay for. Gradually more people are deciding it is worth paying both to support his work and to be able to make comments. He gets about one or two new paying subscribers each day. That’s $8 or $16 a month but it adds up. This reminds him of the commercials on TV which show a sick or starving child and say “for only $19 a month, that’s only 63 cents a day, you can help this child.” (There’s a reason so many charities choose this amount.)

There was an ICE raid at a hospital where seriously ill immigrant patients were loaded into a van to be taken to a deportation center. That was a human interest story he thought people could relate to. There was also the news that the US Postal Service, long since put under the Department of Commerce, had announced that they would cease to allow mail-in ballots to be sent in postage paid envelopes. It seemed like a small victory that courts managed to stop from outlawing mail in voting but this was clearly an effort to make it more difficult. Mail service was so slow with postal workers fired and post offices closed that many people stopped even buying stamps since they rarely mailed letters.

Clark had settled into a mood of low grade depression and anxiety. He tried to breathe in the aroma of newly mown grass and clear his mind so he could decide what to write about. Then his neighbor's mower stopped. There was nothing unusual in that, but he had a sudden sense of dread that came out of nowhere. It prompted him to look out of the window.

What he saw chilled him to the bone. It was one of those armored Tesla Cybertrucks that the FBI was now using. He'd seen photos of them on the news. He'd watched as Musk met with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at a Tesla plant where the vehicles were being manufactured. He heard Musk explain how powerful they were, how much gear they could carry, and especially how they could stop the bullet from an AR-15. There were videos on TV of FBI agents using Cybertucks as they raided high profile anti-Trumpers. Three or four of these futuristic vehicles pulling up in front of someone’s house was somehow more terrifying to watch than the same number of black Ford Suburbans. 

He thought he was small potatoes. He never thought they would come for him. He had the presence of mind to get the name of a decent criminal lawyer, just in case, and write it down, but in a panic he couldn't remember where he put it. 

He watched as four heavily armed men in FBI body armor exit the car and begin to walk towards the path to his house. "Honey," he said to his wife, "it's happening, they are here for me."

The back story:

This was first reported earlier in February:

'Sleazy corruption': $400M award reportedly for 'Armored Tesla' outrages Musk critics

It was denied but then new information came out yesterday:

A new document undercuts Trump admin's denials about $400 million Tesla deal

It never made sense that an armored Cybertruck would be appropriate for ferrying diplomats from place to place. It does make sense for the FBI Gestapo to adopt them their primary mode of transportation. When they do their raids they offer the protection from being shot at. If they need to pursue anybody they are incredibly fast. 

And finally, there’s this:

If they needed more firepower they could mount a machine gun in the back. (Read article)

Excerpt:

The warlord leader of Chechnya has mounted a machine gun on a Tesla Cybertruck that he says he plans to send to Russian forces on the battlefields in Ukraine.

Ramzan Kadyrov published a video on Saturday of himself driving the vehicle, which he said had been sent to him by “the strongest genius of our time,” Elon Musk, before it was adapted.

Musk later denied giving the vehicle to the Chechen leader. “Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.

In the slickly produced video, a grinning Kadyrov is seen driving the vehicle through an empty square in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. He then gets out of the truck and stands behind the machine gun with an ammunition belt draped round his neck.

“We received a Tesla Cybertruck from the respected Elon Musk. I was happy to test the new equipment and personally saw that there’s a reason that it is called the ‘Cyberbeast,’” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram.

Kadyrov said he “literally fell in love” with the vehicle, which he said was “invulnerable,” “fast,” “comfortable” and “maneuverable.”

Now we know. Musk, who has threatened to cut Starlink to the Ukrainian military, has already helped the Russians. This is the General he gave the Cybertruck to:

For decades, Kadyrov has been criticized for alleged human rights violations. The US State Department sanctioned him in 2020, saying it “has extensive credible information” that Kadyrov was responsible for “gross violations of human rights,” including torture and extrajudicial killings. Kadyrov has also been sanctioned by the United Kingdom and European Union.

Monday’s Substack:

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We'e on the road to tyranny, By Hal M.Brown

 

There was good and bad news on Rachel Maddow last night. It was the same news. The news was that Trump's favorability rating in the polls are horrible. Does this sound like good news? This is one way to look at it. I see it though a dark glass. Trump only believes in polls when they favor him, but he knows that when mulitple polls are unfavorable towards him they are correct.

As polls turn against him this will hasten Trump's drive to cement his dictatorship. He will keep testing the limits until something unconstitional or illegal that he does goes to the Supreme Court.

When it does, he hopes the ruling will be in his favor, but I have little doubt that if the court rules against him, he plans to ignore the ruling and see if he can get away with it.

He's been able to fire highly competent people and install loyalists in their place, to close down federal buildings, to ban DEI references, to get Musk's team of DOGE warriors into numerous departments where they can mess with computer data and, most tellingly, shut down USAID despite the public outcry over the deaths that this was causing

This is penny ante stuff compared with what he intends to do. He wants to be eliminate the American democracy and become the ruler for life of an authoritarian regime. In order to achieve this he can't merely issue orders which defy the Constitution and undermines democracy unless he has the hard power of the state to back them up.

Trump also has shown every indication that he will abandon Ukraine, drop out of NATO, and develop some sort of alliance with Russia.

Trump believes he controls all the hard power mechanisms in the country. I am sure he relishes watching his heavily armed ICE agents, who look like SWAT members attacking a drug kingpin's lair, storming into some house using flash-bang grenades.

Trump, with the approval of Kash Patel as FBI director, now controls all of the departments that can exercise hard power. By hard I mean that they have guns and the power to arrest people, and worse.

Steve Bannon is pushing for Trump to run for a third term. Whether this would pass constitutional muster with the Supreme Court remains to be seen and it might be irrelevant. If Trump succeeds in turning the country into a dictatorship he doesn't need to run for office. If he knows that the majority of voters won't vote for him, he won't bother setting up a fake election so he could win. He could just suspend elections.

I fear that Trump will find an excuse to call some kind of national emergency. This could be as simple as ginning up a lie about needing to stop a fentanyl influx, or protests that even if they aren't violent he says could turn violent. Once Trump knows he controls the military, he could find an excuse to invoke martial law.

Forget the Posse Comitatus Act, he'd just ignore it.

It isn't a sure thing that just because Trump has put loyalists in control federal hard power that the foot soldiers will do their bidding. All of them swore oaths, but there's a contradiction in, for example, the US Army oath. Soldiers swear to obey the Constitution, but also sweat to obey the orders of the President of the United States.

Even if a large number of his hard power Gestapo and SS troops quit or accept early retirement, their places could be filled by people like members of far right militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keppers. Kash Patel could fill some of the expected vacancies in the FBI with the J6 inssurectionists.

The speed limit sign we are approaching on the road to tyranny says “SPEED, NO LIMIT.” The United States is accelerating along this route. Soon it may be unstoppably barrelling down this road. I see tyranny as being just over the horizon. There’s still hope that the brakes can be slammed on, but how fast we get to the point of no return remains to be seen.

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Want to join the MAGA Mafia or Amercian Gestapo? Make your bones by turning in your DEI neighbor or colleague. By Hal M.Brown

 

Frank Figluizzi,who served as assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, posted a photo of someone painting a wall at the FBI Academy on BlueSky (here) which lists operativenss, fairness, compassion, integrity, initative, respect, and stability as some of the core values of the agency. It also lists diversity.

The photo was published in The Washington Post article 

Several senior FBI leaders told to leave agency or be fired, people familiar with matter say: 

The ultimatum was unusual for the FBI and suggested that President Donald Trump is purging leadership at an agency he has harshly criticized.

If you don't have a subsription to the Post you can read a summary of the article on RawStory.

This coincides with news that senior FBI agents are being fired across the country.

What I wondered about was just who decided this wall was offensive because it had one word, diversity, on it which would offend Kash Patel when he saw it. I think the bottom word is Constitution which would also be unacceptable to the likes of Patel and Trump.

It occurred to me that somebody with authority thought that they could curry favor with Kash Pateland Trump if they took credit for getting rid of it. I thought this was like a foot soldier in the Mafia making their bones by carrying out a hit for the capos. I bet they have a smile on their face today and are waiting for their reward.

I thought this was akin to ordinary Germans, an adult or a child, reporting a Jewish family they knew of to the Gestapo. Germans proved how loyal they were by being accessories to murder. I have no doubt that they were rewarded when they informed on Jews. In Holland citizens were paid a bounty for informing on Jews.

No Americans will be sent to a concentration camp and die in a gas chamber, starved, or worked to death because of the quest to root out DEI from the government. They won't exactly be like those who were called "willing executioners" in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen. Not exactly, but how many of them would have been like Hitler's willing executioners?

People are being incentivized to report those they think are DEI hires. In this effort to purge the federal government of all DEI hires, people will loss their jobs, their lives will be disrupted, they and their families will suffer.

As a result of proving their loyalty and zeal, lower members of the MAGA mafia move up to positions of having more power. 

I made screen grabs of parts of the Mission Page on the FBI website because it has the word diversity on it, and also includes on the very top upholding the Constitution and, under priories, protection of civil rights.

Diversity is on the bottom of the list of core values. How long it will take before it is sucked into the black hole of Trump's lsy for revenge remains to be seen. I'll keep up on this and let readers know.

Something else that may disappear from an FBI website is on the FBI Selection page. Below is a list of the disqualifiers. Note what is listed at number three.

Click to enlarge

Having knowingly or willfully engaged in acts designed to overthrow the U.S. goverment would disqualify anyone who was part of J6. There's nothing there about them having been pardoned. I wonder if this will be dropped as a disqualifier and J6 insurrentionists will end up as FBI agents.

This could mean that Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes might become an FBI agent as long as his disability, having lost an eye, wouldn't make him a DEI hire.

He could end up as a member of the FBI SWAT team.

The FBI under Kash Patel will become a modern day Gestapo as it tracks down members of "the deep state." 

Instead of the small caliber Walther PPK (above) the Gestapo carried, they carry  full-size Glock 17 and compact Glock 19 pistols in 9mm. Regular agents can be backed up by FBI SWAT teams with assault rifles when they make arrests. Wait for the photo ops.

I bet Kash Patel can't wait to have an FBI badge and a Glock on his belt as he struts into the FBI building (which I doubt will be turned into a museum) with his protection detail.

Addendum:

Here are some of the replies to Frank Figluzzi's BlueSky post (click to enlarge them):

Updates: Read this by Andrew Weissmann.

Not all of the DEI scrubbing makes the headlines. Consider:

'Absolutely furious': Pioneering female astronomer’s legacy rewritten amid diversity purge

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches