Better in their words…

Sandwich hurler charged in DC crime crackdown; Bondi-Patel RussiaGate drops roll on; Luna teases Biblical aliens on Rogan; Trump meeting rattles Europe; DC court lifts final DOGE block; more.

Source: SLEDGE HAMMER ☙ Thursday, August 14, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Meet the Democrats’ brave new resistance superhero: Captain Gyro. The Washington Post ran the story near the top of its web page this morning, headlined, “Man who hurled sandwich at law enforcement in D.C. charged with felony.” They’ve got him colder than a refrigerated reuben. The sub-headline explained, “‘I did it. I threw a sandwich,’ the man allegedly said to police after his arrest.”

Sunday night around 11 p.m., Sean Charles Dunn — balding, in a pink polo, tan shorts, and fashion-forward New Balances — took possession of either a turkey club or an Italian supreme (investigation ongoing), then approached federal officers near 14th and U NW. After shouting obscenities and calling them “fascists,” Dunn delivered the battle cry “Eat fresh!” and launched his hoagie like a patriot’s musket ball — then bravely ran away. The officer’s deli-meat-proof vest took the hit.

Dunn was captured after a short foot pursuit, which might have gone better if he’d carbo-loaded before the chase. Now he faces multiple counts of felony assault on federal employees and — yes — assault with a deli weapon. Judge Jeanine pounced on the story, closing her segment with: “We’re gonna back the police to the hilt — so stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”

Not since John Wilkes Booth struck back for the Southland have Democrats achieved such a bold and enduring statement of resistance.

And, the snafu gave Judge Jeanine the ingredients for a hilarious video. “We’re gonna back the police to the hilt,” she said at the end of her video. “So stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”

Meanwhile, Fox reports paid protester requests have spiked 400% since Trump’s federal takeover of D.C.’s police force, with one crowd-supplying company claiming most attendees at political events in Washington are compensated in some way. Resistance isn’t cheap— especially if you want the combo meal. Fox News headline, Tuesday:

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Yesterday, on Joe Rogan’s podcast Episode 2365, photogenic Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R) described her Congressional Task Force investigation into the looming alien menace, albeit in fuzzy and semi-spiritual detail. Carefully calling them “interdimensional beings,” Luna said, “this gets into deeper aspects of religion… you have the modern-day Bible, and… books of the Bible that have been removed that explain these topics.”

CLIP: Representative Anna Paulina Luna says she’s seen evidence of interdimensional beings that travel in time and space, and future tech (3:08).

Her conviction after reviewing what the government is so far willing to cough up does, one must admit, give pause.

“We’ve heard from people… I take it with a grain of salt, because you do have a lot of crazy people, and there’s a lot of fake stuff out there,” Luna admitted. “But when you have people that are high-level executives, very successful, clean-cut, not on drugs, and they’re telling you this stuff, and you’re cross-referencing it with various people in the intelligence agencies, there’s something there that we should be at least open to hearing the argument.”

Luna referred to classified evidence —without describing it specifically— that she believes shows we’re dealing with interdimensional beings who can travel through space and time. Of course, many of us have long identified similar evidence. I mean, open your eyes, people:

It was purified catnip for alien watchers, so have a field day. Rogan and Luna also dug into topics like remote viewing, autistic telepathy, and other stuff I’ve never heard of. But hey, it’s 2025, and intergalactic comets are buzzing all the planets near Earth, and the science media is straight-out reporting about astrophysicists speculating about alien probes, so who knows.

And to be fair, Luna never called them “aliens.” Not in the sense that they hail from other spacefaring planets, come in peace, or want to be taken to our leader, and so forth. She seemed to hew to a more Biblical view, that the non-human visitors are fallen angelic beings using high-tech transportation. But mileage may vary. Especially interdimensional mileage.

Apart from the more, uh, controversial parts, the discussion included some other good material randomly sprinkled through the podcast, such as about Luna’s experiences adjusting to being a new Congresswoman, the deep state, internal House politics, and so on. Even if you don’t have alien fever, it might be a solid background listen.

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Amidst the DC law enforcement lockdown and Trump’s imminent meeting with President Putin, the RussiaGate disclosure operation continued bearing fruit yesterday. Just the News, which has been one of the central conduits, ran the story yesterday below the headline, “‘Shut it down’: Bombshell FBI timeline exposes political interference in Clinton corruption probe.” As late as 4pm yesterday, DNI Tulsi Gabbard continued dropping newly declassified RussiaGate documents on X:

It wasn’t only Just the News. Late yesterday, Fox ran its own story under the headline, “Clapper allegedly pushed to ‘compromise’ ‘normal’ steps to rush 2017 ICA, despite concerns from NSA director.” The subheadline added, “Gabbard declassified emails, exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital, allegedly reveal that the ‘manufactured intelligence assessment was deliberate and came from the very top.’”

Yesterday’s double-barreled declassifications slammed into the news cycle like a fusillade of political artillery. First, DNI Tulsi Gabbard dropped an email showing then-DNI James Clapper telling NSA Director Mike Rogers they might have to “compromise” on normal intel procedures, to fast-track the infamous January 2017 report blaming Russia for the DNC hacks, even though NSA Director Rogers’ team said they weren’t given nearly enough time or access to source documents to be “absolutely confident” in the conclusion.

DNI Clapper then replied that he needed everyone to be “on the same page” in “the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re sticking to it.’” (Caps in original.) In other words, there would be no more time, and no more debate.

Next, FBI Director Kash Patel surfaced a 2017 DOJ-authored timeline documenting how, whereas the RussiaGate hoax got first class seats on the bullet train, the Clinton Foundation corruption probe was handcuffed, blindfolded, and shoved in a filing closet. Obama’s Deputy AG Sally Yates allegedly ordered prosecutors to “shut it down,” Andrew McCabe required personal approval for any new investigative step, and field offices were told not to recruit new sources or collect documents.

Shut. It. Down. They did. By Election Day 2016, the Clinton investigation was effectively dead. Mission accomplished, as George Bush might say.

As previously reported, Bondi’s Justice Department is prepping (or maybe already running) a grand jury, to probe whether the scheme wasn’t justpartisan bias, but actually a coordinated criminal conspiracy to protect political allies and frame enemies. In other words, we may soon find out whether “Crossfire Hurricane” and “Clinton Foundation” were opposite sides of the same coin — one side polished and laminated, the other side carved off and hastily buried below the deep state’s chicken coop.

If these documents are authentic and materially complete, this situation is about as historic as it gets for the U.S. intelligence community. Not because the evidence merely shows bias or bureaucratic turf wars, but because its primary-source, contemporaneous evidence that top national security officials discussed, in writing, how to cut procedural corners and align politically sensitive conclusions for public consumption.

🔥 If Bondi’s new grand jury finds this to be evidence of a coordinated, top-down political operation inside the intelligence and justice apparatus, it could be the first time in U.S. history that the senior architects of a politicized IC operation are themselves put under oath to account for it— not before a congressional committee, but in a criminal courtroom.

If you can never remember this kind of vast declassification of recent IC documents in pursuit of contemporaneous criminal charges, that’s because nothing like it has never happened. The slow drip of declassification is the opposite of the usual “history first, prosecutions never” pattern. Even Iran-Contra, which did see some prosecutions, did not start with declassified top-level cables. The Iran-Contra prosecutors quietly built cases behind the scenes, and only later disclosed selected evidence.

The number of ways that Bondi’s DOJ can get at these former officials is multiplying faster than Viagra-fed rabbits. First, there are the crimes themselves— with statutes of limitations doubled because the subject matter involves national security. Then there are all the false statements made to federal officials and under oath in Congress, carefully collected by Republican Congressional committees, and contradicted by the declassified documents.

In other words, Bondi now has contemporaneous documentary evidence —the declassified emails, reports, and timelines— that directly contradicts sworn statements and public testimony already on record. That’s prosecutorial gold.

Finally, and third, there are potential process crimes related to the efforts to cover up and obscure the original crimes themselves. Obstruction of justice, destruction or concealment of records (remember the burn bags?), witness tampering — all carry their own penalties, independent of the underlying conduct.

🔥 This is significant: The case that is being carefully presented to the public proves that the DOJ will offer the juries multiple ways to convict. Obviously, the more different ways there are to find a defendant guilty, the more likely it becomes there will be a conviction on something.

We can safely assume the DOJ is not releasing all the evidence (and there’s no reason they need to). Bondi’s DOJ is almost certainly holding back the majority of what they have.

Prosecutors don’t tip their whole hand unless they’re forced to. Keeping key documents, witness statements, or classified intercepts under wraps preserves the ability to drop them later, at the grand jury stage or at trial, when the defendants can’t pre-spin them in the media. And even during a declassification wave, there will be lots of stuff that remains classified, because it reveals sources, methods, or ongoing operations.

But those can still be used in court under the Classified Information Procedures Act without being previewed to the public beforehand.

And some evidence is almost certainly being withheld until after witness interviews, so that prosecutors can test whether people lie about facts they know the DOJ can prove — turning those lies into fresh perjury or obstruction counts. The old “perjury trap.”

Finally, unlike the public, the jurors can see a lot more of the unredactedmaterial.

At some point, maybe soon, Gabbard and Patel will leak the last tranche of declassified documents, and then the real game begins.

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Tomorrow, Trump and Putin will meet in Anchorage to discuss the Proxy War. The confab is scheduled for 3:30pm EST (11:30am Alaska, 10:30pm Moscow time). The media can’t decide which story is bigger: Trump and Putin or the DC LEO takeover. The Times ran several stories about the meeting; I selected the one headlined, “How a Call From Trump Ignited a Frantic Week of Diplomacy by Ukraine.”

The Times explained that Trump broke the meeting story last Friday in a call to Zelensky. The former funnyman freaked out when Trump announced two things: (1) he planned to meet with President Putin, which breaks the rule of ostracizing the Russian president. And (2), Trump advised the little leader that he might have to consider letting the Russians keep some of the formerly Ukrainian territory.

Those two facts, the story said, led to all the mania and mayhem on the European continent over the last few days, culminating in the gang call yesterday between Trump, Vance, and over a dozen European officials.

They don’t seem to realize how childish and ineffectual the call made them look.

First of all, if they have great ideas for settling the war in Ukraine, why pitch them to Trump? They have phones, don’t they? And they are much closer to Moscow. Why not pitch their ideas directly to Putin? A big call to “Daddy” to whine about their classmate Russia makes them seem more like bullied fifth graders rather than heads of state.

Seriously, behold this picture the Times included in the story, showing the Europeans sitting at a table that looks like it was decorated for the first day of kindergarten:

I wish I were making that up. It’s not AI. And if you still think I’m exaggerating, check out how the Times described one of the most recent meetings:

Trying to “dissuade” us from cutting a deal with Russia behind their backs?It’s just like fifth-grade mean girls. You can’t talk to Rebecca about Rob unless we all do!

But wait, it gets even better. The more I see of Secretary Scott Bessent, the more I love that guy. Here he is describing the Administration’s offer to Europe. It’s brilliant:

CLIP: Secretary Bessent makes the opening offer (0:26).

“I was at the G7 meeting in Canada, with President Trump,” Bessent said, chuckling. “And the Europeans kept talking about Senator Graham’s bill to do the secondary tariffs, and I looked at all the leaders around the table, and I asked, ‘is everyone at this table willing to put a 200% secondary tariff on China?’ And you know what? Everybody suddenly wanted to see what kind of shoes they were wearing.”

Bessent continued. “President Trump is meeting with President Putin, and the Europeans are in the wings carping about how he should do it, and what he should do, but the Europeans need to join us in these sanctions. They need to be willing to put on these secondary sanctions, too.”

Haha! Boomerang! Checkmate! The Europeans have been crying in their room-temperature beer (ugh) for months demanding that America slap the “bone-crushing sanctions” on all the countries —like China— that buy Russian energy products. Well, how about them? Will they walk the talk, or are they just pasty blowhards demanding that America go fight that guy?

Bessent answered his own question: They are just pasty blowhards demanding that America go fight that guy. It’s nuanced! And complicated! And nuanced! We just got our nails done!

It is political dynamite. The Europeans are in a box. It was just a rhetorical question, sure, but why should America bear the costs of “bone-crushing” sanctions if the Europeans aren’t willing to do it? Especially when they are the ones demanding it be done? There’s no good answer. As they say, if it weren’t for double standards, the Europeans would have no standards at all.

Best of all, Trump and Bessent just let all the air out of the sanctions gasbag. Since the whiny Europeans won’t agree to join in them, then Trump needn’t threaten “bone-crushing” sanctions at tomorrow’s meeting. It’s over. Trump can do whatever he wants.

No wonder none of yesterday’s articles about the Zelensky-Eurocall mentioned the secondary sanctions. Just like that, it’s a non-issue. Good job, Scott.

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More Trump wins in court. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a very encouraging story headlined, “Federal appeals court clears DOGE to access sensitive records at agencies.”

The Fourth Circuit just handed Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency a major win, clearing its access to ‘sensitive’ agency databases, despite howls of protest from unions and benefit recipients. In a 2–1 ruling, Judges Julius Richardson and Steven Agee held that the plaintiffs “struggled to show harm,” and reminded everyone that privacy laws don’t bar access for federal workers whose jobs require it — like, say, the folks modernizing those systems.

In other words, if DOGE’s job is to clean up an agency’s IT, it gets admin-level access to everything inside. Period.

Launching out of the gate, Trump created DOGE by executive order in January, granting it “full and prompt access” to all unclassified agency records and systems. The initiative (once overseen by Elon Musk) has been one of the most polarizing parts of Trump’s second term— hailed by his allies as a swamp-draining efficiency engine, blasted by his opponents as a scary, unaccountable digital skeleton key.

A Maryland judge had blocked DOGE from accessing certain ‘private’ data at Treasury, OPM, and Education, but the appeals court shredded that injunction, citing a June Supreme Court decision allowing DOGE into Social Security’s files.

Dissenting Judge Robert King said the lower court “acted quickly — but extremely carefully” in keeping DOGE out, but would have kept the firewall. But for now, the firewall’s gone — and DOGE’s data bulldozers are rolling in.

The last major impediment to the DOGE project has fallen. From what we know of DOGE’s anti-bureaucratic speed, they’re probably already working. This is an unpopular take, but I suspect DOGE’s real job is less about cutting the bloat and more about corralling and cross-checking the sprawling federal database. Let’s see what they do with it.

Have a terrific Thursday! C&C will return tomorrow, with a fine Friday roundup of all the essential news and sarcastic commentary that you can rely on.

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