Better in their words…

Zelensky’s final friend crushed in purge; NC law fires up; Trump freezes asylum and Afghan visas; oil smashes records; tax reform teased; last Trump case dies; Autopen scrapped; and MAGA snaps back.

Source: FINDING OUT ☙ Saturday, November 29, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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It’s House of Cards: Kiev Edition. There was always an implied consequence attached to Trump’s public demands that Ukraine agree to a peace deal by Thanksgiving. Or else. Early speculation was that Trump would pause or cancel U.S. intelligence sharing. But yesterday, we found out. The New York Times ran the story, headlined, “In Firing His No. 2, Zelensky Loses Both a Negotiator and an Enforcer.” As Agatha Christie would say: and then there was one.

In 2019, with loving assistance from USAID, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s career as an actor playing Ukraine’s president wrapped— and he stepped right into the role for real. It was his first time holding any public office. The cosmic joke —not so hilarious to Ukrainian citizens— was that he ran as an “outsider” on an anti-corruption crusade. And he hauled his two best friends along with him, under the official story that Zelensky needed people around him whom he could “trust.”

Tymur Mindich, Zelensky’s business partner and personal money manager, was handed the keys to the kingdom— the Energy Ministry, tax revenue levers, power structures, the whole bureaucratic buffet. Locals called him “Zelensky’s wallet.” Last week, the wallet snapped shut and bolted. Mindich caught the Midnight Express to Israel after NABU —Ukraine’s “corruption investigation agency” with unmistakable State Department fingerprints— raided his apartment and offices. And then there were two. (Collateral damage from NABU’s “Kyiv Massacre” also vaporized roughly half a dozen cabinet ministers who were in the blast radius.)

One week ago, Mindich’s departure prompted the Washington Post to announce Zelensky was scraping the bottom.

Zelensky’s only other oldest and best friend is Andriy “the Giant” Yermak. From 2011 till the 2019 elections, Yermak was Zelensky’s personal lawyer— handling media, finance, and intellectual-property issues while Zelensky built his entertainment empire. As Zelensky’s wealth grew, Yermak became an all-in-one producer, fixer, consigliere, and legal counsel. So after Zelensky won the presidency, Yermak oozed into power along with him.

Yermak became Chief of Staff— arguably the second-most powerful man in Ukraine, and on most days, the first.

The Times called Yermak “a sharp-elbowed and imperious political operative, to the point that opposition politicians and journalists accused him of repression and abuse,” and who “nearly always remained physically close to the president.” (You may rightly wonder which journalists accused Yermak of abuse and repression— and why you never ever heard that story from the Times’s journalists. It was independent media.)

Till last week, we’d basically never even heard of Yermak, the powerful giant who “always remained physically close to the president.” In other words, Yermak never lets Zelensky out of his sight. (It is widely reported that the men often even sleep in the same room.) The Times, for sure, never mentioned the oversized man constantly looming over the little wartime president. But now, the Grey Lady is heaping on the scorn: “Yermak struck an almost cartoonish contrast to the diminutive Mr. Zelensky in photographs.”

It is a physical metaphor; Yermak was the real power behind the tiny throne.

Yermak was merely grazed, a flesh wound, when NABU took down Zelensky’s best friend and top minister, Mindich. Last week, NABU dramatically released glossy video and audio of intercepts, featuring unidentified corrupt government ministers conspiring to carve up Ukraine like a Thanksgiving turkey. One of the voices, who used the code-name “Ali Baba,” was widely believed to be Yermak. Sporadic calls began to emerge for his resignation.

Right around that time, Yermak —who hadn’t been charged with anything or openly investigated— decided to earnestly begin negotiating with the US on a peace deal for real this time. I’ve previously surmised that the timing of NABU’s dramatic release was not coincidental, but was a US-led pressure campaign focused on the Green Sweatshirt himself. As the negotiations unfolded, Trump alluded to the aforementioned deadline.

Then the deadline came and went without a deal.

Yesterday —one day post-deadline— NABU promptly raided Yermak’s offices and his home address. A few hours later, like clockwork, Yermak abruptly resigned as Chief of Staff. And then there was one. A wide-eyed Zelensky made the announcement, claiming Yermak was only removed out of an abundance of caution, to avoid unspecified “distractions.” He did not mention the corruption investigation.

“Mr. Yermak’s departure,” the Times said, “is a seismic event in Ukraine’s wartime politics.” I bet. Who’ll keep Zelensky away from the tender embraces of his white powder now?

Zelensky said the search for Yermak’s replacement would begin soon, which proves that his departure was unexpected and unplanned. For his part, Yermak gave a bizarre, “impassioned” interview by text message to the New York Post (of all places), in which he comically claimed that he planned to join the Army and go fight on the front lines. Okay.

What will Zelensky do now, without his wallet and his enforcer? He’s been isolated. He’s a man on an island.

🚀 We have some clue. Yermak led the peace negotiations with the US. With Yermak gone, that duty falls to Ukraine’s Defense Secretary Rustem Umerov, who, the Post reported, “spoke with FBI Director Kash Patel ahead of his meeting with Witkoff.” If that sounds odd, it’s not just you. “It is unclear why that meeting took place,” the Post primly noted, since it couldn’t say more.

But I’ll say more. Umerov’s meetings with FBI Director Patel suggest he is a cooperating witness. It also suggests he will be much more receptive to the U.S. position than was the “sharp-elbowed” Yermak. (Nobody talks about Zelensky, the former actor, as any force of personality in the negotiations. He is a nullity; a spent force. He’s just the one who must sign.)

Umerov will meet with Trump’s negotiating team at luxurious Mar-a-Lago this weekend. Yermak was supposed to go; but he’s apparently now headed for the front lines instead.

Media is spinning faster than a neutron star trying to paint Yermak’s firing as a bold move by Zelensky to “shore up” his government. But, to give you an idea of how profoundly this affects the calculus, consider three headlines. First, a defiant headline from the Atlantic, two days ago (just before Yermak was forced out):

Remember, Yermak was “Ukraine’s chief negotiator” who “said conceding sovereign territory is off-limits in peace talks.” That was a bold position to take. Then, immediately after Yermak suddenly fell under investigation, a UK Telegraph headline struck a decidedly different tone:

I guess Ukraine’s position must have softened for some reason. Finally, this morning’s UK Guardian carried a once-unimaginable headline:

Two days ago, media crowed about Yermak defiantly insisting that even conceding 20% of territory was “off-limits.” Now, according to the Guardian’s op-editor, it’s fine; it’s a glass mostly full. “The vast majority of its people and its land remain intact,” the article reassured readers. “That is a win worth taking,” it encouraged.

All the turnaround took was one morning’s office raid.

🚀 Trumps’ team just slew another giant. And they even kept leverage, since it was a half step. Yermak wasn’t charged, just raided. They could still file charges, or withhold them, depending on whether Yermak plays ball by staying out of the way. Brilliant.

Reading between the lines, I think President Trump and his team have decided they want this war wrapped up before the end of the year. Let’s see if I’m right.

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Local KFOX ran a story two months ago in September, headlined, “Rep. Fine proposes bill to allow lawsuits against judges releasing violent offenders.” The story described a promise made by Florida Representative Randy Fine (R-Fl.) in the wake of Iryna Zarutska’s brutal murder. Randy vowed to introduce a federal bill to let citizens sue judges who negligently release violent criminals. He did file the bill, HR 5312, and it was titled the “Judicial Accountability for Irresponsible Leniency Act,” or “JAIL Act,” but nothing’s happened. Why?

For one thing, the bill is only twelve lines long, which means it doesn’t seriously treat its tricky subject matter. It was introduced and referred to the House Judiciary committee with no summary, no CBO score, and no reported committee activity or amendments, which is typical of an “optics only” bill designed for press releases and campaign mail, and not legitimate negotiation and passage.

If it went anywhere (which it won’t), Randy’s bill would have stripped judicial immunity for any judge, state or federal, who released any repeat offender —even a one-time offender— who then harmed someone. There is no requirement in the bill that the release be unlawful, reckless, negligent, improper, or violate any statute, effectively making judges liable for any bad outcomes. It would have swept state judges and state release decisions into federal court, raising immediate federalism, separation‑of‑powers, and due‑process problems that would invite prompt constitutional challenge.

Which lawmakers and staff would have recognized if this were a serious attempt at real policy.

So never mind about that one. But the issue continues to be one of the hottest debates going: how can we rein in progressive judges who keep releasing violent criminals?

There are undoubtedly bad judges. But the solution to bad judges cannot, unfortunately, be to make all judges personally liable for bad decisions. Beyond the constitutional problems, it would raise massive practical problems, not least of which would be huge conflicts of interest, since judges’ rulings would be swayed by their personal interests in not getting sued.

The real solution is more painful, piecemeal, and ponderous. Legislatures must tighten the rules, metrics, and oversight around bail and sentencing, rather than threaten judges personally with tort liability. Outlawing “cash bail” (i.e. promises instead of bail) for violent offenders would be a great start.

Judges could also be required to make detailed written findings when granting any bail to repeat violent offenders, for example, allowing prosecutors to immediately seek appellate review. Judicial review committees can be enabled to investigate patterns of bad outcomes by judges, such as when a judge’s violent-felony release and reoffense rate is an outlier. These state review committees can already impose bar discipline, reassignment, or mandatory retraining. Congress could design a similar federal system.

We could also require judge and DA-level dashboards with statistics showing release rates, violent reoffense rates on pretrial release, and sentencing patterns in violent cases, so that voters could make more informed decisions in judicial and prosecutor elections. These are just some ideas.

Indeed, lawmakers in North Carolina responded quickly in September and passed “Iryna’s Law,” which kicks in on Monday. Among other things, it outlaws “cash bail” and requires detailed written findings from judges for any pretrial release of a repeat offender. This week, local WSOC-TV ran an anguished story headlined “County braces for jail surge as Iryna’s Law takes effect Monday.”

Hyphenated Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell said, “I am almost speechless about the impacts across the board here.” Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden is worried about staffing. He expects more people will be held in jail and for longer periods of time. For everyone else, that is probably a good thing.

North Carolina is a test. The rest of the nation watches expectantly to see how Iryna Zarutska’s tragic legacy will affect the state’s safety.

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Let’s do a lightning round of good news. First, yesterday, President Trump promptly followed through with his Thanksgiving promise in the wake of the weird DC shootings. The New York Times reported, “Trump Pauses All Asylum Applications and Halts Visas for Afghans.” Nobody alive can remember an Administration that moves this nimbly.

“The United States on Friday paused all asylum decisions and stopped issuing visas to people from Afghanistan,” the Times said, “as President Trump launched a major review of the country’s immigration system after the shooting of two National Guard members.”

Many folks hope this is the first step in a much bigger policy President Trump has called “reverse migration.”

The latest tweaks aren’t new; Trump has been working on this for a while. Afghan refugee applications were frozen months ago in a blanket refugee ban. In June, President Trump issued a travel ban on nineteen countries, including Afghanistan, with an exemption for Special Immigrant Visas.

With yesterday’s action, the final legal entrance for Afghans outside the United States has now been closed.

Best of all, officials also announced they are reviewing all existing green cards of people from the nineteen banned nations— presumably the same ones Trump meant when he referred to “Third World countries.” Biden’s team tossed green cards out to migrants like they were Mardi Gras beads. Now the green cards may become red cards.

🔥 Meanwhile, yesterday, Baird Maritime ran a story headlined, “US oil production sets new record high in September, shrugging off surplus fears.” US crude oil output rose +44,000 barrels per day in September to reach a record 13.84 million barrels per day, according to Energy Department data.

I hope someone rounds up all the records Trump has broken in his first 11 months. I should’ve started the list a long time ago, but now it is too late. I’ve lost track.

Yesterday, Axios ran a remarkable story headlined, “Income taxes could be eliminated soon due to tariffs, Trump says.” It is quite a change in tone from where we started, with headlines like “Trump tariffs will cause a Great Depression: Experts.” At a Thanksgiving event on Thursday —he kept working!— Trump teased, “In the next couple of years, I think we’ll be substantially cutting, or maybe cutting out completely, the income tax.”

CLIP: Trump’s Thanksgiving presser runs down excellent national news and teases tax reform (4:20).

“Some of that tariff income is going back in a dividend to taxpayers, some will reduce debt,” the President explained. “We could completely replace the income tax because the money we’re taking in is so large.”

If he does pull off a major reduction in income tax rates, never mind eliminating them completely, he will have essentially replaced the income tax with a foreign sales tax, delighting tax reform activists. And, his “tariff dividend checks,” sent out next year to lower-income Americans, will be politically crucial in advance of the midterm elections, especially if Democrats keep clinging to their amorphous “affordability” narrative.

The Supreme Court recently heard the oral arguments over challenges to Trump’s tariffs. The justices’ questions were decidedly mixed, defying any predictions of their pending decision. Now everyone is waiting on pins and needles to find out whether Trump can continue running his tariff dashboard using his preferred statute, IEEPA (or as I like to call it, “Jeepers”).

🔥 The Wall Street Journal ran a Thanksgiving story that left 18 of Trump’s co-defendants feeling deeply grateful, headlined, “Georgia Judge Drops Election-Interference Case Against Trump.”

Amorous Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis’ replacement, prosecutor Peter J. Skandalakis, asked the judge on Wednesday to dismiss the high-profile case, saying he found insufficient evidence to support the wide-ranging RICO charges, and noting that there was “no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial.”

Even better, Skandalakis wrote, “I begin the process of evaluating this case with a basic truth: It is not illegal to question or challenge election results.” So much for election denialism.

The salutary result is that, at long last, Fani Willis’s fraying circus has quietly collapsed into an inglorious sinkhole, never to return. At one time, the case was Democrats’ best hope of “getting Trump.” Now, it’s a historical footnote.

I’ll end this segment with a nod of appreciation for local defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who single-handedly and doggedly unearthed Fani Willis’s corruption— even though she just represented defendant Mike Roman and not the President. It took enormous effort and perseverance through years of mind-numbing public records battles to disassemble the most serious remaining case.

That a solo lawyer did what legions of tall-building attorneys could not proves the essential, democratic wisdom of our judicial system, and shows that we small-firm lawyers often produce the best out-of-the-box results. I’m only saying. (For my picky commenters: Ashleigh is technically not a completesolo; she practices with her husband at the Merchant Law Firm in Marietta, Georgia.)

Only two Trump cases remain. His 34-count New York felony conviction for writing the wrong notation on his check stubs, the so-called “Hush Money” case, is up on appeal. So are the E. Jean Carroll sexual‑abuse and defamation lawsuits, including petitions to the Supreme Court, mostly since Democrats had passed a single-use law allowing Caroll’s 25-year-old claim to proceed, even though it was otherwise long past the statute of limitations.

TAW.

🔥 Finally, also yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran another delightful story headlined, “Trump Says He Is Canceling Biden Executive Orders Signed With Autopen.” Democrats have defiantly defended the presidential use of the machine-signature device, arguing that it allows busy presidents time for more important matters than signing their own Executive Orders. The fact that Biden could never be described as ‘busy’ has largely escaped them.

“I am hereby canceling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally,” Trump posted to Truth Social yesterday in his usual style. “Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury,” Trump added.

It might be a tad over-enthusiastic. The first one is easy: Trump can legally override any Biden executive order. But it is unclear that Trump can legally override pardons or clemency decisions after they’ve been made. It will require some creative legal work to make that happen, but I can’t rule it out; no president was ever dumb enough to try this before, so it has never been tested. Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi said her team was “reviewing the Biden administration’s reported use of autopen for pardons.” We’ll see.

There’s no law against lying. So Biden can keep lying about his Autopen decisions without perjury liability so long as he is not under oath. The Journal noted drily, “A Biden spokesperson declined to comment” about Trump’s threat. They aren’t taking any chances.

This is red meat for MAGA. Trump has been on a roll since last week when MTG rage-quit and the media started predicting the MAGA coalition was “shattering.” It only took the President about four days —including a major holiday— to fire the base back up again. So I guess it wasn’t that fractured after all. Onwards.

Have a wonderful weekend! Coffee & Covid will be back on Monday morning with an all-new roundup of engaging essential news and constructive commentary. It’s all the information you need to stay informed.

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