Do you think they would have prosecuted if it had been a low level employee doing the same thing? Running their own private email server, doing government business on that server?

I think they would have, that’s why I think it’s important to note that they chose not to prosecute her despite it being something that would have been prosecuted for other less powerful people.

Was it as big a deal as the GOP made of it? No. But, it’s still a rule that everybody else has to follow or they get charged.

Deciding not to prosecute isn’t necessarily the same as deciding it wasn’t criminal.

Given that Google probably trains their LLMs based on the content of people’s Gmail inboxes, how long until a prompt convinces Gemini to spit out Waltz’s emails verbatim?

Or, could use this profile:

• Former military officers
• Graduates of Virginia Military Academy
• Married men in their early 50s
• Men Living in Washington DC
• Fathers of teenage daughters
• …

Then microtarget ads that will be shown only to him. I can guarantee that a guy this bad at OPSEC doesn’t know how to use an ad blocker.

(And if you’re a North Korean hacking group, you make sure the ad has a malicious payload that gives you control over his computer.)

Hillary wasn’t prosecuted, though she probably should have been. But, she was grilled by government committees for many hours.

I wouldn’t be surprised of the NSA or a similar agency controls key cell “towers” near the White House and other places he often goes, Mar A Lago, etc. Even in normal times, that’s just good practice, but with Trump it might allow them to do some filtering or drop data strategically.

He’s not some hillbilly bumpkin, he’s incredibly dangerous, like the HW Bush to Reagan.

A one-term president who may have been much smarter than his predecessor but lacked the charisma and wasn’t able to get much done as a result.

JD Vance is much smarter, but there’s only one god emperor in this cult. If Trump died, the GOP would suddenly lack a focal point and would go back to infighting and chaos.

The US military got so lucky here.

They’re lucky that the incompetence was exposed so early in the administration. Signal isn’t allowed on government phones, apparently, so this was all done with personal devices. We’ve already seen how many people have compromised phones with something like Pegasus installed. This is why secure government phones exist in the first place. Who knows how long some foreign spy agency might have been reading the group chat if they hadn’t done such a stupid leak.

They’re lucky that the guy accidentally included in the group chat was a responsible journalist, not some rando who’d stay in the group chat and just keep leaking this stuff, or someone who might have chosen to sell access to China or North Korea or something.

They’re lucky that the target was Houthi rebels, and not a near-peer nation state. Even with hours of advance warning, the Houthis probably wouldn’t have been able to shoot down F-18s. But 3+ hours is plenty of time for a more advanced enemy to set up an ambush.

Can you imagine how it feels to be one of the F-18 pilots reading this article, knowing how close you could have come to getting killed?

The really sad thing is that in this scenario only Republicans matter. As long as they keep treating Trump as some kind of god-emperor, nothing will happen.

I was going to say “treating him as a king”, but England and Canada have kings and would never put up with this kind of shit from a king. England hasn’t put up with kings acting this way since the Magna Carta was signed.

Exactly. If they had wanted to intentionally leak classified information in order to move the overton window or something, they would have done it differently. They wouldn’t have had the VP disagreeing with Trump. They wouldn’t have actually leaked serious classified information, including the name of an active CIA officer. They wouldn’t have leaked it to the editor in chief of the Atlantic.

They fired all the adults that think things through and provide rigor for a reason so the only people left are children doing whatever they want ignorant of the consequences.

For example, they fired anyone who would otherwise have said “Folks, this is not an appropriate communications tool for classified information. This needs to be shared in a SCIF”.

Anybody who knows better also knows to keep their mouth shut if they want to keep their job in this admin. And even if keeping their job isn’t their priority, they know that if they speak up they risk being scapegoated, hung out to dry, and possibly killed by MAGA loyalists for daring to confront the king.

What I love is that it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

The whole reason it has such an absurd valuation, 20x higher than a normal car company, is that they convinced investors they weren’t just a boring car company. They had a visionary CEO who was going to keep innovating and growing the company in ways that normal car companies could never replicate. He was Tony Stark! Now they’re in a situation where it’s that same CEO who’s dragging them down. His politics is tanking their reputation, so it’s tanking their stock value.

The problem is, if they dump him as CEO, there’s absolutely no way to justify the absurd P/E ratio. They can’t just go out and appoint another supposed “Tony Stark” to run the company. That means they stick with him and their stock price tanks because he’s one of the most hated people in the world. Or, they ditch him and their stock price tanks because with their visionary CEO gone, the jig is up and there’s clearly no way to justify a P/E ratio of 100 when Toyota has a P/E ratio of approximately 7.

And for Elon, half his wealth is Tesla stock, and he borrowed against that Tesla stock to fund his Twitter purchase. If Tesla tanks, it all could come crashing down around him. There’s no escape for him either. He can’t realistically even sell his stock because as soon as he started trying to do that it would signal his lack of confidence and cause the value to plummet.

It’s just annoying that Tesla’s stock isn’t crashing faster. So many people who don’t believe in the sunk cost fallacy, and are desperately lying to themselves rather than cashing out before the bubble bursts.