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Friday, May 29, 2026

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Ansprego struggled to explain his codpiece-knitting obsession to the chickpea farmers who brought him various soups.

Hasn't this great country suffered enough?

After four years of enduring the desiccated husk of Joe Biden and his upholstery-clad wife, DOCTOR Mama Jill, being the theoretical president and first lady of the United States, we should be spared having to see either one of them in the news. The mainstream media loves to keep the Democratic Party's has-beens around, though, and we're getting frequent reminders of them lately.

First, Joe Biden's puppet masters are suing the Department of Justice to prevent the release of what are bound to be some embarrassing transcripts from interviews with a ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir, which Matt wrote about yesterday.

Whatever legacy they're hoping to preserve is a work of pure fiction. Give it up, already.

The insufferable Mrs. Biden's contribution to the news cycle is even more annoying and unnecessary. This is also from Matt:

Anyway, it turns out that Dr. Jill wasn’t so blown away by her husband’s performance that night. In an interview with CBS News, she admitted that she thought her husband was having a stroke while it was happening.
In a newly released clip from a CBS News interview with correspondent Rita Braver, published Wednesday, Jill Biden recalls watching Joe struggle through the debate onstage opposite Donald Trump, his voice hoarse, his sentences trailing off into nothing, his presence diminished in a way that, up until that night, only conservatives were noticing.
Braver asked whether she felt "horrified" watching the man she'd spent decades vouching for fall apart on national television. Jill Biden's answer was revealing. "I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since, never," she said.

Make it stop.

This charade of everyone on the left pretending that they didn't know that Biden's brain had checked out has gone on long enough. Forget about all of conservative media — or even just Townhall Media — the body of evidence on this site alone that there was no "there" there in Joe Biden's brain is overwhelming. My colleagues and I were all writing about that during the 2020 campaign, while he and the wife were doing all of those basement videos.

Saying that she was worried that he might have had a stroke is a far cry from the effusive "Joe, you did such a great job answering every question. You knew all the facts," praise that she heaped upon him immediately after the debate. It was a staged photo-op, but because Democrats don't have any self-awareness, Mrs. B. didn't know how bad she was making him look. She sounded like a mother praising her toddler for pooping on the poddy for the first time.

Jill Biden and the rest of the Democrats aren't going to stop trying to do retroactive damage control on the unmitigated train wreck that was Joe Biden's unfortunate occupation of the Oval Office. Perhaps they figure that, if given enough time, a lot of people will forget what a bumbling moron Biden was while he was pretending to be president. Dr. Jill's decades in public education have greatly contributed to making America dumber, so it just might work.

Democrats who leave the White House feel a need to continue imposing themselves on the American public seemingly forever. Hillary Clinton always crawls out of her box of Franzia just as I've put her out of my mind. You know who I never hear about these days? George W. and Laura Bush. I am blissfully unaware of anything they are doing until a famous politician dies and W. shows up at the funeral.

The Bidens are awful people (Abandoned grandchild, anyone?), and four years of them in the White House were too much. It's time for them to get back to that Delaware beach that Sir Sniffsalot was always absconding to from 2021-2025 and leave all of us alone.

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2026/05/27/the-morning-briefing-the-bidens-really-need-to-shut-up-and-go-away-n4953304

Wacky birds whack Cornyn

Wacky birds whack Cornyn

T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

It must suck to be a manic depressant.

For RINOs this year, May was the cruelest month as MAGA voters primaried those who defied their orders.

In Indiana on May 5, Republican voters rejected six of the seven incumbent state senators who defied the desire to redistrict the state’s congressional map to send two more Republicans to Washington.

In Louisiana on May 16, Senator Wild Eyes Bill Cassidy finished third in the primary meaning he won’t be in the runoff primary that will decide the nomination. Cassidy voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment. MAGA impeached and convicted Cassidy.

In Kentucky on May 19, MAGA voters sent Congressman Thomas Massie packing. He’s headed to the Libertarian Party where he belongs. He’ll replace Jill Stein as their perennial losing presidential nominee.

In Texas on May 26 (last night), MAGA voters toppled Senator John Cornyn in a runoff against primary against Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. The race was close until Trump endorsed Paxton. That blew Cornyn off the map as Paxton beat him by 27 points.

The media is lying when it frames the issue as Trump’s revenge against perceived enemies.

This is MAGA voters flushing the commode. The electorate has had it with politicians who promise voters everything but give them Dem Lite.

Democrats are on the 20 side of every 80/20 issue and yet Republican representatives and senators keep blocking action on those 80/20 issues.

The opposition to congressional redistricting in Indiana was not over some high-minded principle.

The Senate Republican Caucus decided to take their ball and go home rather than fully fund ICE and the border patrol. In his concession speech, Cassidy said, “When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen. Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our constitution.”

But 2020 was stolen—and Cassidy wanted to punish the victim.

Mitt Romney couldn’t help himself. He said, “The Senate to now lose an exceptionally brilliant and creative mind, an M.D. who chairs healthcare, and a person of character. Bill Cassidy’s departure is a loss for the country.”

You know who else is an M.D.? Tony Fauci.

As far as character, a man elected to represent the people does not abandon them time after time in the name of some principle that they never spell out.

The media claims that President Trump earned this rebuke and that Senate Republicans should show him who is boss of the party.

Well, he is. The party has nominated Trump for president three consecutive times. In 2016, he ran on building the wall; Cornyn and company blocked him. In 2024, Trump ran on deportations; Cornyn and company won’t fund it.

The Kool-Aid swilling media spin on Republicans choosing Paxton over Cornyn is this will elect Democrat James Talarico to the Senate.

On CNN, Scott Jennings and Xochitl Hinojosa traded words.

HINOJOSA: Talarico is well funded. Talarico will continue to raise money, but it’s interesting to me that now Republicans have to worry about deep red Texas because they have a flawed candidate who does not know how to raise. And you’re now seeing that currently play out.

JENNINGS: All these analysis of this race and sort of the differences between what a Cornyn or a Paxton would look like here. I’m thinking about the differences between Talarico and LITERALLY every other Texan.
I don’t know any Texans who believe in six genders other than Talarico. Don’t know any Texans who said it’s immoral to eat meat other than Talarico. Don’t know any Texans who walk around saying things you know God is non-binary. You all are both Texans. Do you know ANY other Texan who even talks like that?
Issues aside, who says these things out loud? When this gets adjudicated, all that money coming in from California and New York, it will be well spent in Texas.

Establishment Republicans see Trump and his voters—wacky birds as John McCain called them—as a threat to their very existence.

For 10 years they weren’t. Now they are.

Presidents usually lose midterm elections. But what was done in May could upend that and give Republicans a November to remember.

https://donsurber.substack.com/p/wacky-birds-whack-cornyn

Thursday, May 28, 2026

On This Date, ‘Peaceful Protests’ Put an End to the COVID Pandemic

On This Date, ‘Peaceful Protests’ Put an End to the COVID Pandemic

Tim O'Brien

The COVID-19 pandemic ended for me on May 28, 2020, almost three months into the state-mandated lockdowns, social distancing, and masking. That was the day I saw the same elected leaders and public health officials who had taken away almost all of my freedoms look the other way when Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa took control of American cities and burned major parts of them to the ground.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf wouldn’t let my wife see her dying father in the hospital or more directly manage his care — which became deplorable once hospital staff knew family couldn’t come in and check on them. Wolf's public health experts told us if we so much as breathed while singing in church we could kill someone’s grandmother, and then he participated in a BLM march, violating any number of his pandemic dictates.

Hypocrisy: Gov. Tom Wolf marches with George Floyd protesters ‘to show solidarity’ despite pandemic via @washtimes https://t.co/lMPjol7iVp https://t.co/lMPjol7iVp pic.twitter.com/FbogvIAgOV
— Chris Alan (@ChrisAlanjo03) June 5, 2020

I had made up my mind on COVID-19 before I saw this photo, but this one cemented it for me. The same man who said I couldn’t be in a group of 25 or more people marched and encouraged the marching of thousands of people. The same man who said I had to limit my contact with non-family members, and whose administration said I couldn’t get any closer than six feet away from someone else, was marching arm-in-arm with total strangers. What a joke. And the joke was on me and everyone else who had to follow his rules.

Lest we forget, in Pennsylvania, we weren’t allowed in rooms the size of a large auditorium or banquet space with more than 25 people. Masking was mandated, even outdoors in some places. To work outside the home, you had to be deemed “essential,” like a nurse or a liquor store clerk. No in-person office work, no in-person schooling, no in-person worship. But if you wanted to participate in a little “peaceful protesting” by looting the nearest electronics store, have at it.

This is one of the more blatant examples of how the media tried to gaslight us into believing that the 2020 summer of love was “mostly peaceful protests,” this one being in Kenosha, Wis., in August of that year.

All of this while law-abiding, obedient Americans hid in their homes from a form of the flu with a 99% survival rate.

I didn’t wait until August to decide the pandemic was over. Whatever compliant things I did, like wearing a mask in a grocery store, stopped on May 28. No more mask for me. No more social distancing. No more compliance.

While I couldn’t open up the stores or the places I wanted to go, I decided I didn’t need to stay at home under Anthony Fauci’s and Gov. Wolf’s orders. Not to mention that this strange creature was the Pennsylvania public health czar at the time.

My wife started to force her way into facilities that “cared” for her dying father as much as possible, and it still wasn’t enough. We didn’t cancel a wedding in our family, and instead held it outdoors with more people on hand than what the governor would have approved. And not one person there wore a mask or social distanced.

On social media and in my real life, when I started to follow the lead of those BLM protestors by not obeying the health establishment — without the rioting, looting and arson — a rift emerged between me and some friends and family. After those George Floyd riots started, the lines between common-sense, independent-minded Americans and the more obedient and compliant members of society became more pronounced.

Those who allowed fear and a desire to conform to control them became more resentful of those of us who did not. Some of that persists to this day.

But it wasn’t just the public tenor that ended the pandemic for me. In my work, I had handled the crisis response for a hospital, a transit system, and a couple of other organizations that had to manage their own response to the pandemic.

I’d like to be able to say I got a glimpse behind the curtain, but for the most part there was no curtain to look behind. Society moved in unison under the dictatorial control of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the state health departments. Once one international or federal agency issued a dictate, everyone else followed it, no questions asked.

In the process, I watched and studied how the public health establishment was handling the crisis communications element from the very start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020, and I was horrified. Every tenet of responsible crisis communications was turned on its head.

Typically, the first rule is to work to remain calm and to calm the public. The reason is simple. No matter how bad things are or could be, a panicked public doesn’t listen, and it doesn’t cooperate. Panic creates an unsafe environment. But in 2020, the public health authorities were actively trying to gin up panic, justifying this by saying this was necessary to get people to pay attention. That was an institutional lie, and I had concluded so pretty quickly.

The second rule is to try to stick to verifiable facts in communication, and not rely on emotion or partial information, which would only add to rumor-mongering, speculation, and the spread of actual misinformation. But the public health establishment all of a sudden dismissed decades-old conventional wisdom on things like herd immunity, the efficacy of masks, and quarantine procedures.

Prior to COVID-19, if you were sick, you self-quarantined. If you were not sick, you didn’t. But with COVID-19, the public health establishment told you that if you had no symptoms, you really had to quarantine, because you were most dangerous. Words like “asymptomatic” were used to label healthy, non-infected people as pariahs. Gaslighting once again? Yes. And it was disgusting.

If you worked in crisis management then, and you kept your head about you (not all of my peers did), you saw plainly that the public health establishment was conducting a grand experiment that had nothing to do with containing a virus. It had more to do with the engineering of mass psychosis.

By May 28, 2020, all of this was clear to me, and as other events and developments would unfold later in the year and into 2021, everything just reaffirmed what some of us already knew the day those George Floyd protests started.

The pandemic, for how it was billed, was over. After that, I couldn't unsee it for what it was — a naked power grab. I'm not denying that a novel virus was spreading. It was. But the public health establishment's response was nothing less than a massive, complex campaign to manipulate the people so as to put power into the hands of the last people on earth who ever should have had power.

https://pjmedia.com/tim-o-brien/2026/05/28/on-this-datepeaceful-protests-put-an-end-to-the-covid-pandemic-n4953335?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Top DOJ Lawyer's Email Reveals Even Garland's Inner Circle Knew Mar-a-Lago Raid Was Rotten to the Core

Top DOJ Lawyer's Email Reveals Even Garland's Inner Circle Knew Mar-a-Lago Raid Was Rotten to the Core

By Bob Hoge

You knew when the Mar-a-Lago raid went down in August 2022 that something was rotten in Denmark. You need over 30 armed agents to raid a former president’s house over a classified documents dispute? Please.

We reported in December 2025 how many FBI agents didn’t believe there was probable cause for the banana republic-style action — and forwarded their concerns to former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice — but the greenlight was given anyway.

Now, Just the News is reporting that a top Justice Department official and “key ally” of Merrick Garland also cried foul and questioned the legality of the raid. It seems that everyone knew it was ethically and legally dubious, but Biden’s attack dog didn’t care about such trivialities:

Patty Stemler, a decades-long DOJ veteran who was reportedly picked by Garland in 2022 to help consult on Trump-related cases, sent an email just two days after the bureau’s Aug. 8, 2022 raid of Trump’s Florida resort home, where Stemler said she had “a few concerns.”
Stemler sent the email to Sophia Brill, a future Biden White House lawyer and then an attorney inside DOJ’s National Security Division, which played a central role in this anti-Trump inquiry.

The memo was recently unearthed by the DOJ as they investigate the weaponization of law enforcement under the Biden regime, according to the report. It seems like Stemler had more than just “concerns” — to me, it reads like she’s flat-out calling it an illegal search:

“I didn’t know about this search in advance, but I have been worrying about it ever since and worrying more now,” Stemler wrote to Brill on Aug. 10, 2022. “Doesn’t Trump maintain that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still President?
"Has anyone in NSD or OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] looked at that? I know we have procedures for declassifying, but is the President as Commander in Chief bound by those procedures? We also have procedures for granting pardons, but the President doesn’t have to follow them," she added.

MORE: Bombshell Emails Reveal FBI Agents Did Not Believe They Had Probable Cause to Raid Mar-a-Lago

Have We Forgotten… So Quickly? (VIP)

Remember this?

Trump claimed that he had a standing order from his first term as president that declassified all documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Stemler worried whether releasing details about the FBI’s seizures would be “ethical”:

“I don’t know if we intend to charge anyone with respect to the classified documents seized yesterday, but if we disclose that we found X classified documents before we seek an indictment, will that trench on any fair trial rights or violate the ethical obligations of a prosecutor?" she wrote.

She continued:

I seem to recall that a prosecutor has some leeway to inform the public that we have arrested the serial killer and seized from his home evidence that ties him to the murders for the purpose of reassuring the public that they are now safe. But aren’t there ethical limits on what a prosecutor can say otherwise?

The Mar-a-Lago raid is a stain on our country’s history and shows just how low Garland, Biden, and Co. were willing to go to “get” Orange Man Bad. Like the concerns expressed by FBI agents that there was no probable cause for the invasion, this email reveals that even those on the inside of the lawfare regime were uncomfortable with much of what was going on.

And that would likely be because they knew it was unethical.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/05/26/top-doj-lawyers-email-reveals-even-garlands-inner-circle-knew-mar-a-lago-raid-was-rotten-to-the-core-n2202726?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

The Trump Administration Just Made a Massive Move to End Bogus Asylum Cases

The Trump Administration Just Made a Massive Move to End Bogus Asylum Cases

Joseph Chalfant

The Trump Administration Just Made a Massive Move to End Bogus Asylum Cases — *AP Photo/Gregory Bull*

According to a press release issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump administration’s top immigration prosecutors will begin to pursue fraud cases against lawyers pushing fake asylum cases.

The release states that ICE attorneys have been given greater authority in enforcing laws that outlaw document fraud. Previous cases have focused largely on the asylum applicant, but the new policy will help the Trump administration to combat illegal immigration by specifically targeting the attorneys who draft and file the bogus applications.

“For many years, millions of illegal aliens have committed fraud in our immigration system. No place is this more rampant than in immigration court,” DHS General Counsel James Percival said in the press release. “Protection claims like asylum are intended to cover unique and narrow circumstances, but it is standard practice for immigration attorneys representing illegal aliens to assert that virtually every illegal alien is going to be persecuted or tortured in his or her home country.”

“Historically, ICE has depended on the discipline of immigration judges and the enforcement of criminal fraud laws to deter this conduct, but ICE has its own tools,” Percival continued. “Now, thanks to this directive, ICE attorneys have greater authority to enforce the law and stop the abuse of our asylum system by illegal aliens and attorneys.”

This move isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has set their sights on activists attorneys attempting to perpetuate mass migration into the United States. In March of last year, the White House issued a statement lamenting “the immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices” who “coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims” to scam courts into granting asylum status.