Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10/24/25
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Thursday! It’s also the last full week in October. So. Your Swamp-draining roundup includes: the long preparation phase is over and the disgusting swamp water is beginning to pour out of the federal apparatus; media freakout over Trump’s election integrity team; media freakout over Trump’s anti-deep state “weaponization” team; Republican redistricting efforts begin racking up as North Carolina becomes latest state to flip seats to the red column; and former Obama CIA Director and Russiagate architect John Brennan is referred by the House Judiciary Committee for criminal prosecution.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that spooked its increasingly fretful readers but which we all find rather reassuring. It was headlined, “Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances.” The sub-headline said, “The president has placed proponents of his false claims into government jobs while dismantling systems built to secure voting, raising fears that he aims to seize authority over elections ahead of next year’s midterms.” In other words, after months of preparation, Trump’s Swamp Draining Teams are starting to firm up. First up— elections.
The overlong, hyperventilating article was not “news.” It was an ugly hit job on a bunch of courageous citizens who volunteered to step into the election integrity crosshairs after 2020’s “overnight spikes” debacle, which the Times clearly considers the most secure election in history, despite a vast miasma of circumstantial evidence of cheating as big as a body positivity convention.
The story offered nothing newsworthy. The only dated developments in the story were an August appointment and two March and September election group calls. Yawn. But they still excreted over 2,000 words, packed with critical opinions, Blue-Anon speculation, and generous anonymous sourcing of local “election officials” who claim to be “alarmed” about federal efforts to improve election security.
Indeed, coming in at over 2,000 words, the garrulous story included only a single short quote from anyone except its targets (the lone exception was a Republican Never-Trumper, though the Times didn’t explain that). Trump’s three new election officials, the Times fretted, are all rightwing activists who are now “government insiders, who could wield their newfound power to discredit future results or rekindle old claims to argue for a federal intrusion into locally administered voting systems.”
Well, hopefully.
Let’s look at the brave folks the Times tried to undermine. First up is Heather Honey, who minded her own business and worked as a self-employed private investigator in Pennsylvania until she was shocked out of complacency by Basement Biden’s unaccountable victory. It goosed her into action and several years of heroic work digging up evidence of cheating. This August, Heather was appointed as HHS’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity. It’s driving the Times cuckoo.
Next up was Kurt Olsen, a “lawyer who has been tasked with examining the 2020 vote and other election matters,” who “worked closely for years with the pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell to promote stolen-election theories.” Since being hired last week, he is on special assignment to the White House. The Times isn’t sure exactly what Kurt’s special assignment is, and that’s what scares them the most.
Finally, the article named Marci “Ms. Misinformation” McCarthy who, according to the Times, “spread debunked claims about voting machines in Georgia when she was the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party.” In May, McCarthy was appointed director of public affairs at the hated Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has overseen layoffs or reassignments of “nearly all of the election experts at CISA.”
The moronic headline claimed President Trump is “still fixated on 2020 grievances” —as if he thinks of nothing else— but the article utterly failed to deliver on that extraordinary claim. All it proved was that the President is willing to hire at least some people with a healthy skepticism about how Biden came to infest the Oval. Which is not great news for the “most secure election in history” crowd.
What they can see of Trump’s “Election Team” is terrifying them about the midterms. And rightfully so. Fair elections mean bad news for Democrats. Recall that last year’s elections, which resulted in a modern landslide for the GOP, was overseen by Biden’s team at the federal level. Next year’s midterms will be the first federal election where people focused on fairness are running things.
And Trump’s new Election Integrity team still has a year to go.
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Yesterday, Reuters ran another Swamp-draining team story headlined, “Exclusive: Wide-ranging group of US officials pursues Trump’s fight against ‘Deep State.’” It’s a completely different, bigger, and better team than the Election Integrity heroes.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order directing HHS to investigate and correct the weaponization of government.
In an “exclusive,” Reuters breathlessly reported yesterday that a “wide-ranging group” of nearly forty newly appointed officials and reliable careerists have been regularly meeting to coordinate President Trump’s push to dismantle the Deep State. The group is called the Interagency Weaponization Working Group (IWWG), and has been quietly meeting biweekly since at least April. It includes officials from the White House, Justice Department, CIA, FBI, ODNI, DHS, IRS, FCC, and others.
It wasn’t news; except in the sense that Reuters just noticed. “None of this reporting is new,” a White House official told Reuters. The news service didn’t dispute that. But it was shocked and appalled to find out the group was already assembled and has been meeting so often and for so long without the media knowing.
Like the Times’s story about the EI Team, the “news” was that Reuters is worried that the IWWG might actually be more substantial than just another blue-ribbon commission of the type that infests Washington and usually just spends years traveling to exotic travel destinations for conferences until it finally, at the ultimate deadline, coughs up a six-hundred-page report in book form featuring a useless laundry list of dry policy recommendations that are scientifically designed to stupefy any brain bored enough to try reading it.
So, while absolutely nothing dramatic has yet happened —not visibly, anyway— Reuters is implicitly warning its progressive readers that this effort feels more organized, larger, and —potentially— less cosmetic than hundreds or thousands of previous government committees that do little more than swanking, cocktailing, and drafting useless white papers. Reuters’ main worry seemed to be that the IWWG might actually become a real force for Trump’s “retribution” agenda (as Reuters sees it) rather than just being a standard symbolic gesture or duplicative D.C. process.
More than anything, what seems to have blown up Reuters’ skirt is that this committee —breaking normal DC tradition— isn’t advertising what it is up to. “Reuters could not determine the extent to which the interagency group has put its plans into action,” the article reported. “The news agency also could not establish Trump’s involvement in the group,” it complained.
In other words: nobody’s leaking.
The story had a single anonymous “source,” described only as a “White House official.” The official said, “IWWG is simply looking at available facts and evidence that may point to actions, reports, agencies, individuals, etc. who illegally weaponized the government in order to carry out political attacks.”
Reuters did its research, or it tried to. What it found left it shocked and appalled. Based on publicly available information, “people working in or with the group include covid vaccine mandate opponents and proponents of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him,” a scalded Reuters indignantly reported. The source also offered that the group is considering the Russiagate conspiracy, the Epstein files, and the January 6th prosecutions.
When asked, a DHS spokesman said the IWWG was coordinating with other federal departments to “reverse the harm caused by the prior administration.” That’s a tall order. I don’t know if reversals are on the cards, but I would accept some accountability in the form of consequences.
🔥 Feelings about Reuters’ exclusive were fiery over on BlueSky. They suspect the worst. For instance, here’s a post by Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery:
Believe it or not, the Reuters exclusive about a six-month-old committee instantly spawned several generations of outraged offspring in corporate media, on blogs, TikToks, and Youtubes. The common theme was “revenge” and “authoritarianism.” Without any evidence of the IWWG taking a single action since April, they are still furious.
It’s a thousand times worse than Hitler. Kings!
The same things that terrify Reuters and the BlueSky brigadiers are what is most encouraging. Completely off the radar, the IWWG has been meeting often —twice a week!— for months, and until now the media has completely overlooked it. In other words, the group’s discipline is incredible. Reuters is right to consider this group to be something quite different from the ordinary DC committee, which usually would have issued a press release after every meeting.
The IWWG looks most like it is Trump’s A-Team. Imma get you, sucka!
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Yesterday, NBC ran another encouraging story, headlined, “North Carolina lawmakers pass new map designed to give GOP an extra House seat.” It’s even better than that; technically, the new seat shifts the House +2 toward the GOP, since the move also eliminated a Democrat district. A small group of NC Democrats outside the state Senate building were mad. So much to protest, so little time.
Thanks to the state’s legislative supermajority, North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Josh Stein cannot veto the new map. “If I did have that power, I assure you I would veto this map,” Stein told the public in a social media video yesterday. The new map will be used for next year’s midterms.
In August, Texas drew a new map adding +5 to the GOP. Last month, Missouri’s new map gave Republicans +1. Kansas and Indiana Republicans are currently debating drawing new maps in those states, and Ohio (majority GOP) is legally required to draw a new one this year.
The Democrats have tried to counter Republican gerrymandering by shattering California’s independent map commission, and taking the Golden State redistricting effort directly to voters. If it passes, a new map could cough up +5 blue districts. However, the push faces a slew of legal challenges. According to NBC, Democrats in Maryland and Illinois are also “considering” redistricting.
At this point, it seems clear that the Republican redistricting strategy took Democrats completely by surprise. Is what we are seeing part of Project 2025’s carefully calculated battle plan?
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On Tuesday, USA Today ran this pleasant headline, pregnant with promise: “House Republicans refer Obama CIA Director John Brennan for criminal prosecution.” According to a letter House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Oh.) sent to the DOJ this week, Brennan repeatedly lied to Congress about Russiagate in 2023 and 2017.
The short version is that Brennan swore to Congress that the discredited Steele Dossier (the “pee pee files”) were not used in any way as a predicate for wiretapping and investigating President Trump. But, “As the newly declassified documents demonstrate, Director Brennan eagerly wanted to include information from the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment, a fact Brennan himself documented in writing,” Chairman Jordan wrote in the letter.
Here’s one example (of several) that Chairman Jordan cited in his letter:
But newly declassified documents (thanks, Tulsi!) show that Director Brennan insisted on attaching the Steele Dossier to the critical Intelligence Community Assessment that launched the Russiagate hoax. In other words, he’s an insurrectionist and a liar.
It remains to be seen whether the DOJ acts on Jordan’s letter, but at this point on the Russiagate justice arc, inaction would be surprising. Last month, former FBI Director James Comey’s indictment shattered records, when that bottom-feeding official became the first FBI Director to be prosecuted in US history— also for making false statements to Congress. So, while Brennan would be the first CIA director prosecuted in the U.S., it would not be unprecedented.
You may not be surprised to discover that Mr. Brennan has gotten away with it for years. A Guardian headline from July 2014:
In that unfortunate encounter, Senators from both parties accused Brennan, then Obama’s CIA Director, of spying on Senate staffers and trying to set them up for prosecution. Then he lied to Congress about it.
Back then, under Obama, nothing at all happened. The Senate fumed but did not act. The 2014 Senate did not refer Brennan to the DOJ— even though the CIA had criminally referred Senate staff for allegedly hacking CIA computers. Instead, a couple months later, the CIA “apologized,” for misconduct that the IC-owned media helpfully shrank down to “snooping.” Politico, July 2014:
It’s not certain that the DOJ will take up the referral and indict Obama CIA Director and Russiagate architect John Brennan for lying to Congress. But my money is on some kind of indictment— maybe lying plus something even bigger.
My hope is that today’s roundup proves that, unlike during Trump 1.0, the Swamp is not only being drained— but we are just getting started.
Have a terrific Thursday! Scoot back here tomorrow morning, for more hard-hitting essential news and commentary!
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
