Category: Weaponized justice
Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.
Courts can block executive action, so Congress must cut funding. Yet Republicans refuse, leaving the Justice Department and FBI with the same tools Democrats will use again.
That gap between rhetoric and action now threatens to erase everything President Trump promised. In March 2023, he vowed, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” and pledged to “obliterate the deep state” and fire the bureaucrats who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Those words land with force. Appropriations decide whether they mean anything.
Trump’s ‘retribution’ pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose.
But if Trump relies on executive action alone, courts will block key moves and the next Democrat in the White House will reverse the rest. Only structural reforms written into law can stop the next round of weaponization.
That reality hits hardest at the Department of Justice and the FBI. A Congress that keeps funding these agencies under the Biden-era architecture keeps the weaponization machine intact.
Yet Republicans just pushed through a Justice funding bill that drew more Democrat support than conservative support.
That vote captures the GOP Congress since 2017. Leadership passes budget bills with less resistance from Democrats than from Republicans. Spending is the battlefield. Everything else fades fast. If your own side opposes your funding bills more than the other side, you are not changing the country. You are managing the status quo.
Here’s the brutal truth: Congress has not structurally defanged the Justice Department’s weaponization or taken a sledgehammer to the FBI’s open-ended mandate. The same deep-state actors who drove January 6 abuses, FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists, and FBI operations like Arctic Frost still collect paychecks.
Republicans had one last chance to shrink this machinery before Democrats likely regain the House. The final Justice Department appropriations bill should have cut off funding for the most abusive programs and permanently reduced the department’s ability to target Americans. Instead, Republicans passed a status quo bill that effectively codifies Biden’s DOJ.
The vote breakdown exposes the scam. All but six House Democrats supported the minibus package that included full-year DOJ funding. Meanwhile, 22 House conservatives opposed it.
The package included three appropriations bills: Commerce-Justice-Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment. Freedom Caucus pressure forced leadership to hold a separate vote on the Commerce-Justice-Science portion first, and even then, it drew 40 Republican “no” votes. Leadership tried to quiet the revolt by swapping out a $1 million earmark for a Somali-led nonprofit after a welfare fraud scandal in that state. That move changed nothing about the bill’s core failures.
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Democrats voted for this bill despite calling Trump a dictator because the bill left the regime’s tools in place. On the issues that matter most, it stayed silent.
It did not:
- Bar funding for future January 6 prosecutions.
- Bar funding for FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists.
- Address the FBI’s Arctic Frost overreach.
- Defund sanctuary cities, even though sanctuary policies endanger federal agents and courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to punish them. If Congress refuses to codify enforcement policy, courts will keep neutralizing it.
- Cut off grants to NGOs that help illegal aliens evade deportation. Other appropriations bills even fund refugee resettlement contractors.
- End incentives for blue states to implement red-flag laws. The bill keeps the $740 million slush fund that bribes states to expand them. It also fails to defund Biden’s pistol brace ban, the “engaged in the business” rule, and the Justice Department’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
- Fund an Election Integrity Office to implement Trump’s executive order on election integrity, even while the bill keeps money flowing to offices that persecute Americans.
- Rein in the Office of Inspector General, which receives $139 million despite lacking an appointed inspector general and operating under an acting career bureaucrat.
The FBI budget barely took a haircut from its record Biden-era levels. Keep the scale in mind: The bureau has more than 35,000 employees, yet only 138 have been fired so far.
Republicans also promised fiscal discipline. This minibus package totals roughly $180 billion and rejects steeper cuts conservatives proposed in committee. It includes nearly $5.6 billion in earmarks for 3,030 projects. Leadership found room for parochial spending while refusing to squeeze the agencies that turned federal power against the public.
Congress holds one real lever to change the regime without begging courts for permission: the power of the purse. If Republicans won’t pass transformative legislation, they must at least defund odious policies through appropriations.
Trump’s “retribution” pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose. When Democrats vote happily to fund the very departments that targeted Americans under Biden, the conclusion writes itself. Washington will not dismantle the machine. It will keep it humming until Democrats take power again and aim it at us with even fewer restraints.
How faith sustained me in my darkest hour
I am a retired Navy lieutenant commander who served our nation for nearly two decades in the intelligence community. My wife, Sharon, and I spent years running a successful software company serving federal agencies. We were living peacefully on our small family farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley when, in a pre-dawn SWAT raid, armor-clad FBI agents shattered our lives following the January 6 protest at the nation’s Capitol.
What followed was my arrest for a crime I never committed, solitary confinement in what I can only describe as an icy dungeon, and a battle through a politically driven legal system determined to crush everything Sharon and I had built together.
The thought consumed me: I’m never getting out of here. Why not take control?
There are moments in life when everything you thought defined you simply ceases to exist. For me, that moment came in a Virginia supermax solitary confinement cell, lying on cold concrete after being struck in the spine by a guard, unable to draw a full breath, watching uniformed backs disappear through a steel door that slammed with finality.
In that cell, I had no pride, no dignity, no vanity, no vitality, no ambition, no joy, no self-respect, no ego, no hope. I was reduced to what I can only describe as the rapidly hammering heart of human anguish.
I’ve spent considerable time thinking about whether places of extreme suffering have the power to trap a person’s essence — whether dungeons and passageways can hold people captive by imprinting upon them the heartache, grief, and distress endured, replaying that wretchedness and pain in a perpetual loop across time itself. In those solitary confinement catacombs, I felt that I was living in exactly such a place.
The darkest thought came to me with unexpected clarity: As a Christian, I know I am going to heaven. This knowledge, when I thought too much about it, formed an excellent argument for suicide. Why endure this abuse when I could be with Jesus, with friends and family, with my puppy in heaven? I wouldn’t shake there. I wouldn’t hurt or ache any more. It would stop the pain. In the depths of my hopelessness, this thought gave me a feeling of relief. My suffering would end, and Sharon could live and be free.
I was so far gone that I let the enemy put these thoughts in my head. Death, which should have come to me many years from now as a benevolent old friend bringing gifts of peace and rest, instead clung to my being like a fungus rooted in desperation and despair. I heard other inmates talk of it through the walls and in the passageways — to no one in particular, or at least to no one somebody else could see.
The thought consumed me: I’m never getting out of here. Why not take control?
So I told the Lord then and there that I wanted to come home to Him, to end all of this, and I asked Him to make it so. My will to go on had fled me. Unless you have reached the point of total physical and emotional collapse, I’m not sure I can make you understand. In a way, I was already dead.
That might have been the first and only time this confessed control freak had ever said “Your will be done, Father,” and really meant it.
I had no control over anything in my desiccated world, but I had the ability to relinquish control of my life that day. Nothing that I owned or that I thought was a part of me existed in that hell. Was this “dying to self”? Those curious Bible words suddenly made sense.
It had something to do with my idea of the sum of me as a human being — my personal, selfish desires, the things I wanted or ever thought I did, my plans for a happy future with Sharon. I couldn’t clearly picture them any more. They were lost like last night’s dreams, forgotten with the free man’s morning coffee.
Right now, they counted for exactly nothing.
I didn’t know how to pray at that moment. I was too beaten down, and I didn’t have the tongue for it. All I could offer was: “Whatever You have planned is much better than this, Lord. Let’s try that, please, because this place totally sucks.”
With the warning lights on the remnant of my life force glaring a constant red, He took me in.
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Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
That surrender — that complete, desperate relinquishment of control — was the moment my faith stopped being something I professed and became something I lived. Not in victory, but in total defeat. Not in strength, but in absolute weakness. It was there, in that place of utter brokenness, that I discovered what faith actually means: trusting God when you have nothing left, not even yourself.
Through years of persecution, Sharon and I were repeatedly pulled from the brink by what I can only describe as miraculous events. Our marital bond and our enduring faith in God sustained us through a battle against overwhelming odds. In a federal courtroom where I faced slander, perjury, and falsification of evidence, it was that moment of complete surrender in solitary confinement — when I finally meant “Your will be done” — that gave me the strength to endure what seemed unendurable.
I am living proof that faith isn’t found in our strength, but in God’s strength when ours has completely failed.
