Calling President Donald Trump “corrupt” is like calling a thermonuclear device a “bomb” — technically true, but it misses the magnitude entirely, argues New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie.

Trump’s corruption is “so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics. The president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion. They have received hundreds of millions of dollars from a network of branded cryptocurrency assets,” Bouie explains — for starters.

Citing a Wall Street Journal report, Bouie details the events surrounding Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother and national security adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates.

“Tahnoon’s investment fund purchased a half-billion dollar stake in the Trump family’s crypto fund, World Liberty Financial, just days before Trump’s second inauguration. Tahnoon has since successfully lobbied the White House for U.A.E. access to America’s most advanced A.I. chips, with a large portion going to Tahnoon’s A.I. company,” Bouie writes.

There are also Trump’s pardons.

Crypto firm Binance’s founder Changpeng Zhao, convicted in 2023 for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, donated software to Trump’s World Liberty Financial to launch its own cryptocurrency. He lobbied for — and was granted — a pardon from Trump, “raising the possibility that Zhao could recover his court-ordered fines — $4.3 billion to the U.S. government as punishment for allowing criminal actors to use Binance for a broad array of illicit transactions, including child sex abuse, illegal narcotics and terrorism.”

Later, another investment firm tied to Tahnoon announced it would buy a $2 billion stake in Binance, “using the cryptocurrency provided by World Liberty Financial. This deal could net the Trump family up to $80 million a year in interest.”

There are also Trump’s “monuments” — to himself, such as his ballroom, presidential library, and triumphal arch, which Bouie says “appear to be little more than state-sanctioned opportunities for graft.”

Trump has collected hundreds of millions of dollars for the projects, from wealthy donors and large corporations. In one case, tens of millions of dollars appear to be unaccounted for, Bouie writes, citing a report in The New Republic.

Then there is Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump’s lawyers are in settlement talks, which Bouie calls “tantamount to presidential looting of the treasury, little different than if he had stolen the money outright.”

Bouie also walks through presidential administrations history looking for evidence of similar corruption. He asks, “do we see anything like the self-dealing and naked personal enrichment of Trump and his family?” and concludes, “No, we do not.”

Bouie concludes with a warning.

To America’s founders, “corruption was poison, a cancer that ate at the foundations of self-government. A state so stricken was bound to succumb to political death.”

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Just days after the U.S. Department of Justice removed the federal prosecutor in charge of its investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, the DOJ reportedly has “hit the brakes” and begun to withdraw several subpoenas issued in the case.

MS NOW‘s Carol Leonnig and Lisa Rubin report that the criminal probe into Brennan includes “a purported conspiracy by the Obama administration to embarrass President Donald Trump,” according to people familiar with the matter.

“The dramatic shift in plans revealed some confusion and disorder in the controversial Justice Department investigation, which career prosecutors have privately criticized as lacking evidence and being politically motivated to please Trump,” MS NOW noted. The subpoenas had been served over the weekend, after the removal of the prosecutor, to witnesses “purportedly with knowledge of the Obama administration’s decision to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

The subpoenas were seen by Trump allies “as a sign of progress the Justice Department was making in a top political priority for the president: to go after the architects of the Russia probe that eventually became special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s campaign and Trump himself.”

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Some subpoenas were to be served to former government officials and some current and former intelligence agency officials, MS NOW reports, in the case where the DOJ is “looking to charge Brennan with making false statements about his and the CIA’s role in launching the Russia probe.”

Rather than serve subpoenas, DOJ will seek voluntary testimony.

The probe into Brennan is part of a larger “grand conspiracy” investigation into why the Russia probe was opened. But the critical loss of prosecutors “appears to have contributed to the whiplash decision to subpoena witnesses this weekend in Washington in the Brennan investigation and then withdraw them days later, according to the people.”

The prosecutor who had been removed had told colleagues that she had informed her supervisors there was insufficient evidence to charge Brennan.

READ MORE: The Supreme Court Is at War — With Itself: Columnist

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The U.S. Supreme Court, “nine angry men and women in black robes,” according to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, has gone “off the rails,” and is now “at war with itself.”

“Almost every day, there are new signs — from shocking news leaks to surprisingly indecorous public jabs, and legal opinions that read like cries for help — that the U.S. Supreme Court is at war … with itself,” Bunch argues. “Looming large over this soft civil war inside one of America’s three branches of government is our most fundamental liberty, the right to vote.”

Pointing to President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, amid its “shaky” ceasefire and “the daily unraveling” of the White House, “the biggest bombshell wasn’t dropped in the Persian Gulf but in the pages of the New York Times.”

Bunch is referring to the widely-cited scoop from the Times‘ Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, that reveals the extreme steps Chief Justice John Roberts took to block President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan — and expand the powers of the Court via the “shadow docket.”

“For more than a decade now, these emergency rulings have largely constrained Democratic presidents and boosted the power of Donald Trump on major issues,” Bunch writes.

He notes that the Times published a batch of five justices’ secret memos, including those from Roberts, that “exposed the hypocrisy” of the Chief Justice, “who has argued during his two decades overseeing the court that its justices are not political actors but impartial umpires ‘calling balls and strikes,’ based on sound interpretation of the law.”

Bunch states these memos “reveal Roberts as less an umpire and more the manager of a team desperate to win the World Series for corporate America.”

The leaking of the memos, which, to many, cast Roberts in a negative light, “is just the latest in a series of news leaks and public statements coming from the Supreme Court that lack any precedent, legal or otherwise.”

Bunch says the court had already been facing a “crisis of credibility,” given the “revelations of alleged corruption” swirling about Justice Clarence Thomas, and the “billion-dollar efforts by wealthy conservatives to shape and then lobby the court.”

The Times’ report was far from the first leak.

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In 2022 came the “Mother of All Leaks” — the draft opinion that would ultimately overturn 1970s’ landmark ruling, Roe v. Wade.

The leaker was never discovered, but “there’s been much speculation that it came from the conservative wing hoping the news coverage would prevent last-minute defections.”

Meanwhile, since the Court’s 2024 decision granting President Donald Trump and all presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” Bunch writes, “there has been even less decorum and more overt verbal warfare.”

Sometimes, justices publish their snipings inside their opinions, “as when Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in response to that ruling on presidential power that POTUS is now ‘a king above the law,’ signing off ‘with fear for our democracy.'”

Bunch says an even more “shocking” event occurred when Sotomayor “lashed out” at Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when she commented that one of his opinions had come from “a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

She quickly apologized.

Like the 2022 leak, no one has publicly stated who leaked the secret memos to The New York Times.

But, Bunch surmises, someone “very high in the judicial pyramid is trying to send a ‘bat signal’ to the American public — that things at the nation’s highest court have gone off the rails.”

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