☕️ AN IMPERIAL JUDICIARY☙ Friday, March 6, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

DHS swaps Kristi Noem for Senator Mullin— not a firing, a promotion; the 9th Circuit torches activist judges; ACIP prepares to finally count vaccine injuries; the Epstein files land at UF; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! I’m hotel blogging again this morning, having hit my fourth city and third hotel in six days. Whew. Your roundup includes: Trump’s Cabinet reshuffle continues — beauty queen out, MMA fighter in — and it’s not chaos, it’s chess; the Ninth Circuit drops a landmark immigration ruling that reads like a love letter to the Constitution; ACIP prepares to vote on a new medical code for covid vaccine injuries — the establishment is terrified; and the Epstein files land right in my backyard: a UF presidential search committee member’s Maxwell emails would make a Gator blush.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Trump’s 2026 org-chart reshuffle continued yesterday. Never one to miss an opportunity to stick the knife in (while always missing the point), the New York Times led with “Timeline: The Rise and Fall of Kristi Noem as Trump’s DHS Secretary.” Chaos in the Cabinet!

Carefully curating a carousel of unflattering pictures of former Governor Noem, and leading with a list of alleged foibles (including the tired, years-old story about putting her dog down), the Times did its best to frame her status change as part of the paper’s frantic “chaos” narrative.

The Times speculated that Trump “fired her” due to gaffes and missteps. “Ms. Noem’s streak of controversies,” the article gloated, “might have proved too much for President Trump.”

Might? They might have proved too much? That’s news? The Times knows nothing.

What happened was: yesterday, President Trump announced on Truth Social (where else?) that DHS Secretary Noem would be shifted to running his new Doral Western security initiative, and that Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, would replace her. The useless Times falsely reported Noem was “fired”— a word that appeared nowhere in Trump’s post, and since she was immediately reassigned to another role, it isn’t “fired” anyway. She remains on the payroll, morons.

More interesting for C&C readers is that this story tracks all our dot-connecting from yesterday. A major reorganization is underway, and it involves the Senate.

Trump took Noem off DHS on Thursday and immediately announced her special envoy role. Two days later, she’ll lope into Doral as the new face of hemispheric security. Does anybody —except Times reporters— think Noem is striding in there cold? Like, she just found out?

Don’t be a Times reporter. Of course not.

Noem even thanked President Trump in a tweet: “Thank you @POTUS Trump for appointing me as the Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.” She added that she’ll work to “dismantle cartels that have poured drugs into our nation.” Doesn’t sound like she’s fired to me.

The timing shows Noem’s transfer wasn’t about Minnesota protestor shootings or seven-year-old affair allegations— it was about repositioning her for this specific role at this specific moment. Trump didn’t put Noem in charge of his new hemispheric security alliance because he thinks she’s a train wreck, or as though running Trump’s Monroe Doctrine project were a consolation prize.

Meanwhile, Trump spun the Senatorial carousel again, drawing Oklahoma’s junior Senator Markwayne Mullin as our newest DHS Secretary, and simultaneously bumping the total number of Senatorial swaps up to seven, so far. Governor Kevin Stitt will appoint a temporary replacement for the safe GOP seat, to serve until the general election in November. (The interim appointee may not run.) Note that, coincidentally, the shift’s timing aligns perfectly with primary season.

Senator Mullin is perfect for DHS. He’s literally a pugilist. He’s also Cherokee —a real one, not Liz Warren’s ‘tribe’— who hails from Westville, Oklahoma, left college at 20 to save his father’s plumbing business, built it into the largest service company in the region, went undefeated as a professional MMA fighter, got inducted into Oklahoma’s Wrestling Hall of Fame, served ten years in the House, and won Jim Inhofe’s Senate seat in 2022.

Mullin is built like an above-average fire hydrant and is now in charge of the border. Noem was a beauty queen. Mullin is an MMA fighter. It’s a serious upgrade. (If you kick a fire hydrant, the hydrant doesn’t move, and your foot hurts.)

Corporate boardrooms take a year to replace a CEO. Trump has restructured 7% of the Senate in about 6 weeks. Meanwhile, name one Democrat succession plan. Just one. Take your time. I’ll wait.

The Times also failed to mention the glaring contrast between Trump’s style and the Cabbage’s. Trump’s DHS chiefs are (1) a former Governor and (2) a sitting Senator. Biden’s DHS Secretary, the permanent bureaucrat Alejandro Mayorkas, was just a lifetime Swamp creature. Please. And don’t even get me started about Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Petie “Surrogate Mom” Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend (pop: 103,000).

The way I see it, the Trump Plan is entering its next phase, and the President is resetting the chess pieces. The Times sneered at any “plan” and called it chaos. But of course, the Times also claims cotton face masks magically block virus particles, that men can get pregnant, and that Kristi Noem was fired. So. You decide.

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TAW. Yesterday, Reuters ran more terrific news for the President’s immigration policy below the headline, “Trump can suspend refugee admissions, US appeals court rules.” It was another win at the appeals court level.

Yesterday, in a decision that knocked immigration activists right out of their Birkenstocks, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals —one of the nation’s most progressive courts— ruled that President Trump’s executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is perfectly lawful.

The three-judge panel vacated most of the preliminary injunction issued by Seattle District Judge Jamal Whitehead (Biden appointee), who’d tried to block the President’s refugee freeze.

Judge Jay Bybee (Bush appointee), writing for the three-judge panel, began strong: “Our task is to determine whether the President’s actions were within the statutory authority granted him under the INA. Whether we agree with those actions is beside the point.” He concluded, “The wisdom of the policy choices made by the President is not a matter for our consideration.” And then, for good measure, he added, “We do not sit as a committee of review.”

The reasoning was simple and elegant: Congress gave the President this power, period. That’s it. The court noted that the statute “exudes deference to the President,” granting him “broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States.”

But the very best part of the opinion was its conclusion. Judge Bybee acknowledged what he called the “enormous practical implications” of the ruling — and then wrote a paragraph for the ages:

“There are over one hundred thousand vetted and conditionally approved refugees, many of whom may have spent years completing the USRAP process in a third country only to be turned away on the tarmac. But such a result is one potential consequence of Congress’s sweeping grant of power to the President to ‘suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens.’ Whether that consequence reflects prudent policy is not a question for this court. To hold otherwise would be to substitute our judgment for Congress’s.”

Read that again. The Ninth Circuit just said: we know this is hard, we know people are affected, but Congress said the President can do it anyway. That is what courts are supposed to sound like.

⚖️ For pure rhetorical firepower, read Judge Kenneth Lee’s (Trump appointee) partial dissent. Lee —himself an immigrant— agreed with the majority on the core holding, then dissented only to say the majority didn’t go far enough. And then he absolutely torched the lower court.

Lee catalogued District Judge Whitehead errors: he expanded the categories of refugees who could be admitted beyond what the Ninth Circuit’s own stay order permitted, made up a system where plaintiffs’ lawyers at an NGO and Perkins Coie got to review refugee applications first, and even ordered the United States government to “submit weekly reports to the Court detailing actions taken since the last report to comply with the Court’s injunctions.”

As Judge Lee put it, it was “in effect, a weekly homework assignment for the President.” Then Judge Lee delivered the kill shot:

“Our constitutional structure will topple if a single district court sits atop the President, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the federal appellate court.”

He even quoted Hamilton’s Federalist No. 78, which called the judiciary the “weakest” branch because it has “neither force nor will” but “merely judgment,” and warned that courts “risk inching towards an imperial judiciary that lords over the President and Congress.”

Next, Judge Lee added a moving personal aside: “As an immigrant, I am forever grateful to the United States for welcoming our family and feel blessed to enjoy the liberties and opportunities provided by our great country. This experience shapes my own personal views on various policy issues. But whatever personal opinions I may have, they cannot and must not have any bearing on the legal issues before us. Our allegiance is always to the law and the Constitution.”

Those are the words we’ve been praying to hear judges say since February of last year, when the tsunami of lawfare first started.

⚖️ This ruling goes far beyond refugees. Yesterday was a two-fer day: the Seventh Circuit also vacated a Chicago federal judge’s injunction restricting ICE use of force during Operation Midway Blitz, calling the lower court’s order “constitutionally suspect.” Bloomberg, yesterday:

Two circuits, same day, both telling district judges to stop freelancing immigration policy from the bench.

As I’ve predicted from early last year, we are watching the judicial system slowly, painfully, but unmistakably correcting itself. The Ninth Circuit just reminded every federal judge in America of something that should have been obvious all along: Congress writes the laws, the President executes them, and Courts only interpret them.

When a Seattle district judge decides he’d rather be a one-man legislature, the grown-ups upstairs will eventually come along and explain how the Constitution actually works. That’s not “authoritarianism;” that’s how a constitutional republic works.

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In two weeks, the CDC’s ACIP Vaccine Committee will meet to discuss (and hopefully approve) a new diagnosis code for covid vaccine injuries. CIDRAP ran an outraged article earlier this week headlined, “The COVID vaccine myocarditis signal was real but is now resolved. ACIP’s March agenda pretends otherwise.” Children’s Health Defense:

On March 18 and 19, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices —ACIP, the formerly obscure expert panel that quietly decides which vaccines get recommended for every man, woman, child, and infant in America— will hold a two-day virtual meeting. It will discuss three agenda items: covid vaccine injuries, long covid, and changes to ACIP’s recommendation methodology.

Finally.

Votes may be taken or scheduled on all three topics. The big one involves adopting a new ICD medical code (T50.B25) specific to covid vaccine injury. ICD codes are the medical system’s way of formally recognizing that a condition exists. Without an ICD code, it doesn’t exist in the billing system. It doesn’t exist in the insurance system, it doesn’t get tracked, which means it can’t be easily studied, and critics can claim it doesn’t even exist.

In other words, creating a specific code is the medical establishment’s way of saying: this is a real thing.

💉 Remember how far we’ve come. Three years ago, suggesting that covid vaccines caused injuries got you deplatformed, fired, and labeled a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist. The medical experts resolutely insisted the vaccines were “safe and effective,” full stop. ACIP recommended them for everyone over six months of age. Doctors who raised safety concerns lost their licenses. Social media companies censored peer-reviewed studies.

Now, VAERS contains over one million reports of adverse events from covid vaccines, including 15,499 reported deaths. The FDA’s new director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Dr. Vinay Prasad, wrote in December, “It is horrifying to consider that the US vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”

ACIP member and early mRNA researcher Dr. Robert Malone has called the investigation’s data “politically explosive,” but said he’s “embargoed from speaking on the details.” Sooner or later, it will come out. The clock is thumping like a bass line.

💉 Right on cue, the medical establishment began trying to contain the damage. CIDRAP —the University of Minnesota’s influential Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy— published a preemptive op-ed this week, complaining that ACIP’s March agenda is “organized around concerns rooted in the early pandemic experience” and represents “a fixation on a historical grievance at the expense of present-day public health priorities.”

At this point, what difference does it make? Move on. Oh, it makes a lot of difference. Just you wait.

CIDRAP essentially argued that the myocarditis signal was “real but is now resolved,” since the original monovalent vaccines are no longer on the market. In other words, sure, we hurt some people, but we stopped selling that particular version of the thing that hurt them, so let’s move on. Nothing to see here.

That’s like Ford arguing that the Pinto’s exploding gas tank problem was “resolved” because they discontinued the Pinto.

Meanwhile, over a dozen blue-state attorneys general are suing HHS Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration for changing the CDC vaccine schedule and restructuring the ACIP committee. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused President Trump and Secretary Kennedy of “blatant disregard for science.”

HHS fired back that the lawsuit is “a publicity stunt dressed up as a lawsuit.” (Which, to be fair, describes most Democrat lawfare.)

If the ACIP approves the new billing code, it means there will finally be a way to track diagnosed covid vaccine injuries. And then we will begin to count the real cost.

An ICD code is permanent infrastructure. It means every hospital, every insurance company, every electronic health record in the country will have a box to check: covid vaccine injury.

When that happens, researchers can study prevalence. Patients can get diagnosed, treated, and reimbursed. It means the injury is real, official, and countable. For the millions of gaslit victims who were told their post-vaccine symptoms were anxiety, coincidence, or misinformation— March 19th might finally be the day the medical system grudgingly says, we can see you.

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Yesterday, the Epstein Files struck right at home in my little town of Gainesville. As I met a colleague for lunch, my eyes strayed to the stack of free college papers —the Independent Florida Alligator— and guess what the top headline said? “UF presidential search member’s ties to Epstein appear stronger in latest file drop.”

Epstein exposés are now trickling down to local student investigators.

The Alligator has been doggedly tracking a story that should shame every administrator in Tigert Hall. Doug Band, who was appointed to UF’s presidential search advisory committee for the second time in December 2025, has now been identified in at least 33 documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

And as usual, it’s ugly.

The latest batch, released January 30, includes 21 emails between Band and Ghislaine Maxwell containing what the Alligator euphemistically described as “flirtatious language.” To be more specific, Maxwell emailed Band about “ploting disgustungs things w/you or I should say your body.” Band replied: “And what I would do to you 2 chicas.”

He called Maxwell “baby” and “booboo” and “boobihead.” He wrote “Naked?” in one message. In another, Band gushed, “Say hi to jeeeeeeefffffffrey.” In yet another exchange, Maxwell asked if Band could meet Epstein at his house at 6 p.m., and Band agreed.

Doug Band was Bill Clinton’s right-hand man, his personal counselor and the architect of Clinton’s entire post-presidential career. He co-founded Teneo Holdings, a global “advisory firm” (whatever that is) that, according to a WikiLeaks-released memo Band himself wrote, was used to funnel money to the Clinton Foundation and personally to Clinton.

Band “advised” Teneo clients to donate to Clinton’s Foundation. Teneo also secured paid speaking gigs for Clinton. Band even solicited “in-kind services for the President and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.”

The new documents include an FBI memo listing Band as having “pertinent information” regarding Epstein’s criminal case— right alongside names like former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and billionaire Les Wexner, who was identified as an Epstein co-conspirator by the FBI.

Somehow, the University of Florida put Band on its search committee to select the state’s biggest school’s next president. Twice.

🔥 After the Alligator first reported Band’s Epstein connections following the December 2025 file release, UF’s response was a masterclass in institutional see-no-evil. Spokesperson Steve Orlando told the paper that “the university has reviewed the documents concerning Band and decided no actions against him need to be taken.”

After the January release —with 33 more documents, more explicit emails, and the FBI criminal case memo— UF spokesperson Cynthia Roldán told the Alligator that the university “had nothing to add beyond Band’s statement to The Times.”

For his part, Band told the New York Times that his communications with Maxwell “occurred when he was in his late 20s and unmarried.” Apparently being single in your twenties is a blanket defense for emailing sex traffickers. Noted.

Band then denied any physical relationship, and, for good measure, called Maxwell “a monster.”

So it’s monster now. I guess “boobihead” was too informal or something. Who knows what “boobihead” even means, anyway?

As of February 20th, Band still served on the presidential search committee. The university that calls itself a “top five public university” apparently sees nothing wrong with having a man referenced in 33 Epstein documents— a man who emailed Ghislaine Maxwell about doing “disgustungs things” to his body — helping pick the next leader of one of America’s largest research universities.

Um, no.

Good on the Alligator. I’m a Gator, a long-time Gainesville resident, and back when I was in college, I was briefly a stringer for the paper. To be honest, I usually disagree with the Alligator’s takes. It’s as goofy of a liberal student paper as ever went to press.

But the humble Alligator is doing the investigative work that UF’s own administration won’t do and the national media can’t be bothered with. Reporter Alexa Ryan has filed two detailed stories, pulled the actual DOJ documents, identified specific emails with dates and DOJ file numbers, and gotten the university on record —twice— essentially admitting they don’t care.

Far beyond Gainesville, the Epstein files are rapidly exposing a sordid network whose tendrils snake into every institution— Wall Street, Hollywood, world governments, international institutions, and (of course) the rotten academy. The question isn’t just why is Doug Band on this committee? The bigger question is, who put him there, and what does that tell us about how these elite networks maintain power?

The president of a major research university like Florida decides who gets access to one of the largest research budgets in the country, who controls billions in endowment spending, and who shapes the day-to-day education of 60,000+ students. Until the Alligator started asking questions, nobody thought to check whether the people making that decision had an unsightly habit of exchanging sophomoric late-night emails with convicted sex traffickers.

But now it’s all coming to light. Even in my quiet, little, blue hometown. I’ll say this— Jeffrey and Ghislaine weren’t gathering any moss. STDs maybe. But definitely not moss.

Round and round the wheel of disclosure goes! Meanwhile, the plan relentlessly moves forward.

Have a fantastic Friday! I’ll return home this afternoon, back in the saddle and blogging from HQ, for tomorrow morning’s terrific Weekend Edition roundup of essential news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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