☕️ BRO-BOTS ☙ Thursday, February 12, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Judges vs. DOJ in constitutional chicken; SAVE Act filibuster showdown; $60M dark money exposed; military lasers vs. party balloons; the billable hour gets a terminal diagnosis; and much more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: judges and the DOJ playing constitutional chicken over a U.S. attorney who lasted shorter than a TikTok video; the SAVE Act passes the House and heads for a Senate filibuster showdown; $60 million in dark money exposed under oath plus a trillion-dollar fraud bombshell; the military’s new border laser accidentally zaps a party balloon; and KPMG teaches the world how to kill the unkillable billable hour.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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How do you bury an investigation into a crooked attorney general? Have her friends on the bench pick your replacement. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a whimsical story headlined, “U.S. Attorney Chosen to Replace Trump Pick Is Quickly Fired by White House.” It seemingly began yesterday afternoon, after federal judges in Northern New York used a Civil War-era statute to appoint a new U.S. attorney named Donald Kinsella. By Wednesday evening, Deputy AG Todd Blanche had fired him. On X. “You are fired, Donald Kinsella,” Blanche posted, adding, “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution.” But that’s the tip of the judicial iceberg.

It’s hard to tell whether Blanche is running the Justice Department or auditioning for a reboot of The Apprentice. Either way, it was the most efficient government termination since— well, since the last one, which was probably also on X. It’s also a complicated story of raw power politics that would make the House of Cards writers writhe with jealousy.

There is so much backstory the Times conveniently forgot about.

The rebellious judges replaced John Sarcone III, a Trump loyalist with no prior prosecutorial experience before becoming U.S. attorney last March. In January, a federal judge decided that Sarcone was serving “unlawfully,” after the administration used a series of admittedly creative job-title maneuvers to keep him in the chair after his interim appointment expired in July. As a result, Sarcone held more titles than an above-average Somali daycare center.

Here’s the part the Times ‘forgot.’ The many-titled Sarcone was investigating Letitia James —the New York AG who sued Trump and has a wee mortgage fraud problem— when the judges pulled the plug. Ms. James challenged US Attorney Sarcone’s authority. The judges sided with her.

And Bob’s your uncle, without giving Trump a chance to replace Sarcone, the judges used the 1860’s law (expanded in 2007) to appoint a new one, Mr. Kinsella, themselves. Then Todd Blanche promptly fired Kinsella, and gave Sarcone another new title, “First Assistant US Attorney.” Then the federal judge barred Sarcone specifically from working on the James investigation, and quashed two subpoenas he’d sent her. (The DOJ is appealing.)

And now the investigation into Letitia James is exactly where she’d like it: somewhere on the prosecutorial dial between “stalled” and “what investigation?”

So that’s the sordid game the NDNY judges were really up to— burying the James investigation. The judges’ pick, Kinsella, appears to be a solid, seasoned attorney with no public partisan profile. He’s probably a great guy and clearly has tons of experience. But he would have pulled the plug on the James case, you can be sure of that. Unfortunately, his tenure as judge-appointed US Attorney was shorter than a TikTok dance video.

The brewing “constitutional crisis” is a different matter.

🔥 Federal judges have never tried playing this particular game of constitutional chicken before. They’ve never removed a president’s pick and then appointed their own. Thus, liberal judges have handed down another Trump 2.0 constitutional stress test.

So far, setting another historic record, five judges in five blue states have struck Trump’s picks for US Attorney within a six-month stretch:

• New Jersey (Alina Habba — Aug. 2025)

• Nevada (Sigal Chattah — Sep. 2025)

• California (Bill Essayli — Oct. 2025)

• Virginia (Lindsey Halligan — Nov. 2025)

• Northern NY (John Sarcone — Jan. 2026)

These judges are getting away with it because these particular US Attorneys were not confirmed by the Senate. President Trump can’t confirm certain US Attorneys thanks to an arcane Senate tradition (not even a rule) called “the blue slip.” This extra-constitutional tradition allows home-state senators to block the Judiciary Committee from advancing judicial nominees to a floor vote without approval from both home-state senators. It’s effectively a veto for blue states.

So Trump has been appointing US Attorneys without confirmation, skirting the blue slip problem. Thus, blue-state judges devised the scheme of striking down the appointees in bulk lots, which metastasized this week into just finding their own attorneys and ashcanning inconvenient investigations into Democrat officials.

Here’s the wild part: since this showdown scenario has never happened before, nobody knows whether the President can legally fire judicially appointed prosecutors. It’s a legal conundrum. “Mr. Kinsella said that he did not yet know whether the White House email carried the force of law,” The Times said. “He said he would discuss the matter with the district judges in the morning and go from there.”

Is he the US Attorney, or isn’t he? That is the question. All US Attorneys work for the President, and the Appointments Clause doesn’t alter that. What would the alternative be anyway? It feels like it might be a teensy bit of a conflict if a district’s top prosecutor could be fired by the judges before whom his department’s cases are tried. This kind of thing is catnip for us lawyers, who live for these tangled constitutional intricacies.

This is the main point: if there is a constitutional crisis here, the judges created it. And they created it to save one of the dumbest Democrats around, Letitia James. So it’s more of a two-tiered justice system with judicial overreach as a side order.

In the end, a guy with 50 years of experience lost his job in 50 characters. The judges say they pick prosecutors. The DOJ says the president picks prosecutors. And somewhere in Albany, Letitia James is watching it play out with the excitement of a below-average OnlyFans model seeing a new Saudi sponsor show up in her feed.

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Yesterday, Politico reported, “House passes GOP elections overhaul.” In a squeaker vote (218-213), the House narrowly passed the SAVE Act, which requires citizenship and ID to vote in federal elections. All Republicans and one Democrat, Henry Cuellar (TX), voted for it. Let the filibuster showdown begin.

It was odd that the vote was so close. Remarkably, voter ID is a classic 80/20 issue. Check out the latest polls:

• Gallup: 84% of ALL Americans support requiring photo ID to vote. Including 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents, and 67% of Democrats.

• Rasmussen (Jan. 2026): 74% favor voter ID requirements.

Trump knows it, too. Two days ago, the White House blog said, “Voter ID is overwhelmingly popular with literally everyone — except Democrat politicians.” There is an obvious disconnect between Democrat voters and Democrat lawmakers. They are all for requiring ID for driving, flying, vape pens, cold medicine that works, concert tickets, entry into the Democrat convention, Somalian voter registration, and buying crypto— but not for electing the government of the most powerful nation in the world, donating to ActBlue, crossing the border on foot, or opening a Minnesota daycare center.

If I didn’t know better, I might start getting suspicious.

🔥 Having been approved in the House, the bill now flips to the Senate. Things are getting spicier than Thai-hot tonkatsu ramen. So far, 45 intrepid Senators —and possibly soon including Democrat John Fetterman— have agreed to co-sponsor the bill.

Now begins the real show. Under the current rules, the Senate requires 60 votes to beat the silent filibuster, and Senate Democrats would rather eat their own shoes than let voter ID become law before November’s midterms. Texas Representative Chip Roy, among others, laid out the game plan, which we’ve discussed many times: force Democrats into a real talking filibuster.

Under existing Senate rules, they would have to physically stay on the floor, on live streaming, gibbering continuously and trying to defend the indefensible— why proving you’re American is too much to ask when voting in America.

Given the 80/20 issue, the optics of a real standing filibuster would be insanely helpful to Republicans, only getting better the longer it continued, which makes one wonder whether this whole thing could have been a rope-a-dope from the jump. Stand by for the fireworks.

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Yesterday, following a wild public hearing in the Homeland Security Committee, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) published a presser titled, “Hawley Exposes Fraud in State and Federal Programs and Dark Money Funding Web.” Corporate media ignored it. “They learned a valuable lesson during the pandemic: the government never runs out of money,” one witness testified, “and the probability of getting caught is virtually zero.”

First, the Committee discussed the fake Minneapolis protest situation. Seamus Bruner, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute, testified under oath that his organization has tracked over $60 million flowing to fourteen groups running national anti-ICE protest operations— via dark money networks including Soros, the Arabella funding network, the Neville Roy Singham network (which has CCP ties), Tides, the Ford Foundation, the ACLU, Muslim groups, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Soros, Arabella, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Tides— that’s not a donor list. That’s a Davos cocktail party seating chart.

“These massive NGOs have billions of dollars to spend on all kinds of coordinated protest, or in this case, riot activity,” Bruner told the committee. For anti-ICE protests, sixty million dollars. For a “spontaneous grassroots movement.” That’s roughly what it costs to produce a Netflix original series— which, come to think of it, is exactly what these protests are.

But the testimony got worse. Minnesota State Senator Mark Koran told the committee the protests are “highly organized and coordinated,” involving 30,000 trained observers, doxxing of federal agents, frozen bottles thrown at officers, and in one case, an ICE agent who had his finger bitten off.

Democrat Senator Andy Kim whined that exposing the funding “delegitimizes the protesters’ anger.” Delegitimizes! Complaining that turning on the lights delegitimizes the cockroaches is a bold take. Democrats insisted the protests are organic, grassroots expressions of rage. Organic! Apparently, it’s the most organic thing since Whole Foods started slapping ‘artisanal’ on everything and doubling the price.

The main difference being, Whole Foods doesn’t train 30,000 observers to bombard cop cars with frozen water bottles.

🔥 Next, the Committee discussed the highly related fraud situation. Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, told the Committee that the government pays over a trillion dollars a year to fraudsters. Senator Hawley asked, “Where’s the money going?” Talcove answered, “It goes to terrorism, it goes to child trafficking, it goes to drugs… and then it’s used to purchase luxury items, cars, purses, homes.” The witness angrily shook his head. “That’s all funded by people like me who pay taxes— $115 million an hour.”

It’s good to know that LexisNexis, which literally tracks every human on earth, can find a trillion dollars in dark money, but the DOJ can’t. Maybe the DOJ needs a LexisNexis subscription. “There need to be prosecutions here,” Hawley concluded. “So, I just renew my call to the Department of Justice to investigate these groups, these dark money groups, untangle this web and bring prosecutions wherever you can.”

Think of it. A trillion dollars in government fraud, every year. Thanks largely to pandemic policies. We could repair the hole in the budget just by locking them all up. Keep it going.

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In case you missed it, the government now has military-grade lasers at the border. We’ll get to the balloon in a minute. Yesterday, a confusing cascade of events dramatically shut down all flights in and out of El Paso, Texas, stranding tens of thousands of travelers and baffling everyone including, apparently, the White House. The Guardian reported the story, headlined, “US Officials Lift 10-Day Closure of El Paso Airspace After Balloon Mistaken for Drone.” The headline tells you exactly what media wants you to think about this.

Here’s what actually happened. The Pentagon lent Customs and Border Protection a directed-energy anti-drone laser— the kind of hardware you normally associate with Bond villains and congressional budget fiascos— and CBP agents successfully deployed it at the border this week against suspected cartel drones and one extremely unfortunate party balloon.

It’s apparently true; one of the “drones” turned out to be a mylar party balloon. In the agents’ defense, have you seen mylar party balloons lately? Those things are bigger than some actual drones. The FAA, which apparently nobody bothered to tell about the laser, freaked out and closed El Paso’s airspace for ten days— without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the White House, or approximately 900,000 residents.

In a viral social media clip, a Southwest pilot who’d just landed was informed his airport would essentially cease to exist for a week and a half. “So the airport is totally closed?” he asked, with the remarkable professional calm you only achieve at 30,000 feet.

The closure was reversed within hours, but not before reporters enjoyed a field day. Corporate media wants to focus on the balloon and bungled communications. The real story is that the U.S. military is now deploying directed energy weapons at the southern border because the cartel drone problem has escalated past the point where bullets are sufficient.

Last June, President Trump signed an executive order requiring the War Department to come up with countermeasures for drone incursions (and, presumably, Chinese spy balloons). Looks like they did.

It’s 2026! We’ve gone from “build the wall” to “fire the photon torpedo.” So there’s that. Welcome to the future. Plus, someone at FAA unilaterally shut down a major American airport for ten days without telling the White House. That’s not a border security failure; it’s a bureaucratic mutiny. Expect that little problema to be corrected shortly. Adios.

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Pay attention! It’s happening. Late last week, the Financial Times quietly reported “KPMG pressed its auditor to pass on AI cost savings.” Is the billable hour on its last legs?

The Financial Times reported that KPMG— one of the world’s Big Four accounting firms— bullied its own auditor into a 14% fee cut. Their argument was elegant in its simplicity: if your AI is doing the work, your people shouldn’t be billing for it. KPMG’s hapless auditor, Grant Thornton, tried to kick but quickly folded like a WalMart lawn chair, dropping its auditing fee from $416,000 to $357,000.

And now every CFO on Earth is reaching for a calculator.

Here’s the dark comedy. Grant Thornton’s UK audit leader bragged in a December blog post that AI was making their work “faster and smarter.” KPMG took note, and immediately asked why it was still paying the slower-and-dumber price. This is why lawyers tell their clients to stop posting on social media. The marketing department just became the billing department’s worst enemy.

As a lawyer who bills by the hour —and I suspect many of you work in professions that do the same— I can assure everyone that this story sent a terrifying chill racing through the spines of every white-collar professional who’s been out there cheerfully babbling about AI adoption at industry conferences.

The billable hour has survived the fax machine, personal computers, email, electronic filing, spreadsheets, and the entire internet. The billable hour has the survival instincts of a post-apocalyptic cockroach and the institutional momentum of a Senate tradition. But AI might finally be the dinosaur killer, and KPMG just showed everyone exactly how the asteroid hits: your client reads your own press release and demands a discount.

It’s too late; the story stretched, warmed up, and is racing down the track. For instance, I.T. consultant Ian Brooks:

What Ian was laughing about is that now, KPMG’s customers will be asking for their AI discounts—from KPMG. What’s good for the auditor’s auditor is also good for the auditor, if you follow my meaning. The point is, they’re all auditors. So.

The billable hour won’t die overnight. But it just got a terminal diagnosis. Every professional services firm that’s spent the last two years bragging about AI efficiency is now staring at the same problem: you can’t brag to your clients you’re faster and also charge them for the same number of hours. As they say at KPMG, it doesn’t add up. Somewhere in a law firm right now, a partner is quietly deleting a LinkedIn post about how AI is “transforming their practice.” Smart move.

The first rule of AI efficiency fight club is: you never talk about AI efficiency.

Have a terrific Thursday! Get back here tomorrow morning for more delicious and nutritious Coffee & Covid, with the latest essential news and commentary.

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