☕️ CONNECTING DOTS ☙ Tuesday, August 12, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump seizes DC police with massive fed surge; Harvard caves after Trump finds perfect lever; Kash Patel drops closest RussiaGate smoking gun yet—sparking a mind-bending full-circle theory; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Boy oh boy, do I have a fun roundup for you today. It’s time to connect the dots again, step back, and see what the increasingly astonishing picture is starting to look like. In today’s dot-connecting roundup: Trump takes over DC Metro Police with massive surge in federal law enforcement and military resources; what it might mean for the woke, partisan MPD; Harvard University suddenly caves in its resistance to Trump’s pressure to de-woke itself after the Administration finally finds the right pressure point; and Kash Patel declassifies the closest thing to a smoking RussiaGate gun that we’ve yet seen—with mind-bending possibilities looping us right back to the start.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, corporate media was totally triggered about the DC crime story, and Trump is right in his element, having once again captured the news cycle and set it on fire. But man-oh-man, are there some terrific hidden dots to connect. I started with the least hysterical and most factual New York Times story, headlined, “Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police.” But just look at the Times’ front page:

It’s everywhere. Last night, I had the misfortune of watching a nearly 20-minute segment from ABC Nightly News about Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, DC, on account of out-of-control crime. Of ABC’s 20 minutes, four were devoted to the actual news, and then the anxious anchors spent 16 precious TV minutes discussing the minutiae of official DC Metro Police crime statistics, apparently trying to bore the audience into cognitive submission by proving with numbers that Trump did it for no reason.

But everyone is missing the deeper strategy.

In a 78-minute White House spectacle that combined campaign rally and a police procedural, President Trump announced he was invoking Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act, to seize control of the Metropolitan Police Department for 30 days and flood the capital with 800 National Guard troops, plus a rotating cast of various federal agents, including yesterday’s aforementioned FBI foot patrollers.

At the same time, Trump announced his newest executive order, titled, “Declaring a Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia.”

Bracketed between attorney general Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump dramatically declared it “Liberation Day in D.C.,” vividly describing the poorly managed capital city as being overrun by “bloodthirsty criminals,” “roving mobs of wild youth,” and “drugged-out maniacs.” The official rationale was clear: Washington faces a violent-crime emergency that local leaders were either unwilling or unable to fix, and the President has the constitutional duty and the statutory authority to step in, restore order, and reclaim the streets for law-abiding citizens.

“The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogotá, Colombia, Mexico City… Baghdad… Panama City, Brasilia, San José… Bogota… Lima, Peru — all double and triple what they are,” Trump said during the presser.

Hilariously, not even Trump’s most rabid critics dispute whether DC has a crime problem. (WaPo’s Megan McArdle, for instance, began her op-ed by agreeing DC crime was “outrageously high.”) The best they can do is credulously cite Metro Police crime statistics showing dropping crime levels —as if to say we were already fixing it ourselves— but without mentioning that those stats have been credibly accused of being cooked up.

Indeed, the allegation of DC police officials letting violent criminals go to keep the numbers down is probably sufficient justification by itself for the takeover. The allegations were so serious that at least one commander has already been fired.

If the local DC police union’s claims are true — that MPD supervisors have been reclassifying or disappearing incidents and, in some cases, letting violent offenders walk to protect the “crime is down” talking point — then we’re not just dealing with a crime problem, we’re dealing with a corrupt police department problem. Absent credible numbers, witless local DC leadership is clueless about the crime threat’s real scope or nature, which is precisely the sort of systemic breakdown that Section 740 of the Home Rule Act was designed to cover.

But there’s another, unspoken but plain possibility. During January 6th, the Metro Police Department outed itself as a sold-out, partisan political actor deeply aligned with Democrats and hostile to Americans who share different beliefs. Now that Pam Bondi has assumed control of MPD, get this, she has hire/fire authority. Think about that for a second.

🔥 The goals of stopping random violence in the Nation’s Capitol and removing the eyesore of human detritus from the streets (hopefully moved to mandatory treatment) are sufficient in and of themselves. A nation that can’t secure its own capital is a nation in civilizational collapse. It’s intolerable.

But my guess (and I’m just guessing) is that we’re about to see a DOGE-style, anti-DEI deconstruction of DC’s entire police department. I think that could be what this is really all about. The dots are right there.

The sheer size and variety of federal manpower Trump’s throwing into D.C. — National Guard, FBI agents on night patrol, deputy marshals, DEA, ATF, Park Police — makes no sense if this were just a 30-day “assist.” You don’t need to parachute in half the federal alphabet soup just to babysit a department you’re planning to hand back intact in a month.

But if the real plan is to strip MPD down to the studs — purge leadership, dismantle DEI programs, root out anyone they think is politically hostile, and rebuild the force in the Trump-Bondi image — then all those federal bodies aren’t temporary help, they’re a replacement backbone. They’ll keep the city covered while the locals get benched, investigated, or walked out.

And because § 740 takeovers can be renewed in 30-day bites, Bondi has plenty of time to do it. After the pandemic’s endless “emergencies,” nobody’s going to panic if the federal presence stretches into the fall, then the winter, especially if crime stays flat or (more likely) drops.

Normal Americans don’t care who’s running DC law enforcement so long as it works.

If I’m right, if that is the play, the public story is “crime crackdown,” but the operational reality is federal receivership with a remodel crew already on site. Brilliant.

But I could be wrong. Very wrong. There could be a lot more to this move. A much bigger dot. We’re not finished with this story yet; just wait.

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TAW! It was a tale of two headlines, with two more delicious dots to connect. On Friday, the Harvard Crimson ran a financially fascinating story under the headline, “Trump Administration To Investigate Harvard’s Patents.” Ruh-roh.

Harvard’s research patents are its crown jewels. That collection of prized intellectual property is Harvard’s biggest boast and its most financially valuable asset. It also turns out that its patents are its greatest weakness.

The woke Ivy League school can only blame itself. Under a long-standing federal law, 1980’s Bayh-Dole Act, all patents developed using federal grant money are required to be aggressively pursued for U.S. manufacturing, be fully and timely disclosed to the government, and must “maximize public benefit.” If a federally-funded patent holder fails to check Bayh-Dole’s boxes, then the government can confiscate the patent.

On Friday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Harvard a stinker of a letter —also, hilariously, posted to Twitter— announcing an “immediate comprehensive review” of Harvard’s patent portfolio to ensure Bayh-Dole compliance. Lutnick gave the University one month to submit a complete list of patents tied to federal funding, including Bayh-Dole disclosure dates, current use, and full licensing terms.

But it didn’t take a month. Not even close. It only took one weekend.

Just like that, the #Resistance folded. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a resigned story headlined, “Harvard Nears a Deal With the Trump Administration to Restore Funding.” By Monday, Secretary Lutnick’s “comprehensive patents review” had been folded into a “potentially landmark legal settlement” framework between the Academy and the White House.

According to the Times, Harvard is now —suddenly— prepared to commit $500 million dollars over the next few years to agreed-upon “vocational and research programs.” The amount is twice Columbia’s settlement and ten times what Brown University paid in its deal. In exchange, the Administration would restore frozen research funding, end the Bayh-Dole patent probe before it bites, and call off the rest of the school’s many pending federal investigations.

The settlement’s details, obviously, remain fluid. The Times noted that the Administration seeks a painful stipulation in the deal requiring Harvard to cough up detailed admissions data, including on race and gender, grade point averages, and standardized test scores. “It was not clear on Monday,” the Times explained, “how any agreement between the government and Harvard would resolve that demand.”

Trump may have finally found the right leverage. It was only a matter of time.

Until now, Trump’s campaign against the Ivies has relied on tools that schools could posture against, like Title VI discrimination probes, DEI crackdowns, foreign student visa fights, and endowment taxes. All of those sting, but they’re either politically deniable (we’re standing up for academic freedom!) or slow-burning enough to drag out in court and maybe run out the clock.

But meanwhile, for decades behind the scenes, elite universities have treated the Bayh-Dole Act’s patent rules like polite suggestions, confident the government would never actually wield its “march-in” power to seize federally funded inventions. By suddenly threatening Harvard’s crown-jewel patent portfolio, Trump turned that dusty clause into a live grenade that blows straight through endowment walls and PR shields. Now, they’re talking about real money.

They panicked. They don’t want their priceless patent portfolio audited— not when they know they’ve been ignoring Bayh-Dole for a very long time. Checkmate.

If this works against Harvard —the leader of the #Resistance— then every other research-heavy campus in America now knows the White House can simply skip the culture-war skirmishes and go straight for the gold mine.

Expect a lot of sudden and unexpected compliance. The days of DEI admission are running very short now.

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The latest shoe in the RussiaGate declassification story dropped late last night, and the stakes ratcheted up yet another level. Here comes the most mind-blowing dot of all. Yesterday, Trump-aligned Just The News broke a searing story under the headline, “Exclusive: Democrat whistleblower told FBI that Schiff okayed leaking classified intel to hurt Trump.” About ten hours ago, FBI Director Kash Patel posted this on X:

According to newly declassified FBI interview reports, a longtime Democrat analyst assigned to the House Intelligence Committee said then-House Rep. Adam Schiff personally greenlit leaking classified info in 2017 to hurt Trump — in front of staff, with the stated goal of “indicting the president.” The whistleblower himself called it “unethical,” “illegal,” and even “treasonous,” but was reassured that Schiff believed the speech-and-debate clause would protect him from prosecution.

The whistleblower complained to the FBI multiple times over six years, between 2017 and 2023, describing meetings, naming Eric Swalwell as another suspected leaker, and recounting specific episodes— including one where a “particularly sensitive document” was leaked to the press within 24 hours of being viewed by a handful of staff and members. He also said he was fired for “lack of party loyalty” after refusing to join the leaking conspiracy.

Here’s one eye-popping part of one of the 302 interview reports (h/t Clandestine):

Unsurprisingly, the DOJ never acted, citing the same constitutional immunity Schiff allegedly invoked:

Director Patel has now turned over to Congress the FBI’s internal 302 interview memos, along with other leak-related documents, hinting at a broader reckoning with politicized intelligence. Note the timing of this latest declass.

It’s the closest thing to a smoking gun we’ve yet seen.

This isn’t gossip, partisan spin, or a creative reading of timelines. It’s a sworn Democratic insider, embedded on the House Intelligence Committee, telling the FBI in multiple formal interviews at the time that he personally heard Adam Schiff convene staff, outline a plan to leak classified information damaging to Trump, and state the explicit goal: “indict the president.” The whistleblower detailed a coordinated process— sensitive documents restricted to a small circle, Schiff deciding what would leak, and staffers offering reassurances that they “would not be caught,” an admission that betrays consciousness of guilt and an awareness they were crossing legal lines.

The leaks then appeared in the press almost verbatim within days. Layered with dates, meetings, named players, and repeat episodes over months, it meets the textbook definition of a conspiracy: multiple actors, in agreement, secretly, committing unlawful acts toward a shared objective. Captured in official FBI 302s now in Congress’s hands, it is the most direct, contemporaneous evidence yet that RussiaGate’s narrative wasn’t merely sloppy intelligence work — it was a deliberate, organized, secret plot carried out while knowing it was wrong.

We just learned who the conspiracy’s Congressional ringleader was. Back in the early RussiaGate phase, Schiff told media outlets he had seen “direct evidence” of Trump–Russia collusion, language clearly intended to suggest insider sourcing. In hindsight — and in light of these newly revealed FBI 302s — it’s hard to avoid the pattern: Schiff presenting himself as the conduit for virtuous truth-tellers exposing Trump, while allegedly running his own clandestine leak network inside the House Intelligence Committee, drip-feeding classified material to the press for the identical political ends as Obama, Comey, Brennan, and the rest.

If Democrats want to argue about whether Schiff’s treasonous leaks of classified intel were protected by his speech privilege, whether his crimes lie beyond the statute of limitations, or whether his Biden pardon provides immunity— they still lose. Any argument conceding the facts of what happened fails from the first.

The only way they can avoid this one is by somehow discrediting the whistleblower. But the whistleblower —described as an experienced intelligence analyst— knew at the time that providing false statements to the FBI was a serious federal felony. Nor did the FBI discredit his claims at the time— instead, it even seemed to verify the claims, citing Schiff’s privilege rather than tossing out the evidence as insufficient.

This latest disclosure is clearly the next step in the mounting stream of disclosure, carefully building a public permission structure for arrests or other substantive action. That much seems obvious.

🔥 Now, let’s swerve into even more speculative and much more entertaining territory. Connect this new dot of disclosure to Trump’s federal takeover of DC’s law enforcement. What if —and I am just wondering here— what if the Administration is securing DC before it makes a really controversial move? Like arresting someone near the top of the political food chain?

Suppose you were planning something like that, and you wanted to preclude the otherwise inevitable violent protests in the Nation’s Capital. What better way to prepare than in advance by loading up DC with military, national guard, FBI, and tons of other resources under direct federal control, that might otherwise seem like overkill to handle a few mobs of unruly teenage gangsters?

(Obviously, the useless Metro Police wouldn’t be any help. They’d wave through those kinds of protests. They’d never ever shut them down, citing the First Amendment and the right to protest, however “mostly peaceful.” Hence, a surge of federal law enforcement.)

What Trump has rolled out —800 National Guardsmen, plus FBI, DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, and even Park Police, all under centralized federal command— is massive overkill for routine street crime. It’s also expensive: you’re paying for deployments, per diems, temporary billets, and operational integration of multiple agencies.

So it sure looks like they’re getting ready, for something. Now for the most entertaining part. The sweet spot in the timeline where high-profile arrests might appear is only one to two weeks after the takeover. Any longer, and he’s pushing up against the first 30-day limit. It isn’t likely to be any sooner than a week, since it will take at least that long to thoughtfully stage and organize the various teams.

So … maybe the “bloodthirsty criminals” line isn’t the real story at all — maybe it’s the cover story. A ready-made, legally supportable excuse for a hard lockdown of the Nation’s Capital, days or weeks before something drops that could otherwise turn Washington into a full-blown war zone.

If you were about to make a move on someone high enough up the political food chain to ignite instant unrest, you wouldn’t wait until the crowd was already forming at Union Station. You’d flood the zone first — National Guard, FBI, DEA, ATF, all under a single federal command — so that when the real shoe does drop, the perimeter is already sealed and the city’s protest infrastructure is choked off before it can even get started.

Haha, I’m just letting my imagination run a little wild. We don’t (and shouldn’t) know. But the timing sure is suggestive, isn’t it? And it sure is fun to think about. Tell me what you think in the comments.

And: let the man work.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow, when we’ll lock down the very latest essential news and commentary.

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