☕️ CROOKS AND COOKS ☙ Thursday, August 21, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

DOJ probes DC’s cooked crime stats; Fed governor hit with mortgage fraud; NYT admits Dems hemorrhaging voters; Texas maps, vax task force, Tulsi’s ODNI shakeup, Epstein, Russia, Mar-a-Lago; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Today’s terrific roundup includes lots of great news: DOJ announces formal investigation into DC police officials and local leaders for corrupt crime statistics; another high-profile Democrat official accused of mortgage fraud—this time in a key position; New York Times drops another breathtaking admission—Democrats are hemorrhaging voters; and a lightning round of good news: Texas redistricting plan marches forward, vaccine committee forms covid-19 vaccine task force; Tulsi Gabbard announces wholesale reorganization of ODNI; Democrats’ Epstein scam crumbling; Russians make generous peace offering; and Kash Patel guts the Mar-a-Lago narrative.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The mystery of the New York Times’s Editorial Board’s insane limited hangout three days ago, unexpectedly admitting that Democrats botched the crime issue, has been solved. They were trying to get ahead of the story. Around the same time, NBC News had run a story headlined, “Justice Department is investigating whether D.C. police manipulated crime data.”

CLIP: DC Police Union says crime stats in DC are fake ().

One suspects the Times’ editors worry the DOJ is right, and a stinky crime stats scandal will soon emerge from the DC sewer system.

“I don’t think the crime stats in DC are trustworthy,” said Gregg Pemberton, Chairman of the DC Police Union, which represents 3,000 rank-and-file cops. Now the DOJ is investigating the capital’s creative crime accounting. “This investigation,” NBC reported, “is expected to go much further, looking at police and city officials for possible wrongdoing.”

Lived experiences. Pemberton said, “What we know, what our members know, is that we go call to call to call out on the streets at night, going from robbery to carjacking to stabbing to shooting, and we just know that crime is ubiquitous, and it’s all in every quadrant of the city. So to have people tell us, ‘well, crime is down, you shouldn’t be worried about that,’ that’s not the reality that we feel on the streets.”

And guess what else? Three days ago, the Police Union reported that since the federal surge of law enforcement in DC started, crime has actually fallen, and dramatically:

In other words, despite all progressive predictions that Trump would only make crime worse: it’s working.

But the street criminals aren’t the only ones in the cleanup’s crosshairs. As Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman always advised, “It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught.” For years (decades?), blue cities have massaged their crime figures harder than Enron’s staff masseuse but nothing ever happened. So, an official DOJ investigation into corruption in local crime reporting is practically revolutionary.

This isn’t the first cooked-books scandal over crime stats.

In the 1990s, New York City was investigated for crime-numbers wrangling in what became known as the “CompStat Scandals” (named for the city’s “innovative” new crime database system). But beyond some minor political embarrassment and internal reassignments, nobody was ever punished or even prosecuted. Well, nobody except for Adrian Schoolcraft, the whistleblower cop, who paid the price. He was forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward after exposing the manipulation. He sued, and the city finally settled for about $600,000— but the whistleblower was punished, not the corrupt supervisors he secretly recorded.

Once again, Trump has maneuvered Democrats into picking the worst possible side of the issue. This time things are going to be different. In New York’s CompStat scandals, the union circled the wagons and punished whistleblowers like Adrian Schoolcraft. Now, in DC, the union itself is the whistleblower. That changes everything.

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Ruh-roh. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran another Democrat crime story headlined, “Trump Considers Firing Fed Official After Accusation of Mortgage Fraud.” Not just a “fed official.” Lisa Cook isn’t just some mid-tier bureaucrat in the alphabet soup. Appointed by Joe Biden, she’s a Federal Reserve Governor— one of the seven people at the top of the central bank, serving a term that runs until 2038. She’s one of the most powerful unelected officials in the world.

Hilariously, Cook is now accused of lying on mortgage paperwork. Mortgages are one of the financial instruments overseen by the Fed. Bill Pulte, the new director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged on social media Wednesday morning that Cook submitted what he called fraudulent information on a pair of mortgage applications.

Yep. It was the same old “primary residence” scam now also dogging Senator Adam Schiff (D-Ca.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James. So, that’s three high-profile Democrat officials now squirming like e. coli samples under the prosecutorial microscope. (In related news, the New York Times reported yesterday that Schiff has officially started his “legal defense fund” so that he can use Democrats’ money to pay his lawyer bills.)

Pulte’s Twitter post (!) claimed that, in 2021, Ms. Cook sought mortgages on two properties —one in Michigan, one in Atlanta— describing both as her primary residence— in papers submitted only 14 days apart. Her ego may be large enough to occupy two residences. We aren’t sure yet.

Lisa Cook’s case intersects with both the excellent mortgage flyspecking that Bill Pulte has been up to at FHFA and Trump’s ongoing war with the Federal Reserve. Under federal law, Trump can only fire Fed Governors like Cook “for cause.” The Journal sneered at flexible primary residences being sufficient cause, calling it “a stretch,” but to this lawyer’s eyes, fraud against the government seems like a pretty solid start, even if it did happen before Biden appointed her.

Yesterday, Trump telegraphed on Truth Social: “Cook must resign, now!!!” Tick, tock.

🔥 We needn’t stretch to the Trump prosecutions to find a precedent for these prosecutions. For one example, in February, 2024, Baltimore’s then-Attorney General Marilyn Mosby was convicted of paperwork-related mortgage fraud (the fraud charge was later overturned on technical grounds related to a bad jury instruction, but her perjury conviction stuck).

Bill Pulte’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has suddenly and unexpectedly transformed into the federal government’s Captain Razoul. Traditionally, the FHFA is a quiet, sleepy regulator babysitting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now, under Trump, it’s out in the open with a magnifying glass, combing through decades-old paperwork — cross-checking addresses, verifying signature lines, and flyspecking the documents.

Who could have predicted that a backwater agency like the FHFA could become a political powerhouse overnight? Of course, Democrats helped, by playing fast and loose with rules that would get the rest of us a federally-funded vacation in Tallahassee, and an involuntary change in our original principal residence.

This isn’t “revenge.” This is how two-tiered justice is dismantled. No previous Administration was ever brave enough to hold federal officials to account. But Trump isn’t worried that the next Democrat Administration will pursue Republicans for similar paperwork snafus. He’s practically inviting them to do it. He’s saying, there’s one standard for everybody, and let the chips fall on any fake homesteads.

Or, possibly, Trump’s planning on there never being another Democrat Administration. Wait till you see the next story.

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For months, the media has complained at length about how Democrats are leaderless, rudderless, and underfunded. But post-election-loss handwringing and emo introspection are historically common. So it’s been impossible to handicap whether the Democrats’ problems were performative or profound. But yesterday, the New York Times debuted another disastrous-admission piece headlined, “The Democratic Party’s Voter Registration Crisis.”

“The Democratic Party,” the Times bitterly complained, “is hemorrhaging voters.” There’s literally no good news, anywhere they look. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party,” the article explained, “Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.”

“The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too,” the Times warned. “Fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.” According to the story, in the last four years, Dems lost -2.1M voters and Republicans gained +2.4M— a 4.5M swing to the right. The counter-revolution is finally showing up in the numbers.

In raw percentage terms, 4.5 million out of ~160–170 million registered voters is only about 2–3% of the electorate. On its face, that sounds modest. But a shift of even 1–2% in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Arizona can flip the presidency. 4.5 million voters is more than the entire population of battleground states like Nevada. It’s even worse during off-year elections like the upcoming midterms.

🔥 Even worse for Dems, voter registration is a lagging indicator, because people usually start voting differently long before they formally switch party registration. Which means if the rolls are already showing a 4.5 million rightward swing, the real erosion underneath the “Democratic brand” must be even deeper. It’s like finding a stream of water flowing out of the ground somewhere far out on your property and then, after testing, discovering it’s coming from underneath the yard from the pool.

Michael Pruser, director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, said, “I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this.”

There’s no clear solution to this kind of historic flight from a major political party. “Democrats,” the Times noted, “are divided and flummoxed over what to do.” At this point, a Democrat comeback would take either a Clinton-style centrist rebrand or a once-in-a-generation political leader who can break Trump’s hold on working-class voters. It’s not impossible, but it’s getting there.

The timing of this story is fascinating. Next month, the midterm primary season begins in earnest. If the Blue Party was sandbagging and holding back its ammunition, we’d expect to see signs of new life starting to bloom. But something like this is different.

🔥 Notice that the Times didn’t just stumble across a breaking story. They could have run it any time since early 2024, when the warning lights started flashing. Instead, they waited until right before this year’s midterm primary season kicks off. Why? We don’t know yet. It could be a klaxon call to motivate Democrat voters: We’re going to get shellacked if we don’t have a terrific turnout.

This data —and the Times’ open admission— guts the notion that Trump lacks a mandate. Voters are flocking to him.

Much of the change is from party switchers. Lakshya Jain, a Democratic analyst and co-founder of Split Ticket, told the Times, “The act of being a registered Democrat is still psychologically something. The act of switching is a political statement.” Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a progressive donor network, said, “It would be naïve to call 2024 anything other than a reckoning on the Democratic brand.”

A “preference cascade” is a concept coined by Timur Kuran (Private Truths, Public Lies): when individuals privately disagree with the dominant narrative but stay quiet — until enough people break ranks, and suddenly everyone feels free to express what they already thought. Think of the Berlin Wall moment: for decades, people grumbled in private, then overnight the whole edifice collapsed because everyone realized they weren’t alone.

That’s what makes the article such a calculated risk. When the New York Times —the cathedral of Democrat respectability— says “the Democrat Party faces a voter registration crisis,” it legitimizes what millions of voters already know. Readers who were privately thinking “maybe I’m done with the Democrats” now see it echoed in the Times. That can turn hesitation into action.

🔥 If you can access the article, and have time and patience, you should read the thousands of comments. Holy cow. The shortest summary is that the Times’s progressive readers are flummoxed and dispirited. They need someone to tell them what to think— but for whatever reason, that’s not happening anymore. And they don’t like it. A few quotables:

• “I feel like I’ve been orphaned by my own newspaper.”

• “We’re used to clichés like ‘danger to democracy’ or ‘resist!’ But here? Just… silence.”

• “Nobody’s telling us what to do next. We’re just left here, stunned.”

The quoted comments reflect the ugly fact that the Times usually tells Democrats what to think about the news. This time, it just told them the numbers— and walked away. Sorry, guys! That silence may prove more dangerous to “the brand” than anything else Trump has done.

Unmentioned by the Times, when a major political party sheds millions of registered voters, they’re not just losing ballot pullers— they’re also losing grassroots donors. Those $10 and $20 recurring gifts that once flowed into ActBlue dry up fast when people quietly stop identifying as Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republicans enjoy +4.5M new grassroots donors. (Same with volunteers.)

Not surprisingly, therefore, the money picture is as lopsided as the voter rolls.

Republicans head into the midterm season with a commanding $65–$75 million cash advantage at the committee level, while Trump himself sits on a staggering $600 million personal war chest, with ambitions to push it near a billion. (Remember the Iron Law of Politics: ability to win and to raise money.) Democrats, by contrast, are strapped — their party committees lag in fundraising, their donor networks are fractured, and the small-dollar pipeline that once fueled Obama and early Biden campaigns is drying up.

In blunt terms: headed into the midterm primary season, the GOP is flush and Democrats are fumbling, and the battlefield is about to be saturated with Republican dollars.

The next four months will be crucial.

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Now for a quick good-news lightning roundup! First, the Texas redistricting drama is resolving in Trump’s favor. Yesterday, from the New York Times:

California Democrats won’t actually “counter on the same day,” since the Golden State requires a referendum before it can redistrict again before the midterms. (the Times: “For Democrats, however, the fight is proving harder. The California effort will require working around the state rules that give an independent commission responsibility for redistricting.”)

💉 This next story was ignored by corporate media, but reported in a Substack interview with MIT’s Retsef Levi. Dr. Levi said the newly restaffed CDC vaccine committee (ACIP) is creating a task force to investigate covid-19 vaccine problems:

According to a one-page executive summary, they plan to look into all the issues: spike protein persistence, DNA contamination, IGG class switching, long-vaxx, and more.

🔥 Tulsi Gabbard is just getting started. Yesterday, she announced a major overhaul of her Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), with more purges of deep state moles and a top-down reorganization to prevent the weaponization of intelligence:

🔥 The Democrat Epstein Smears Campaign against President Trump is already fraying around the edges. Fox News, Monday:

Not only that, but alert online investigators found (late) Virginia Guiffre’s deposition transcript, where she testified that she never saw Trump with Epstein a single time.

It’s always frustrating when the facts don’t line up with the narrative.

🔥 President Putin gifted a random Alaskan with a new Russian motorcycle, after last week’s delegation members saw him with a broken-down version that he said he couldn’t get parts for.

Why anyone would want a Russian motorcycle remains mysterious, but hey, it’s a free country. I filed this Alaskan story under ‘good news’ since it showed thawing in the frigid relationship between the two superpowers. It was a small (but reportedly, very fast) peace offering.

🔥 Finally, FBI Director Kash Patel definitely declared to Fox Business that there was, in fact, “no legal predicate” for the precedent-smashing Mar-a-Lago raid.

CLIP: Kash Patel Interview on Mar-a-Lago — there was no predicate (2:56).

Ruh-roh! Reckonings inbound.

Have a terrific Thursday! Ride back around tomorrow morning, for more keen C&C insights and essential news.

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