☕️ TRADITIONAL JUSTICE ☙ Tuesday, December 30, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

DOJ sues states over illegal-alien tuition bias; Hoover Building shuttered as FBI moves to Reagan—architecture as policy; arrests surge post-Biden; WSJ misses genius behind DOJ’s DEI fraud squeeze.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Today’s all-justice roundup includes: DOJ sues Virginia and other states over discriminatory tuition support for illegal aliens; Kash Patel formally announces permanent closure of the nuclear bunker-like Hoover Building; FBI will move its headquarters to much nicer digs under the Reagan rubric; metaphors and signals of new era; architecture as policy; Fox finds outstanding and inarguable signs of progress in nation’s top law enforcement agency, especially compared to Biden era; and Wall Street Journal completely misses the strategic genius behind the DOJ’s “unconventional” fraud claims against DEI practices.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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At times, one clutches the brow in despair and wonders: what aren’t we paying for? Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Justice Department Sues Virginia Over Tuition Aid for Unauthorized Immigrants.” In case it wasn’t clear, the sub-headline added, “The DOJ said the state’s policy of granting unauthorized immigrants in-state financial aid at public colleges and universities violates federal law.”

Put simply: the State of Virginia pays illegal immigrants’ tuition and gives them in-state rates. Yesterday, the DOJ filed suit to stop it.

In 2020, Governor Ralph “Ralphie” Northam (D) signed a law allowing illegals access to in-state tuition rates. At the time, Northam, whose favorite pastime is huffing kindergarten paste, called illegals “Virginians, in every sense of the word, except for the immigration status,” which might be true if the only criterion for being “a Virginian” is reliably handing over your mail-in ballot to a DNC harvester while hawking SNAP cards for cash to wire back to Venezuela.

The DOJ’s lawsuit has legs. In June, the Department won a case in Texas, and the court struck down a 20-year-old state statute providing in-state tuition to illegals. (Helpfully, Texas had joined the DOJ in arguing against its own statute.) In September, the DOJ sued the state of Illinois over a similar law, and last month filed suit against California.

In other words: the DOJ filed first in the friendliest jurisdiction, and created the precedent. It has been working out a carefully planned legal strategy.

The DOJ’s legal argument is simple. It argues that it is a constitutional violation of equal protection to provide illegals with in-state tuition and advantage foreign nationals over Americans from other states. The policies also violate various federal laws and regulations, which the DOJ argues should preempt contrary state laws like Virginia’s.

Democrats quoted for the story worried that the DOJ aims to overturn a 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe, in which the high court held that state governments must provide illegal immigrants with a free K-12 public school education. At the time, the New York Times still knew how to say “illegal alien” instead of using kooky and confusing euphemisms like “undocumented” and “unauthorized:”

It wasn’t immediately clear how the DOJ’s lawsuit against college tuition threatens Plyler v. Doe, but never mind. The takeaway is that the Trump Administration is now working to unwind almost 50 years of progressive “conventional wisdom” that illegal aliens residing in a state should enjoy the same public benefits available to citizens.

The problem with Democrats is not that they are ungenerous. The problem is that they are so generous with other people’s money.

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The Museum of the Deep State will soon shut its doors once and for all. Maryland Matters ran the story under the headline, “J. Edgar Hoover Building to close for good as FBI relocates its HQ, Patel says.”

It was no surprise. FBI Director Kash Patel has called for the building’s closure for years, long before he had any inkling he’d ever be running the troubled organization. In July, Patel announced starting work on a formal closure plan. But this week, Kash tweeted, “After more than 20 years of failed attempts, we finalized a plan to permanently close the FBI’s Hoover headquarters.”

Twenty years! Well, to be fair, in federal construction time, that is only half of a feasibility study window.

The FBI had landed on a plan to build a new, palatial operations building in DC for the affordable price of only $5 billion, that would optimistically open as soon as 2035. That’s barring any unforeseen delays— like the unforeseen delays that stymied Cabbage Patch Biden’s national internet plan, Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail project, or virtually any other Democrat building project, which inevitably transfer vast amounts of money to favored constituencies without building anything but dreams of revised Powerpoint presentations.

Anyway, Kash’s new plan directs the FBI to relocate its headquarters to the Reagan Building, which will receive a glow-up and makeover— but at a fraction of the cost of the proposed new facility.

And so, an era ends. It won’t even be a museum. “The Hoover Building,” Kash tweeted, “will be shut down permanently.” The physical closing of one of the ugliest buildings in the Capital is also a metaphor for the closing of an ignominious chapter in FBI history.

🔥 But the symbolism runs far deeper than that. The FBI’s new home, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, is actually the anti-Hoover building. In spirit and energy, it is the mirror opposite of the old headquarters.

Completed in 1998, the Reagan building sits neatly on Wilson Plaza, right on Pennsylvania Avenue, and looks like something Washington’s architects accidentally unleashed in a fit of merry optimism after a great afternoon at the track, right before sobering up and reverting back to the grinchlike default of only building gloomy concrete bunkers.

Unlike the Hoover edifice, Reagan’s building features light stone, symmetry, arches, columns, and —brace yourself— windows. Lots of windows. In other words, sunlight can actually enter the building (without a court order).

Inside, Reagan’s place feels more like a Roman forum than a Cold War fallout shelter. There’s a massive and beautiful glass-roofed atrium, wide public corridors, colorful marble floors, and enough open space that you don’t feel like you’re being pushed through the federal government’s small intestine.

It was designed during that fleeting, halcyon, post-Cold-War, “peace dividend” moment when America briefly remembered that institutions should look confident rather than paranoid. Then 9/11 hit, and it was back to the bunkers.

The FBI —long headquartered in a Brutalist fortress named for its most notorious director— will soon move into a building originally designed to host diplomacy, trade, public events, and sunshine. In other words, from bunker to basilica. From Marxist chíc to constitutional classicism. From secrecy to transparency. From “just trust us” to “come see what we’re doing.”

If the shrinks are right, and workers’ environments do affect their psychology, then moving the FBI from a windowless concrete sarcophagus into a sunlit, open, civic building is more than a facilities decision— it’s a behavioral intervention.

For a half century, the Hoover Building trained its occupants —subtly, relentlessly— to view themselves as closeted guardians behind the wall, initiates in a cloistered order, protectors of deep secrets too dangerous for daylight. They didn’t need a memo to learn that culture; the building itself was the lesson.

President Trump —the builder— has long said that architecture is policy. Moving the FBI from Hoover to Reagan isn’t just a massive cost-saving move, and it’s not merely the rare federal project that will finish in months instead of decades, but it is the declaration of a new golden era for the FBI itself.

I don’t think that’s any exaggeration. Kash is telling the FBI —architecturally— that the Cold War is over, the era of suspicion-by-default is done, and the age of unaccountable compartments is finished. It is a new, transparent age of serve and protect.

🔥 The quiet revolution inside the FBI isn’t waiting for the moving trucks. It’s already happening. Two weeks ago, Fox —and only Fox— ran an old-school bit of journalism headlined, “FBI violent crime arrests double in Trump’s first year in 17 key cities compared to Biden record.”

Fox dug into the FBI’s own crime statistics and found something remarkable. Under Biden, arrests across major FBI field offices had flatlined. Same depressing low numbers, year after year. Bureaucratic meh. But under Kash Patel, arrests haven’t just ticked up— they doubled in his first year.

It’s an even bigger delta than it looks. Remember that Biden’s arrest numbers included roughly 1,600 January 6th tourists— grandmas, veterans, selfie-takers, and the occasional confused cosplayer masquerading as a Viking. Strip those out, and Biden’s “law enforcement productivity” looks even thinner.

By contrast, the 2025 arrest totals are packed with the things the FBI used to exist to pursue: gangs, cartels euphemistically called “transnational organized crime,” and child human trafficking networks—across 17 major FBI field offices.

Fox found that total arrests in those offices jumped to nearly 14,000 between January 20th (Trump’s inauguration) and December 22nd. Under Biden, the same offices averaged an anemic 6,000 to 7,000 arrests per year. An FBI spokesman quoted for the story cited an even larger figure —28,000 arrests nationwide in 2025— once all offices were included.

Some of the field office numbers are frankly bonkers:

• Buffalo: up 400%, from 125 (Biden) to 642

• Jackson: up 264%, from 248 to 904

• New York (highest raw total): up 175%, from 621 to 1,709

• Nashville: up 160%, to 871

• Detroit: more than doubled, from 305 to 765

That’s not a narrative, a vibe shift, or a media frame. You can’t argue with arrest statistics. They’re the core metric of law enforcement. And by that unforgiving measure, the FBI didn’t just change tone this year. It is acting like a completely new agency— one that remembers, dimly at first but increasingly clearly, what it was actually built to do.

These figures should be headline news across every wire service. It’s an amazing accomplishment.

This kind of across-the-board institutional transformation isn’t easy. Large agencies —often compared unfavorably to cruise ships— don’t pivot; they creak, resist, and shed parts before they start moving at all. The FBI didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to be different, it had to be forced through structural choke points that most reforms never survive.

Now that Kash Patel has successfully reinvented the FBI and redirected it back to its original mission of arresting actual criminals instead of patriots and abortion clinic protesters, just imagine what 2026 will look like.

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The law enforcement news was even better than that. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an overwrought, protein-free thinkpiece headlined, “Justice Department Using Fraud Law to Target Companies on DEI.” The article radiated the familiar scent of elite panic—heavy on adjectives, light on understanding.

The headlined news was that the United States Department of Justice has begun probing corporate behemoths like Google and Verizon Communications over their DEI hiring practices, using what the Journal portrayed as a dangerously clever, faintly sinister, and possibly unconstitutional legal theory.

But —as usual— the Journal entirely missed the point.

This story is not mainly about a clever legal trick. It’s about a long-planned strategic arc now reaching execution phase. The Journal described the move as novel, aggressive, even improvised. In reality, this has been mapped out for months, maybe longer. Possibly much longer.

Here’s the part the Journal left out.

The order directed federal agencies to insert two deceptively modest clauses into every new federal contract and grant. First, a statement that compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government’s payment decisions. Second, a certification that the contractor does not operate DEI programs that violate applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.

That’s the whole trick. And it’s a pretty neat one, too.

Once a company signs that contract, every invoice becomes an express certification of compliance. At that point, what used to be an HR dispute quietly mutates into a fraud-on-the-Treasury problem. Employment law walks offstage; fraud liability strolls on stage, grinning in hungry anticipation.

If a contractor’s DEI programs —its hiring quotas, promotion targets, leadership pipelines, supplier diversity mandates, internships, and fellowships— amount to unlawful race- or sex-based preferences under Title VI, Title VII, or related statutes, then certifying compliance while still maintaining those DEI programs can be framed as a legally false claim under the False Claims Act (31 U.S.C. § 3729).

And the False Claims Act is not merely a wrist-slapping statute. It carries treble damages, per-claim civil penalties, and the nuclear option: debarment — which means the loss of eligibility for all future federal work. Add the Act’s qui tam mechanism, and suddenly disgruntled employees, rejected applicants, and compliance officers can also sue on the government’s behalf. It could be a tsunami of litigation.

“The financial consequences,” the Journal noted with admirable restraint, “can be significant.”

Last week, Google and Verizon reportedly found themselves “among a list of companies that have received Justice Department demands for documents and information about their workplace programs.” Lawyers quoted by the Journal fretted that it was unusual to use antifraud law to pursue “hot-button conservative policy objectives.”

Translation: this leverage used to be aimed only in one direction.

“But now,” the Journal said, “the Justice Department is embracing the theory that holding a federal contract while still considering diversity when hiring is, in effect, fraud against the government that entitles it to recoup potentially millions of dollars.”

It’s had a bracing effect on the federal contracting community. One employment lawyer said, “companies have been closely re-evaluating their workplace policies in light of the federal government’s stance.” I bet they have. Super closely.

Democrats are now wailing that the federal government is “dictating” private companies’ personnel policies. What business is it of Washington, they ask, if corporations prefer certain races, genders, or sexual identities over straight white males?

The irony, of course, is exquisite.

The anti-discrimination laws already exist—largely thanks to Democrats themselves. They simply never imagined those laws would be enforced neutrally, to prohibit discrimination against unfashionable groups. “Reverse racism,” when you strip away the euphemism, is just racism with better PR.

If you take money from the federal government and sign a contract agreeing you won’t discriminate against any race, gender, or sexual “identity,” then you must live with the contract’s terms. Nobody forced you to sign it.

What we’re seeing isn’t improvisation. It’s patience. The new language required by Trump’s Executive Order went into federal contracts. The DOJ waited months while invoicing accrued. Internal Justice Department reforms proceeded quietly in the background. In the meantime it focused on DEI at colleges and universities.

And now —after the corporate paper trail has ripened— they’ve sprung the trap.

All across the country in corporate America, risk managers are screaming and hurling donuts and other baked goods at the HR department. Public companies, unlike activist nonprofits, owe duties to shareholders— and those duties do not include martyrdom for elite ideology.

This might be the Trump Administration’s most effective anti-DEI move yet. And, despite the Journal’s framing as though this were some novel gambit Todd Blanche dreamed up over the holiday weekend, it has been enscribed in the playbook from Day One.

And just think— we still haven’t even seen the entire scope yet. Trump signed a historic number of executive orders. Every one of them was signed for a reason. Get ready.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Swing back here tomorrow morning, for another fresh, hot installment of essential news and commentary.

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