February 12, 2026

February 12, 2026

In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers

and minors, President Donald J. Trump was presented with a trophy that calls him the undisputed

champion of beautiful, clean coal.

At the event, Trump signed an executive order directing the defense department to buy

billions of dollars of power produced by coal and decried the radical Left's war on

the industry.

Anna Bats of the Guardian noted that Trump also announced the Department of Energy will

spend $175 million to modernize, retrofit and extend the life of coal-fired power plants

in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky.

As Lisa Friedman pointed out in the New York Times last month, the United States has been

the largest polluter since the start of the industrial era.

But emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, have been declining since 2007.

Trump maintains that climate change is a hoax and has withdrawn the U.S. from the main

global climate treaty.

Since he took office in January 2025, U.S. emissions have increased 1.9 percent, largely

because of the renewed use of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked the scientific finding that has been the

basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants since 2009.

That finding, called the Endangerment Finding, reflects the consensus of scientists that

greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, endanger

the health and general welfare of the American people.

The Trump administration says scientists are wrong about the dangers of climate change

and that the regulations hurt industry and slow the economy.

Climate claims ending the rule will save Americans 1.3 trillion dollars, primarily through

cheaper cars and trucks.

But it did not factor in the costs of extreme weather caused by climate change, or the

costs of pollution-related health issues.

Last year, Josh Dossi and Maxine Jossalow, of the Washington Post, reported that at a

campaign event at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, then candidate Trump told oil executives

they should raise a billion dollars for his campaign.

In exchange, Trump promised he would get rid of Biden-era regulations and make sure no

more such regulations went into effect, in addition to lowering taxes.

Trump told them a billion dollars would be a deal, considering how much money they would

make if he were in the White House.

Tyler Pager and Mattina Stavis-Gridneff, of the New York Times, reported on Tuesday that

Trump's threats to stop the opening of the Gordy Howe International Bridge between Detroit,

Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, came just hours after billionaire Matthew Maroon, whose family

operates a competing bridge called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik.

Maroon has tried to stop the construction of the new bridge for decades.

The $4.7 billion construction cost of the Gordy Howe Bridge has been fully funded by Canada,

although the bridge is partly owned by Michigan and will be operated jointly by Canada and

Michigan.

The new bridge will compete with the Ambassador Bridge, the one the Maroon family operates,

for about $300 million in trade crossing the border daily.

White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt told reporters that this is just another example

of President Trump putting America's interest first.

This afternoon, Dustin Vols, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal

reported that the whistleblower complaint of last May involved another country's interception

of a conversation between two foreign nationals who were discussing Trump's son-in-law,

Jared Kushner, issues related to Iran, and perhaps other issues.

Kushner runs Affinity Partners, an investment fund that has taken billions of dollars in

funds from Arab monarchies.

He does not have an official role in the U.S. government, but appears to be acting in foreign

affairs as a volunteer.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of the whistleblower complaint on February

2, 2026, reporting that Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had bottled it

up for political reasons, taking it not to Congress, but to White House Chief of Staff Susie

Wiles.

On February 3, Gabbard released a highly-redacted version of the complaint to the gang of eight,

the top member of each party in the House and Senate, and the top member of each party

on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

It may or may not be related that in early April 2025, the administration abruptly fired

National Security Agency Director General Timothy Hawke and his deputy, hours after dismissing

several staffers at the National Security Council.

At the time, conspiracy theorist Laura Lumer, who is close to Trump, posted on social media

that Hawke and his deputy have been disloyal to President Trump.

That is why they have been fired.

In Talking Points memo, editor Josh Marshall has been exploring the contours of what he calls

the authoritarian international, which he identifies as a host of authoritarian governments

around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European

right revanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley, which accounts for

a larger and larger percentage of the top owners, if not the larger community, the Israeli

private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs, and, increasingly, the world's billionaire

class.

Marshall notes that those in this world are not just anti-democratic, they are constructing

a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing

national interest with individual financial interest.

The model operates, in part, by maintaining control over figures thanks to compromising

material on them.

Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone

else.

Marshall's description dovetails neatly with former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director

Robert Mueller's 2011 explanation of the evolving organized crime threat.

Organized crime had become multinational, he said, making billions of dollars from human

trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement, and cornering

the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.

We explained, these groups may infiltrate our businesses, they may provide logistical

support to hostile foreign powers, they may try to manipulate those at the highest levels

of government, indeed, the so-called iron triangles of organized criminals, corrupt government

officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.

To protect this system, transparency must be prevented at all costs.

The administration seems to be illustrating this principle as it denies the right and duty

of Congress to conduct oversight of the government.

The Department of Justice, or DOJ, has refused to release all the Epstein files to the public

as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondy appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, but

it was clear she was not there to answer lawmakers' questions or explain why she had not released

the files.

Nor did she acknowledge the survivors of Epstein's sexual assaults and sex trafficking, many

of whom were in the audience and noted that she had not met with them.

When Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat of Washington, urged her to apologize to

the survivors for the sloppiness of the release that had left many survivors' names, identifying

information, and even sexually explicit photos unredacted while covering the names of perpetrators,

Bondy accused Jayapal of theatrics, and, as Glenn Thrasch of the New York Times reported,

of dragging the hearing into the gutter.

Instead, she came prepared with a book of insults to aim at Democrats and met questions

with attacks on the questionnaires and praise for Trump.

Republican Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky, who has been instrumental in pressuring

the White House over the Epstein Files, posted on social media, a funny thing about Bondy's

insults to members of Congress who had serious questions.

Staff literally gave her flashcards with individualized insults, but she couldn't memorize them

so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flashcards insult that matches the

member.

Bondy was not only stonewalling, but also demonstrating the tactics of authoritarian

power, turning her own shortcomings into an attack on those trying to enforce rules.

Even more ominously, Kent Nishimura of Reuters captured a photo of a page of the book with

a printout titled, Jayapal Pramila Search History.

It appeared to be the file's representative Jayapal accessed after the DOJ made some

of the Epstein Files available at DOJ offices earlier this week.

This is a shocking intrusion of the executive branch into surveilling members of the legislative

branch and weaponizing that information.

The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland,

said he will ask for an investigation of this outrageous abuse of power.

Bondy's performance drew widespread condemnation from outside the administration, and even

Republicans seemed to realize she was toxic.

Scott McFarland of CBS News noted that in the committee hearing, Republicans didn't

use all their time to question her, but simply yielded their time allotted to ask questions

back to the committee.

But Bondy appeared to be playing to Trump, as she made clear when she veered into the

bizarre claim that what the committee should be talking about was not the Epstein Files,

but rather the booming stock market.

Last month, Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal

reported that Trump was complaining to AIDS that Bondy is weak and ineffective.

Yesterday's performance pleased him.

This morning, Trump's social media account posted, A.G. Pam Bondy, under intense fire

from the Trump-deranged radical left lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday's hearing on the

never-ending saga of Jeffrey Epstein, where the one thing that has been proven conclusively

much to their chagrin was that President Donald J. Trump has been 100 percent exonerated

of their ridiculous Russia-Russia-Russia-type charges.

Nobody cared about Epstein when he was alive.

They only cared about him when they thought he could create political harm to a very popular

president who has brought our country back from the brink of extinction and very quickly

at that.

An economist Yu-Gov-Pole released Tuesday shows that 85 percent of U.S. adults agree with

the statement, there are powerful elites who helped Epstein target and abuse young girls.

They protected him and need to be investigated.

Only 3 percent of American adults disagree.

50 percent of American adults think Trump was involved in crimes allegedly committed

by Jeffrey Epstein, while only 29 percent think he wasn't.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead and Massachusets, recorded with music

composed by Michael Moss.