Joohn Choe

At least Russia can win gold medals in poor hot takes

The really interesting thing about it is what it *doesn't* say

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What does the end of a ten year civil information war look like?

I think we're seeing it.

www.patreon.com/posts/beginn...

Full post on the Supreme Court's decision on tariffs and the threat matrix for midterm election disruption here:
www.patreon.com/posts/suprem...

The Supreme Court handed down a decision on tariffs this morning, and the newspaper version is, it's a 6-3 ruling, holding that IEEPA doesn't authorize the President to impose tariffs.

The analytically relevant version for tracking threats to elections is considerably more granular.

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So how're you folks liking those restrictions on steel and aluminum imports? Good?

Good.

There are a few things our country is unquestionably still world-class at, and one of them, you'd think, is bombing Iran.

As of Feb 19 2026, I don't think we're 100% there though.

Full post here; detailed probability assessments and sources & methods for subscribers
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Means, motive and opportunity: the usage of Presidential emergency powers for election disruption | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

EO 13848 - Trump's "Foreign Interference" emergency order, renewed thru Sept 2026 - is the most underappreciated election disruption instrument in play. IEEPA + undefined "interference" + functionally unreviewable presidential discretion = major threat scenario.

www.patreon.com/posts/means-...

It's just as I predicted.

The Fulton County ballot-raid warrant was a soup sandwich.

And neither the warrant nor Fulton County's Rule 41(g) motion mention ANY reason for the Director of National Intelligence to be there.

www.patreon.com/posts/fulton...

The Fulton County Affidavit: Political Prosecution Masquerading As National Security | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

So the meaningful thing about the Fulton County warrant affidavit is not what it says.

What it says is, as Fulton County correctly notes, basically bullshit.

What you need here to understand this is to look for what it DOESN'T SAY.
www.patreon.com/posts/fulton...

If you've been tracking what I've been writing you are 2-3 steps past this. Remember:

- DNI Gabbard was there
- ODNI raided ballots in Puerto Rico, and
- when the DNI justified her presence on Feb 2 with a word salad of intelligence authorities she could not have known that we'd see the warrant

The thing is, as impressive as the warrant affidavit looks up-front, when you pick it apart, it's FULL of stuff like this.

I didn't go into the known backgrounds of the witnesses as fully as Fulton County did but just from what I saw, it was obviously a pretty slipshod job of legal writing.

Called it. The Fulton County raid warrant is a soup sandwich, y'all. Fulton County's latest filing is utterly dismantling it and I am HERE FOR IT 😂🤣

Full analysis coming up, for now, here's the ZebraDuck bit.

I noticed this too in my write-up.

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The gap between the authorities that the DNI was claiming and the frankly stupid warrant affidavit in Fulton County suggests to me that if you were doing a parallel construction to shield a shady national-security predicate for election disruption using emergency powers...

It might look like this.

The Fulton County Affidavit: Political Prosecution Masquerading As National Security | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

The ODNI's Feb 2 letter is all about foreign interference in critical infrastructure and cites a national emergency under EO 13848 to justify the DNI's presence.

But raid warrant - which they thought we'd never see - doesn't mention the word 'foreign'.

Not ONCE.
www.patreon.com/posts/fulton...

When you look at the gap between the Feb 2 letter and the affidavit, you know what stands out?

The DNI letter is full of disparate, seemingly 'stacked' legal authorities. It cites laws wrong and invokes a national emergency with potentially far-reaching consequences.
www.patreon.com/posts/dnis-b...

Now that the warrant for the Fulton County ballot raid is unsealed and people have had time to read it, they seem to have dismissed it as an exercise in conspiracy theories around the 2020 election.

That's a mistake.

What it really does is tell us how the government thinks they can lie to us.

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We know that John Yoo, who probably reviewed PEADs, talked to Trump in his first term; and we also know, all the first-term guardrails are gone.

The question isn't so much "will the courts say no?". They probably will.

The question would be, what if the courts say 'no' and Trump escalates anyway?

#2 is the version you really don't want to think about: the activation of a Presidential Emergency Action Document (PEAD), colloquially referred to as 'The Doomsday Book'.

"What is a PEAD?" you ask.

Answer: PEADs are ancient, dangerous weapons from the nuclear age.
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The legal pretext could come from EO 13848 and the declared national emergency with regard to foreign election interference, last renewed in September 2025.

Assuming the Trump administration renews it, which they should, it'll be in force this November.
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

#1: the first way would involve secret agency determinations authorizing aggressive enforcement in swing districts.

We can guess, from a whistleblower disclosure on Jan 21, that it'd look like the Lyons memo, an internal finding with controlled distribution.
www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

I've been immersed in Presidential emergency power laws for the past two weeks.

ICE raids to suppress votes is plausible.

There are two ways in particular that this could happen that I think are worth warning about, this far out.

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Anyway, I had all these images handy from '23 to '24 - some of it is recycled Ukraine war templates, others from a custom Midjourney build in '24 for the election - so, why not.

Might as well normalize a little rebellion.
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A process that has operated for six months and only netted a target list in the hundreds is off by an order of magnitude.

The point is pretty obviously the fear.

Let's give that ICE approval rating on Facebook a haircut, since Facebook trends male, white and conservative. So, call it 60% of 253 million Facebook users.

That's still 151.8 million people on Facebook who could reasonably be expected at some point to criticize ICE.

Step back from it a bit, though, consider the scale involved.

As of Feb 5, 2026, 65% of Americans thought ICE actions had gone too far in PBS/Marist polling.

There more than 253 million Americans on Facebook, going off early 2025 figures.

At least some of these subpoenas have been complied with. Reporters from The New York Times have reviewed two subpoenas sent to Meta over the past six months, which also suggests that this program has been running for at least that long.

The Department of Homeland Security sent Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta hundreds of administrative subpoenas requesting the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize ICE and DHS.

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I have literal skin in this game.

So I'm apprised and aware of the changes to American denaturalization policy.

I'm just not shook by it.

Full post on Patreon:
www.patreon.com/posts/indust...

I'm one of the very few non-Alabamian 'political operatives' alive today who can claim to have beaten Steve Bannon and Trump in 2017.

It's a cool story, ask me about it some time.

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