As Seen in the Omaha World-Herald and the Des Moines Register: Tough on Crime: Unless You Can Afford a Signature / Keep Dogs Out of the Locker Rooms / Delusional Intelligence / A Pause and an Apology

by Brent Lambi | Sep 23, 2026 | Political, Uncategorized

Keep Dogs Out of the
Locker Rooms
Iowa and Nebraska check who walks into the shower.
Washington no longer automatically checks the barn.“
Congratulations are in order. After years
of warning us that predators lurk behind
every gym door, the party of family values
has finally found one background check
it considers too strict: the Federal Bureau
of Investigation’s.
THE LINE THEY ERASED.
An archived 2023 FBI document listed
“engagement in prostitution or bestiality”
among the bureau’s “automatic
disqualifiers.” Current guidance lists
neither. Under the new rules, applicants
who engaged in past acts of bestiality or
animal cruelty may still be considered
as long as the incidents took place before
age 18, and sources told CBS News
the policy does not differentiate between
applicants who willingly engaged in bestiality
and those who were coerced. Paid
for sex? Still eligible if it happened fewer
than three times and at least 10 years ago.
On Tuesday, Director Kash Patel told the
Senate Judiciary Committee “we did not
want to punish victims of bestiality, victims
who were trafficked.” The explanation
drew bipartisan disbelief. Republican
Sen. John Kennedy pressed him: “But
you’re not telling us today that if a human
being had sex with an animal, that they
can still be an FBI agent.” Every farm
family in Iowa was asking the same thing.
THE COMPANY HE PARDONS.
This is not new. On his first day back,
President Trump pardoned nearly every
Jan. 6 defendant. NPR found dozens had
prior convictions or pending charges for
crimes including rape and sexual abuse
of a minor. Kasey Hopkins carried a 2002
THE LAW THAT PASSED 427-1
Last November, Congress did something
it almost never does: it agreed. The Epstein
Files Transparency Act cleared the
House 427-1, passed the Senate without
objection, and was signed by the president
on Nov. 19, 2025. The deadline was
thirty days. Release it all, protect the victims,
protect nobody else.
Ten months later, the Justice Department
says it has done its part, with nearly
3.5 million pages published in total. Rep.
Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican,
says millions more are still being held
back. A federal judge agreed that something
was being hidden. In a suit brought
by journalist Katie Phang, the court ordered
redactions lifted on key records,
including at least eight Epstein email exchanges
about a “torture video” and sexual
activity with young women and minors,
plus interviews with a woman who
says President Trump abused her when
she was a minor. The department’s answer
was not compliance. It filed notice
that it plans to appeal.
THE BRAVEST MAN IN THE
ROOM IS A BLACK MARKER
This is the movement that promised to
drain the swamp and expose the elite. It
turned out the swamp had a filing cabinet,
and the cabinet had a lock.
When the House Oversight Committee
subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi
in March to testify about the release,
she was fired by Trump within a month.
Her replacement, Todd Blanche, is the
president’s former criminal defense lawyer.
He was confirmed 50-49. Ghislaine
Maxwell, the only person convicted in the
trafficking scheme, was moved to a minimum-
security camp days after sitting
down with Blanche.
The administration calls this historic
transparency. In my opinion, a transparency
law that needs a court order to work
is not transparency. It is a press release.
A transparency law that needs
a court order to work is not
transparency. It is a press release.
MERCY, BY THE TON
Now look at who gets the benefit of the
doubt.
Juan Orlando Hernández, the former
president of Honduras, was sentenced to
45 years for helping move more than 400
tons of cocaine toward American streets.
Trump pardoned him, and he walked out
Dec. 1, 2025. Before him came Ross Ulbricht,
who ran the Silk Road drug marketplace,
and a commutation for gang
leader Larry Hoover. The Washington
Post counts roughly 100 drug clemencies.
Reuters found that 96 percent of second-
term grants fell outside Justice Department
guidelines, up from 14 percent
in the first term.
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and
George W. Bush never pardoned a head of
state convicted of trafficking. No president
had. This one did it and called it fairness.
WHAT THAT MEANS ON I-80
Interstate 80 runs through Omaha and
Des Moines, and it is a trafficking corridor.
Our sheriffs and troopers seize the
product. Our families bury the overdoses.
Every pardon of a convicted drug trafficker
erases the work of every agent, trooper
and prosecutor who built that case. They
put their lives at risk for nothing. And
every kingpin who walks free puts every
family in America at risk again.
Washington has told the men at the top
that a friendly word in the right ear can
wipe the slate clean. Every deputy on that
highway is entitled to ask what, exactly, he
is risking his life for.
THE HONEST PART
The pardon power is nearly absolute, and
every president has used it in ways critics
hated. Joe Biden commuted the sentences
of thousands of nonviolent drug
offenders and pardoned his own family.
The Justice Department says its redactions
protect victims, as the law requires.
No court has found that the withholding
shields any particular person. Being
named in the files is not proof of a crime.
Democrats are not saints, and this newspaper
does not endorse parties.
But only one party holds the Justice Department,
the pardon pen, and both
houses of Congress right now. Only one
party can open the file tomorrow. It has
chosen not to.
HOLD YOUR NOSE
I am a lifelong Independent. I do not ask
this lightly. If the party of law and order
will not stand for the survivors and will
not stand against the cartels, then it has
no claim on your vote.
If you want to keep Iowa and Nebraska
safe, hold your nose and vote Democrat,
or stay home this November.
In reality, this administration seems
more interested in protecting the perpetrators
of crime than the victims of
crime.
THE FILE AND THE PARDON PEN
Tough on Crime: Unless
You Can Afford a Signature
They sealed the file on a trafficker’s friends and opened
the cell door for the men who moved the cocaine.
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” — Mark Twain
forcible-rape conviction. Theodore Middendorf
is a registered sex offender for
crimes against a 7-year-old. Andrew Paul
Johnson, freed by the same pardon, was
later sentenced to life for molesting two
children. The pardons covered the riot,
not the earlier crimes. In my opinion, the
vetting was the same as the FBI’s new
rule: look away first.
THE LOCKER ROOM TEST.
Republican lawmakers in Des Moines and
Lincoln have spent entire sessions legislating
who may stand in a locker room.
Fine. Let us apply their standard evenly. If
the test is safety, the question is conduct:
Should a man with a history
involving livestock shower
beside your son?
Should a man whose name
appears in the Epstein files coach
your daughter’s team?
The party that told us the innocent have
nothing to fear can start by releasing the
files Congress ordered opened, 427 to 1.
THE HONEST PART.
A name in the Epstein files is not proof of
a crime, and a child abused with an animal
is a victim, not a suspect. That is exactly
why the right fix was a written victim
exception, not quietly deleting the line for
everyone. In my opinion, a bureau that
saw 1,139 special agents leave in 2025
chose the shortcut over the standard.
Sources: CBS News; CNN (Sept. 15, 2026
testimony); NPR; Axios; NBC News
CONSERVATION, AT LAST.
For fifty years, presidents begged Americans to drive less and burn cleaner. None of them
found the lever. This one did. On September 11 the national average for diesel crossed
six dollars a gallon for the first time in history: $6.06, against $3.70 a year ago. Gasoline
stood at $4.29. No mandate was required and no regulation was written. The air over the
interstate has never been cleaner, because fewer people can afford to be on it.
THE DEBT RELIEF PLAN.
Inflation, we are assured, lets the working man retire his mortgage in cheap dollars. A
fine theory, provided he locked his loan in 2021. August CPI came in at 3.4 percent and
the 30-year fixed at 6.66. Inflated dollars and expensive money. Never mind the bank
holding the note.
A STRONGER DOLLAR.
The old method was fiscal discipline. The new method is a portrait. A one-dollar coin
bearing his likeness has circulated since September 2; his signature now sits above the
Treasury Secretary’s; and a $250 note waits on a Congress willing to repeal the rule
against living men on money. The coin has a gold-like finish and is struck from base
metal. There is the fiscal program in a sentence.
“A gold-colored coin struck from base metal is
not a monetary policy. It is a self-portrait.”
AND THEREFORE, MINING.
Gold ballrooms require supply. The federal government has taken financial stakes in
at least seven mining and minerals companies, with roughly $10 billion in federal financing
associated with those deals. Washington is now, in some cases, both an investor
in these companies and the government responsible for regulating or permitting
their projects.
THE CRYPTO VISION.
His disclosures report $1.4 billion in crypto revenue. In August, a federal regulator
chartered a bank affiliated with the family venture. Last October, he pardoned the
convicted exchange founder whose platform had helped it along. Coincidence, surely.
SUPERVISED INTELLIGENCE.
He is right that this technology will reorder the world. He is also certain that his own
administration should decide what it is permitted to say. Whoever holds that pen
holds the dictionary. No president of either party should.
Sources: Reuters, Feb. 4, 2026; U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Feb. 4 and Aug. 12,
2026; U.S. Department of Energy; U.S. Department of Defense.
When I filed this case, I expected a
straightforward process involving discovery
and documents. If the record supported
it, I also expected the true wrongdoer to
be named as a third party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is
being shaped by people whose names do
not appear in the case caption. I cannot
prove that today, and I will not tell readers
otherwise. I can only tell you what I
believe and why I am acting on it.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and
its agents may themselves have been used
by someone else who gave them a version
of events and left them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this
defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author
of this defamation but a vehicle for it. To
the extent that my filings suggested otherwise,
my apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or
its agents will come forward or tell others
what I suspect they may already know: the
origin of this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute
with the federal government is ongoing
and that the government’s objective is to
silence and discredit me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In
this political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi: The opinions expressed
above are solely those of the author.