Who Gets to Decide If You’re Heard?
Actually, the Federal Government
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
The mailbox and the inbox were never neutral plumbing. They are levers and
the most dangerous kind of silence is the kind you never even notice.
OPINION | June 3, 2026
We live by two quiet beliefs: that the letter we mail will arrive, and the email we send will land completely unfiltered without interference. We stake our friendships, our businesses, even our court cases on them. Yet both pass through hands we never see, and those hands hold more power than we dare imagine or realize.
Email is NOT a sealed letter passed hand to hand. It is an electronic postcard relayed through sorting machines. First your provider, then theirs, and strangers in between. At each stop software decides whether your words move on, get buried, or vanish. You meet this power daily in the spam folder: a filter you never set, choosing what you will never see. Now add the government’s reach. A 1994 law requires phone carriers to build their networks so the state can intercept communications on lawful order; regulators stretched that mandate to broadband internet in 2005.1 Providers can be forced to surrender your messages, log who you talk to, throttle your connection, or make a website refuse to load.2 The internet is not free air. It runs through a few licensed companies that answer to Washington.
Your paper mail via the United States Postal Service is no safer. Since the 2001 anthrax killings, postal machines have photographed the outside of nearly every piece of mail in the country that generate billions of images a year.3 A century-old tool called a “mail cover” lets investigators record the outside of your letters before delivery, mapping everyone you write to.4 Opening a sealed envelope still takes a warrant; learning your every contact does not.5 And a single form can quietly hold or reroute everything in your box.
Here is the heart of the danger, and it should chill you: these powers are nearly invisible. A letter that never arrives looks exactly like one never sent. A buried email looks exactly like a message no one answered. The donation that never landed, the reply that never reached you. Each wears the mask of ordinary bad luck. You cannot mourn the letter you were never handed. The deepest power is not the power to shout you down in public; it is the power to decide, in silence, which of your words ever finish their journey and all the while you suspect nothing.
Dissent is strangled in a free country not with a midnight knock, but with a thousand quiet failures no one can prove.
This is not paranoia; it is documented history. For fifteen years the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program spied on, smeared, and tried to destroy civil-rights leaders, antiwar activists, and ordinary dissenters.6 A president kept an “enemies list” and turned federal agencies loose on the names.7 None of it was confessed. It took a break-in and the Church Committee hearings to expose it,8 and the warrant rules we rely on today exist only because these powers were already abused once.9
And it is not only history. Beginning in 2025, the government invoked a 1798 wartime law to deport people it branded members of a foreign “terrorist” group with sharply limited opportunities for hearings and judicial review. 10 When a judge ordered the flights stopped, the planes landed in a foreign prison anyway, and the court found probable cause for criminal contempt. 11 The Supreme Court later ruled the people swept up had been denied due process, given barely a day to show the government had the wrong man. 12 The official Trump defense: that judges had no right to second-guess a “national security” call.
Sit with that, for it is the whole nightmare in a single line. Once Trump officials brand you a “threat,” they claim the right to act first and answer to a court later, if ever. Now picture that machinery aimed at a critic, a donor, a journalist, or a political rival by a government willing to ignore the courts and warrant requirements and invent the label. Your funding withers as contributions silently fail to arrive. Your website slows to nothing. Your mail disappears. An investigation opens on a charge built from a lie; your accounts freeze, your name is ruined. And because each blow looks like coincidence, you may never learn it was done to you on purpose.
This is why proof still matters. A sheriff or process server who places a document in your hand face to face, and a filing stamped into a court’s permanent record, create what no filter can erase or prevent: a witness, a date, a record that survives.
And remember: all of this was once done by hand, by clerks with paper files, which limited how far it could reach. Artificial intelligence erases that limit. A machine can now read, sort, slow, and bury millions of messages at once, learning whose voice to silence faster than any watchdog can follow. The tool that filters junk from your inbox can, in the wrong hands, filter out dissent.
So what must a free people demand? Plain rules on when our communications may be touched, and by whom. Audits that outlive any administration. Honest answers when a citizen asks what the government holds. Courts and watchdogs with teeth. Court orders that are obeyed rather than are blatantly ignored by the Trump Administration. None of this is radical; it is the difference between a government we can check and one we must simply trust.
The mailbox and the inbox were never neutral plumbing. They are levers, and whoever works them decides who is heard and who is quietly switched off. The most dangerous power is not the power to silence you with a shout. It is the power to silence you so smoothly that you never even know it happened.
NOTES & SOURCES
1 Lawful-intercept mandate. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), Pub. L. 103-414, enacted in 1994, requires telecommunications carriers to design their networks so that, with a court order or other lawful authorization, the government can intercept communications and obtain call-identifying information. Originally it covered telephone and similar services; in 2005 the Federal Communications Commission extended its reach to facilities-based broadband internet access and interconnected internet phone service. See 47 U.S.C. §§ 1001–1010; FCC, fcc.gov/calea.
2 Compelled disclosure and network control. Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and its Stored Communications Act (1986), providers can be compelled by warrant, court order, or subpoena to turn over the contents of communications and records of whom a customer contacts. Because internet access is delivered by regulated private carriers, the same systems that manage network traffic can be used to slow, prioritize, or block particular destinations.
See 18 U.S.C. §§ 2701–2712.
3 Mail imaging. Through the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, Postal Service equipment photographs the exterior of essentially every piece of mail processed in the United States — roughly 160 billion items in the year before the program became public. Created after the 2001 anthrax killings, it surfaced in 2013 when the FBI cited it in a ricin-letter investigation. See Ron Nixon, “U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement,” The New York Times, July 3, 2013.
4 Mail covers. A “mail cover” is a long-used investigative tool in which postal employees record the information on the outside of a target’s mail and forward it to the requesting agency; the sealed contents are not opened. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail are subject to this each year, and a 2014 audit by the USPS Office of Inspector General found that the Postal Service approved the large majority of such requests, sometimes with weak controls. See USPS OIG audit (2014), as reported by The New York Times.
5 Warrant protection for sealed mail. In Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727 (1878), the Supreme Court held that sealed letters and packages in the mail are protected by the Fourth Amendment and may not be opened without a warrant — a protection that does not extend to the information written on the outside of the envelope.
6 COINTELPRO. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (c. 1956–1971) secretly surveilled, infiltrated, and sought to discredit civil rights organizations, antiwar groups, and political dissidents, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Its existence reached the public after activists removed files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971. Documented in the Church Committee Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976).
7 The “enemies list.” The Nixon administration maintained a list of political opponents — made public during the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings — whom it sought to target through tax audits and other federal levers. See testimony and exhibits, Senate Watergate Committee (1973).
8 The Church Committee. The U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church, investigated decades of intelligence abuses and issued its final reports in 1976. See S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976).
9 Reform born of abuse. In direct response to the abuses the Church Committee exposed, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Pub. L. 95-511, creating warrant procedures and a specialized court for national-security surveillance. See 50 U.S.C. § 1801 et seq.
10 Wartime law, no hearings. Beginning in March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime statute previously used for World War II–era internment — to rapidly deport Venezuelan nationals it accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua, which it had designated a foreign terrorist organization. Its legal position was that it could carry out these removals without the hearings or judicial review ordinarily required; in court filings the government conceded that many of those removed had no U.S. criminal records. See NPR, “Trump asks Supreme Court to allow deportations under Alien Enemies Act,” March 28, 2025.
11 Contempt. After Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order halting the deportation flights, the planes nonetheless arrived in El Salvador. On April 16, 2025, the judge found probable cause to hold the government in criminal contempt for violating the order; the Justice Department argued he had overstepped into matters of foreign policy. See NPR, April 16, 2025.
12 Due process denied. In a per curiam decision on May 16, 2025 (7–2), the U.S. Supreme Court found that roughly 24 hours’ notice before removal, lacking information on how to exercise due-process rights, did not pass constitutional muster, and barred further removals of the named plaintiffs pending review. A federal judge separately ruled in December 2025 that the men deported in March had been denied due process. See Courthouse News Service, May 16, 2025; NPR, Dec. 22, 2025.
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HONEST-POLITICS.COM

AnOpen Letter to
TheDrug Enforcement Administration hasmisled you.
TheHonduras pardon is the proof. Please act.
DearMr. President:
I write to you as an independent voter, a small-business owner, and the editor of an independent civic-journalismpublication
inOmaha—the citywhere BerkshireHathaway holds itsAnnualMeeting andwhere the country’s
most respected businessminds gather each spring. I write not in anger, but in concern—for your reputation, for
the country, and for the truth.
On November 28, 2025, you announced—and on December 1, formally granted—a full pardon to Juan Orlando
Hernández, former President of Honduras.Mr. President, with all respect: I believe the people who urged that
pardonmisled you about whoMr.Hernández is.
This is not aman who was “treated very harshly and unfairly.” This is aman whomprosecutors accused of leading
a narco-state. A federal jury in New York convicted him in March 2024. A federal judge sentenced him to 45
years and an $8 million fine. The Assistant U.S. Attorney told the court Mr. Hernández had “paved a cocaine superhighway
to theUnited States.” Prosecutors documented at least 400 tons of cocainemoved intoAmerica during
his presidency and a $1million bribe to his brother—also convicted—fromthe Sinaloa Cartel under “El Chapo”
Guzmán himself, in exchange for unimpeded passage of product throughHonduras.
By any measure—tonnage, duration, sophistication, government infrastructure—Juan Orlando Hernández is
in the running for the largest cocaine trafficker any American jury has ever convicted. Bloomberg described the
pardon as having “toppled the capstone of one of themost ambitious narcotics investigations in the history of the
Department of Justice.”
Mr. President, I do not believe you knew. I believe you were told a different story.
That story came, in significant part, through the Drug Enforcement Administration — the agency that built the
case, that knows every page of the record, and that should have walked into the Oval Office and told you plainly:
“Sir, do not pardon this man. His record will become your record.” If the DEA gave you anything less, I believe the
DEA failed you. If theDEA helped engineer that pardonwhilewithholding its institutional knowledge, I believe the
DEA betrayed you.
I do notwrite to you as a stranger toDEAmisconduct. I amthe pro se plaintiff in active federal litigation in theU.S.
DistrictCourt for theDistrict ofNebraska arising froma Freedomof InformationAct enforcement claimagainst the
DEA, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security. In the course of that litigation, I have
developed firsthand knowledge ofDEA conduct that inmy opinion does not reflectwell on the agency. Iwill not air
the details here; they belong in court filings. But Iwill statemy opinion plainly:my experience is consistentwith an
agency that has lost the discipline of telling its political leadership the truth.
You have demonstrated, in this term, a willingness to remove officials whose conduct damaged the administration.
That same willingness is needed now. Senator Mark Warner has already called the Hernández pardon
“glaring hypocrisy”—and that was before the capture of NicolásMaduro on essentially identical charges. The
contradiction is unanswerable; the agency that allowed it to develop is the one that should answer for it.
I write from Omaha, where the country’s most discerning business community gathers eachMay. Your reputation
among serious Omaha businesspeople is being eroded by DEA conduct that does not bear your fingerprints
but is being attributed to your administration. That is unjust to you.
For your protection, and for mine, please act:
 Direct the Attorney General to remove the current Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
 Direct the Department of Justice Inspector General to open a formal review of the agency’s communications
with theWhiteHouse regarding theHernández pardon—who recommended it, who vouched for the recommendation,
and who possessed institutional knowledge ofMr.Hernández’s conduct and failed to convey it.
The country deserves aDrug Enforcement Administration that tells the President the truth. You deserve advisors
who do not damage your record by engineering pardons that contradict your own policy. And I deserve a federal
agency that responds tomy FOIA requests honestly, accurately and transparently.
Respectfully,
Brent Lambi
May 28, 2026
PresidentDonald J. Trump

PAID ADVERTISEMENT
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and I are both being
financially bled by the same thing — and it isn’t each other.
The pig in Charlie Munger’s parable is wearing a federal badge.
We’re Both Getting Dirty
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
OPINION | May 24, 2026
Charlie Munger said it plain. “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” I want to say something today that an opposing party in active litigation almost never says. Berkshire Hathaway and I are both being hurt. By the same thing. And it isn’t each other.
Let me state my interest plainly. I am the pro se plaintiff in Case No. CI 26-1752, Douglas County District Court. I sued Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices entities for breach of a Buyer’s Listing Agreement and defamation. Separately, I have a federal civil rights and FOIA enforcement case pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Case No. 8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, against components of the DEA, DOJ, and DHS.
Those two cases should have nothing to do with each other. They do.
Here is what I believe, in plain English. A federal officer, acting outside the lawful boundaries of their office, has reasons to want my state defamation case bogged down. Discovery in my state case touches my federal case. If my state case never produces discovery, their exposure shrinks. Delay protects them. Resolution exposes them.
That is the pig in the pen.
Now here is what most writers would never admit. Berkshire is not the villain in this story. Berkshire is bleeding too.
Count the costs. Defense counsel fees, billed by the hour, in a case the math says should have settled. Insurance reserves tied up. Brand exposure every week the case stays in the news. Discovery motions, depositions, sanctions briefing — none of that comes cheap. Every dollar Berkshire’s insurer spends defending this case past the point where settlement made sense is a dollar shareholders will not see. Charlie Munger could have done that arithmetic on a napkin.
And me? I am a pro se plaintiff carrying my own load on two fronts at once. Filing fees, transcripts, expert costs, the unrecoverable hours of my own life. Reputation hits in a small civic-journalism market. Stress I will not pretend does not exist.
Both sides of the “v.” are losing money. The only party making a return on this litigation is the federal actor who benefits from delay.
Which raises the only question that matters: why is this case still being fought the way it is being fought?
I do not believe Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, as a sophisticated business defendant, would choose to fight a routine state defamation and breach-of-contract case this way.
The conduct does not match the math. Defenses calibrated for delay, not resolution. Discovery resistance that costs more than the underlying claim. A posture that drives up fees on both sides while the actual exposure sits unchanged.
When the math does not work, somebody else is doing the calculations.
I believe — and I will say it directly — that the defense strategy in this case is being shaped, influenced, or coordinated by interests outside the four corners of the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices contractual relationship. A third party. One with its own reasons. One whose interests are not Berkshire’s interests, and are certainly not mine.
If that is true, Berkshire is not the defendant. Berkshire is the host. And I am the bait.
Charlie Munger warned about exactly this. When you wrestle with a pig, the pig sets the rules. The pig picks the venue. The pig decides how long the fight goes. And when it is over, the pig walks away clean while everyone else is covered in mud and short on cash.
So I will say what a writer and a plaintiff can say at the same time. Berkshire, look at the bill. Look at who benefits. Look at who keeps pushing for more depositions, more delay, more motion practice in a case that should have closed months ago. Whose money is paying for this? Whose strategy is this actually serving?
And then look at the door. I am open to resolution. I have always been open to resolution. A buyer’s agency dispute is not a constitutional crisis. It is a contract and a duty of care, and grown adults find a number. If Berkshire’s actual decision-makers want to talk — not the defense apparatus, the actual decision-makers — the door is open.
What I am not willing to do is keep wrestling indefinitely while a federal officer profits from our fight.
That is the story. A pig in the pen. Two parties getting bled. One actor laughing.
Charlie Munger told us how this ends. We both get dirty. The pig likes it. The question for Omaha, for Berkshire shareholders, and for every lawyer billing on this case, is whether anyone is going to do the obvious thing: stop wrestling each other, and look at who let the pig in.
The author is the pro se plaintiff in Case No. CI 26-1752, Douglas County District Court, and in the matter docketed as Case No. 8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska. The opinions expressed are the author’s own and reflect allegations and beliefs based on the public record and the author’s observation of the proceedings. Nothing herein is intended as a finding of fact against any party. All parties named are presumed entitled to a full and fair adjudication on the merits. Honest Politics welcomes responses for publication.

MEMORIAL DAY IS THE ONLY DAY RESERVED ENTIRELY FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HERE TO OBSERVE IT.
Veterans Day belongs to the troops who came home — and who, most proudly, carry the duty of honoring the fallen comrades they could not bring back with them. Memorial Day belongs to the others.
THE FAMILIES OF THOSE WHO DID NOT COME HOME SURELY DESERVE TO KNOW, EACH NIGHT, WHETHER THEIR LOVED ONE’S DEATH WAS WORTHY OF THE SACRIFICE — A QUESTION ONLY THEY CAN ANSWER. BUT THEY ALWAYS DESERVE OUR RESPECT.
The numbers do not numb. They indict. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 651,031 American servicemembers have been killed in battle since the Revolution. Another 539,054 have died in service from disease and accident. Add the more than 7,000 lost since September 11 and the total exceeds 1.2 million dead in uniform.
One-point-two million numbers. One-point-two million families.
But the true arithmetic does not stop at 1.2 million. Each of those Americans had a mother and a father — that alone is 2.4 million parents who buried a child they had raised. Most had a brother or a sister, many had a spouse, a son or a daughter waiting at home, and every one of them had aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who, in the years that followed, would remember the face that no longer appeared in the family photograph. Counted honestly, the number of Americans across our history directly broken by these 1.2 million deaths runs to fifteen million or more. The flag at a graveside is small. The grief it covers is not.
A TIME OF HEARTACHE
A mother who opened the door to two officers dressed in blue and knew before they spoke.
A father who could not finish the eulogy.
A young spouse handed a folded flag at a graveside.
A young child too small to remember the face of a parent, a brother or a sister they never got to know.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
Many names on many stones are the results on decisions made in Washington. The casualty lists were directly related by the signature of a Commander in Chief and the votes of a Congress. The grief at those gravesides did not arrive by accident.
Most of us, given enough years, learn the weight of losing someone we love. Grief becomes an accepted tax on the privilege of having lived. But to lose someone to a war that did not have to be fought is a different kind of grief. It does not soften. It hardens. And it leaves every one of those 1.2 million families with the same burning question.
“Was it really worth it?”
This is the question Memorial Day should make us reflect and ponder “did we do everything as a citizen and voter to mitigate this sacrifice in the past or in the future?”
TWO NEBRASKANS WHO KNEW THE WEIGHT
Senator Chuck Hagel earned two Purple Hearts as an Army infantryman in Vietnam, serving in the same squad as his brother Tom. Senator Bob Kerrey lost part of his leg leading a Navy SEAL team in 1969 and received the Medal of Honor and the Purple Heart.
When Hagel and Kerrey rose to speak about the use of force, they spoke with the moral authority of men who had bled under the flag they swore to defend. Hagel, a Republican, broke with his party on Iraq. Kerrey, a Democrat, was equally clear-eyed about what combat does to a soldier’s conscience for life.
NOT ALL UNIFORMS CARRY THE SAME WEIGHT
A second category of public officials deserves an honest accounting: those who put on the uniform but served entirely from a stateside base or a quiet rear-echelon posting. Their service is honorable. No modern army functions without quartermasters, clerks, mechanics and drivers.
Rash political action does not only cost American lives in uniform. It also produces preventable civilian deaths abroad — children, mothers and the elderly. In this writer’s opinion, those who have witnessed death and caused death in a war understand best that it must always be a last resort.
A soldier who pulled three years at a stateside motor pool and was honorably discharged has every right to call himself a veteran. What he has not earned — and what no honest combat veteran will tell him
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he has earned — is the moral standing to speak with finality about sending other people’s children into the kind of war that produces Purple Hearts and Medals of Honor.
Reporting death and witnessing death are different things.
THE DEFERMENT CLASS
Beneath both ranks of veterans sits a third class: the senators, representatives, governors and presidents who reached the highest offices in this country on multiple medical deferments, fortunate timing, well-connected fathers, or draft numbers that simply never came up. The list is bipartisan.
A bone spur here. A college deferment there. A National Guard slot quietly arranged while the sons of farmers, steelworkers and schoolteachers shipped out to a war their classmates of means would never see.
This is not an argument that service must be a prerequisite for office. It is an argument for honesty: the people most casually willing to send other people’s children to die in countries whose names they cannot pronounce are very often the people whose families never had to weigh that risk at the dinner table.
BENEATH THE DEFERMENT CLASS
There is one final disgusting category, and on Memorial Day 2026 it requires being named. Donald J. Trump received four educational deferments and a medical deferment for bone spurs during the Vietnam War, placing him by his own record squarely in the Deferment Class. That alone would not warrant naming him here.
What warrants it is what came after. By credible national reporting and the on-the-record testimony of his own former White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly referred to the American war dead — the fallen heroes whose names are carved into the marble of Arlington and the stones of the American cemeteries above the beaches of France — as “suckers” and “losers.” That disrespect is repugnant to every standard of decency this country has ever claimed for itself.
And in this writer’s opinion, plainly stated: if you continue to support the disrespectful Donald J. Trump or the nominees he has installed in office, knowing what he has called the Americans who died bravely for the flag he asks you to salute, then — by this writer’s own opinion — you are a sucker, and you are a loser.

FOR SIXTEEN YEARS, Viktor Orbán was
Vladimir Putin’s most useful man inside the
European Union. On April 12, 2026, Hungarian
voters fired him. Péter Magyar’s Tisza
party took 138 of 199 parliamentary seats on
53.6 percent of the vote — the largest mandate
in modern Hungarian history. Ursula
von der Leyen replied from Brussels in four
words: “Hungary has chosen Europe.“
The world is moving. The question
is whether the United States is
moving with it – or against it.
When the President of the United States
and the President of the Russian Federation
agree on most things — on a Ukrainian
“peace” that rewards invasion, on the demolition
of multilateral institutions, on the
disposability of allies. Every American of every
party should be alarmed. I am alarmed.
So, increasingly, is the free world we used
to lead.
CONSIDER THE COMPANY WE
NO LONGER KEEP!
After Trump started what I believe to be
an unjustified war in Iran. Spain’s Prime
Minister Pedro Sánchez called the U.S. and
Israeli strikes “illegal.” Italy denied American
bombers use of the Sigonella airbase in
Sicily. Spain closed Rota, Morón, and its airspace
to U.S. military flights tied to the war.
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said
the United States “is being humiliated by the
Iranian leadership.” The Pope – the Pope –
called for negotiation, and the President of
the United States called him “weak on crime”
and “terrible for foreign policy.” Prime Minister
Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s closest
European friend, called Trump’s attacks on
the Pope “unacceptable.”
The president’s response to a continent of
allies refusing to be dragged into what I consider
to be an unprovoked war was to call
other NATO leaders “cowards”, threaten to
withdraw American troops from Italy and
Spain, and then instruct the Pentagon to float
suspending Spain from NATO altogether.
THREATS TO SEIZE AN ALLY
In the same months, the president renewed
his demand that the United States
take control of Greenland – sovereign territory
of Denmark, a NATO founding member.
France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain
and the United Kingdom issued a joint
statement defending Danish sovereignty.
The country that wrote the postwar order is
now threatening to disassemble it.
When Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the
United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Bishop
of Rome are all telling Americans that we
have lost the plot – we have lost the plot. We
are no longer the leader of the free world –
we are its liability.
AND WHILE PRESIDENT TRUMP was
punishing democratic allies for refusing
his war, he was rescuing a convicted narco-
trafficker.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
On December 1, 2025, President Trump
pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández – a
former President of Honduras who a federal
jury, in 2024, convicted of conspiring
to import more than 400 tons of cocaine
into the United States. The U.S. sentencing
judge found Hernández used “considerable
acting skills” to pose as a drug warrior while
deploying his country’s police and military
to protect the Sinaloa Cartel. “El Chapo”
Guzmán routed roughly $1 million to him
through his brother.
The Trump Administration pardon was
announced three days before the Honduran
presidential election. I believe it was
conditioned on the success of Hernández’s
National Party candidate. This was what I
believe to be an electoral bribe paid to a foreign
nation in the currency of cocaine.
And read the trial record. Hernández was
convicted of using cartel money to finance
his own campaigns and commit voter fraud
in 2013 and 2017. Drug-money-into-elections
is not a hypothesis. It is the crime of
conviction. President Trump has now released
him into a hemisphere where the
same administration is openly hand-picking
ideological winners.
Congress should ask the question,
plainly: where is Hernández now?
Whose campaign is he in contact
with? What financial networks does he
still command? In my opinion, after
President Trump pardons one of the
largest cocaine importers in American
history, oversight is not optional.
Meanwhile, the same president who freed
the architect of 400 tons of American addiction
has ordered the U.S. Navy to obliterate
small fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.
At least 80 people are dead!
SO LET US NAME IT.
The President of the United States is more
aligned today with Viktor Orbán, Vladimir
Putin and Juan Orlando Hernández
than with the Prime Ministers of the United
Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and
Spain – or with the Bishop of Rome.
READ THAT SENTENCE AGAIN!
A democratically elected American president
has placed himself, in deed and in word,
in the company of an autocrat who invaded
Ukraine and a convicted cocaine trafficker
who deployed his nation’s army to move 400
tons of poison into ours. He has placed himself
against Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Denmark and the Vatican.
Hungary’s voters answered this on a Sunday
in April. The Pope answered it in Rome.
Six European capitals answered it in a joint
statement. The U.S. Senators across two
parties – Grassley, Paul and Warren – answered
it on the Senate floor.
When will Congress as an institution finally
answer it?
NOVEMBER IS COMING. VOTE
SUPPORTERS OF THIS UNETHICAL
ADMINISTRATION OUT OF OFFICE!
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity — were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the free market. This is not
the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish
dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is
as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
a man — his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community — meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those
of the author.

Regime Change Begins at Home
Budapest votes. Rome prays. Washington pardons. The world sees what Congress will not.
OPINION | May 13, 2026
FOR SIXTEEN YEARS, Viktor Orbán was
Vladimir Putin’s most useful man inside the
European Union. On April 12, 2026, Hun-
garian voters fired him. Péter Magyar’s Tisza
party took 138 of 199 parliamentary seats on
53.6 percent of the vote — the largest man-
date in modern Hungarian history. Ursula
von der Leyen replied from Brussels in four
words: “Hungary has chosen Europe.“
The world is moving. The question
is whether the United States is
moving with it – or against it.
When the President of the United States
and the President of the Russian Federa-
tion agree on most things — on a Ukrainian
“peace” that rewards invasion, on the dem-
olition of multilateral institutions, on the
disposability of allies. Every American of ev-
ery party should be alarmed. I am alarmed.
So, increasingly, is the free world we used
to lead.
CONSIDER THE COMPANY WE
NO LONGER KEEP!
After Trump started what I believe to be
an unjustified war in Iran. Spain’s Prime
Minister Pedro Sánchez called the U.S. and
Israeli strikes “illegal.” Italy denied Ameri-
can bombers use of the Sigonella airbase in
Sicily. Spain closed Rota, Morón, and its air-
space to U.S. military flights tied to the war.
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said
the United States “is being humiliated by the
Iranian leadership.” The Pope – the Pope –
called for negotiation, and the President of
the United States called him “weak on crime”
and “terrible for foreign policy.” Prime Min-
ister Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s closest
European friend, called Trump’s attacks on
the Pope “unacceptable.”
The president’s response to a continent of
allies refusing to be dragged into what I con-
sider to be an unprovoked war was to call
other NATO leaders “cowards”, threaten to
withdraw American troops from Italy and
Spain, and then instruct the Pentagon to float
suspending Spain from NATO altogether.
THREATS TO SEIZE AN ALLY
In the same months, the president re-
newed his demand that the United States
take control of Greenland – sovereign terri-
tory of Denmark, a NATO founding mem-
ber. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain
and the United Kingdom issued a joint
statement defending Danish sovereignty.
The country that wrote the postwar order is
now threatening to disassemble it.
When Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the
United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Bishop
of Rome are all telling Americans that we
have lost the plot – we have lost the plot. We
are no longer the leader of the free world –
we are its liability.
AND WHILE PRESIDENT TRUMP was
punishing democratic allies for refusing
his war, he was rescuing a convicted nar-
co-trafficker.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
On December 1, 2025, President Trump
pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández – a
former President of Honduras who a fed-
eral jury, in 2024, convicted of conspiring
to import more than 400 tons of cocaine
into the United States. The U.S. sentencing
judge found Hernández used “considerable
acting skills” to pose as a drug warrior while
deploying his country’s police and military
to protect the Sinaloa Cartel. “El Chapo”
Guzmán routed roughly $1 million to him
through his brother.
The Trump Administration pardon was
announced three days before the Hondu-
ran presidential election. I believe it was
conditioned on the success of Hernández’s
National Party candidate. This was what I
believe to be an electoral bribe paid to a for-
eign nation in the currency of cocaine.
And read the trial record. Hernández was
convicted of using cartel money to finance
his own campaigns and commit voter fraud
in 2013 and 2017. Drug-money-into-elec-
tions is not a hypothesis. It is the crime of
conviction. President Trump has now re-
leased him into a hemisphere where the
same administration is openly hand-pick-
ing ideological winners.
Congress should ask the question,
plainly: where is Hernández now?
Whose campaign is he in contact
with? What financial networks does he
still command? In my opinion, after
President Trump pardons one of the
largest cocaine importers in American
history, oversight is not optional.
Meanwhile, the same president who freed
the architect of 400 tons of American addic-
tion has ordered the U.S. Navy to obliterate
small fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pa-
cific. At least 80 people are dead!
SO LET US NAME IT.
The President of the United States is more
aligned today with Viktor Orbán, Vladi-
mir Putin and Juan Orlando Hernández
than with the Prime Ministers of the Unit-
ed Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and
Spain – or with the Bishop of Rome.
READ THAT SENTENCE AGAIN!
A democratically elected American presi-
dent has placed himself, in deed and in word,
in the company of an autocrat who invaded
Ukraine and a convicted cocaine trafficker
who deployed his nation’s army to move 400
tons of poison into ours. He has placed him-
self against Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Denmark and the Vatican.
Hungary’s voters answered this on a Sun-
day in April. The Pope answered it in Rome.
Six European capitals answered it in a joint
statement. The U.S. Senators across two
parties – Grassley, Paul and Warren – an-
swered it on the Senate floor.
When will Congress as an institution final-
ly answer it?
NOVEMBER IS COMING. VOTE
SUPPORTERS OF THIS UNETHICAL
ADMINISTRATION OUT OF OFFICE!

On Saturday, May 2, I sat with thousands
of shareholders inside the CHI Health Center
for the first Berkshire Hathaway annual
meeting of the post-Buffett era. Greg Abel
ran the show. Warren Buffett, ninety-five,
watched from the front row as a jersey bearing
the number 60 — his years as CEO — was
raised to the rafters. What we got, beneath
the folksy banter and Cherry Coke jokes,
was a warning shot fired across the bow of
the global economy.
Six minutes in, a video of Warren Buffett
opened the Q&A. “Hi. My name is Warren
from Omaha,” he began, then joked about
his recent change in role before asking Abel
why shareholders should hold long. Abel answered
with the usual confidence — strong
operating businesses, a record $397 billion
cash hoard. Then Abel pulled the rug out.
That wasn’t Warren. That was a deepfake,
scraped from publicly available footage
with, by Abel’s account, zero input from
Buffett!!!
Even with the disclosure, I still walked
out half-convinced I had heard Buffett
himself! If a deepfake fools me in the room
where the fakery is announced, what
chance does an unwitting person have
to detect AI is being used to fool them?
The bright side of AI also got its airtime —
productivity, automated claims, lower labor
costs. Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s insurance chief,
called AI a potential “game-changer.” Then
he said something that belongs on the front
page of every newspaper in America: Berkshire
is sitting on the cyber insurance sidelines.
They are not ducking competition.
They are ducking the math. On AI-enabled
cyber, Jain is not sure how bad, bad can be.
TOO BIG, TOO DANGEROUS, TOO
UNQUANTIFIABLE TO INSURE AT ANY
PRICE WE WOULD WILLINGLY TAKE.
Read that again. The largest, best-capitalized
property and casualty operation on
earth — the firm that quotes pandemic policies
and Strait of Hormuz war risk before
lunch — looked at AI-driven cyber exposure
and effectively said: too dangerous, too unquantifiable
to insure at any price we would
willingly take.
Now stack the deepfake on top of the uninsurable.
The next Bernie Madoff is not
lurking in Manhattan; he is renting GPUs,
cloning voices, and forging wire authorizations
faster than any regulator can match.
If Berkshire tells you the losses cannot be
priced, ask who is left to absorb them. The
answer is you.
Now consider who Washington proposes
to govern all of this. On February 27, the
President ordered federal agencies to cease
all use of products from Anthropic, a leading
American AI developer, and the Defense
Secretary — now styled “Secretary of War”
— designated the firm a national security
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
supply chain risk, a label by statute reserved
for foreign firms like Huawei. Anthropic’s
offense? Refusing to let the Pentagon use its
models for mass surveillance of Americans
or lethal autonomous weapons.
Read the federal court ruling. On March
26, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin called the
Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic “Orwellian”
and found it amounted to retaliation
that likely violated the First Amendment.
The government’s own files showed
the designation was triggered not by any
security review but by an internal Pentagon
complaint about the company’s conduct
in the press. The security assessment was
completed only after the punishment had
already been decided.
Translate that out of legalese. A private
American company said: not warrantless
mass surveillance, not autonomous kill decisions.
The federal response was to brand
the company a national security threat —
punishing it for the very limits the Fourth
Amendment and the laws of war already exist
to enforce.
On the home front, the same posture appears.
Last August, the President fired the
Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
hours after a weak jobs report, calling
the numbers “rigged” without evidence.
The institution that produces our benchmark
unemployment and inflation data is
being told: deliver favorable numbers or
pack your desk.
“Branding an AI company a national
security threat for refusing warrantless
surveillance is not oversight.”
Combine the trajectories. A government
that wants AI for surveillance and lethal
force but no AI it cannot bend. An insurance
industry that cannot price the resulting losses.
That is the kind of economy capital flees.
Berkshire, once again, is the canary in
the coal mine. When CNBC’s Becky Quick
asked Buffett about the morning’s deepfake,
the man who has watched seventy
years of American capitalism answered in
two words: “It’s scary.” When the people
who price risk for a living tell you they cannot,
you should listen. When the federal government
moves to silence the company that
drew the red line, you should listen harder.
Do we have the ethical team in Washington
today to set the rules for technology this
powerful? In my judgment — and this is
opinion — we do not. An administration that
withdrew more than fifty of its own nominations
in a single year and has cycled Cabinet
and agency heads from Justice to the CDC
has not earned the credibility to govern how
the most powerful technology ever built is
used against Americans. Branding a domestic
AI company a national security threat
for declining warrantless surveillance is not
oversight. It is the removal of guardrails by
the hands that should be installing them.
The Oracle has left the building. The version
on the screen isn’t real. And the people
in the current government are not, in my
opinion, the ones who should regulate this
new threat. That is the warning Berkshire
just delivered. We had better hear it.
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity — were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the free market. This is not
the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish
dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is
as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
a man — his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community — meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those
of the author.

On Saturday, May 2, I sat with thousands
of shareholders inside the CHI Health Center
for the first Berkshire Hathaway annual
meeting of the post-Buffett era. Greg Abel
ran the show. Warren Buffett, ninety-five,
watched from the front row as a jersey bearing
the number 60 — his years as CEO — was
raised to the rafters. What we got, beneath
the folksy banter and Cherry Coke jokes,
was a warning shot fired across the bow of
the global economy.
Six minutes in, a video of Warren Buffett
opened the Q&A. “Hi. My name is Warren
from Omaha,” he began, then joked about
his recent change in role before asking Abel
why shareholders should hold long. Abel answered
with the usual confidence — strong
operating businesses, a record $397 billion
cash hoard. Then Abel pulled the rug out.
That wasn’t Warren. That was a deepfake,
scraped from publicly available footage
with, by Abel’s account, zero input from
Buffett!!!
Even with the disclosure, I still walked
out half-convinced I had heard Buffett
himself! If a deepfake fools me in the room
where the fakery is announced, what
chance does an unwitting person have
to detect AI is being used to fool them?
The bright side of AI also got its airtime —
productivity, automated claims, lower labor
costs. Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s insurance chief,
called AI a potential “game-changer.” Then
he said something that belongs on the front
page of every newspaper in America: Berkshire
is sitting on the cyber insurance sidelines.
They are not ducking competition.
They are ducking the math. On AI-enabled
cyber, Jain is not sure how bad, bad can be.
TOO BIG, TOO DANGEROUS, TOO
UNQUANTIFIABLE TO INSURE AT ANY
PRICE WE WOULD WILLINGLY TAKE.
Read that again. The largest, best-capitalized
property and casualty operation on
earth — the firm that quotes pandemic policies
and Strait of Hormuz war risk before
lunch — looked at AI-driven cyber exposure
and effectively said: too dangerous, too unquantifiable
to insure at any price we would
willingly take.
Now stack the deepfake on top of the uninsurable.
The next Bernie Madoff is not
lurking in Manhattan; he is renting GPUs,
cloning voices, and forging wire authorizations
faster than any regulator can match.
If Berkshire tells you the losses cannot be
priced, ask who is left to absorb them. The
answer is you.
Now consider who Washington proposes
to govern all of this. On February 27, the
President ordered federal agencies to cease
all use of products from Anthropic, a leading
American AI developer, and the Defense
Secretary — now styled “Secretary of War”
— designated the firm a national security
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
supply chain risk, a label by statute reserved
for foreign firms like Huawei. Anthropic’s
offense? Refusing to let the Pentagon use its
models for mass surveillance of Americans
or lethal autonomous weapons.
Read the federal court ruling. On March
26, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin called the
Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic “Orwellian”
and found it amounted to retaliation
that likely violated the First Amendment.
The government’s own files showed
the designation was triggered not by any
security review but by an internal Pentagon
complaint about the company’s conduct
in the press. The security assessment was
completed only after the punishment had
already been decided.
Translate that out of legalese. A private
American company said: not warrantless
mass surveillance, not autonomous kill decisions.
The federal response was to brand
the company a national security threat —
punishing it for the very limits the Fourth
Amendment and the laws of war already exist
to enforce.
On the home front, the same posture appears.
Last August, the President fired the
Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
hours after a weak jobs report, calling
the numbers “rigged” without evidence.
The institution that produces our benchmark
unemployment and inflation data is
being told: deliver favorable numbers or
pack your desk.
“Branding an AI company a national
security threat for refusing warrantless
surveillance is not oversight.”
Combine the trajectories. A government
that wants AI for surveillance and lethal
force but no AI it cannot bend. An insurance
industry that cannot price the resulting losses.
That is the kind of economy capital flees.
Berkshire, once again, is the canary in
the coal mine. When CNBC’s Becky Quick
asked Buffett about the morning’s deepfake,
the man who has watched seventy
years of American capitalism answered in
two words: “It’s scary.” When the people
who price risk for a living tell you they cannot,
you should listen. When the federal government
moves to silence the company that
drew the red line, you should listen harder.
Do we have the ethical team in Washington
today to set the rules for technology this
powerful? In my judgment — and this is
opinion — we do not. An administration that
withdrew more than fifty of its own nominations
in a single year and has cycled Cabinet
and agency heads from Justice to the CDC
has not earned the credibility to govern how
the most powerful technology ever built is
used against Americans. Branding a domestic
AI company a national security threat
for declining warrantless surveillance is not
oversight. It is the removal of guardrails by
the hands that should be installing them.
The Oracle has left the building. The version
on the screen isn’t real. And the people
in the current government are not, in my
opinion, the ones who should regulate this
new threat. That is the warning Berkshire
just delivered. We had better hear it.
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity — were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the free market. This is not
the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish
dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is
as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
a man — his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community — meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those
of the author.

We Were Warned in 1973. Fifty Years and Trillions of Dollars Later, Middle
East Oil Is Still Destroying Our Finances,Our Health, and Our Children.
PAID FOR BY BRENT LAMBI | WWW.HONEST-POLITICS.COM
Brent Lambi is a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa and the Creighton University School of Law.
New Website Launch: www.honest-politics.com
I’m excited to announce the launch of my new website. Simply scan the QR code to visit.
The site features a dedicated space for readers to share feedback and ideas. I welcome your thoughts and
suggestions for future topics — your input helps shape this ongoing effort. The new site will also feature
podcasts discussing my work.
As always, I’m deeply grateful to those who have supported this campaign through contributions. If you’d
like to get involved, please visit www.honest-politics.com to learn how you can help.
In October 1973, OPEC turned off the
spigot. Gasoline lines stretched around city
blocks, the economy convulsed, and every
serious person in America understood that
Middle Eastern oil was an existential threat
to the Republic. That was fifty-three years
ago. What followed was not energy independence.
Not a national ethanol program.
Not a wind buildout. Not a serious solar
mandate. What followed was five decades
of choosing the oil lobby’s quarterly earnings
over the national interest. Every consequence
America now faces—every war,
every soldier dead, every trillion borrowed,
every child breathing carcinogenic exhaust
— was foreseeable in 1973. The warning was
given. It was ignored. That is not a policy
failure. It is amoral one.
The Strait of Hormuz—twenty-one miles
wide between Iran and Oman — carries
twenty percent of the world’s oil supply
daily. Britain, France, and Germany are
not on board with American military escalation
toward Iran. They carry war memory
that Washington’s political class apparently
does not—and they understand that a Hormuz
closure collapses the global economy,
triggers cascading recessions on every continent,
and creates the precise conditions
under which world wars ignite. Any leader
confronting Iran while blocking wind, solar,
and ethanol is either serving interests that
are not America’s, or has learned nothing
from a half century of catastrophic, entirely
preventable evidence.
“The 1973 embargo was the warning.
$8 trillion borrowed, 7,000 Americans
dead, 50,000 wounded, and poisoned air
in every city was the price of ignoring it.”
THE ETHANOL SOLUTION: CLEANER,
DOMESTIC, READY NOW
The antidote is growing in Iowa,Nebraska,
Kansas, and Indiana right now. Brazil
stopped being strangled by oil markets decades
ago—its fleet runs on E27 or higher as
a national standard. Ford,GM, and Chrysler
once built E85 flex-fuel vehicles at scale.
Millions remain on American roads today.
A pump modification costs a few thousand
dollars. Washington let that infrastructure
atrophy and chose Big Oil’s margin over national
leverage. Mandate E20 immediately.
Bind E30 into law within 36months. Restore
E85 nationwide. The infrastructure exists.
The farmers are ready. The only thing missing
is the will. And ethanol is not merely a
strategic substitute for oil—it is a cleaner
one by every measurable standard.
Corn ethanol reduces lifecycle greenhouse
gas emissions 40 to 50 percent versus
gasoline. Cellulosic ethanol cuts them by up
to 90 percent. At the tailpipe, carbon monoxide
drops 30 percent. Particulate matter—
the microscopic soot that penetrates
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
lung tissue and drives asthma, cardiovascular
disease, and early death —falls sharply.
Most critically, ethanol eliminates the BTEX
compounds entirely: benzene, toluene, ethyl
benzene, and xylene, the carcinogenic
fingerprint of petroleum combustion. Benzene
is an EPA and WHO Group 1 human
carcinogen — no safe exposure threshold, a
direct cause of leukemia—released by every
gallon of straight gasoline burned near every
school, playground, and hospital in this
country. Ethanol contains none of them.
Moving from E10 to E30 is not just energy
policy. It is the largest preventable public
health intervention available to this government.
Period. Full stop. No asterisk.
THE COST OF FIFTY YEARS OF
WRONG DECISIONS
Every wind turbine built and every ethanol
blend point gained is a direct, permanent
reduction in the leverage Iran, Russia, and
OPEC hold over American decisions. No
foreign regime can embargo Nebraska wind
No cartel can price Iowa corn. No tanker
through Hormuz carries American sunlight
These are not green talking points. They
are geopolitical facts—and the American
people have been paying in blood and borrowed
money for the refusal to act on them
since 1973.TheUnited States has spent a
conservatively estimated $8 trillion on Middle
East military operations since 1990. The
Gulf War. Afghanistan. Iraq. Carrier strike
groups permanently stationed in the Persian
Gulf at $10 billion per group per year.
More than 7,000 American service members
killed in post-9/11 wars. More than 50,000
wounded— limbs gone, traumatic brain injuries,
PTSD that never fully heals. Every one
of those dollars was borrowed. Every one of
those deaths was preventable. The corn that
could have powered American cars sat at
below-break even prices in Midwest bins.
The wind that could have lit American cities
blew unharnessed across the Great Plains.
Good decisions in 1973—an E30 standard,
a wind buildout, a serious solar program—
would have made most of those deployments
unnecessary. The failure was not ignorance.
It was a choice, made repeatedly,
by politicians collecting oil money in the
morning and sending young Americans to
the Middle East in the evening.
“Middle East oil is America’s financial
demise and physical health demise.
Both were entirely preventable. Both
were chosen. It is time to collect the
accounting that was never given.”
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity — were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the free market. This is not
the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish
dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is
as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
a man — his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community — meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those
of the author

and broken promises, there lives aman in
Omaha, Nebraska who still eats breakfast
atMcDonald’s and drives himself to work.
His name isWarren Buffett. His company,
BerkshireHathaway, is one of themost admired
institutions in the history of American
capitalism — built on honesty, frugality,
and a bone-deep contempt for the
appearance of impropriety.These are values
our nation’s leaders have not merely
forgotten. They have made a spectacle of
abandoning them.
HONESTY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE
When Salomon Brothers was caught
in a Treasury bond scandal in 1991, Buffett
did not spin or delay. He walked into
the Senate chamber and told regulators:
report to me anything that smells wrong.
Then he cleaned house — publicly and
decisively — because he understood that
the cover-up is always worse than the
crime. Berkshire employees receive no
thick compliance manual. They receive
a one-page letter from Buffett that says,
in plain English: do nothing you would
be ashamed to see on the front page of a
newspaper. Avoid even the appearance of
impropriety.
“Neverwrestlewith pigs.
You both get dirty and the pig
likes it.”—CharlieMunger.
Washington has not
merelywrestledwith the
pig.Washington has
become the pig.
Washington operates on the opposite
principle. Lawmakers trade stocks in industries
they regulate. Committee assignments
follow donormoney. And “I wasn’t
aware of that” has become the universal
absolution of the powerful. Berkshire does
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
not permit the appearance of impropriety.
Washington runs on it.
UNDER-PROMISE. OVER-DELIVER.
Buffett’s annual shareholder letters are
famous for their candor — he names his
mistakes, declines to forecast what he
cannot see, and has built one of the great
fortunes in history by making investors
feel safe through the radical act of telling
the truth. Washington does the opposite.
Our leaders promise wars that will end by
Christmas, foreign interventions that will
spread democracy in ninety days, and fiscal
programs that will pay for themselves.
They rarely keep their word on any of it—
and the American people, and too often
American soldiers, pay the price.
TRANSPARENCY AND THE
COWARDICE OF CONCEALMENT
Warren Buffett has not only made his
taxes public—he has argued publicly that
he pays too little, using his own return to
illustrate the absurdity of a system that
taxes capital gains at a lower rate than the
wages of a schoolteacher. He did this voluntarily,
without a court order, without
an army of lawyers. Donald Trump sued
the United States government to keep his
returns private, fighting all the way to the
Supreme Court. Whatever those returns
contain, the years-long war to conceal
them told us everything about the man’s
relationship with accountability. A public
servantwho cannot bear public scrutiny is
not a servant. He is a master who has forgotten
his place.
FIDUCIARY DUTY
AND THE PUBLIC TRUST
Berkshire’s principle is simple: when
you hold power over the interests of others,
those interests come first. Not yours.
Theirs. Buffett draws a nominal salary,
lives in the same house he bought in
1958 for $31,500, and does not self-deal.
His returns for ordinary shareholders —
teachers, retirees, small investors — are
the envy of Wall Street. Now consider the
modern political class: senators who enter
office on a government salary and exit
as multi-millionaires, defense contractors
whose boards are stocked with former
Secretaries of Defense, and lobbyists who
help write the very laws they profit from.
This is not fiduciary duty. It is fiduciary betrayal
on a generational scale.
LEGACY WITHOUT
THE NAMEPLATE
WarrenBuffett has given awaymore than
$50 billion — quietly, without naming a
hospital wing or summoning cameras to
record the moment. He calls his fortune
the product of the “ovarian lottery” — the
accident of being born with certain gifts in
a certain country at a certain time — and
believes that luck carries an obligation.
Meanwhile,Washingtonmistakes self-promotion
for leadership and branding for
governance, and we have leaders who
plaster their names on buildings they did
not fund and victories they did not earn.
Themeasure of a
leader is not the size
of hismonument—it is
the size of the trust
he leaves behind.
WHAT AMERICA COULD BE
Imagine a government run on Berkshire
Hathaway principles: honest budgets with
candid price tags; military force reserved
for genuine threats, clearly defined and
disciplined; public servants whose compensation
aligned with the outcomes
of those they served. Leaders who under-
promised and over-delivered. Who
corrected their mistakes in public. Who
gave generously and anonymously, understanding
that the gift is diminished the
moment it becomes a performance.
This is not a fantasy. It is a businessmodel.
It hasworked for sixty years, through recessions,
panics, andcrisesof every kind. It
works because it is grounded in something
that cannot be faked indefinitely: character.
Warren Buffett will not be president.
But his life’s work is a standing indictment
of the ethical poverty that passes for leadership
in Washington — and in capitals
around the world. America deserves Berkshire
Hathaway values. The gap between
those values and what it keeps electing is
the precisemeasure of our national crisis

THE PATTERN NO ONE WILL NAME
Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop hedging.
Let’s callwhat is happening to the American
economy exactly what it is: the systematic
construction of an oligarchic power structure
that would make Vladimir Putin nod
with recognition — and perhaps envy. This
is not a foreign threat. This is an inside job.
This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan
panic. This is a pattern so deliberate,
so consistent, and so accelerating that even
the titans of Wall Street — men who built
their fortunes on the premise of American
free-market capitalism — are afraid to say
it out loud. And that silence? That silence is
the story.Compliance has replaced courage.
Calculation has replaced conscience.
WALL STREET’S OWN
ARE RAISING THE ALARM
Financial journalist andCNBCanchorAndrew
Ross Sorkin — hardly a bomb-throwing
radical — has publicly drawn chilling
comparisons between the current concentration
of economic and political power in
America and the conditions that preceded
catastrophicmarket collapse, raising alarms
in his recent work that echo the pre-crash
vulnerabilities of 1929. When voices from
the very center of establishment finance begin
sounding those alarms, the rest of us had
better listen. Urgently.
But most CEOs won’t say a word publicly.
They walk on eggshells. They attend state
dinners, smile in photographs, and write
checks. They have watched what happens
to those who don’t fall in line, and they have
made their calculations accordingly.
CONTROLLING THE PRESS: CBS, CNN,
AND THE COLBERT SHAKEDOWN
Consider the architecture of media control
now being assembled. The Skydance
merger, which in my opinion, has been engineered
to bring CBS and the crown jewel
of American journalism, 60 Minutes, into a
more pliable configuration — was only the
opening move. When Larry Ellison visited
the White House and subsequently found
himself in what I believe to be favorable
regulatory consideration, eyebrows should
have arched across every newsroom in the
country. Now CNN faces its own existential
pressure. When the administration moved
to extract a financial settlement from CBS
while targeting StephenColbert for the sinof
political satire, I think the message to every
media executivewas unmistakable: comply,
or pay.
National Public Radio and the Public
Broadcasting Service — funded by taxpayers
to serve the public interest, not the president’s
— are on the chopping block. In my
opinion, this is not because they are failing
theirmission but precisely because they are
fulfilling it.
SEIZING CONTROL OF
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The most chilling frontier of all is artificial
intelligence. The push to gain “supply chain
oversight” and “national security access” to
AI platforms—includingAnthropic—is not
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
about chips or servers. I believe it is about
controlling the infrastructure of thought itself.
Unfettered access to the most powerful
reasoning tools ever built is not a procurement
strategy. It is the opening clause of an
authoritarian manifesto. Every strongman
in history understood that controlling communication
was the precondition for controlling
everything else.
TARIFFS, PATRONAGE,
AND THE PUTIN PARALLEL
Meanwhile, the tariff regime functions as
a patronage system of baroque complexity.
Carve-outs flow not from economic logic
but from donor loyalty. Amazon. Microsoft.
Union Pacific. The acquisition plays surrounding
US Steel and Intel follow the same
logic Putin used when he brought Russia’s
energy sector toheel: youdonotneedtoown
everything outright. You need to only make
clear that your favor is required to survive.
In Russia, such men are called “oligarchs.”
In America, we call them“job creators” and
seat themat the inauguration.
What distinguished America was the
proposition that no man — regardless of
wealth or power—sat above themarket, the
law, or the press. That proposition is being
repealed, quietly and then suddenly, in the
manner Hemingway described bankruptcy:
gradually, and then all at once.
A PERSONAL NOTE
FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A
WINDOW — BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of
falling fromhospitalwindows.Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truthsmeet inconvenient
ends on staircases and balconies
acrossMoscow. I amwriting this fromOmaha,
Nebraska. I have not been thrown from
a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something
just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing
is what I believe to be a targeted,
methodical IRS assault — not random,
not routine, not coincidental. It follows my
speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced.
In Russia, they silence critics with
gravity. In America, I think they are learning
to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial
ruin — stripping away everything a
person has built until the cost of their voice
becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi V. United States of America, et al
Case # 8:2026cv00101
U.S. District Court for the District
of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED
INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument
being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-
sourced slander — lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason
to doubt what they were told. I believe that
honest, hardworking realtors employed by
Berkshire Hathaway — one of the most respected
real estate companies in America,
built on a foundation of integrity—were fed
false information about me by government
actors. These were decent professionals
simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting
vectors of what I think is a smear campaign
designed to isolate me professionally, damage
my reputation, and ensure that doors
would close before I could even knock on
them. This is not the freemarket. This is not
the rule of law.This is thedeliberatedestruction
of a private citizen’s livelihood by governmentmachinery
set inmotion to punish
dissent. I believe that BerkshireHathaway is
asmuch of a victimin this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire
Hathaway Home Services, et al
Case # D01CI260001752
Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration.
No broken glass. No headlines. Just
aman—his savings under assault, his name
poisoned in his own community—meant to
serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching.
The message is clear: speak up, and we
will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am
still standing. And I intend to be heard.