THE LONGEST CON / A Pause and an Apology

WANTED TO BELIEVE IT. In 1980 I cast my
ballot for John Anderson, an independent, because
a government too large to audit is a government
too large to trust. So when a movement
arrived promising to shrink it, end the
wars, balance the books and enforce the law,
I gave it a hearing. Eleven years on, I will say
plainly what I have concluded: it is the biggest
lie I have ever witnessed.
LAW AND ORDER, EXCEPT AT THE TOP. In
2024, Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley
wrote to the FBI accusing it of quietly revising
crime figures and calling the numbers unreliable.
Today the same party quotes the same
system as proof of its own success. I will concede
the decline is real: homicides fell 18 percent
in the first half of this year, and independent
analysts say so, not just the government.
But a party that trusts the measuring stick only
when it flatters its case has not adopted a standard.
It has adopted a scoreboard.
AND THEN THE PARDONS. Juan Orlando
Hernández moved more than four hundred
tons of cocaine and drew forty-five years.
He served roughly eighteen months and
walked out on a signature. Ross Ulbricht.
Larry Hoover. Some 100 drug-related clemencies.
Roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants,
including men convicted of assaulting police
officers. Ninety-six percent of second-term
grants were issued outside Justice Department
review. That is not law and order. That
is a favor window.
The kingpin got a signature.
The trafficker got a transfer.
The girls got a sealed file.
The Biggest Lie I Have
Ever Witnessed
I voted for John Anderson in 1980 because I believed
big government was dangerous. I still believe it.
That is exactly why I cannot vote for this one.
NO FOREIGN WARS. We fought a war with
Iran that Congress never voted on. The Abraham
Lincoln’s crew has been at sea more than
260 days with no date home. Iran sells its oil
at a better price today than before we started.
A BALANCED BUDGET. $39.8 trillion. About
$286,000 per household. Interest now costs
more than defense. Every point of it lands on
your mortgage, your car note and your child’s
tuition, all parts of the finances you were
promised you would control.
AND THE CHILDREN. The Epstein Files
Transparency Act passed the House 427–1
and was signed in November 2025. Nine
months later the file is still shut. But Ghislaine
Maxwell, days after a private meeting
with the Deputy Attorney General, was
moved to a minimum-security camp that
Bureau of Prisons policy says a sex offender
cannot be assigned to at all. No survivor ever
got that consideration.
I DID NOT LEAVE A MOVEMENT.
THE MOVEMENT LEFT THE OATH.
Source note: Clemency, crime and appropriation figuresThe Right Move for
the Wrong Reason
Scaling back the Korea drills is the first real
de-escalation of this term. Now do it three more times.
ONE GOOD ORDER. On Sunday the president instructed Secretary Hegseth to “substantially
reduce” the joint exercises with South Korea, calling them costly and a signal that is “totally inappropriate
and hostile” toward a North Korea he says has not been threatening. Set the messenger
aside. Lowering the temperature on the most heavily armed border on earth is the correct call,
and the first of its kind this term.
NOW DO IT AGAIN. The same week, he told Fox News that if Oman gets in the way, we will
bomb it. That is not a policy. That is a mood. Iran remains under an American air campaign
Congress never voted on. Maduro was taken by force in January. Greenland belongs to a NATO
ally, and this White House will not rule out taking it. No foreign wars was the promise. It has been
broken in three theaters.
“Withdrawal is not weakness. Keeping a promise never is.”
AND USE THE RELATIONSHIP. If the friendship with Kim Jong Un is real, spend it. Pyongyang
has shipped Russia some 33,000 containers of arms and buried thousands of its own men in
Kursk. Ask him to stop. That is what a good relationship is for.
THE HONEST PART. The stated reason was not peace. It was irritation that Seoul would not join
the Iran war. And the order came Sunday, while the drills began Monday, reduced but not canceled.
A right move made for a wrong reason is still a right move. It is also still a shaky foundation.
FOUR THEATERS, ONE PROMISE
KOREA Ulchi Freedom Shield cut on the president’s order, Aug. 16.
IRAN American air campaign continues. Congress has never voted.
VENEZUELA Maduro seized by U.S. forces, Jan. 3, 2026.
GREENLAND A NATO ally’s territory. Force not ruled out.
PYONGYANG ~33,000 containers of arms to Russia; troops in Kursk.
THE PROMISE “No foreign wars.” Kept in one place out of four.
Source: Truth Social post of Aug. 16, 2026; AP/PBS, NPR, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy and CNN reporting
of Aug. 16–17, 2026; Defense News and Washington Times reporting on DPRK support to Russia.
DE-ESCALATION IS NOT SURRENDER.
IT IS THE PROMISE YOU RAN ON.
NOW KEEP IT IN TEHRAN, IN CARACAS, AND IN NUUK.
NO MORE FOREIGN WARS
KEEP THE PROMISE.
Sources: Truman diary (May 1945); Executive Order 11154 (1964); Church Committee reports (1975–76);
Senate and Justice Department records, August 2026; Washington Post, PBS/AP, NBC News, Time, The Hill.
If J. Edgar Hoover
Became President
J. Edgar Hoover held one desk for forty-eight years and made
eight presidents afraid of him. In my opinion, we are now
watching the same instinct with every desk in its hands.
THE MAN WITH THE FILES. J. Edgar Hoover ran the Bureau from 1924 to 1972, through eight
presidents, and none of them fired him. His authority was never statutory. It sat in the locked
“Official and Confidential” files in his own office: derogatory material on congressmen, senators
and presidents. Truman wrote in 1945 that the FBI was drifting toward a Gestapo and dabbling
in sex-life scandals and blackmail. Johnson exempted him from mandatory retirement. Even
Robert Kennedy, with a brother in the White House, could not control him. Within days of his
death, his secretary destroyed the files.
AND WHAT HE DID TO CRITICS. In 1964 the Bureau mailed Dr. King an anonymous letter and
a tape urging him to end his own life. Agents planted a false story about the actress Jean Seberg
with a gossip columnist. Melvin Purvis, the agent who got the credit for Dillinger, was pushed
out and frozen out afterward. The Church Committee documented the pattern. Cross J. Edgar
Hoover, and you were not argued with. You were ruined.
AND THE PART HE HID. He ran a “Sex Deviates” program that collected files on suspected homosexuals
and got them fired from government work by the thousands, while spending his life
beside Clyde Tolson, his deputy, constant companion, and heir. His own private life was never
established, and the lurid stories remain unproven. What is documented is the arrangement:
one standard enforced on strangers, another kept for himself.
J. Edgar Hoover never had to win an argument.
He only had to have a file.
THE SAME INSTINCT, ALL THE DESKS. The Attorney General is the President’s former defense
lawyer, confirmed 50–49, three weeks after a federal judge set aside his settlement with
that same client, finding it had been filed in bad faith. The FBI Director has polygraphed his
own detail hunting leakers, turned the Bureau toward reporters who wrote about him, and sued
a magazine for describing him. Homeland Security is run by a senator introduced as a MAGA
warrior. The Homeland Security Secretary kept her job after federal agents killed two American
citizens in Minneapolis; she lost it over a $220 million advertising campaign featuring her on
horseback. J. Edgar Hoover would have recognized every part of that.
AND STILL NOTHING WAS DELIVERED. Retribution rules, and the public was played the
fool. Nine months after a transparency law passed 427–1, the Epstein file still takes a judge to
pry loose. Gasoline is up 26.7 percent, compared with 3.2 percent wage growth. Premiums rose
about 26 percent, with no replacement plan. The debt is $39.8 trillion.
THE HONEST PART. Presidents appoint allies; that is the job, and the Senate signs off. J. Edgar
Hoover was never elected and could not be removed. These men can be. But appointees leave
and judges do not.
J. EDGAR HOOVER NEEDED FORTY-EIGHT YEARS AND A FILE CABINET.
THIS ONE NEEDED NINETEEN MONTHS AND A SIGNATURE.
RETRIBUTION RULES. THE PUBLIC WAS PLAYED THE FOOL.
REPAIR TAKES LONGER THAN RUIN 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.
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.
are drawn from public records and cited reporting

HONEST POLITICS
Brent Lambi
The Strait is Not The Border
Forty thousand people looked at the world as it is and
decided to swim. The rest of us should ask what they were
swimming away from and who built it.
Last week, tens of thousands of young Moroccans walked into the sea. French reporting
put the figure near 40,000; Ceuta’s own leader estimated 60,000, with Madrid counting roughly
8,000 children among them. They swam around a breakwater toward a beach in Africa that
happens to belong to Spain. Dozens drowned doing it.
Ask why, honestly. The answer is not recklessness. It is arithmetic. From Fnideq, a young
man can see, five kilometers across open water, a life he cannot reach in forty years of labor
on his own side. He priced the swim against the wait and took the swim. Meanwhile, Ukrainians
die defending a border, Gazans die trapped inside one, and half the world lives beyond
the reach of a physician.
He priced the swim against the wait and took the swim.
We are told some nations simply do things right. Norway educates its children, insures its
sick, and pensions its elderly. But Norway also sits atop North Sea oil and had the rare discipline
to bank the proceeds for the unborn instead of spending them on itself. Afghanistan
has been an empire’s chessboard for a century and a half, with British, Soviet, and American
powers each arriving with a theory and departing with a body count. Institutions matter
enormously. So does whether the world ever permitted you to build any.
That distinction should trouble us, because it decides who gets to be born lucky.
So here are the questions we should ask aloud and answer on the record:
If prosperity is largely an accident of geology, geography, and who invaded whom, on what
moral ground do we call it earned?
Is a border a legitimate line of governance, or a fence around a lifeboat?
We spent $113 billion on 145 days of war in Iran. What would that sum have purchased in
clinics, wells, and classrooms, and which purchase would have produced fewer swimmers?
If a stranger’s child drowns within sight of your shore, does distance excuse you, or only
comfort you?
And the hardest one: do we hold these gifts in trust, or in fee simple?
A man born on the lucky side of the water will tell you
it was his swimming that got him there.
The Compliment You Didn’t Ask For
On being diagnosed by people who have never opened a chart
Congratulations. You have been diagnosed.
Not by a physician, not after an examination, and not on the basis of anything you actually
said. You were diagnosed the instant you produced a fact your opponent could not answer.
The condition is called Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the only known symptom is
winning.
Consider how the diagnosis is made. You cite a dollar figure. You cite a court ruling. You
ask a question with a documentary answer. Your opponent, finding no fact of his own, reaches
past the argument and reaches for you. He does not say the number is wrong. He says you
are unwell.
In debate, this maneuver has a name older than the republic. It is the ad hominem, and it
is not a rebuttal but a surrender delivered in the tone of an insult. A man with better evidence
produces the evidence. A man without it produces a label. When the label arrives, the scoring
is over; only the volume is still in dispute.
A man with better evidence produces the evidence.
A man without it produces a label.
Notice what the phrase concedes. To call criticism deranged is to admit that criticism exists
in quantity and that ordinary people, given the record, keep arriving at the same unflattering
conclusion. That is not a syndrome. That is a consensus.
Honesty requires a word for the other side. Some criticism is unhinged. There are people
who read a grocery receipt as a coup and who would be no better company under any other
president. Say so when you see it. But the cure for a bad argument is a better one, not a nickname,
and the man who cannot tell the difference has told you which he lacks.
So accept the honor. When someone informs you that you are deranged, he has told you
three things: he heard you, he could not answer you, and he would rather discuss your mind
than his candidate’s record.
Take the trophy. It was awarded under protest, which is the only kind worth having.
The Sickness No Medical
School Can Cure
A billion dollars to build healers, while others use
their offices to tear them down
CHANGE MY MIND
In February 2024, a woman in her nineties stood before a room of medical students in the
Bronx and told them their tuition was gone. Ruth Gottesman had taught at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine since 1968, specializing in learning disabilities, and chaired its board of
trustees. The billion dollars came from her late husband, David, an early investor in Berkshire
Hathaway, who left it to her to spend as she saw fit. She saw fit to make Einstein tuition
free in perpetuity, the largest gift ever made to an American medical school.
Understand what she actually bought. Tuition ran nearly $59,000 a year, and roughly half
of Einstein’s graduates left owing more than $200,000. Debt of that size does not merely burden
a young doctor; it selects her specialty for her. It steers her away from pediatrics, from
primary care, from the clinic in the neighborhood that needs her most and pays her least.
Gottesman did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible and freed them to study,
to research, and to serve.
“She did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible.”
Set that beside the spectacle we now call oversight. Anthony Fauci spent five decades on
HIV, Ebola, and COVID and helped build a program credited with saving millions of lives
abroad. His reward in 2026 was a subpoena and a hearing room designed to produce a referral
rather than an answer.
One American spent a fortune expanding the nation’s capacity to heal. Others use their
offices, their subpoena power, and our money to attack the people who already did.
That is the contrast worth amplifying. A gift like Gottesman’s is not charity; it is infrastructure.
It will outlive every politician currently auditioning outrage for a fundraising list.
Medical school can teach anatomy. It cannot teach gratitude. It can teach pharmacology,
but there is no course in humility, and no prescription for a public official who mistakes
destruction for duty. That sickness is moral, not clinical, and the only known treatment is
administered at the ballot box.
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897),
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
What the Pool Reflects
Sixteen million dollars, a friend with a contract awarded without
bidding, and a mirror the President refuses to look into.
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar (1894)
A reflecting pool has exactly one job. It shows you what is standing in front of it.
For roughly $16 million of the public’s money, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
has performed that job with a fidelity no one in this administration intended. It reflected a
rushed vanity project. It reflected a contract handed to a friend. It reflected a government
that, confronted with its own failure, went looking for a citizen to punish.
THE MONEY
A $14.7 million contract awarded without competitive bidding went to Atlantic Industrial
Coatings of Virginia to spread blue waterproofing across the pool’s concrete floor, justified
by urgent need. The Park Service bypassed competitive bidding by invoking an urgency exemption
tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary. A second contract, worth $1.7 million, went
to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio firm whose owner keeps a home in Palm Beach less than a
mile from the President’s Palm Beach residence. Its controlling figure, John J. Cafaro, has two
felony convictions: a 2001 guilty plea for conspiring to bribe a congressman and a 2010 plea
for a campaign finance violation. A deadline became a license. The license became a favor.
The work failed within days. The coating peeled. The water turned green. And the President
of the United States went on social media to announce, without evidence, that saboteurs had
cut a gash measuring 250 feet into the facade and poured corrosive chemicals into the water.
THE BLAME
Then came the arrests. A person who was 17 years old was cited over a piece of paint. And
David “Davey” Hearn, who competed in the Olympics three times, was indicted on a felony
charge carrying a sentence of up to ten years, accused of pulling up roughly two square feet
of liner. The U.S. Attorney announced “tremendous evidence.”
On July 31, that case collapsed. Prosecutors told the court the damage resulted from
flawed installation by the contractor, not vandalism. More damningly, they said that if the
Interior Department had been forthcoming with information already in its possession, no
indictment would ever have been sought.
A man who cannot look at a mirror without
demanding it show him someone else.
Credit where it is owed: Jeanine Pirro corrected the record against her own interest. Days
earlier, the Interior secretary had told the country the contractor did a fantastic job and would
be rehired for the repairs. And the President? On Saturday he answered the confession of his
own Justice Department by insisting the major damage was still the work of vandals.
WHAT HISTORY RECORDS
Here is the part worth remembering. History reflects well on the public servant who owns
a mistake. It always has. Voters forgive error; they do not forgive the official who insists the
mirror is lying. Pirro will be remembered for the harder filing, not the easier one. An honest
correction is not weakness; it is the whole reason an office is worth holding.
An Olympian’s name was put on a federal felony indictment to cover a contractor’s failure.
That is not a paint problem. That is the machinery of federal prosecution turned into a
drop cloth.
THE RIPPLE
“We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going,
and then go with the drove.” Twain wrote that of the American
habit of borrowing an opinion rather than forming one.
But a reflecting pool does more than mirror. It ripples. Whatever is thrown into it travels
outward to the edges, which is to say, to us. A political party is an implied association. When
a voter stands inside a party line and says nothing about a contract awarded without bidding
and steered to a neighbor, or an innocent citizen charged to protect an official story, that
silence becomes part of the reflection. It is not only the President in that water. It is everyone
standing behind him who declined to speak.
Congress has the bidding under review. Voters hold something stronger: a ballot and the
standing to demand honesty before they spend it. Demand it out loud and demand it of your
own side first. History reflects favorably on those who did and keeps a clear record of those
who did not.