Coffee Talk with Tiff

September 23, 2026 12:12 pm EDT Tiff Coffee Talk with Tiff 0
Image credit: AI-generated illustration created with ChatGPT

What Fresh Hell Is This?


Eye-Roll Wednesday

Puddle vs. the Media…

Then why were they ranting and raving like Lunatics, in the Press Area, at the United Nations? Why was she there?

Narrator: She was doing her job covering an event that featured world leaders.

Narrator: 🙄

The Department of Justice has responded to the lawsuit filed on behalf of CNN, MSNOW, and POLITICO.

Narrator: When everything is “national security” nothing is national security.

Speaking of national security…

A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.

[snip]

“We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the representative of the group told 404 Media.

The representative provided 404 Media with a sample appearing to contain the personal data of 5,000 FBI employees. That data included an alleged address, phone number, date of birth, and in some cases details on their spouse.

404 Media put some of the sample phone numbers into open source intelligence tool OSINT Industries and found they did correspond to people with the same name as listed in the sample file. 404 Media also searched some of the records through compromised data tool Darkside, made by cybersecurity company District 4. That revealed some of the phone numbers are associated with U.S. Department of Justice personnel.

[snip]

After publication of this article, an FBI spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “The FBI is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating.”

404Media. 09/22/2026.

Speaking of the FBI…

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

[snip]

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.

Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.

What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.

Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.

[snip]

The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.

ProPublica. 09/22/2026.

I’m gonna stop there, the article deserves the read.


In other Eye-roll Wednesday news…

The Washington Post is reporting that the first architect tapped to build Puddle’s vanity project clashed over silly things like building safety codes.

In the weeks leading up to his resignation last year, the first architect on the White House ballroom clashed with President Donald Trump over design features that the architect believed violated building safety codes, according totwopeople with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

James McCrery II withdrew from the project last October after warning repeatedly that Trump was insisting on a preliminary design that did not provide adequate emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

Trump brushed off McCrery’s concerns, they said, and the president countered that no building codes apply to White House construction.

“I am the code,” Trump said.

Washington Post (gift link). 09/23/2026.

As President Donald Trump fights to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, administration officials are circulating a list of government sites that could have his name affixed to them in some way, according to people familiar with the effort.

One landmark that has emerged in the discussions among administration officials has raised eyebrows: Ford’s Theatre, the playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

It is unclear how seriously the theater is being considered or how the administration would attach Trump’s name to it. One administration official said the idea had been discussed, but they didn’t know where it stood. The prospect sparked a flurry of discussion over the past week among people responsible for the historic site.

[snip]

White House officials, advisers and allies pitch ideas such as naming buildings after Trump to get on the president’s good side, a former administration official told MS NOW, granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. The president’s view, the official said: “Why would I say no? Everybody’s trying to please me.”

“They know flattery gets them everything,” the former official said, adding that people wait to hear “How can I help you?” in return.

One person with knowledge of the broader renaming effort who requested anonymity to address a sensitive topic said officials were looking for buildings and other sites that could carry the president’s name while presenting an easier legal path than the Kennedy Center push.

Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House, where Lincoln later died, are owned by the Interior Department and maintained by the National Park Service as the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. The Interior Department manages roughly a fifth of the nation’s land, including the 433 units of the National Park System, more than 570 national wildlife refuges and hundreds of dams and reservoirs across the West.

MSNOW. 09/23/2026.

My eyes might never stop rolling…

☕️ Open Thread

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About Tiff 3804 Articles
Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.