Stephen Miller

The guy's a fuckin' lunatic.

And he says it out loud - "our hemisphere"

One question remains: "How did he escape that bunker in Berlin?"

And then his wife posted this:

Chippin' Away

The Republicans in the house lost another seat today, on the death of Doug Lamalfa (R-CA01).

I'd never heard of him, but I'm sorry the guy's dead, and I feel for the family on losing a patriarch.

What really galls me is that Trump, while announcing the guy's death to GOP members today, couldn't help but turn it into something about him.

Trump praised LaMalfa for his work on water rights before adding, “You know, he voted with me 100% of the time.”

Translated: I didn't know that schmuck from Adam's off-ox, but he voted with me, therefor he liked me, therefor he was an OK guy.

Trump continues to demonstrate that he's a graceless, worthless slug with no regard for anything or anyone but himself.

And that's not "Trump Derangement Syndrome". That's direct observation of provable fact.

So now, with the resignation of MTG, Mike "The Flaccid" Johnson has a majority of exactly 218. On any vote that requires a House majority, he can't afford even one defection. Not that we were looking forward to much of anything getting done this year, but it does bring up some interesting brain bits.

Key Areas of Legislation (per Google search)

• Appropriations: Finalized spending packages for Fiscal Year 2026, covering the Interior Dept., EPA, and Energy Dept., were recently unveiled.
• Health & Safety: Bills address e-cigarette regulation, accountability for organ procurement, and methamphetamine response.
• Technology & Education: Discussions include combating misinformation in schools, reporting adversarial education contributions, and federal data standardization.
• Immigration: Legislation aims to eliminate the H-1B visa program and mandate photo ID for federal elections.
• Government & Economy: Bills focus on reducing red tape, ensuring qualified civil service, and improving federal employee benefits. 

Things aren't likely to get any better for Mr Johnson.

Mike Johnson brags about ‘a great year.’ House Republicans are discussing his replacement.

Other than the reconciliation bill, House Republicans say they have little to show for their time controlling Washington.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published last week, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declared 2025 “a great year” for House Republicans, calling it “one of the most productive first years of any Congress in our lifetimes.”

But in interviews with more than a dozen House Republicans last week, a far less rosy picture emerged. And as lawmakers prepare to return for what could be the final year of unified Republican control in Washington during Donald Trump’s presidency — if current polling holds — some members are already talking privately about new House leadership in the next Congress.

For Johnson, the case for GOP success rests almost entirely on one accomplishment: the reconciliation bill. Republicans passed the legislation this summer, with Trump signing it into law on July Fourth. In his op-ed, Johnson highlighted the package’s tax cuts, the billions in new border enforcement funding and the more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid.

The House Republicans who spoke to MS NOW agreed the reconciliation bill was a major accomplishment for their party. (It’s worth noting that no Republican took issue with any of the policies that became law in the reconciliation bill, like the tax cuts that are projected to reduce tax revenue by $4.5 trillion over the next decade or those Medicaid cuts that are projected to cause 10.9 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage over that same time period.) But many of these Republicans wondered what the GOP had accomplished since.

Beyond overseeing the longest government shutdown in history and passing a few mandatory bills, many Republicans said they have little to show for their time controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“The latter half of the year, in particular, starting with the speaker’s baffling decision to keep the House out of session for two months while the country was mired in a very harmful shutdown, that did not really match the tone of the op-ed,” Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California told MS NOW.

Kiley, a frequent Johnson critic, said the low productivity during the second half of the year was a consequence of the speaker choosing to keep the House out of session during the historic 43-day government shutdown.

“The decision to absent the House from Washington for two months and cancel six great weeks of session,” Kiley said, “I’m not sure the speaker or the House really recovered from that at the end of 2025.”

A second House Republican, who spoke to MS NOW on the condition of anonymity, said the tax cuts delivered through the reconciliation bill were good. “But other than that, like, what else have we done?” the member asked. “Like, I can’t tell you, because we haven’t.”

This GOP lawmaker added that Trump had been very productive, particularly calling out what the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department had been doing. “Quite the opposite story when you get to both chambers of Congress,” this member said.

“I understand the point Johnson is trying to make here,” another House Republican told MS NOW, “but I don’t think his claims ring true for most Americans. With all due respect, this characterization does not reflect the reality facing the American people.”

This member added that Trump won “a resounding victory in 2024 with a clear mandate,” and yet now, Congress’ approval rating is near all-time lows and the American people are “rightly frustrated that we have not delivered more boldly on that mandate.”

And asked for their thoughts on Johnson’s op-ed, another House Republican called it “a very rosy way of writing their own story.”

The frustration isn’t particularly surprising, given the lack of legislative progress in the second half of last year. But what may be notable, however, is that Republicans are now discussing new leadership in the next Congress.

Yet another House Republican, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the sensitive conversations, told MS NOW that the current GOP leadership team “is generally viewed as weak, reactive and unintelligent.”

“It is the increasing sense across the entire continuum of the Republican Conference, from the Freedom Caucus to the Tuesday Group, that there is a need to elect an entirely new leadership team in the 120th Congress,” this member said, referring to the hard-line conservative and moderate GOP groups.

“Expect the silent majority in the GOP conference to push for entirely new faces, and an entirely new approach, in the next Congress,” this lawmaker added. “We are already hearing from those who will move to force the legacy figures to step aside at the end of this Congress, and replace them with new, fresh faces — new ideas and a new approach.”

While these conversations are mostly happening behind the scenes — with little appetite to change leadership in the middle of this Congress — some of the chatter has been making its way into public view.

In early December, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a member of House GOP leadership and a close Trump ally, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that Johnson “certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow.”

Of course, there isn’t a vote tomorrow. And if Johnson loses the House majority, he would obviously face challenges to retain his position as the No. 1 Republican. But if the GOP were to somehow hold on to the majority, removing Johnson would be difficult.

Still, another GOP lawmaker agreed with Stefanik’s assessment that Johnson would lose a vote tomorrow: “A good attorney. A good man. A bad politician,” this member said.

Kiley said there were “definitely frustrations” with Johnson’s leadership among a cross section of the conference. “I don’t discount how challenging the job is, but he seems to have done the one thing that frustrates pretty much everyone in our conference, by simply making the House of Representatives a lot less relevant in recent months,” Kiley said.

That decaying relevance has come as Johnson has deferred much of Congress’ power to the executive branch. The legislative branch’s reduced role in the checks-and-balances system of government came into greater focus over the weekend, when Trump bombed Venezuela and put U.S. boots on the ground to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro — without congressional authorization.

Where congressional leaders of previous eras might take issue with the president conducting offensive strikes without authorization — or at least insist on congressional input — Johnson applauded the president Saturday for a “decisive and justified operation that will protect American lives.”

“President Trump is putting American lives first, succeeding where others have failed, and under his leadership the United States will no longer allow criminal regimes to profit from wreaking havoc and destruction on our country,” Johnson wrote on X.

Johnson has seemed to grasp that his power as a Republican leader depends greatly, if not entirely, on Trump’s approval. And as Trump has seized power from the legislative branch — through tariffs, through impoundments, through executive orders, through emergency declarations and by his administration ignoring congressional orders — Johnson has been an enthusiastic partner of the president.

Reached for comment, the speaker’s office referred MS NOW to the message in the op-ed and the more than 100 influential conservative and industry and community leaders touting the House GOP’s accomplishments in 2025.

Still, the numbers paint a more humble picture.

With Republicans controlling the House, Senate and White House, 38 bills became law this year — exactly half of the 76 bills that were enacted under full Democratic control in 2021 and far short of the 74 bills that were signed under full GOP control in 2017. (In 2009, when Democrats also had unified control of Congress and the White House, they passed 115 bills into law.)

Johnson wasn’t without defenders. Several Republicans pointed out that Johnson was grappling with a razor-thin majority — decreasing to a two-vote cushion at one point — which makes passing major legislation difficult.

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., a second-term lawmaker who is part of the Freedom Caucus, called 2025 “one of the best years Congress has had.”

“While we may not have passed a bunch of individual bills, the amount of legislation, and good legislation, that was passed in the ‘one big, beautiful bill’ is quite a bit,” Burlison said.

He did, however, push back on Johnson’s description of 2025 as “one of the most productive first years of any Congress in our lifetime.”

“I don’t know if you’d say the most productive,” Burlison said. “I’d say it’s the best in at least a generation. And by best, I mean we didn’t pass a bunch of swampy things; we passed really good legislation.”

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a retiring moderate, similarly touted the breadth of policy in the reconciliation bill, as well as the annual defense policy bill, which Congress has passed every year for more than six decades.

“If you just look at the number of bills passed, it’s easy to say, I guess, that’s a low production, but I think if you have a little bit of nuance, it was probably more than just that low number, because the reconciliation bill had tons of tax policy in it,” Bacon said, though he added that “the real answer” is that “I sure wish we could have got more done.”

Notably absent from the list of accomplishments? A fix for health care, as Obamacare subsidies expired, driving up prices for tens of millions of Americans.

“Substantively, what we’ve done, the biggest thing is that ‘big, beautiful bill,’” one of the previously quoted lawmakers said. “And the biggest deficiency is certainly the health care.”

At the end of his op-ed, Johnson said “the best is yet to come.” But some House Republicans are just wishing for some normalcy.

Asked what they were most hopeful for in the second half of the 119th Congress, another one of the previously quoted lawmakers had a modest ambition: “Little or no drama.”

From John Fugelsang

(with a tiny bit of editing because I'm egotistical, and I need to "make things a little better")

Here’s the dirty little secret we came to understand in 2025, and it’s not as depressing as it seems:

Losing faith in institutions isn’t nihilism.

It's discernment. It's an informed response by an adult with a living thinking brain to watching dudebro arsonists assume control of the fire department.

About That 60 Minutes Thing

Fascism is when you have to

find a Canadian bootleg copy

of a news story produced

in your own country

because it makes

your government

look bad

More Intrusive Government

Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns

The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.

Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.

The Border Patrol has recently grown even more powerful through collaborations with other agencies, drawing information from license plate readers nationwide run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, private companies and, increasingly, local law enforcement programs funded through federal grants. Texas law enforcement agencies have asked Border Patrol to use facial recognition to identify drivers, documents show.

This active role beyond the borders is part of the quiet transformation of its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, into something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation. Under the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts, CBP is now poised to get more than $2.7 billion to build out border surveillance systems such as the license plate reader program by layering in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

The result is a mass surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars.

This investigation, the first to reveal details of how the program works on America’s roads, is based on interviews with eight former government officials with direct knowledge of the program who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, as well as dozens of federal, state and local officials, attorneys and privacy experts. The AP also reviewed thousands of pages of court and government documents, state grant and law enforcement data, and arrest reports.

The Border Patrol has for years hidden details of its license plate reader program, trying to keep any mention of the program out of court documents and police reports, former officials say, even going so far as to propose dropping charges rather than risk revealing any details about the placement and use of their covert license plate readers. Readers are often disguised along highways in traffic safety equipment like drums and barrels.

The Border Patrol has defined its own criteria for which drivers’ behavior should be deemed suspicious or tied to drug or human trafficking, stopping people for anything from driving on backcountry roads, being in a rental car or making short trips to the border region. The agency’s network of cameras now extends along the southern border in Texas, Arizona and California, and also monitors drivers traveling near the U.S.-Canada border.

And it reaches far into the interior, impacting residents of big metropolitan areas and people driving to and from large cities such as Chicago and Detroit, as well as from Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston to and from the Mexican border region. In one example, AP found the agency has placed at least four cameras in the greater Phoenix area over the years, one of which was more than 120 miles (193 kilometers) from the Mexican frontier, beyond the agency’s usual jurisdiction of 100 miles (161 kilometers) from a land or sea border. The AP also identified several camera locations in metropolitan Detroit, as well as one placed near the Michigan-Indiana border to capture traffic headed towards Chicago or Gary, Indiana, or other nearby destinations.

Border Patrol’s parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said they use license plate readers to help identify threats and disrupt criminal networks and are “governed by a stringent, multi-layered policy framework, as well as federal law and constitutional protections, to ensure the technology is applied responsibly and for clearly defined security purposes.”

“For national security reasons, we do not detail the specific operational applications,” the agency said. While the U.S. Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States,” the agency added.

While collecting license plates from cars on public roads has generally been upheld by courts, some legal scholars see the growth of large digital surveillance networks such as Border Patrol’s as raising constitutional questions. Courts have started to recognize that “large-scale surveillance technology that’s capturing everyone and everywhere at every time” might be unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches, said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University.

Today, predictive surveillance is embedded into America’s roadways. Mass surveillance techniques are also used in a range of other countries, from authoritarian governments such as China to, increasingly, democracies in the U.K. and Europe in the name of national security and public safety.

“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities,” Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, said in response to the AP’s findings. “These surveillance systems do not make communities safer.”

‘We did everything right and had nothing to hide’

In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.

Gutierrez Lugo was pulled over by a local police officer in Kingsville, a small Texas city near Corpus Christi that lies about 100 miles from the Mexican border. The officer, Richard Beltran, cited the truck’s speed of 50 mph (80 kph) in a 45 mph (72 kph) zone as the reason for the stop.

But speeding was a pretext: Border Patrol had requested the stop and said the black Dodge pickup with a white trailer could contain contraband, according to police and court records. U.S. Route 77 passes through Kingsville, a route that state and federal authorities scrutinize for trafficking of drugs, money and people.

Gutierrez Lugo, who through a lawyer declined to comment, was interrogated about the route he drove, based on license plate reader data, per the police report and court records. He consented to a search of his car by Beltran and Border Patrol agents, who eventually arrived to assist.

They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash. No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo and an effort by prosecutors to seize the cash, vehicle and trailer as contraband was eventually dropped.

Luis Barrios owns the trucking company, Paquetería El Guero, that employed the driver. He told AP he hires people with work authorization in the United States and was taken aback by the treatment of his employee and his trailer.

“We did everything right and had nothing to hide, and that was ultimately what they found,” said Barrios, who estimates he spent $20,000 in legal fees to clear his driver’s name and get the trailer out of impound.

Border Patrol agents and local police have many names for these kinds of stops: “whisper,” “intel” or “wall” stops. Those stops are meant to conceal — or wall off — that the true reason for the stop is a tip from federal agents sitting miles away, watching data feeds showing who’s traveling on America’s roads and predicting who is “suspicious,” according to documents and people interviewed by the AP.

In 2022, a man from Houston had his car searched from top to bottom by Texas sheriff’s deputies outside San Antonio after they got a similar tipoff from Border Patrol agents about the driver, Alek Schott.

Federal agents observed that Schott had made an overnight trip from Houston to Carrizo Springs, Texas, and back, court records show. They knew he stayed overnight in a hotel about 80 miles (129 kilometers) from the U.S.-Mexico border. They knew that in the morning Schott met a female colleague there before they drove together to a business meeting.

At Border Patrol’s request, Schott was pulled over by Bexar County sheriff’s deputies. The deputies held Schott by the side of the road for more than an hour, searched his car and found nothing.

“The beautiful thing about the Texas Traffic Code is there’s thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for,” said Joel Babb, the sheriff’s deputy who stopped Schott’s car, in a deposition in a lawsuit Schott filed alleging violations of his constitutional rights.

According to testimony and documents released as part of Schott’s lawsuit, Babb was on a group chat with federal agents called Northwest Highway. Babb deleted the WhatsApp chat off his phone but Schott’s lawyers were able to recover some of the text messages.

Through a public records act request, the AP also obtained more than 70 pages of the Northwest Highway group chats from June and July of this year from a Texas county that had at least one sheriff’s deputy active in the chat. The AP was able to associate numerous phone numbers in both sets of documents with Border Patrol agents and Texas law enforcement officials.

The chat logs show Border Patrol agents and Texas sheriffs deputies trading tips about vehicles’ travel patterns — based on suspicions about little more than someone taking a quick trip to the border region and back. The chats show how thoroughly Texas highways are surveilled by this federal-local partnership and how much detailed information is informally shared.

In one exchange a law enforcement official included a photo of someone’s driver’s license and told the group the person, who they identified using an abbreviation for someone in the country illegally, was headed westbound. “Need BP?,” responded a group member whose number was labeled “bp Intel.” “Yes sir,” the official answered, and a Border Patrol agent was en route.

Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement shared information about U.S. citizens’ social media profiles and home addresses with each other after stopping them on the road. Chats show Border Patrol was also able to determine whether vehicles were rentals and whether drivers worked for rideshare services.

In Schott’s case, Babb testified that federal agents “actually watch travel patterns on the highway” through license plate scans and other surveillance technologies. He added: “I just know that they have a lot of toys over there on the federal side.”

After finding nothing in Schott’s car, Babb said “nine times out of 10, this is what happens,” a phrase Schott’s lawyers claimed in court filings shows the sheriff’s department finds nothing suspicious in most of its searches. Babb did not respond to multiple requests for comment from AP.

The Bexar County sheriff’s office declined to comment due to pending litigation and referred all questions about the Schott case to the county’s district attorney. The district attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

The case is pending in federal court in Texas. Schott said in an interview with the AP: “I didn’t know it was illegal to drive in Texas.”

‘Patterns of life’ and license plates

A license plate reader used by U.S. Border Patrol is hidden in a sand crash barrel along the state Highway 80, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, in Douglas, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
A license plate reader used by U.S. Border Patrol is hidden in a sand crash barrel along the state Highway 80, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, in Douglas, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Today, the deserts, forests and mountains of the nation’s land borders are dotted with checkpoints and increasingly, surveillance towers, Predator drones, thermal cameras and license plate readers, both covert and overt.

Border Patrol’s parent agency got authorization to run a domestic license plate reader program in 2017, according to a Department of Homeland Security policy document. At the time, the agency said that it might use hidden license plate readers ”for a set period of time while CBP is conducting an investigation of an area of interest or smuggling route. Once the investigation is complete, or the illicit activity has stopped in that area, the covert cameras are removed,” the document states.

But that’s not how the program has operated in practice, according to interviews, police reports and court documents. License plate readers have become a major — and in some places permanent — fixture of the border region.

In a budget request to Congress in fiscal year 2024, CBP said that its Conveyance Monitoring and Predictive Recognition System, or CMPRS, “collects license plate images and matches the processed images against established hot lists to assist … in identifying travel patterns indicative of illegal border related activities.” Several new developer jobs have been posted seeking applicants to help modernize its license plate surveillance system in recent months. Numerous Border Patrol sectors now have special intelligence units that can analyze license plate reader data, and tie commercial license plate readers to its national network, according to documents and interviews.

Border Patrol worked with other law enforcement agencies in Southern California about a decade ago to develop pattern recognition, said a former CBP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Over time, the agency learned to develop what it calls “patterns of life” of vehicle movements by sifting through the license plate data and determining “abnormal” routes, evaluating if drivers were purposely avoiding official checkpoints. Some cameras can take photos of a vehicle’s plates as well as its driver’s face, the official said.

Another former Border Patrol official compared it to a more technologically sophisticated version of what agents used to do in the field — develop hunches based on experience about which vehicles or routes smugglers might use, find a legal basis for the stop like speeding and pull drivers over for questioning.

The cameras take pictures of vehicle license plates. Then, the photos are “read” by the system, which automatically detects and distills the images into numbers and letters, tied to a geographic location, former CBP officials said. The AP could not determine how precisely the system’s algorithm defines a quick turnaround or an odd route. Over time, the agency has amassed databases replete with images of license plates, and the system’s algorithm can flag an unusual “pattern of life” for human inspection.

The Border Patrol also has access to a nationwide network of plate readers run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, documents show, and was authorized in 2020 to access license plate reader systems sold by private companies. In documents obtained by the AP, a Border Patrol official boasted about being able to see that a vehicle that had traveled to “Dallas, Little Rock, Arkansas and Atlanta” before ending up south of San Antonio.

Documents show that Border Patrol or CBP has in the past had access to data from at least three private sector vendors: Rekor, Vigilant Solutions and Flock Safety.

Through Flock alone, Border Patrol for a time had access to at least 1,600 license plate readers across 22 states, and some counties have reported looking up license plates on behalf of CBP even in states like California and Illinois that ban sharing data with federal immigration authorities, according to an AP analysis of police disclosures. A Flock spokesperson told AP the company “for now” had paused its pilot programs with CBP and a separate DHS agency, Homeland Security Investigations, and declined to discuss the type or volume of data shared with either federal agency, other than to say agencies could search for vehicles wanted in conjunction with a crime. No agencies currently list Border Patrol as receiving Flock data. Vigilant and Rekor did not respond to requests for comment.

Across five Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. government has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police.

Where Border Patrol places its cameras is a closely guarded secret. However, through public records requests, the AP obtained dozens of permits the agency filed with Arizona and Michigan for permission to place cameras on state-owned land. The permits show the agency frequently disguises its cameras by concealing them in traffic equipment like the yellow and orange barrels that dot American roadways, or by labeling them as jobsite equipment. An AP photographer in October visited the locations identified in more than two dozen permit applications in Arizona, finding that most of the Border Patrol’s hidden equipment remains in place today. Spokespeople for the Arizona and Michigan departments of transportation said they approve permits based on whether they follow state and federal rules and are not privy to details on how license plate readers are used.

Texas, California, and other border states did not provide documents in response to the AP’s public records requests.

CBP’s attorneys and personnel instructed local cities and counties in both Arizona and Texas to withhold records from the AP that might have revealed details about the program’s operations, even though they were requested under state open records laws, according to emails and legal briefs filed with state governments. For example, CBP claimed records requested by the AP in Texas “would permit private citizens to anticipate weaknesses in a police department, avoid detection, jeopardize officer safety, and generally undermine police efforts.” Michigan redacted the exact locations of Border Patrol equipment, but the AP was able to determine general locations from the name of the county.

One page of the group chats obtained by the AP shows that a participant enabled WhatsApp’s disappearing messages feature to ensure communications were deleted automatically.

Transformation of CBP into intelligence agency

The Border Patrol’s license plate reader program is just one part of a steady transformation of its parent agency, CBP, in the years since 9/11 into an intelligence operation whose reach extends far beyond borders, according to interviews with former officials.

CBP has quietly amassed access to far more information from ports of entry, airports and intelligence centers than other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. And like a domestic spy agency, CBP has mostly hidden its role in the dissemination of intelligence on purely domestic travel through its use of whisper stops.

Border Patrol has also extended the reach of its license plate surveillance program by paying for local law enforcement to run plate readers on their behalf.

A federal grant program called Operation Stonegarden, which has existed in some form for nearly two decades, has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to buy automated license plate readers, camera-equipped drones and other surveillance gear for local police and sheriffs agencies. Stonegarden grant funds also pay for local law enforcement overtime, which deputizes local officers to work on Border Patrol enforcement priorities. Under President Donald Trump, the Republican-led Congress this year allocated $450 million for Stonegarden to be handed out over the next four fiscal years. In the previous four fiscal years, the program gave out $342 million.

In Cochise County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Dannels said Stonegarden grants, which have been used to buy plate readers and pay for overtime, have let his deputies merge their mission with Border Patrol’s to prioritize border security.

“If we’re sharing our authorities, we can put some consequences behind, or deterrence behind, ‘Don’t come here,’” he said.

In 2021, the Ward County, Texas, sheriff sought grant funding from DHS to buy a “covert, mobile, License Plate Reader” to pipe data to Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector Intelligence Unit. The sheriff’s department did not respond to a request for comment.

Other documents AP obtained show that Border Patrol connects locally owned and operated license plate readers bought through Stonegarden grants to its computer systems, vastly increasing the federal agency’s surveillance network.

How many people have been caught up in the Border Patrol’s dragnet is unknown. One former Border Patrol agent who worked on the license plate reader pattern detection program in California said the program had an 85% success rate of discovering contraband once he learned to identify patterns that looked suspicious. But another former official in a different Border Patrol sector said he was unaware of successful interdictions based solely on license plate patterns.

In Trump’s second term, Border Patrol has extended its reach and power as border crossings have slowed to historic lows and freed up agents for operations in the heartland. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, for example, was tapped to direct hundreds of agents from multiple DHS agencies in the administration’s immigration sweeps across Los Angeles, more than 150 miles (241 kilometers) from his office in El Centro, California. Bovino later was elevated to lead the aggressive immigration crackdown in Chicago. Numerous Border Patrol officials have also been tapped to replace ICE leadership.

The result has been more encounters between the agency and the general public than ever before.

“We took Alek’s case because it was a clear-cut example of an unconstitutional traffic stop,” said Christie Hebert, who works at the nonprofit public interest law firm Institute for Justice and represents Schott. ”What we found was something much larger — a system of mass surveillance that threatens people’s freedom of movement.”

AP found numerous other examples similar to what Schott and the delivery driver experienced in reviewing court records in border communities and along known smuggling routes in Texas and California. Several police reports and court records the AP examined cite “suspicious” travel patterns or vague tipoffs from the Border Patrol or other unnamed law enforcement agencies. In another federal court document filed in California, a Border Patrol agent acknowledged “conducting targeted analysis on vehicles exhibiting suspicious travel patterns” as the reason he singled out a Nissan Altima traveling near San Diego.

In cases reviewed by the AP, local law enforcement sometimes tried to conceal the role the Border Patrol plays in passing along intelligence. Babb, the deputy who stopped Schott, testified he typically uses the phrase “subsequent to prior knowledge” when describing whisper stops in his police reports to acknowledge that the tip came from another law enforcement agency without revealing too much in written documents he writes memorializing motorist encounters.

Once they pull over a vehicle deemed suspicious, officers often aggressively question drivers about their travels, their belongings, their jobs, how they know the passengers in the car, and much more, police records and bodyworn camera footage obtained by the AP show. One Texas officer demanded details from a man about where he met his current sexual partner. Often drivers, such as the one working for the South Carolina moving company, were arrested on suspicion of money laundering merely for carrying a few thousand dollars worth of cash, with no apparent connection to illegal activity. Prosecutors filed lawsuits to try to seize money or vehicles on the suspicion they were linked to trafficking.

Schott warns that for every success story touted by Border Patrol, there are far more innocent people who don’t realize they’ve become ensnared in a technology-driven enforcement operation.

“I assume for every one person like me, who’s actually standing up, there’s a thousand people who just don’t have the means or the time or, you know, they just leave frustrated and angry. They don’t have the ability to move forward and hold anyone accountable,” Schott said. “I think there’s thousands of people getting treated this way.”

Bulwark Takes

You know you're in a really bad place when the most important profit center driving your business - and your business decisions - is the guy monitoring Trump's social media feeds.

Franklin Fights Back

'Franklin' publisher slams Hegseth for his post of the turtle firing on drug boats

The publisher of the Franklin children's book series has rebuked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after he posted a meme of the anthropomorphic turtle firing on drug boats.

Hegseth's social media post from Sunday shows the turtle, clad in tactical gear, standing on a helicopter and aiming a machine gun at one of several boats in the water below. It's designed to look like an edition of the children's book, but titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.

"For your Christmas wish list …" Hegseth wrote in the caption, as he faces growing scrutiny over the legality of a set of strikes on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean in early September.

On Monday, Toronto-based publishing house Kids Can Press released a statement defending Franklin as a "beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy and inclusivity."

"We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent or unauthorized use of Franklin's name or image, which directly contradicts these values," it added.

Franklin, who usually wears a red neckerchief and baseball cap (not a ballistic helmet), has delighted kids since the debut of his book series in 1986 — with dozens of titles including Franklin Goes to School and Franklin Wants a Pet — and an animated TV series a decade later.

It is not clear why Hegseth — who is a father and stepfather of seven children — chose the turtle of all characters, though Franklin book covers have inspired some popular parodies in the past.

When asked for comment, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told NPR over email: "We doubt Franklin the Turtle wants to be inclusive of drug cartels… or laud the kindness and empathy of narco-terrorists."

A number of Democrats were quick to condemn the post, as well as the larger controversy behind it.

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who has openly sparred with the Pentagon in recent weeks, told reporters that the meme is just one reason why the defense secretary should be fired, calling him "not a serious person."

Congress steps in as questions mount over who authorized a second strike at sea
"He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons and he's putting out … turtles with rocket-propelled grenades," Kelly said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the floor Monday, called Hegseth a "national embarrassment" and described the Franklin meme as a "sick parody."

"Tweeting memes in the middle of a potential armed conflict is something no serious military leader would ever even think of doing," Schumer added. "The only thing this tweet accomplishes is to remind the whole world that Pete Hegseth is not up to the job."

Questions mount over September incident

Hegseth was already in the hot seat, facing bipartisan scrutiny and questions from Congress about what happened — and whether any war crimes were committed — on Sept. 2, when the U.S. carried out the first of over 20 strikes on alleged drug vessels.

U.S. officials have described their targets as "narcoterrorists" from Latin America, though they have not released information about who was on board those boats or evidence that they were ferrying drugs.

Trump administration officials originally described the first attack as a single strike on a Venezuelan vessel that killed 11 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. But in the ensuing weeks, as the U.S. has shared grainy videos of the growing number of strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, more questions and revelations emerged about the one that started it.

Last week, the Washington Post reported — and a source confirmed to NPR — that Hegseth gave a spoken directive to kill the surviving occupants of the boat with a second strike. Attacking "wounded, sick or shipwrecked" combatants violates the law of war, according to a Pentagon manual.

Hegseth denied those reports as "fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory," saying U.S. operations in the Caribbean are "lawful under both U.S. and international law … and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command."

But that didn't satisfy lawmakers, several of whom — on both sides of the aisle — raised concerns about a potential war crime. Over the weekend, both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees opened investigations into the incident.

Then, on Monday, the White House confirmed that there had been a second strike, but attributed the directive to another military leader.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Hegseth had authorized Adm. Mitch Bradley — who led Joint Special Operations Command at the time — to conduct the strikes, adding that Bradley "worked well within his authority and the law." Later that day, Hegseth tweeted in "100% support" of Bradley and his combat decisions.

But a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly has since disputed the White House's account, telling NPR's Tom Bowman that Hegseth issued the command for "two strikes to kill" and two additional strikes to "sink the boat."

For his part, President Trump has defended Hegseth but distanced himself from the incident. When asked by reporters on Sunday night whether he would be okay with Hegseth having ordered a second strike, Trump said, "He said he didn't do it, so I don't have to make that decision."

Adm. Bradley, who was promoted to commander of U.S. Special Operations Command a month after the incident, is scheduled to provide a classified briefing to lawmakers on Thursday.

More Bye Bye

DOGE is dead.

It was never about governing, or making government work better, or making it more cost-effective, or any of that shit. It was about dismantling government. It was about making it worse, so people would be even more dissatisfied, and thus more inclined to go along with the Plutocrats when they propose shit-canning the whole thing and starting over.

1793 can't get here fast enough

Exclusive: DOGE 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter

• DOGE disbanded eight months ahead of scheduled end in July 2026
• Former DOGE employees take new roles in administration
• Elon Musk initially led DOGE, promoting its work on social media

WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump's pledge to slash the government's size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.

"That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.

It is no longer a "centralized entity," Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.

The agency, set up in January, made dramatic forays across Washington in the early months of Trump's second term to rapidly shrink federal agencies, cut their budgets or redirect their work to Trump priorities. The OPM, the federal government's human resources office, has since taken over many of DOGE's functions, according to Kupor and documents reviewed by Reuters.

At least two prominent DOGE employees are now involved with the National Design Studio, a new body created through an executive order signed by Trump in August. That body is headed by Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Trump's order directed him to beautify government websites.

Gebbia was part of billionaire Elon Musk's DOGE team while DOGE employee Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls,” encouraged followers on his X account to apply to join.
The fading away of DOGE is in sharp contrast to the government-wide effort over months to draw attention to it, with Trump, his advisers and cabinet secretaries posting about it on social media. Musk, who led DOGE initially, regularly touted its work on his X platform and at one point brandished a chainsaw to advertise his efforts to cut government jobs.

"This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy," Musk said, holding the tool above his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in February.

DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but it was impossible for outside financial experts to verify that because the unit did not provide detailed public accounting of its work.

"President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment," said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston in an email to Reuters.

TRUMP OFFICIALS HAVE BEEN SIGNALING DOGE'S DEMISE

Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists, even after Musk's public feud with Trump in May. Musk has since left Washington.

Trump and his team have nevertheless signaled its demise in public since this summer, even though the U.S. president signed an executive order earlier in his term decreeing that DOGE would last through July 2026.

In statements to reporters, Trump often talks about DOGE, in the past tense. Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, whose background is in healthcare tech, formally became an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy in March, according to a court filing, in addition to her role with DOGE. Her public statements have largely focused on her HHS role.

Republican-led states, including Idaho and Florida, meanwhile are creating local entities similar to DOGE.

A government-wide hiring freeze - another hallmark of DOGE - is also over, Kupor said.
Trump on his first day in office barred federal agencies from bringing on new employees, with exceptions for positions his team deemed necessary to enforce immigration laws and protect public safety. He later said DOGE representatives must approve any other exceptions, adding that agencies should hire "no more than one employee for every four" that depart.

"There is no target around reductions" anymore, Kupor said.

FORMER DOGE EMPLOYEES MOVE ON TO NEW ROLES

DOGE staff have also taken on other roles in the administration. Most prominent is Gebbia, whom Trump tasked with improving the “visual presentation” of government websites.
So far, his design studio has launched websites to recruit law enforcement officers to patrol Washington, D.C., and advertise the president's drug pricing program. Gebbia declined an interview with Reuters via a spokesperson.

Zachary Terrell, part of the DOGE team given access to government health systems in the early days of Trump's second term, is now chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rachel Riley, who had the same access according to court filings, is now chief of the Office of Naval Research, according to the office’s website.

Jeremy Lewin, who helped Musk and the Trump administration dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department, according to the agency's website.

Musk shortly after Trump’s election said he had a mandate to “delete the mountain” of government regulations. He made undoing government regulations and remaking the government with AI two key tenets of DOGE, in addition to eliminating federal government jobs.

The administration is still working toward slashing regulations. The White House budget office has tasked Scott Langmack, who was DOGE’s representative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with creating custom AI applications to pore through U.S. regulations and determine which ones to eliminate, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Musk, meanwhile, has reappeared in Washington. This week, he attended a White House dinner for Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Another'n

Democrats win another discharge petition, this time to force vote on federal worker bargaining rights

Legislation to restore union rights for hundreds of thousands of federal workers is headed for a House vote.

The bill is opposed by the GOP leaders who control the lower chamber, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers this week very quietly secured the required 218 signatures on a discharge petition to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and force the proposal to the floor.

The breakthrough, which was overshadowed by the week’s intense focus on the Jeffrey Epstein saga, sets the stage for the House to pass legislation returning the collective bargaining rights to federal employees who were stripped of those powers under an executive order signed by President Trump earlier in the year.

Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), the lead sponsor of the legislation, said House rules will allow him to call the bill for a vote as early as Dec. 2.

Labor supporters celebrated the development, with some hammering Trump and GOP leaders for attacking working-class people during a period when economic anxieties are already prevalent. They’re eager to highlight the issue with a House vote — and predict it will pass easily on the floor.

“Speaker Johnson is required, pursuant to the discharge petition, to set in motion an up-or-down vote on restoring collective bargaining for hardworking federal employees,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Calif.) told reporters Wednesday in the Capitol. “And that’s a bipartisan discharge petition that will trigger that vote, so we know the votes exist in the House of Representatives.”

The discharge petition, championed by Golden and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), was introduced in June but was short of the 218 signatures needed to compel consideration of the underlying bill. That changed on Monday, when a pair of New York Republicans — Reps. Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler — endorsed the petition, which had been stuck at 216 signatures for more than two months.

The success of the petition is the latest setback for Trump, Johnson and other GOP leaders, who were forced by another discharge petition to swallow legislation this week forcing the Justice Department to release the full Epstein files — a bill Trump had fervently opposed.

The triumph of the back-to-back petitions has raised questions about Trump’s powers of influence over a House GOP conference he has typically bent to his will. But GOP supporters of the Golden petition said the pushback is not only justified, but constructive.

Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.), one of five GOP lawmakers who endorsed the petition, suggested the rogue Republicans were doing Trump a favor by strengthening the image of the party in the eyes of the labor movement.

“I think we have to force the issue on the president and the leadership. … It’s for the president’s own good,” Bacon said. “For him to rip up an agreement, I think it undermines him in the labor community.”

The legislation might not arrive, however, as a stand-alone bill. That’s because bipartisan negotiators are working separately to install the collective bargaining language in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual Pentagon budget package. Because the NDAA is expected to pass through both chambers of Congress next month, Golden and other supporters of his bill see that as the preferred vehicle for securing the restoration of bargaining rights, which might be too controversial on their own to pass through the Senate.

“Right now, the language to restore those rights is in the NDAA, but there’s still negotiations [over] whether it’s going to stay in,” LaLota said. “So those who are righteous about this issue generally don’t want there to be a vote right now [on the Golden bill], and want to preserve the good faith that’s in the negotiations in the NDAA.”

“This is language that is in the NDAA already, that we’re just hoping doesn’t get stripped out.”

If it does get stripped out, it would almost certainly compel Golden to lean on the discharge petition to force a vote on his stand-alone bill.

If GOP leaders try to undermine the discharge petition in a rule, as they did earlier in the year on a successful petition related to proxy voting, Republicans say they’re ready to sink that rule to ensure the bargaining bill reaches the floor. Bacon noted six Republicans had initially blocked a GOP rule in September to leverage win concessions from Republican leaders on tariff policy.

“We let them know that’s not acceptable, so I hope they don’t do that,” Bacon said. “I mean, this is why we have a discharge petition process.”

“There will have to be a vote on it,” he added, “one way or the other way.”

At issue is an executive order, signed by Trump in March, that prohibits collecting bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal employees across 18 federal agencies, including the departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.

In a fact sheet accompanying the announcement, the White House said certain unions “have declared war on President Trump’s agenda” and argued the change was necessary to protect national security.

“President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people,” the fact sheet reads. “The President needs a responsive and accountable civil service to protect our national security.”

Critics of the executive order have rejected the national security argument, noting that many of the affected federal employees work in industries that directly bolster the armed services and border security.

Others said they simply opposed the idea of scrapping a deal after it had been negotiated.

“When you have a labor agreement and then you just rip it up, it’s not right. And that’s essentially what President Trump did,” Bacon said. “When you sign an agreement, you live by it.”

The final stretch toward 218 signatures was not without some drama.

Lawler was in the hunt to be the 218th lawmaker to endorse the petition, putting it over the top, and had expected a House newcomer, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), to provide the 217th signature shortly after she was sworn in on Nov. 12.

Grijalva, however, was at the center of the weeks-long fight to be the 218th signature on the Epstein petition, which was delayed because Johnson refused to swear her in during the long government shutdown. With the government reopened last week, Democratic leaders wanted to keep the focus of Grijalva’s arrival squarely on the Epstein issue, and encouraged her to sign only the Epstein petition on the day she was seated, lest they dilute their own message. The others — including Golden’s petition and one sponsored by Jeffries to extend ObamaCare subsidies — could come later.

The delay drew howls from some of the New York Republicans, who accused Jeffries of delaying the process at the expense of federal workers.

Democrats, however, see the controversy as a victory, since it was not only Lawler who signed Golden’s petition this week, but LaLota as well — an additional Republican likely to help advance the bill if it comes to the floor on its own. That extra cushion could prove crucial, because one of the Democrats on the petition, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (N.J.), is expected to resign from the House on Thursday following her victory this month to become New Jersey’s next governor.

“Importantly, Democrats have ensured that there is now sufficient bipartisan support to withstand any procedural motions that try and kill this successful discharge petition,” Christie Stephenson, a Jeffries spokesperson, said Wednesday.

Oy

There can be no greater oxymoron than when somebody from the Trump gang calls together a "panel of experts".

"Don't let anybody tell you there's nothing wrong with vaccines, but let's go ahead and remove all mention of known problems that can be caused by pumping your ass full of hormones."

To be clear, my understanding is that hormone replacement isn't known to cause cancer, but an abundance of (eg) estrogen can feed it, causing an existing cancer to grow faster.

That's a simple non-clinician's take on it - kinda like BKjr not having one fucking bit of clinical background, and then providing guidance according to his crew of fellow Dunning-Kruger subjects.

If you have a medical problem, you don't call me, or a plumber, or a junky roids ranger - you call a real live, honest-to-god, licensed practitioner. You call a fucking doctor.

Today's Belle

"Trump always makes it worse for Trump." --Bob Cesca

Cheney's Dead

I won't celebrate the man's death. But I won't mourn his passing either. And I'll never change my opinion that Dick Cheney played a big part in getting us to the shit-point we're at now.

Cheney was a strutting tin-plated martinet - a man of power without conscience. Exactly the wrong kind of guy to be in a position of great consequence in a government where power is supposed to be checked by worthy opposition, and balanced, not just against the letter of the law, but the spirit - what's right and honorable.

In the run up to our invasion of Iraq, Cheney's favorite dirty trick was to plant some bullshit on Thursday with his favorite stooge at the New york Times (Judith Miller), and then hit the talk shows that weekend and point to Miller's piece and say, "Look - it's in the Times - they hate me - it must be true."

That guy's fuckery cost us trillions of dollars (that we still haven't paid off), 14,000 dead Americans, plus anywhere from 400,000 to a million dead Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis.

But hey - at least Dick Cheney was rewarded handsomely by Haliburton, and never mind about all that torture, and graft, and loss of respect for "America's Values" around the world.

The worst of it is that the asshole got to die peacefully in a soft warm bed, surrounded by caregivers and loving family. Makes me wanna fucking puke.



Dick Cheney, powerful vice president during war on terrorism, dies at 84

After 9/11, he used his role as President George W. Bush’s chief strategist to approve the use of torture and steer U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Former vice president Dick Cheney, who recast an understudy’s job into an engine of White House power, becoming chief architect of a post-9/11 war on terrorism that involved bypassing restrictions against torture and domestic espionage, died Nov. 3. He was 84.

The cause was complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family. They did not say where he died.

Heart disease had shadowed Mr. Cheney most of his adult life and was a particular concern during his two terms as next-in-line to President George W. Bush. He suffered the first of five heart attacks at 37 and had eight “cardiac events” between the 2000 and 2008 elections.

After the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, took on the role of primary strategist in all-out military deployments in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. As part of this multitrillion-dollar campaign, intelligence officers were dispatched to use “any means at our disposal,” as Mr. Cheney put it, to find and kill terrorists and those who aided them.

Mr. Cheney and his senior lieutenants, Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and legal counsel David Addington, worked in strict secrecy to circumvent or reinterpret legal prohibitions against torture, domestic espionage and clandestine imprisonment without charge. Mr. Cheney said in 2008 that “it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation.” A 9/11-style attack, he said, “wasn’t going to happen again on our watch.”

Before joining Bush’s ticket in 2000, Mr. Cheney amassed unsurpassed credentials, having served as White House chief of staff, defense secretary and minority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, the second-ranking Republican leadership position in a House then controlled by Democrats.

During Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms as president, Mr. Cheney presided over Halliburton, a Fortune 500 oil field services company, as chairman and chief executive, joining the ranks of America’s moneyed corporate elite.

Under the far less experienced Bush, Mr. Cheney acquired a portfolio so broad that former vice president Dan Quayle, among other observers, saw him functioning in “a sort of co-presidency.” Mr. Cheney also acquired a reputation as a gifted and sometimes ruthless operator. White House contemporaries said Bush proved to be “the decider,” as he described himself in 2006, but no one did more than Mr. Cheney to set his agenda.

Mr. Cheney’s core beliefs — in unfettered markets and expansive presidential authority — defined Bush’s first-term action plan on taxes, spending, personnel appointments, freedom of information, environmental regulation and ballistic missile defense. He also pushed for an aggressive new stance against Iran, Syria, North Korea and the Palestinian Authority — in addition to shaping the global war on terror.

“He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily effective and adept at exercising power,” James A. Baker III a former secretary of state and treasury secretary, said of Mr. Cheney in 2007, looking back on more than 30 years of friendship and rivalry.

Mr. Cheney’s role as the Bush administration’s leading advocate of an expansive, aggressive war on terrorism reflected his conviction that the 9/11 attack was a grave threat to the United States and his long-held belief that the power of the presidency was paramount and needed to be reasserted after decades of diminution by Congress and other forces in American society.

But in his later years, in defense of his daughter Liz, then a congresswoman from Wyoming who was one of only two Republicans on a House committee investigating President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Cheney spoke out against the abuse of presidential power by Trump when he pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“In our nation’s 246-year history,” Mr. Cheney said in an August 2022 TV ad for his daughter’s reelection campaign, “there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election, using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters rejected him. He is a coward.” Liz Cheney, who had voted to impeach Trump, lost her seat in the Republican primary that month, falling to a Trump-supported opponent.

Then, in 2024, when Trump was his party’s nominee for president for the third consecutive time, Mr. Cheney broke with a lifetime of devotion to a particularly muscular brand of Republican conservatism and announced he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris “to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.”

Two decades earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Cheney, without the knowledge of many of Bush’s top advisers, conceived and supervised a wide-ranging new program of warrantless domestic surveillance, code-named Stellar Wind, that circumvented legislative prohibitions and the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Acting through proxies, Mr. Cheney also orchestrated Bush’s decision to strip terrorist suspects of the right under the Geneva Conventions to be protected from “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment. He advocated what he called “robust interrogation,” using methods that U.S. allies and previous U.S. governments defined as torture.

To Mr. Cheney, the war on terror was a new kind of conflict demanding new rules appropriate to what he called “the dark side.” Asked once by a radio host whether he could justify “a dunk in the water” to save lives — a reference to waterboarding, a nonlethal technique that simulates the agony of drowning — Mr. Cheney said, “It’s a no-brainer for me.”

“The techniques were reasonable,” he said in 2008. “And I think it produced the desired result, [preventing] further attacks against the homeland for 7½ years.”

Mr. Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, center, in D.C. with senior staff after the 9/11 attacks. (David Bohrer/U.S. National Archives/Getty Images)

The vice president had concluded that 9/11 revealed a grave new danger. Hostile states armed with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons knew that they could not attack the United States directly without suffering terrible retribution. But the threat of retaliation was less of a deterrent to a non-state actor such as al-Qaeda, the Islamist extremist group that Osama bin Laden founded in 1998 and that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Terrorists might not be able to develop such weapons, but they could deliver them if supplied by a government willing to provide clandestine help.

“The greatest threat we face,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in 2007, was “a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities.”

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces launched a massive strike on Afghanistan, designed to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that hosted it. Mr. Cheney became a leading public spokesman for the decision to go to war, and the intervention initially won wide support at home.

Seventeen months later, when U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Cheney again led the rhetorical push to justify the war, arguing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and, as the vice president put it, “long-standing, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations.” But this time, the move to military action was far more politically divisive.

Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his nuclear weapons program, Mr. Cheney asserted, and Iraqi intelligence services had working ties to al-Qaeda. In these and other statements, the vice president drew upon U.S. intelligence reports but went well beyond the knowledge and consensus judgments of government analysts.

As war approached, Mr. Cheney professed confidence of an easy victory in Iraq, predicting that U.S. troops “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Later, after years of bloody insurgency, he said the opposition was “in its last throes.”

Time and again, events would prove Mr. Cheney wrong. Iraq had no active programs producing weapons of mass destruction, and postwar analysis found no operational links to al-Qaeda. Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and executed, but the Iraq War continued until 2011, and U.S. troops remained in the country for another decade, seeking to stabilize the country and push back against Islamic State extremists. Nearly 5,000 Americans were killed in the war.

The conflict in Afghanistan continued until 2021, when President Joe Biden withdrew the last U.S. troops, ending a war in which more than 2,300 U.S. service members died and allowing the Taliban to retake control of the country.

Among the sharpest of Mr. Cheney’s critics was Dick Armey (R-Texas), the House majority leader during the run-up to the war.

Armey said Mr. Cheney gave him a private prewar briefing alleging that Iraq was close to building a miniature nuclear warhead and that members of Hussein’s family were working with the architects of the Sept. 11 attack. Armey learned later that neither assertion was supported by U.S. intelligence.

“I felt like I deserved better from Cheney than to be [lied to] by him,” Armey said in a 2008 interview, using a bit of vulgar “Texas vernacular,” as he put it, to describe Mr. Cheney’s conduct.

Mr. Cheney fashioned himself as an anti-politician, frankly indifferent to popular approval. When a “Good Morning America” interviewer noted in 2008 that two-thirds of the public opposed the Iraq War, he replied with a single word: “So?” Asked to elaborate, he said, “You cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the opinion polls.”

Around the midpoint of his presidency, Bush began to see the costs of that approach, according to Bush confidants, including the White House communications director, Dan Bartlett.

A growing backlash against Mr. Cheney’s signature policies, at home and abroad, persuaded the more pragmatic president to trim his course. A policy of strict isolation gave way to diplomatic overtures toward Iran and North Korea, despite the vice president's continuing belief that they were ripe for “regime change.” Bush put an end to waterboarding, secret CIA prisons, and electronic surveillance without authority of Congress and the courts.

By the time he left office, with the lowest approval rating on record for a vice president, Mr. Cheney had confounded old friends and, by some accounts, had spent down a reputation built over decades.

Former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who worked closely with him under previous presidents, echoed other longtime colleagues in an interview with the New Yorker. “Dick Cheney, I don’t know anymore,” he said.

Former president Gerald Ford expressed similar sentiments in an interview with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. “He was an excellent chief of staff. First class,” Ford said. “But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious.” He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell’s statement that Mr. Cheney had developed a “fever” about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. “I think that’s probably true,” Ford said.

Mr. Cheney, for his part, told CNN in 2006, “I don’t think I’ve changed any.”

“I think I have been very consistent over time,” he said. “I think, partly, it’s important to remember how significant 9/11 was. … We need to be able to go after and capture or kill those people who are trying to kill Americans.”

He described himself more than once in later years as a “consequential” vice president who took essential steps in the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of protecting the country. History, he said, would credit him and Bush with success.

Although he remained to many Democrats and Republicans alike a symbol of the seemingly endless and eventually highly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Cheney managed to win back a measure of respect from some Democrats more than a decade later, when he broke with most Republican leaders to condemn Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. Cheney had reluctantly endorsed Trump in 2016, after nearly all other Republican candidates for president had dropped out of the race for the nomination. He occasionally criticized Trump’s personality and foreign policy during Trump’s term in the White House. And in 2022 — along with his daughter Liz, who followed in his footsteps as Wyoming’s lone representative in the House — he joined Democrats in a ceremony of remembrance in the House chamber on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

More than two dozen Democrats had moved, unsuccessfully, to impeach Mr. Cheney in 2007 over his role in launching the Iraq War. But now, in the wake of the insurrection, Democrats queued up to shake the hand of the man they had spent years denouncing as a power-mad violator of political and legal norms.

The Cheneys, father and daughter, remained pointedly conservative across a range of issues, but they broke with Trump and his followers, arguing that as president and ex-president, Trump had pushed the party away from policies favoring big-business, internationalism and a muscular military and toward a platform built around fealty to Trump, nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment.

“You can’t overestimate how important it is” to mark the threat to democracy posed by the attack, Mr. Cheney said on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault. “I’m deeply disappointed we don’t have better leadership in the Republican Party to restore the Constitution.”

Mr. Cheney prepares to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1989. (Ron Edmonds/Associated Press)

Hometown hero

Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Jan. 30, 1941, and was the oldest of three children in a family of Democrats. His father, Richard Herbert Cheney, aloof and laconic, owed his federal job as a soil conservation agent to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. His mother, the former Marjorie Dickey, who had played for a nationally ranked softball team, taught the boy to throw.

When Dick Cheney was 13, the family moved to Casper, Wyoming, then a prosperous town of 17,000.

He headed east five years later as Natrona County High School’s hometown hero, the class president and football captain who had squired the homecoming queen. But his journey was painfully interrupted the next fall, when poor grades cost him his full scholarship to Yale. Mr. Cheney was suspended for a semester and flunked out in his sophomore year.

He drifted back west, finding work as a lineman for a power company. He drank too much and was arrested twice — in 1962, when he was jailed briefly for “operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, and drunkenness,” according to the arrest report, and in 1963 for drunken driving.

As commencement speaker at Natrona County High in 2006, Mr. Cheney told the graduating class: “I won’t go into a lot of detail. Let’s just say I did not distinguish myself in those first years after graduation.”

By various accounts, including his own, Mr. Cheney pulled out of his dive when Lynne Vincent, the homecoming queen of his high school romance, informed him that she had no intention of wedding a drunken dropout. An honor student and state baton-twirling champion, she was much the more ambitious of the two. She talked Mr. Cheney back into school, first at Casper’s community college and then at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

They married in 1964. Mr. Cheney received his degree in 1965, and he and Lynne Cheney had their first child, Elizabeth, in 1966.

With newfound discipline, Mr. Cheney completed a master’s degree in political science at Wyoming and began work toward a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, where his wife had joined a doctoral program in British literature. He published a well-regarded article in the American Political Science Review, using statistical techniques to analyze House and Senate voting patterns. Later, with Lynne Cheney, he wrote “Kings of the Hill,” a history of influential speakers of the House.

Meanwhile, Mr. Cheney obtained five student and parental draft deferments during the Vietnam War. “I had other priorities in the … ’60s than military service,” he told reporters as he arrived at the Pentagon as defense secretary in 1989.

Lynne and Dick Cheney began imagining an academic life, at a university where they could teach side by side. But one of Mr. Cheney’s professors offered a detour, steering him to a one-year fellowship in the office of Rep. William A. Steiger (R-Wisconsin).

In 1968, Mr. Cheney set aside his dissertation, never to complete it, and brought his family to Washington, where his second daughter, Mary, was born the next year.

It was in 1969 that Mr. Cheney met his most important patron. Donald H. Rumsfeld, freshly appointed to lead President Richard M. Nixon’s anti-poverty office, sought advice from Steiger. The congressman pitched the assignment to his 28-year-old intern. An impressive memo won Mr. Cheney a meeting with Rumsfeld and then a job as his special assistant.

The fast-rising Rumsfeld brought Mr. Cheney along as his right-hand man when he served as White House counselor in 1970 and as director of the Cost of Living Council in 1971. The two men parted for 18 months when Rumsfeld left for Brussels as U.S. ambassador to NATO. Mr. Cheney spent the interlude at Bradley Woods, an investment research firm, advising private investors about Congress.

The Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 returned Rumsfeld to the White House as chief of staff to Ford. Once again, Rumsfeld chose Mr. Cheney as his No. 2. In November 1975, Ford dispatched Rumsfeld to the Pentagon as secretary of defense, and Mr. Cheney moved up.

Barely six years had passed since Mr. Cheney’s arrival as an intern in Washington. At 34, he became the youngest-ever White House chief of staff.

“I knew that I could ask Cheney to step into Rumsfeld’s shoes and that the White House would function just as efficiently,” Ford wrote in his memoir.

White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy, Mr. Cheney, meet with journalists at the White House in 1975. (Harvey Georges/AP)

Skillful operative

After the irascible, domineering Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney won admirers across party lines with his calm competence, willingness to listen and avoidance of the spotlight. He had a dry wit and a Westerner’s distrust of people with airs. Mr. Cheney shunned some of the prerogatives of rank, dialing his own phone calls and driving his 10-year-old Volkswagen to work.

Then, as later, his inscrutable affect and loyalty to a pragmatic boss were mistaken for moderation of outlook.

Memoirs and records made public in the meantime, show him as holding edge-of-the-envelope views on government secrecy and the supremacy of the president over Congress, especially in matters of national security.

Mr. Cheney believed that Watergate, the fall of Nixon and the Vietnam War had emboldened Congress to overreach, bringing about “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy,” he later said. He tried and failed to persuade Ford to push back against congressional efforts to rein in executive power, including the War Powers Act, the Presidential Records Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, expansion of the Freedom of Information Act and legislative restrictions on covert action.

Although subtler than Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney displayed no less will to power. At an academic conference in 2000, he said he sought control over “things like personnel, process, schedule, speechwriting, legislative relations,” because they allowed a chief of staff to “control and preside over the White House.”

After quiet battles to impose the same discipline on Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, a conflict Mr. Cheney later described as “total hostility,” he helped persuade Ford to drop Rockefeller, a former New York governor, as his running mate in 1976.

The prevailing metaphor in the Ford White House was that the president was the hub of the wheel, supported by many spokes. But it was Mr. Cheney who oversaw access to the Oval Office. At Mr. Cheney’s goodbye party, colleague David Gergen wrote in a 2001 memoir, Ford’s top advisers presented Mr. Cheney with “a gnarled bicycle wheel, rim twisted, its spokes broken and bent.”

Jimmy Carter had defeated Ford in 1976, and Mr. Cheney decided to run for Congress two years later. He made deft use of humor after suffering a heart attack during the hotly contested Republican primary campaign, forming a fictitious Cardiacs for Cheney support group and explaining his decision to stay in the race with a two-page letter to Wyoming Republicans.

He won Wyoming’s House seat handily and began another striking ascent in Washington. In the seniority-conscious House, it took him a single term to reach a GOP leadership post. Soft-spoken and collegial, with a disarming habit of listening more than he spoke, Mr. Cheney once again enjoyed a centrist image. His voting record, in fact, was among the most conservative in the House.

Mr. Cheney supported tax cuts and defense spending increases, like nearly all Republicans, but he joined the rightmost wing in voting against a federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa. He likewise opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund program for toxic-waste cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Although social “wedge issues” were not his main interest, Mr. Cheney cast votes against affirmative action and for prayer in school. He sought to ban abortion without exception for rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life. But on gay rights, Mr. Cheney departed from orthodox conservative tenets, breaking with Bush in 2004 to endorse the legalization of same-sex marriage. Mr. Cheney’s daughter Mary is married to a woman, Heather Poe.

By 1988, with his uncontested election as House minority whip, Mr. Cheney was positioned to succeed Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois as head of the Republican caucus. Many colleagues expected to see him become speaker of the House.

But Mr. Cheney’s career took a sudden shift in 1989 when scandal sunk the nomination of former senator John G. Tower (R-Texas) as defense secretary. President George H.W. Bush turned to Mr. Cheney as a no-drama second choice. The Senate confirmed him unanimously.

An old friend and Pentagon aide, David Gribbin, said Mr. Cheney believed in “the demonstrative use of power” — a sharp blow, now and then, to establish his authority.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Cheney gave a blunt public reprimand to the Air Force chief of staff for “freelancing” in budget talks with Congress. He fired the service’s next chief of staff for impolitic remarks about U.S. war plans in Iraq. He canceled the Navy’s top-priority weapons system, the A-12 stealth fighter, after concluding that the admirals in charge had lied about its progress.

In 1989, when it came time to choose a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. Cheney elevated Army Gen. Colin L. Powell over dozens of more senior flag officers, making Powell the first African American to hold the position. The two men proved a potent team, leading the armed forces and the nation through two conflicts — the invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War — and a dramatic reduction in forces as the Cold War came to an abrupt halt.

A committed anti-communist, Mr. Cheney was among the leading skeptics of accommodation with the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Mr. Cheney drew two lasting lessons from Moscow's unraveling, one about U.S. intelligence, the other about regime change in hostile states, said Aaron Friedberg, a foreign policy adviser during Mr. Cheney’s vice-presidential years.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was really a profound experience,” Friedberg said. “For one thing, the standard experts will tell you things are going to be tomorrow the way they are today.” Even as the Soviet government was collapsing in 1991, Mr. Cheney saw CIA assessments touting the resilience and stability of the regime.

Mr. Cheney came to disdain what Friedberg called “the conventional idea that the way to improve relations with the Soviet Union was by convergence and negotiations.” Mr. Cheney believed that “you had to have a fundamental change of regime” and that trade and diplomacy did little but “delay the collapse of the regime.”

Mr. Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell talk to reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon in 1990. (Tannen Maury/AP)

Mr. Cheney made his strongest public impression as the unflappable voice of news briefings during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which was launched to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. With that mission accomplished, Mr. Cheney supported George H.W. Bush’s decision to leave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in power. Conquest and occupation of Baghdad would have been “a quagmire,” Mr. Cheney said in 1994, adding: “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.”

On other questions, Mr. Cheney pressed unsuccessfully for a harder line. He privately urged Bush to take advantage of Russia’s weakness by recognizing an anti-Moscow Lithuanian government and by inviting former Warsaw Pact nations swiftly into NATO.

He opposed decisions to seek authority from Congress and the U.N. Security Council for the war with Iraq, arguing that the decision to use force rested solely with the commander in chief. Baker and Scowcroft, the secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively, consistently won those debates.

“Sometimes Bush sided with Baker, sometimes he sided with Scowcroft,” said historian Timothy Naftali, who explored the declassified archives. “There was never an instance where Cheney had an outlying opinion and the president sided with Cheney.”

Halliburton bonanza

After Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992, the Cheney family packed a U-Haul truck and headed back west. Mr. Cheney briefly explored a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 1996 but found that he lacked stomach for the race. “I didn’t want to do those things I’d have to do to get elected,” he told The Washington Post in 2004.

A more detailed explanation, which Mr. Cheney offered in 1995, provided a glimpse of his lifelong disdain for courting an emotional, ill-informed public. “I don’t tend to pound on the podium and drool,” he said.

Mr. Cheney also worried that a national campaign would focus unwelcome attention on his daughter Mary, who had not yet publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation. Mary came out to her parents during high school and later wrote in a memoir that her father was supportive. “You’re my daughter and I love you and I just want you to be happy,” he told her, according to the book.

Mr. Cheney’s wife, Lynne, far left, and daughters Liz, center, and Mary, attend a speech by Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute in 2009. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Long after her public coming-out, allusions to Mary’s private life were the only reliable way to pierce Mr. Cheney’s cool. “You’re out of line with that question,” he snapped at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when the anchorman referred in 2007 to GOP critics of Mary’s decision to raise a child with her partner.

Mr. Cheney spent most of the Clinton years at Halliburton, where he made a series of major acquisitions, most prominently of Dresser Industries for $5.4 billion in 1998. He built the world’s largest oil field services firm, but the Dresser deal proved ruinous because of liabilities that emerged in asbestos lawsuits.

Tens of millions of dollars in compensation brought Mr. Cheney and his family, previously of modest means, to a rarefied plateau that included vacation homes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Annapolis. He told friends that he was finished with government.

But then, in early 2000, George W. Bush — the eldest son of George H.W. Bush — locked up the GOP nomination and asked Mr. Cheney to lead the search for a running mate.

Mr. Cheney vetted at least 11 possible vice-presidential candidates, but did not interview any of them before Bush halted the process and chose Mr. Cheney himself.

“If you ever get asked to head up an important search committee,” Mr. Cheney jokingly advised that high school graduation audience in 2006, “say yes.”

President George W. Bush waves to congressional members as Mr. Cheney looks on before Bush’s State of the Union address in 2004. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Bush-Cheney partnership

Before Mr. Cheney accepted Bush’s offer, he negotiated a partnership unique in the history of the White House. After he took office, Quayle paid a visit to give some advice, one vice president to another. Mr. Cheney would spend the bulk of his time, Quayle said, on political and ceremonial chores the president did not want to do.

“You’ll be going to the funerals,” Quayle told Mr. Cheney. “We’ve all done it.”

Mr. Cheney’s mouth curled into his trademark crooked grin. “I have a different understanding with the president,” he said.

By then he had filled the role, in fact if not in name, of transition chief. A strong believer in the idea that “personnel is policy,” Mr. Cheney oversaw nominations for Cabinet and key subcabinet posts, placing allies in senior positions.

Bush agreed that Mr. Cheney was “welcome at every table and at every meeting” and could intercede in “whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,” said Joshua Bolten, who served in the Bush White House as budget director and chief of staff.

Few major decisions, especially in the first term, lacked a Cheney imprimatur, though his fingerprints were seldom apparent. In keeping with his Secret Service code name, Angler, he pursued his objectives obliquely. His own favored metaphor was putting “an oar in the water” on policy choices, steering quietly from astern.

After Mr. Cheney’s long career as a subordinate, the vice presidency now presented what he saw as an obligation to advance his own views. Although he styled himself as only an adviser to Bush, Mr. Cheney noted that he did not serve at the pleasure of the president and had sworn an independent oath of office.

“I’m not a staffer, I’m the vice president, a constitutional officer, elected same as he is,” Mr. Cheney told his authorized biographer, Stephen F. Hayes.

The defining moment for Mr. Cheney came on a sunny September morning in 2001, when hijacked airliners smashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A Secret Service detail, believing the White House to be a target, burst into Mr. Cheney’s office and frog-marched him by his belt and shoulders to an underground bunker.

As Bush flew to safety that morning, from base to base, aboard Air Force One, avoiding an expected follow-on attack, Mr. Cheney took command in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Although he later claimed prior authority from the president, documentary evidence suggested that Mr. Cheney, not Bush, was the first to authorize Air Force fighters to shoot down a passenger jet believed to be under terrorist control.

“It wasn’t a close call,” Mr. Cheney later said of the order to down the civilian plane, which was not carried out because the plane had already crashed in Pennsylvania. “I think a lot of people emotionally look at that and say … ‘My gosh, you just shot down a planeload of Americans.’ On the other hand, you maybe saved thousands of lives. And so it was a matter that required a decision, that required action. It was the right call.”

Before the day ended, Mr. Cheney turned to Addington, his lawyer, and asked him to start thinking about what extraordinary new powers the president would need to respond to al-Qaeda’s attack.

Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, compared the vice president to Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister who wrote that “all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

The vice president brought Bush a draft of his first military order of the new war, a directive removing terrorist suspects from the jurisdiction of any court, foreign or domestic, and ordering that they be tried — if at all — by newly formed “military commissions.”

The president signed the order without change, though most of his national security team had never seen it.

“What the hell just happened?” Powell asked an aide when he saw a report about the order on CNN.

Alienated allies

Especially in Bush’s second term, a long list of comrades fell out with Mr. Cheney on matters ranging from war and peace to tax and budget policy. Disputes over the environment were particularly puzzling to some Cheney critics. He was an avid outdoorsman, who relaxed, when he could not fish, with catalogues of lures. But his campaign to bypass water-use regulations in the Klamath River valley — an intervention on behalf of drought-stricken Oregon farmers — produced the largest human-caused fish kill on record.

One by one, Cheney adversaries were pushed out of the government or resigned, among them Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, Environmental Protection Agency director Christine Todd Whitman, CIA Director George J. Tenet, Secretary of State Powell and Powell’s deputy, Richard L. Armitage.

But allies also left the administration, most notably his old friend Rumsfeld, whom Bush fired as defense secretary in 2006, and Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice the following year.

Libby’s case arose from the vice president’s ire at a vocal critic of the Iraq War, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who accused Mr. Cheney of deliberate public deceit. Attempts to discredit Wilson led to the exposure of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a clandestine CIA officer. A federal jury found that Libby lied about his role in the leak. Armitage and longtime Bush adviser Karl Rove acknowledged their participation and avoided perjury charges.

Evidence introduced during Libby’s trial showed that Mr. Cheney was the first of this group to learn of Plame’s CIA employment and the first to suggest that she could be used to discredit her husband. (Plame had suggested Wilson for a diplomatic mission to check on reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.) Libby testified twice before a grand jury that he could not remember whether Mr. Cheney directed him to leak Plame’s identity to reporters, but he said, “It’s possible.”

“There is a cloud over what the vice president did,” prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in his summation, suggesting that Libby had obstructed justice to protect his boss.

In a 2004 interview with federal investigators, Mr. Cheney said 72 times that he could not recall details of his role in the Plame matter. Mr. Cheney refused to answer other questions from prosecutors and FBI agents, saying that he was not permitted to divulge details of discussions he’d had with the president.

Bush’s anger about the case, and Mr. Cheney's equally stubborn defense, opened a breach between them. The president commuted Libby’s sentence, in part, but refused Mr. Cheney’s insistent requests for a pardon. In 2009, Mr. Cheney spoke openly of his anger that Bush had failed to correct a “serious miscarriage of justice.”

In 2018, Trump pardoned Libby, saying, “I don’t know Mr. Libby, but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.”

Mr. Cheney’s lowest moment came in February 2006, when he accidentally shot a 78-year-old friend in the face during a quail-hunting expedition. It was a moment of horror that swiftly became a comic metaphor for the ferocious image Mr. Cheney sometimes cultivated for himself. (He dressed his black Labrador as Darth Vader one Halloween.)

The political damage was heightened by the habitual secrecy that kept the incident under wraps for a full day, and by victim Harry Whittington’s disconcerting apology for embarrassing the vice president.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, left, shakes hands with Mr. Cheney during an event at the Pentagon in December 2006. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Loss of influence

The Cheney imprint on law and policy, which peaked in the first term, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. One episode, above all others, cooled their relationship.

In 2004, when senior government lawyers rose up in protest against the domestic surveillance program that Mr. Cheney had advocated, Bush did not learn of the dispute until the top leadership of the FBI and main Justice Department reached the brink of mass resignation.

Mr. Cheney’s unyielding drive could pose serious political problems for the president, aides said. Bush also grew prickly about accounts that cast Mr. Cheney as the administration’s puppet master.

“I think I’m wiser than that — than to be pigeonholed or, you know, get cornered by a wily adviser,” Bush replied in 2007 when a Fox News reporter asked about perceptions that Mr. Cheney ran the show. “The thing about Vice President Cheney is, he is predictable in many ways, because he brings a set of beliefs. And, uh, they’re firm beliefs.”

Bush aides argued that the president, before making major decisions, had to weigh a far broader array of concerns than those of special interest to Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Cheney “thinks of the national security interest or the prerogatives of the executive,” said Bartlett, a Bush confidant since Texas days. “The president has other considerations he has to take into account. The political fallout of certain reactions — he’s just going to calculate [differently] than Cheney does. He grew accustomed to that.”

Soon after leaving office, Mr. Cheney began work on a memoir, which he wrote with his daughter Liz and which was published in 2012 as “In My Time.” In addition to his wife and two daughters, survivors include seven grandchildren.

Despite an ailing heart and reduced mobility, the former vice president retained a prodigious capacity for work. He rose early and read voraciously. After suffering his fifth heart attack in 2010, he had a heart transplant in 2012. He wrote a book, “Heart: An American Medical Odyssey” (2013) with his cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, and Liz Cheney.

He allowed himself indulgences, such as a morning drive to Starbucks and attendance at his grandchildren’s soccer and softball games. Butin his later years, much of his time was passed above the garage at his new house in McLean, Virginia, filling legal pads with his slashing longhand. In 2015, he published “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” also written with his daughter Liz.

“When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Mr. Cheney told his biographer Hayes. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. … And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”