R. Fuckminster Buller

My name is Marisa Kabas, and I'm an independent journalist who publishes The Handbasket. I'm reaching out about a matter that involves your team and that continues to trouble me. In June of last year, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan Police Department to compel them to release body camera footage from the March 17, 2025 DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace. What followed was months of back and forth with their lawyers, arguing why it was in the public interest to release the un-redacted footage in its entirety. Though tiny segments were handed over, that wasn't enough: We wanted all of it.  On February 18, 2026, a DC judge ruled in our favor, and your reporter Mark Segraves sent a kind note of congratulations that day. Then on Monday, March 2nd, the footage was handed over to me and excitedly announced I'd received it and would be reviewing it in the coming days and sharing what I learned. When Segraves emailed me this past Thursday asking for my phone number, I didn't think much of it. But when he called me just before 2pm on Friday to let me know NBC4 Washington would be airing a segment at 5pm, I grew concerned.  Segraves said he'd obtained some of the footage via a FOIA request that week after he heard the footage had been released to me. He said he'd credit the work of RCFP and me, but it was little comfort. I asked if he'd known the day before when he emailed me for my number, why didn't he tell me then? He didn't have a good answer for that. He acknowledged all the hard work I'd done getting this footage released. I asked him if he could hold the story until Monday, to which he replied that he's "not just a blogger" (implying that that's all I am, presumably) and that he'd have to check with his editor. I said fine. Nearly an hour later he called back to say his editor refused to hold the story, but that they were happy to interview me via Zoom to add to the package, and I said I would.

What followed was two hours of furiously writing and posting clips of the footage to Youtube so I could get something published before the 5pm broadcast, and in the midst of that, recording a quick Zoom interview with a person who was about to take credit for my work. At 4:59pm ET, The Handbasket published a piece titled "Police body cam footage shows DOGE knew Institute of Peace was private property during raid." Then I tuned into NBC4 Washington via your website to catch the broadcast, and my instinct to rush to get something out first was proven right.  "It's a story you're seeing first on News4," your newscast began. "For the first time we're getting an inside look at what happened the day the Trump administration took over the US Institute of Peace. News4 obtained more than four hours of police body camera video from that day." What followed was more than six minutes of clips and commentary from Segraves, but it's not until six minutes and 21 seconds into the piece that he mentions my name (mispronounced though he asked for the correct pronunciation on Zoom), "The Handbasket blog," and the RCFP's foundational role in bringing this footage to light. I was angry, but didn't feel there was much I could do. Then I saw the version NBC4 posted to Instagram and TikTok—the video itself made ZERO mention of the RCFP or my work, only briefly acknowledging it in the written caption on Instagram, and not even bothering to do that on TikTok. An average viewer with no background on the case is lead to believe that this footage was released because of your efforts. When I saw that, I decided I couldn't let this go. It's difficult to explain what it's like to spend nearly a year working on a story only to have another reporter and outlet surreptitiously take credit for it; months of work and personal risk only to have another reporter lying in wait to swoop in. What NBC4 did was immoral, unethical, and to be frank, just truly sucked.

I just sent this email to the news director at NBC4 Washington about the unprofessional and disrespectful way they handled publishing the body camera footage of the DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace that was obtained via my FOIA lawsuit:

A handicap blue and white painted sign on the asphalt of a parking space. The symbols are meant to be a pregnant women and a baby stroller, but it doesn't look like that. It looks like pac man being killed with scissors next to a dancer

Twerkers at the barbeque get priority parking 🫡

okay

wapo is going to have majority bad takes now, idk what to tell you all. that's just who they are.

You can't bomb a country into an unconditional surrender, so this is essentially a commitment for boots on the ground.

I love watching people use LLMs in public. They’ll reply to a breaking news article and say “@grok is this true?” Babe where do you think it’s about to pull its answer from

Today’s weak jobs report raises new questions about Biden’s economic policies

this appears to be correct.

Israel Epstein - Wikipedia

They’re calling him “the least Googleable man of all time”

The Fart Mask from Jackass 2

Me trapping Ryan Grim in an epistemic chamber sealed tighter than the one around Fox News

"A better world is possible" used to be an uplifting message about the dream of creating a better future.

Now it is just a straightforward statement. Like…FOR SURE a better world is possible. This stupid shit we are up to now definitely isn't the best we can do. Not even close.

think I'm gonna have to contest any definition of "ready-to-eat" that permits glass shards

ISAAC CHOTINER: People imagine you happy. So, are you?

SISYPHUS: I dunno. This fucking boulder. What can I say? What is happy, anyway?

CHOTINER: Well, how did you feel when you asked the Oracle of Delphi for tips on killing your brother?

SISYPHUS: Hey, I asked for tips on getting AWAY with it.

The entire upending of creativity just so folks don’t have to admit marginalized groups make things people want as a cornerstone of culture is wild

2025 reports of Trump obliterating Iran’s nuclear weapons to be scrubbed from White House, CBS News websites.

We have some genuinely anti-war Democrats but Democratic leadership has been pro-war for as long as I can remember. It's genuinely depressing and horrifying.

It sounds like Trump plans to bomb Iran for a while, then declare peace and say "Over to you, Iranians."

Then blame the Iranians when they can't put their country back together.

If Iran had nukes we wouldn’t have touched them. We can bet every other country got the message.

Relatedly, if someone *is* invoking Libya, important to ask whether they are actually implying that the Libya stuff was legal—or are trying to obscure such questions by making some kind of point about hypocrisy.

because it would be stupid to cite an illegal thing as support for an illegal thing.

There is no coherent plan for regime change because that's not the goal. What they want is a perennial bad-guy punching bag they can go hit every few months whenever they want in perpetuity.

That's the plan, and to the extent the Trump admin even wanted to help (they don't), they illegally dismantled the mechanisms for it, like USAID.

It would've served our strategic interests greatly for millions of Iranians to see boxes and crates of vital supplies with U.S. flags on them. Oh well.

>the regime functionaries are yellow border posting on main
@adam35.bsky.social come get ur mans

The push toward AI is an important part of this too. Do you think they are encouraging us to have AI do everything that would otherwise involve thinking because they’re trying to empower people, or

cannot stress enough how bad it is that this administration is going to keep getting rewarded for flashy short-term shows of force while refusing to take responsibility or even acknowledge the long-term consequences

sure the pedophile felon president just illegally bombed a country that may have nukes while federal forces under his command murder and harass people in america and immigrants are tortured and he moves forward with plans to build concentration camps and sorry idk where i was going fuck all of this

at this point, I think it’s fair to say that many respectable scholars, including on the right, think OLC has gone out pretty far over its skis. The OLC memos are also purely internal to the executive; they’ve never been tested in court or stacked up against a real challenge by Congress

Paisley is one of my favorite guests we've ever had. Really loved this episode.

the US could have just started making masking more of a regular accepted thing and everyone would have fewer colds and deaths from flu and maybe we'd even have another tool against rising measles.

Literally not ONE person stopped to think that maybe the Black man wasn't lying. Good lord. This man was assaulted by this woman and by random passersby who clearly felt good about intervening because they got to yell at a Black man. Not one person seemed to try to resolve this like normal people.