Trump said that “SOMETHING MUST BE DONE” about polls showing his strong disapproval ratings.
Page A11From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Trump asks FCC to punish bad polling; DOJ subpoenas Comey adviser; tech collective braces for terrorism probe
As it ran on the front
You want to know how a crackdown starts, it starts exactly like this week started: three memos that have nothing to do with each other, filed on the same afternoon, and by Friday they're the same memo.
Memo one: the President wants the FCC to punish news organizations for publishing his own polling numbers — not fabricated numbers, his numbers, the ones his own campaign apparatus generated, just numbers he didn't like the shape of. Memo two: a federal grand jury subpoenas a former adviser to the ex-FBI Director, in a leak investigation nobody's named the leak in yet. Memo three: an anarchist tech collective — people who write code, not people accused of touching anyone — get told to brace for a terrorism investigation, under a crackdown announced with the word 'terrorism' doing all the lifting the evidence hasn't done yet.…
…(cont) None of these three things is illegal on its face. That's the part that should worry you more, not less. A subpoena is routine. An FCC complaint is a phone call. A terrorism designation is a word, until the day it's a raid. What connects them isn't a conspiracy chart with red string — it's simpler than that. It's the same hand reaching for the same three levers: the press, the leak, the label. Discredit the number, chase the source, criminalize the collective. You don't need a smoking gun when you've got three separate agencies leaning the same direction in the same week, because that's not smoke, that's weather, and the forecast's been the same all year.
Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud at the bar: none of the three targets this week did anything you or I would call dangerous. A newsroom ran a number. An adviser talked to somebody once, maybe. A group of programmers organized. That's the entire rap sheet. If that's enough to get the FCC, a grand jury, and a terrorism task force all moving in the same fiscal quarter, ask yourself what it takes to get you the same treatment, because the bar for 'concerning' just dropped to 'inconvenient,' and inconvenient describes most of us on a bad Tuesday.
“Same week they want the FCC nuking pollsters and DOJ subpoenaing sources, some code nerds who never touched a weapon get filed under terrorism. Follow the file, not the flag — it always lands on somebody who talked.”
“The FCC request is about accuracy standards, not retaliation, and the subpoena is a routine step predating any of this. The terrorism designation for the tech collective is based on credible — we're still finalizing what it's based on, internally, that review is ongoing.”
The receipts
A web hosting service linked to anarchists says it is taking precautions over signs that it may be under a federal investigation. The Department of Justice sent a subpoena to Google for information on the No Gods No Masters Network, which…
Former FBI Director James Comey faces a revived classified leak probe as a grand jury subpoenas his longtime adviser Daniel Richman on Monday.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.