In a day that was chock full of political stories in which Republicans were launching attacks on Democrats, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) made a key point. “We have not passed an emergency supplemental, a Farm Bill, or regular Appropriations,” he said. “The story is not what they are doing. The story is what they are not doing.”
Schatz was referring to specific, vital measures that are not getting through Congress: the outstanding funding bill for aid to Ukraine and Israel, border security, and humanitarian aid for Gaza; the Farm Bill, which governs the nation’s agricultural and food assistance programs and needs to be renewed every five years; and the regular appropriations bills that Congress must pass and that House extremists tossed out former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) over because they wanted deep cuts that he had agreed with President Joe Biden not to make.
But there is a larger point behind Schatz’s observation. Republicans, especially the extremist wing, have garnered power by promising to stop the government from acting. The extraordinary gerrymandering in Republican-dominated states following Operation REDMAP in 2010 created such safe districts that Republicans did not need to worry about losing elections. That safety meant that their role was not to offer real legislative solutions to problems, but rather to gin up support for the party nationally by pushing party talking points on right-wing media. Those talking points focused on slashing the government, which they claimed was hurting their constituents by defending secular society and providing benefits to undeserving minorities and women.
Now, though, the Republicans are in charge of the House of Representatives, and they actually need to get work done. But extremist Republicans’ skill set involves pushing talking points to create a false reality that demands gutting the government, not legislating, which requires compromise and deep understanding of issues.
We appear to be watching Republicans’ fake image crash against reality.
This morning was the scheduled date for the House Oversight Committee’s closed-door deposition from President Biden’s son Hunter. Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed him in early November, trying to find evidence that the president participated in illegal business deals before he became president. But, in fact, the committee is making its case entirely by innuendo—it has turned up no evidence of any such schemes—and publicly misrepresented the closed-door testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner to say the opposite of what it did.
So Hunter Biden’s lawyers called their bluff, saying the younger Biden would be happy to testify…but only in a public hearing, so that his testimony could not be misrepresented. The committee refused that offer, saying he must appear behind closed doors, a condition that seemed to undercut their claim they want transparency.
Today, Hunter Biden turned the tables on their habit of giving press statements by showing up himself outside of the Capitol to reiterate that he would answer “any legitimate questions” in a public hearing. “Republicans do not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics, expose their baseless inquiry, or hear what I have to say. What are they afraid of?”
He offered his own statement. “Let me state as clearly as I can,” he said. “[M]y father was not financially involved in my business, not as a practicing lawyer, not as a board member of Burisma, not in my partnership with a Chinese private businessman, not in my investments at home nor abroad, and certainly not as an artist,” he said. “There is no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business, because it did not happen,” he said.
He portrayed his father as a loving parent who supported him through his addiction struggle, and noted that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had showed naked photos of him in a committee hearing, taking “the light of my dad’s love for me” and presenting it “as darkness.”
Republicans say they will prosecute Hunter Biden for contempt of Congress because he defied a subpoena. But that, too, is awkward, as a number of Republican representatives—including Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH)—ignored subpoenas from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Pushing the idea that there is a “Biden crime family” is a transparent effort to create confusion by suggesting that the Bidens are simply the Democratic version of the Trumps, whose family business, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of tax fraud in January 2023. Judge Arthur Engoron also found that company, along with Trump and his two older sons and two other employees, liable for bank fraud in September 2023 and is currently considering fines of at least $250 million and ending the Trumps’ ability to do business in New York. Testimony in that trial concluded today.
With no comparable Biden Organization, Republicans are trying to invent one.
Their effort to convince voters that President Biden is corrupt has led to the tail wagging the dog as, after hearing constantly about how lawless Biden is, their supporters have demanded that House Republicans launch an impeachment inquiry into him. Today, House Republicans unanimously voted to open such an inquiry, though the lack of evidence made them caution that such an inquiry did not mean they would ultimately impeach the president.
When asked what he’s hoping to gain from an impeachment inquiry, Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) answered: “All I can say is Donald J. Trump 2024, baby.”
Biden reacted with uncharacteristic anger, calling out Republicans for ignoring the many imperative issues before them in order to “waste time on this baseless political stunt that even Republicans in Congress admit is not supported by facts.” He listed the nation’s unfinished business: funding for Ukraine and Israel, immigration policy, and funding the government to avoid “self-inflicted economic crises like a government shutdown, which Republicans in Congress are driving us toward in just a few weeks because they won’t act now to fund the government and critical priorities to make life better for the American people.”
Biden pointed out that having wasted weeks after tossing out their own House speaker and “having to expel their own members”—a reference to George Santos (R-NY), whom the House expelled two weeks ago—Republicans are now “leaving for a month without doing anything to address these pressing challenges.”
Republicans’ image has met reality today in another way, as well. In 2020, former president Trump insisted that Biden would tank the economy, but in fact, under Biden it has bloomed. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average, one of the key measures of the stock market, climbed to a new all-time high, topping out at over 37,000. At the same time, unemployment has sat below 4% for months now, and inflation has fallen, showing that “Bidenomics” has been hugely successful.
Tonight, though, Trump doubled down on Republican talking points, telling an audience in Iowa that unless he is reelected—presumably to reverse Biden’s policies—“we’ll have a depression the likes of which I don’t believe anybody has ever seen.”
But in an interesting rejection of House talking points in favor of reality, this evening the Senate passed a clean $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which gives a 5.2% pay raise to military personnel, by a vote of 87 to 13. House Republicans had loaded the measure up with a wish list of attacks on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and diversity initiatives.
Tomorrow the measure will go to the House, where extremist Republicans angrily oppose it, but experts expect it will pass nonetheless.
Hope you stick around.
According to a new Reuters/IPSOS poll, only 31 percent of Republicans would refrain from voting for Donald Trump if he were convicted before Election Day in 2024. This figure is significantly lower than the results from August, where nearly half of the surveyed Republicans stated they would not vote for Trump if he were "convicted of a felony crime by a jury." source
It's not necessarily good news for Biden.
Today is one of those days when the main story is not what’s on the pages, but what the stories say when they are themselves seen as a pattern.
This morning the Associated Press ran a story by national political reporter Brian Slodysko titled “The Republican leading the probe of Hunter Biden has his own shell company and complicated friends.” It told the story of how Representative James Comer (R-KY), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, has a financial history that looks a great deal like that of which he accuses the Bidens, including a shell company that appears to ethics experts to have problematic connections to a campaign donor.
Comer is leading the House impeachment effort against President Joe Biden, an effort that Philip Bump of the Washington Post eviscerated today when he took apart Republicans’ accusations point by point. The Associated Press story is interesting not because it tells us something we don’t know—the story of Comer’s shell company is what led him to attack Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) as a “Smurf” last month—but because of how far and wide it spread.
By this evening, Slodysko’s story had been reprinted by ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, and a number of smaller outlets.
The strength of that story, after years in which the Republican narrative was largely unchallenged in popular political culture, reminds me of the rise of the so-called muckrakers of the Progressive Era. That is, journalists from the 1870s onward wrote a lot about the shift in power during the Gilded Age toward the very wealthy and the politicians they bought. But it was only in the 1890s that journalists, writing for magazines like the landmark publication McClure’s Magazine, began to gain traction as cultural leaders.
Key to that shift was the sense that those who had been directing the country for decades were vulnerable, that they might lose their perch on top of the political, social, and economic ladder.
The vulnerability of the dominance of today’s MAGA Republicans has been exposed in part by the fecklessness of House Republicans, whose lack of interest in governing is evident from their focus on passing bills loaded with extremist demands that signal to their base but are nonstarters for actually passing the Senate and getting the president’s signature. Yesterday those same House Republicans voted unanimously to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden although they are unable to identify any reason for that inquiry.
The Larry, Moe, and Curly aspect of their leadership seems to have made them appear to be low-hanging fruit for investigative journalists. When Hunter Biden yesterday stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and called House Republicans out for not daring to let him testify in public while they were using their privileged positions to show naked pictures of him in a hearing, he did the same thing McClure’s writers did: he personalized politicians’ abuse of their power.
That, in turn, makes it easier for people who might not otherwise note the large swings of politics to understand exactly what the Republicans are doing.
The vulnerability of the MAGA Republicans showed up in another way, today, too. Today is the eleventh anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a 20-year-old murdered 20 children between the ages of six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. In that wake of that mass shooting, Americans demanded background checks for gun purchases, a policy supported by 90% of Americans. But the measure was killed in the Senate by lawmakers who represented just 38% of the American people.
Since then, Republicans have blocked legislation to regulate guns and have instead offered thoughts and prayers after each mass shooting.
That dominant narrative was turned on its head today when Mothers for Democracy/Mothers Against Greg Abbott released a devastating ad in which a young girl falls into a swimming pool and, rather than jumping in to save her, her mother prays for God to save her while observers—including a man who looks like Texas governor Greg Abbott—offer thoughts and prayers as the child drowns. “Thoughts and prayers are meaningless when you can act,” the ad says. “Act Now. Demand gun reform.”
The vulnerability of MAGA Republicans was also underscored today at the trial of former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has already been found liable for defaming Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, to determine what damages he owes them.
Giuliani told reporters on Wednesday that he would testify in his own defense, but his lawyer stopped that plan after Giuliani continued to attack the women this week. In his closing statement at the trial, Giuliani’s lawyer could suggest only that the former New York City mayor is “a good man.” “He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” the lawyer said, adding, “My client, he’s almost 80 years old.”
Trump’s insistence that he actually won the 2020 election is part of the MAGA Republicans’ need to portray themselves as invulnerable. They must never be seen to lose. Indeed, on Tuesday, Trump once again went on at great length, claiming he won the 2020 election. He also doubled down on the idea that he will become a dictator, feeding the idea that he is invulnerable. But those who participated in his scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election are admitting that Biden won the election or are cooperating with prosecutors, and his own legal cases are speeding up.
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are holding up a crucial aid package for Ukraine, insisting that immigration reform is such a grave national security issue it must take precedence over Ukraine aid. In their focus on immigration, they are following Trump’s lead: he is telling crowds that countries are dumping people from their “insane asylums” in the U.S., explicitly referring to the serial killer portrayed in the film The Silence of the Lambs.
And yet, despite that alleged national crisis, the House recessed today for three weeks without addressing it. Several Republicans indicated to Politico’s Playbook that they are not actually interested in a deal, since “polling consistently shows that immigration is the most toxic issue on the campaign trail for Biden. Why take that off the table as an attack on him in 2024?”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is running out of ammunition.
The White House is urging Congress to stay in session to deal with the supplemental funding bill and immigration reform, saying Republicans are “actively undermining our national security interests” to “go on vacation.” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has kept the Senate in session, saying it will stay and vote on a package next week. For his part, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tweeted that “we must secure our own border before we secure another country’s,“ and that while work should continue on the package, “the House will not wait around to receive and debate a rushed product.”
The House’s holiday recess meant that former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) left Congress today, rather than waiting for the end of his term. MAGA Republicans led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL) made history in October by engineering his ouster from the speaker’s chair and grinding the work of the House to a halt. On his way out, McCarthy suggested that Gaetz has reason to be concerned about an investigation by the House Ethics Committee into his alleged sexual misconduct and misuse of funds.
In the 1890s, once the dominant narrative cracked, an entire industry rose as journalists investigated those whose access to power had for decades protected them from scrutiny.
Very little appears to have changed here over the past year. Hard for me to understand why people stick with the same worn out opinions, in the face of the growing mountain of contrary evidence.
yada yada yada
Meanwhile our self appointed, authoritarian "progressive" elites are busy redesigning our washing machines, ventilation systems and food preferences - this after the wonderful job they did on our "all electric transportation system", powered by "clean, efficient and low cost" wind turbines and solar panels. It was an unrealizable fantasy based on amateurish engineering and enforced in rapidly failing policies. The public is at last coming to see these fantasies for what they are .... merely tools for power seeking pipsqueaks in search of control over the rest of us. They will, of course, never admit that, but the reckoning is clearly on the horizon.
Kajiwara asked Ryan how he thought history would judge Kinzinger and Cheney, conservative Republicans from Illinois and Wyoming who stood against Trump and sat on the January 6 committee before being forced out of Congress.
“Look,” Ryan said, “Trump’s not a conservative. He’s an authoritarian narcissist. So I think they basically called him out for that. He’s a populist, authoritarian narcissist.
“… All of his tendencies are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, makes him feel good at any given moment.
“He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior.”
Ryan, an economic conservative who was Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, continued: “There has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re just not going to cross, so that when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, look yourself in the mirror, you like what you see. I think Adam and Liz are brushing their teeth, liking what they see.
“And I think a lot of people in Congress … on the second impeachment, they thought Trump was dead. They thought after January 6, he wasn’t going to have a comeback. He was dead, so they figured, ‘I’m not going to take this heat, vote against this impeachment, because he’s gone anyway.’
“But … he’s been resurrected. There’s lots of reasons for that. But he has been. So I think there’s a lot of people who already regret not getting him out of the way when they could have. So I think history will be kind to those people who saw what was happening and called it out, even though it was at the expense of their wellbeing.”
David Adler @davidrkadler
12h
BREAKING 🇦🇷 President Javier Milei announces a total crackdown on Argentine civil society, calling on armed forces to break strikes, arrest protestors, “protect” children from families that bring them to demos, and form a new national registry of all agitating organisations.
CNN reporters today pulled together evidence from a number of sources to explain how “a binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.” The missing collection of documents was ten inches thick and contained 2,700 pages of information from U.S. intelligence and that of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies about Russian efforts to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
The binder went missing in the last days of the Trump presidency and has not been recovered. Its disappearance has raised “alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed.”
Reporters Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen have pieced together the story of how in his last days in office, Trump tried to declassify most of the information in the binder in order to distribute copies to Republican members of Congress and right-wing media outlets. According to an affidavit by reporter John Solomon, who was shown a copy of the binder, the plan was to begin releasing information from it on the morning of January 20, 2021, so that it would hit the news after President Joe Biden had been sworn in.
But late on January 19, while Solomon was copying the documents, White House lawyers recalled the copies to black out, or redact, sensitive information, worrying that while most of the facts in the binder were apparently already public, the methods of collection and persons involved were not. At some point in that process, an unredacted copy of the binder disappeared.
A former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol last year that she thought Meadows took the unredacted binder with him.
Today, in statements that seemed very carefully worded, Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, told CNN: “Mr. Meadows was keenly aware of and adhered to requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong.” Terwilliger told the New York Times: “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time.”
The missing binder was not among the material the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered from Mar-a-Lago last year, and intelligence officials briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about the missing information (the CNN story does not say that the House Intelligence Committee has been briefed). In April 2021, Trump allegedly offered to let the author of a book about him see the binder, saying “I would let you look at them if you wanted…. It’s a treasure trove…it would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”
The story of yet more missing classified information highlights that Judge Aileen Cannon, who was confirmed to her position after Trump lost the 2020 election, has permitted Trump to slow down United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, the pending criminal case in which he and two aides are accused of mishandling classified documents under the Espionage Act as well as making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Perhaps even more strongly, at a time when House Republicans have declined to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s 2022 invasion, the story serves as a reminder of the role Russia played in Trump’s 2016 election and how, during Trump’s time in office, he continued to cultivate a relationship with Russia’s authoritarian president Vladimir Putin and to turn his back on America’s traditional democratic allies, including those in NATO. (At one point, he told National Security Advisor John Bolton, “I don’t give a sh*t about NATO.”)
Indeed, Trump has suggested he would take the U.S. out of NATO if he returns to office, breaking the coalition that held first the Soviet Union and then Russia at bay since World War II. Such a betrayal would weaken all of the security alliances of the United States, according to Eastern European specialist Anne Applebaum, exposing the U.S. as an unreliable ally. As democracies ceased to work together, they would have to work with authoritarian governments, and after American political influence declined, so would the economic influence that has protected our economy. Authoritarian leaders like Putin would be the winners.
News about the missing binder also highlights just how hard Trump worked to convince his loyalists that that connection was a hoax. Although all U.S. intelligence services and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that, in fact, Russia did intervene in the election to get Trump into the White House, many Trump loyalists continue to believe Trump’s lie that such interference did not happen.
Trump’s determination to convince his followers that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax was in part an attempt to get out from under the legal implications of working with a foreign country to win an election but also, perhaps more profoundly, an attempt to make his followers believe his lies over reality. If he could make them believe him, rather than the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and the Senate, they would be his to command.
Russia, Russia, Russia was an important precursor to the Big Lie that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. The Big Lie has failed at every test of evidence, and yet Trump loyalists still say they believe it.
Today, former Trump ally Rudy Giuliani continued to defend the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen, even after a jury of eight Americans said he must pay the eye-popping sum of $148,169,000 to Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman for defaming them by saying they had participated in election fraud—he made that up—and for emotional distress. Freeman and Moss had asked for $24 million each.
Of that verdict, $75,000,000 was for punitive damages, illustrating that spreading Trump’s lies so that they hurt individuals comes at a whopper of a cost. Giuliani had refused to cooperate in the case, although he admitted to the truth of the underlying facts, and he had continued to attack Moss and Freeman to reporters during the trial.
Trump’s election lies that hurt companies are also costly, as the Fox News Corporation found when it settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million over the media company’s lies about the 2020 election.
Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) tried to address Trump’s attack on our democracy when this week they inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act a provision saying that no president can withdraw from NATO without approval from the Senate or from Congress as a whole.
“NATO has held strong in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said. He added that the legislation “to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”
Rubio added, “The Senate should maintain oversight on whether or not our nation withdraws from NATO. We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies.”
Israeli hostages killed mistakenly in Gaza were holding white flag, official says
Peter Beaumont
An initial IDF probe into the hostage killing incident suggests all three men were shirtless, with one carrying a makeshift white flag.
On seeing them, one Israeli soldier shouted “terrorists!” to the other forces, initiating fire at the men, according to reports.
While two hostages were hit immediately and fell to the ground, the third managed to escape into a nearby building where despite pleas in Hebrew, he was also shot and killed, a military official said.
West Bank: Israel opens probe after videos appear to show troops shooting Palestinians at close range
Two men, one unarmed and the other already injured, died after being shot in a military raid on a refugee camp
Israel has said it is opening a military police investigation into the killing of two Palestinians in the West Bank after an Israeli human rights group posted videos that appeared to show Israeli troops killing the men – one who was incapacitated and the second unarmed – during a military raid in a West Bank refugee camp.
The B’Tselem human rights group accused the army of carrying out a pair of “illegal executions.”
The security camera videos show two Israeli military vehicles pursuing a group of Palestinians in the Faraa refugee camp in the northern West Bank. One man, who appears to be holding a red canister, is gunned down by soldiers. B’Tselem identified the man as 25-year-old Rami Jundob.
The military Jeep then approaches Jundob as he lies bleeding on the ground and fires multiple shots at him until he is still. Soldiers then approach a man identified by B’Tselem as 36-year-old Thaar Shahin as he cowers underneath the hood of a car. They shoot at him from close range.
Btselem said that Shahin was killed instantly and Jundob died of his wounds the next day.
Israel’s military said its military police unit opened an investigation into the 8 December shootings “on the suspicion that during the incident, shots were fired not in accordance with the law.” It said that the findings would be referred to a military prosecutor, an indication that criminal charges could be filed.
Israel rarely prosecutes such cases, and human rights groups say soldiers rarely receive serious punishments even if wrongdoing is found. In a high-profile case, an Israeli soldier was convicted of manslaughter and served a reduced nine-month sentence in jail after shooting a badly wounded Palestinian who was lying on the ground in 2016.
The army recently opened an investigation into a soldier who shot and killed an Israeli man who had just killed a pair of Palestinian attackers at a Jerusalem bus stop. The soldier apparently suspected the Israeli was also an assailant – despite kneeling on the ground, raising his hands and opening his shirt to show he wasn’t a threat. The shooting underscored what critics say is an epidemic of excessive force by Israeli soldiers, police and armed citizens against suspected Palestinian attackers.
In a separate incident Friday, police said they had suspended officers caught on video beating up a Palestinian photojournalist in East Jerusalem. The photojournalist was identified on social media as Mustafa Haruf, who works for the Turkish news agency Anadolu.
In the video, one officer approaches Haruf and strikes him with the butt of his gun while another officer pushes him against a car. One points his gun at Haruf and another pulls him to the ground in a headlock. An officer kneels on Haruf’s body, the other officer kicking Haruf repeatedly in the head as he screams in pain.
Other officers stand by, watching and pushing back shocked onlookers.
“The Border Police Command views the conduct of these officers as inconsistent with the values of the force,” the police said in a statement as it announced the suspensions of the officers and an investigation.
Both incidents come as tensions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been inflamed by the war between Israel and Hamas, with Israelis on edge and bracing for further attacks. Palestinians and human rights groups have long accused Israeli forces of using excessive force and skirting accountability.
Since the outbreak of war, violence in the West Bank from Israeli forces and settlers has reached record levels. Since 7 October 287 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s the deadliest year on record in the West Bank in 18 years, it said.
How Israel jails hundreds of Palestinians without charge
In a family home in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, Yazen Alhasnat was sitting next to his mother rubbing sleep from his eyes.
The 17-year-old had been released from prison the night before, nearly five months after being arrested in a 4am Israeli military raid on the home.
Yazen had been held under "administrative detention" - a longstanding security policy, inherited from the British, that allows the Israeli state to imprison people indefinitely without charge, and without presenting any evidence against them.
"They have a secret file," Yazen said. "They don't tell you what's in it."
He was back at home because he was among the 180 Palestinian children and women released from prison by Israel in the recent exchange for hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
But at the same time the Palestinian prisoners were being released, Israel was detaining people at its highest rate in years. In the weeks since 7 October, the number of people in administrative detention - already at a 30-year high of 1,300 - has shot up to more than 2,800.
When Yazen was released, his family was told not to publicly celebrate in any way or to talk to the media. The same instructions were given to the families of two other teenagers who spoke to the BBC about their experiences. But all three families said they wanted to highlight the issue of administrative detention.
Israel says that its use of the policy is compliant with international law and a necessary preventative measure to combat terrorism. Maurice Hirsch, a former director of military prosecutions for the West Bank, from 2013 to 2016, told the BBC that Israel was "not only meeting international law but far surpassing it", by allowing detainees to appeal and ensuring that their detentions were reviewed every six months.
But human rights groups say Israel's expansive use of the measure is an abuse of a security law not designed to be employed at such scale, and that detainees cannot effectively defend themselves, or appeal, because they have no access to the evidence against them.
"Under international law, administrative detention should be a rare exception," said Jessica Montell, the executive director of HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organisation that monitors detention of Palestinians.
"You are supposed to use it when there is a present danger and no other way to prevent that danger than detaining someone. But it is clear Israel is not using it that way. It is detaining hundreds, thousands of people, without charge, and using administrative detention to shield itself from scrutiny."
Palestinians have been subject to administrative detention in this region since 1945, first under the British Mandate and then in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The law has in some very rare instances been used against Israeli settlers, but it is overwhelmingly used to detain West Bank Palestinians, including children.
Administrative detainees are granted a hearing - at a military court, in front of an Israeli military judge - but the state is not required to disclose any of its evidence to the detainees or their lawyers. The detainees can then be sentenced to up to six months. But the six months can be extended indefinitely by the military court, meaning that administrative detainees have no real idea at any point how long they are going to be locked up.
"What really gets to you is the uncertainty," Yazen said, sitting in his living room. "Will you finish your six months and leave? Or will you be extended for a year, for two years?"
The detainees can mount an appeal, all the way up to Israel's Supreme Court, but with no access to the evidence against them, they have nothing to base it on. Palestinians who are formally tried in the military courts have more access to evidence, but the courts boast a roughly 99% conviction rate.
"Defending Palestinians in the military courts is an almost impossible task," said Jerusalem-based defence lawyer Maher Hanna.
"The entire system is designed to limit a Palestinian's capacity to defend himself. It imposes harsh constraints on the defence and relieves the state prosecutor of the burden of proof."
Israel's use of the policy in the West Bank had "crossed all lines - red, green, every colour", Yazen's mother Sadiah said.
"We are living under a parallel system of justice."
When 16-year-old Osama Marmesh was detained, he was pulled off the street and into an unmarked car, he said. So for the first 48 hours of Osama's detention, his father Naif had no idea where he was. "You call everyone you know to ask if they have seen your son," Naif said. "You don't sleep."
Osama asked repeatedly during his arrest for the charges against him, he said, but was told each time to "shut up".
When 17-year-old Musa Aloridat was arrested, in a 5am raid on his family home, Israeli forces pulled apart the bedroom he shared with his two younger brothers and fired a bullet into the wardrobe, smashing the glass, he said.
"They took him away in his underwear," Musa's father Muhannad said, holding up a picture on his phone. "For three days we knew nothing."
Neither Yazen, Osama nor Musa, nor their parents or lawyers, were shown any evidence against them during their months of detention. When Israel published lists of the detainees to be released in the recent exchanges, in the column detailing the charges, against Yazen, Osama and Musa's names there was only the vague line, "Threat to the security of the area".
Another version of the list said Yazen and Musa were suspected of being affiliated with Palestinian militant groups. When Osama was released, he was handed a brief charge sheet which said that on two occasions, months earlier, he had thrown a stone, "half the size of his palm", towards Israeli security positions.
Maurice Hirsch, the former director of military prosecutions, said that it would be wrong to draw any conclusions from the limited information available. "There's a very stark difference between the openly available evidence against these terrorists and what the intelligence information carries," he said.
"We see administrative detention being used by the Americans in Guantanamo, so we know that this measure is internationally recognised and accepted," he added. "And since this is an internationally accepted measure, why should it be only Israel that is prevented from using it, when we are dealing with probably the highest terror threat that anyone has ever seen?"
In the end, Yazen, Osama and Musa spent between four and seven months in prison. All three said that conditions had been relatively comfortable until the Hamas attack on 7 October, when their bedsheets, blankets, extra clothes and most of their food rations were removed, and all communication with the outside world was cut off, in what they described as collective punishment for the attack.
Other detainees have alleged that they were beaten, tear-gassed or had dogs set on them.
The Israeli Prison Service confirmed that it had put the prisons into emergency mode and "reduced the living conditions of the security prisoners" in response to the Hamas attack.
Yazen, Osama and Musa were all released early, because the exchange for Israeli hostages prioritised women and children. But, according to the most recent numbers from the prison service, there are still 2,873 people being held under administrative detention in Israeli jails.
The day after he got home, Musa was back in his room, where he had been grabbed from his bed by the Israeli military four months earlier. The wardrobe doors, smashed by a bullet, had been taken off to be replaced, but the room had otherwise been put back together carefully by his parents. Musa had expected to be in prison much longer, he said. His lawyer had told him there was a 90% chance his detention would be extended.
All three boys said they wanted to try to finish school. But living under the constant threat of being locked up again was its own "kind of psychological detention", Musa said.
"They released us into a bigger prison", Yazen said.
"There is no peace," Yazen's mother said, looking over at him. "They can take you at any time."
