Newsom Comms Director Blamed DOJ for Blaze at Judge’s Home, Now Investigators Say No Evidence Fire Was Set

Where’s Dan Rather when you need ‘im?

Rather — for those of you young enough to not remember the times when America was naïve enough to believe network anchors’ obvious piffle if they were stentorian enough about it — was once the trusted host of the “CBS Evening News” when he and his team had what was, at the time, the journalistic scoop of the 21st century.

During the 2004 campaign, they had documents from the 1970s that purported to show that higher-ups in the Texas Air National Guard were pressured to give sugar-coated officer reports about future President George W. Bush, ostensibly to keep him out of Vietnam. It turns out that any sort of desultory analysis of the documents would have revealed they were created in Microsoft Word — which, again, for those of you young enough to not remember when computers were not a thing, was decidedly not a product in use during that era.

Suffice it to say, Rather’s career was ruined by hitching his star to this fake story, which was meant to highlight that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was the true patriot (hahahahaha) and Dubya was a draft-dodging fraud.

Now, in the wake of a spate of political violence aimed at the right due to the rhetoric of the left, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s people thought they had the perfect story: a judge criticized by President Donald Trump whose house was the subject of what they intimated was an arson. All they needed was Dan Rather’s stentorian voice — along with that weird “courage” sign-off — to make the whole thing a national story about the administration fomenting thuggery and death against its opponents.

Alas, Rather was too tired to do the job, or even he smelled a rat — because, as it turns out, the “arson” that the Newsom people were touting seems to be a run-of-the-mill house fire. Whoops.

According to NBC News, the Saturday fire at a beach home in Edisto, South Carolina, hospitalized three people. It’s owned by Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein and her husband; Goodstein had ruled against the Trump administration in a recent case, which had caused some criticism from the White House.

From NBC News:

While the cause of the fire has not been determined, Democrats quickly pointed the finger at the right, noting that Goodstein had recently issued a temporary ruling blocking the Trump administration’s attempted seizure of state voting records.

The rush to blame comes amid an increase in threats against judges in a year when there have been major instances of political violence, including the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, for which Republicans also quickly blamed the left.

… which turned out to be accurate; not only were there few other people on the political spectrum with reason to shoot Kirk, but shootings like that don’t happen accidentally, contra what some (now former) MSNBC analysts posited. House fires, meanwhile, can and usually do happen in the absence of Molotov cocktails.

That didn’t stop the communications director for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic 2028 presidential front-runner, from issuing this j’accuse! on social media:

A few weeks ago, one of Trump’s top DOJ officials publicly targeted this judge.

Today, the judge’s home is on fire. https://t.co/FEQb6zGubk pic.twitter.com/leD0G7bGoG

— Izzy Gardon (@iGardon) October 5, 2025

Yeah, how do you refute that logic?

Gavin Newsom’s communications director blamed @AAGDhillon yesterday for a judge’s home burning down because she criticizing her rulings.

Law enforcement just released a statement saying that there is no evidence that the fire was set intentionally. https://t.co/Fw1v1557x3

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 6, 2025

Oh yeah, like that. Again from NBC News:

Law enforcement officials in South Carolina are investigating a fire that engulfed the home of a state judge and a former Democratic state senator but say there’s no current evidence the fire was intentionally set.

Now, the obvious caveats about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence, but come on. We’re expected to believe that, to send a political message via violence, a MAGA nut set a fire with such subtlety that law enforcement couldn’t discern it was arson?

That is generally, sadly, not how these things happen: Assassins want you to know, at the very least, that they tried or succeeded in killing someone for their actions, or at least to gain notoriety. This ain’t exactly Hercule Poirot-level deduction at work here.

Of course, watch — Gov. Newsom will do one of his patented wannabe-Trump social media rants to push this even further: “DUMB DONALD AND HIS MAGA CREW ALL WANT YOU TO THINK THIS OBVIOUS ARSON WAS A LIE OF THE LIE-BRUL MEDIA BECAUSE THIS JUDGE STOOD UP TO THE RULE OF LAW!!11 WE ALL KNOW THE TRUTH!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!”

And, if history repeats itself, Rather will at least get around to reposting it on his Bluesky account. It’s like the circle of progressive media grifter life in action, friends. One can only hope that the same thing that happened to John Kerry befalls Gavin three years from now.

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