Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative December 2024 news and views
Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.
Dec. 15
Top Headlines
- Washington Post, Investigation: Elon Musk put $277 million into the election. He’s $200 billion richer this year, Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani
- Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Truth About Musk, From His Biographer, Seth Abramson
- Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon
New York Times, ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump- New York Times, Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage, David Enrich
- Meidas Touch Network, Commentary on Legal AF,: Bye Bye George Stephanopoulos… You Sold Out!, Ben Meiselas
- Lance's Substack, Political Commentary and Opinion: Why Biden must issue Sweeping Preemptive pardons For Trump Retribution Targets, Lance F. Rosen
Politico, Opinion: You Should Worry About Kash Patel Running the FBI, Ankush Khardori- New York Times, News Analysis: Why Wray’s Resignation May Signal a Shift in F.B.I. Tradition, Devlin Barrett
- New York Times, An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones
- New York Times, Opinion: The Trouble Began When #MeToo Became #ChurchToo, David French
- Washington Post, Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses
- New York Times, Texas Attorney General Sues New York Doctor for Mailing Abortion Pills
- Washington Post, Opinion: Biden’s clemency for ‘kids for cash’ judge is a big mistake, Heather Long
- Washington Post, Trump’s CDC pick wouldn’t let go of false theory that vaccines cause autism
- New York Times, Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
- Washington Post, Polio survivor Mitch McConnell criticizes efforts to undermine vaccine
- New York Times, Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Pete Hegseth
- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns- Washington Post, Opinion: Progressives should defend Biden’s legacy to protect their future, E.J. Dionne Jr.
- Washington Post, Opinion: McConnell has the chutzpah to complain about Trump’s ‘America First,’ Jennifer Rubin
- Washington Post, In Ohio, an immigrant community prepares for Trump’s crackdown
- Washington Post, Middle East Conflict: Biden team uses fall of Assad to defend Mideast record; critics say it doesn’t eclipse horrors in Gaz
- Washington Post, Turkey using ‘war on terror’ tactics, such as abductions and secret detentions, on critics in other countries
- Washington Post, Israeli government approves plan to expand settlements on occupied Golan
- NBC News, Russian oil tankers split in two by strong storms in the Black Sea
- Enforcer News, Massive Russian Ships SINK In Black Sea; MAJOR Rescue Operation Underway
Trump Transition News, Commentary
- Politico, The Catholics in Trump’s administration could take GOP in whole new direction
- New York Times, Devin Nunes, Pugnacious Trump Loyalist, to Lead Espionage Advisory Board
- New York Times, Trump Names Richard Grenell for ‘Special Missions’ Role
- New York Times, Trump Transition: F.B.I. Director to Step Down
- New York Times, In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump
- New York Times, Trump’s Night-Owl Tendencies Set Stage for After-Hours Diplomacy
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann- Washington Post, Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses
More On Health Care CEO's Murder
More On U.S. Public Health, Transition, Fears
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
- New York Times, Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
- New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country
- New York Times, Trump Wants to Shake Up Health Care. Many Americans Don’t Mind
- The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 15, 2024 [Safe Drinking Water Act, Heather Cox Richardson
- Big, The Newsletter of Antitrust, Monopoly Round-Up Commentary: FTC Revives the "Magna Carta of Small Business," Matt Stoller
More On Middle East Crises: Syria, Israel, Lebanon
At the country’s most notorious prison, Syrians confront their worst fears: that they will never know what happened to the loved ones who disappeared (New York Times photo).
- New York Times, Syria Shudders as Bashar al-Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light
- New York Times, How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues
- Washington Post, Middle East Conflict: Biden team uses fall of Assad to defend Mideast record; critics say it doesn’t eclipse horrors in Gaza
- Washington Post, Turkey using ‘war on terror’ tactics, such as abductions and secret detentions, on critics in other countries
- Washington Post, Israeli government approves plan to expand settlements on occupied Golan
New York Times, United States in Direct Contact With Rebels Who Took Over Syria- Washington Post, Opinion: With Iran’s guard down, the U.S. and Israel face an urgent choice, David Ignatius
- New York Times, Antony Blinken Meeting Arab Ministers Amid Uncertainty Over Syria Transition
- New York Times, Russian Military Appears to Be Packing Up Some Equipment in Syria
More On South Korean Crisis
New York Times, After Impeachment, South Korea Is Left With No Elected Leader- New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Impeached Over Martial Law Crisis
- New York Times, How the President Alienated South Korea, One Group at a Time
- New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out
- New York Times, South Korea Bars President From Traveling Abroad
- New York Times, Opposition to South Korea’s President Grows as He Faces Impeachment
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Warning from Seoul: Democracy at Risk in an Age of Authoritarian Power, Thom Hartmann
More U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
New York Times, Nancy Pelosi Has Hip Replacement Surgery After Fall- Washington Post, Investigation: Elon Musk put $277 million into the election. He’s $200 billion richer this year, Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani
- New York Times, What We Know About Drone Sightings in New Jersey and New York
- New York Times, Why Democrats Lost More Seats in Vermont Than Any Other State
- New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise
New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman- Politico, Matt Gaetz gets his own TV show on OAN
- New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country
- New York Times, Agriculture Department to Require Testing of U.S. Milk Supply for Bird Flu Virus
More On U.S. Foreign Policy, Defense, Tariffs
More On Presidential Pardons, Cases
Washington Post, Opinion: Biden’s clemency for ‘kids for cash’ judge is a big mistake, Heather Long- New York Times, President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 1,500 Americans, a Record for One Day
- Politico, Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences, promises ‘more steps in the weeks ahead’
- Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
- Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman
Russian War Against Ukraine
- New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent
- New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says
- Washington Post, Spies are secretly at war with Russian drones. But Moscow is fighting back — with lots of lousy weapons, Joby Warrick and Serhiy Morgunov
- Washington Post, Faltering Russian drones point to modest successes in Western sanctions to block Moscow’s access to technology
- Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid
Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
New York Times, Security Strategy of Recruiting Cheap Militiamen Backfires in Burkina Faso- New York Times, After Impeachment, South Korea Is Left With No Elected Leader
- New York Times, As Ambassador, Rahm Emanuel Says His Impatience Nudged Japan Forward
- New York Times, How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues
- Washington Post, Opinion: Macron names François Bayrou as French prime minister after government collapse
- New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top
- New York Times, Brazilian Police Arrest Close Ally of Ex-President Bolsonaro, Official Says
- Washington Post, Middle East Conflict: Assad’s fall to Islamist rebels in Syria unsettles region’s autocrats
- New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial
- New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions
- New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades
- New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages
U.S. Defense, Foreign Policy, Security
More U.S. Legal News
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 15, 2024 [Safe Drinking Water Act, Heather Cox Richardson
- Big, The Newsletter of Antitrust, Monopoly Round-Up Commentary: FTC Revives the "Magna Carta of Small Business," Matt Stoller
- New York Times, Crystal Mangum, who accused Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, says she lied
- Politico, Anti-slavery movement charts its path forward,
The Mercury News, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
U.S. Immigration
Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
- Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon
- New York Times, ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump
- New York Times, Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage, David Enrich
- New York Times, An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones
- New York Times, Opinion: The Trouble Began When #MeToo Became #ChurchToo, David French
New York Times, Crystal Mangum, who accused Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, says she lied- New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case
- New York Times, Jay-Z, Accused in Suit of Raping Minor With Sean Combs, Calls It Blackmail
- The New Yorker, Investigation: Pete Hegseth’s Secret History, Jane Mayer
U.S. Economy, Jobs, Pensions
Energy, Environment, Transportation, Climate Change, Disasters
- New York Times, Automakers Thrived in the Pandemic. Many Are Now Struggling
- Washington Post, Investigation: Elon Musk put $277 million into the election. He’s $200 billion richer this year, Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani
- New York Times, E.P.A. Bans Cancer-Causing Chemicals Used in Dry Cleaning
- Washington Post, Skyrocketing car-insurance premiums are pushing inflation higher
- New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says
- New York Times, Sellers of Toxic Fertilizer Ask Congress: Protect Us From Lawsuits
- New York Times, Insurer Reverses Policy That Would Have Limited Anesthesia Periods
- New York Times, Elon Musk’s $50 Billion Tesla Pay Can’t Be Reinstated, Delaware Judge Rules
Media, High-Tech, Culture, Education
- Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon
- New York Times, ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump
- New York Times, Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage, David Enrich
- New York Times, An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones
- New York Times, Opinion: The Trouble Began When #MeToo Became #ChurchToo, David French
- Washington Post, Investigation: Elon Musk put $277 million into the election. He’s $200 billion richer this year, Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America- The Mercury News, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust- Washington Post, Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion
Top Stories
Washington Post, Investigation: Elon Musk put $277 million into the election. He’s $200 billion richer this year, Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani, Dec. 15, 2024. Elon Musk’s net worth has climbed by more than $200 billion in 2024, a massive increase in the same year that the world’s richest person spent at least $277 million backing Donald Trump and other Republican candidates.
Trump’s election sent stock in electric automaker Tesla, a company central to Musk’s wealth and where he is CEO, soaring. Shares were trading at prices around 70 percent higher on Friday than on Election Day.
As of Friday, Musk’s fortune was about $442 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That estimate includes a pay package from Tesla worth more than $50 billion that is held up in court after a Delaware judge ruled to strike it down in January and upheld her decision this month. Tesla has pledged to appeal.
Trump has indicated he will be friendly to businesses and investors of all kinds when he returns to office. Musk’s empire is poised to especially benefit from the president-elect’s promised cuts to regulation — and potentially also overt favors to the tech billionaire, who has become a loyal political lieutenant.
Trump picked Musk to co-chair a nongovernmental advisory group on cuts to federal spending and regulation known as the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, potentially allowing the tech entrepreneur to shape policies that affect his businesses. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
“Elon Musk is a once in a generation business leader and our federal bureaucracy will certainly benefit from his ideas and efficiency,” said Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump-Vance Transition. He described Musk and Trump as “great friends and brilliant leaders working together to Make America Great Again.”
Musk launched his entrepreneurial career in 1995 when he abandoned a graduate program at Stanford to found a start-up later called Zip2 that created online city guides. It was sold for about $300 million in 1999.
He went on to co-found an online banking company, X.com, that merged with another start-up to create PayPal. Auction site eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Truth About Musk, From His Biographer, Seth Abramson, left, best-selling author, attorney, former journalism professor, Dec. 14, 2024. A viral Bluesky thread introduced tens of 
thousands around the world to a first glimpse of a forthcoming biography of Elon Musk. Here—in a single essay—is some of what the world just learned.
Elon Musk may be an unelected plutocrat, but in six weeks he’ll become co-President of the United States. Unfortunately, many people around the world are only just now beginning to research who Musk really is—not the mythos he spent decades carefully weaving about himself like a cloak, but the hard realities that define the actual man.
Most of what people think they know about Elon Musk is manifestly false. This essay, written by an Elon Musk biographer and based on OSINT research, reveals the truth—or at least a significant part of it. Rest assured that none of what remains is any better.
I’ve been a Musk biographer for two years now. In that time I’ve published hundreds and hundreds of pages of professionally researched content about the man—well over a book’s worth—here at Proof, an independent media outlet at Substack that ranks as a Top 25 U.S. Politics substack worldwide.
The longest report that I’ve published about Elon Musk so far is March 28. It’s a novella in and of itself, despite being just one of many fully sourced reports on Musk authored by a bestselling historian and biographer whose focus before now was the political career—and political scandals—of Donald Trump.
As you will soon see, the parallels between the lives of Trump and Musk are jarring.
The reason the report linked to above is so long is because it covers many different topics and subtopics.
One of its foci was on how Elon Musk got rich in business—a separate topic from how he had the money to break into the business world in the first place, a topic I’ll get to further along in this essay.
The simple fact is that Zip2, which brought Elon the massive financial haul he needed to do literally anything else in business in the United States, arose from an idea that he appears to have stolen. I say “appears” to have stolen because there are three separate potential sources for the idea for Zip2—and only one is Elon and his brother Kimbal.
The key one is a phonebook salesman, and another an entrepreneur who actually sued Elon for stealing the idea for Zip2. Both these well-documented claims are credible, even as the attempts by the Musk boys to discredit them and center themselves in the story of Zip2 are half-hearted and, in the judgment of this biographer, even laughable.
Indeed, these two claims are so credible that after Elon and Kimbal for years told the story of the phonebook salesman in a way that—if you can believe it—made it pretty clear that they took an idea he was pitching to the company Elon was then interning for wholesale, they suddenly realized how reciting historical events in this way came off and changed the origin story of Zip2 a hundred and eighty degrees. Suddenly, they were the heroes of it and (apparently to drive the coverup home) the salesman who’d conceived of the concept Zip2 would instantiate was a dope the Musk boys laughed at.
They’ve since enlisted family members to try to help them date the Zip2 idea as theirs; none of those claims are credible. Worse still, their own admission is that as they were materializing the Zip2 idea—again, an idea that sure seems stolen—they were acting wildly unprofessionally, in fact in ways that would make the jaw drop of anyone who has ever entered a professional workplace.
Both Musk boys knew their father was a contemptible figure the likes of which no one in Silicon Valley would ever condone, so they lied about everything: their immigration status; the source of their startup money; their ability to conduct themselves in an office setting as professionals; even their personal politics, which were far right (Elon a bit more so than Kimbal), a fact they knew would never be accepted in California.
Former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, center, at federal court with her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, left, on April 25 in New York City (Associated Press photo by Seth Wineg).
Former President Donald Trump is shown in a photo collage with columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won a jury verdict that he sexually attacked her three decades ago.
Disclosures in the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault lawsuit echoed Trump's words in "Hollywood Access" videotape, reported upon above, that arose during the 2016 presidential campaign. Shown Then: The front page of a 2016 New York Daily News edition contrasts with President Trump's claimed innocence in the Carroll case.
New York Times, ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump, Michael M. Grynbaum and Alan Feuer, Dec. 15 2024 (print ed.). ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump.
The outcome of the lawsuit marks an unusual victory for President-elect Donald J. Trump in his ongoing legal campaign against national news organizations.Listen to this article · 6:03 min Learn more
The agreement was a significant concession by a major news organization and a rare victory for a media-bashing politician whose previous litigation efforts against news outlets have often ended in defeat.
Under the terms of a settlement revealed on Saturday, ABC News will donate the $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Mr. Trump during a televised interview in March.
ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will pay Mr. Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.
The outcome is an unusual win for Mr. Trump, who has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Several experts in media law said they believed that ABC News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the courts for a public figure like Mr. Trump to prove defamation. A plaintiff must not only show that a news outlet published false information, but that it did so knowing that the information was false or with substantial doubts about its accuracy.
“Major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah.
“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.”
ABC News did not elaborate on Saturday about its precise reasons for settling. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a network spokeswoman said. A lawyer for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the agreement.
Mr. Trump sued ABC and Mr. Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Mr. Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.
In that case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
In his lawsuit, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that he had been found liable for raping Ms. Carroll. (Mr. Trump was ordered by a jury in the Carroll case to pay her damages of $83.3 million. He is appealing the verdict.)
The settlement agreement in the defamation case, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, was signed on Friday, the same day that a judge ordered Mr. Trump to sit for a deposition in the case next week in Florida. Mr. Stephanopoulos was also on the verge of being deposed.
Tensions ran high between ABC News and Mr. Trump’s camp throughout the 2024 campaign.
Mr. Trump denounced ABC as “terrible” for its handling of his sole debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, faulting the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for fact-checking his answers and musing about stripping the network of its broadcasting license.
Debra OConnell, the Disney executive who directly oversees ABC News, dined with Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Palm Beach last Monday, according to two people briefed on their interaction. The dinner was part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.
News networks typically arrange such meetings ahead of a new presidential administration to discuss subjects like booking and day-to-day coverage. Another person familiar with the meeting said its purpose was to discuss Mr. Trump’s White House transition, not the pending defamation case.
Under the settlement terms, ABC agreed to place an editor’s note at the bottom of an online article about the interview with Ms. Mace. The note reads: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
New York Times, Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage, David Enrich (David Enrich’s latest book, to be published in 2025, is about the weaponization of libel law and the campaign to limit press freedoms), Dec. 15, 2024.
The small flurry of threatened defamation suits is the latest sign that Donald Trump’s administration may do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.
The legal threats have arrived in various forms. One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or emails.
All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and F.B.I.
The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. Before and after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.
Actual or threatened libel lawsuits are another weapon at their disposal — and they are being deployed even before Mr. Trump moves back into the White House.
It is notoriously difficult for public figures like Mr. Trump to win defamation lawsuits. Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent — which Mr. Trump and some of his allies want to see weakened or overturned — plaintiffs must prove that a publisher knew a defamatory statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its accuracy.
But that high bar has not stopped a wide range of politicians, business leaders and others from threatening or filing such suits — a strategy that often seems tailored to cause news outlets and individuals to rein in aggressive coverage of the public figures.
The strategy can pay other dividends as well.
On Saturday, ABC News said it had agreed to give $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum to settle a defamation suit that Mr. Trump filed against the network and one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos. Mr. Trump sued in March after Mr. Stephanopoulos inaccurately said the former president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial. In fact, Mr. Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse.
The settlement followed months of attacks by Mr. Trump and his allies on ABC News, with the once and future president going so far as to say that the network should lose its federal broadcast license.
The deal set off criticism of ABC News by those who perceived the network as needlessly bowing down to Mr. Trump. And it led some legal and media experts to wonder whether the outcome would embolden Mr. Trump and others to intensify their assault on the media, at a moment when many news organizations are struggling with declining public trust and deteriorating finances.
Even before the settlement was reached, Elizabeth McNamara, a prominent media lawyer, said she expected that the trend “is only going to increase,” given the political environment.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary on Legal AF,: Bye Bye George Stephanopoulos… You Sold Out!, Ben Meiselas, Dec. 15, 2024. I once admired ABC host George Stephanopoulos (shown above in a 2009 file photo). I thought he was smart and fearless. Silly me. So many people I admired are revealing themselves as cowards now. It’s pathetic.
One day after ABC and Stephanopoulos settled with Trump for $15 million, Stephanopoulos deleted his X (formerly Twitter) account. He was getting mocked on X by MAGA accounts for kissing the ring. Stephanopoulos doesn’t have a Threads or Bluesky account, but he is also getting roasted by MAGA accounts on his Instagram. He is swarmed with comments on his Instagram.
This is why you never obey in advance. As I say, I prefer to die once than to have my soul ripped apart and die a thousand deaths in a lifetime for being a coward like so many journalists now.
Stephanopoulos looks like a total coward to those who oppose the settlement, and he has been beclowned by MAGA, who treat him as a pathetic loser.
I wonder if he will delete his Instagram soon as well.
I’ve heard some try to say it’s not Stephanopoulos’ fault that ABC settled since he works for them.
This is wrong. Stephanopoulos makes $15 million a year from ABC. By the way, if you wanted to know how Trump arrived at the $15 million settlement amount, that’s a hint right there.
Stephanopoulos was not forced into the settlement agreement. He has the right to his own lawyers, and ABC’s insurance would be obligated to pay for his defense if he didn’t settle.
Stephanopoulos’ net worth is probably close to $100 million. He has more money than anyone needs in multiple lifetimes. He could do what Harry Litman did at the LA Times and resign. If he believed in his talents, I’m sure he could land another job somewhere, or he could start his own show.
But Stephanopoulos is a company guy who wanted to stay employed at ABC to keep those fat $15 million-a-year checks. So he settled as well when ABC/Disney cut Trump a $15 million check.
Stephanopoulos literally signed on the dotted line of the settlement agreement. He has free will. He exercised it the way he did, and now he is compromised. MAGA mocks him, while pro-democracy fans of his are fans no longer.
Look, here is my promise to you: MeidasTouch Network will never obey. We will never cave. Trump attacked us in a recent court filing, and I couldn’t care less. There is nothing he or MAGA could do to us to ever make us submit.
We need to rebuild media from its ashes. We are doing that now. This fight is not going to be easy.
Politico, Opinion: You Should Worry About Kash Patel Running the FBI, Ankush Khardori, Dec. 14, 2024. The days of J. Edgar Hoover may be over, but Patel’s nomination is deeply worrisome all the same.t national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.
Some key pieces appear to be snapping neatly into place for Donald Trump’s much-feared prosecutorial revenge tour as the year draws to a close.
Trump’s new nominee to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, is a staunch loyalist who predicted last year that after Trump’s reelection, “the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones.” Trump told NBC News that the members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail” (even as he claimed that he would not direct his appointees to prosecute them). And his plan to install Kash Patel, right, as FBI director was made easier after Christopher Wray, himself a Trump appointee, announced he would resign despite having more than two years left on his term.
Trump’s decision to nominate Patel has proven particularly controversial, since his principal qualification appears to be his sycophancy toward Trump. (A Trump transition spokesperson said, “Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic director.”)
Many observers, including former federal law enforcement officials, oppose Patel’s nomination on the grounds that he would likely use the FBI to pursue Trump’s political opponents and that he might substantially corrupt the culture and professionalism of the bureau. To some, Patel calls to mind the specter of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director whose nearly 50-year stint running the agency until 1972 was marked by egregious abuses of power — including illegal surveillance, blackmail and the harassment of political dissidents.
Patel clearly lacks the qualifications, experience and temperament to lead the agency. But how worried should the American public really be about him at the helm of the FBI?
The truth is that there are stronger internal and external safeguards in place against law enforcement abuses than during the Hoover era. He will indeed face some constraints because of the culture and bureaucracy of the FBI. But they may not contain him. And he will have plenty of opportunity to damage the bureau and its work — and to use and abuse the FBI for political ends. His nomination poses a considerable and unjustifiable risk to the country.
Excerpt Continued Below.
Lance's Substack, Political Commentary and Opinion: Why Biden must issue Sweeping Preemptive pardons For Trump Retribution Targets, Lance F. Rosen, 
right, Dec. 15, 2024. Kash Patel Is A Lunatic.
This MSNBC article by author and writer Jay Michaelson makes a strong case for Biden to carry out sweeping pre-emptive pardons to protect those targeted for revenge prosecutions by Trump and his incoming "Himmler," Kash Patel, left.
The counterarguments by legalists, MAGA fascists and several Biden-bashing liberal media pundits are fairly well refuted, and in fact shown to be bogus in each example.
Americans by and large are letting their fears affect their judgment, and are either blocking out the Trump/Patel threat to our constitutional system and targeted individuals, or have resigned themselves to it and are retreating into a psychological bunker mentality.
The only remedy is effective political action. Throwing junk memes up against your Facebook wall is no solution and represents a net negative as far as wasted time and energy.
Facebook is part of the apparatus which will be deployed to identify us and pick us off, one by one. Be clear that this is a devolving Orwellian type of platform designed to neutralize Trump's political opposition.
I should not have to make this case. You all saw what Facebook did with their algorithm to spike most of the posts about Project 2025 when that became the leading issue in the campaign. And of course it was soon determined that the corporate figure who designed that algorithm in charge of so-called “community guidelines” was a Trump guy.
And now you have Zuckerberg crawling to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's bone spurs, then funding his inaugural to the tune of 1 million, with who knows what other kinds of backroom deals were struck to keep Trump off his back. Same with Bezos.
My days here are numbered. You also saw this week that my page was hijacked and I lost all but a handful of my 1400 readers. My wife posted a notice on my timeline to notify everyone that I have a new page, and how to find it. That message was removed, either by Facebook or the hijacker.
So this place is a dead end for those resisting the regime. That is where we are. I'm taking steps this weekend to backup and safeguard my Substack archive of a 1000 articles going back six years. Others who are writers and posters should consider taking similar steps to preserve their data.
Don't block on this, we are headed into dark territory.
New York Times, An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones, Natasha Singer (Natasha Singer reported from Revere, Mass., and reviewed more than 400 student fight videos from schools in 15 states), Dec. 15, 2024. Cafeteria melees. Students kicked in the head. Injured educators. Technology is stoking cycles of violence in schools.
Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted.
He watched, horrified, as a dozen teenage boys rampaged through the cafeteria, pummeling and kicking one another, overturning tables and chairs. Other students jeered and jostled to film the fight on their phones.
“It was like a stampede of videos,” said Mr. Martinez, now 18 and a senior. “Everyone was trying to get the best angle.”
But the pandemonium at Revere High School in Revere, Mass., was just beginning.
Within minutes, students in other parts of the building began receiving text messages about the lunchroom brawl. Suddenly, teachers said, dozens of riled-up teenagers started racing down hallways and careening down stairways with their phones to get to the fight.
New York Times, Opinion: The Trouble Began When #MeToo Became #ChurchToo, David French, right, Dec. 15, 2024. l When did we know that the #MeToo
moment was truly over?
At its most compelling, #MeToo tried to change a culture that both concealed and enabled the illegal abuse of women and imposed hypocritical double standards, holding women to one standard of behavior while celebrating and elevating unscrupulous men.
But events in 2024 have told us loudly and clearly that the moment has passed.
Perhaps it was when reports emerged that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice to be the next secretary of defense, had paid an accuser to settle a sexual assault claim. He denies wrongdoing, but his defense — that he had consensual sex with a married woman — was still dreadful. His philandering and mistreatment of women have been so egregious that his mother called him an “abuser of women,” in an email to him (she has since disavowed her statement) — and yet somehow his chances of being confirmed by the Senate appear to be increasing.
Perhaps it was when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is married to the actress Cheryl Hines, allegedly had an improper “personal relationship” via smartphone with Olivia Nuzzi, a political reporter who is much younger, and she lost her job while he was picked to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
But I think it happened earlier, when a jury found Donald Trump responsible for sexual abuse, and he was ultimately re-elected to the presidency. After years of rightfully arguing that combating sexual assault and sexual abuse can’t override due process, many conservatives not only disregarded the jury verdict, they actually reveled in how little his voters cared about the scandal, or just dismissed it as another instance of “lawfare” against Trump.
I distinctly remember the mood on the right when the #MeToo movement got going. There was a sense of schadenfreude. The morally bankrupt, sexualized culture of Hollywood and the liberal media had finally been exposed. For all their talk about feminism and respecting women, many famous liberals proved to be dangerous hypocrites — or much, much worse.
Yes, there was leakage into right-wing media. Roger Ailes was pushed out at Fox News in 2016, and Bill O’Reilly suffered the same fate after my Times colleagues Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt reported that O’Reilly or Fox had paid $13 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct made by five different women against him.
All that happened before my colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein. But the early wave of #MeToo revelations was heavily concentrated in traditionally liberal institutions.
When #MeToo became #ChurchToo, though, that was the beginning of the end. In a remarkably short period of time, the narrative changed. No longer was sexual abuse and exploitation a “Hollywood problem” or a “secular problem,” it was also an evangelical problem, and it was a problem in many of the most important institutions of the church.
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Politico, The Catholics in Trump’s administration could take GOP in whole new direction, Megan Messerly, Dec. 15, 2024. The president-elect has nominated at least a dozen Catholics to top positions.
Joe Biden will leave the White House in January as only the second Catholic to occupy it. But a number of Catholics are expected to soon fill the ranks of Donald Trump’s administration.
Trump, who was raised as a Presbyterian but now considers himself non-denominational, has nominated at least a dozen Catholics to top positions in his administration, including his own vice president JD Vance, left, a Catholic convert, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick for Health and Human Services Secretary.
Their faith could play a direct role in shaping public policy, from pro-union policies and new tariffs to expanding the child 
tax credit and more tightly regulating the food and drug industries — and also help carve a new path forward for the Republican Party.
In interviews, several conservative practicing Catholic leaders said they see a close alignment between many of Trump’s second-term policy priorities and a conservative read of Catholic social teaching, which goes far beyond abortion. It’s also focused on promoting marriage and having children, giving parents wide discretion on everything from school content to health care and empowering non-governmental institutions like churches and nonprofit organizations for social support.
“No one’s walking into the administration ready to mount a crusade or anything,” said Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank. But “there’s a very specific sort of Catholic paradigm that you may begin to see.”
It comes after decades of influence of a more individualistic evangelical Protestantism on the Republican Party that, among other things, strongly embraced individual liberty and free market capitalism.
“The market is not an end unto itself. The market has a purpose — and that is to create a free and flourishing society. If the family is not doing well, society is not doing well. We need to make sure our public policy is helping family to function,” Bovard added.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.
In his nearly decade of political prominence, Trump has already dramatically reshaped the GOP, and it’s clear that the Republican Party’s future likely won’t be found in Ronald Reagan’s three-legged stool of conservatism, which was fiscally conservative, socially conservative and hawkish.
Where Republicans have long been skeptical of government intervention, some in the party increasingly see the government as a tool to reshape social policy. Republicans who long embraced “pro-life” policies, like restricting abortion access and supporting crisis pregnancy centers, are now leaning into a broader set of what they call pro-family policies that range from tax policies encouraging people to get married and have children to restrictions on kids accessing online porn. They are also now starting to turn a skeptical eye toward big businesses, including Big Pharma, Big Ag and Big Tech.
New York Times, News Analysis: Why Wray’s Resignation May Signal a Shift in F.B.I. Tradition, Devlin Barrett, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher 
in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director changes with the administration.
Christopher A. Wray, right, had considered resigning as F.B.I. director before. More than once, confronted with angry demands from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, he contemplated calling it quits.
When Mr. Wray on Wednesday announced his intent to do so, it was because he believed staying on the job into a second Trump term risked significant disruptions to the work force and its mission.
Mr. Trump had already declared his plan to replace him with Kash Patel, a tough-talking loyalist who has vowed to force out bureau leaders and empty its Washington headquarters.
In conceding to the reality of raw power, Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director is more of a political post that changes with the administration.
For decades, F.B.I. directors have been appointed to 10-year terms to insulate them from the shifting winds of politics. Few F.B.I. directors stay a full decade, and the circumstances of Mr. Wray’s departure after seven years suggest that insulation has worn thin.
Washington Post, Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses, Jacob Bogage, Jacqueline Alemany and Jeff Stein, Dec. 14, 2024 Trump feuded with the mail agency in his first term. Privatizing it could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains.
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.
Trump has discussed his desire to overhaul the Postal Service at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition, the people said. Earlier this month, Trump also convened a group of transition officials to ask for their views on privatizing the agency, one of the people said.
Trump’s specific plans for overhauling the Postal Service were not immediately clear. But he feuded with the nation’s mail carrier as president in 2019, trying to force it to hand over key functions — including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients — to the Treasury Department.
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New York Times, Texas Attorney General Sues New York Doctor for Mailing Abortion Pills, J. David Goodman and Pam Belluck, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). The lawsuit appeared to be among the first attempts to stop doctors from mailing the medication to states that ban abortions.
The Texas attorney general opened a new front in the contentious battle over access to abortion this week by suing a New York doctor for sending abortion pills into Texas. It appeared to be among the first attempts to stop the mailing of such medication into states that ban abortion.
The lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton — filed on Thursday in state court in Collin County, north of Dallas — pits the laws of Texas, which has a near-total ban on abortion, against those of New York, where lawmakers have taken steps to shield doctors from out-of-state prosecution.
Under shield laws, states like New York will refuse to cooperate with attempts by other states to prosecute or sue abortion providers who prescribe and send pills across state lines. Such laws exist in eight states and have allowed doctors there to send more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to women in states with bans.
But legal experts say they expect Texas to try to pursue its case even if it is rebuffed by New York’s law. Such an effort could wind up in federal court, potentially imperiling the ability of women in other states with bans to receive abortion pills by mail, and becoming a major test of whether states can enforce contradictory laws across state lines.
“It’s a huge deal,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Shield doctors mailing pills into ban states was always going to be, I think, both the most consequential in terms of access to abortion and the highest risk.”
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). Aaron Siri, above, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.
That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.
Much of Mr. Siri’s work — including the polio petition filed in 2022 — has been on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit.
Washington Post, Polio survivor Mitch McConnell criticizes efforts to undermine vaccine, Maegan Vazquez, Dec. 14, 2024. The statement is the first time the Senate minority leader has publicly weighed in on the nomination process beyond acknowledging meeting with some of Trump’s picks for his administration.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who battled polio as a child, warned on Friday that anyone seeking a Senate confirmation should “steer clear” of associating with any efforts to undermine public confidence in the polio vaccine.Get the latest election news and results
“The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said in a statement. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
Several people Donald Trump has tapped for high-level roles in his incoming administration have expressed vaccine skepticism, most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the president-elect picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Washington Post on Friday confirmed that Aaron Siri, an ally of Kennedy’s who has a history of seeking to expand vaccine exemptions, petitioned the government in 2022 to reconsider its approval of a widely used polio vaccine. Siri has been working as a top adviser for Kennedy as he builds out his staffing and plans for HHS, a person with direct knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid told The Post. The New York Times first reported the polio petition.
Katie Miller, a Trump transition spokeswoman for Kennedy, said Siri “has never had a conversation about these petitions with Mr. Kennedy or any of the HHS nominees at any point.” The vaccine, she added, “should be investigated and studied appropriately. We should be as transparent as possible, as it relates to vaccines, but it should be available to the public.”
Washington Post, Opinion: Biden’s clemency for ‘kids for cash’ judge is a big mistake, Heather Long, Dec. 15, 2024. It’s also yet another reminder of how broken the presidential pardon process is.
My jaw dropped when I saw Michael Conahan, a former judge involved in a notorious “kids for cash” scandal in Pennsylvania, among the nearly 1,500 people President Joe Biden granted clemency to last week. The White House portrayed the mass clemency as a historic moment for justice. But Conahan’s commutation only underscores how broken the presidential pardon clemency is.
I don’t know much about most of the people on Biden’s list, but I do know a fair amount about Conahan. I started my career as a journalist in Pennsylvania and had a front-row seat when the scheme — one of the worst corruption scandals in U.S. juvenile justice history — came to light in 2008 and 2009.
Conahan and fellow judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. were accused of receiving cash kickbacks in exchange for helping to construct two for-profit juvenile detention facilities in Luzerne County and then sentencing young people to those facilities to keep them full. In total, they received more than $2.8 million, court documents show. They didn’t do this a handful of times. They did it to more than 2,500 juveniles over five years.
And the worst part? To maximize the payout, they often gave kids the harshest possible sentence. Young people who were first-time offenders and probably should have received a warning or community service would end up locked up. Some were younger than 13. What the judges did caused tremendous harm to thousands of young people and their families. One young man died by suicide. Many youths became depressed and dropped out of high school.
They finally got caught only because one distraught family contacted the Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit legal aid group in Philadelphia. In an early example of data sleuthing, the center compared the numbers with those of the 66 other counties in Pennsylvania and realized something very wrong was occurring in Luzerne County. It unearthed that half of these youngsters had no legal representation, and 60 percent were removed from their homes. That’s how the judges got away with it for so long: There was literally no one watching.
The revelations shook the state. The story broke as the Great Recession was in full swing, with high unemployment and home foreclosure rates. Luzerne County is a proud coal-mining community full of Catholic churches that sell delicious Polish pierogi out of their basements. But the community had fallen on hard times as coal’s reign was ending. The judges were getting rich by exploiting — and making harder — the struggles of working-class families.
In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison for racketeering conspiracy and Ciavarella to 28 years for racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other crimes. A lot of Pennsylvanians didn’t think that was sufficient punishment. I was deputy opinion editor of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg. We named the Juvenile Law Center Pennsylvania’s “Best of 2009” — our version of Time magazine’s person of the year award. The center not only uncovered the scandal; it also successfully pushed the state Supreme Court to clear the records of more than 2,200 of its victims.
The White House portrayed last week’s clemency decisions as helping nonviolent offenders who had done sufficient time and remediation. In 2020, as pandemic raged, Conahan successfully petitioned to be released to home monitoring in Florida due to a high risk of complications if he contracted the virus. This year, he sought an early end to his sentence. Now 72, Conahan was supposed to serve until the summer of 2026. He told the judge he had reformed and helped others in prison with their cases. But Senior U.S. District Judge Robert D. Mariani denied Conahan’s request, arguing that he had done “irrevocable harm” to his victims and that releasing him early “would undermine respect for the law and would not adequately deter such conduct.”
When I reached out to the White House, an administration official said this wasn’t a case-by-case decision. The Biden team set broad criteria, and Conahan matched them. The plan was clemency for nonviolent offenders who were seen as low-risk and had been released to home confinement after a legal review process.
That explanation isn’t going down well with many in Pennsylvania. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro called the clemency “absolutely wrong.” Some victims are speaking out in shock. There’s similar disbelief in Illinois that Rita Crundwell — the former comptroller of the city of Dixon who orchestrated a $54 million embezzlement scheme — was also on Biden’s sentence-reduction list. Crundwell was supposed to serve time until 2028.
Washington Post, Trump’s CDC pick wouldn’t let go of false theory that vaccines cause autism, Lena H. Sun, Fenit Nirappil and Aaron Schaffer, Dec. 15, 2024. Dave Weldon’s long record of promoting the disproven link between vaccines and autism raises concerns among some public health experts about his ability to run the CDC.
The world’s most respected infectious-disease agency needed a new leader. Anti-vaccine activists knew just the man: Dave Weldon, a Florida physician and former seven-term Republican congressman who had for years expressed concerns about the safety of vaccines.You are what you read. Reveal your 2024 reader type with Newsprint.
The year was 2017.
Weldon didn’t get the job then, but, seven years later, President-elect Donald Trump has tapped the 71-year-old former Army doctor to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC is charged with protecting the United States from health threats at home and abroad. That includes making vaccine recommendations — work that has come under fire from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime vaccine skeptic whom Trump has picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which has oversight over the CDC.
Kennedy proposed Weldon for the job, according to a person involved in the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private conversation.
Weldon’s past record of promoting the disproven link between vaccines and autism in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence attesting to the safety and efficacy of vaccines raises concerns among some public health experts about his ability to run the CDC. If confirmed, Weldon could undermine confidence in the lifesaving shots at a time when infectious-disease threats such as measles and whooping cough are on the rise, they say.
Washington Post, Opinion: McConnell has the chutzpah to complain about Trump’s ‘America First,’ Jennifer Rubin, Dec. 15, 2024. Mitch McConnell bears great responsibility for the return of Trump and his foreign policy.
Without minimizing the many factors responsible for reelecting the most unfit presidential candidate in U.S. history, we must not forget the singular role played in 2021 by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) in preventing then-President Donald Trump’s removal from office in his second impeachment trial, thereby enabling his return to office. It is therefore grotesquely hypocritical for McConnell now to bemoan the danger to the nation posed by the revival of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
McConnell recently told the Financial Times: “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II.” He added, “Even the slogan is the same: ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.” He continued:
The cost of deterrence is considerably less than the cost of war. To most American voters, I think the simple answer is, “Let’s stay out of it.” That was the argument made in the ’30s, and that just won’t work. Thanks to Reagan, we know what does work — not just saying peace through strength, but demonstrating it.
McConnell strongly advocated for U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, a position starkly at odds with Trump’s insistence on “ending” the war immediately and scolding the Biden administration and Ukraine for “escalating” the war.
McConnell’s posturing rings hollow, considering not only his role in rescuing Trump from conviction after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but also his opposition to Trump’s removal in the first impeachment trial, for abusing the office of the presidency to try to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help his reelection bid. In that impeachment trial, McConnell went so far as to block the introduction of evidence and disingenuously argue that Trump’s threats to withhold U.S. aid merely concerned the “timing” of aid.
Washington Post, Opinion: Progressives should defend Biden’s legacy to protect their future, E.J. Dionne Jr.,,right, Dec. 15, 2024. Trump’s victory should 
not be used to erase Biden’s policy achievements.
Besides the president and his staff, who should care about how Joe Biden’s policy legacy is judged? Everyone who believes that government should invest in the future and defend the interests of workers and those stuck at the bottom of the income heap — that’s who.Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
The trickiest problem for Democrats and progressives in the coming months will not be finding a new electoral strategy. There’s plenty of time for that, and the 2024 outcome was close enough to allow multiple paths to the White House. A far more pressing imperative is to prevent Donald Trump’s victory from discrediting Biden’s genuinely impressive accomplishments and the course he set for the country, which was broadly correct.
Legacies are not just about bragging rights or a politician’s self-esteem. How a president is judged can affect the direction of policy for decades. Public anger over Herbert Hoover’s mismanagement of the Great Depression opened the way for the dominance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism for a half-century — even when Republicans held power. Frustration over inflation under Jimmy Carter led to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 counterrevolution in favor of lower and less progressive taxes, regulatory restraint, and a celebration of the social role played by wealthy entrepreneurs.
Roosevelt and Reagan had advantages that Biden doesn’t. FDR won four straight elections. He was succeeded after his death by Harry S. Truman, his vice president, who got elected in his own right in 1948. And voters endorsed Reagan’s direction by electing his vice president, George H.W. Bush, in 1988.
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Impeached Over Martial Law Crisis, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, Victoria Kim and Qasim Nauman, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). Celebrations broke out in Seoul after lawmakers voted to oust President Yoon Suk Yeol, right. He vowed to fight removal in the country’s Constitutional Court.
South Korea’s National Assembly voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday, suspending him from office after his stunning declaration of martial law earlier this month caused widespread outrage and plunged the country into a constitutional crisis.
With the impeachment vote, Mr. Yoon has been suspended from office.
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New York Times, How the President Alienated South Korea, One Group at a Time, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles, Dec. 15, , (print ed.). Ever since Yoon Suk Yeol took office, the public had been infuriated with near-constant scandals and unpopular decisions. Angry rice farmers. Striking doctors. A $2,200 Dior bag.
South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, may have sealed his political fate on Dec. 3, when he declared martial law, triggering public outrage. And on Saturday, the National Assembly voted to impeach Mr. Yoon, who was then suspended from office.
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Washington Post, In Ohio, an immigrant community prepares for Trump’s crackdown, Joanna Slater, Dec. 15, 2024. President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations could target places like Painesville, a small city in northeastern Ohio whose population has been transformed by immigration.
Veronica Isabel Dahlberg looked out at dozens of familiar faces gathered in a new community center on a recent Monday evening, all of them anxious for answers she didn’t have.
What would happen to the immigrants and farmworkers in this swath of northeastern Ohio?You are what you read. Reveal your 2024 reader type with Newsprint.
Dahlberg, who has worked with the community for nearly three decades, couldn’t say whether President-elect Donald Trump would follow through on his pledge to carry out mass deportations. But she reminded the audience what his first term looked like here.
The ramped-up deportations, not of “bad guys” or criminals, but mothers and fathers pulled over for routine traffic stops. The people so frightened of being detained they sought sanctuary in local churches. The raids on a flower nursery and meat processing plant in the region.
What was coming would be at least as bad and possibly much worse, Dahlberg thought. She had read about Trump’s promises to build detention camps and use the military to expand deportations. She wondered who she could count on to help. As the head of HOLA Ohio, a local nonprofit, she had built relationships with elected officials, employers, police officers and school administrators.
“I don’t believe that they would just stand by and let our community get destroyed,” she said.
She paused. “But I could be wrong.”
Across the country, immigration advocates are racing to prepare for a crackdown on unauthorized immigrants that could be unlike anything the nation has witnessed in decades. Trump has promised to deport the country’s undocumented residents, a population estimated to number 11 million people as of 2022, according to the most recent data available. Such an operation would face considerable hurdles: during Trump’s first term, deportations peaked at 347,240 in the 2019 fiscal year.
The consequences of Trump’s new push will unfold not just in areas close to the southern border or in major metropolises, but in places like Painesville, a small city of 20,000 near the shore of Lake Erie whose population has been transformed in recent decades by immigration, primarily from Mexico.
An estimated 130,000 undocumented immigrants live in Ohio. Most of those in Painesville have been in the country for more than a decade, mirroring the national trend, and nearly all of them live in “mixed-status” families — families that also include U.S.-born children, naturalized citizens or legal immigrants.
For such families, deportations nearly always separate parents from their children. Dahlberg saw it happen dozens of times in Trump’s first term. Last month, during her presentation at the community center, she reviewed the details of those cases.
Washington Post, Middle East Conflict: Biden team uses fall of Assad to defend Mideast record; critics say it doesn’t eclipse horrors in Gaza, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Dec. 15, 2024. The Biden administration is seeking to reframe a beleaguered policy as a success.
The White House is seizing on the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to mount a new defense of its often criticized policy in Gaza and the wider Middle East, arguing that President Joe Biden’s staunch support of Israel and his approach to the region paved the way for events that ultimately led to Assad’s ouster and could bring a new era of cooperation.Get the latest election news and results
Biden’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza is viewed by progressives and a growing number of Democrats as a major foreign policy failure, with some in the party saying his unwillingness to rein in Israel and avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza will tarnish his long-term legacy. Biden and his aides are now working to reframe his largely unconditional support of Israel as a resounding success, saying it led to the weakening of two powerful militant groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, which in turn made the fall of Assad possible.
Many Middle East experts and analysts agree that the Biden administration deserves credit for preventing an all-out regional war that could have drawn in the United States directly, and for providing Israel with military aid that helped it degrade Hezbollah and Hamas. But they also say the administration’s narrative assigns too much credit to the United States for events that were largely driven by actors in the region.
And humanitarian groups say that however beneficial Assad’s fall, it does not eclipse the death and devastation in Gaza. During the war, the Biden administration repeatedly said Israel was not doing nearly enough to limit civilian casualties, but did little to pressure the country to change course. Israel has now sealed off northern Gaza and may be preparing for an indefinite occupation there, diplomats said, while some 2 million Palestinians are crammed into the southern half of the tiny enclave amid destitute conditions as aid remains sharply limited.
Washington Post, Turkey using ‘war on terror’ tactics, such as abductions and secret detentions, on critics in other countries, Greg Miller, Dec. 15, 2024. Turkey has drawn extensively from the U.S. counterterrorism post-9/11 playbook to go after exiled political enemies, in particular the Gulen movement.
NBC News, Russian oil tankers split in two by strong storms in the Black Sea, Dec. 15, 2024.
Enforcer News, Massive Russian Ships SINK In Black Sea; MAJOR Rescue Operation Underway, Dec. 15, 2024. Today, 2 Massive Russian Ships have sunk in the Black Sea resulting in a major disaster for the Russians as they mount a full-scale rescue operation to save the men onboard.
The ships were carrying thousands of tons of petroleum (estimated at 5,000 tons apiece)which if fully released into the sea, would result in the worst disaster in the history of the Black Sea.
Putin is furious and demanding answers from top officials. We also received news that Ukraine attacked the special forces headquarters in Grozny, Chechnya with a full size Ukrainian FoxBat drone which evaded all of Ramzan Kadyrov's air defenses. Meanwhile we also received news from the Ukrainians that the North Korean soldiers are taking extremely heavy losses as they begin to retreat/run in major swarms from the frontline. We also got some news coming out of Syria as well. Please like and subscribe for more daily short war updates!
Trump Transition News, Commentary
New York Times, Devin Nunes, Pugnacious Trump Loyalist, to Lead Espionage Advisory Board, Charlie Savage, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). As chair of the House Intelligence Committee (shown above), he attacked the Russia inquiry and Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment. Now, Mr. Nunes runs Mr. Trump’s social media company.
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Saturday that he would appoint Devin Nunes, a former member of Congresswho had used his role as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to try to delegitimize the Trump-Russia investigation, to head an independent advisory board on espionage policy.
The organization — the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — dates back to the early Cold War and consists of private citizens with top-level security clearances who are supposed to help the White House analyze spy agency effectiveness and planning. Its members do not need Senate confirmation, so presidents can pick whomever they want for it.
In a statement, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Nunes — who is currently the chief executive of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the Truth Social platform — for his counterinvestigation into the Trump-Russia inquiry in 2017-18, when Mr. Nunes led the House Intelligence Committee as a Republican congressman from California.
“While continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group, Devin will draw on his experience as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Mr. Trump wrote in his announcement.
New York Times, Trump Names Richard Grenell for ‘Special Missions’ Role, Elizabeth Williamson, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). A combative loyalist and the president-elect’s former ambassador to Germany, Mr. Grenell had hoped to be secretary of state.
President-elect Donald J. Trump named Richard Grenell, his former ambassador to Germany and former acting director of national intelligence, as his “envoy for special missions,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.
A loyalist known for unbridled social media attacks on Mr. Trump’s perceived critics and many others, Mr. Grenell led a shambolic effort to challenge the 2020 election results in Nevada after Mr. Trump’s loss, and he has lobbied assiduously for a diplomatic job in the new administration.
He got his start in government before Mr. Trump’s rise, as a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations under multiple presidents. But his online toxicity, foreign business contacts and tendency toward biting personal attacks on political opponents and the media turned off many centrist conservatives, helping propel him toward Mr. Trump, a man he denounced in 2016 as “dangerous.”
“Ric will continue to fight for Peace through Strength, and always put AMERICA FIRST,” Mr. Trump wrote in his announcement.
Mr. Grenell did not immediately reply to a texted question about his priorities for the role, which does not currently exist. Mr. Trump outlined it as: “Ric will work in some of the hottest spots around the World, including Venezuela and North Korea.”
The role is a far cry from secretary of state, the job Mr. Grenell coveted, but to which Mr. Trump plans to appoint Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican from Florida. Being named for a lower-profile White House envoy job could help Mr. Grenell avoid persistent questions about his paid work for foreign clients, including luxury hotel development projects he has pursued in the Balkans with Jared Kushner, the president-elect’s son-in-law.
During the first Trump administration, Mr. Grenell was ambassador to Germany. His abrasiveness and partisanship alarmed diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly after he told Breitbart London that he planned to “empower” German conservatives opposing “the failed policies of the left.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump named Mr. Grenell to temporarily replace the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, whom Mr. Trump had fired.
New York Times, In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump, Theodore Schleifer and David Yaffe-Bellany, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump.
The $1 million donations came gradually — and then all at once.
Meta. Amazon. OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Each of these Silicon Valley companies or their leaders promised to support President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural committee with seven-figure checks over the past week, often accompanied by a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee.
The procession of tech leaders who traveled to hobnob with Mr. Trump face-to-face included Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and Sergey Brin, a Google founder, who together dined with Mr. Trump on Thursday. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, shared a meal with Mr. Trump on Friday. And Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, planned to meet with Mr. Trump in the next few days.
This was the week when many tech companies and their top executives, as reluctant as they may have been, acknowledged the reality of getting business done in Mr. Trump’s Washington. With their donations, visits and comments, they joined a party that has already raged for a month, as a cohort of influential Silicon Valley billionaires, led by Elon Musk, began running parts of Mr. Trump’s transition after endorsing him in the campaign.
While businesses frequently try to get on an incoming president’s good side, the frenzy of tech activity stood out from other industries. Until President Obama’s administration, the tech industry had largely stayed aloof from politics. Some wrote just small checks for Mr. Trump’s first inauguration.
New York Times, Trump’s Night-Owl Tendencies Set Stage for After-Hours Diplomacy, Michael D. Shear,.Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). At Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Trump has been hosting diplomatic dinners, announcing cabinet picks and texting his aides — all after the sun goes down.
It was past midnight in Florida this week when President-elect Donald J. Trump decided to mock Justin Trudeau on social media, calling the prime minister of America’s neighbor the “governor” of “the Great State of Canada.”
The middle-of-the-night jest was the latest reminder that Mr. Trump, a well-known night owl, seems to rev up after the sun goes down. He has been the president-elect (again) for 37 days, but he has been most active in the evenings, hosting lavish dinners, announcing nominations and firing off texts to his aides.
Of the more than 80 personnel announcements Mr. Trump has made since Election Day, 45 have been announced in social media posts and emails that he has sent after 6 p.m. Many have come after 10 p.m., prompting a wave of social media chatter and television coverage that sometimes continues throughout the night and into the early morning hours.
New York Times, Why Democrats Lost More Seats in Vermont Than Any Other State, Jenna Russell, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). Even though Kamala Harris won the state, voters ousted more than two dozen Democratic legislators, who they felt had not addressed an affordability crisis.
It was no surprise that most voters in Vermont rejected Donald J. Trump on Election Day, favoring Vice President Kamala Harris by a margin of more than 30 points.
But lower down the ballot, in a sweeping show of dissatisfaction, voters cast out more than two dozen Democratic state lawmakers. The outcome eliminated Democratic supermajorities in the Vermont Legislature and put the small, rural state at the leading edge of the anti-incumbent wave that swept the country this election.
More Democrats lost seats in Vermont than in any other state. The results stunned lawmakers, set off soul-searching and left even some stalwart Democratic voters elated.
“It was a revolution,” said John McCormick, 81, of Bristol, who helped a Republican candidate campaign for, and win, a seat in Vermont’s State Senate. “I’m a full-blown Democrat and environmentalist, and I didn’t just vote for him — I did everything I could to get him elected.”
New York Times, Trump Transition: F.B.I. Director to Step Down, Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Wray told F.B.I. employees he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, right, told bureau employees on Wednesday that he intended in January, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.
Mr. Wray made the disclosure while addressing employees Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Wray added that he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.
Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.
Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.
But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.
His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by searching the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.
“He invaded Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump told NBC News in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.
In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.
His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”
“If Kash gets in, he’ll be taking somebody’s place, and that somebody is the man you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with NBC News, referring to Mr. Wray.
Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.
At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.
Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.
The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.
Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.
After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.
“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. 
But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel, right (and author of the book Government Gangsters, shown at left, is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.
Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sought to weigh in on F.B.I. operations and at times expressed frustration that presidents typically stayed out of the bureau’s business.
“I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in 2017. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
Politico, Opinion: You Should Worry About Kash Patel Running the FBI, Ankush Khardori, Dec. 14, 2024. The days of J. Edgar Hoover may be over, but Patel’s nomination is deeply worrisome all the same.t national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.
Some key pieces appear to be snapping neatly into place for Donald Trump’s much-feared prosecutorial revenge tour as the year draws to a close.
Trump’s new nominee to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, is a staunch loyalist who predicted last year that after Trump’s reelection, “the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones.” Trump told NBC News that the members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail” (even as he claimed that he would not direct his appointees to prosecute them). And his plan to install Kash Patel as FBI director was made easier after Christopher Wray, himself a Trump appointee, announced he would resign despite having more than two years left on his term.
Trump’s decision to nominate Patel, right, has proven particularly controversial, since his principal qualification appears to be his sycophancy toward Trump. (A Trump transition spokesperson said, “Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic director.”)
Many observers, including former federal law enforcement officials, oppose Patel’s nomination on the grounds that he would likely use the FBI to pursue Trump’s political opponents and that he might substantially corrupt the culture and professionalism of the bureau. To some, Patel calls to mind the specter of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director whose nearly 50-year stint running the agency until 1972 was marked by egregious abuses of power — including illegal surveillance, blackmail and the harassment of political dissidents.
Patel clearly lacks the qualifications, experience and temperament to lead the agency. But how worried should the American public really be about him at the helm of the FBI?
The truth is that there are stronger internal and external safeguards in place against law enforcement abuses than during the Hoover era. He will indeed face some constraints because of the culture and bureaucracy of the FBI. But they may not contain him. And he will have plenty of opportunity to damage the bureau and its work — and to use and abuse the FBI for political ends. His nomination poses a considerable and unjustifiable risk to the country.
On paper, there is no way to justify Patel’s ascension. He spent a few years as a federal prosecutor focused on national security and was an aide in Congress and the first Trump administration on intelligence and national security issues. Even setting aside the decidedly mixed and often controversial results of that work (more on that below), Patel has no experience managing anything remotely like the FBI’s sprawling bureaucracy — 35,000 employees, 55 field offices throughout the country and more than 60 offices overseas.
What he does have is years spent endorsing Trump’s conspiracy theories and railing against many of Trump’s perceived enemies in the “deep state” — often in deeply unserious appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, on other conservative media outlets and on the campaign trail.
Those appearances — replete with comments from Patel that would disqualify him from consideration for the post in pretty much any other era — have since become a central part of the case against him.
He has frequently denigrated the employees he hopes to lead — perhaps most infamously, when he said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen [it] the next day as a museum of the deep state” and “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” He has accused the FBI and Justice Department of “politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes” and questioned “how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore.”
Patel went even further in his book, Government Gangsters, in which he describes the FBI as “an existential threat to our republican form of government.”
Still, Patel’s stated interest in a full-scale overhaul of the FBI faces some obvious challenges, even setting aside the fanciful notion of immediately shutting down the bureau’s headquarters.
“It takes a year to learn the place, and then only at a surface level,” said a former senior FBI official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“The truth is that even the most intelligent, thoughtful, engaged, diligent director can’t really bend that place to his will,” the former official told me. “It’s a hard culture and a good culture. Folks are law-abiding, and they’re process-oriented.”
The fear that Patel would use the FBI to go after Trump’s political opponents is also well-founded given Patel’s own public statements. Perhaps most notably, he has threatened to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” He added, “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
He has since tried to walk those comments back, but the rhetoric alone ought to be disqualifying for a position that demands the confidence of the American public.
According to the Trump transition spokesperson, “Kash Patel is going to end the weaponization of law enforcement. The FBI will target crime, not individuals with Kash leading the bureau.”
Patel has also previously publicly zeroed in on some of Trump’s most prominent antagonists. Among others, he has suggested that Attorney General Merrick Garland, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Anthony Fauci should be investigated or potentially arrested. So far as I can tell from the rhetoric, the legal theories underlying Patel’s claims are at best highly dubious, if not transparently ridiculous.
He has frequently denigrated the employees he hopes to lead — perhaps most infamously, when he said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen [it] the next day as a museum of the deep state” and “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” He has accused the FBI and Justice Department of “politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes” and questioned “how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore.”
Patel went even further in his book, “Government Gangsters,” in which he describes the FBI as “an existential threat to our republican form of government.”
Still, Patel’s stated interest in a full-scale overhaul of the FBI faces some obvious challenges, even setting aside the fanciful notion of immediately shutting down the bureau’s headquarters.
“It takes a year to learn the place, and then only at a surface level,” said a former senior FBI official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“The truth is that even the most intelligent, thoughtful, engaged, diligent director can’t really bend that place to his will,” the former official told me. “It’s a hard culture and a good culture. Folks are law-abiding, and they’re process-oriented.”
The fear that Patel would use the FBI to go after Trump’s political opponents is also well-founded given Patel’s own public statements. Perhaps most notably, he has threatened to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” He added, “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
He has since tried to walk those comments back, but the rhetoric alone ought to be disqualifying for a position that demands the confidence of the American public.
According to the Trump transition spokesperson, “Kash Patel is going to end the weaponization of law enforcement. The FBI will target crime, not individuals with Kash leading the bureau.”
Patel has also previously publicly zeroed in on some of Trump’s most prominent antagonists. Among others, he has suggested that Attorney General Merrick Garland, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Anthony Fauci should be investigated or potentially arrested. So far as I can tell from the rhetoric, the legal theories underlying Patel’s claims are at best highly dubious, if not transparently ridiculous.
Ankush Khardori is a senior writer for POLITICO Magazine and a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, where he specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime. He has also worked in the private sector on complex commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. His column, Rules of Law, offers an unvarnished look a
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the 
potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
New York Times, Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Pete Hegseth, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). After President-elect Trump was persuaded to stick with his embattled choice to lead the Pentagon, a swarm of supporters mobilized to pressure senators.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon was battered by damaging headlines: Drinking. Extramarital affairs. An allegation of sexual assault, which he denied.
Republican senators — emboldened after tanking Mr. Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the scandal-ridden Matt Gaetz — were going public with their concerns. Mr. Trump was getting sick of hearing about it all, and he told confidants he was serious about picking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to replace him.
But within 48 hours, Mr. Trump had changed his mind. He was going to see if Mr. Hegseth could survive.
People close to the president-elect had been telling him that this was a moment that would test his power as he prepared to return to Washington. It would be catastrophic, they argued, if he allowed Republican senators, like Joni Ernst of Iowa, to obstruct his mandate.
Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.)A handful of Silicon Valley executives could help transform the country’s largest bureaucracy — and benefit themselves while trying.
A culture clash is headed for Washington that will pit the risk-embracing, fast-first nature of Silicon Valley against the lumbering bureaucracy of the country’s largest federal agency.
Donald Trump has already tapped billionaire finance executives to be Navy secretary and the Pentagon’s No. 2, and startup world successes are in the running for other Pentagon posts. If they all make it, the long-frustrated kings of the Valley who bristle at the doddering pace of Pentagon decision-making could force real change in the building — and benefit themselves while trying.
They’ll be tasked with building weapons faster, fixing a broken shipbuilding system and matching China’s tech prowess. And while every new administration tries to clean up the Pentagon, this crew of outsiders has animated the tech sector.
“A lot of us are hoping there’s a revolution coming,” Joe Lonsdale, founder of software company Palantir and startup investor said at a recent defense forum, “where we hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy.”
The Trump team has worked to fill the Pentagon with picks such as Stephen Feinberg, a wealthy investor with no experience inside the building, as deputy secretary of Defense. Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, is being considered for the Pentagon’s top research and engineering job, as POLITICO first reported. Trae Stephens, co-founder and chair of Anduril Industries, is also in the mix for a high-ranking job at the Pentagon.
The executives all have investments and stakes in multiple companies working with the Pentagon and will need to determine how they detangle a web of potential conflicts of interest — such as Anduril’s drone development or Palantir’s software platforms the Pentagon is helping fund.
New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History, David Leonhardt, Graphics by Albert Sun, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered the country, government data shows.
The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.
That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 11, 2024. The terrifying implications of pardoning insurrectionists who killed and maimed…
This past weekend, in his Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker (shown above), Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to pardon the people who attacked our Capitol, killing five civilians and three police officers and sending more than 140 cops to the hospital.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said of pardoning Jan. 6 killers. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Most media and political observers and commentators appear to be of the opinion that this is simply Trump’s way of thanking the people who made what he considers a heroic effort to keep him in office through violence. That would be bad enough, but experts at The Critical Internet Studies Institute are worried that there may be a much more sinister explanation.
If they’re right, it would also go a long way toward explaining his picks for Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and FBI director.
This theory, increasingly shared among counterterrorism experts and people who monitor violent rightwing extremist groups, suggests that the real reason Trump would do the pardons (and is unafraid of discussing them) is because he’s recruiting. And you don’t need to go back to 1930s Europe to find examples of how that could work.
Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, for example, has often used non-state actors to intimidate and even kill his political enemies. The most well-known is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club, aka “Putin’s Angels,” run by a man who calls himself “the Surgeon.”
They helped Putin invade Crimea and Ukraine, but most of their activity is against protestors, “communists” (anybody opposing Putin), and the queer community in Russia.
Similarly, five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing Hungarian “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”
Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”
Language strikingly similar, if not milder, to Trump‘s way of describing Black people, immigrants, and liberals.
Orbán refused to condemn Bayer or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white, Orbán-supporting Hungarian militias.
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Armed rightwing militia groups in the United States have been on a recruiting jag of their own in anticipation of Trump’s presidency, according to press reports and terrorism experts. For example, Reuters notes:
“The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.”
Similarly, Wired magazine reports that Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), is preparing for something like war:
“’This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,’ says Seddon. ‘Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.’”
El Pais tells the story of armed militia groups who are looking forward to action on America’s southern border when Trump allows it. Referencing them, Tom Homan, who Trump has appointed as his “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:
“There are thousands of retired agents, border patrols, retired military personnel who want to come and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do deportation operations.”
They also cite a Wired article that quotes Tim Foley, head of Arizona Border Recon, a white “civilian patrol group,” as saying they’re doing outreach:
“We’re in talks with a few different people. We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”
It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.
Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:
“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
More recently, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth, left, asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”
Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”
Our timid national media refuse to even consider such a savage scenario, but America should brace itself as Trump has not let up on his violent rhetoric and neither have his followers. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
“You know, when you listen to these comments and watch these videos, what you are forced to consider is the message that Donald Trump is sending, because it is not just to the January 6th defendants.
“It is to the people he hopes will support him in this next term, and the message is: ‘Support me at all costs, use violence, commit crimes, I will take care of you.’
“I find that to be deeply frightening.”
January 6th taught us that Trump and some of the people following him are deadly serious and willing to use violence and even murder to achieve their goals.
America needs to get ready. President Biden should be preparing (or reassuring) us. And, if the latter, explaining why.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, in a red dress, addressing the Republican National Convention.Kimberly Guilfoyle has been engaged to Donald Trump Jr. since late 2020 (Associated Press photo by J. Scott Applewhite).
New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley, Dec. 11, 2024. The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr., Ms. Guilfoyle’s fiancé, has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida.
It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly — the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece.
The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson.
The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as “incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on” with a “stunning ‘it girl.’”
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, 46, did not return a request for comment on his relationship with Ms. Anderson, or on his engagement with Ms. Guilfoyle, to whom he has been betrothed since late 2020. Ms. Anderson, 38, also did not return requests for comment.
In his announcement of her posting to Greece, the president-elect called Ms. Guilfoyle “a close friend and ally,” but made no mention of her relationship with his son.
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States,” the elder Mr. Trump wrote, in a post on Truth Social.ImageBettina Anderson, wearing a white dress with a green floral pattern, sits on a bench in front of a pink and green artworkBettina Anderson was recently seen with Donald Trump Jr. in Palm Beach celebrating her birthday.Credit...Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images for FIGUE
The suggestions of a love triangle have been swirling for several months, including in July, at the Republican National Convention, where Ms. Anderson was spotted sitting behind Mr. Trump — and Ms. Guilfoyle — in a red dress. Ms. Guilfoyle spoke at the convention, saying, “Donald Trump will never stop fighting for you” about his father.
But speculation about Ms. Anderson’s closeness with the president-elect’s son intensified in September, with reports that the pair were seen kissing during a brunch not long before. (Adding a layer of intrigue were various reports that Ms. Anderson was a friend of his ex-wife, Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children.)
Suspicions about the durability of Mr. Trump and Ms. Guilfoyle’s engagement were given more fodder when Ms. Guilfoyle did not appear in a post-election family portrait, which did feature Vanessa Trump and their children. (Melania Trump — the once and future first lady — was also absent, though the photo did feature Elon Musk.)
New York Times, Musk’s Foundation Gave Away Less Money Than Required in 2023, David A. Fahrenthold and Theodore Schleifer, Dec. 12, 2024. Private foundations must donate 5 percent of their assets every year. Elon Musk’s enormous charity missed that standard for three consecutive years.
For the third year in a row, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation did not give away enough of its money.
And it did not miss the mark by a small amount.
New tax filings show that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the amount it was required to give away in 2023. Now, Mr. Musk has until the end of the year to distribute that money, or he will be required to pay a sizable penalty to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk, in his new role as a leader of what President-elect Donald J. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, is promising to downsize and rearrange the entire federal government — including the I.R.S. But the tax records show he has struggled to meet a basic I.R.S. rule that is required of all charity leaders, no matter how small or big their foundations.
Mr. Musk's is one of the biggest. His foundation has more than $9 billion in assets, including millions of shares in Tesla, his electric vehicle company. By law, all private foundations must give away 5 percent of those assets every year. The aim is to ensure that wealthy donors like Mr. Musk use these organizations to help the public instead of simply benefiting from the tax deductions they are afforded.
New York Times, Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous, Lisa Friedman, Dec. 12, 2024. Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.
Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels.
His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
The argument offered by Mr. Wright, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to run the Energy Department, ignores the fact that wind, solar and other renewable energy are cleaner and increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency says clean energy is coming online globally at an “unprecedented rate” and will play a significant role in the future. In some places, renewable energy has been able to displace fossil fuels.
New York Times, Health Insurance Workers Fearful Amid Public Anger After Slaying of C.E.O., Reed Abelson, Mitch Smith, Katie Benner and Amy Julia Harris, Dec. 12, 2024. The fatal shooting last week of an executive on the streets of New York City plunged his family members and colleagues into grief. For rank-and-file employees across the health insurance industry, the killing has left them with an additional emotion: fear, with many frightened for their own safety and feeling under attack for their work.
Health insurance companies have increased security measures since the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, and as an outpouring of online rage toward the industry has followed. Health care leaders have spoken with frustration about feeling vilified, and in the Minneapolis suburbs where United is headquartered, police officers stepped up protection of the company’s offices.
“Clearly the employees have been shaken,” said Mayor Brad Wiersum of Minnetonka, who said the city was working “just to provide that reassurance and that security, to let people know that we are going to do everything we can to keep them safe.”
One UnitedHealthcare worker who processes claims described being cleareyed about the American health care system’s shortcomings, but also believes that she and her colleagues did their best to help patients within the limits of that system. Like most workers interviewed, she did not want to be named because, given the reaction after Mr. Thompson’s killing, she feared for her own safety.
The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo, Dec. 10, 2024. There is confidence in the outcome: ‘They’re all going to get confirmed.’
It didn’t take long for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to realize she had stepped in it. Shortly after Ernst offered a chilly reception to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head the department of defense, she recognized she was in trouble politically, with grassroots Republicans calling for her head.
“How do I make this go away?” a flabbergasted Ernst said to an intermediary, according to a top Donald Trump adviser who received the message.
The answer was obvious to everyone involved. All Ernst had to do was back away from her tacit opposition to Hegseth and the MAGA dogs would stop baying.
Sure enough, on Monday, Ernst changed her tune—not explicitly saying she’d vote for Hegseth’s confirmation but saying she supported him in the process.
By then, the Trump team was feeling good, not just about her vote but about the slate of confirmations to come.
“It sent a message,” according to a top Trump adviser involved in the discussions with Ernst who relayed them to The Bulwark. “Nobody wants to be Joni.”
The desire not to get in MAGA’s crosshairs has spread throughout much of the Senate Republican conference in recent days. It’s the result of both a remarkable swelling of grassroots energy to demand party loyalty from GOP officials and the belief—among some members themselves—that it would send a bad message to see a second Trump nominee go down after Matt Gaetz’s failed bid for attorney general.
Leading that charge has been Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP conference chair, who’s tasked with charting the course for his party’s messaging in the chamber (a post for which he beat Ernst last month). Cotton, a vet like Ernst and Hegseth, was increasingly annoyed with political chatter that the Senate was essentially duty-bound to vote down one of Trump’s picks because of tradition (Gaetz never made it to a vote).
So Cotton directed staff to research the history of Senate confirmations and he quickly concluded that the GOP conference needed to support not just Hegseth, but all of Trump’s controversial nominees
.“I expect our Republican Senate is going to confirm all of President Trump's nominees,” he said Monday morning. In a separate post, he added: “Of the 72 cabinet secretary nominees since the Clinton transition, only 2 nominees have ever received NO votes from the president-elect’s party. No one should be surprised that the Republican Senate will confirm President Trump’s nominees.”
Cotton’s bravado and Ernst’s buckling underscored the choice facing 53 Republican senators in the weeks ahead: board the Trump train or get tied to the tracks.
As of early this week, an emboldened Trump team and top supporters believe that 50-plus members will get on board not just for Hegseth’s confirmation but for Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (secretary of health and human services), and Kash Patel (FBI director) as well.
“They’re all going to get confirmed,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl.) told The Bulwark. “We’re going to respect the fact that he [Trump] got 77 million votes, respect the fact that he won in a landslide, respect that he’s the president.”
Donald Trump on NBC's Meet the Press on December 8, 2024.
Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail, Staff Report, Dec. 8-9, 2024. In his first sit-down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he still plans to pardon those convicted for their role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while he said that the members of committee tasked with investigating it “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
“So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded, adding that he thinks “everybody” on the January 6th Committee should go to jail. Cheney served as vice chair of the January 6th Committee, which concluded in 2022 with a criminal referral to the Justice Department over Trump’s role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump said that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, but “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
In the wide ranging interview, Trump said that he plans to issue pardons to the January 6th rioters on his first day in office, adding that many of those convicted have been in prison “for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump also vowed action on the first day in office to end birthright citizenship, and he reiterated plans for mass deportations.
Welker challenged him on his ability to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants, given the tremendous resources needed to carry out such a plan.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump did say that he wanted to “work something out” to come up with a plan in how to handle “dreamers,” who were children when they were brought to the United States illegally.
Welker asked Trump about his previous pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden.
“Where did I say that?” Trump said.
Welker noted that he posted on Truth Social on June 12, 2023.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to go after Joe Biden?” Welker asked him.
Trump told her that he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
Pressed again on whether he would go after Biden, Trump said, “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump defended his plans for mass tariffs, saying that he doesn’t believe economists who predict costs will be passed on to consumers. But he told Welker that he cannot guarantee that Americans won’t end up paying more.
He said, “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation.”
Then-U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) helping preside as members of the House Jan. 6 Investigative Committee.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative, said President-elect Donald J. Trump “lied about” the bipartisan House committee that investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Former Representative Liz Cheney on Sunday called President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to imprison her and other members of a congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Responding to comments Mr. Trump made in an interview aired on Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Ms. Cheney said the incoming president “lied about the Jan. 6 select committee” and that there would be “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” to prosecute its members.
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” she said in a statement. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”
She continued: “This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Her statement came after Mr. Trump repeated his unfounded allegation that the committee destroyed evidence during its investigation.
“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” he said, referring to Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman. “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”
He went on: “And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”
In fact, the committee did not destroy all evidence. It released an 800-page report as well as 140 transcripts of testimony and various memos, emails and voice mail messages. The evidence remains online. Mr. Thompson explained in a letter last year that the committee had asked the executive branch to go through some material first to protect “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.”
Ms. Cheney pointed to that letter in her statement on Sunday. “Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson,” she said. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people targeted by Mr. Trump like Ms. Cheney as part of the president-elect’s promised “retribution” against his foes. Ms. Cheney did not say in her statement whether she would accept such a pardon to protect herself from a politically motivated prosecution by the next administration.
But she said that the evidence that should be made public was the material gathered by the special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. “The Justice Department should ensure that all that material is preserved and cannot be destroyed. As much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report.”
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 11, 2024. Should Fox Kennedy be selected for the role, she would have a major hill to climb in the confirmation process.
In new reporting from Axios, Donald Trump's selection to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now pushing to have his daughter in law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, to serve as deputy director of the CIA. Fox Kennedy has a long history of working for the Agency and served as an undercover spy for nearly a decade.
But, we are now learning that the reason Kennedy is pushing for his daughter in law to join the Agency in a top role stems from his belief that she could help uncover secrets regarding the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
RFK Jr. has long spread conspiracy theories related to his uncle's assasination, claiming that the federal government and the CIA may have been involved in the assassination plot. There has been no evidence released to support Kennedy's claims.
According to Axios, Fox Kennedy would have a steep uphill climb to be confirmed should she be selected as the deputy director of the Agency. When she first left the Agency, Fox Kennedy published a memoir without getting prior approval from the Agency's vetting team.
In addition, Fox Kennedy has made concerning comments about ISIS. During a 2016 interview, Fox Kennedy stated that "The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them." The enemy she was referring to was ISIS.
Whether Trump listens to RFK Jr. and nominates her, however, remains to be seen.
Kaja Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.(AFP photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images).
Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns , Elena Giordano, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.).The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, says Russia has learned how to influence elections through new technologies.
“I see the examples from Romania, but also other parts, that [the] Russians have really cracked the code on how to influence elections,” Kallas said at POLITICO’s P28 event Tuesday evening.
Responding to a question about the influence of new technologies on democracy, Kallas said she is “really worried.”
“Democracy is based on trust, and if you can’t trust elections anymore then how can you trust the outcome?” she asked.
Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair are outdated and don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.
“I think we should take them very seriously,” she said.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing, Ashley Southall and Maria Cramer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The man who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two officials.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare at a company investors’ day, was found 
with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said.
The shooting occurred early Dec. 4 as Mr. Thompson arrived early at a Hilton hotel on West 54th Street to prepare for the UnitedHealthcare investors’ meeting.
The Bulwark, Political Commentary: By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President, Andrew Egger, Dec. 11, 2024. An unsettling number of House Republicans are open to Trump’s threats against the House January 6th committee.
How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”
A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct. January 6th Committee Democrats were quick yesterday to deny that they had done anything untoward: “There’s nothing we did as a January 6th Select Committee that violates the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the committee, told NBC News.
For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the January 6th Committee criminally destroyed records in an attempt to bury facts that would exonerate him. (As fact checks have repeatedly shown, Trump’s claim is a totally baseless—a funhouse-mirror distortion of claims made back in 2023 by House Republicans who were then already investigating the work of the January 6th Committee and who were crabby that, for instance, they were only being provided with transcripts of depositions rather than video footage.)
For the most part, House Republicans who spoke to The Bulwark were careful not to actually say that they believed, like Trump, that the committee had destroyed evidence. But they were comfortable entertaining the possibility it had (despite those fact checks) and content with the idea of prosecuting lawmakers if they did. “I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”
Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee. (Raskin’s office did not return a request for comment.) It’s the committee which Comer chairs and on which Boebert and Burchett serve. That those three lawmakers showed comfort with Trump targeting the January 6th Committee members underscores the degree to which partisan affiliations now overwhelm institutional prerogatives.
The Oversight Committee exists specifically to provide congressional accountability and scrutiny to the actions of the executive branch. But none of these Oversight Republicans had an issue with Trump vowing open retribution against House members who performed that sort of accountability work during the last Congress.
When I asked Comer whether he was worried about the chilling effect of the president accusing an entire House committee of collective crimes, he dodged: “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Boebert wasn’t worried either: “I don’t lack confidence” in the House’s ability to do oversight, she said as she hopped into her car.
Not every House Republican The Bulwark spoke to endorsed Trump’s modest proposal of jail for the J6 committee. But none were willing to publicly criticize it either. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), considered one of the more bipartisan remaining members of the House, declined all questions about Trump’s interview in a sequence of terse monosyllables. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—typically as good for a soundbite as any human in Washington—smirked and ignored The Bulwark’s question as she walked to the House floor.
Remarkably, while some GOP lawmakers were practically licking their chops over the prospect of some of their colleagues facing legal retribution, others incorrectly argued Trump had never called for such retribution at all.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.). “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”
Over on the other side of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins was doing her part to avoid the controversy by focusing on the less openly bloodthirsty elements of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. “It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” she told reporters yesterday, alluding to Trump’s insistence that he would find “retribution” in office not by looking backwards but by being a successful president. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm, Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout, Dec. 11, 2024. Gaetz is a longtime friend to John Morgan, a prominent trial lawyer.Matt Gaetz raises his fist in the air.
Matt Gaetz may be taking on a second job.
Prominent Florida megadonor John Morgan is actively in talks with the former Republican lawmaker about joining his firm, Morgan & Morgan, he told POLITICO in an extensive interview. The job would be in addition to the role Gaetz announced on Tuesday that he’s joining the conservative One America News Network as a prime-time host beginning in January.
Morgan praised Gaetz, who recently withdrew from consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, for his positions on marijuana legalization, property insurance and processed foods.
“A lot of the things that my politics are, Matt Gaetz’s are,” said Morgan, who has given heavily to Democratic candidates but is registered in Florida as a no-party affiliated voter.
Morgan said that he could see Gaetz being helpful in a recent lawsuit his firm filed that alleges major food companies specifically engineered their products to be addictive and then marketed them to kids, contributing to chronic illness.
In a text exchange, Gaetz acknowledged that he and Morgan had “talked about collaborating professionally” and said he was grateful for their friendship.
“I’ve known John Morgan for more than a decade,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot of advice from him on matters of law, policy and politics. I have great respect for how he stands to the powerful for his clients — and he wins.”
The job at Morgan & Morgan would be a high-profile landing for Gaetz, who resigned from the House after he dropped out of the process to be Trump’s attorney general, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz has denied the allegations, and a Department of Justice investigation into him resulted in no charges. Yet the accusations quickly dogged his confirmation process, and Gaetz left public service altogether.
The former member of Congress has also been seen as a potential Republican candidate for governor in 2026, a contest that has been increasingly fluid as Trump tapped numerous Floridians to hold jobs in his administration. Gaetz has already tapped into a potential campaign theme by siding with critics — like Morgan — that the GOP-controlled Legislature kowtowed to the property insurance industry when it passed a measure DeSantis signed into law that makes it much harder to sue insurers.
Morgan said the details of the potential job are still under discussion and that he was waiting until the news about Gaetz’s new TV spot settled down. He said that his firm hired “finders, minders and grinders” and that he saw Gaetz as a potential “finder-minder” who he saw at the “36,000-foot” level versus “in the trenches.”
“I know he’s controversial,” Morgan said of Gaetz, “but I’m fucking controversial.”
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 11, 2024. Trump’s association with Mel Gibson highlights troubling endorsement.
During a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, actor Mel Gibson implied that California wildfires might be deliberately set by political opponents of Donald Trump. Gibson stated:
"…4 years of thinly veiled Marxism, and, you know, now I think what we have is a four-year grace period. But we have to work hard for all of it. And I don’t know. The president’s got a big job on his hands to turn this place around. A lot of damage was done, and they continue to start fires, like around my house..."Mel Gibson at Mar-a-Lago
Mel Gibson: “they continue to start fires, like around my house...”
Gibson also praised former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and referred to Trump’s potential second term as a "four-year grace period" from what he described as Marxist policies. Flynn associates himself with fringe MAGA personalities who push conspiracies. Trump HitlerTrump Echoes Hitler: Migrants "Poisoning the Blood of Our Country"Read More
The comments come against a backdrop of devastating wildfires in Malibu, California, which have scorched thousands of acres and destroyed homes. Gibson’s claims mirror baseless conspiracy theories and detract from the real causes of these disasters.Mel Gibson, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Flynn, and Kid Rock at Mar-a-Lago
Gibson’s presence at Mar-a-Lago and his endorsement of Trump raise serious questions about the former president’s associations. Gibson’s history is riddled with controversy. He was infamously caught on tape berating his ex-girlfriend with vile, racist language, suggesting she would be sexually assaulted by “[n-words]” for her clothing choices.
Additionally, Gibson has a long-documented history of anti-Semitic remarks, including a drunken tirade in 2006 which he claimed that Jews are responsible for “all the wars in the world.”Mel Gibson, Trump, and Roger Stone in 2023
Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 11, 2024. Oligarchs have been getting slighted for far too long.
During her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris laid out an economic vision for America that was designed to help people at the bottom get ahead.
Well, here comes the Convict-Elect of the United States — and he’s all ‘fuck that noise. you know who really needs our help?’
‘Billionaires.’
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Finally, America’s beleaguered billionaires are getting the fast track to the help they so desperately need.
Are you an oligarch? well then step right to the head of the line, bro. all you have to do is grease Dear Leader’s palm to the tune of a bil, and every door will open for you.
What do you need, some permits? here you go, pal. is some annoying judge hassling you about regulations? put your mind at rest, ace. we’re going to make those regulations go fuckity-bye.
did you notice how Donny goes out of his way to mention that his little pay-for-play scheme includes ‘environmental approvals’? that’s pretty specific, isn’t it?
Hey, you know who’s a billionaire in bad need of a free pass to despoil the environment?
New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office, Sharon Otterman, Dec. 11, 2024. Harvard, Penn and U.S.C. were among the universities and colleges that issued advisories in anticipation of possible travel bans.
With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are advising their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
During his last administration, Mr. Trump imposed restrictions on entry to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, a policy that stranded thousands of students who were abroad at the time. Later in his term, Mr. Trump added more countries to the restricted travel list. And he has spoken of wanting to reimpose those restrictions once he is back in the White House.
“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell’s Office of Global Learning warned students on its website late last month, advising them to be back in the United States before the start of spring-semester classes on Jan. 21. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added to this list, particularly China and India.”
Colleges are also warning all students to prepare for possible delays at the border and in the processing of paperwork.
“Budget time ahead of the semester start, prior to the January Martin Luther King holiday,” Harvard advised on its website for international students who have concerns.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University have issued comparable advisories and guidance. The advice is precautionary in nature, since the policies of the new administration remain uncertain.
Mr. Trump has said that he wanted to bring back or strengthen some of the travel restrictions he imposed in his first term.
New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power, Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina, Dec. 11, 2024. After cloaking a bill that strips key powers from Democrats as hurricane aid, the state’s legislature overrode a veto from Gov. Roy Cooper to pass it into law.
Republicans in North Carolina muscled through a sweeping expansion of their own power on Wednesday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that will give the G.O.P. increased control over elections, judicial appointments and whether its laws stand up in the courts.
Perhaps most striking was how Republicans did it: They titled the legislation “Disaster Relief” but filled it with measures that had nothing to do with aid for areas devastated by Hurricane Helene and instead eroded the power of top state Democrats. Just 13 of the bill’s 131 pages dealt directly with the storm.
Republicans moved swiftly to pass the bill last month, only for Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to veto the legislation. Republicans then moved to overcome his veto in the final weeks of their single-vote supermajority in the House, where they lost key seats in November. Even as Donald J. Trump carried the state, Republicans fell short in several other top races, including for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
The override vote, which passed by 72 to 46 along party lines, follows four years of efforts by Republicans nationwide to gain greater control over the mechanics of elections, a push initially fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential contest.
State Representative Tim Moore, the departing Republican speaker of the House, said openly before the vote that the bill was meant to help his party win future elections.
“This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket and move this country in the right direction,” Mr. Moore told the Trump ally and conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday.
Lawmakers in North Carolina have a tradition of trying to lock in their political power after election losses. Democrats wielded such tactics in the 1990s, but more recently Republicans have led the way. After Mr. Cooper beat the Republican incumbent in 2016, the legislature stripped the governor’s office of key powers and reduced the number of staff members he could appoint by more than 1,000 positions.
New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan, Alan Feuer, Dec. 11, 2024. The incoming administration said it would not rely on outside groups to carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants, but militias have a long record of inserting themselves into patrolling the border.
A few days after the election, William Teer, who runs the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump with an offer: His organization could help Mr. Trump carry out his plan to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally.
“In support of our nation’s commitments to lawful immigration practices, I wanted to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs, to promote the safety and security of our state,” Mr. Teer wrote. “I am available for further discussion.”
He said Mr. Trump had yet to respond. A spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s transition team said the mass deportation plan would use state and federal resources, not private ones. But Mr. Teer’s offer was one of several recent efforts by far-right organizations, including some that have a history of taking it on themselves to patrol the border with Mexico, to insert themselves into the deportation plan.
Richard Mack, the founder of a group of hard-right sheriffs, said on television last week that if members of his organization assisted with the initiative, it would make it “a lot easier and a lot cheaper and a lot more effective.” And last month, members of other militia-style groups also volunteered their services, with some discussing in private group chats their desire to get involved.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews, Dec. 11, 2024. The outgoing Senate Democratic majority isn't going out without a fight.
Ben Meiselas discusses the early swearing-in of Democrats Adam Schiff and Andy Kim as U.S. Senators, surprising and infuriating MAGA Republicans.
Both Schiff and Kim won their elections, and were given gubernatorial approval to be sworn-in early due special circumstances, allowing them to gain seniority and participate in key Senate hearings.
Kim is replacing disgraced Senator Bob Menendez in New Jersey, and Schiff is filling the seat once held by Dianne Feinstein, who passed away in September of 2023.
Schiff, known for his prosecutorial background, has been a favorite target from MAGA for his role in leading the impeachments of Donald Trump. His early swearing-in has the MAGA trolls making fools of themselves; crying foul while not understanding this process is completely legal.
Andy Kim, a friend of MeidasTouch, delivered a heartfelt statement to his constituents pledging to serve with integrity, and a focus on healing the country; a poignant and powerful statement from a man who will be replacing the crook Bob Menendez.
The U.S. Senate, as well as the American People benefit having Andy Kim step into that office early to gain seniority.Meiselas also played a touching video you’ll only see on MeidasTouch, with Kamala Harris meeting Kim’s family during his swearing-in ceremony, and telling his kids that she knows her dad is a good man and up to the challenge and hard work of being a U.S. Senator.
Meiselas also highlights Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s efforts to secure Democratic control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by advancing the nominations of Lauren McFerrin and Joshua Didleberg; a move to shield the Board from figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Trump allies, who want to weaken the NLRB's power to protect American workers.
Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats, Greta Reich, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). “I’m not worried about it at all in the least,” the former Jan. 6 committee member said.Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger delivers remarks.t worried about President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to throw members of the committee in jail.
“No, I have absolutely no worries about this,” Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN’s “Inside Politics” host Manu Raju on Sunday.
Trump made the threat in an interview with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on NBC. He said that members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail.”
“First off, the executive branch can’t go after the legislative branch because we embarrassed him. That’s not a sin. That’s not against the law. Ultimately, when we talked about him throwing his ketchup and hamburger against the wall, there’s nothing illegal about that,” Kinzinger continued, referring to an alleged incident from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in which Trump once became so angry that he threw his plate of food at the wall and smeared it with ketchup.
He added that “most of the people that testified were actually his Republicans, you know, fellow Republicans that went up and spoke [against] him.”
Some Republicans who testified during the hearings included former Attorney General William Barr; former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue; Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; and Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s daughter.
“So look, he’s all butt hurt, right now because he was embarrassed,” Kinzinger added. “He’s not going to come after us and I’m not worried about it at all in the least.”
New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Applicants for government posts, including inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, say they have been asked about their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election.
At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, conducted in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful.
The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). She and her firm have clients that have been doing legal battle with the U.S. government.
Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.
Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.
Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.
Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.
Bondi, who has yet to resign from Ballard, where she serves as a D.C.-based partner and chairs the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice focusing on Fortune 500 companies. Since 2019, she has lobbied the federal government for a host of major businesses, including Amazon, General Motors, Fidelity National Financial, Uber and Carnival North America. She serves as a key adviser to the firm’s president, Brian Ballard.
Bondi has also lobbied for the GEO Group, a major private prison company that is paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year by the federal government, according to federal records. The Justice Department is a major customer.
Currently, Bondi is only registered to lobby for the Major County Sheriffs of America, which pays her firm $50,000 a quarter, the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter, and the Florida Sheriffs Association, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter. Bondi, a former personal attorney to Trump, has also worked on corporate and regulatory issues and litigation at the Florida-based law firm Panza Maurer.
“It is essentially impossible to organize a Justice Department ethically in light of the breadth of Bondi’s connections,” said Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive Revolving Door Project. “I think it’s just going to be off-the-charts bad.”
He added that even if Bondi were not to involve herself in issues involving certain companies, she could still influence her department in their favor. For example, Hauser argued, her direction for the antitrust division would have broad implications for her onetime client Amazon.
Bondi did not respond to an email seeking comment, and a spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment.
Some business leaders had feared that, under Trump, they would lose their allies in the GOP, as the party veered in a more populist direction. But big business is hopeful that with Bondi, they’ll get a reprieve from the Biden administration’s corporate crackdowns and avoid follow-through on the Trump campaign’s anti-corporate rhetoric.
“Pam may reinforce that idea that we’re going back to normalcy on deal flow,” said one Republican lobbyist, referring to corporate mergers. The person was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone believes that she’s approachable. … She understands that companies need to have an opportunity to be heard.”
The tech industry, for one, is relatively optimistic about Bondi’s nomination, especially compared to former lawmaker and antitrust crusader Matt Gaetz, whose earlier nomination for attorney general imploded. Major companies have spent the last four years fighting anti-monopoly champions at the Department of Justice, led by Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. With Bondi’s selection, Big Tech sees a movement away from the economic populism that made them major targets, said one lobbyist representing major technology companies.
New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The enormous spending from the world’s richest man quietly fueled allied groups and was revealed only now, as Mr. Musk plays a key role in the presidential transition.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.
The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.
One of Mr. Musk’s most brazen moves — which emerged only on Thursday — was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.
Mr. Musk put the lion’s share of the money he donated toward his main super PAC, America PAC, cutting three checks for $25 million each in the final weeks of the race, according to the new filings with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Musk also spent $40.5 million on legally controversial checks to voters in swing states who signed a petition in support of the Constitution.
Over the course of the race, he gave America PAC a staggering $239 million in both cash and in-kind contributions.
Relevant Recent Headlines
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- Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats
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- Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas
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- New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office
- New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power
- New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann
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- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
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- New York Times, Pam Bondi’s Journey From Traditional Republican to Warrior for Trump, Patricia Mazzei
- New York Times, Investigation: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes Jesse Drucker
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- The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld
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More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise, Corey Kilgannon, Mike Baker, Luke Broadwater and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione, above, charged in the death of an executive in New York, was an Ivy League graduate who had recently suffered physical and psychological pain.
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.
Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say, Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione faces gun charges and other counts. He was denied bail after his arraignment in Altoona, Pa.
Authorities said Monday that they had taken a 26-year-old man into custody in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, a health insurance executive who was gunned down last week on a Manhattan sidewalk.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The shooting sparked a sprawling five-day manhunt that ended in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where police said Luigi Mangione, a Maryland native, was spotted eating at a local McDonald’s. He was arrested and charged with five counts, including possessing an instrument of a crime, providing false identification to law enforcement and carrying a firearm without a license. Police said Mangione had a ghost gun, along with a lengthy handwritten document indicating anger toward “corporate America.”
“He is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, said at a news briefing.
Thompson, 50, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed Wednesday outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a stunning act of early-morning violence in one of New York’s busiest areas.
Police said it appeared that the suspect they were seeking escaped the city shortly after the shooting. Law enforcement officials said they were scouring reams of video footage and tips, but they pleaded with the public for more help, sharing several images of a person they said was wanted in connection with the killing.
ABC News, What we know about Luigi Mangione, Ivy League grad and suspect in CEO's murder, Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele, Josh Margolin, and Meredith Deliso, Dec. 9, 2024. Mangione, above, was located in Pennsylvania nearly a week after Brian Thompson's death.
Salon, Alleged UnitedHealthcare assassin praised Elon Musk for battle against “woke mind virus," Russell Payne, Dec, 9, 2024. Not so fast, what kind of "anti-capitalist" is praising Elon Musk and retweeting Peter Thiel?
On Monday afternoon, police announced that they had arrested a person of interest in the investigation into the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who was shot outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan last week.
According to police, Luigi Mangione was arrested around 9:15 a.m. in Altoona, Pennsylvania with a ghost gun and suppressor that New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with the weapon used in the murder.”
While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber's comments on “the decay of traditional values.”
Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives.
While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”
One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
He reposted another tweet, which was a link to an article calling TikTok “The Smiling Tiger” and making the argument that the short-form video app is an “accelerant” in a Chinese plot to get Western liberal capitalism to destroy itself.
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Public Health, Scandal, #MeToo, Trafficking, Abortion.
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country, Jonathan Weisman, Dec. 10, 2024. When Donald Trump said Robert Kennedy Jr. could “go wild” on health, he might not have expected him to go to battle against the president-elect’s own voters.
The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.
To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.
To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”
Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies. Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
Excerpt Continued Below.
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, Dec. 5, 2024. Save your healthcare and dump Medicare Advantage before it’s too late. Here’s why you should return to real Medicare if you still can...
You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.
The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.
If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.
Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.
So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?
When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.
Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.
With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.
With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.
These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.
Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.
You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.
This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.
And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.
If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.
But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.
The FTC news release laid it out:
“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”
And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.
Washington Post, Opinion: What is going on with Cheryl Hines? Monica Hesse, 
Dec. 5, 2024. It’s time to accept that the actress and RFK Jr. are a package deal.
I’m as baffled by this as the rest of you, but I’m going to have to subject us all to a close analysis of Cheryl Hines’s recent Instagram story featuring her naked husband, RFK Jr.
The video takes place in the Hines/Kennedy bathroom. Cheryl is in the foreground, holding a linen spray and some kind of cream that she would like you to buy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking a shower. His bottom half is covered by his wife’s strategically located head, and, as he stands under the water, she giggles uproariously and says: “No, you can’t take a shower, I’m doing a video!” He continues showering; she continues giggling. “No, no. No. You’ve got to give me a second, I’m doing a video for Hines and Young!”
Some logistical questions:
If Hines was already in the bathroom filming when her husband entered, why did she wait until he came in, took off all his clothes, turned on the shower and started hosing himself down before she decided to tell him that she was filming?
And if he was in the shower to begin with, why didn’t she notice that before she started advertising a holiday sale? Why did the couple not, at that point, sort out who needed to be naked and who needed to hawk merchandise, and agree to do those things in different rooms? Why leave the camera running? Why post the results?
Hines was advertising products from the wellness company she runs with her daughter, but she was also advertising her marriage. Which is to say, she would like you to know that the couple is fine. They are flirty. He wants to remove fluoride from public drinking water, but she will still caption videos with, “Oh Bobby!”
The number of times in the past two years that I have thought, Well, now she’ll divorce him has been … many. The couple has been married for more than a decade, but she is, after all, a successful actress with 12 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” under her belt. Not A-list, maybe, but running in circles with Larry David and J.B. Smoove would seem to provide enough glamour and financial independence that she shouldn’t need to put up with any crap.
Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert, Dec. 2, 2024. Mehmet Oz has extolled Ozempic’s promise for weight loss. Now Medicare may cover it.
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Middle East Crises: Syria, Israel, Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon
New York Times, Syria Shudders as Bashar al-Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light, Christina Goldbaum, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak (as shown above), Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). At the country’s most notorious prison, Syrians confront their worst fears: that they will never know what happened to the loved ones who disappeared.
People came by the thousands the day after the rebels arrived in Damascus, racing down the once desolate stretch of road, up a jagged footpath cut into the limestone hillside and through the towering metal gates of Syria’s most notorious prison. They flooded the halls lined with cells, searching for loved ones who had disappeared into the black hole of torture prisons under Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Some tore through the offices of the prison, Sednaya, looking for maps of the building and prisoner logs. One woman shoved a photograph of her missing son toward others walking by, hoping someone had found him. “Do you recognize him?” she pleaded. “Please, please, did you see him?”
In the entrance hall of one section, dozens of men with sledgehammers and pickaxes tore up the floors, convinced there were secret cells with more prisoners deep underground. Crowds swelled around them as people clambered to see what they found, pausing only when Israeli airstrikes landed close enough to shake the prison’s walls.
“Move back, move back!” one man, Ahmad Hajani, 23, yelled. “Let them work!”
Since a rebel coalition overthrew the Assad government last week, unchaining a country ruled by the iron fist of the Assad family for more than 60 years, thousands of Syrians in Damascus, the capital, have taken to the streets to revel in the city’s newfound freedom.
New York Times, How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues, Neil MacFarquhar and Justin Scheck, Dec. 15, 2024. The Islamist rebels who ousted Syria’s dictator ran a pragmatic and disciplined administration in the territory they controlled. They also jailed their critics.
Since 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its affiliated organizations, driven by a hunger for broader power, created a certain level of stability in Idlib, governing with pragmatism and discipline. While the group retained overall control, it governed through a civilian authority with 11 ministries, which allowed it to concentrate on rebuilding its militia as a more structured force.
In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham maintained a robust internal security force to confront other military factions and domestic critics, prompting regular protests against what were seen as authoritarian methods and against harsh jail conditions.
The primary question is whether these rebels, who are now trying to form a national government, can scale up what they achieved in Idlib, a poor, agrarian region with a relatively small population.
In Idlib, ministers who dealt with outside aid organizations could never make a decision on the spot, they always had to consult first with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leaders, according to one representative of a humanitarian organization who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of aid operations in the area. Such tight control might work in a small governorate, but could prove unwieldy in a large country.
With its roots in the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham modified and moderated its own jihadist orientation starting around 2016. While it enforced some conservative Islamic practices, they did not resort to the strictures imposed by the Islamic State terrorist group when it ruled parts of Syria.
Still, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Nations, Turkey and others. Because that designation blocked overt outside support, the group found new ways to sustain itself financially and militarily.
It levied fees on all kinds of goods and enterprises, including crops, border crossings, construction, trade, shopkeeping and craftwork. In addition, companies linked to the group enjoyed a monopoly on providing fuel, electricity, water and garbage collection.
“H.T.S. exemplifies adaptability in conflict economics,” said Mark Nakhla, the chief research officer at Kharon, an open-source analytics firm that advises companies on complying with sanctions against armed groups and other hostile actors.
He has been tracking Hayat Tahrir al-Sham since its jihadist days, and has watched it go through what he called a “strategic rebranding” and a shift from relying financially on wealthy foreign donors to sustaining military and civilian operations through local taxation and governance.
New York Times, Antony Blinken Meeting Arab Ministers Amid Uncertainty Over Syria Transition, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Dec. 14, 2024. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan to confer with Arab foreign ministers on the ouster of the longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was meeting on Saturday with Arab leaders in Jordan to discuss how to assist a political transition in Syria, nearly a week after rebels toppled the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.
The abrupt demise of the Assad government has prompted celebrations in Syria along with uncertainty over how the new administration under a caretaker prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, can manage a transition in a country shattered by decades of war and repression.
It is a new upheaval in a region already reeling from more than a year of war and has set in motion a realignment with implications for Israel, Iran and Lebanon, as well as Russia, a stalwart ally of Mr. al-Assad.
Mr. Blinken was expected to meet in the coastal city of Aqaba with foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, as well as the secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, according to a statement by Jordan’s Foreign Ministry. Turkey, the United Nations and the European Union would also participate.
New York Times, United States in Direct Contact With Rebels Who Took Over Syria, Michael Crowley, Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Steven Erlanger, Dec. 14, 2024. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was communicating with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel faction, despite its designation as a terrorist group.
The United States has been in direct contact with the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad a week ago, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Saturday.
His remarks were the first official confirmation that Washington is communicating with a group that it designated a terrorist organization several years ago but whose behavior Washington hopes to influence now that the group controls Syria’s interim government.
“We’ve been in contact with H.T.S. and with other parties” in Syria, Mr. Blinken said, referring to the rebel group, after a meeting with Arab ministers in Aqaba, Jordan, to discuss how to assist Syria’s political transition.
He said that the United States had communicated a set of governing principles that it is urging Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to adopt, including respect for human rights and rejecting extremism. The United States has also stressed the importance of finding and returning Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist kidnapped in Syria seven years ago.
Washington Post, Opinion: With Iran’s guard down, the U.S. and Israel face an urgent choice, David Ignatius, Dec. 14, 2024. Israel’s former defense minister says there is “a window to act” — and the clock is ticking.
Iran appears to be at the most precarious moment in its modern history. Its proxy armies have been crushed in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. And it appears to be nearly naked to attack after a wave of pinpoint Israeli airstrikes on its air defense system in October.Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
“We showed that Iran is vulnerable,” argued Yoav Gallant, who was Israel’s defense minister and led most of this year’s military campaigns against Iran and its proxies. Gallant explained during a briefing with me in Washington this week that Israel’s devastating but relatively little-discussed bombing campaign on Oct. 26 created “a window to act against Iran” before it produces a nuclear weapon.
U.S. decisions about how to exploit Iran’s weakness — whether by negotiating a binding nuclear agreement or, failing that, taking decisive military action — will fall to President-elect Donald Trump. Asked last month about the possibility of war with Iran after he takes office on Jan. 20, Trump told Time magazine, ominously, that “anything can happen.”
Global attention has shifted to Trump, but senior Biden administration officials tell me they also recognize the opportunity ahead for “coercive diplomacy” about nuclear issues with a weakened Iran. Though Israel played the decisive role in humbling Iran, President Joe Biden provided an important backstop by deploying U.S. carriers, planes, submarines and other forces.
Israel’s Oct. 26 assault was calculated to leave Iran unprotected against a future attack. An astonishing wave of 120 jets took part in the raid, an Israeli military source said. The Israeli planes targeted air defense radars and antiaircraft batteries protecting Tehran as well as key factories producing fuel for Iranian ballistic missiles. The attack was in retaliation for Iran’s Oct. 1 bombardment of Israel with about 200 ballistic missiles — but the planning began many months before.
New York Times, Russian Military Appears to Be Packing Up Some Equipment in Syria, Ben Hubbard and Raja Abdulrahim, Dec. 14, 2024. Satellite images reveal military movements that could be a possible prelude to Moscow’s withdrawal. An American found in Damascus this week was handed over to U.S. forces.
New York Times, Syria Shudders as Bashar al-Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light, Christina Goldbaum, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 14, 2024. At the country’s most notorious prison, Syrians confront their worst fears: that they will never know what happened to the loved ones who disappeared.
People came by the thousands the day after the rebels arrived in Damascus, racing down the once desolate stretch of road, up a jagged footpath cut into the limestone hillside and through the towering metal gates of Syria’s most notorious prison. They flooded the halls lined with cells, searching for loved ones who had disappeared into the black hole of torture prisons under Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Some tore through the offices of the prison, Sednaya, looking for maps of the building and prisoner logs. One woman shoved a photograph of her missing son toward others walking by, hoping someone had found him. “Do you recognize him?” she pleaded. “Please, please, did you see him?”
In the entrance hall of one section, dozens of men with sledgehammers and pickaxes tore up the floors, convinced there were secret cells with more prisoners deep underground. Crowds swelled around them as people clambered to see what they found, pausing only when Israeli airstrikes landed close enough to shake the prison’s walls.
“Move back, move back!” one man, Ahmad Hajani, 23, yelled. “Let them work!”
Since a rebel coalition overthrew the Assad government last week, unchaining a country ruled by the iron fist of the Assad family for more than 60 years, thousands of Syrians in Damascus, the capital, have taken to the streets to revel in the city’s newfound freedom.
But amid the celebrations, the country has also found itself in the opening chapter of a nationwide reckoning over the horrors that Syrians endured under Mr. al-Assad’s government as they come face to face with the network of prisons, police stations and torture chambers at the center of his family’s brutal rule.
In that time, hundreds of thousands of Syrians were swallowed up by the Assad security forces’ vast apparatus. Over the past 13 years, after the failed rebel uprising and subsequent civil war, Mr. al-Assad wielded the long arms of that system as never before to stamp out every last inkling of dissent.
Protesters, activists, journalists, doctors, aid workers and students were snatched from their shops, plucked from university classrooms and yanked from their cars at checkpoints by the secret police — never to be heard from again.
Many ended up in Sednaya, the notorious prison on the outskirts of Damascus that was often the last place detainees were dumped after months of interrogation in other detention centers. The sprawling prison with three wings became a haunting symbol of Mr. al-Assad’s ruthlessness and the center of some of the worst atrocities committed during his rule.
Tens of thousands of people were crammed into the overcrowded cells, tortured, beaten and deprived of food and water. More than 30,000 detainees were killed, many executed in mass hangings, according to rights groups. Amnesty International called Sednaya a “human slaughterhouse.”
Their relatives lived in an agonizing limbo for years, unsure if their loved ones were alive. They went to local security officials every few months to beg for information and paid thousands of dollars in bribes to government officials to track down their relatives’ whereabouts. If security officers told them their disappeared relative was dead, many refused to believe them.
“They were liars,” one woman, Aziza Mohammed Deek, said of those in Mr. al-Assad’s government. “They were all liars.”
New York Times, Antony Blinken Meeting Arab Ministers Amid Uncertainty Over Syria Transition, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Dec. 14, 2024. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan to confer with Arab foreign ministers on the ouster of the longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was meeting on Saturday with Arab leaders in Jordan to discuss how to assist a political transition in Syria, nearly a week after rebels toppled the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.
The abrupt demise of the Assad government has prompted celebrations in Syria along with uncertainty over how the new administration under a caretaker prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, can manage a transition in a country shattered by decades of war and repression.
It is a new upheaval in a region already reeling from more than a year of war and has set in motion a realignment with implications for Israel, Iran and Lebanon, as well as Russia, a stalwart ally of Mr. al-Assad.
Mr. Blinken was expected to meet in the coastal city of Aqaba with foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, as well as the secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, according to a statement by Jordan’s Foreign Ministry. Turkey, the United Nations and the European Union would also participate.
“The talks will focus on supporting a comprehensive, Syria-led political process aimed at achieving a transitional solution,” the Jordanian statement said. A later statement on Saturday said the meeting was about to begin. It made no mention of any Syrian representative to attend.
Turkey has emerged in recent days with greater influence, given its years of support for the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebel group that led the offensive out of its bases in the northwest in recent weeks to take power.
The Turkish government made plans this week to reopen its embassy in Damascus, which has been closed for almost 13 years, and it also conducted military operations, including airstrikes, in northern Syria against Kurdish militants whom it considers a threat.
On Friday, the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, issued a stark warning to members of the Kurdish militia that controls northeastern Syria, the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
“It is our strategic target to eliminate the YPG,” he said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster NTV. He said that any members who are not Syrian should leave the country as soon as possible, and added: “The entire command level of YPG should leave the country too. The remaining ones should continue living as they lay down their weapons.’’
The Kurdish-led forces in Syria have been key partners with the United States in the fight against the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria. The U.S. and Turkey are NATO allies.
Turkey, at the same time, has funded and trained a Syrian rebel force, the Syrian National Army, which provided security for Turkish military bases in northern Syria and helped it fight Kurdish-led forces in the country.
The commander of Syria’s largest Kurdish militia accused the United States this week of abandoning its Kurdish allies in Syria.
Mr. Blinken is in Jordan as part of a tour of the Middle East that has included stops in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, as the United States assesses the fallout from Mr. al-Bashar’s ouster.
American officials have expressed concern that instability across Syria, where various armed groups with competing agendas are active, could threaten its neighbors.
The outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011 helped to fuel the rise of Islamic State, which conquered large swaths of Syria and Iraq and took years to defeat.
Israel has also seized an opportunity created by the collapse of the Assad dynasty, bombing weapons stores and other targets in Syria to eliminate what it says are potential threats and also seizing territory in the country near the disputed Golan Heights.
Syria on Friday condemned Israel’s attack and called on the United Nations Security Council to compel the Israeli government to cease any further attacks.
Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Koussay Aldahhak, said the Security Council should “compel Israel to respect international law,” and not allow it to benefit from Syria’s transition.
New York Times, Russian Military Appears to Be Packing Up Some Equipment in Syria, Ben Hubbard and Raja Abdulrahim, Dec. 14, 2024. Satellite images reveal military movements that could be a possible prelude to Moscow’s withdrawal. An American found in Damascus this week was handed over to U.S. forces.
The Russian military appeared to be packing up equipment at one of its most critical bases in Syria on Friday, in what could be a prelude to Moscow’s military withdrawal from an important strategic foothold in the Middle East.
The movements of Russian equipment came as jubilant crowds gathered in cities across Syria for the first Friday Prayers since rebels toppled President Bashar al-Assad.
People celebrating the collapse of a long authoritarian dynasty waved revolutionary flags and posed for photographs with friends as one of the largest crowds in memory filled the marble courtyard of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, where al-Assad security forces had long suppressed antigovernment demonstrations with brutal violence. Not all the chants were religious, reflecting the country’s newfound sense of liberty; in Damascus and in Idlib, a city that has long been rebel territory, people sang, “Raise your head high, you are a free Syrian!”
The largely celebratory mood in Damascus, the capital, belied the monumental challenges facing Syria’s new leaders as they try to bring order to a country wracked by sectarian divisions, the bloody legacy of the Assad era and the competing interests of an array of armed groups that fought in a 13-year civil war that human rights groups estimate killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Also on Friday, Travis Timmerman, an American citizen who was found outside Damascus earlier this week, was handed over to U.S. forces by Syrian opposition representatives. Mr. Timmerman, who said he had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power, is now in Jordan, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Politico, Has Syrian rebel leader al-Golani really shaken off his al Qaeda past? Jamie Dettmer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The leopard claims he has changed his spots, but will he bring stability to the devastated nation
In the not so distant past, Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, shown at right in a U.S. State Department photo, sported a long unkempt beard, wore a style of turban favored by jihadis and looked like he was auditioning for the role of a young Osama bin Laden.
But the man who toppled the regime of Bashar Assad on Sunday cuts a very different figure today. Like a political chameleon, he wears green fatigues in the style of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or preppy blazers and chinos, and his beard is neatly trimmed. He even recently dropped his nom de guerre and reverted to using his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a.
But how convincing is the makeover? Should Syrians be worried that a man who once made the pledge of allegiance — or bay’ah — to al Qaeda, and fought Western forces in Iraq, is now the most powerful man in their country, and is poised to play a major role in the transition from the 54-year-long autocracy of the Assad dynasty?
He could even lead the country.
Is this a case where the apparel really does proclaim the man? Has the Damascus medical school dropout genuinely transitioned from being a jihadi, or is his embrace of toleration a ruse?
Those are the questions Western leaders and officials are also grappling with as they plot their next steps. France and Germany have promptly agreed to work with the Syrian opposition groups that took power in Damascus, while the U.S. and Britain are deliberating whether to delist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main insurgent Islamist faction led by al-Golani that swept into Damascus, as a terrorist organization.
For now, everyone is watching and waiting, piecing together clues about who al-Golani really is and what future HTS has planned for Syria — an inclusive, democratic one embracing the country’s diversity, its religious sects and ethnic minorities, including Christian, Alawite, Druze and Kurds; or an Islamist state that oppresses, restricts and elevates the Sunni majority? Or somewhere in-between?
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Israel Says Its Troops Will Stay in Seized Territory for Now, Aaron Boxerman and Michael Crowley, Dec. 12, 2024. Here are the latest developments.
As countries in the Middle East and beyond work out how to respond to the sudden fall of the Assad government, Israel said on Thursday that its military would stay in Syrian territory it seized until “a new force” was established that met its security demands.
“The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in a statement. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities.”
Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli soldiers would deploy in Syrian territory only “temporarily,” but did not give any clear timeline for their departure.
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South Korean Crisis
New York Times, After Impeachment, South Korea Is Left With No Elected Leader, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 15, 2024. The suspension of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s powers left a seasoned but unelected prime minister in charge of a country facing challenges at home and abroad.
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment and suspension from office has left South Korea, one of the United States’ most important allies, without a strong elected leader to tackle challenges like a belligerent North Korea and a deepening political polarization at home.
By voting to impeach Mr. Yoon on Saturday, the National Assembly delivered a crushing vote of no confidence in a leader who had been unpopular through his term. Outside the legislature, people danced in the streets, celebrating Mr. Yoon’s peaceful removal from office less than two weeks after his declaration of martial law as proof of the resilience of the country’s democracy.
Yet, despite their euphoria, the political turmoil and uncertainty unleashed by Mr. Yoon’s botched attempt on Dec. 3 to place his country under military rule for the first time in 45 years remained unresolved.
His impeachment has created a political vacuum at the top. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the No. 2 official in the government hierarchy, has stepped in as the interim leader, but he has no electoral mandate. A new government cannot be born until the Constitutional Court decides whether to reinstate or formally oust Mr. Yoon.
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Impeached Over Martial Law Crisis, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, Victoria Kim and Qasim Nauman, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). Celebrations broke out in Seoul after lawmakers voted to oust President Yoon Suk Yeol. He vowed to fight removal in the country’s Constitutional Court.
South Korea’s National Assembly voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday, suspending him from office after his stunning declaration of martial law earlier this month caused widespread outrage and plunged the country into a constitutional crisis.
With the impeachment vote, Mr. Yoon has been suspended from office. Under South Korea’s Constitution, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo will step in as interim leader.
“This is a victory for the South Korean people and for democracy,” Park Chan-dae, the opposition floor leader said at a news conference.
Mr. Yoon repeated his intention to fight the impeachment in the Constitutional Court, which will now decide whether to reinstate or formally remove him, a process that could take up to six months. “I will never give up,” he said in a televised address shortly after the vote.
Inside the National Assembly, there were loud cheers and gasps from lawmakers when the speaker announced that the votes in favor of impeachment had crossed the 200 needed to pass. The result indicated that 12 lawmakers from Yoon’s party had joined the opposition to impeach him.
The thousands of protesters gathered outside the Assembly in frigid weather jumped up and down, and hugged or shook hands.
“I’m over the moon, but this cannot happen again,” said An Jung-hyun, 26, who as a high school student joined protests against President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached in 2017.
The opposition leader, Lee Jae-myung, addressing the crowd, noted that their fight was not over. “We’ve only just overcome a small mountain,” Mr. Lee said. “There is a larger, steeper mountain ahead.”
Mr. Yoon declared martial law on Dec. 3, accusing the opposition of paralyzing his government, and soldiers were sent to the National Assembly. Lawmakers managed to vote down the declaration, however, prompting Mr. Yoon to rescind his order within hours.
It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
The impeachment was the latest twist in a turbulent term that began in 2022, when Mr. Yoon narrowly won the election on a conservative, business-friendly platform. His tenure has been marked by near-constant protests and political deadlock.
Mr. Han, the prime minister who will step in to perform presidential duties, was appointed by Mr. Yoon in 2022. On Saturday, Mr. Han said in brief comments that his heart was heavy. “I will focus all my strength and effort on stably running the affairs of the state,” he said.
New York Times, How the President Alienated South Korea, One Group at a Time, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles, Dec. 14, 2024. Ever since Yoon Suk Yeol took office, the public had been infuriated with near-constant scandals and unpopular decisions. Angry rice farmers. Striking doctors. A $2,200 Dior bag.
South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, may have sealed his political fate on Dec. 3, when he declared martial law, triggering public outrage. And on Saturday, the National Assembly voted to impeach Mr. Yoon, who was then suspended from office.
But even before Mr. Yoon's brief imposition of military rule, voters were furious with a series of scandals and unpopular decisions since he took office. Amid growing inequality, rising prices and escalating threats from North Korea, his controversial leadership had left him with some of the lowest approval ratings in South Korea's history.
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 10, 2024. Lee Jae-myung, the main opposition leader, is leading efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his declaration of martial law.
Shortly after his political nemesis, President Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law last Tuesday, Lee Jae-myung began livestreaming from his cellphone. While driving to the National Assembly, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party appealed to Koreans to rush to the Assembly and hold back soldiers trying to seize the parliament.
“You must protect the Assembly, the last line of defense for our democracy,” Mr. Lee said repeatedly — in a watershed moment for South Korean democracy and for his own political career. Mr. Lee’s exhortation, relayed by YouTubers, helped attract crowds who slowed down the advance of troops and bought time for lawmakers to vote down Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree, forcing the president to withdraw it after just six hours.
Mr. Lee, who has been fighting legal charges that he says are politically motivated, now finds himself in a stronger political position than ever. His party holds the majority in the Assembly and he represents what most South Koreans want: Mr. Yoon removed from office. Polls show he is most favored to win if a presidential election is held now.
New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Victoria Kim and Thomas Fuller, Dec. 4, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to break a political deadlock by imposing military rule collapsed within hours, leaving him with few defenders.
Emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, members of South Korea’s political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.
Several opposition parties, buoyed by thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the president, jointly submitted the impeachment motion, which could be put to a vote as early as Friday. While the parties represent an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, it remains unclear whether they will have the two-thirds vote needed to impeach.
Mr. Yoon’s surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America’s closest allies and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s.
Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder, historian, Dec. 4, 2024. South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, invoked martial law, tried to install a military dictatorship -- and failed completely. In his actions there are some likely similarities with the coming Trump regime, and some clear lessons for Americans to learn right now.
Yoon won a very narrow election, as did Trump. Like Trump, he refers constantly to "fake news" and calls his political opponents enemies of the state (as Trump says, "the enemy within"). Yoon used this language to justify the imposition of martial law, as will Trump if he decides to invoke the Insurrection Act in the United States.
Like Trump, Yoon telegraphed his move in advance, and not only with such language. He surrounded himself with military men and intelligence officers who were characterized by personal loyalty. Trump is trying to do the same, now, with his proposals for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Kash Patel as director of the FBI, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. He also wants to purge the top ranks of the armed forces.
Yoon's main political opponent, Lee Jae-myung, had correctly predicted that Yoon would try to implement martial law. Trump makes this prediction rather easy. Trump has spoken openly of being "dictator for a day," and of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military inside the United States.The Insurrection Act is not quite the same thing as martial law. Under martial law, the military assumes the basic responsibilities associated with a civilian government. The Insurrection Act, in principle, only allows the American president to use the armed forces to assist civilian authorities to enforce some law in the presence of an insurrection. But the language of the law is quite vague. Trump makes it clear that he has in mind invoking the Insurrection Act to very broad purposes, essentially to change the regime.
In both South Korea and the United States, the legal basis for asserting greater presidential authority is antiquated. Martial law was declared in South Korea for the last time in 1979. Since the late 1980s, South Korea has moved quite decisively in the direction of meaningful elections and civil rights, thanks to the forceful activity of civil society, especially trade unions. In the United States, the Insurrection Act is an assemblage of laws passed between 1792 and 1871. It was last invoked during racial violence in Los Angeles in 1992.
Yoon's actions, although rooted of course in his own personality and South Korean career, and enabled by South Korean law, were very trumpy. Indeed, it seems likely to me that the very presence of Trump on the international scene will make such attempts more likely, among America's democratic allies (such as South Korea) and generally.
But Yoon failed, and very badly. His dictatorship for a day lasted only about six hours. What can Americans learn from his less-than-a-day dictatorship?First of all, we have to take in a very basic reality: that attempts to establish military dictatorships have been made in democracies, and will be made in other democracies --including, very possibly, in the American one.
The most worrying moment of Yoon's invocation of martial law was that, in the beginning, the military acted as he wished that it would. Military leaders initially joined in his coup attempt, with General Park An-su claiming to ban political actions, political parties, political gatherings, and "propaganda," which can mean anything anyone says. He also claimed to take all media outlets under the control of the military.
The pertinent question for Americans would be: will Trump be able to surround himself with loyalists who will do the same thing? He is trying to do so. And so the Senate, in confirmation hearings, has an obvious question to ask all of Trump's appointees with any responsibility for national security or intelligence: if Trump attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act to stifle domestic political life, just as Yoon attempted to do in South Korea, would you take part?
For legislators, the lessons are also very clear. The moment Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Kim, told people to rally at the parliament. Legislators themselves entered its chambers, despite the wishes of the military leadership, and then voted unanimously for the revocation of martial law. Members of Yoon's own right-wing party, in other words, joined with the opposition in a dramatic demonstration of unity in the face of the threat of a military dictatorship.
Are American legislators capable of defending their roles and their republic? The evidence thus far is very mixed; it remains to be seen.
New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon and Jin Yu Young, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol made the decree, the first of its kind in more than four decades, amid a bitter feud with the political opposition. Lawmakers demanded the declaration be canceled, setting up a showdown. Earlier, a general said news outlets were under “martial law command.”
President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, right, declared emergency martial law on Tuesday, banning “all political activities,” in an extraordinary reaction to the political deadlock that has hobbled his tenure.
The full extent of what martial law entails was not immediately clear, but the announcement enabled the president to take command of the news media. His declaration set off protesters clashing with the police outside the National Assembly, and an immediate effort by opposition lawmakers to halt the decree. It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since the military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
Mr. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply unpopular and divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
In a late-night meeting, the National Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the president must lift it “without delay.”
Here’s what else to know.
- Protesters in Seoul: Some demonstrators appeared to be trying to enter the National Assembly as police officers tried to block them, as seen in images broadcast by local networks. “End martial law! End martial law!” protesters chanted.
- Political paralysis: Elected president in 2022, Mr. Yoon has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls the National Assembly. In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday night, he denounced the opposition for repeatedly using its majority in the National Assembly to impeach members of his cabinet and block the passage of his government’s budget plans. This has “paralyzed the administration,” Mr. Yoon said. “The National Assembly, which should have been the foundation of free democracy, has become a monster that destroys it.”
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Warning from Seoul: Democracy at Risk in an Age of Authoritarian Power, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 4, 2024. How Yoon’s State of Emergency and Trump’s Strategies Are Eroding Global Freedoms.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.
In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.
Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.
Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.
The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.
Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 4, 2024.For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, John Yoon and Ephrat Livni, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol has been locked in a bitter fight with the opposition, which controls Parliament.
It was the first martial law declaration in more than four decades in South Korea, which saw the end of a military dictatorship in the late 1980s. Mr. Yoon, who was elected president in 2022, has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, and his government has faced plunging public approval ratings.
In his speech declaring martial law late Tuesday, Mr. Yoon said he was making the move to “defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order. Through this emergency martial law, I will rebuild and defend the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into ruin.”
New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law, Dec. 3, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol made the extraordinary declaration in an unannounced speech to the nation on Tuesday night.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid
- Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Opinion: Can Martial Law Happen in America? David French
- New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law
- New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea
- New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law
More Global News
New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader, above, has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel Macron.
The one-on-one duel that has shaped French political life for nearly a decade ratcheted up a notch last week, with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen claiming one big scalp, and giving notice of going after a bigger one, President Emmanuel Macron.
No one doubted that she was calling the shots. Yet by Monday, Mr. Macron, right, had relegated Ms. Le Pen and her party, the anti-immigrant National Rally, to 
“pariah” — her word — status. He did not deign to meet with her in his search for a new prime minister to replace the one she had largely ousted last week.
Leaders of other parties had tête-à-têtes with Mr. Macron at the presidential palace; but not Ms. Le Pen, who was excluded because she is part of the “anti-Republican front” — his words.
That could turn out to be a big mistake. Last week, Ms. Le Pen announced the demise of the hapless prime minister, Michel Barnier, in Parliament; sure enough he was overthrown in a no-confidence vote soon after.
Mr. Barnier had tried to force through a budget proposal without a vote, and above all he had barely consulted with Ms. Le Pen, who has the largest bloc 
of parliamentarians and cannot be ignored.
She has suggested successive Macron governments could fall, until he steps down — making clear she is after a more consequential trophy: the president himself.
Mr. Macron was barely off the plane from Saudi Arabia as she spoke last Wednesday night. As the bemused parliamentarians listened, she promised “deliverance” for France from its woes, “maybe, very soon.”
That seemed as much promise as threat.
It all rested on one man’s decision, she said, avoiding Mr. Macron’s name while suggesting she was pushing him toward the exit. Her target was clear.
“It’s up to the person concerned, by himself, to decide whether he should stay,” she said. “It’s on his conscience, to determine whether he should sacrifice public policy, and France’s fate, for the sake of his own pride.”
New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial, Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 10, 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a trial that began four years ago. He has denied the charges.
Outside the courthouse, he is one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, overseeing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, its occupation of southern Lebanon and recent strikes in Syria.
As he stepped into a cramped and sweltering underground courtroom in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel morphed into the defendant in Case 67104-01-20 — charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Eight years after the police started investigating him and four years after his trial began, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was taking the stand for the first time to respond to accusations of corruption that have defined and disrupted Israeli public life for nearly a decade.
“Like everyone who is brought to the witness stand, you are charged with speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” said Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of three judges hearing the case.
An audience of roughly 100 journalists, lawmakers, government ministers and lawyers craned their necks to catch his response.
“I have waited eight years for this moment — to tell the truth, the truth as I remember it,” replied Mr. Netanyahu, gripping the sides of a wooden lectern as he stood to the left of the judges.
It was a humbling moment — a sitting prime minister, forced to answer accusations of graft, before a courtroom filled with his peers. It was also a moment Mr. Netanyahu seemed determined to transcend.
“I am shocked by the magnitude of this absurdity,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
“I am the prime minister, I am running a country, I am running a war,” he continued. “I am not occupying myself with my future, but rather with that of the state of Israel.”
For nearly a decade, the corruption charges against Mr. Netanyahu have divided Israel, leading to years of political turmoil. The electorate has been roughly evenly split on the question of whether Mr. Netanyahu should remain in office while he stands trial — a dynamic that has created an electoral stalemate, leading to five elections in less than four years.
Apart from a brief court appearance to plead not guilty in 2021, Mr. Netanyahu had rarely been affected by the day-to-day proceedings of the trial.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers spent years interviewing witnesses instead of the defendant himself. The hearing on Tuesday — 1,661 days since the trial began — was set to be Mr. Netanyahu’s first full day in court.
Mr. Netanyahu had sought to delay his testimony by several months, arguing that his management of the war campaign had disrupted his preparations. But the court agreed to a postponement of only a few days.
While his appearance on Tuesday provided a crescendo in the judicial process, it was also, to many Israelis, anti-climactic. The charges against Mr. Netanyahu have been a part of Israeli discourse for so long that the spectacle of a prime minister on trial no longer seems as shocking as it once did.
“The public has completely accepted the idea that we have a sitting prime minister who has been investigated, indicted and is now on trial — even in the middle of a war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst who attended the hearing on Tuesday.
“What would have been unimaginable 10 years ago has been completely normalized,” she added.
Mr. Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The charges center on claims that he gave regulatory favors and diplomatic support to prominent businessmen in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage.
The trial is expected to continue for years, and Mr. Netanyahu will likely take the stand several times a week for several months.
New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions, Jeffrey Gettleman, Dec. 10, 2024. The former Soviet Republic has been rocked by demonstrations over the same issues that hurtled Ukraine into war: its relationship with Europe and Russia.
On the streets of Georgia, it’s starting to look a little like the Ukraine of 10 years ago, before the war, when tensions with Russia started brewing.
- An increasingly authoritarian government in a former Soviet republic cools to the European Union and drifts closer to Moscow.
- Enormous protests erupt, calling for the government’s ouster.
- Riot police respond.
- Young demonstrators are beaten up and dragged away.
- Each side digs in, raising the specter of a major crisis in a country that has long struggled to break away from Russian dominance.
On the continent’s far eastern edge, embracing the European Union can be a risky move, threatening vested interests, especially those of Russia, which is wary to lose any of its regional influence.
These tensions have been playing out to different degrees in recent years in Georgia, Moldova and, in the most extreme example, Ukraine. All three are former Soviet republics and Russian troops occupy different slices of each.
In Georgia, what concerns people here and beyond are the unmistakable echoes of Ukraine’s popular revolution in 2014 that succeeded in pulling the country away from Moscow but ultimately resulted in a devastating war.
“The government is trying to turn the country back to the Russian sphere of influence against the will of the people, who were moving toward the West,which felt almost inevitable,” said Cristina Florea, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Eastern Europe.
“It is creepily similar to what happened in Ukraine,” she said, and “so, so worrying.”
Ever since the ruling party announced in late November it was postponing its effort to join the European Union, thousands of outraged, pro-Europe Georgians have poured into the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, provoking a brutal response.
Lazare Maglakelidze, a 20-year-old computer science student, said men in unmarked black uniforms snatched him from a recent protest, dragged him into a van, pummeled his face, broke his nose and threatened to rape him. He shared medical records and video footage corroborating much of his account.
Still, in an interview, speaking through a mask of medical tape, he said he wasn’t discouraged and found the Ukraine parallel inspiring.
“Ukraine is where we see people fighting for their dignity, dedicating their lives to the highest of high concepts that anybody can imagine,” he said.
“Yes, there’s a risk to standing up to Russia,” he went on. “But it’s better to die fighting, to die with dignity, than to live a miserable, unworthy, unholy life.”
New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades, David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien, Dec. 10, 2024. Taiwan is on high alert in response to China’s unannounced deployment of naval and Coast Guard ships, as tensions rise over U.S. support for the island.
Taiwan said on Tuesday that China was conducting its largest maritime operations in nearly three decades, sending nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels into waters stretching from the southern Japanese islands to the South China Sea.
Taiwanese defense officials said the scope of the deployment suggested that China was not only trying to show that it could choke the self-governed island, but also that it could block American allies in the region like Japan and the Philippines from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
China has “extended their military strength outward,” Gen. Hsieh Jih-sheng, a senior official in Taiwan’s ministry of defense told reporters. “The numbers are indeed astonishing,” he said, referring to the surge of Chinese vessels in the waters. Sun Li-fang, a 
spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, said the maritime operations were the largest that Taiwan has seen since 1996.
The officials said that Taiwan was on high alert in response to the Chinese ships, many of which were in waters off Taiwan’s southwest, east and northwest coasts.
China’s intentions were not immediately clear. There were no official announcements from Beijing that its forces were holding exercises. A foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked on Tuesday if China was conducting drills near Taiwan, deflected the question.
Speculation had been growing for days that China would launch war games in retaliation for visits made by Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam last week while on his way to the Pacific islands.
Trump Cases, Convictions, Reprisals, Allies
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Politico, Trump promised Jan. 6 pardons. His post-election silence is making loyalists nervous, Kyle Cheney, Nov. 30, 2024. His die-hard supporters — as well as some federal judges — are left to speculate about his clemency plans.
Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to pardon a vast swath of supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his silence on the matter since winning the election has begun unsettling some fervent allies awaiting even the slightest signal from Trump about how he intends to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.
Federal judges overseeing Jan. 6 cases have been left to guess at Trump’s plans. As a result, they have allowed nearly all cases to proceed, saying Trump’s clemency plans are merely “speculative.” Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have brought a handful of new Jan. 6 felony cases since Election Day, and they’ve argued repeatedly against efforts by defendants to delay their cases to await Trump’s inauguration.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people for their roles in the riot. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would pardon many of them. But he left the specifics unclear, and never said whether he might leave in place some prosecutions, particularly against people who assaulted police.
Now that he’s president-elect, his failure to say more has begun nagging at some of his die-hard supporters, who have engaged in a public guessing game on X about Trump’s intentions.
“[H]onestly people have suffered for 4 years and many are still in flux and terrified. A word of reassurance from the top would go a long way for people,” wrote Brandon Straka, a prominent Trump ally who spent three months in home detention after pleading guilty to Jan. 6 misdemeanors. “The silence on the issue just exacerbates the victims’ anxiety. Hopefully some kind of messaging comes soon.”
Adding to the anxiety expressed by some Jan. 6 defendants is a statement from Trump’s transition team that hinted at a far more limited approach than the sweeping pardons that many in Trump’s base have demanded.
“President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis,” incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in the statement.
The meaning of “case-by-case” has morphed into a raging debate among Jan. 6 defendants and their allies.
“It is just a phrase. ‘Case by case,’ It isn’t a policy, or a strategy, or anything,” wrote Suzzanne Monk, a longtime advocate for Jan. 6 defendants. “It is a catch phrase the media is using to push the ‘only some will be pardoned’ narrative.”
Politico, Trump picks Kash Patel to lead FBI, Megan Messerly, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). The position will require Senate confirmation.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Pate, shown above,l as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.
If confirmed, Patel will replace current FBI Director Chris Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017 after firing James Comey, cutting his 10-year term short. Wray’s term is not set to expire until 2027, so Trump will have to fire Wray to install Patel, if Wray doesn’t resign first.
Trump, in a post to Truth Social, called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”
“He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” the president-elect added, referring to the role Patel played as a staffer in crafting House Republican responses to the investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At the time, Patel was an aide to Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, a position that helped raise his profile in Trump’s inner circle.
Patel was also angling to be deputy director of the CIA, a position that would not have required Senate confirmation, unlike the FBI director post, which does. It’s unclear whether Patel, who is a divisive figure even among Trump loyalists, will have the votes needed in the Senate to be confirmed.
When Trump floated naming Patel deputy director of the FBI during his first administration, then-Attorney General Bill Barr responded “over my dead body,” according to reporting at the time. CIA Director Gina Haspel also threatened to quit over the 
move.
Patel is a former federal public defender and former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s national security division. A staunch Trump defender, Patel has been assisting the president-elect in compiling a list of candidates to join the Justice Department.
Patel has also promised to investigate and potentially prosecute journalists.
“We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” Patel said last year.
The president-elect also announced Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Chronister, a 32-year veteran of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, joins a long line of Floridians Trump has picked to join his administration.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said Chronister would work with Pam Bondi, his appointee for attorney general, to “secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES.”
Chronister was first appointed to the post by then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Donald J. Trump, left, then as a former president defending himself in New York earlier this year, appears with his attorney Todd Blanche in a court-designated media availability site at the courthouse
Washington Post, Trump picked his lawyer for a top Justice Dept. job. Does it matter? Mark Berman, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). If confirmed as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche should recuse from Justice Department matters related to cases where he represented Donald Trump, experts say.
Soon after winning the presidential election, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to install Todd Blanche, one of his criminal defense attorneys, as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department.
Blanche would fix “a broken System of Justice,” Trump declared in a statement.
Days later, Blanche was hard at work in his current role, signing a court filing that derided one of the cases against Trump as “politically-motivated and fatally flawed” and argued that it should be dismissed.
Blanche — Trump’s pick to be the deputy attorney general — faces an uneasy balancing act, particularly given the president-elect’s stated desire to seek retribution against his investigators and political foes.
If Blanche is confirmed, his previous work representing Trump in multiple criminal cases would raise ethical concerns unless he recuses himself from anything at the Justice Department that might touch on those matters, according to interviews with several legal experts.
Recusal is “an obvious call,” said Eli Wald, a law professor at the University of Denver who specializes in legal ethics. He said Blanche overseeing anything that touches on his previous defense of Trump in either state or federal court would create a clear “appearance of impropriety.”
The Justice Department has “lots of excellent lawyers,” Wald said. “Why would we want one person that Americans can correctly identify with being President Trump’s lawyer to be … making decisions about the same matters in which he represented the president? That would defy common sense.”
Washington Post, Analysis: Trump’s plans for disruption, retribution explained through Cabinet picks, Amber Phillips, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). On some choices, his strategy is clear: Disruption and retribution.
President-elect Donald Trump has quickly put together his Cabinet picks. Loyalty to him has been a major factor.
But Trump is also sending a mixed message with his choices: Will his administration be more of a traditional Republican one, or one that shakes up the system as much as it can?
And despite saying during the presidential campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, the policy blueprint coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Trump picked one of its architects to a top government job.
“On a lot of this, we just don’t know what to make of it,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said of Trump’s Cabinet announcements.
Here are some broad trends behind the Cabinet picks so far.On some, Trump is clear: He wants disruption and retribution.
MSNBC Alex Wagner Tonight, Commentary: DOJ braces for corruption of department as Trump prioritizes revenge, Nov. 27, 2024. David Rohde, national security editor for NBC News, discusses how prosecutors at the Justice Department are preparing to be the subject of weaponized investigations at the hands of Pam Bondi to appease Donald Trump's desire for revenge for efforts to hold him accountable.
Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him, Sonam Sheth, Nov. 26, 2024. Schiff Reminds His GOP Colleagues The Outcome Of Trump Hush Money Trial.
California U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, shown above in a file photo, questioned on Tuesday whether President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general will go after the grand jurors who voted to indict Trump. "Is she also going to go after the grand jurors who found there was probable cause to believe he was engaged in multiple crimes?" Schiff said on MSNBC, referring to Trump'sattorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, shown below.
Special counsel Jack Smith's office secured two grand jury indictments against Trump: one in Washington, D.C., in connection to his activities surrounding efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and in the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol; and another in Florida, related to Trump's handling of classified documents.
Smith's office this week moved to dismiss the January 6 case, and prosecutors also dropped an appeal to the dismissal of the classified documents case.A jury in New York also returned an indictment charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was convicted of all 34 charges earlier this year, but his sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.
And the president-elect and several of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering charges, but that case has been placed on hold amid a legal challenge to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' role in the case.
During his MSNBC interview on Tuesday, Schiff, who recently won his Senate race in California, mentioned special counsel John 
Durham, left, who was tapped to investigate the Justice Department's inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Durham did not secure convictions in any of the cases.
"You can very well see a lot of prosecutors, like Durham, who spend millions of taxpayer dollars to come up with nothing," Schiff told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace. "Pam Bondi [shown in a 2016 file photo below] follows through with what she's pledged to do, which is to investigate nonexistent voter fraud, for example, or to go after the prosecutors."
[MSNBC Host Nicolle Wallace, shown below in a file photo, responded: "It’s clear that Trump wants a whole bunch of John Durhams in the Justice Department.”]
A 1798 political cartoon's depiction of the XYZ Affair with America as a female being plundered by Frenchmen
The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann, right, Nov. 28, 2024. From Jefferson’s era to today, history proves democracy’s defenders can still win…
It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?
Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.
In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?
My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.
In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.
New York Times, Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities, Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang, Nov. 28, 2024 (interactive). A Times analysis shows where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joe Biden and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift.
New York Times, Analysis: Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles, David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk as co-leader, has advantages that past budget-cutters did not, but changes could still be slow.
New York Times, What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now? Theodore Schleifer, Nov. 27, 2024. The party’s donor class is still wrestling with Donald Trump’s victory, worried about retribution and sluggish liberal energy. (Shown at right, Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Washington Post, Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted'- Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him
- Washington Post, Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election, Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein
- Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu
- The Hartmann Report, Political Opinion: Is Democratic Leadership Missing in Action as Trump Tightens His Grip? Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump Evaded Jack Smith and the Rule of Law, Jesse Wegman
- New York Times, They Attended Trump’s Trial. Now He’s Offering Them High-Profile Jobs
New York Times, Trump’s Sentencing in New York Is Officially on Hold 
New York Times, Pam Bondi, Former Florida Prosecutor, Is Trump’s New Attorney General Pick- New York Times, Pam Bondi Is Trump’s New Choice for Attorney General. Here’s What to Know About Her
- Washington Post, Matt Gaetz withdraws bid to be attorney general in Trump administration
- The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann
More On Presidential Pardons
Emptywheel, Analysis: You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 6, 2024. The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s 
reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.
Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.
With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.
And it won’t work.
Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden
Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.
Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted. But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.
While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media. The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.
Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.
Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.
More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.
Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.
That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.
There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole
Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.
Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.
Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.
Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.
There are legal privileges to protect
One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking opening of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.
To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.
Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”
Plus, the opinion via which Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.
The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.
If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.
It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law
There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.
Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.
Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.
Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.
Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.
Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.
Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.
Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.John Bolton would beg to differ with you.
Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.
Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.
But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.
Hunter Biden, shown above in a file photo. The Biden sentencing judges, U.S. District Court Judges Maryellen Noreika (left) of Delaware and Mark Scarsi of California, both nominated by Donald Trump, are shown side by side.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 4, 2024. I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.
ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.
Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.
According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.
In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.
This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.
Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.
First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.
But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.
Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1
[snip]
The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.
Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.
Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.
New York Times, Editorial: The Dangerous Precedent of Biden’s Pardon, Editorial Board, Dec. 4, 2024. President Biden has issued pardons to just 26 people during his term, and granted the commutation of 132 prison sentences. Though he has been criticized for his reluctance to extend clemency, his choices mostly represented the best form of it, wiping away the criminal stains of everyday people who had been unjustly convicted or reducing prison time for those whose sentences were excessive. And his modest record spoke to Mr. Biden’s attempt to project an admirable restraint in using his absolute, easily abused power to overrule the judgment of the justice system.
Then on Sunday, in direct violation of his own pledges not to do so, Mr. Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter. Though he claimed the decision was made out of fatherly love, his explanation also attacked the investigation of his son and, implicitly, his own Justice Department.
New York Times, Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun.
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”
He said he did so because the charges against his son were politically motivated and designed to hurt the president politically.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
After Mr. Biden announced the pardon, Hunter Biden issued a statement of his own. “I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” he said. “I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though he and his spokeswoman had denied for months that he had any intention of doing so. NBC News first reported on Sunday evening that Mr. Biden had in fact decided to pardon his son.
But the move quickly drew expressions of scorn from Mr. Biden’s political adversaries and others and called into question the president’s honesty, given the many public statements that he made saying he would not pardon his son.
President Biden used the power of his office to wave aside years of his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, including a guilty plea for illegally buying a gun. Republicans, including the president’s successor, President-elect Trump, have spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues. Read Joe Biden’s Statement About Pardoning Hunter
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the 
moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced — precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter of lying on the firearms form. The tax charges were due to be tried in Los Angeles in September 2024, but Hunter suddenly decided to “plead to the sheet,” i.e., admit guilt to all charges.
Both cases were awaiting sentencing until last night’s presidential pardon, which brought them both to a swift end.
The pardon is generating controversy, even among Democrats and my former prosecutor peers. I understand their ambivalence, but I think it rests on considerations that don’t undermine the essential fairness and propriety of the pardon. In the few hours since the pardon was announced, these are the main objections I’ve heard, along with my responses:
New York Times, Opinion: Biden’s Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office, Jeffrey Toobin, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Toobin, right, is the author of the 
forthcoming book “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
Pardons are the consummate discretionary acts; presidents are never required to issue even a single one, nor are they limited in the number they issue or to whom. In this way, they reveal their roots in the royal prerogative of mercy. There is only one reason presidents, or kings, issue pardons: because they want to.
On Sunday night as he boarded a plane to Cape Verde, en route to Angola, President Biden revealed himself as an anguished, and furious, father when he pardoned his son Hunter. Mr. Biden said, as recently as June, that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter or commute his sentence, and his press secretary reiterated that he had no plans to pardon Hunter after last month’s election. In June, a jury had found the younger Mr. Biden guilty of three felony counts relating to lies about his drug use on a federal form to apply to own a firearm. Then, in September, he pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California.
Hunter was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month, which undoubtedly served to precipitate his father’s action. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, he was probably facing at least a couple of years in prison. But the pardon from his father wiped out that possibility and gifted the son a clean record, as if he had never been charged in the first place. The pardon goes further. It is “not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted” and encompasses the period when the younger Mr. Biden joined the board of Burisma.
Reader Comment: I would agree with Mr. Toobin here, except that there are a few unique circumstances that move this out of the realm of typical Federal sentencing situations.
The Secret Service is responsible for Mr. Biden until July 19, 2025, which means there is a six-month period during which they must protect him in prison. His time in prison would very likely have exceeded that period. Between the time of the sentencing report following his tax-related guilty plea (September 5, 2024) and yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Secret Service, the DOJ, and his lawyers have been trying to construct an incarceration plan that would have guaranteed his safety, at least until July 19, 2025.
The overriding concern is that an incoming administration consisting of some of the announced nominees would be easily capable of, and, in fact, looking forward to, relocating Mr. Biden from a low-security facility to a Federal hell-hole with a shiv-carrying general population.Even solitary confinement is not a safe escape from that population.
Hunter Biden deserves to serve time, but does not deserve to be murdered in prison. Does President Biden need to sacrifice yet another child to prove his character?
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon
New York Times, President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night.
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.
From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given noncriminal resolutions.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
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It is clear that Hunter was treated differently. The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.
There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.
Washington Post, Hunter Biden’s team issues a fiery defense ahead of sentencing, possible pardon, Matt Viser, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Judges are scheduled to sentence the president’s son for gun and tax offenses in December.
Hunter Biden’s legal team is launching an assertive public defense of the president’s son just weeks before federal judges in Delaware and California prepare to sentence him this month, and as his father faces a diminishing window to pardon him if he chooses to do so despite previously ruling it out.Get the latest election news and results
In a 52-page paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” released Saturday, Hunter Biden’s lawyers criticize the foundation of the investigations into their client, arguing that he was prosecuted for crimes that an ordinary citizen would not have been. Hunter Biden is likely to face further unfair threats when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the lawyers contend.
The document at times seems aimed directly at President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said that he will not pardon or commute the sentences of his son. Hunter has been with his father over the past several days in Nantucket, where the Biden family for decades has gathered for Thanksgiving.
“With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real,” the report asserts. It cites comments that Trump has made about targeting his opponents, along with remarks from congressional Republicans who for years have investigated Hunter and other Biden family members.
“There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter,” the report says. “The prospect that Trump will turn his vengeance on the Special Counsel prosecutors if they fail to take a harder line against Hunter no doubt exerts considerable pressure on them not to let up on Hunter.”
Both cases against Hunter Biden, for gun and tax offenses, were brought by special counsel David Weiss, left (nominated by Donald Trump to be U.S. attorney), whose office was staffed by attorneys from the Justice Department. That department will now be overseen by Trump and his attorney general.
Taken as a whole, the document largely rehashes past arguments made by Hunter Biden and his legal team, at times unsuccessfully in court. It includes a lengthy timeline of events since 2017 that the attorneys say demonstrate that federal prosecutors unfairly targeted the son of a prominent politician.
“Here, in one place, is the complete and reprehensible history of the political persecution of Hunter Biden,” Abbe Lowell, one of Hunter’s top attorneys, said in a statement. “This is a seven-year saga propelled by an unrelenting political desire to use a son to hurt his father.”
He added, “It is a wild and terrifying story that serves as a stark warning of what is to come as some of the same Republicans who targeted Hunter prepare to resume power and have stated their intention to use the government’s vast power to pursue their perceived enemies.”
New York Times, Analysis: In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints, Peter Baker, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden and President-elect Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.
The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Mr. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much the way Mr. Biden has now said his son was.
Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Mr. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Mr. Biden did not explicitly accuse the Justice Department of being biased against his family, but suggested that it was influenced by Republican politicians who have waged a long public campaign assailing Hunter Biden.
As it happens, the Justice Department has rejected both accusations. The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics, and senior department officials have denied that politics entered the equation against either man. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases.
But Mr. Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the F.B.I. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Mr. Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.
“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.
Representative Greg Stanton, Democrat of Arizona, disputed the president’s argument that politics was behind his son’s prosecution. “I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said online. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
The Bulwark, Opinion: The Father, the Son, and Kash Patel, William Kristol, Dec. 2, 2024. One thing can be bad and another thing can be much worse.
In The Bulwark’s house there are many rooms. In one of them resides the estimable Mona Charen, who a couple of weeks ago urged President Biden not to pardon his son, Hunter. In another dwells the laudable Kim Wehle, who this morning defends Biden’s pardon as judiciously as one can. For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in Mona’s wing of our (virtual) Bulwark mansion.
The president ought not to have pardoned Hunter Biden. It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.
In any case, The Bulwark will survive some disagreement over the act of a man who let his love as a father overwhelm his judgment as a president. So will the nation. The question we face is how well the nation will survive the next four years of a Trump presidency, where neither love nor judgment are present, only the will to arbitrary power and the desire for personal retribution.
President Biden made a mistake. But the problem with Donald Trump and his appointees isn’t that they’ll make mistakes. It is that the whole Trump presidency is animated by a plan to create centralized, personalized, unconstrained, and unaccountable power in the president and his agents.
Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Kash Patel director of the FBI is one piece of the puzzle, but a particularly dangerous piece at that. It is emblematic of an attempt to seize full control over the power ministries of the government—including the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Whether these agencies are run by true believers like Patel or Tulsi Gabbard, or weak opportunists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, is less important than that they be run fully and unequivocally in accord with the wishes of Trump and his key apparatchiks in the White House—Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and OMB Director Russell Vought.
If Trump can get Patel confirmed as FBI director, he’s obviously off to the authoritarian races. But even if Patel isn’t confirmed, or isn’t confirmed quickly, we’re on a very dangerous path. Trump will govern and seek to enable his agents to govern in what one might call the spirit of Kash Patel—a lawless and authoritarian spirit.
One way Trump will advance this plan is by appointing loyalists to serve in an “acting” capacity in key positions where the Senate hasn’t confirmed his nominees. Trump experimented with this in his first term. Indeed, he commented in January, 2019: “I like acting [appointments]. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.” Now his lawyers and operatives have had years to plan on how to systematically place loyalists as acting officials in key positions, from secretary and director on down.
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced—precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.Gerald Ford (left) speaks as Richard Nixon looks on.
Gerald Ford (left) speaks as President Richard Nixon looks on in October 1973. Eleven months later, after Nixon resigned and Ford became president, he pardoned Nixon. | STR/AFP via Getty Images
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon.
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U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
Washington Post, Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses, Jacob Bogage, Jacqueline Alemany and Jeff Stein, Trump feuded with the mail agency in his first term. Privatizing it could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains.
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.
Trump has discussed his desire to overhaul the Postal Service at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition, the people said. Earlier this month, Trump also convened a group of transition officials to ask for their views on privatizing the agency, one of the people said.
Told of the mail agency’s annual financial losses, Trump said the government should not subsidize the organization, the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations.
Trump’s specific plans for overhauling the Postal Service were not immediately clear. But he feuded with the nation’s mail carrier as president in 2019, trying to force it to hand over key functions — including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients — to the Treasury Department.
“The government is slow, slow, slow — decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things, and there’s a lot of [other] carrier services that became legal in the ’70s that are doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs,” said Casey Mulligan, who served as a top economist in the first Trump administration. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.”
The postal system is older than the nation itself, founded in 1775 with Benjamin Franklin as its chief, revitalized with free rural delivery at the start of the 20th century, then transformed into a financially self-sustaining agency in 1970 designed to “bind the nation together” through the mail. Even through financial challenges wrought by the rise of the internet, the Postal Service has remained one of Americans’ most beloved federal agencies, second only the National Park Service in a 2024 Pew Research Center study.
But as congressional Republicans and others in Trump’s orbit have clamored in recent weeks for federal cost-cutting, the Postal Service has emerged as a prominent target. People who will work on the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a nongovernmental panel led by tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have also held preliminary conversations about major changes to the Postal Service, said two other people familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks.
The Postal Service lost $9.5 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, stung by continued declines in mail volume and a slower-than-anticipated parcel shipping business, even as it made major new investments in modernized facilities and equipment. The agency faces nearly $80 billion in liabilities, according to its annual financial report.
Cuts to the Postal Service could upend the trillion-dollar e-commerce industry, hitting small businesses and rural consumers whose businesses and budgets make the agency the shipper of choice. Amazon, the Postal Service’s largest customer, uses the agency for “last-mile” delivery between its hulking product fulfillment centers and consumers’ homes and businesses. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And the agency’s “universal service obligation” — which requires it to deliver mail or parcels regardless of distance or profitability concerns — means it is often the only carrier that will deliver to far-flung reaches of the country.
Attempts to privatize one of the most prominent parts of the federal government could spark a political backlash, especially for Republicans representing rural districts that the agency disproportionately serves. Federal officials from Alaska, for example, often invite postal executives to the Last Frontier to see how crucial the Postal Service is to the state’s economy.
Responding to inquiries about privatizing the agency, a Postal Service spokesperson said the agency’s 10-year modernization plan has led it to cut 45 million work hours in the past three years and reduce spending on transportation by $2 billion. The agency is also seeking regulatory approval to alter its mail processing and delivery timetables to better align with private-sector practices, the spokesperson said in a statement.
“The United States Postal Service is already engaged in an initiative to ensure that we can provide our customers with a high level of service to every delivery address in the nation at least 6-days-a-week in an efficient and financially sustainable fashion as required by law,” the agency’s statement said.
Trump has long had a tense relationship with the mail agency. He once derided it from the Oval Office as “a joke” and in a social media post as Amazon’s “Delivery Boy.” In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump threatened to withhold emergency assistance from the Postal Service unless it quadrupled package prices, and his treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, authorized a loan for the mail agency only in exchange for access to its confidential contracts with top customers.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump said the Postal Service was incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because the agency could not access the emergency funding he was blocking. The Postal Service ultimately delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days.
When he returns to office, Trump could have several options to exert control over the mail agency — though he may not have the authority to unilaterally privatize it.
The Postal Service has three vacancies on its nine-member governing board. Among sitting members, three are Republicans, and two of those are Trump appointees. Biden has three pending nominees, but the Senate does not appear poised to confirm them before Trump’s inauguration.
Significantly narrowing the universal service obligation — which had been recommended by officials during Trump’s first term — would probably require an act of Congress. If approved, the Postal Service would almost immediately be required to scale back delivery service to unprofitable areas and downsize its staff of roughly 650,000 employees.
The agency was also under fire earlier this week, when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy faced sharp questioning from Republicans in a hearing Tuesday. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Kentucky) warned DeJoy that next year’s Congress could seek to overhaul the mail service.
New York Times, Nancy Pelosi Has Hip Replacement Surgery After Fall, Karoun Demirjian, Dec. 14, 2024. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, had hip replacement surgery on Saturday after falling while on an official trip to Luxembourg, her office said in a statement.
“Earlier this morning, Speaker Emerita Pelosi underwent a successful hip replacement and is well on the mend,” Ian Krager, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, said in a statement.
Ms. Pelosi traveled to Luxembourg as part of a congressional delegation attending a ceremony to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, a pivotal fight during World War II. On Friday, she tripped and fell while going down marble stairs at the Grand Ducal Palace, according to a person familiar with the incident who was not authorized to comment and spoke on condition of anonymity.
People close to Ms. Pelosi said at the time that she had fractured her hip in the accident, though it was not immediately clear if she would be treated in Europe or the United States. Her spokesman’s statement indicated that her surgery ultimately had taken place at a U.S. military base in Germany.
The former speaker “is well on the mend,” her spokesman said. She fell in Luxembourg on a trip to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.
New York Times, What We Know About Drone Sightings in New Jersey and New York, Alyce McFadden, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). Reports of flying objects continue to occur throughout the region. State and local officials say they do not pose a threat but have provided few answers.
Bright lights floating or flying in the night sky above New Jersey have captivated residents for nearly a month. Now the sightings, which many observers believe to be drones, have spread throughout the region.
Federal authorities investigating the sightings have provided few answers about what the objects are or their origin, leaving residents unsettled and local leaders frustrated.
U.S. officials on Thursday said that they had been unable to corroborate the reported drone sightings, and suggested that many of the objects might in fact be manned aircraft, such as airplanes or helicopters.
But assurances from state and federal officials that the sightings do not indicate a threat to residents have done little to allay public concerns. Lawmakers have expressed frustration with the lack of information, and are urging the federal government to share more about its investigation.
New York Times, Agriculture Department to Require Testing of U.S. Milk Supply for Bird Flu Virus, Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The new rules call for testing unpasteurized milk from dairies across the country and for farm owners to provide details that would help officials identify and track cases more easily.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new rules on Friday requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus known as H5N1, nearly a year after the virus began circulating through dairy cattle.
Under the new testing strategy, the department will begin testing bulk samples of unpasteurized milk from dairy processing facilities across the country.
Farmers and dairy processors will be required to provide samples of raw milk on request from the government. The rules also require farm owners with infected herds to provide details that would help officials identify more cases and contacts.
The rules are a departure from the voluntary guidance that the department has issued during the outbreak. Many dairy farms have not complied with voluntary testing of milk or of dairy workers, leaving federal officials in the dark about how widely the virus might have spread.
Many experts in the United States and elsewhere, including with the World Health Organization, have sharply criticized the lack of testing of cattle and of people who may be infected with the virus. The virus does not yet spread easily among people, but every untreated infection is an opportunity for it to gain the ability to do so, experts have said.
Politico, Federal judge preserves Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions, Bianca Quilantan, Dec. 6, 2024. A federal judge argues that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.An entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Maryland, is seen.
A federal judge on Friday upheld the U.S. Naval Academy’s consideration of race in admissions arguing that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.
The ruling is an early blow to Students for Fair Admissions’ latest attempt to extend the scope of its Supreme Court win against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that gutted the use of race in college admissions. The ruling also comes while the Naval Academy’s admissions process is underway for its next class.
Judge Richard Bennett emphasized in his ruling that the academy is “distinct from a civilian university” because its mission is to prepare its students to become officers in the military. He also said that while race is considered in admissions, the academy does not have racial quotas or engage in racial balancing, and race is not a determinative factor in its process.
Bennett added that the academy proved its national security interest is measurable and its admissions program is narrowly tailored. He also said the court defers to the executive branch on military personnel decisions.
“The program survives strict scrutiny because the Naval Academy has established a compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Bennett wrote. “Specifically, the Academy has tied its use of race to the realization of an officer corps that represents the country it protects and the people it leads.”
SFFA, an anti-affirmative action group, argued that the Naval Academy has “no justification for using race-based admissions” when using race in admissions is unconstitutional for all other colleges across the country. But the Biden administration has argued the case is nothing like the one against Harvard or UNC because the admissions process and applicant pool are different. The administration also argued SFFA was overreading the ruling in the case against Harvard because the Supreme Court explicitly did not address military academies’ admissions policies.
The high court, in siding with SFFA against Harvard, had said it could not address admissions at the schools because of “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
SFFA President Edward Blum said the group was “disappointed” in the ruling and will appeal the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Politico, Eric Adams doesn’t rule out switch to the GOP: ‘Cancel me,’ Joe Anuta, Dec. 6, 2024. The New York City mayor has been at odds with national Democrats over immigration.Eric Adams walks in a parade.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has taken a soft touch with President-elect Donald Trump, left open the possibility of switching to the Republican Party in a pair of Friday morning interviews.
Adams was a member of the GOP from 1995 through 2002, and was asked during an appearance on NY1 whether he would return to the party. He did not rule out the possibility.
“I’m a part of the American party,” he said in response. “I love this country.”'Cancel me': Adams says he's open to working with Trump border czar
Asked to clarify his comments in a subsequent interview on PIX11, the big-city mayor again left open the question about his future political affiliation.
“No matter what party I’m on or vote on, I’m going to push for American values,” he said, arguing that officials need to move beyond parties altogether and work in concert to solve voters’ problems.
Adams’ comments come on the heels of a presidential race in which the mayor — unlike most of his fellow Democrats — took pains to avoid criticizing Trump. And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Adams has spoken glowingly about Elon Musk, a confidant of Trump tasked with making government more efficient.
The mayor is set to sit down with Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, next week to talk about plans to deport undocumented immigrants. Adams has said he would support any federal plan that focuses on those undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes.
The mayor’s openness to Trump has outraged local Democrats because of the power the incoming president will have over the five-count criminal case Adams faces in federal court.
Trump has already settled on a nominee to replace the U.S. Attorney prosecuting Adams. And as POLITICO has reported, Trump could assist Adams with the case, including offering him a pardon.
Each has cast criminal charges against themselves as the result of a politicized Justice Department — a notion President Joe Biden bolstered by criticizing the justice system in pardoning his son Hunter Biden. And Trump has expressed empathy toward Adams’ predicament.
When asked Friday if he would run for reelection next year as a Democrat, Adams gave a perfunctory answer.
“That is what I’m proposing to do,” he said. “I’ve been a Democrat for many years and I’m going to run for my reelection as a Democrat.”
And he had a final message for any naysayers.
“Those who don’t like it, they will cancel me,” he said. “I say: Cancel me. I’m for America.”
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Middle East Wars, Reactions
Travis Timmerman, shown in an AFP photo via Getty Images.
New York Times, Man Found in Syria Appears to Be a Missing American, Ben Hubbard and Amelia Nierenberg, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). The man told reporters that his name was Travis Timmerman and that he had entered Syria on a religious pilgrimage. He said that he had been detained for months.
The Syrian authorities said on Thursday that a foreign man who had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital.
In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year. In a video aired on Thursday by the news channel Al Arabiya, someone is heard asking the man if his name is Travis Timmerman. The man says, “That’s right.”
Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said that the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.
The man told reporters that he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Storm Another Major City, Ben Hubbard, Dec. 5, 2024. Opposition forces advanced on the city of Hama as their startling offensive moved quickly in the direction of the capital, Damascus.
Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad.
The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.
In a video circulated by the rebel group leading the offensive, their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, jubilantly calls for the rebels to push on toward other Syrian cities, including the capital.
“The people of Homs, prepare yourselves,” he said in the video, which his group said was filmed on Wednesday. “The people of Damascus, the people of Dara’a, the people of Deir al Zour. Victory for all, God willing.” The New York Times could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video or when it was filmed.
The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country, opened voids exploited by jihadist groups, drawn in world powers including Russia and the United States and created a long-term refugee crisis for neighboring countries.
Hama is one of the few major Syrian cities where rebels had yet to seize significant control during the civil war, which began with a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. al-Assad in 2011.
The city’s name is synonymous with one of the most notorious massacres in the Middle East. In 1982, security forces serving the president’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, massacred thousands of people there during an anti-government uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
New York Times, Fighting Rages in Syria as Rebels Advance, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Vivian Yee, Dec. 1, 2024. Forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad control the Aleppo airport and are attacking Hama, local officials and a U.K.-based war monitor say.
New York Times, A Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs, Amanda Taub, Dec. 1, 2024. Hamas's weakened position could leave the territory without any governing institutions, our columnist writes.
New York Times, Police and Protesters Clash in Georgian Capital, Cassandra Vinograd, Dec. 1, 2024. The government’s decision to suspend its bid for European Union membership has driven thousands of protesters onto the streets.
Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia’s capital late Saturday during the third consecutive night of demonstrations over the government’s suspension of its bid to join the European Union.
Thousands of people have rallied in the capital, Tbilisi, since Thursday night after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the country was putting the process of E.U. accession on hold until 2028 and would decline all grants from the bloc. The police have responded with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.
Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday morning that protests overnight had “evolved into violence.” It claimed that protesters “threw pyrotechnics” and “ignited objects” toward police officers and at Parliament, causing a fire to break out. Windows were smashed by “stones and various objects,” the ministry added in a statement, saying that protesters also had damaged protective iron barriers around the building.
More than 100 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, according to the ministry, which also said that several police officers were wounded and that 42 of its employees had been injured since the protests began.
The Associated Press reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters; it was not immediately clear how many protesters suffered injuries.
Georgia has been gripped by political crisis since the disputed victory of the Georgian Dream party in October’s parliamentary elections. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China. Georgia’s opposition, which says the election was rigged and has boycotted the new sitting of Parliament, seeks closer ties with the West.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Israeli Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant (File pool photo).
More On U.S. Foreign Policy, National Security, Tariffs
New York Times, As Ambassador, Rahm Emanuel Says His Impatience Nudged Japan Forward, Motoko Rich, Dec. 15, 2024. Patience, Rahm Emanuel likes to say, is a waste of time.
The former congressman, chief of staff to President Barack Obama and mayor of Chicago is brash, a touch cocky and frequently profane. Above all, he wants to get things done. Yesterday.
As the United States ambassador to Japan, a country where change typically follows a long process of quiet consensus-building referred to as “nemawashi,” Mr. Emanuel, 65, was initially seen as an unorthodox appointment. But maybe, he suggests, he was just what Japan needed.
“I think on a lot of things, Japan was ready to go,” said Mr. Emanuel, referring to a recent cascade of bold revisions to the country’s defense policy. In the past three years, Japan has doubled the amount earmarked for military spending, acquired Tomahawk missiles from the United States and, in a reversal of postwar restrictions on weapons exports, agreed to manufacture American-designed Patriot missiles to sell to the U.S. government.
Although he acknowledged the groundwork was laid before he arrived, Mr. Emanuel said these changes didn’t simply coincide with his term as American envoy to Tokyo.
“While I was here, they did more, went faster and farther and deeper than I think they themselves originally thought,” he said during an interview late last month in the library of his residence in Tokyo. “Did I contribute to that?” Mr. Emanuel said. “Uh, yeah.”
Just how much credit should go to Mr. Emanuel is a matter of perspective.
“Ambassador Emanuel shared various ideas with me and offered advice,” the former prime minister, Fumio Kishida, who left office in early October, said in an interview late last month in his parliamentary office in Tokyo. But “it was the Japanese government that made the decisions.”
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: {December 11 [Human Rights Day History, Implications] Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian, author, Dec. 11, 2024. Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans.
In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.”
New York Times, China Bans Rare Mineral Exports to the U.S., David Pierson, Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.
China said on Tuesday that it would begin banning the export of several rare minerals to the United States, an escalation of the tech war between the world’s two biggest powers. The move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology.
The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products, like weaponry and semiconductors.
Politico, Trump threatens BRICS nations with 100 percent tariff, Ari Hawkins, Nov. 30, 2024. Trump also said: “There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”
New York Times, Trudeau Flies to Mar-a-Lago to See Trump Amid Tariff Concerns, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Nov. 29, 2024. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is the first G-7 leader to visit since the election. He is under pressure to persuade President-elect Trump to back down from his tariff threat.
The visit makes Mr. Trudeau the first foreign head of government from the Group of 7, a key forum of global coordination consisting of the world’s wealthiest democracies, to visit the president-elect.
Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump were to dine together on Friday evening, one official said, along with a delegation of senior Trump allies poised for top trade and security positions in his new administration.
Washington Post, Trump, Mexican president talk border, migrant caravans amid tariff threats, Mary Beth Sheridan and Niha Masih, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke to President-elect Donald Trump after he threatened to impose tariffs and she hinted at retaliation in a letter.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, left, assured President-elect Donald Trump in a phone call Wednesday that migrant caravans are no longer reaching the U.S.-Mexican border, after Trump’s threat earlier this week to impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from her country if it could not halt irregular migrants and fentanyl from crossing the U.S. border.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
“We discussed the Mexican strategy for the phenomenon of migration, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at our northern border, because we deal with them in Mexico,” Sheinbaum wrote on X after the call.
She described the conversation as “excellent.” Trump, posting about the call on Truth Social, his social media platform, said the conversation was “very productive.”
The conciliatory tone on both sides followed a tense exchange Tuesday: In a letter, Sheinbaum responded angrily to Trump’s tariff warning, threatening tariffs of her own. But they diverged in how they described the conversation.
Trump said Sheinbaum had agreed to “stop Migration through Mexico,” which would mean “effectively closing our Southern Border.” In a second post he said this would be come into effect immediately, prompting another tweet from Sheinbaum in which she said: “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders but to build bridges,” adding that her country would offer assistance to migrants, including caravans, before they could reach the northern border.
New York Times, Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy, Michael Crowley, Nov. 29, 2024. The world is braced for disruption from President-elect Trump, but he may find more common ground with President Biden than many assume.
President-elect Donald J. Trump comes to office with a view of America’s place in the world that is dramatically different from his predecessor’s.
Branding President Biden’s foreign policy as “historically horrible,” Mr. Trump is vowing to reinstate an America First approach that in his first term swept away years of policy consensus and shook U.S. alliances around the world.
He wants friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, may slash U.S. support for Ukraine and has threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He admires foreign autocrats and shows little interest in Mr. Biden’s goal of championing democracy abroad. He is hostile to international organizations and treaties including the United Nations and the Paris climate accord.
But amid the many areas of potential disruption, Mr. Trump will also find plenty of things to like in Mr. Biden’s policies. Beyond the glaring exceptions of Europe and his plans for Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s initial approach could bear a surprising resemblance to the Biden status quo.
One reason is that abrupt foreign policy swerves are rare and difficult to execute, analysts say. America’s military, economic and political power tends to provide a fairly fixed amount of leverage over other countries. Pressure from allies, Congress and the federal bureaucracy push commanders-in-chief toward consensus views.
New York Times, How China Became the World’s Largest Car Exporter, Agnes Chang and Keith Bradsher, Nov. 29, 2024. President-elect Trump has promised to impose new tariffs, but they are unlikely to undercut China’s dominance given its advantages in automaking.
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Trump Legal Cases, Strategies, Allies
New York Times, Devin Nunes, Pugnacious Trump Loyalist, to Lead Espionage Advisory Board, Charlie Savage, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). As chair of the House Intelligence Committee (shown above), he attacked the Russia inquiry and Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment. Now, Mr. Nunes runs Mr. Trump’s social media company.
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Saturday that he would appoint Devin Nunes, a former member of Congresswho had used his role as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to try to delegitimize the Trump-Russia investigation, to head an independent advisory board on espionage policy.
The organization — the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — dates back to the early Cold War and consists of private citizens with top-level security clearances who are supposed to help the White House analyze spy agency effectiveness and planning. Its members do not need Senate confirmation, so presidents can pick whomever they want for it.
In a statement, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Nunes — who is currently the chief executive of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the Truth Social platform — for his counterinvestigation into the Trump-Russia inquiry in 2017-18, when Mr. Nunes led the House Intelligence Committee as a Republican congressman from California.
“While continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group, Devin will draw on his experience as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Mr. Trump wrote in his announcement.
New York Times, Trump Names Richard Grenell for ‘Special Missions’ Role, Elizabeth Williamson, Dec. 15, 2024 (print ed.). A combative loyalist and the president-elect’s former ambassador to Germany, Mr. Grenell had hoped to be secretary of state.
President-elect Donald J. Trump named Richard Grenell, his former ambassador to Germany and former acting director of national intelligence, as his “envoy for special missions,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.
A loyalist known for unbridled social media attacks on Mr. Trump’s perceived critics and many others, Mr. Grenell led a shambolic effort to challenge the 2020 election results in Nevada after Mr. Trump’s loss, and he has lobbied assiduously for a diplomatic job in the new administration.
He got his start in government before Mr. Trump’s rise, as a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations under multiple presidents. But his online toxicity, foreign business contacts and tendency toward biting personal attacks on political opponents and the media turned off many centrist conservatives, helping propel him toward Mr. Trump, a man he denounced in 2016 as “dangerous.”
“Ric will continue to fight for Peace through Strength, and always put AMERICA FIRST,” Mr. Trump wrote in his announcement.
Mr. Grenell did not immediately reply to a texted question about his priorities for the role, which does not currently exist. Mr. Trump outlined it as: “Ric will work in some of the hottest spots around the World, including Venezuela and North Korea.”
The role is a far cry from secretary of state, the job Mr. Grenell coveted, but to which Mr. Trump plans to appoint Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican from Florida. Being named for a lower-profile White House envoy job could help Mr. Grenell avoid persistent questions about his paid work for foreign clients, including luxury hotel development projects he has pursued in the Balkans with Jared Kushner, the president-elect’s son-in-law.
During the first Trump administration, Mr. Grenell was ambassador to Germany. His abrasiveness and partisanship alarmed diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly after he told Breitbart London that he planned to “empower” German conservatives opposing “the failed policies of the left.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump named Mr. Grenell to temporarily replace the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, whom Mr. Trump had fired.
New York Times, An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones, Natasha Singer (Natasha Singer reported from Revere, Mass., and reviewed more than 400 student fight videos from schools in 15 states), Dec. 15, 2024. Cafeteria melees. Students kicked in the head. Injured educators. Technology is stoking cycles of violence in schools.
Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted.
He watched, horrified, as a dozen teenage boys rampaged through the cafeteria, pummeling and kicking one another, overturning tables and chairs. Other students jeered and jostled to film the fight on their phones.
“It was like a stampede of videos,” said Mr. Martinez, now 18 and a senior. “Everyone was trying to get the best angle.”
But the pandemonium at Revere High School in Revere, Mass., was just beginning.
Within minutes, students in other parts of the building began receiving text messages about the lunchroom brawl. Suddenly, teachers said, dozens of riled-up teenagers started racing down hallways and careening down stairways with their phones to get to the fight.
New York Times, How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues, Neil MacFarquhar and Justin Scheck, Dec. 15, 2024. The Islamist rebels who ousted Syria’s dictator ran a pragmatic and disciplined administration in the territory they controlled. They also jailed their critics.
Since 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its affiliated organizations, driven by a hunger for broader power, created a certain level of stability in Idlib, governing with pragmatism and discipline. While the group retained overall control, it governed through a civilian authority with 11 ministries, which allowed it to concentrate on rebuilding its militia as a more structured force.
In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham maintained a robust internal security force to confront other military factions and domestic critics, prompting regular protests against what were seen as authoritarian methods and against harsh jail conditions.
The primary question is whether these rebels, who are now trying to form a national government, can scale up what they achieved in Idlib, a poor, agrarian region with a relatively small population.
In Idlib, ministers who dealt with outside aid organizations could never make a decision on the spot, they always had to consult first with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leaders, according to one representative of a humanitarian organization who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of aid operations in the area. Such tight control might work in a small governorate, but could prove unwieldy in a large country.
With its roots in the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham modified and moderated its own jihadist orientation starting around 2016. While it enforced some conservative Islamic practices, they did not resort to the strictures imposed by the Islamic State terrorist group when it ruled parts of Syria.
Still, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Nations, Turkey and others. Because that designation blocked overt outside support, the group found new ways to sustain itself financially and militarily.
It levied fees on all kinds of goods and enterprises, including crops, border crossings, construction, trade, shopkeeping and craftwork. In addition, companies linked to the group enjoyed a monopoly on providing fuel, electricity, water and garbage collection.
“H.T.S. exemplifies adaptability in conflict economics,” said Mark Nakhla, the chief research officer at Kharon, an open-source analytics firm that advises companies on complying with sanctions against armed groups and other hostile actors.
He has been tracking Hayat Tahrir al-Sham since its jihadist days, and has watched it go through what he called a “strategic rebranding” and a shift from relying financially on wealthy foreign donors to sustaining military and civilian operations through local taxation and governance.
New York Times, After Impeachment, South Korea Is Left With No Elected Leader, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 15, 2024. The suspension of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s powers left a seasoned but unelected prime minister in charge of a country facing challenges at home and abroad.
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment and suspension from office has left South Korea, one of the United States’ most important allies, without a strong elected leader to tackle challenges like a belligerent North Korea and a deepening political polarization at home.
By voting to impeach Mr. Yoon on Saturday, the National Assembly delivered a crushing vote of no confidence in a leader who had been unpopular through his term. Outside the legislature, people danced in the streets, celebrating Mr. Yoon’s peaceful removal from office less than two weeks after his declaration of martial law as proof of the resilience of the country’s democracy.
Yet, despite their euphoria, the political turmoil and uncertainty unleashed by Mr. Yoon’s botched attempt on Dec. 3 to place his country under military rule for the first time in 45 years remained unresolved.
His impeachment has created a political vacuum at the top. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the No. 2 official in the government hierarchy, has stepped in as the interim leader, but he has no electoral mandate. A new government cannot be born until the Constitutional Court decides whether to reinstate or formally oust Mr. Yoon.
New York Times, As Ambassador, Rahm Emanuel Says His Impatience Nudged Japan Forward, Motoko Rich, Dec. 15, 2024. Patience, Rahm Emanuel likes to say, is a waste of time.
The former congressman, chief of staff to President Barack Obama and mayor of Chicago is brash, a touch cocky and frequently profane. Above all, he wants to get things done. Yesterday.
As the United States ambassador to Japan, a country where change typically follows a long process of quiet consensus-building referred to as “nemawashi,” Mr. Emanuel, 65, was initially seen as an unorthodox appointment. But maybe, he suggests, he was just what Japan needed.
“I think on a lot of things, Japan was ready to go,” said Mr. Emanuel, referring to a recent cascade of bold revisions to the country’s defense policy. In the past three years, Japan has doubled the amount earmarked for military spending, acquired Tomahawk missiles from the United States and, in a reversal of postwar restrictions on weapons exports, agreed to manufacture American-designed Patriot missiles to sell to the U.S. government.
Although he acknowledged the groundwork was laid before he arrived, Mr. Emanuel said these changes didn’t simply coincide with his term as American envoy to Tokyo.
“While I was here, they did more, went faster and farther and deeper than I think they themselves originally thought,” he said during an interview late last month in the library of his residence in Tokyo. “Did I contribute to that?” Mr. Emanuel said. “Uh, yeah.”
Just how much credit should go to Mr. Emanuel is a matter of perspective.
“Ambassador Emanuel shared various ideas with me and offered advice,” the former prime minister, Fumio Kishida, who left office in early October, said in an interview late last month in his parliamentary office in Tokyo. But “it was the Japanese government that made the decisions.”
New York Times, Security Strategy of Recruiting Cheap Militiamen Backfires in Burkina Faso, Elian Peltier, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, Dec. 15, 2024. By arming civilians who are poorly trained and have little respect for human rights, the military has brought the nation to the brink of civil war.
Burkina Faso, a nation that once prided itself on tolerance and peaceful interethnic relations, is now home to one of the deadliest conflicts in West Africa. Since the current military leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, seized power in a coup in 2022, he has escalated a war against Islamist insurgents that has now killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly three million others.
To beef up the ranks of his embattled military, Captain Traoré’s government recruited tens of thousands of men into a civilian militia, known as the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland. The militia was created by a previous leader to protect communities against the insurgents. But under Captain Traoré, it has spread unchecked violence and pitted local populations against each other, with minority ethic groups being brutally targeted in what some analysts fear will lead to a civil war.
Acts of violence against local populations involving militiamen have more than doubled since Captain Traoré’s coup, according to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. The militiamen have carried out executions, forced disappearances or looting every six days on average, the data shows.
Arming civilians who have poor training and little respect for human rights and then giving them near total impunity is not unique to Burkina Faso.
In northeast Nigeria, members of a civilian militia assisting the country’s fight against Boko Haram have been accused of sexual violence, child recruitment and summary executions. In Sudan, the militia known as the Rapid Support Forces triggered a war that has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
New York Times, How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues, Neil MacFarquhar and Justin Scheck, Dec. 15, 2024. The Islamist rebels who ousted Syria’s dictator ran a pragmatic and disciplined administration in the territory they controlled. They also jailed their critics.
Since 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its affiliated organizations, driven by a hunger for broader power, created a certain level of stability in Idlib, governing with pragmatism and discipline. While the group retained overall control, it governed through a civilian authority with 11 ministries, which allowed it to concentrate on rebuilding its militia as a more structured force.
In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham maintained a robust internal security force to confront other military factions and domestic critics, prompting regular protests against what were seen as authoritarian methods and against harsh jail conditions.
The primary question is whether these rebels, who are now trying to form a national government, can scale up what they achieved in Idlib, a poor, agrarian region with a relatively small population.
In Idlib, ministers who dealt with outside aid organizations could never make a decision on the spot, they always had to consult first with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leaders, according to one representative of a humanitarian organization who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of aid operations in the area. Such tight control might work in a small governorate, but could prove unwieldy in a large country.
With its roots in the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham modified and moderated its own jihadist orientation starting around 2016. While it enforced some conservative Islamic practices, they did not resort to the strictures imposed by the Islamic State terrorist group when it ruled parts of Syria.
Still, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Nations, Turkey and others. Because that designation blocked overt outside support, the group found new ways to sustain itself financially and militarily.
It levied fees on all kinds of goods and enterprises, including crops, border crossings, construction, trade, shopkeeping and craftwork. In addition, companies linked to the group enjoyed a monopoly on providing fuel, electricity, water and garbage collection.
“H.T.S. exemplifies adaptability in conflict economics,” said Mark Nakhla, the chief research officer at Kharon, an open-source analytics firm that advises companies on complying with sanctions against armed groups and other hostile actors.
He has been tracking Hayat Tahrir al-Sham since its jihadist days, and has watched it go through what he called a “strategic rebranding” and a shift from relying financially on wealthy foreign donors to sustaining military and civilian operations through local taxation and governance.
New York Times, Man Found in Syria Appears to Be a Missing American, Ben Hubbard and Amelia Nierenberg, Dec. 12, 2024. The man told reporters that his name was Travis Timmerman and that he had entered Syria on a religious pilgrimage. He said that he had been detained for months.
The Syrian authorities said on Thursday that a foreign man who had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital.
In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year. In a video aired on Thursday by the news channel Al Arabiya, someone is heard asking the man if his name is Travis Timmerman. The man says, “That’s right.”
Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said that the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.
The man told reporters that he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.
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Washington Post, Proud Boys’ Tarrio could testify at leak trial of D.C. police officer, Spencer S. Hsu, Peter Hermann and Tom Jackman, Dec. 1, 2024. Lt. Shane Lamond’s contacts with Henry Tarrio fed Proud Boys’ anger at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. His trial spotlights police dealings with the extremist group.
A former D.C. police lieutenant will face a federal trial Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied to investigators about their interactions.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Prosecutors say advance word from Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, deepened anger among the far-right Proud Boys and fueled their instigation of the mob two days later at the Capitol. But Lamond, then head of the force’s intelligence unit, says he may call Tarrio as a defense witness, seeking to convince the judge their talks were within the normal bounds of how a police investigator handles a source.
Such a move would put Lamond in the awkward position of seeking exoneration through a man serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy after being found guilty of plotting violence to stop Congress’s certification of the 2020 election, according to court filings.
Either way, Lamond’s bench trial before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will spotlight D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021. That tumultuous summer and fall, episodes of street violence in Washington marred both racial justice demonstrations prompted by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May and marches by Donald Trump supporters following the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Capitol riot that led to at least five deaths, $3 million in damage and assaults on about 140 officers.
The inner workings of police intelligence gathering stirred controversy, with liberal groups accusing police of favoring right-leaning organizations and crossing the line between eliciting information and appearing to take sides. They pointed to officers who posed for photos with supporters of Trump and who stood back as counterdemonstrators vandalized Black Lives Matter signs or pressed arguments to physical conflict.
Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, left, and former President Donald Trump, shown in a collage via CNN.
Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). The special counsel filed a motion to dismiss Donald Trump’s election-obstruction case without prejudice, which means the case could be revived in the future.
Special counsel Jack Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Monday to dismiss the federal election interference charges against President-elect Donald Trump, putting an end to a lengthy investigation that never made it to trial.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Smith’s motion seeks to dismiss the case without prejudice, acknowledging that Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president. If she does that, it leaves open the possibility that prosecutors could again bring charges once Trump leaves office after his second White House term.
But legal experts said it’s possible that once Trump is in office, he could try to do something that has never been tested before: pardon himself to foreclose the possibility of legal jeopardy in the future.
Trump faces four counts related to conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results. Smith’s filing acknowledges that the Justice Department has longed believed a sitting president cannot stand trial, and says prosecutors conferred with Trump’s attorneys and that they did not oppose the request to dismiss the case.
Russian War Against Ukraine
New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, Dec. 9, 2024. The messaging app’s popularity has soared during the war with Russia, leading Ukrainian officials to weigh Telegram’s upsides against its security risks.
In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support.
But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed.
Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings.
“We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.”
New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 370,000 wounded since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago. It was the first time in months that he had disclosed military casualty figures, a highly sensitive topic in Ukraine, particularly as Kyiv’s forces lose more ground to Russian troops.
The Ukrainian leader’s tally could not be verified independently, and it differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials and military analysts, who have put the number of dead much higher. U.S. officials said in August 2023 that close to 70,000 soldiers had been killed, a figure that has probably increased significantly since then.
Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian journalist with close ties to the army, shared a similar figure last week, adding that 35,000 soldiers were also missing in action.
Mr. Zelensky also noted that about half of the wounded soldiers return to the battlefield after treatment. This suggests that Ukraine has suffered a total of about 230,000 irreplaceable losses, comprising those killed and those permanently incapacitated by injuries.
It was not immediately clear why Mr. Zelensky chose to release casualty figures now, but his statement came just a few hours after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that Ukraine had lost 400,000 soldiers, without specifying the number of dead or wounded. Mr. Trump, who also said that Russia’s casualties were close to 600,000 soldiers, said the high toll of the war underscored the need for an immediate cease-fire and the start of peace negotiations.
Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid, Michael Birnbaum, Missy Ryan and Siobhán O'Grady, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president’s Ukraine directive has stirred debate, as some officials worry it will cut too deeply into American stockpiles and jeopardize military needs elsewhere.
The Biden administration is engaged in an 11th-hour scramble to provide Ukraine with billions of dollars in additional weaponry, a massive effort that is generating concerns internally about its potential to erode U.S. stockpiles and sap resources from other flash points, officials said.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The lame-duck initiative was spurred in part by Russia’s battlefield momentum and a fear among Ukraine’s fiercest advocates that once President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20, there will be an abrupt shift in U.S. policy toward the war.
Yet some in the administration have taken the view that no matter what Washington does, Kyiv’s military will remain outmatched without far more soldiers to sustain its fight. And even as they accelerate arms shipments, there is growing frustration with Ukraine’s leaders, who have resisted U.S. calls to lower the country’s draft age from 25 to 18.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have captured Ukrainian territory at the fastest pace since 2022, causing alarm in Washington. Administration officials say their end-of-term weapons push — accompanied by President Joe Biden’s decision to green-light missile strikes deep into Russian territory and the deployment of antipersonnel land mines long criticized by human rights groups — can give Kyiv some breathing room. But they are urging Ukrainian leaders to use the moment to expand their military beyond the 160,000 recruits Kyiv says it needs
“We’re absolutely going to keep sending Ukraine weapons and equipment. We know that’s vital. But so, too, is manpower at this point,” White House spokesman John Kirby said last week. “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.”
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Ukraine Matters, HORROR Spreads in Russian Force: Ukraine War Map Update, Georgi, Dec. 2, 2024. Crises in Russian conscripts, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine military as impacting Russian war against Ukraine.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
New York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants, Constant Méheut, Nov. 29, 2024. Moscow has increasingly hit critical substations linked to nuclear power plants in an effort to disconnect them. The assaults risk a disaster, experts said.
New York Times, Russia Launches Record Number of Drones in Overnight Attack, Ukraine Says, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). The assault, which the Ukrainian Air Force said involved 188 drones, came as both sides intensify air bombardments.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that it had shot down 76 of the drones in the “massive attack” but that nearly all the rest had disappeared from radar. It was unclear how many of those drones had been intercepted by other means, such as electronic interference, and how many had struck targets.
Some critical infrastructure was hit and residential buildings were damaged in several regions, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Damage to the power grid in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, caused electricity and water outages, the local authorities said.
New York Times, The Global Profile: As Russia Advances in Ukraine, a Cop Has to Flee City After City, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). For Volodymyr Nikulin, being a wartime police officer means aiding evacuees, surviving a shrapnel wound and tackling looters. It also means quickly switching cities when one falls to the invaders.
The belongings of Volodymyr Nikulin, a Ukrainian police officer stationed near the country’s eastern front line, boil down to this: a shrapnel-riddled car, a small sack stuffed with sweaters and pants, and two plastic bags filled with basic food and medicine.
Keeping it simple is essential for Mr. Nikulin, who has had to leave three cities to escape the advance of Russian forces in the country’s eastern Donbas region, losing his home each time. So he has learned to live with little, and to be ready to pack up on short notice.
He has barely bothered to settle into the friend’s apartment he currently occupies in Sloviansk, a city 15 miles from the combat zone, leaving the bedroom untouched and sleeping instead in a small office. The distant rumble of Russian bombing regularly echoes through the walls, a reminder he may soon have to leave everything behind, again.
“Who knows where I’ll be in a few months?” Mr. Nikulin said on a recent morning last month in Sloviansk, acknowledging that Russian forces in the area were creeping closer. He joked that he could at least count on his damaged car, recalling how it had helped him escape several Russian attacks.
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Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
NBC News, Russian oil tankers split in two by strong storms in the Black Sea, Dec. 15, 2024.
Enforcer News, Massive Russian Ships SINK In Black Sea; MAJOR Rescue Operation Underway, Dec. 15, 2024. Today, 2 Massive Russian Ships have sunk in the Black Sea resulting in a major disaster for the Russians as they mount a full-scale rescue operation to save the men onboard.
The ships were carrying thousands of tons of petroleum (estimated at 5,000 tons apiece)which if fully released into the sea, would result in the worst disaster in the history of the Black Sea.
Putin is furious and demanding answers from top officials. We also received news that Ukraine attacked the special forces headquarters in Grozny, Chechnya with a full size Ukrainian FoxBat drone which evaded all of Ramzan Kadyrov's air defenses. Meanwhile we also received news from the Ukrainians that the North Korean soldiers are taking extremely heavy losses as they begin to retreat/run in major swarms from the frontline. We also got some news coming out of Syria as well. Please like and subscribe for more daily short war updates!
New York Times, Security Strategy of Recruiting Cheap Militiamen Backfires in Burkina Faso, Elian Peltier, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, Dec. 15, 2024. By arming civilians who are poorly trained and have little respect for human rights, the military has brought the nation to the brink of civil war.
Burkina Faso, a nation that once prided itself on tolerance and peaceful interethnic relations, is now home to one of the deadliest conflicts in West Africa. Since the current military leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, seized power in a coup in 2022, he has escalated a war against Islamist insurgents that has now killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly three million others.
To beef up the ranks of his embattled military, Captain Traoré’s government recruited tens of thousands of men into a civilian militia, known as the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland. The militia was created by a previous leader to protect communities against the insurgents. But under Captain Traoré, it has spread unchecked violence and pitted local populations against each other, with minority ethic groups being brutally targeted in what some analysts fear will lead to a civil war.
Acts of violence against local populations involving militiamen have more than doubled since Captain Traoré’s coup, according to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. The militiamen have carried out executions, forced disappearances or looting every six days on average, the data shows.
Arming civilians who have poor training and little respect for human rights and then giving them near total impunity is not unique to Burkina Faso.
In northeast Nigeria, members of a civilian militia assisting the country’s fight against Boko Haram have been accused of sexual violence, child recruitment and summary executions. In Sudan, the militia known as the Rapid Support Forces triggered a war that has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
New York Times, How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues, Neil MacFarquhar and Justin Scheck, Dec. 15, 2024. The Islamist rebels who ousted Syria’s dictator ran a pragmatic and disciplined administration in the territory they controlled. They also jailed their critics.
Since 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its affiliated organizations, driven by a hunger for broader power, created a certain level of stability in Idlib, governing with pragmatism and discipline. While the group retained overall control, it governed through a civilian authority with 11 ministries, which allowed it to concentrate on rebuilding its militia as a more structured force.
In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham maintained a robust internal security force to confront other military factions and domestic critics, prompting regular protests against what were seen as authoritarian methods and against harsh jail conditions.
The primary question is whether these rebels, who are now trying to form a national government, can scale up what they achieved in Idlib, a poor, agrarian region with a relatively small population.
In Idlib, ministers who dealt with outside aid organizations could never make a decision on the spot, they always had to consult first with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leaders, according to one representative of a humanitarian organization who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of aid operations in the area. Such tight control might work in a small governorate, but could prove unwieldy in a large country.
With its roots in the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham modified and moderated its own jihadist orientation starting around 2016. While it enforced some conservative Islamic practices, they did not resort to the strictures imposed by the Islamic State terrorist group when it ruled parts of Syria.
Still, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Nations, Turkey and others. Because that designation blocked overt outside support, the group found new ways to sustain itself financially and militarily.
It levied fees on all kinds of goods and enterprises, including crops, border crossings, construction, trade, shopkeeping and craftwork. In addition, companies linked to the group enjoyed a monopoly on providing fuel, electricity, water and garbage collection.
“H.T.S. exemplifies adaptability in conflict economics,” said Mark Nakhla, the chief research officer at Kharon, an open-source analytics firm that advises companies on complying with sanctions against armed groups and other hostile actors.
He has been tracking Hayat Tahrir al-Sham since its jihadist days, and has watched it go through what he called a “strategic rebranding” and a shift from relying financially on wealthy foreign donors to sustaining military and civilian operations through local taxation and governance.
New York Times, Brazilian Police Arrest Close Ally of Ex-President Bolsonaro, Official Says, Ana Ionova, Dec. 14, 2024. Gen. Walter Braga Netto was Jair Bolsonaro’s running mate. The arrest was for meddling in an investigation into a plot to stage a coup, the police said.
Brazilian police on Saturday arrested Gen. Walter Braga Netto, a close ally of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his running mate in 2022, according to a police official, accusing him of meddling in their investigation into a plot to stage a coup after Mr. Bolsonaro lost the election.
The federal police said in a statement that they had carried out an arrest and two search warrants against people for “hindering the free production of evidence during the criminal proceedings.”
The police official confirmed that General Braga Netto was the target of the arrest, which the police said in the statement was “to prevent the repetition of illegal actions.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the matter. The targets of the search warrants were not identified.
Washington Post, Opinion: Macron names François Bayrou as French prime minister after government collapse, Ellen Francisand Anthony Faiola, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). The new prime minister, a Macron ally, must try to assemble a government, regain control of France’s deficit and satisfy warring political factions.
French President Emmanuel Macron named François Bayrou, a centrist ally, as prime minister on Friday, in a bid to restore stability after a no-confidence vote toppled the shortest-serving government in the modern French republicGet concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
The new prime minister must now try to cobble together a government and get a handle on France’s spiraling deficit and debt burden — in a way that satisfies enough of the warring political factions to keep everything from crashing down again.
European allies are looking for France and neighboring Germany, also in political and financial turmoil, to get their affairs in order at a time when President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to launch a trade war and to pivot the U.S. position on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The appointment of 73-year-old Bayrou — a well-known name in French politics and a longtime Macron ally — came after a nearly two-hour meeting with the president at the Élysée Palace on Friday morning.
“No one knows the difficulty of the situation better than I do,” Bayrou said during a red-carpet ceremony for the transition of power at the prime minister’s official residence. He acknowledged the extent of the challenges that lie ahead, called for reconciliation of acrimonious divisions and described curbing debt as not only a financial priority but a “moral” issue.
Facing backlash over the political turmoil, Macron has called on the country’s fractious parties to make compromises in the national interest. He held consultations with the leaders of different blocs in the lead-up to Friday’s announcement. The far-right and far-left parties that pushed for the no-confidence vote have not been included in the talks.
France has alternated through periods of political chaos and paralysis since June, when Macron announced early legislative elections. Strategic coordination between a left-wing alliance and centrist parties blocked a far-right win, but the election resulted in a bitterly divided legislature. And the government that took office in September was threatened with collapse at any moment — its fate ultimately resting in the hands of far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Last week, Le Pen decided to wield her sword. Her party added its votes to those of the left-wing New Popular Front in an unusual combination to overthrow the government.
Whether she will maintain as much power over the next administration will depend on whether Bayrou can garner a broader base of support — and his odds of lasting longer than his predecessor were not immediately clear.
Le Pen said Friday that the new prime minister would have to “listen to the opposition to build a reasonable and thoughtful budget.” Otherwise, she said, he risked “impasse and failure.”
Le Pen, who has long sought the presidency, is among the Macron critics on the far right and far left who have called on him to resign. He has pledged to serve out his term, which ends in 2027. But if his opponents manage to bring down successive governments, that would pile further pressure on the president.
Le Pen, meanwhile, is awaiting a verdict in a trial accusing her of misusing European funds, and if found guilty, she could be banned from running for president.
To secure wider support and strip Le Pen of some influence, the new prime minister is expected to try to win over some on the left and will probably have to offer concessions on the budget. “Much will depend on the success or failure of his overtures,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group consultancy.On the left, Friday’s announcement brought mixed reactions. The hard-left France Unbowed, a key force in the broad left-wing alliance and a fierce opponent of Macron, rejected Bayrou as “a continuation” of the president’s policies.
The Socalists criticized Macron for picking from his own camp, while suggesting that the new government could avoid collapse if it doesn’t force through changes without a vote or “place itself under the dependence” of the anti-immigrant National Rally.
New York Times, India’s Luxury Property Market Is a Boon to Donald Trump’s Business, Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj, Dec. 9, 2024. The Trump Organization has found a warm welcome in the country, where status-hungry home buyers clamor for a famous American brand.
New York Times, How a Criminal With Close Ties to China Became a New York Power Broker, Michael Forsythe, Bianca Pallaro, Jay Root and Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 9, 2024. John Chan was a Chinatown gangster before remaking himself into a powerful force in New York politics — one closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. On a Monday in March, in the heart of China’s capital, more than 2,000 delegates of a rubber-stamp advisory body to the authoritarian government of President Xi Jinping gathered for their annual meeting.
One mission of the men and women in attendance was to spread the global influence of China’s Communist Party. Of the throngs of party officials, generals and business executives who watched as Mr. Xi took the stage, just 20 people had been invited to represent the country’s vast diaspora, including a single person from the United States: a 69-year-old man from Brooklyn named John Chan.
Mr. Chan’s participation reflected a remarkable proximity to the highest levels of power in China, experts said, and marked him as a person on whom the country’s leaders might call for favors. But it was remarkable, too, because of his position at home: He has operated as a power broker in America’s largest city, with immense sway over an important subset of New York politics.
Mr. Chan, now 70, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the investigations. But against the backdrop of recent events, he has stood out nonetheless, both for his overt connections to the Chinese government and for his ability to influence American elections up and down the ballot.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
New York Times, South Korea Bars President From Traveling Abroad, Victoria Kim and Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 9, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol cannot leave as an investigation unfolds into whether he led an insurrection last week when he briefly imposed martial law.
New York Times, France’s First Big #MeToo Case Goes to Trial, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Dec. 9, 2024. The actress Adèle Haenel has accused the director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She accused him of isolating her during rehearsals and filming. Of grooming her for three years, when on Saturday afternoons he would touch her sexually. When it began, he was 36. She was 12.
Five years ago, the French actress Adèle Haenel shocked the country’s film world when she spoke out about the director Christophe Ruggia, who had cast her as the lead actor in a 2002 film about an incestuous relationship.
On Monday, the case went to court, marking the first major #MeToo accusations in France to proceed to trial. Mr. Ruggia, 59, is charged with aggravated sexual assault against a minor. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison as well as a fine of up to 150,000 euros, about $190,000.
Mr. Ruggia has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying that his relationship with Ms. Haenel was strictly platonic and that he never sexually harassed or touched her inappropriately. His lawyer Fanny Colin had refused to speak publicly before the trial, but had said that Mr. Ruggia intended to plead not guilty.
After Ms. Haenel first told her story to the French investigative outlet Mediapart in 2019, it inspired heated conversations about the country’s film industry and sex with minors, and how the French justice system treats sexual abuse complaints.
At the time, Ms. Haenel was a rising star, praised for fierce yet sensitive performances that had earned her two Césars — the French equivalent of the Oscars. In the United States she rose to fame with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” her final role before she announced her decision to boycott the industry.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Loses No-Confidence Vote and Is Expected to Resign, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 4, 2024. Prime Minister Michel Barnier, above, is likely to remain as a caretaker until a replacement is named. But the vote could create a wider opening for the far right.
French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.
France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.
It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.
President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Is on the Block, and Marine Le Pen Holds the Blade, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 1, 2024. The end of Michel Barnier’s government looks inevitable, even imminent, and would add to the country’s political malaise. How long can he last?
The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, (shown above in an AP photo), known for composure on previous scaffolds.
His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.
The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.
Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, left, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.
She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.
Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.
Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.
“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”
But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”
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U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
Big, The Newsletter of Antitrust, Monopoly Round-Up Commentary: FTC Revives the "Magna Carta of Small Business," Matt Stoller, right, Dec. 15, 2024. The Federal Trade Commission went after the middleman economy. Plus, Kid Rock may keep the Ticketmaster antitrust suit alive, and other news of the week.
There’s lots of monopoly related news this week, like Kid Rock lobbying against Ticketmaster, Trump musing on eliminating the FDIC that protects against bank runs, and recriminations as Kroger and Albertsons execs point fingers at each other while desperately trying to not get fired. That part of the round-up is after the paywall.
The big news itself of the week is that the Federal Trade Commission finally attacked illegal price discrimination, after forty years of neglect. The FTC used an old and often neglect antitrust law, the Robinson-Patman Act, to sue a dominant liquor distributor you’ve likely never heard of, a company called Southern Glazer. Somewhere, Wright Patman is smiling down upon Federal Trade Commissioners Lina Khan, Alvaro Bedoya, and Rebecca Kelly-Slaughter for this historic move. And it is historic.
Southern Glazer is the tenth largest private company in the U.S., with $26 billion of revenue, and it is the exclusive distributor in certain states of a host of liquors, such as Hennessy, Tanqueray, Bacardi, Captain Morgan, Grey Goose, Jameson, and Johnnie Walker. And the FTC’s allegation is Southern Glazer gives better prices to big stores than small ones.
Since at least 2018 and continuing today, Southern has repeatedly discriminated in price between disfavored independent purchasers—which include neighborhood grocery stores, local convenience stores, and independently owned wine and spirits shops—and favored large chain purchasers of wine and spirits, such as Total Wine & More, Costco, and Kroger.
Still, the allegation doesn’t sound, on first blush, illegal. I mean, doesn’t a business have the right to choose its prices? And also, on some level, who cares? Don’t big stores just get volume discounts? That’s just how things work, right?
Well, no. Price discrimination, like gambling, usury, or even liquor itself, is the kind of political question that used to provoke deep reservoirs of anger and righteousness, a touchstone of the American character. “Let’s keep Hitler’s methods of government and business in Europe,” said Wright Patman in 1940, noting that consolidation wrought by price discrimination had the potential to turn America fascist. He was not alone. “I would rather have thieves and gangsters than chain stores in Louisiana,” echoed Huey Long. Chain stores, wrote Louis Brandeis in 1933, were “converting independent tradesmen into clerks” and “sapping the resources, the vigor and the hope of the smaller cities and towns.”
Former FTC Chair Paul Rand Dixon once said of the law barring price discrimination, “I think it compares favorably with the Magna Carta or the Sherman Act.” Heady stuff.
From the other side, the antitrust bar has always hated the Robinson-Patman Act. Robert Bork called it the “Typhoid Mary of Antitrust,” Herb Hovenkamp said it was “irritating to almost anyone who is serious about antitrust,” and law professor Jerrold G. Van Cise said it was a “roughly hewn, unfinished block of legislative phraseology.” Its revival was a point of bitterness at last year’s American Bar Association Antitrust Section Spring conference, prompting sputtering at FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who defended the use of the law. To understand the debate, let’s start with why Walmart is so cheap. It’s not because it’s some super efficient entity, it’s simply because it gets better prices from producers and distributors. Walmart sells something like 8-10% of all groceries in America, so when Walmart says jump, its suppliers ask how high? We routinely hear from independent stores and chains that they buy from their wholesaler for more than Walmart sells at retail, which is impossible unless Walmart is just getting better pricing for the same good.
And it’s not just the little guy who suffers, of course. Take the Kroger-Albertsons failed merger. One of the nuggets that came out in the case is that Albertsons, a massive supermarket chain, buys basic staples wholesale for less than Walmart sells it retail. Albertsons, even though it’s really really big, is a relative minnow, and sought to sell itself off rather than try and compete.
Price discrimination is the reason that Walmart and Amazon exist as the giants they are. Between 1997 and 2012, after we had stopped enforcing the law, roughly 108,000 local grocers and other retailers disappeared and rural poverty skyrocketed. The rise of Walmart stores, which are a result of Walmart getting better prices than rivals, even spurred a jump in obesity.
I bring up this dynamic all the time on BIG. The prevalence of price discrimination is a key reason we had shortages during Covid, why our shipping industry is a cartel, why drug prices are out of control, why small businesses are dying, why bike stores are consolidated, and why radicalism is the order of the day in politics.
From the other side, antitrust lawyers and executives think the law is unworkable and ridiculous. They think businesses must charge different prices to different customers, there are rebates, fees, bundles, and a whole set of arrangements that simply cannot be subjected to micro-management by a law like the Robinson-Patman Act. But their real argument is that they believe it’s their right to discriminate among customers and suppliers. Might makes right.
So what happens now? Well the vote to bring the case was 3-2, with the two Republicans opposed. However, Andrew Ferguson, who will be the new chair, wrote in his dissent that he supports the use of the Robinson-Patman Act, and another Republican FTC nominee, Mark Meador, also supports enforcing the law. Ferguson’s objection to the case was due to his belief that the case wasn’t particularly strong, but it would be unusual to withdraw a case brought by a previous administration. Is it a strong case? Probably. The FTC complaint is based on a 2022 private case that is going to trial in 2026, brought by a law firm that is generally well-respected and specializes in the law.
Much of the FTC’s complaint is redacted, but it seems pretty clear that Southern Glazer was engaged in price discrimination. I mean, the law was a dead letter for decades, so it would be weird if corporations across the economy weren’t violating it.At any rate, I’m guessing we’ll see more private and state enforcement around this law, and adjacent state laws.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 15, 2024 [Safe Drinking Water Act, Heather Cox Richardson, historian and author, Dec. 15, 2024. Tomorrow, December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican.
The measure required the Environmental Protection Agency to set maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and required states to comply with them. It protected the underground sources of drinking water and called for emergency measures to protect public health if a dangerous contaminant either was in or was likely to enter a public water system.
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment.
That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and
By 2015, almost 77 million Americans lived in regions whose water systems did not meet the safety standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In addition, more than 2 million Americans did not have running water, and many more rely on wells or small systems not covered by the Safe Water Drinking Act.
The Biden administration began to address the problem with an investment of about $22 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems. The money removed lead pipes, upgraded wastewater and sewage systems, and addressed the removal of so-called forever chemicals and proposed a new standard for acceptable measures of them.
What this will mean in the future is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase production of oil and gas—although it is currently at an all-time high—and such projects are often slowed by environmental regulations. On Tuesday, December 10, he posted on social media, “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
“[B]y ignoring environmental costs we have given an economic advantage to the careless polluter over his more conscientious rival,” Trump’s Republican predecessor Nixon told the nation in 1970. “While adopting laws prohibiting injury to person or property, we have freely allowed injury to our shared surroundings.” When he signed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, President Ford added simply: “Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water.”—
Politico, Anti-slavery movement charts its path forward, Emily Schultheis, Dec. 14, 2024. An unlikely setback in progressive California has activists working to remove slavery exceptions from state constitutions grappling with the best way to draft future ballot measures.A California prison inmate with the Prison Industry Authority cleans one of the newly installed headstones.
The national movement to close a so-called slavery loophole in state constitutions was riding a wave of momentum after voters in eight states — including deep-red Alabama and Tennessee — removed exceptions to post-Civil War bans on slavery and involuntary servitude.
But the movement was handed an unexpected defeat this year in progressive California, where the failure of a ballot measure explicitly packaged as a ban on forced prison labor has left activists nationwide grappling with how best to draft such constitutional amendments in the up to 14 states where they could appear on ballots in 2026.
The movement’s lawyers want detailed language delineating what constitutes involuntary servitude so courts can be compelled to defend prisoners’ rights against forced labor. At the same time, campaigners confronting voters breaking right on questions of criminal justice want to see simply worded anti-slavery provisions free of specifics about what they mean for the incarcerated people who stand to benefit.
“That’s been a big part of our fight, making sure the language is correct,” said Dennis Febo, the New Jersey-based lead organizer for the Abolish Slavery National Network. “The more we’ve done on this question, the more we understand how complicated it is.”
New York Times, President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 1,500 Americans, a Record for One Day, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Mark Landler, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). Many of those being granted clemency had been placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic.
President Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest grant of clemency by an American president in a single day, the White House announced in a statement on Thursday.
The commutations affect mostly those who had been released from prison and placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic. The people who received pardons were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including possession of marijuana.
A pardon wipes out a conviction, while a commutation leaves the guilty verdict intact but reduces some or all of the punishment.
The announcement came two weeks after Mr. Biden issued a pardon for his son, Hunter, who had been convicted of gun possession and income tax evasion. That decision was harshly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats because Mr. Biden had long ruled out clemency for his son.
Politico, Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences, promises ‘more steps in the weeks ahead,’ Andrew Howard, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330.
President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of almost 1,500 people and pardoned another 39, the most ever in a single day, the White House announced on Thursday.
The White House said in its announcement that those receiving clemency “have shown successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” The 39 pardon recipients had all committed non-violent crimes, and the commutations were for people who were placed in home confinement during the pandemic.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As President, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
Following Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, he faced pressure from some Democrats, as well as outside advocacy groups, to use his clemency powers more widely before his term ends in January. Biden indicated in his statement that he “will take more steps in the weeks ahead.” “My Administration will continue reviewing clemency petitions to advance equal justice under the law, promote public safety, support rehabilitation and reentry, and provide meaningful second chances.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who was one of the Democrats pressuring Biden to issue pardons, praised the president’s decision, calling it a “meaningful and historic action.”
“Thanks to President Biden, today a near 1,500 families will have their lives changed forever and I congratulate each and every family on this new beginning,” she said in a statement.
Still, Pressley is pushing for more clemency actions before Biden’s term ends.
“With 39 days remaining in his presidency, President Biden has the power to continue to use his clemency authority to change and save the lives of many, many other Americans behind the wall,” she said. “It is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, and it is a matter of legacy.”
The progressive group Popular Democracy in Action struck a similar tone, praising Biden’s decision but also telling the president “do not stop now.”
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.).. During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Horowitz’s report, which does not identify the lawmakers by name, did not turn up indications that the two outspoken Trump critics were targeted because of their political views or affiliation.
“We did not find any evidence of retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors who issued the compulsory process we reviewed,” the report said.
The Justice Department during the Trump administration also faced scrutiny for efforts to access the email account of then-House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel. Patel, who is now Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has long decried the intrusion by Justice Department officials, which he claimed was retaliation for his effort to undermine the investigation of Trump’s 2016 ties to Russia.
Last year, Patel sued top Justice Department officials over the grand jury subpoena, and his suit was dismissed in September by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Patel was one of the 43 congressional staffers whose phone or email logs were pursued by investigators — a number higher than previously known. The review found that 21 of them were affiliated with Democrats, 20 with Republicans and two were in nonpartisan positions. The Justice Department did not seek or obtain the content of their communications, but only details such as which phone numbers or email accounts they were in contact with and when, Horowitz found.
Around the same time the existence of subpoenas aimed at lawmakers was reported, it emerged that prosecutors also sought phone or email records for journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN as part of the same leak investigations.
Barr did approve the subpoenas aimed at reporters, but the department never convened an internal panel that a policy in place at the time said should examine all such requests, the watchdog report found.
“This deviation from the Department’s own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role,” Horowitz wrote.
Biden called the tactic aimed at reporters “simply wrong” and vowed it would not continue under his administration. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo banning the practice and he later formalized that policy in DOJ regulations.
Horowitz was particularly critical of the Justice Department’s handling of gag orders it obtained on companies like Apple and Google. Those orders prevented the firms from telling targets about the demands.
Last year, the Justice Department issued a policy on subpoenas aimed at lawmakers, requiring high-level approvals at DOJ. Horowitz’s report reveals that DOJ quietly updated that policy again in September after getting a draft of the review. Among the latest requirements: Prosecutors must inform the judge or magistrate that the requests target a member of Congress or congressional staff.
The incoming Trump administration is expected to roll back the protections Garland adopted for journalists and perhaps even to eliminate earlier limits Democratic and Republican administrations had put on such demands. Legislation pending in Congress could block those moves, but last month Trump urged Republican lawmakers to “kill” the measure, known as the PRESS Act.
Horowitz said the past and current policies encourage prosecutors to seek lawmakers’ records because getting subpoenas for journalists’ emails or phone records required high-level approval, which has been basically impossible to get since 2021. He noted that even the latest Justice Department policy doesn’t require prosecutors to exhaust other avenues before demanding email and phone providers turn over lawmakers’ records.
Most of the leaks did not result in criminal charges, but one staffer swept up in one round of phone and email records searches — Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe — pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his dealings with journalists. A judge sentenced Wolfe to two months in prison.
Another long-awaited report is expected from Horowitz’s office in the coming days: a review of the Justice Department’s actions in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. That review has been pending for nearly four years. Horowitz recently acknowledged that work on it was frozen for about two years while prosecutors pursued some of the most serious criminal cases stemming from the attack.
Horowitz’s release of the long-awaited investigations comes as Horowitz and other inspectors general across the government face the possibility of being removed or even fired by the incoming Trump administration. Some Trump allies have urged him to install his own appointees in the independent watchdog roles at federal agencies, although traditionally most inspectors general have not resigned during a change of administration or of partisan control of the White House.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have vowed to oppose any attempt by Trump to oust the experienced watchdogs.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews Dec 10, 2024. 70% of Americans favor ending lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices.
Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices. The move is aimed at restoring confidence in the Court, as the approval rating for SCOTUS is at its lowest point in history, with only 16% of Americans reporting "a great deal of confidence" in the highest Court.
The Manchin-Welch amendment would impose single 18-year, non-renewable terms for Supreme Court justices. Each 18-year term would be staggered every two years. Current justices will not be held to term limits, but blocks of 18-year terms will begin to cycle every two years once the amendment is ratified. When a current justice retires, their replacement will be assigned the remainder of the current 18-year block, until every justice on the Court is term limited.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas Dec 10, 2024. Prosecutors are pressing forward with the case even with Trump becoming President again.
This afternoon, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has filed an opposition to Donald Trump's request to immediately vacate the guilty verdicts against him and to dismiss the criminal case given the results of the November 5th election. Prosecutors had been considering whether to make this move for several weeks, and have officially decided to oppose any dismissal on several grounds.
First, prosecutors argue that the Manhattan court should reject Trump's motion to immediately dismiss the case given the fact that he has not yet been sworn in and does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution while President-elect.
The opposition goes on to highlight how even after he is sworn into office, the case should not be dismissed because the temporary immunity Trump will enjoy over the next four years does not justify wiping out the jury's verdict, especially as Trump's team does not dispute that the 34 felonies he was convicted of deal with purely unofficial conduct.
Prosecutors note that "at most, [Trump] should receive temporary accommodations during his presidency to prevent this criminal case form meaningfully interfering with his official decision-making."
Prosecutors listed several alternative remedies to a complete dismissal including a stay of proceedings during his term in office if judgment is not entered before January 20th. The decision will now ultimately be up to Justice Merchan who will decide whether or not to dismiss the criminal charges against Trump.
New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024. A New York jury acquitted Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely. Republican politicians hailed the verdict. But some New Yorkers found it deeply disturbing.
Outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Monday, a scuffle broke out among demonstrators, their chants amplified over bullhorns.
On one side were supporters of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was charged with fatally choking a fellow subway rider, Jordan Neely, on an uptown F train last year. They held signs, including one that said, “Daniel Penny deserves a prize not a prison.” On the other side were people protesting on behalf of Mr. Neely. Upset, they grabbed a sign and ripped it up.
As the sides exchanged barbs and police officers erected a barrier to separate them, inside the courthouse 12 New Yorkers were coming to a unanimous decision. Mr. Penny, they concluded, was not guilty.
If the death of Mr. Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who had struggled with mental health problems, had left New Yorkers unnerved and divided, the verdict quickly became yet another flashpoint in the nation’s debate over how best to address issues of crime and justice, homelessness and mental illness.
Republican political figures including Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani praised the jury and criticized the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for pursuing the case.
“Thank God justice was done in this case,” Mr. Vance said on social media. “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Penny a hero who deserved a medal.
But in New York, some found the verdict deeply troubling. “This decision highlights a deep-seated societal discomfort with unhoused individuals in need of support, and effectively green-lights ‘vigilante justice’ against the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” leaders of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus said in a statement.
Washington Post, Appeals court upholds nationwide TikTok ban-or-sale law, Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-Strong, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.
TikTok had argued to the three-judge panel, unsuccessfully, that the ban must be struck down for infringement on the free speech rights of the app’s users and owners under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” the court wrote in its opinion.
TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to take up the case before the sale deadline ends Jan. 19, or to first request that all the judges on the appeals court review the panel’s decision.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. He criticized the ban-or-sale law as being based on “inaccurate” information and said it was “resulting in the outright censorship of the American people.”
The appeals court on Friday said years-long bipartisan investigations into the app, and the government’s willingness to consider TikTok’s alternatives, weighed in favor of the law.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for a three-judge panel. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”
However, the judges said they rejected the government’s “ambitious argument” that the law did not “implicate the First Amendment at all,” saying that it would impose a “disproportionate burden on TikTok, an entity engaged in expressive activity.” The government had suggested that TikTok’s ownership by a foreign company left it without First Amendment rights, despite it having roughly 170 million U.S. accounts.
The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.By Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-StrongUpdated 45 minutes ag
The decision sets up a potential showdown with President-elect Donald Trump. Having backed a ban during his first term in the White House, he is expected to try to halt it, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Jose Ibarra listens through an interpreter during his trial at Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, Nov. 20, 2024, in Athens, Ga. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution pool photo by Hyosub Shin via Associated Press).
Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
New York Times, Opinion: The Trouble Began When #MeToo Became #ChurchToo, David French, right, Dec. 15, 2024. l When did we know that the #MeToo moment was truly over?
At its most compelling, #MeToo tried to change a culture that both concealed and enabled the illegal abuse of women and imposed hypocritical double standards, holding women to one standard of behavior while celebrating and elevating unscrupulous men.
But events in 2024 have told us loudly and clearly that the moment has passed.
Perhaps it was when reports emerged that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice to be the next secretary of defense (shown above and at left), had paid an accuser to settle a sexual assault claim. He denies wrongdoing, but his defense — that he had consensual sex with a married woman — was still dreadful. His philandering and mistreatment of women have been so egregious that his mother called him an “abuser of women,” in an email to him (she has since disavowed her statement) — and yet somehow his chances of being confirmed by the Senate appear to be increasing.
Perhaps it was when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., above right, who is married to the actress Cheryl Hines, allegedly had an improper “personal relationship” via smartphone with Olivia Nuzzi, center, ,a political reporter who is much younger, and she lost her job (and disputed with her ex, reporter Ryan Lizza, while he was picked to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
But I think it happened earlier, when a jury found Donald Trump responsible for sexual abuse, and he was ultimately re-elected to the presidency. After years of rightfully arguing that combating sexual assault and sexual abuse can’t override due process, many conservatives not only disregarded the jury verdict, they actually reveled in how little his voters cared about the scandal, or just dismissed it as another instance of “lawfare” against Trump.
I distinctly remember the mood on the right when the #MeToo movement got going. There was a sense of schadenfreude. The morally bankrupt, sexualized culture of Hollywood and the liberal media had finally been exposed. For all their talk about feminism and respecting women, many famous liberals proved to be dangerous hypocrites — or much, much worse.
Yes, there was leakage into right-wing media. Roger Ailes was pushed out at Fox News in 2016, and Bill O’Reilly suffered the same fate after my Times colleagues Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt reported that O’Reilly or Fox had paid $13 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct made by five different women against him.
All that happened before my colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein. But the early wave of #MeToo revelations was heavily concentrated in traditionally liberal institutions.
When #MeToo became #ChurchToo, though, that was the beginning of the end. In a remarkably short period of time, the narrative changed. No longer was sexual abuse and exploitation a “Hollywood problem” or a “secular problem,” it was also an evangelical problem, and it was a problem in many of the most important institutions of the church.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, faced a sexual abuse “apocalypse,” a series of scandals that my friend Russell Moore, the former head of the S.B.C.’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called “a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”
Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the world, faced its own sexual scandals. Its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., stepped 
aside after a sordid series of allegations that involved him, his wife and a pool-boy-turned-business associate [and his wife's assistant, shown above].
At the same time that the school was sheltering a corrupt president, it was also mishandling claims of sex abuse against students, including by turning the school’s code of conduct, called the Liberty Way, against sex abuse victims. If they’d violated a school policy, by drinking, for example, that could be used against them in the schools’ disciplinary proceedings.
The hypocrisy was stark. The Christian president of a Christian university was imposing standards on students — including victims of abuse — that he was flouting himself.
There’s an easy answer for understanding the end of #MeToo, one that has the benefit of being largely true — American society (including the American church) is still rife with misogyny. As with race, the fact that America has come quite far in respecting the legal rights of women does not mean that we don’t still have far to go to achieve true cultural equality and respect.
But misogyny was never a complete explanation, especially given the fact that sex abuse isn’t confined to men abusing women and girls. Something else is at work, something that also represents a deep and profound moral flaw. A person might value vulnerable people in the abstract — or might even declare a strong commitment to justice — but very few people will sacrifice anything they truly value to correct an injustice that doesn’t involve them immediately and directly.
My wife’s story helped me understand. When she was 12 years old, a vacation Bible schoolteacher abused her in her own home. Decades later, her pastor, by then retired, told her that the same person had abused at least a dozen other women and girls in the church.
The abuser was never held accountable — either by church leaders or law enforcement. Instead, he moved to a town in Kentucky and became a high school girls’ basketball coach. He lost his teaching certificate in 2023 after there were multiple reports of misconduct.
The abuser’s father was a powerful person in the church and in Nancy’s small town. Confronting his son carried a cost, and the simple fact is that very few people were willing to bear that cost, including people who were very close to Nancy. Not even their love for her could overcome their fear of the social risk.
Yes, people want justice. They want abuse to stop, but they also don’t want to poison their relationships with friends and colleagues or undermine their social status. They don’t want to say no to kids who ask to go back to their favorite summer camp. They don’t want to lose an election. Any sacrifice, no matter how attenuated, is too much.
That’s a bleak truth — one that is very hard to face — and so there is a temptation to rationalize, to say that #MeToo was a valuable movement until it went too far. Rationalizations are often rooted in a measure of truth. At its height, #MeToo was too quick to rush to judgment, too reliant on rumors and too dismissive of due process, especially due process on campus.
Even so, one can and should be able to raise awareness of a terrible social evil without undermining fundamental fairness or discarding constitutional values.
There are always excessive responses to genuine problems, and the existence of the excessive response shouldn’t blind us to the underlying reality. The fact that defunding the police was a terrible idea — or that rioters burned buildings during the summer of 2020, for example — doesn’t mean that American police officers have no problems with brutality.
And so here we are, with the nation about to be led by a man found liable for sexual abuse, with key members of his chosen senior team beset by their own gross scandals, voted into office on the strength of overwhelming white evangelical support (according to 2024 exit polls, he won white evangelicals by 65 points and lost everyone else by 18 points). And all too many Christians still celebrate his victory — and their indispensable support — as a triumph of good over evil.
When I was younger and more naïve, I wondered why so many historical injustices persisted for so long in the United States. Now I have my answer.
Crystal Mangum in 2011 (Photo by Chuck Liddy of the Raleigh News & Observer / Tribune News Service via Getty Images).
New York Times, Crystal Mangum, who accused Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, says she lied, Jenna West, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). / Crystal Mangum, a woman who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, publicly said for the first time that she lied about the allegations.
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” Mangum said on an episode of the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat” released this week. “And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me.”
The episode was recorded in November at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where Mangum is serving time after being convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing her boyfriend in April 2011.
“I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” Mangum told podcast host Kat DePasquale about the Duke case, “and that was wrong when God already loved me for who I was regardless.”
The Duke case made national headlines after Mangum, a Black woman, accused lacrosse players David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann of raping her at a party where she was hired to perform as a stripper. It caused the cancellation of the lacrosse team’s 2006 season, and Duke forced coach Mike Pressler to resign.
The North Carolina attorney general’s office reviewed the case and declared Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann innocent in 2007. The attorney general’s office said the charges should not have been brought against the three players and there was no DNA or evidence to corroborate the allegations.
District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred for ethics violations, including making false statements and lying about withholding evidence. Prosecutors declined to press charges against Mangum for making false allegations.
Also in 2007, Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann reached an undisclosed settlement with Duke for the school’s handling of the allegations.
“I want them to know that I love them, and they didn’t deserve that, and I hope that they can forgive me,” Mangum said of the players.
New York Times, Texas Attorney General Sues New York Doctor for Mailing Abortion Pills, J. David Goodman and Pam Belluck, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). The lawsuit appeared to be among the first attempts to stop doctors from mailing the medication to states that ban abortions.
The Texas attorney general, right, opened a new front in the contentious battle over access to abortion this week by suing a New York doctor for sending abortion pills into Texas. It appeared to be among the first attempts to stop the mailing of such medication into states that ban abortion.
The lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton — filed on Thursday in state court in Collin County, north of Dallas — pits the laws of Texas, which has a near-total ban on abortion, against those of New York, where lawmakers have taken steps to shield doctors from out-of-state prosecution.
Under shield laws, states like New York will refuse to cooperate with attempts by other states to prosecute or sue abortion providers who prescribe and send pills across state lines. Such laws exist in eight states and have allowed doctors there to send more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to women in states with bans.
But legal experts say they expect Texas to try to pursue its case even if it is rebuffed by New York’s law. Such an effort could wind up in federal court, potentially imperiling the ability of women in other states with bans to receive abortion pills by mail, and becoming a major test of whether states can enforce contradictory laws across state lines.
“It’s a huge deal,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Shield doctors mailing pills into ban states was always going to be, I think, both the most consequential in terms of access to abortion and the highest risk.”
In a statement on Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said that she was “committed to maintaining New York’s status as a safe harbor for all who seek abortion care.”
“Make no mistake,” she added. “I will do everything in my power to enforce the laws of New York State.”
Ms. Ziegler said that the case could play out in several ways. She said that New York’s shield law had a provision that allows the doctor being sued, or possibly the state, to countersue against Texas, so the case could end up with dueling lawsuits.
If, as expected, the case ends up in federal court, she said, Texas might argue that shield laws cannot be enforced because the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution requires states to respect other states’ laws. But, Ms. Ziegler said, some legal experts who support shield laws say the laws constitute a “public policy exception” to that clause.
The use of abortion medication has grown since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. One study found that medication is now used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions.More in U.S.
Already, abortion providers have become concerned that a 151-year-old federal anti-vice law known as the Comstock Act could be revived by the incoming Trump administration. The law, which has been rarely enforced, prohibits the mailing of “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials, like pornography, or any item “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.”
In 2022, the Justice Department concluded that abortion medication could be sent by mail if the sender did not intend for the recipient to use them unlawfully. Abortion opponents have been pushing for the incoming administration to rescind that interpretation and say that the act bans all mailing of abortion pills.
In the Texas suit, Mr. Paxton said that Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., provided two medications to a 20-year-old woman in Texas that “resulted in a medical abortion” over the summer. The two medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, are widely used together to end pregnancies up to 12 weeks.
In July, the woman asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room because of “severe bleeding,” and it was there that he first learned that she was nine weeks pregnant, according to the lawsuit.
The man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage,” the suit said, and he went back to their home in Collin County, where he “discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter.”ImagePiles of white pills on a table. Two hands wearing medical gloves are on the table, and one is hovering over a pile.Misoprostol, which is used to end pregnancies.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Dr. Carpenter specializes in reproductive health and is a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization that assists doctors in states where abortion is legal with interstate telemedicine in order to “close the abortion accessibility gap,” according to the group’s website.
She is not licensed to practice medicine in Texas, according to the suit. A colleague of Dr. Carpenter’s said on Friday that Dr. Carpenter would not be commenting on the case.
But the colleague, Dr. Linda Prine, who has been open about prescribing abortion pills under New York’s shield law, said: “Maggie has been providing legally protected abortion care, protected by the State of New York, to people who are greatly in need. Texas has no jurisdiction over us in New York State. Abortion is a human right.”
Mr. Paxton said he was seeking to have the court stop Dr. Carpenter from continuing to provide abortion medication to patients in Texas, and to apply Texas’ ban on abortion to her. The ban carries a penalty of at least $100,000 for each violation.
It was not clear how Mr. Paxton would seek to enforce the state law against a New York doctor. His office did not respond to a request to discuss the suit.
David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who has helped draft and lobby for shield laws, including New York’s, said the suit was precisely what the shield laws were meant to cover.
“Texas has no jurisdiction over Maggie Carpenter,” Mr. Cohen said. “She is not physically present there. The courts cannot order her to do anything, and they cannot get the assistance of the New York courts to order her to do anything because of the shield law.”
But anti-abortion groups were already celebrating the legal challenge.
“If Texas wins, this case could open the door for the state to take further legal action against one of the largest organizations in the illegal abortion cartel: Aid Access,” said Kimberlyn Schwartz, director of media and communication for Texas Right to Life, referring to the Europe-based organization that has been at the forefront of telemedicine abortion and has shield-law providers in several states.
Katie Daniel, the director of legal affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, applauded Mr. Paxton for “leading the charge to hold out-of-state abortion businesses accountable for preying on Texas’ unborn children and their mothers.”
It is not the first time that Mr. Paxton has tried to stretch Texas’ ban beyond state borders. He fought in court this year to reverse a rule by the Biden administration that prevents investigators from inspecting the medical records of women who travel out of state for abortions. It was not clear if Mr. Paxton had been seeking such records.
Ms. Ziegler says the new lawsuit also sets up an interstate battle that is “kind of giving the lie to the whole idea that each state is going to be left to do its own thing,” she said. “That was the winning recipe for the G.O.P. — every state can make its own policy.”
But with abortion pills being mailed across state lines, she said, the conflicts between conservative and liberal states don’t go away. Instead, they become heightened.
“The whole ‘each state is going to leave each other state alone’ thing is not an accurate depiction of what any of the states are doing or want to do,” she said.
New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case, Michael Levenson, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., right, who claimed to have more than 20 “wives” including 10 “brides” under 18, pleaded guilty in April to two felony conspiracy charges.
The self-proclaimed leader of a polygamist sect in Arizona who amassed more than 20 “wives,” including 10 “brides” under 18, was sentenced on Monday to 50 years in prison in connection with what prosecutors described as an interstate child sexual abuse ring, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.
Federal prosecutors said that the man, Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., led a group that victimized girls as young as 9.
Using his status as a self-declared prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mr. Bateman forced his child “brides” to participate in sexual activities with him and with other adult men and women, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Penny choked Mr. Neely in a minutes-long struggle on the floor of a New York subway car. The case reflected the pathologies of post-pandemic New York.
Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked a fellow subway rider on an uptown F train last year, was acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide on Monday, ending a case that had come to exemplify New York City’s post-pandemic struggles.
The jurors decided that Mr. Penny’s actions were not criminal when he held the rider, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold as the two men struggled on the floor of a subway car on May 1, 2023. Mr. Neely, who was homeless and had a history of mental illness, had strode through the subway car that afternoon, yelling at passengers and frightening them, according to witnesses.
After the forewoman announced the verdict, the courtroom erupted, with some people cheering the outcome and others responding with anger.
Upon hearing the words “not guilty,” Mr. Penny’s lawyer, Thomas A. Kenniff, slapped his palm on the defense table and turned to hug Mr. Penny, who had a large grin on his face. Another of his lawyers, Steven Raiser, stood and kissed his client on the cheek.
Mr. Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, lashed out at supporters of Mr. Penny, and the judge asked him to leave the room.
The jurors had spent more than three days trying to come to a unanimous decision on whether Mr. Penny, 26, was guilty of manslaughter — a higher charge — in the death of Mr. Neely, 30. On Friday, the jurors sent two notes to the judge overseeing the trial saying that they had deadlocked.
After the jurors — seven women and five men — sent the first note that morning, the judge, Maxwell T. Wiley, instructed them to resume their deliberations. When the jurors sent the second note in the afternoon, telling Justice Wiley that they were still unable to reach an agreement, he granted the prosecution’s request to dismiss the charge. He sent the jurors home for the weekend, telling them to prepare to begin deliberating on the lesser 
charge, criminally negligent homicide, on Monday. Ultimately, they decided to acquit Mr. Penny.
The decision was a defeat for the office of Alvin L. Bragg, left, Manhattan’s district attorney. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bragg said that the jury “has now spoken.”
“We deeply respect the jury process and we respect their verdict,” he said.
In his statement, Mr. Bragg also noted that prosecutors and their families had been “besieged with hate and threats — on social media, by phone and over email” throughout the trial. “Simply put, this is unacceptable, and everyone, no matter your opinion on this case, should condemn it,” he said.
New York Times, Youth Pastor Is Charged With Nearly 200 Sex Crimes Going Back Decades, Billy Witz, Nov. 27, 2024. Many of the victims were the West Virginia pastor’s relatives, the police said, including five nieces who filed a complaint against him in 2004.
The state police in West Virginia are continuing to investigate a longtime youth pastor who has now been charged with nearly 200 counts of sexual abuse crimes involving children, many of them his relatives, dating back more than three decades.
The pastor, John W. Radcliff II, was arrested a second time last week after officers investigating a complaint filed against him in September revisited a case from 2004, when five of Mr. Radcliff’s nieces told the police that he had abused them.
“I have no idea what happened, but we never saw charges pressed,” said one niece, Carla Rinehart, whose mother is Mr. Radcliff’s sister.
Ms. Rinehart, 38, said that growing up, she did not know that her relatives had endured the same type of abuse that she says her uncle had committed against her. But when Ms. Rinehart was hospitalized at 17 after a mental breakdown, she began to share her story with family members. Her sister recounted a similar experience at the time, and then their cousins did the same.
A local TV station, citing court documents in Lewis County, W.Va., on the 2004 case, reported that Mr. Radcliff had forced the girls to perform sexual acts on him from 1987 to 1996, and sexually assaulted them in other ways until they were about 12. The victims are all now adults, the news outlet reported.
Lewis is one of four counties where Mr. Radcliff has been charged with abuse.
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U.S. Immigration
Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramirez, Dec. 8, 2024. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported.
And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of the 1.4 million people in the U.S. immigration system who have pending deportation orders cannot be sent back to their home countries, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, posing one of several looming obstacles to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge for a mass removal campaign.
Some orders can’t be carried out because the would-be deportee’s home country won’t take them or limits cooperation with ICE. Others identified for deportation are serving prison terms, or have received a reprieve or deferral from an immigration judge, due to a medical condition, a credible persecution threat or another extenuating factor.
An array of other logistical and legal impediments also could constrain mass deportations, according to current and former ICE officials.
Trump promises to brush aside hurdles and mount a campaign modeled after the harsh roundups of the Eisenhower administration, when the U.S. government expelled hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to Mexico.
“We will begin — and we have no choice — the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said on the campaign trail.
Trump’s aides describe the anticipated campaign as an enforcement blitz that will leverage the power and resources of the U.S. military to roll back the effect of record numbers of illegal border crossings under President Joe Biden. Criminals and those with outstanding deportation orders will be the administration’s priority as of Trump’s inauguration, Jan. 20, aides say.
Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery, Laura Vozzella and Salvador Rizzo, Dec. 8, 2024. Virginia’s governor, shown above in a file photo, has used the arrest of two undocumented men who misunderstood directions to stop at a check-in station to inflame fears over illegal immigration.
There are two versions of a May 3 incident at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia involving two Jordanian men, both undocumented immigrants, who pulled up to the entrance in a box truck.
There’s the mundane account given by federal prosecutors about some confusion over where to check in during an Amazon delivery stop. And there’s the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has been telling for the past six months that makes it sound like two foreigners stormed the gates at the fortified military installation.
“We have folks that have crashed the — illegal immigrants — that have crashed the front gate at Quantico in a box truck, trying to gain access to Quantico,” Youngkin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Oct. 14 in one of multiple national television appearances — plus speeches at the National Republican Convention and a rally in Virginia with then-Republican nominee Donald Trump — where he has invoked the episode to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies.
Federal prosecutors — who initially charged the pair with misdemeanor trespassing, but later dropped those charges — say that, while the Jordanians were in the country illegally and are in the process of being deported, they did not crash the gate or intend to do any harm at Quantico.
Mohammad Dabous, working for an Amazon subcontractor, was trying to make a delivery to the post office in the town of Quantico, which can only be accessed through the gates of the military base, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Amico, who handled the case, said in a court filing. Hasan Hamdan was a passenger in the truck.
“Marine Corps … agents spoke with Mr. Dabous’s supervisor at the subcontractor delivery company, who confirmed Mr. Dabous’s employment and verified the scheduled authorized delivery to the Northern Virginia town of Quantico on May 3, 2024,” Amico wrote in a motion filed Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The same filing noted that neither man had any known terrorist links. “The FBI has not identified any national security concerns regarding either defendant,” wrote Amico, who also said he consulted the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Neither defendant is on the watch list.”
Quantico officials issued Dabous and Hamdan citations for trespassing, a petty offense punishable by a maximum six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. They then turned the pair over to ICE because of their immigration status. The men were later released on bond from ICE custody.
The U.S. attorney’s office dropped the charges Oct. 3, but the deportation proceedings continue.
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U.S. Jobs, Investment, Economy, Pensions
Washington Post, Skyrocketing car-insurance premiums are pushing inflation higher, Andrew Ackerman and Federica Cocco, Dec. 14, 2024. Auto insurance costs in particular are making the Federal Reserve’s job more difficult.
Soaring insurance premiums, particularly for autos, are fueling rising consumer prices and complicating policymakers’ attempts to beat back inflation.
Inflation cooled for much of the year before picking up this fall, with insurance prices for autos, homes and medical care contributing to a 15 percent of the increase in overall consumer prices, economists say. A double-digit spike in auto-insurance prices drove the vast majority of that rise.Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
Indeed, November’s hotter annual inflation gain of 2.73 percent would have been much lower, closer to a 2.37 percent inflation rate, without the outsize increase to auto insurance.
“It is punching well above its weight for that contribution,” said Josh Hirt, a senior economist at Vanguard.
Insurance premiums are among a handful of stubborn costs that have yet to yield much relief for consumers, in addition to shelter costs and other services like medical care.
Car insurance has remained elevated, and it has a bigger influence on overall inflation than other types of insurance because it’s required to drive in most states. And that cost can multiply with more than half of households owning two or more cars, according to census data.
Since just before the pandemic in December 2019, consumers have seen a roughly 51 percent jump in auto-insurance prices, Hirt said.
Car insurance prices revolve around the supply of cars available for purchase, which has been trending far more expensive as manufacturers funnel resources into souped-up versions of pricey models and cut back on cheaper options. New technologies have made vehicles safer, but the costs are higher to replace these more expensive parts. Labor costs to repair cars have also skyrocketed.
Rising accident frequency and severity is another factor, said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, fueled by distracted and reckless driving. “As a result, we are seeing more fatalities and injuries, leading to increased attorney involvement in claims,” she said.
Kyle Morrison, 52, of Seattle, was taken aback by the sharp rise in insurance premiums on his 2017 Kia Forte, which jumped to about $200 per month in December from roughly $130, he said.
Initially, Morrison, a transportation contractor with a clean driving record, thought the price hike by his insurer, Safeco, stemmed from a recent move to a new neighborhood, he said. But his insurance representative told him it largely had to do with price increases “across the board and from all insurance carriers,” Morrison said.
New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting, Jeanna Smialek, Dec. 11, 2024. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent in the year through November. The Federal Reserve is considering whether to cut interest rates next week.
The Hill, Powell calls for ‘change’ in ‘unsustainable’ fiscal path, Taylor Giorno, Dec. 4, 2024. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday that the U.S. is on an “unsustainable” fiscal path and called for a course correction days after the national debt topped $36 trillion for the first time ever.
New York Times, Trump Tax Cuts Won’t Help the Economy Grow, Budget Office Finds, Andrew Duehren, Dec. 4, 2024. A larger debt and higher interest rates would cancel out the boost from keeping individual taxes lower, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found.
New York Times, Opinion: Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America, Paul Krugman, right, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). It’s late 2025, and Donald Trump has done what he said he would do: impose high tariffs — taxes on imports — on goods coming from abroad, with extremely high tariffs on imports from China. These tariffs have had exactly the effect many economists predicted, although Trump insisted otherwise: higher prices for American buyers.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
Well, U.S. trade law gives the executive branch broad discretion in tariff-setting, including the ability to grant exemptions in special cases. So you apply for one of those exemptions. Will your request be granted?
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
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Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, Automakers Thrived in the Pandemic. Many Are Now Struggling, Jack Ewing, Dec. 15, 2024. A few years ago, automakers were celebrating record profits as the pandemic created shortages of new cars, allowing them to raise prices. Now the hangover is setting in.
Nissan, the Japanese automaker, is laying off 9,000 employees. Volkswagen is considering closing factories in Germany for the first time. The chief executive of the U.S. and European automaker Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Peugeot, Fiat and other brands, quit after sales tumbled. Even luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz are struggling.
Each carmaker has its own problems, but there are some common threads. They include a tricky and expensive technological transition, political turmoil, rising protectionism and the emergence of a new class of fast-growing Chinese carmakers. The many woes raise questions about the future of companies that are a critical source of jobs in many Western and Asian countries.
Many of these problems have been apparent for years but became less pressing during the pandemic, lulling some automakers into complacency. When shortages of semiconductors and other components slowed production and limited inventory, carmakers found it easy to raise prices. .
Changing technology, political turmoil and competition from China are cutting into profits and forcing carmakers to cut jobs and close factories.
New York Times, E.P.A. Bans Cancer-Causing Chemicals Used in Dry Cleaning, Hiroko Tabuchi, Dec. 9, 2024. The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 9, 2024. Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
New York Times, ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump, Michael M. Grynbaum and Alan Feuer, Dec. 15 2024 (print ed.). ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump.
The outcome of the lawsuit marks an unusual victory for President-elect Donald J. Trump in his ongoing legal campaign against national news organizations.Listen to this article · 6:03 min Learn more
The agreement was a significant concession by a major news organization and a rare victory for a media-bashing politician whose previous litigation efforts against news outlets have often ended in defeat.
Under the terms of a settlement revealed on Saturday, ABC News will donate the $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Mr. Trump during a televised interview in March.
ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will pay Mr. Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.
The outcome is an unusual win for Mr. Trump, who has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Several experts in media law said they believed that ABC News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the courts for a public figure like Mr. Trump to prove defamation. A plaintiff must not only show that a news outlet published false information, but that it did so knowing that the information was false or with substantial doubts about its accuracy.
“Major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah.
“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.”
ABC News did not elaborate on Saturday about its precise reasons for settling. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a network spokeswoman said. A lawyer for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the agreement.
Mr. Trump sued ABC and Mr. Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Mr. Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.
In that case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
In his lawsuit, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that he had been found liable for raping Ms. Carroll. (Mr. Trump was ordered by a jury in the Carroll case to pay her damages of $83.3 million. He is appealing the verdict.)
The settlement agreement in the defamation case, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, was signed on Friday, the same day that a judge ordered Mr. Trump to sit for a deposition in the case next week in Florida. Mr. Stephanopoulos was also on the verge of being deposed.
Tensions ran high between ABC News and Mr. Trump’s camp throughout the 2024 campaign.
Mr. Trump denounced ABC as “terrible” for its handling of his sole debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, faulting the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for fact-checking his answers and musing about stripping the network of its broadcasting license.
Debra OConnell, the Disney executive who directly oversees ABC News, dined with Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Palm Beach last Monday, according to two people briefed on their interaction. The dinner was part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.
News networks typically arrange such meetings ahead of a new presidential administration to discuss subjects like booking and day-to-day coverage. Another person familiar with the meeting said its purpose was to discuss Mr. Trump’s White House transition, not the pending defamation case.
Under the settlement terms, ABC agreed to place an editor’s note at the bottom of an online article about the interview with Ms. Mace. The note reads: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
The Mercury News, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment, Staff Report, Dec. 14, 2024. Suchir Balaji, 26, claimed the company broke copyright law.
A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week.
Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said.
The medical examiner’s office determined the manner of death to be suicide and police officials this week said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”
Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.
Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.
Its public release in late 2022 spurred a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI from authors, computer programmers and journalists, who say the company illegally stole their copyrighted material to train its program and elevate its value past $150 billion.
The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including the New York Times, to sue OpenAI in the past year.
In an interview with the New York Times published Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
Balaji grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley to study computer science. It was then he became a believer in the potential benefits that artificial intelligence could offer society, including its ability to cure diseases and stop aging, the Times reported. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the newspaper.
But his outlook began to sour in 2022, two years after joining OpenAI as a researcher. He grew particularly concerned about his assignment of gathering data from the internet for the company’s GPT-4 program, which analyzed text from nearly the entire internet to train its artificial intelligence program, the news outlet reported.
The practice, he told the Times, ran afoul of the country’s “fair use” laws governing how people can use previously published work. In late October, he posted an analysis on his personal website arguing that point.
No known factors “seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” Balaji wrote. “That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.”
Reached by this news agency, Balaji’s mother requested privacy while grieving the death of her son.
In a Nov. 18 letter filed in federal court, attorneys for The New York Times named Balaji as someone who had “unique and relevant documents” that would support their case against OpenAI. He was among at least 12 people — many of them past or present OpenAI employees — the newspaper had named in court filings as having material helpful to their case, ahead of depositions.
Generative artificial intelligence programs work by analyzing an immense amount of data from the internet and using it to answer prompts submitted by users, or to create text, images or videos.
When OpenAI released its ChatGPT program in late 2022, it turbocharged an industry of companies seeking to write essays, make art and create computer code. Many of the most valuable companies in the world now work in the field of artificial intelligence, or manufacture the computer chips needed to run those programs. OpenAI’s own value nearly doubled in the past year.
News outlets have argued that OpenAI and Microsoft — which is in business with OpenAI and also has been sued by The Mercury News — have plagiarized and stole its articles, undermining their business models.
“Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely,” the newspapers’ lawsuit said.
OpenAI has staunchly refuted those claims, stressing that all of its work remains legal under “fair use” laws.
“We see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience,” the company said when the lawsuit was filed.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, married for the fifth time in August 20124, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday. Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp. The couple announced their engagement in March.
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Murdoch wanted to change the terms of his family’s trust to ensure that his son Lachlan would be his successor upon his death.
Rupert Murdoch, right, has faced a setback in his bid to cement his son Lachlan’s future control of his media empire, after a Nevada probate commissioner 
rejected his bid to change his family’s trust, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
Murdoch, 93, initiated the effort to change the terms of the trust last year to preserve the conservative orientation of his sprawling media empire, which includes U.S. businesses Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. As first reported by the New York Times this summer, the elder Murdoch was concerned that a “lack of consensus” among his three other older children would have financial consequences for the company.
But probate commissioner Edmund “Joe” Gorman Jr. ruled against the effort, deeming it a “carefully crafted charade,” the New York Times reported on Monday afternoon. The case will now move to a district judge who could choose to affirm the recommendation, deny it or send it back for additional inquiry.
“We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members,” a spokesperson representing Prudence, Elisabeth and James Murdoch told The Washington Post in a statement.
The three siblings strongly objected to their father’s effort, which set off the current legal battle. The trust had been set up as part of divorce proceedings between Murdoch and his second wife, the former Anna Murdoch Mann.
Lachlan is ideologically aligned with his father and would be expected to continue the editorial positioning that has made the company successful. There was concern that his three siblings could choose to reorient the company in a more moderate direction after their father’s passing. James, in particular, has become a vocal supporter of liberal causes since he formally exited his father’s media company in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” But the three other siblings have not publicly expressed any desire to replace Lachlan or to change the company’s editorial direction.
Lachlan, 53, who has flitted in and out of the Murdoch media fold, became his father’s most likely successor after he was named chairman and CEO of the Fox Corporation in 2019. His grasp on that position only tightened after his father announced last fall that he would step down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., which includes the company’s newspaper and publishing portfolio.
Lachlan was the only one of the patriarch’s four older children who attended their father’s fifth wedding in June to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, a sign of the deep-seated family tensions at play.
The drama in Nevada was almost entirely hidden from the public and the media by dint of the commissioner, who determined that the trust battle was a private matter, rejecting efforts by a coalition of media companies — including The Post — to open up the case. Sealed hearings in the case were held in September. While no decisions in the case have been made public, the online docket now shows the status of the case to be “pending inactive.”
The elder Murdoch has been backed in his legal efforts by William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Previous attempts at a settlement that would have resolved the dispute without a court case were unsuccessful, though they could continue.
Murdoch’s company is still facing a host of legal challenges, including a defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic and shareholder lawsuits alleging that Fox executives were deficient in preventing defamatory content from airing on the network.
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Politico, Opinion: You Should Worry About Kash Patel Running the FBI, Ankush Khardori, Dec. 14, 2024. The days of J. Edgar Hoover may be over, but Patel’s nomination is deeply worrisome all the same.t national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.
Some key pieces appear to be snapping neatly into place for Donald Trump’s much-feared prosecutorial revenge tour as the year draws to a close.
Trump’s new nominee to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, is a staunch loyalist who predicted last year that after Trump’s reelection, “the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones.” Trump told NBC News that the members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail” (even as he claimed that he would not direct his appointees to prosecute them). And his plan to install Kash Patel, right, as FBI director was made easier after Christopher Wray, himself a Trump appointee, announced he would resign despite having more than two years left on his term.
Trump’s decision to nominate Patel has proven particularly controversial, since his principal qualification appears to be his sycophancy toward Trump. (A Trump transition spokesperson said, “Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic director.”)
Many observers, including former federal law enforcement officials, oppose Patel’s nomination on the grounds that he would likely use the FBI to pursue Trump’s political opponents and that he might substantially corrupt the culture and professionalism of the bureau. To some, Patel calls to mind the specter of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director whose nearly 50-year stint running the agency until 1972 was marked by egregious abuses of power — including illegal surveillance, blackmail and the harassment of political dissidents.
Patel clearly lacks the qualifications, experience and temperament to lead the agency. But how worried should the American public really be about him at the helm of the FBI?
The truth is that there are stronger internal and external safeguards in place against law enforcement abuses than during the Hoover era. He will indeed face some constraints because of the culture and bureaucracy of the FBI. But they may not contain him. And he will have plenty of opportunity to damage the bureau and its work — and to use and abuse the FBI for political ends. His nomination poses a considerable and unjustifiable risk to the country.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, News Analysis: Why Wray’s Resignation May Signal a Shift in F.B.I. Tradition, Devlin Barrett, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director changes with the administration.
Christopher A. Wray, right, had considered resigning as F.B.I. director before. More than once, confronted with angry demands from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, he contemplated calling it quits.
When Mr. Wray on Wednesday announced his intent to do so, it was because he believed staying on the job into a second Trump term risked significant disruptions to the work force and its mission.
Mr. Trump had already declared his plan to replace him with Kash Patel, a tough-talking loyalist who has vowed to force out bureau leaders and empty its Washington headquarters.
In conceding to the reality of raw power, Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director is more of a political post that changes with the administration.
For decades, F.B.I. directors have been appointed to 10-year terms to insulate them from the shifting winds of politics. Few F.B.I. directors stay a full decade, and the circumstances of Mr. Wray’s departure after seven years suggest that insulation has worn thin.
Washington Post, Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses, Jacob Bogage, Jacqueline Alemany and Jeff Stein, Dec. 14, 2024 Trump feuded with the mail agency in his first term. Privatizing it could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains.
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.
Trump has discussed his desire to overhaul the Postal Service at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition, the people said. Earlier this month, Trump also convened a group of transition officials to ask for their views on privatizing the agency, one of the people said.
Trump’s specific plans for overhauling the Postal Service were not immediately clear. But he feuded with the nation’s mail carrier as president in 2019, trying to force it to hand over key functions — including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients — to the Treasury Department.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Texas Attorney General Sues New York Doctor for Mailing Abortion Pills, J. David Goodman and Pam Belluck, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). The lawsuit appeared to be among the first attempts to stop doctors from mailing the medication to states that ban abortions.
The Texas attorney general opened a new front in the contentious battle over access to abortion this week by suing a New York doctor for sending abortion pills into Texas. It appeared to be among the first attempts to stop the mailing of such medication into states that ban abortion.
The lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton — filed on Thursday in state court in Collin County, north of Dallas — pits the laws of Texas, which has a near-total ban on abortion, against those of New York, where lawmakers have taken steps to shield doctors from out-of-state prosecution.
Under shield laws, states like New York will refuse to cooperate with attempts by other states to prosecute or sue abortion providers who prescribe and send pills across state lines. Such laws exist in eight states and have allowed doctors there to send more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to women in states with bans.
But legal experts say they expect Texas to try to pursue its case even if it is rebuffed by New York’s law. Such an effort could wind up in federal court, potentially imperiling the ability of women in other states with bans to receive abortion pills by mail, and becoming a major test of whether states can enforce contradictory laws across state lines.
“It’s a huge deal,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Shield doctors mailing pills into ban states was always going to be, I think, both the most consequential in terms of access to abortion and the highest risk.”
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). Aaron Siri, above, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.
That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.
Much of Mr. Siri’s work — including the polio petition filed in 2022 — has been on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit.
Washington Post, Polio survivor Mitch McConnell criticizes efforts to undermine vaccine, Maegan Vazquez, Dec. 14, 2024. The statement is the first time the Senate minority leader has publicly weighed in on the nomination process beyond acknowledging meeting with some of Trump’s picks for his administration.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who battled polio as a child, warned on Friday that anyone seeking a Senate confirmation should “steer clear” of associating with any efforts to undermine public confidence in the polio vaccine.Get the latest election news and results
“The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said in a statement. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
Several people Donald Trump has tapped for high-level roles in his incoming administration have expressed vaccine skepticism, most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the president-elect picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Washington Post on Friday confirmed that Aaron Siri, an ally of Kennedy’s who has a history of seeking to expand vaccine exemptions, petitioned the government in 2022 to reconsider its approval of a widely used polio vaccine. Siri has been working as a top adviser for Kennedy as he builds out his staffing and plans for HHS, a person with direct knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid told The Post. The New York Times first reported the polio petition.
Katie Miller, a Trump transition spokeswoman for Kennedy, said Siri “has never had a conversation about these petitions with Mr. Kennedy or any of the HHS nominees at any point.” The vaccine, she added, “should be investigated and studied appropriately. We should be as transparent as possible, as it relates to vaccines, but it should be available to the public.”
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Impeached Over Martial Law Crisis, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, Victoria Kim and Qasim Nauman, Dec. 14, 2024. Celebrations broke out in Seoul after lawmakers voted to oust President Yoon Suk Yeol, right. He vowed to fight removal in the country’s Constitutional Court.
South Korea’s National Assembly voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday, suspending him from office after his stunning declaration of martial law earlier this month caused widespread outrage and plunged the country into a constitutional crisis.
With the impeachment vote, Mr. Yoon has been suspended from office.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, How the President Alienated South Korea, One Group at a Time, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles, Dec. 14, 2024. Ever since Yoon Suk Yeol took office, the public had been infuriated with near-constant scandals and unpopular decisions. Angry rice farmers. Striking doctors. A $2,200 Dior bag.
South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, may have sealed his political fate on Dec. 3, when he declared martial law, triggering public outrage. And on Saturday, the National Assembly voted to impeach Mr. Yoon, who was then suspended from office.
Excerpt Continued Below.
Kaja Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.(AFP photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images).
Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns , Elena Giordano, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.).The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, says Russia has learned how to influence elections through new technologies.
“I see the examples from Romania, but also other parts, that [the] Russians have really cracked the code on how to influence elections,” Kallas said at POLITICO’s P28 event Tuesday evening.
Responding to a question about the influence of new technologies on democracy, Kallas said she is “really worried.”
“Democracy is based on trust, and if you can’t trust elections anymore then how can you trust the outcome?” she asked.
Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair are outdated and don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.
“I think we should take them very seriously,” she said.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing, Ashley Southall and Maria Cramer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The man who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two officials.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare at a company investors’ day, was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said.
The shooting occurred early Dec. 4 as Mr. Thompson arrived early at a Hilton hotel on West 54th Street to prepare for the UnitedHealthcare investors’ meeting.
The Bulwark, Political Commentary: By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President, Andrew Egger, Dec. 11, 2024. An unsettling number of House Republicans are open to Trump’s threats against the House January 6th committee.
How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”
A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct. January 6th Committee Democrats were quick yesterday to deny that they had done anything untoward: “There’s nothing we did as a January 6th Select Committee that violates the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the committee, told NBC News.
For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the January 6th Committee criminally destroyed records in an attempt to bury facts that would exonerate him. (As fact checks have repeatedly shown, Trump’s claim is a totally baseless—a funhouse-mirror distortion of claims made back in 2023 by House Republicans who were then already investigating the work of the January 6th Committee and who were crabby that, for instance, they were only being provided with transcripts of depositions rather than video footage.)
For the most part, House Republicans who spoke to The Bulwark were careful not to actually say that they believed, like Trump, that the committee had destroyed evidence. But they were comfortable entertaining the possibility it had (despite those fact checks) and content with the idea of prosecuting lawmakers if they did. “I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”
Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee. (Raskin’s office did not return a request for comment.) It’s the committee which Comer chairs and on which Boebert and Burchett serve. That those three lawmakers showed comfort with Trump targeting the January 6th Committee members underscores the degree to which partisan affiliations now overwhelm institutional prerogatives.
The Oversight Committee exists specifically to provide congressional accountability and scrutiny to the actions of the executive branch. But none of these Oversight Republicans had an issue with Trump vowing open retribution against House members who performed that sort of accountability work during the last Congress.
When I asked Comer whether he was worried about the chilling effect of the president accusing an entire House committee of collective crimes, he dodged: “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Boebert wasn’t worried either: “I don’t lack confidence” in the House’s ability to do oversight, she said as she hopped into her car.
Not every House Republican The Bulwark spoke to endorsed Trump’s modest proposal of jail for the J6 committee. But none were willing to publicly criticize it either. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), considered one of the more bipartisan remaining members of the House, declined all questions about Trump’s interview in a sequence of terse monosyllables. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—typically as good for a soundbite as any human in Washington—smirked and ignored The Bulwark’s question as she walked to the House floor.
Remarkably, while some GOP lawmakers were practically licking their chops over the prospect of some of their colleagues facing legal retribution, others incorrectly argued Trump had never called for such retribution at all.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.). “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”
Over on the other side of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins was doing her part to avoid the controversy by focusing on the less openly bloodthirsty elements of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. “It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” she told reporters yesterday, alluding to Trump’s insistence that he would find “retribution” in office not by looking backwards but by being a successful president. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
Trump Transition News, Commentary
New York Times, In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump, Theodore Schleifer and David Yaffe-Bellany, Dec. 14, 2024. It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump.
The $1 million donations came gradually — and then all at once.
Meta. Amazon. OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Each of these Silicon Valley companies or their leaders promised to support President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural committee with seven-figure checks over the past week, often accompanied by a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee.
The procession of tech leaders who traveled to hobnob with Mr. Trump face-to-face included Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and Sergey Brin, a Google founder, who together dined with Mr. Trump on Thursday. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, shared a meal with Mr. Trump on Friday. And Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, planned to meet with Mr. Trump in the next few days.
This was the week when many tech companies and their top executives, as reluctant as they may have been, acknowledged the reality of getting business done in Mr. Trump’s Washington. With their donations, visits and comments, they joined a party that has already raged for a month, as a cohort of influential Silicon Valley billionaires, led by Elon Musk, began running parts of Mr. Trump’s transition after endorsing him in the campaign.
While businesses frequently try to get on an incoming president’s good side, the frenzy of tech activity stood out from other industries. Until President Obama’s administration, the tech industry had largely stayed aloof from politics. Some wrote just small checks for Mr. Trump’s first inauguration.
New York Times, Trump’s Night-Owl Tendencies Set Stage for After-Hours Diplomacy, Michael D. Shear,.Dec. 14, 2024. At Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Trump has been hosting diplomatic dinners, announcing cabinet picks and texting his aides — all after the sun goes down.
It was past midnight in Florida this week when President-elect Donald J. Trump decided to mock Justin Trudeau on social media, calling the prime minister of America’s neighbor the “governor” of “the Great State of Canada.”
The middle-of-the-night jest was the latest reminder that Mr. Trump, a well-known night owl, seems to rev up after the sun goes down. He has been the president-elect (again) for 37 days, but he has been most active in the evenings, hosting lavish dinners, announcing nominations and firing off texts to his aides.
Of the more than 80 personnel announcements Mr. Trump has made since Election Day, 45 have been announced in social media posts and emails that he has sent after 6 p.m. Many have come after 10 p.m., prompting a wave of social media chatter and television coverage that sometimes continues throughout the night and into the early morning hours.
New York Times, Why Democrats Lost More Seats in Vermont Than Any Other State, Jenna Russell, Dec. 14, 2024. Even though Kamala Harris won the state, voters ousted more than two dozen Democratic legislators, who they felt had not addressed an affordability crisis.lIt was no surprise that most voters in Vermont rejected Donald J. Trump on Election Day, favoring Vice President Kamala Harris by a margin of more than 30 points.
But lower down the ballot, in a sweeping show of dissatisfaction, voters cast out more than two dozen Democratic state lawmakers. The outcome eliminated Democratic supermajorities in the Vermont Legislature and put the small, rural state at the leading edge of the anti-incumbent wave that swept the country this election.
More Democrats lost seats in Vermont than in any other state. The results stunned lawmakers, set off soul-searching and left even some stalwart Democratic voters elated.
“It was a revolution,” said John McCormick, 81, of Bristol, who helped a Republican candidate campaign for, and win, a seat in Vermont’s State Senate. “I’m a full-blown Democrat and environmentalist, and I didn’t just vote for him — I did everything I could to get him elected.”
New York Times, Trump Transition: F.B.I. Director to Step Down, Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Wray told F.B.I. employees he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, right, told bureau employees on Wednesday that he intended in January, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.
Mr. Wray made the disclosure while addressing employees Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Wray added that he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.
Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.
Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.
But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.
His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by searching the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.
“He invaded Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump told NBC News in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.
In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.
His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”
“If Kash gets in, he’ll be taking somebody’s place, and that somebody is the man you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with NBC News, referring to Mr. Wray.
Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.
At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.
Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.
The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.
Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.
After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.
“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel, right (and author of the book Government Gangsters, shown at left, is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.
Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sought to weigh in on F.B.I. operations and at times expressed frustration that presidents typically stayed out of the bureau’s business.
“I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in 2017. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
Politico, Opinion: You Should Worry About Kash Patel Running the FBI, Ankush Khardori, Dec. 14, 2024. The days of J. Edgar Hoover may be over, but Patel’s nomination is deeply worrisome all the same.t national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.
Some key pieces appear to be snapping neatly into place for Donald Trump’s much-feared prosecutorial revenge tour as the year draws to a close.
Trump’s new nominee to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, is a staunch loyalist who predicted last year that after Trump’s reelection, “the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones.” Trump told NBC News that the members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail” (even as he claimed that he would not direct his appointees to prosecute them). And his plan to install Kash Patel as FBI director was made easier after Christopher Wray, himself a Trump appointee, announced he would resign despite having more than two years left on his term.
Trump’s decision to nominate Patel, right, has proven particularly controversial, since his principal qualification appears to be his sycophancy toward Trump. (A Trump transition spokesperson said, “Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic director.”)
Many observers, including former federal law enforcement officials, oppose Patel’s nomination on the grounds that he would likely use the FBI to pursue Trump’s political opponents and that he might substantially corrupt the culture and professionalism of the bureau. To some, Patel calls to mind the specter of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director whose nearly 50-year stint running the agency until 1972 was marked by egregious abuses of power — including illegal surveillance, blackmail and the harassment of political dissidents.
Patel clearly lacks the qualifications, experience and temperament to lead the agency. But how worried should the American public really be about him at the helm of the FBI?
The truth is that there are stronger internal and external safeguards in place against law enforcement abuses than during the Hoover era. He will indeed face some constraints because of the culture and bureaucracy of the FBI. But they may not contain him. And he will have plenty of opportunity to damage the bureau and its work — and to use and abuse the FBI for political ends. His nomination poses a considerable and unjustifiable risk to the country.
On paper, there is no way to justify Patel’s ascension. He spent a few years as a federal prosecutor focused on national security and was an aide in Congress and the first Trump administration on intelligence and national security issues. Even setting aside the decidedly mixed and often controversial results of that work (more on that below), Patel has no experience managing anything remotely like the FBI’s sprawling bureaucracy — 35,000 employees, 55 field offices throughout the country and more than 60 offices overseas.
What he does have is years spent endorsing Trump’s conspiracy theories and railing against many of Trump’s perceived enemies in the “deep state” — often in deeply unserious appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, on other conservative media outlets and on the campaign trail.
Those appearances — replete with comments from Patel that would disqualify him from consideration for the post in pretty much any other era — have since become a central part of the case against him.
He has frequently denigrated the employees he hopes to lead — perhaps most infamously, when he said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen [it] the next day as a museum of the deep state” and “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” He has accused the FBI and Justice Department of “politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes” and questioned “how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore.”
Patel went even further in his book, Government Gangsters, in which he describes the FBI as “an existential threat to our republican form of government.”
Still, Patel’s stated interest in a full-scale overhaul of the FBI faces some obvious challenges, even setting aside the fanciful notion of immediately shutting down the bureau’s headquarters.
“It takes a year to learn the place, and then only at a surface level,” said a former senior FBI official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“The truth is that even the most intelligent, thoughtful, engaged, diligent director can’t really bend that place to his will,” the former official told me. “It’s a hard culture and a good culture. Folks are law-abiding, and they’re process-oriented.”
The fear that Patel would use the FBI to go after Trump’s political opponents is also well-founded given Patel’s own public statements. Perhaps most notably, he has threatened to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” He added, “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
He has since tried to walk those comments back, but the rhetoric alone ought to be disqualifying for a position that demands the confidence of the American public.
According to the Trump transition spokesperson, “Kash Patel is going to end the weaponization of law enforcement. The FBI will target crime, not individuals with Kash leading the bureau.”
Patel has also previously publicly zeroed in on some of Trump’s most prominent antagonists. Among others, he has suggested that Attorney General Merrick Garland, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Anthony Fauci should be investigated or potentially arrested. So far as I can tell from the rhetoric, the legal theories underlying Patel’s claims are at best highly dubious, if not transparently ridiculous.
He has frequently denigrated the employees he hopes to lead — perhaps most infamously, when he said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen [it] the next day as a museum of the deep state” and “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” He has accused the FBI and Justice Department of “politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes” and questioned “how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore.”
Patel went even further in his book, “Government Gangsters,” in which he describes the FBI as “an existential threat to our republican form of government.”
Still, Patel’s stated interest in a full-scale overhaul of the FBI faces some obvious challenges, even setting aside the fanciful notion of immediately shutting down the bureau’s headquarters.
“It takes a year to learn the place, and then only at a surface level,” said a former senior FBI official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“The truth is that even the most intelligent, thoughtful, engaged, diligent director can’t really bend that place to his will,” the former official told me. “It’s a hard culture and a good culture. Folks are law-abiding, and they’re process-oriented.”
The fear that Patel would use the FBI to go after Trump’s political opponents is also well-founded given Patel’s own public statements. Perhaps most notably, he has threatened to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” He added, “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
He has since tried to walk those comments back, but the rhetoric alone ought to be disqualifying for a position that demands the confidence of the American public.
According to the Trump transition spokesperson, “Kash Patel is going to end the weaponization of law enforcement. The FBI will target crime, not individuals with Kash leading the bureau.”
Patel has also previously publicly zeroed in on some of Trump’s most prominent antagonists. Among others, he has suggested that Attorney General Merrick Garland, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Anthony Fauci should be investigated or potentially arrested. So far as I can tell from the rhetoric, the legal theories underlying Patel’s claims are at best highly dubious, if not transparently ridiculous.
Ankush Khardori is a senior writer for POLITICO Magazine and a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, where he specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime. He has also worked in the private sector on complex commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. His column, Rules of Law, offers an unvarnished look a
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
New York Times, Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Pete Hegseth, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). After President-elect Trump was persuaded to stick with his embattled choice to lead the Pentagon, a swarm of supporters mobilized to pressure senators.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon was battered by damaging headlines: Drinking. Extramarital affairs. An allegation of sexual assault, which he denied.
Republican senators — emboldened after tanking Mr. Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the scandal-ridden Matt Gaetz — were going public with their concerns. Mr. Trump was getting sick of hearing about it all, and he told confidants he was serious about picking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to replace him.
But within 48 hours, Mr. Trump had changed his mind. He was going to see if Mr. Hegseth could survive.
People close to the president-elect had been telling him that this was a moment that would test his power as he prepared to return to Washington. It would be catastrophic, they argued, if he allowed Republican senators, like Joni Ernst of Iowa, to obstruct his mandate.
Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.)A handful of Silicon Valley executives could help transform the country’s largest bureaucracy — and benefit themselves while trying.
A culture clash is headed for Washington that will pit the risk-embracing, fast-first nature of Silicon Valley against the lumbering bureaucracy of the country’s largest federal agency.
Donald Trump has already tapped billionaire finance executives to be Navy secretary and the Pentagon’s No. 2, and startup world successes are in the running for other Pentagon posts. If they all make it, the long-frustrated kings of the Valley who bristle at the doddering pace of Pentagon decision-making could force real change in the building — and benefit themselves while trying.
They’ll be tasked with building weapons faster, fixing a broken shipbuilding system and matching China’s tech prowess. And while every new administration tries to clean up the Pentagon, this crew of outsiders has animated the tech sector.
“A lot of us are hoping there’s a revolution coming,” Joe Lonsdale, founder of software company Palantir and startup investor said at a recent defense forum, “where we hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy.”
The Trump team has worked to fill the Pentagon with picks such as Stephen Feinberg, a wealthy investor with no experience inside the building, as deputy secretary of Defense. Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, is being considered for the Pentagon’s top research and engineering job, as POLITICO first reported. Trae Stephens, co-founder and chair of Anduril Industries, is also in the mix for a high-ranking job at the Pentagon.
The executives all have investments and stakes in multiple companies working with the Pentagon and will need to determine how they detangle a web of potential conflicts of interest — such as Anduril’s drone development or Palantir’s software platforms the Pentagon is helping fund.
New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History, David Leonhardt, Graphics by Albert Sun, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered the country, government data shows.
The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.
That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 11, 2024. The terrifying implications of pardoning insurrectionists who killed and maimed…
This past weekend, in his Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker (shown above), Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to pardon the people who attacked our Capitol, killing five civilians and three police officers and sending more than 140 cops to the hospital.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said of pardoning Jan. 6 killers. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Most media and political observers and commentators appear to be of the opinion that this is simply Trump’s way of thanking the people who made what he considers a heroic effort to keep him in office through violence. That would be bad enough, but experts at The Critical Internet Studies Institute are worried that there may be a much more sinister explanation.
If they’re right, it would also go a long way toward explaining his picks for Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and FBI director.
This theory, increasingly shared among counterterrorism experts and people who monitor violent rightwing extremist groups, suggests that the real reason Trump would do the pardons (and is unafraid of discussing them) is because he’s recruiting. And you don’t need to go back to 1930s Europe to find examples of how that could work.
Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, for example, has often used non-state actors to intimidate and even kill his political enemies. The most well-known is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club, aka “Putin’s Angels,” run by a man who calls himself “the Surgeon.”
They helped Putin invade Crimea and Ukraine, but most of their activity is against protestors, “communists” (anybody opposing Putin), and the queer community in Russia.
Similarly, five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing Hungarian “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”
Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”
Language strikingly similar, if not milder, to Trump‘s way of describing Black people, immigrants, and liberals.
Orbán refused to condemn Bayer or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white, Orbán-supporting Hungarian militias.
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Armed rightwing militia groups in the United States have been on a recruiting jag of their own in anticipation of Trump’s presidency, according to press reports and terrorism experts. For example, Reuters notes:
“The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.”
Similarly, Wired magazine reports that Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), is preparing for something like war:
“’This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,’ says Seddon. ‘Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.’”
El Pais tells the story of armed militia groups who are looking forward to action on America’s southern border when Trump allows it. Referencing them, Tom Homan, who Trump has appointed as his “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:
“There are thousands of retired agents, border patrols, retired military personnel who want to come and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do deportation operations.”
They also cite a Wired article that quotes Tim Foley, head of Arizona Border Recon, a white “civilian patrol group,” as saying they’re doing outreach:
“We’re in talks with a few different people. We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”
It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.
Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:
“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
More recently, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth, left, asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”
Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”
Our timid national media refuse to even consider such a savage scenario, but America should brace itself as Trump has not let up on his violent rhetoric and neither have his followers. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
“You know, when you listen to these comments and watch these videos, what you are forced to consider is the message that Donald Trump is sending, because it is not just to the January 6th defendants.
“It is to the people he hopes will support him in this next term, and the message is: ‘Support me at all costs, use violence, commit crimes, I will take care of you.’
“I find that to be deeply frightening.”
January 6th taught us that Trump and some of the people following him are deadly serious and willing to use violence and even murder to achieve their goals.
America needs to get ready. President Biden should be preparing (or reassuring) us. And, if the latter, explaining why.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, in a red dress, addressing the Republican National Convention.Kimberly Guilfoyle has been engaged to Donald Trump Jr. since late 2020 (Associated Press photo by J. Scott Applewhite).
New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley, Dec. 11, 2024. The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr., Ms. Guilfoyle’s fiancé, has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida.
It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly — the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece.
The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson.
The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as “incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on” with a “stunning ‘it girl.’”
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, 46, did not return a request for comment on his relationship with Ms. Anderson, or on his engagement with Ms. Guilfoyle, to whom he has been betrothed since late 2020. Ms. Anderson, 38, also did not return requests for comment.
In his announcement of her posting to Greece, the president-elect called Ms. Guilfoyle “a close friend and ally,” but made no mention of her relationship with his son.
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States,” the elder Mr. Trump wrote, in a post on Truth Social.ImageBettina Anderson, wearing a white dress with a green floral pattern, sits on a bench in front of a pink and green artworkBettina Anderson was recently seen with Donald Trump Jr. in Palm Beach celebrating her birthday.Credit...Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images for FIGUE
The suggestions of a love triangle have been swirling for several months, including in July, at the Republican National Convention, where Ms. Anderson was spotted sitting behind Mr. Trump — and Ms. Guilfoyle — in a red dress. Ms. Guilfoyle spoke at the convention, saying, “Donald Trump will never stop fighting for you” about his father.
But speculation about Ms. Anderson’s closeness with the president-elect’s son intensified in September, with reports that the pair were seen kissing during a brunch not long before. (Adding a layer of intrigue were various reports that Ms. Anderson was a friend of his ex-wife, Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children.)
Suspicions about the durability of Mr. Trump and Ms. Guilfoyle’s engagement were given more fodder when Ms. Guilfoyle did not appear in a post-election family portrait, which did feature Vanessa Trump and their children. (Melania Trump — the once and future first lady — was also absent, though the photo did feature Elon Musk.)
New York Times, Musk’s Foundation Gave Away Less Money Than Required in 2023, David A. Fahrenthold and Theodore Schleifer, Dec. 12, 2024. Private foundations must donate 5 percent of their assets every year. Elon Musk’s enormous charity missed that standard for three consecutive years.
For the third year in a row, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation did not give away enough of its money.
And it did not miss the mark by a small amount.
New tax filings show that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the amount it was required to give away in 2023. Now, Mr. Musk has until the end of the year to distribute that money, or he will be required to pay a sizable penalty to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk, in his new role as a leader of what President-elect Donald J. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, is promising to downsize and rearrange the entire federal government — including the I.R.S. But the tax records show he has struggled to meet a basic I.R.S. rule that is required of all charity leaders, no matter how small or big their foundations.
Mr. Musk's is one of the biggest. His foundation has more than $9 billion in assets, including millions of shares in Tesla, his electric vehicle company. By law, all private foundations must give away 5 percent of those assets every year. The aim is to ensure that wealthy donors like Mr. Musk use these organizations to help the public instead of simply benefiting from the tax deductions they are afforded.
New York Times, Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous, Lisa Friedman, Dec. 12, 2024. Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.
Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels.
His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
The argument offered by Mr. Wright, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to run the Energy Department, ignores the fact that wind, solar and other renewable energy are cleaner and increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency says clean energy is coming online globally at an “unprecedented rate” and will play a significant role in the future. In some places, renewable energy has been able to displace fossil fuels.
New York Times, Health Insurance Workers Fearful Amid Public Anger After Slaying of C.E.O., Reed Abelson, Mitch Smith, Katie Benner and Amy Julia Harris, Dec. 12, 2024. The fatal shooting last week of an executive on the streets of New York City plunged his family members and colleagues into grief. For rank-and-file employees across the health insurance industry, the killing has left them with an additional emotion: fear, with many frightened for their own safety and feeling under attack for their work.
Health insurance companies have increased security measures since the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, and as an outpouring of online rage toward the industry has followed. Health care leaders have spoken with frustration about feeling vilified, and in the Minneapolis suburbs where United is headquartered, police officers stepped up protection of the company’s offices.
“Clearly the employees have been shaken,” said Mayor Brad Wiersum of Minnetonka, who said the city was working “just to provide that reassurance and that security, to let people know that we are going to do everything we can to keep them safe.”
One UnitedHealthcare worker who processes claims described being cleareyed about the American health care system’s shortcomings, but also believes that she and her colleagues did their best to help patients within the limits of that system. Like most workers interviewed, she did not want to be named because, given the reaction after Mr. Thompson’s killing, she feared for her own safety.
The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo, Dec. 10, 2024. There is confidence in the outcome: ‘They’re all going to get confirmed.’
It didn’t take long for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to realize she had stepped in it. Shortly after Ernst offered a chilly reception to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head the department of defense, she recognized she was in trouble politically, with grassroots Republicans calling for her head.
“How do I make this go away?” a flabbergasted Ernst said to an intermediary, according to a top Donald Trump adviser who received the message.
The answer was obvious to everyone involved. All Ernst had to do was back away from her tacit opposition to Hegseth and the MAGA dogs would stop baying.
Sure enough, on Monday, Ernst changed her tune—not explicitly saying she’d vote for Hegseth’s confirmation but saying she supported him in the process.
By then, the Trump team was feeling good, not just about her vote but about the slate of confirmations to come.
“It sent a message,” according to a top Trump adviser involved in the discussions with Ernst who relayed them to The Bulwark. “Nobody wants to be Joni.”
The desire not to get in MAGA’s crosshairs has spread throughout much of the Senate Republican conference in recent days. It’s the result of both a remarkable swelling of grassroots energy to demand party loyalty from GOP officials and the belief—among some members themselves—that it would send a bad message to see a second Trump nominee go down after Matt Gaetz’s failed bid for attorney general.
Leading that charge has been Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP conference chair, who’s tasked with charting the course for his party’s messaging in the chamber (a post for which he beat Ernst last month). Cotton, a vet like Ernst and Hegseth, was increasingly annoyed with political chatter that the Senate was essentially duty-bound to vote down one of Trump’s picks because of tradition (Gaetz never made it to a vote).
So Cotton directed staff to research the history of Senate confirmations and he quickly concluded that the GOP conference needed to support not just Hegseth, but all of Trump’s controversial nominees
.“I expect our Republican Senate is going to confirm all of President Trump's nominees,” he said Monday morning. In a separate post, he added: “Of the 72 cabinet secretary nominees since the Clinton transition, only 2 nominees have ever received NO votes from the president-elect’s party. No one should be surprised that the Republican Senate will confirm President Trump’s nominees.”
Cotton’s bravado and Ernst’s buckling underscored the choice facing 53 Republican senators in the weeks ahead: board the Trump train or get tied to the tracks.
As of early this week, an emboldened Trump team and top supporters believe that 50-plus members will get on board not just for Hegseth’s confirmation but for Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (secretary of health and human services), and Kash Patel (FBI director) as well.
“They’re all going to get confirmed,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl.) told The Bulwark. “We’re going to respect the fact that he [Trump] got 77 million votes, respect the fact that he won in a landslide, respect that he’s the president.”
Donald Trump on NBC's Meet the Press on December 8, 2024.
Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail, Staff Report, Dec. 8-9, 2024. In his first sit-down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he still plans to pardon those convicted for their role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while he said that the members of committee tasked with investigating it “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
“So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded, adding that he thinks “everybody” on the January 6th Committee should go to jail. Cheney served as vice chair of the January 6th Committee, which concluded in 2022 with a criminal referral to the Justice Department over Trump’s role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump said that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, but “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
In the wide ranging interview, Trump said that he plans to issue pardons to the January 6th rioters on his first day in office, adding that many of those convicted have been in prison “for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump also vowed action on the first day in office to end birthright citizenship, and he reiterated plans for mass deportations.
Welker challenged him on his ability to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants, given the tremendous resources needed to carry out such a plan.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump did say that he wanted to “work something out” to come up with a plan in how to handle “dreamers,” who were children when they were brought to the United States illegally.
Welker asked Trump about his previous pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden.
“Where did I say that?” Trump said.
Welker noted that he posted on Truth Social on June 12, 2023.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to go after Joe Biden?” Welker asked him.
Trump told her that he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
Pressed again on whether he would go after Biden, Trump said, “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump defended his plans for mass tariffs, saying that he doesn’t believe economists who predict costs will be passed on to consumers. But he told Welker that he cannot guarantee that Americans won’t end up paying more.
He said, “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation.”
Then-U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) helping preside as members of the House Jan. 6 Investigative Committee.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative, said President-elect Donald J. Trump “lied about” the bipartisan House committee that investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Former Representative Liz Cheney on Sunday called President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to imprison her and other members of a congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Responding to comments Mr. Trump made in an interview aired on Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Ms. Cheney said the incoming president “lied about the Jan. 6 select committee” and that there would be “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” to prosecute its members.
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” she said in a statement. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”
She continued: “This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Her statement came after Mr. Trump repeated his unfounded allegation that the committee destroyed evidence during its investigation.
“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” he said, referring to Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman. “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”
He went on: “And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”
In fact, the committee did not destroy all evidence. It released an 800-page report as well as 140 transcripts of testimony and various memos, emails and voice mail messages. The evidence remains online. Mr. Thompson explained in a letter last year that the committee had asked the executive branch to go through some material first to protect “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.”
Ms. Cheney pointed to that letter in her statement on Sunday. “Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson,” she said. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people targeted by Mr. Trump like Ms. Cheney as part of the president-elect’s promised “retribution” against his foes. Ms. Cheney did not say in her statement whether she would accept such a pardon to protect herself from a politically motivated prosecution by the next administration.
But she said that the evidence that should be made public was the material gathered by the special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. “The Justice Department should ensure that all that material is preserved and cannot be destroyed. As much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report.”
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 11, 2024. Should Fox Kennedy be selected for the role, she would have a major hill to climb in the confirmation process.
In new reporting from Axios, Donald Trump's selection to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now pushing to have his daughter in law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, to serve as deputy director of the CIA. Fox Kennedy has a long history of working for the Agency and served as an undercover spy for nearly a decade.
But, we are now learning that the reason Kennedy is pushing for his daughter in law to join the Agency in a top role stems from his belief that she could help uncover secrets regarding the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
RFK Jr. has long spread conspiracy theories related to his uncle's assasination, claiming that the federal government and the CIA may have been involved in the assassination plot. There has been no evidence released to support Kennedy's claims.
According to Axios, Fox Kennedy would have a steep uphill climb to be confirmed should she be selected as the deputy director of the Agency. When she first left the Agency, Fox Kennedy published a memoir without getting prior approval from the Agency's vetting team.
In addition, Fox Kennedy has made concerning comments about ISIS. During a 2016 interview, Fox Kennedy stated that "The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them." The enemy she was referring to was ISIS.
Whether Trump listens to RFK Jr. and nominates her, however, remains to be seen.
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm, Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout, Dec. 11, 2024. Gaetz is a longtime friend to John Morgan, a prominent trial lawyer.Matt Gaetz raises his fist in the air.
Matt Gaetz may be taking on a second job.
Prominent Florida megadonor John Morgan is actively in talks with the former Republican lawmaker about joining his firm, Morgan & Morgan, he told POLITICO in an extensive interview. The job would be in addition to the role Gaetz announced on Tuesday that he’s joining the conservative One America News Network as a prime-time host beginning in January.
Morgan praised Gaetz, who recently withdrew from consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, for his positions on marijuana legalization, property insurance and processed foods.
“A lot of the things that my politics are, Matt Gaetz’s are,” said Morgan, who has given heavily to Democratic candidates but is registered in Florida as a no-party affiliated voter.
Morgan said that he could see Gaetz being helpful in a recent lawsuit his firm filed that alleges major food companies specifically engineered their products to be addictive and then marketed them to kids, contributing to chronic illness.
In a text exchange, Gaetz acknowledged that he and Morgan had “talked about collaborating professionally” and said he was grateful for their friendship.
“I’ve known John Morgan for more than a decade,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot of advice from him on matters of law, policy and politics. I have great respect for how he stands to the powerful for his clients — and he wins.”
The job at Morgan & Morgan would be a high-profile landing for Gaetz, who resigned from the House after he dropped out of the process to be Trump’s attorney general, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz has denied the allegations, and a Department of Justice investigation into him resulted in no charges. Yet the accusations quickly dogged his confirmation process, and Gaetz left public service altogether.
The former member of Congress has also been seen as a potential Republican candidate for governor in 2026, a contest that has been increasingly fluid as Trump tapped numerous Floridians to hold jobs in his administration. Gaetz has already tapped into a potential campaign theme by siding with critics — like Morgan — that the GOP-controlled Legislature kowtowed to the property insurance industry when it passed a measure DeSantis signed into law that makes it much harder to sue insurers.
Morgan said the details of the potential job are still under discussion and that he was waiting until the news about Gaetz’s new TV spot settled down. He said that his firm hired “finders, minders and grinders” and that he saw Gaetz as a potential “finder-minder” who he saw at the “36,000-foot” level versus “in the trenches.”
“I know he’s controversial,” Morgan said of Gaetz, “but I’m fucking controversial.”
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 11, 2024. Trump’s association with Mel Gibson highlights troubling endorsement.
During a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, actor Mel Gibson implied that California wildfires might be deliberately set by political opponents of Donald Trump. Gibson stated:
"…4 years of thinly veiled Marxism, and, you know, now I think what we have is a four-year grace period. But we have to work hard for all of it. And I don’t know. The president’s got a big job on his hands to turn this place around. A lot of damage was done, and they continue to start fires, like around my house..."Mel Gibson at Mar-a-Lago
Mel Gibson: “they continue to start fires, like around my house...”
Gibson also praised former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and referred to Trump’s potential second term as a "four-year grace period" from what he described as Marxist policies. Flynn associates himself with fringe MAGA personalities who push conspiracies. Trump HitlerTrump Echoes Hitler: Migrants "Poisoning the Blood of Our Country"Read More
The comments come against a backdrop of devastating wildfires in Malibu, California, which have scorched thousands of acres and destroyed homes. Gibson’s claims mirror baseless conspiracy theories and detract from the real causes of these disasters.Mel Gibson, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Flynn, and Kid Rock at Mar-a-Lago
Gibson’s presence at Mar-a-Lago and his endorsement of Trump raise serious questions about the former president’s associations. Gibson’s history is riddled with controversy. He was infamously caught on tape berating his ex-girlfriend with vile, racist language, suggesting she would be sexually assaulted by “[n-words]” for her clothing choices.
Additionally, Gibson has a long-documented history of anti-Semitic remarks, including a drunken tirade in 2006 which he claimed that Jews are responsible for “all the wars in the world.”Mel Gibson, Trump, and Roger Stone in 2023
Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 11, 2024. Oligarchs have been getting slighted for far too long.
During her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris laid out an economic vision for America that was designed to help people at the bottom get ahead.
Well, here comes the Convict-Elect of the United States — and he’s all ‘fuck that noise. you know who really needs our help?’
‘Billionaires.’
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Finally, America’s beleaguered billionaires are getting the fast track to the help they so desperately need.
Are you an oligarch? well then step right to the head of the line, bro. all you have to do is grease Dear Leader’s palm to the tune of a bil, and every door will open for you.
What do you need, some permits? here you go, pal. is some annoying judge hassling you about regulations? put your mind at rest, ace. we’re going to make those regulations go fuckity-bye.
did you notice how Donny goes out of his way to mention that his little pay-for-play scheme includes ‘environmental approvals’? that’s pretty specific, isn’t it?
Hey, you know who’s a billionaire in bad need of a free pass to despoil the environment?
New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office, Sharon Otterman, Dec. 11, 2024. Harvard, Penn and U.S.C. were among the universities and colleges that issued advisories in anticipation of possible travel bans.
With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are advising their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
During his last administration, Mr. Trump imposed restrictions on entry to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, a policy that stranded thousands of students who were abroad at the time. Later in his term, Mr. Trump added more countries to the restricted travel list. And he has spoken of wanting to reimpose those restrictions once he is back in the White House.
“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell’s Office of Global Learning warned students on its website late last month, advising them to be back in the United States before the start of spring-semester classes on Jan. 21. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added to this list, particularly China and India.”
Colleges are also warning all students to prepare for possible delays at the border and in the processing of paperwork.
“Budget time ahead of the semester start, prior to the January Martin Luther King holiday,” Harvard advised on its website for international students who have concerns.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University have issued comparable advisories and guidance. The advice is precautionary in nature, since the policies of the new administration remain uncertain.
Mr. Trump has said that he wanted to bring back or strengthen some of the travel restrictions he imposed in his first term.
New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power, Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina, Dec. 11, 2024. After cloaking a bill that strips key powers from Democrats as hurricane aid, the state’s legislature overrode a veto from Gov. Roy Cooper to pass it into law.
Republicans in North Carolina muscled through a sweeping expansion of their own power on Wednesday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that will give the G.O.P. increased control over elections, judicial appointments and whether its laws stand up in the courts.
Perhaps most striking was how Republicans did it: They titled the legislation “Disaster Relief” but filled it with measures that had nothing to do with aid for areas devastated by Hurricane Helene and instead eroded the power of top state Democrats. Just 13 of the bill’s 131 pages dealt directly with the storm.
Republicans moved swiftly to pass the bill last month, only for Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to veto the legislation. Republicans then moved to overcome his veto in the final weeks of their single-vote supermajority in the House, where they lost key seats in November. Even as Donald J. Trump carried the state, Republicans fell short in several other top races, including for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
The override vote, which passed by 72 to 46 along party lines, follows four years of efforts by Republicans nationwide to gain greater control over the mechanics of elections, a push initially fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential contest.
State Representative Tim Moore, the departing Republican speaker of the House, said openly before the vote that the bill was meant to help his party win future elections.
“This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket and move this country in the right direction,” Mr. Moore told the Trump ally and conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday.
Lawmakers in North Carolina have a tradition of trying to lock in their political power after election losses. Democrats wielded such tactics in the 1990s, but more recently Republicans have led the way. After Mr. Cooper beat the Republican incumbent in 2016, the legislature stripped the governor’s office of key powers and reduced the number of staff members he could appoint by more than 1,000 positions.
New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan, Alan Feuer, Dec. 11, 2024. The incoming administration said it would not rely on outside groups to carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants, but militias have a long record of inserting themselves into patrolling the border.
A few days after the election, William Teer, who runs the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump with an offer: His organization could help Mr. Trump carry out his plan to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally.
“In support of our nation’s commitments to lawful immigration practices, I wanted to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs, to promote the safety and security of our state,” Mr. Teer wrote. “I am available for further discussion.”
He said Mr. Trump had yet to respond. A spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s transition team said the mass deportation plan would use state and federal resources, not private ones. But Mr. Teer’s offer was one of several recent efforts by far-right organizations, including some that have a history of taking it on themselves to patrol the border with Mexico, to insert themselves into the deportation plan.
Richard Mack, the founder of a group of hard-right sheriffs, said on television last week that if members of his organization assisted with the initiative, it would make it “a lot easier and a lot cheaper and a lot more effective.” And last month, members of other militia-style groups also volunteered their services, with some discussing in private group chats their desire to get involved.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews, Dec. 11, 2024. The outgoing Senate Democratic majority isn't going out without a fight.
Ben Meiselas discusses the early swearing-in of Democrats Adam Schiff and Andy Kim as U.S. Senators, surprising and infuriating MAGA Republicans.
Both Schiff and Kim won their elections, and were given gubernatorial approval to be sworn-in early due special circumstances, allowing them to gain seniority and participate in key Senate hearings.
Kim is replacing disgraced Senator Bob Menendez in New Jersey, and Schiff is filling the seat once held by Dianne Feinstein, who passed away in September of 2023.
Schiff, known for his prosecutorial background, has been a favorite target from MAGA for his role in leading the impeachments of Donald Trump. His early swearing-in has the MAGA trolls making fools of themselves; crying foul while not understanding this process is completely legal.
Andy Kim, a friend of MeidasTouch, delivered a heartfelt statement to his constituents pledging to serve with integrity, and a focus on healing the country; a poignant and powerful statement from a man who will be replacing the crook Bob Menendez.
The U.S. Senate, as well as the American People benefit having Andy Kim step into that office early to gain seniority.Meiselas also played a touching video you’ll only see on MeidasTouch, with Kamala Harris meeting Kim’s family during his swearing-in ceremony, and telling his kids that she knows her dad is a good man and up to the challenge and hard work of being a U.S. Senator.
Meiselas also highlights Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s efforts to secure Democratic control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by advancing the nominations of Lauren McFerrin and Joshua Didleberg; a move to shield the Board from figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Trump allies, who want to weaken the NLRB's power to protect American workers.
Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats, Greta Reich, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). “I’m not worried about it at all in the least,” the former Jan. 6 committee member said.Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger delivers remarks.t worried about President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to throw members of the committee in jail.
“No, I have absolutely no worries about this,” Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN’s “Inside Politics” host Manu Raju on Sunday.
Trump made the threat in an interview with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on NBC. He said that members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail.”
“First off, the executive branch can’t go after the legislative branch because we embarrassed him. That’s not a sin. That’s not against the law. Ultimately, when we talked about him throwing his ketchup and hamburger against the wall, there’s nothing illegal about that,” Kinzinger continued, referring to an alleged incident from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in which Trump once became so angry that he threw his plate of food at the wall and smeared it with ketchup.
He added that “most of the people that testified were actually his Republicans, you know, fellow Republicans that went up and spoke [against] him.”
Some Republicans who testified during the hearings included former Attorney General William Barr; former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue; Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; and Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s daughter.
“So look, he’s all butt hurt, right now because he was embarrassed,” Kinzinger added. “He’s not going to come after us and I’m not worried about it at all in the least.”
New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Applicants for government posts, including inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, say they have been asked about their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election.
At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, conducted in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful.
The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
Excerpt continued below.
Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). She and her firm have clients that have been doing legal battle with the U.S. government.
Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.
Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.
Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.
Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.
Bondi, who has yet to resign from Ballard, where she serves as a D.C.-based partner and chairs the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice focusing on Fortune 500 companies. Since 2019, she has lobbied the federal government for a host of major businesses, including Amazon, General Motors, Fidelity National Financial, Uber and Carnival North America. She serves as a key adviser to the firm’s president, Brian Ballard.
Bondi has also lobbied for the GEO Group, a major private prison company that is paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year by the federal government, according to federal records. The Justice Department is a major customer.
Currently, Bondi is only registered to lobby for the Major County Sheriffs of America, which pays her firm $50,000 a quarter, the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter, and the Florida Sheriffs Association, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter. Bondi, a former personal attorney to Trump, has also worked on corporate and regulatory issues and litigation at the Florida-based law firm Panza Maurer.
“It is essentially impossible to organize a Justice Department ethically in light of the breadth of Bondi’s connections,” said Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive Revolving Door Project. “I think it’s just going to be off-the-charts bad.”
He added that even if Bondi were not to involve herself in issues involving certain companies, she could still influence her department in their favor. For example, Hauser argued, her direction for the antitrust division would have broad implications for her onetime client Amazon.
Bondi did not respond to an email seeking comment, and a spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment.
Some business leaders had feared that, under Trump, they would lose their allies in the GOP, as the party veered in a more populist direction. But big business is hopeful that with Bondi, they’ll get a reprieve from the Biden administration’s corporate crackdowns and avoid follow-through on the Trump campaign’s anti-corporate rhetoric.
“Pam may reinforce that idea that we’re going back to normalcy on deal flow,” said one Republican lobbyist, referring to corporate mergers. The person was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone believes that she’s approachable. … She understands that companies need to have an opportunity to be heard.”
The tech industry, for one, is relatively optimistic about Bondi’s nomination, especially compared to former lawmaker and antitrust crusader Matt Gaetz, whose earlier nomination for attorney general imploded. Major companies have spent the last four years fighting anti-monopoly champions at the Department of Justice, led by Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. With Bondi’s selection, Big Tech sees a movement away from the economic populism that made them major targets, said one lobbyist representing major technology companies.
New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The enormous spending from the world’s richest man quietly fueled allied groups and was revealed only now, as Mr. Musk plays a key role in the presidential transition.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.
The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.
One of Mr. Musk’s most brazen moves — which emerged only on Thursday — was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.
Mr. Musk put the lion’s share of the money he donated toward his main super PAC, America PAC, cutting three checks for $25 million each in the final weeks of the race, according to the new filings with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Musk also spent $40.5 million on legally controversial checks to voters in swing states who signed a petition in support of the Constitution.
Over the course of the race, he gave America PAC a staggering $239 million in both cash and in-kind contributions.
Excerpt continued below.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution’
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, Trump Organization Plans an Ethics Policy Without Banning Foreign Deals
- New York Times, Pam Bondi’s Journey From Traditional Republican to Warrior for Trump, Patricia Mazzei
- New York Times, Investigation: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes Jesse Drucker
- Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases; Investigations, Hearings, Trials
- Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge
- The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld
- Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: Elderly golfer is an incoherent mess on Meet the Press, Jeff Tiedrich
- New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, He Promised Huge Tax Refunds. Now Donald Trump Wants Him to Lead the I.R.S.
- New York Times, Trump Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China
- Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks
More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise, Corey Kilgannon, Mike Baker, Luke Broadwater and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione, above, charged in the death of an executive in New York, was an Ivy League graduate who had recently suffered physical and psychological pain.
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.
Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say, Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione faces gun charges and other counts. He was denied bail after his arraignment in Altoona, Pa.
Authorities said Monday that they had taken a 26-year-old man into custody in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, a health insurance executive who was gunned down last week on a Manhattan sidewalk.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The shooting sparked a sprawling five-day manhunt that ended in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where police said Luigi Mangione, a Maryland native, was spotted eating at a local McDonald’s. He was arrested and charged with five counts, including possessing an instrument of a crime, providing false identification to law enforcement and carrying a firearm without a license. Police said Mangione had a ghost gun, along with a lengthy handwritten document indicating anger toward “corporate America.”
“He is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, said at a news briefing.
Thompson, 50, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed Wednesday outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a stunning act of early-morning violence in one of New York’s busiest areas.
Police said it appeared that the suspect they were seeking escaped the city shortly after the shooting. Law enforcement officials said they were scouring reams of video footage and tips, but they pleaded with the public for more help, sharing several images of a person they said was wanted in connection with the killing.
ABC News, What we know about Luigi Mangione, Ivy League grad and suspect in CEO's murder, Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele, Josh Margolin, and Meredith Deliso, Dec. 9, 2024. Mangione, above, was located in Pennsylvania nearly a week after Brian Thompson's death.
Salon, Alleged UnitedHealthcare assassin praised Elon Musk for battle against “woke mind virus," Russell Payne, Dec, 9, 2024. Not so fast, what kind of "anti-capitalist" is praising Elon Musk and retweeting Peter Thiel?
On Monday afternoon, police announced that they had arrested a person of interest in the investigation into the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who was shot outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan last week.
According to police, Luigi Mangione was arrested around 9:15 a.m. in Altoona, Pennsylvania with a ghost gun and suppressor that New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with the weapon used in the murder.”
While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber's comments on “the decay of traditional values.”
Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives.
While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”
One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
He reposted another tweet, which was a link to an article calling TikTok “The Smiling Tiger” and making the argument that the short-form video app is an “accelerant” in a Chinese plot to get Western liberal capitalism to destroy itself.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different
- New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
- Letters from an American, Commentary: December 5, 2024 [Health Care CEO's Murder], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say
Public Health, Scandal, #MeToo, Trafficking, Abortion.
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country, Jonathan Weisman, Dec. 10, 2024. When Donald Trump said Robert Kennedy Jr. could “go wild” on health, he might not have expected him to go to battle against the president-elect’s own voters.
The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.
To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.
To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”
Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies. Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
Excerpt Continued Below.
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, Dec. 5, 2024. Save your healthcare and dump Medicare Advantage before it’s too late. Here’s why you should return to real Medicare if you still can...
You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.
The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.
If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.
Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.
So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?
When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.
Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.
With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.
With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.
These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.
Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.
You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.
This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.
And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.
If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.
But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.
The FTC news release laid it out:
“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”
And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.
Washington Post, Opinion: What is going on with Cheryl Hines? Monica Hesse, Dec. 5, 2024. It’s time to accept that the actress and RFK Jr. are a package deal.
I’m as baffled by this as the rest of you, but I’m going to have to subject us all to a close analysis of Cheryl Hines’s recent Instagram story featuring her naked husband, RFK Jr.
The video takes place in the Hines/Kennedy bathroom. Cheryl is in the foreground, holding a linen spray and some kind of cream that she would like you to buy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking a shower. His bottom half is covered by his wife’s strategically located head, and, as he stands under the water, she giggles uproariously and says: “No, you can’t take a shower, I’m doing a video!” He continues showering; she continues giggling. “No, no. No. You’ve got to give me a second, I’m doing a video for Hines and Young!”
Some logistical questions:
If Hines was already in the bathroom filming when her husband entered, why did she wait until he came in, took off all his clothes, turned on the shower and started hosing himself down before she decided to tell him that she was filming?
And if he was in the shower to begin with, why didn’t she notice that before she started advertising a holiday sale? Why did the couple not, at that point, sort out who needed to be naked and who needed to hawk merchandise, and agree to do those things in different rooms? Why leave the camera running? Why post the results?
Hines was advertising products from the wellness company she runs with her daughter, but she was also advertising her marriage. Which is to say, she would like you to know that the couple is fine. They are flirty. He wants to remove fluoride from public drinking water, but she will still caption videos with, “Oh Bobby!”
The number of times in the past two years that I have thought, Well, now she’ll divorce him has been … many. The couple has been married for more than a decade, but she is, after all, a successful actress with 12 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” under her belt. Not A-list, maybe, but running in circles with Larry David and J.B. Smoove would seem to provide enough glamour and financial independence that she shouldn’t need to put up with any crap.
Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert, Dec. 2, 2024. Mehmet Oz has extolled Ozempic’s promise for weight loss. Now Medicare may cover it.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- New York Times, Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Unfounded Health Claims
- Washington Post, Opinion: What is going on with Cheryl Hines? Monica Hesse
- Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert
- New York Times, Trump Transition: Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life
- New York Times, How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy, Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie
- Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID, Sam Stein and Andrew Egger
- Politico, Kennedy's 'MAHA transition team' includes anti-vax activists
- New York Times, Five Ways R.F.K. Jr. Could Undermine Lifesaving Childhood Vaccines, Emily Anthes and Emily Baumgaertner
- Washington Post, The New Administration: Millions may not have health coverage if subsidies return to pre-Biden level
- New York Times, Dr. Martin Makary, a Frequent Fox News Commentator, Is Chosen to Head F.D.A.
- Politico, Health Care: Trump transition closes in on picks for top health posts
- The Hill, Medicare Advantage gets ally in Dr. Oz
- Politico, Kennedy's 'MAHA transition team' includes anti-vax activists
- Politico, Progressive groups share many of RFK Jr.’s goals. They’re opposing him anyway
- Politico, Transition of Power: Project 2025 author rejected for top health position
- Washington Post, Trump selects Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, as health secretary
Middle East Crises: Syria, Israel, Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon
New York Times, Syria Shudders as Bashar al-Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light, Christina Goldbaum, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak (as shown above), Dec. 14, 2024. At the country’s most notorious prison, Syrians confront their worst fears: that they will never know what happened to the loved ones who disappeared.
People came by the thousands the day after the rebels arrived in Damascus, racing down the once desolate stretch of road, up a jagged footpath cut into the limestone hillside and through the towering metal gates of Syria’s most notorious prison. They flooded the halls lined with cells, searching for loved ones who had disappeared into the black hole of torture prisons under Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Some tore through the offices of the prison, Sednaya, looking for maps of the building and prisoner logs. One woman shoved a photograph of her missing son toward others walking by, hoping someone had found him. “Do you recognize him?” she pleaded. “Please, please, did you see him?”
In the entrance hall of one section, dozens of men with sledgehammers and pickaxes tore up the floors, convinced there were secret cells with more prisoners deep underground. Crowds swelled around them as people clambered to see what they found, pausing only when Israeli airstrikes landed close enough to shake the prison’s walls.
“Move back, move back!” one man, Ahmad Hajani, 23, yelled. “Let them work!”
Since a rebel coalition overthrew the Assad government last week, unchaining a country ruled by the iron fist of the Assad family for more than 60 years, thousands of Syrians in Damascus, the capital, have taken to the streets to revel in the city’s newfound freedom.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Antony Blinken Meeting Arab Ministers Amid Uncertainty Over Syria Transition, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Dec. 14, 2024. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan to confer with Arab foreign ministers on the ouster of the longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was meeting on Saturday with Arab leaders in Jordan to discuss how to assist a political transition in Syria, nearly a week after rebels toppled the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.
The abrupt demise of the Assad government has prompted celebrations in Syria along with uncertainty over how the new administration under a caretaker prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, can manage a transition in a country shattered by decades of war and repression.
It is a new upheaval in a region already reeling from more than a year of war and has set in motion a realignment with implications for Israel, Iran and Lebanon, as well as Russia, a stalwart ally of Mr. al-Assad.
Mr. Blinken was expected to meet in the coastal city of Aqaba with foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, as well as the secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, according to a statement by Jordan’s Foreign Ministry. Turkey, the United Nations and the European Union would also participate.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, United States in Direct Contact With Rebels Who Took Over Syria, Michael Crowley, Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Steven Erlanger, Dec. 14, 2024. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was communicating with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel faction, despite its designation as a terrorist group.
The United States has been in direct contact with the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad a week ago, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Saturday.
His remarks were the first official confirmation that Washington is communicating with a group that it designated a terrorist organization several years ago but whose behavior Washington hopes to influence now that the group controls Syria’s interim government.
“We’ve been in contact with H.T.S. and with other parties” in Syria, Mr. Blinken said, referring to the rebel group, after a meeting with Arab ministers in Aqaba, Jordan, to discuss how to assist Syria’s political transition.
He said that the United States had communicated a set of governing principles that it is urging Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to adopt, including respect for human rights and rejecting extremism. The United States has also stressed the importance of finding and returning Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist kidnapped in Syria seven years ago.
Washington Post, Opinion: With Iran’s guard down, the U.S. and Israel face an urgent choice, David Ignatius, Dec. 14, 2024. Israel’s former defense minister says there is “a window to act” — and the clock is ticking.
Iran appears to be at the most precarious moment in its modern history. Its proxy armies have been crushed in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. And it appears to be nearly naked to attack after a wave of pinpoint Israeli airstrikes on its air defense system in October.Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
“We showed that Iran is vulnerable,” argued Yoav Gallant, who was Israel’s defense minister and led most of this year’s military campaigns against Iran and its proxies. Gallant explained during a briefing with me in Washington this week that Israel’s devastating but relatively little-discussed bombing campaign on Oct. 26 created “a window to act against Iran” before it produces a nuclear weapon.
U.S. decisions about how to exploit Iran’s weakness — whether by negotiating a binding nuclear agreement or, failing that, taking decisive military action — will fall to President-elect Donald Trump. Asked last month about the possibility of war with Iran after he takes office on Jan. 20, Trump told Time magazine, ominously, that “anything can happen.”
Global attention has shifted to Trump, but senior Biden administration officials tell me they also recognize the opportunity ahead for “coercive diplomacy” about nuclear issues with a weakened Iran. Though Israel played the decisive role in humbling Iran, President Joe Biden provided an important backstop by deploying U.S. carriers, planes, submarines and other forces.
Israel’s Oct. 26 assault was calculated to leave Iran unprotected against a future attack. An astonishing wave of 120 jets took part in the raid, an Israeli military source said. The Israeli planes targeted air defense radars and antiaircraft batteries protecting Tehran as well as key factories producing fuel for Iranian ballistic missiles. The attack was in retaliation for Iran’s Oct. 1 bombardment of Israel with about 200 ballistic missiles — but the planning began many months before.
New York Times, Russian Military Appears to Be Packing Up Some Equipment in Syria, Ben Hubbard and Raja Abdulrahim, Dec. 14, 2024. Satellite images reveal military movements that could be a possible prelude to Moscow’s withdrawal. An American found in Damascus this week was handed over to U.S. forces.
Excerpt Continued Below.
New York Times, Syria Shudders as Bashar al-Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light, Christina Goldbaum, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 14, 2024. At the country’s most notorious prison, Syrians confront their worst fears: that they will never know what happened to the loved ones who disappeared.
People came by the thousands the day after the rebels arrived in Damascus, racing down the once desolate stretch of road, up a jagged footpath cut into the limestone hillside and through the towering metal gates of Syria’s most notorious prison. They flooded the halls lined with cells, searching for loved ones who had disappeared into the black hole of torture prisons under Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Some tore through the offices of the prison, Sednaya, looking for maps of the building and prisoner logs. One woman shoved a photograph of her missing son toward others walking by, hoping someone had found him. “Do you recognize him?” she pleaded. “Please, please, did you see him?”
In the entrance hall of one section, dozens of men with sledgehammers and pickaxes tore up the floors, convinced there were secret cells with more prisoners deep underground. Crowds swelled around them as people clambered to see what they found, pausing only when Israeli airstrikes landed close enough to shake the prison’s walls.
“Move back, move back!” one man, Ahmad Hajani, 23, yelled. “Let them work!”
Since a rebel coalition overthrew the Assad government last week, unchaining a country ruled by the iron fist of the Assad family for more than 60 years, thousands of Syrians in Damascus, the capital, have taken to the streets to revel in the city’s newfound freedom.
But amid the celebrations, the country has also found itself in the opening chapter of a nationwide reckoning over the horrors that Syrians endured under Mr. al-Assad’s government as they come face to face with the network of prisons, police stations and torture chambers at the center of his family’s brutal rule.
In that time, hundreds of thousands of Syrians were swallowed up by the Assad security forces’ vast apparatus. Over the past 13 years, after the failed rebel uprising and subsequent civil war, Mr. al-Assad wielded the long arms of that system as never before to stamp out every last inkling of dissent.
Protesters, activists, journalists, doctors, aid workers and students were snatched from their shops, plucked from university classrooms and yanked from their cars at checkpoints by the secret police — never to be heard from again.
Many ended up in Sednaya, the notorious prison on the outskirts of Damascus that was often the last place detainees were dumped after months of interrogation in other detention centers. The sprawling prison with three wings became a haunting symbol of Mr. al-Assad’s ruthlessness and the center of some of the worst atrocities committed during his rule.
Tens of thousands of people were crammed into the overcrowded cells, tortured, beaten and deprived of food and water. More than 30,000 detainees were killed, many executed in mass hangings, according to rights groups. Amnesty International called Sednaya a “human slaughterhouse.”
Their relatives lived in an agonizing limbo for years, unsure if their loved ones were alive. They went to local security officials every few months to beg for information and paid thousands of dollars in bribes to government officials to track down their relatives’ whereabouts. If security officers told them their disappeared relative was dead, many refused to believe them.
“They were liars,” one woman, Aziza Mohammed Deek, said of those in Mr. al-Assad’s government. “They were all liars.”
New York Times, Antony Blinken Meeting Arab Ministers Amid Uncertainty Over Syria Transition, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Dec. 14, 2024. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan to confer with Arab foreign ministers on the ouster of the longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was meeting on Saturday with Arab leaders in Jordan to discuss how to assist a political transition in Syria, nearly a week after rebels toppled the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.
The abrupt demise of the Assad government has prompted celebrations in Syria along with uncertainty over how the new administration under a caretaker prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, can manage a transition in a country shattered by decades of war and repression.
It is a new upheaval in a region already reeling from more than a year of war and has set in motion a realignment with implications for Israel, Iran and Lebanon, as well as Russia, a stalwart ally of Mr. al-Assad.
Mr. Blinken was expected to meet in the coastal city of Aqaba with foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, as well as the secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, according to a statement by Jordan’s Foreign Ministry. Turkey, the United Nations and the European Union would also participate.
“The talks will focus on supporting a comprehensive, Syria-led political process aimed at achieving a transitional solution,” the Jordanian statement said. A later statement on Saturday said the meeting was about to begin. It made no mention of any Syrian representative to attend.
Turkey has emerged in recent days with greater influence, given its years of support for the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebel group that led the offensive out of its bases in the northwest in recent weeks to take power.
The Turkish government made plans this week to reopen its embassy in Damascus, which has been closed for almost 13 years, and it also conducted military operations, including airstrikes, in northern Syria against Kurdish militants whom it considers a threat.
On Friday, the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, issued a stark warning to members of the Kurdish militia that controls northeastern Syria, the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
“It is our strategic target to eliminate the YPG,” he said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster NTV. He said that any members who are not Syrian should leave the country as soon as possible, and added: “The entire command level of YPG should leave the country too. The remaining ones should continue living as they lay down their weapons.’’
The Kurdish-led forces in Syria have been key partners with the United States in the fight against the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria. The U.S. and Turkey are NATO allies.
Turkey, at the same time, has funded and trained a Syrian rebel force, the Syrian National Army, which provided security for Turkish military bases in northern Syria and helped it fight Kurdish-led forces in the country.
The commander of Syria’s largest Kurdish militia accused the United States this week of abandoning its Kurdish allies in Syria.
Mr. Blinken is in Jordan as part of a tour of the Middle East that has included stops in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, as the United States assesses the fallout from Mr. al-Bashar’s ouster.
American officials have expressed concern that instability across Syria, where various armed groups with competing agendas are active, could threaten its neighbors.
The outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011 helped to fuel the rise of Islamic State, which conquered large swaths of Syria and Iraq and took years to defeat.
Israel has also seized an opportunity created by the collapse of the Assad dynasty, bombing weapons stores and other targets in Syria to eliminate what it says are potential threats and also seizing territory in the country near the disputed Golan Heights.
Syria on Friday condemned Israel’s attack and called on the United Nations Security Council to compel the Israeli government to cease any further attacks.
Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Koussay Aldahhak, said the Security Council should “compel Israel to respect international law,” and not allow it to benefit from Syria’s transition.
New York Times, Russian Military Appears to Be Packing Up Some Equipment in Syria, Ben Hubbard and Raja Abdulrahim, Dec. 14, 2024. Satellite images reveal military movements that could be a possible prelude to Moscow’s withdrawal. An American found in Damascus this week was handed over to U.S. forces.
The Russian military appeared to be packing up equipment at one of its most critical bases in Syria on Friday, in what could be a prelude to Moscow’s military withdrawal from an important strategic foothold in the Middle East.
The movements of Russian equipment came as jubilant crowds gathered in cities across Syria for the first Friday Prayers since rebels toppled President Bashar al-Assad.
People celebrating the collapse of a long authoritarian dynasty waved revolutionary flags and posed for photographs with friends as one of the largest crowds in memory filled the marble courtyard of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, where al-Assad security forces had long suppressed antigovernment demonstrations with brutal violence. Not all the chants were religious, reflecting the country’s newfound sense of liberty; in Damascus and in Idlib, a city that has long been rebel territory, people sang, “Raise your head high, you are a free Syrian!”
The largely celebratory mood in Damascus, the capital, belied the monumental challenges facing Syria’s new leaders as they try to bring order to a country wracked by sectarian divisions, the bloody legacy of the Assad era and the competing interests of an array of armed groups that fought in a 13-year civil war that human rights groups estimate killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Also on Friday, Travis Timmerman, an American citizen who was found outside Damascus earlier this week, was handed over to U.S. forces by Syrian opposition representatives. Mr. Timmerman, who said he had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power, is now in Jordan, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Politico, Has Syrian rebel leader al-Golani really shaken off his al Qaeda past? Jamie Dettmer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The leopard claims he has changed his spots, but will he bring stability to the devastated nation
In the not so distant past, Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, shown at right in a U.S. State Department photo, sported a long unkempt beard, wore a style of turban favored by jihadis and looked like he was auditioning for the role of a young Osama bin Laden.
But the man who toppled the regime of Bashar Assad on Sunday cuts a very different figure today. Like a political chameleon, he wears green fatigues in the style of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or preppy blazers and chinos, and his beard is neatly trimmed. He even recently dropped his nom de guerre and reverted to using his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a.
But how convincing is the makeover? Should Syrians be worried that a man who once made the pledge of allegiance — or bay’ah — to al Qaeda, and fought Western forces in Iraq, is now the most powerful man in their country, and is poised to play a major role in the transition from the 54-year-long autocracy of the Assad dynasty?
He could even lead the country.
Is this a case where the apparel really does proclaim the man? Has the Damascus medical school dropout genuinely transitioned from being a jihadi, or is his embrace of toleration a ruse?
Those are the questions Western leaders and officials are also grappling with as they plot their next steps. France and Germany have promptly agreed to work with the Syrian opposition groups that took power in Damascus, while the U.S. and Britain are deliberating whether to delist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main insurgent Islamist faction led by al-Golani that swept into Damascus, as a terrorist organization.
For now, everyone is watching and waiting, piecing together clues about who al-Golani really is and what future HTS has planned for Syria — an inclusive, democratic one embracing the country’s diversity, its religious sects and ethnic minorities, including Christian, Alawite, Druze and Kurds; or an Islamist state that oppresses, restricts and elevates the Sunni majority? Or somewhere in-between?
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Israel Says Its Troops Will Stay in Seized Territory for Now, Aaron Boxerman and Michael Crowley, Dec. 12, 2024. Here are the latest developments.
As countries in the Middle East and beyond work out how to respond to the sudden fall of the Assad government, Israel said on Thursday that its military would stay in Syrian territory it seized until “a new force” was established that met its security demands.
“The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in a statement. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities.”
Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli soldiers would deploy in Syrian territory only “temporarily,” but did not give any clear timeline for their departure.
The Biden administration has been rushing to respond to the upheaval in Syria. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan on Thursday and was heading to Turkey, where he will meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
After a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Mr. Blinken called it “a time of promise but also peril for Syria and its neighbors.” He said that it was essential that Syria’s new government respect basic principles of human rights, including the protection of minorities, and ensure that Syria “is not used as a base for terrorism by groups like the Islamic State.”
Here are other developments:
- Seeking justice: The fall of Syria’s government has reinvigorated a long push for justice over crimes committed by the Assad regime, allowing human rights groups the long-awaited opportunity to inspect prison sites, freely interview witnesses and build legal cases. But there is also frustration because the ultimate goal of the effort would be to see Mr. al-Assad stand trial, and he appears out of reach, having taken exile in Russia.
- Mood in Aleppo: In the northern Syrian city that rebels seized last week before taking Damascus, there was celebration as exiled residents returned home and assessed what remained after more than a decade of civil war. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.
- Russia in Syria: Satellite imagery and ship tracking data reviewed by The New York Times show that Russian naval and commercial activity in the key Syrian port of Tartus — which has played a critical role in Moscow’s projection of military power in the region — has ceased since the Assad government fell on Sunday.
Consortium News, Analysis: The End of Pluralism in the Middle East, Craig Murray, Dec. 11, 2024. What this potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism: An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.
A truly seismic change in the Middle East has occurred. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.
This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities. Witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women when the jihadists — who overthrew the government of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday — first took Aleppo a mere two weeks ago.
The speed of the collapse of Syria took everybody by surprise. Next, a renewed Israeli attack on Southern Lebanon to coincide with a Salafist invasion of the Bekaa Valley seems inevitable, as the Israelis would obviously wish their border with their new Taliban-style Greater Syrian neighbour to be as far North as possible.
It could be a race for Beirut, unless the Americans have already organised who gets it.
It is no coincidence that the attack on Syria started the day of the Lebanon/Israel ceasefire. The jihadist forces do not want to be seen to be fighting alongside Israel, even though they are fighting forces which have been relentlessly bombed by Israel, and in the case of Hezbollah are exhausted from fighting Israel.
The Times of Israel has no compunction about saying the quiet part out loud, unlike the British media:
In fact Israeli media is giving a lot more truth about the Syrian rebel forces than British and American media. This is another article from The Times of Israel:
“While HTS officially seceded from Al Qaeda in 2016, it remains a Salafi jihadi organization designated as a terror organization in the US, the EU and other countries, with tens of thousands of fighters.
Its sudden surge raises concerns that a potential takeover of Syria could transform it into an Islamist, Taliban-like regime – with repercussions for Israel at its south-western border. Others, however, see the offensive as a positive development for Israel and a further blow to the Iranian axis in the region.”
Contrast this to the U.K. media, which from the Telegraph and Express to The Guardian has promoted the official narrative that not just the same organisations, but the same people responsible for mass torture and executions of non-Sunnis, including Western journalists, are now cuddly liberals.
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, left, commander-in-chief of Tahrir al-Sham; he was emir of its predecessor al-Nusra Front, Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. (U.S. State Dept.)
Nowhere is this more obvious than the case of Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, sometimes spelt Al-Julani or Al-Golani, who, now nominally in charge in Damascus, is being boosted throughout western media as a moderate leader. He was the deputy leader of ISIS, and the C.I.A. actually has a $10 million bounty on his head! Yes, that is the same C.I.A. which is funding and equipping him and giving him air support.
Supporters of the Syrian rebels still attempt to deny that they have Israeli and U.S. support – despite the fact that almost a decade ago there was open Congressional testimony in the U.S.A. that, to that point, over half a billion dollars had been spent on assistance to Syrian rebel forces, and the Israelis have openly been providing medical and other services to the jihadists and effective air support.
Violates UK Terrorism Act
One interesting consequence of this joint NATO/Israel support for the jihadist groups in Syria is a further perversion of domestic rule of law. To take the U.K. as an example, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act it is illegal to state an opinion that supports, or may lead somebody else to support, a proscribed organisation.
The abuse of this provision by British police to persecute Palestinian supporters for allegedly encouraging support for proscribed organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is notorious, with even tangential alleged references leading to arrest. Sarah Wilkinson, Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Richard 
Barnard and myself are all notable victims, and the persecution has been greatly intensified by Keir Starmer [UK prime minister, right].
Yet Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) is also a proscribed group in the U.K. But both British mainstream media and British Muslim outlets have been openly promoting and praising HTS – frankly much more openly than I have ever witnessed anyone in the U.K. support Hamas and Hezbollah – and not a single person has been arrested or even warned by U.K. police.
That in itself is the strongest of indications that western security services are fully behind the overthrow of the government in Syria.
For the record, I think it is an appalling law, and nobody should be prosecuted for expressing an opinion either way. But the politically biased application of the law is undeniable.
When the entire corporate and state media in the West puts out a unified narrative that Syrians are overjoyed to be released by HTS from the tyranny of the Assad regime – and says nothing whatsoever of the accompanying torture and execution of Shias, and destruction of Christmas decorations and icons – it ought to be obvious to everybody where this is coming from.
Yet – and this is another U.K. domestic repercussion – a very substantial number of Muslims in the U.K. support HTS and the Syrian rebels, because of the funding pumped into U.K. mosques from Saudi and Emirate Salafist sources.
This is allied to the U.K. security service influence also wielded through the mosques, both by sponsorship programmes and “think tanks” benefiting approved religious leaders, and by the execrable coercive Prevent programme.
U.K. Muslim outlets that have been ostensibly pro-Palestinian – like Middle East Eye and 5 Pillars – enthusiastically back Israel’s Syrian allies in ensuring the destruction of resistance to the genocide of the Palestinians. Al Jazeera alternates between items detailing dreadful massacre in Palestine, and items extolling the Syrian rebels bringing Israel-allied rule to Syria.
Among the mechanisms they employ to reconcile this is a refusal to acknowledge the vital role of Syria in enabling the supply of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Which supply the jihadists have now cut off, to the absolute delight of Israel, and in conjunction with both Israeli and U.S. air strikes.
In the final analysis, for many Sunni Muslims both in the Middle East and in the West, the pull seems to be a stronger sectarian hatred of the Shia and the imposition of Salafism, than preventing the ultimate destruction of the Palestinian nation.
“Many Sunni Muslims have been brainwashed into hating Shia Muslims more than they hate the power committing genocide of mostly Sunnis in Gaza.”
I am not a Muslim. My Muslim friends happen to be almost entirely Sunni. I personally regard the continuing division over the leadership of the religion over a millennium ago as deeply unhelpful and a source of unnecessary continued hate.
Classic Divide and Rule
But as a historian I do know that the western colonial powers have consciously and explicitly used the Sunni/Shia split for centuries to divide and rule. In the 1830’s, Alexander Burnes was writing reports on how to use the division in Sind between Shia rulers and Sunni populations to aid British colonial expansion.
Unlike many readers, I have never been a fan of the Assad regime or blind to its human rights violations. But what it did undeniably do was maintain a pluralist state where the most amazing historical religious and community traditions – including Sunni (and many Sunni do support Assad), Shia, Alaouites, descendants of the first Christians, and speakers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus – were all able to co-exist. The same is true of Lebanon.
New York Times, Syria’s Civil War: Syria’s New Leaders Balance Huge Struggles Amid Disorder, Aryn Baker, Cassandra Vinograd, Euan Ward and Michael Levenson, Dec. 11, 2024. The rebels who seized control called for foreign help in prosecuting atrocities, while trying to restore order in a fractured country.
The rebels who seized control of Syria confronted the challenge on Wednesday of striking a balance between obtaining justice for the victims of atrocities committed under the ousted Assad regime and preventing the newly liberated country from descending into unchecked vengeance.
While Syria’s new leaders have promised amnesty for conscripted soldiers who served under the former president, Bashar al-Assad, the leader of the rebel force that toppled him made clear on Wednesday that those who helped Mr. al-Assad brutalize or slaughter would be held accountable.
“We won’t pardon those complicit in the torture and murder of detainees, and we will go after them in our country,” the leader of the rebel offensive, Ahmed al-Shara, said on the Telegram messaging app. “We call on nations to hand over to us whoever of those criminals has escaped to them to subject them to justice.”
Mr. al-Shara did not name any countries in particular, but Mr. al-Assad arrived in Russia over the weekend as the rebels swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Mr. al-Shara’s comments came as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, warned that armed groups had carried out retaliatory attacks on civilians in areas that were once considered loyal to the Assad government. But it was not clear who was carrying out the violence, or directing it.
Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows fighters inside the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian president and the father of Bashar al-Assad, in the northwestern town of al-Qardaha.
As one of the fighters steps on the tomb, another can be heard thanking God. “This is avenging my cousins and their sons, who were killed by this criminal, Hafez al-Assad, in the 1980s,” he says. “This is our revenge.” In another clip, the rebels can be seen setting fire to parts of the tomb.
The Observatory reported that groups of gunmen were preparing to hunt down former commanders of Mr. al-Assad’s military and that armed groups dressed in military uniforms were looting property and intimidating residents of Latakia Province, the heartland of the Alawite minority to which the Assad family belongs, prompting fears of sectarian strife.
While Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, it has significant communities of Christians and Druse, as well as others who adhere to different sects of Islam. Many of the ousted regime’s top figures came from the Alawite sect.
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus, Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad, Farnaz Fassihi and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Syrian Leader Resigns and Leaves Country, Russia Says. The foreign ministry of Russia, a longtime ally, did not provide details on where President Bashar al-Assad had gone; Rebels stormed the Syrian capital on Sunday without encountering any significant resistance from government forces.
President Bashar al-Assad, shown above, has resigned and left Syria, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Sunday, a stunning fall for the longtime dictator that ushered in hope and uncertainty after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive.
Mr. al-Assad’s departure was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat Mr. al-Assad for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.
For many in Syria, Mr. Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that has used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been riven with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.
“Our hearts are dancing with joy,” Walaa Salameh, 35, a resident of the Damascus area, said in a phone interview. “We can’t predict the future and anything is possible, but the most important thing is we got rid of this oppressive regime.”
The foreign ministry’s statement did not offer details on Mr. al-Assad’s exact whereabouts, saying only that he had held talks with “several parties of the armed conflict.” There was no immediate comment from the Syrian presidency about Mr. al-Assad.
Earlier on Sunday, the main rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, had announced on its Telegram channel that it had taken the capital, Damascus, and that Syrian forces were withdrawing. It later said that Mr. al-Assad had fallen and that Damascus was “free of the tyrant.”
The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.
As reports spread of Syrian government troops fleeing their posts and peeling off uniforms, the sounds of gunfire erupted in Damascus before dawn on Sunday, witnesses said. By late morning, the streets were largely empty but the sound of gunfire still echoed.
“No one should shed any tears over the end of the Assad regime,” Daniel B. Shapiro, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said in Bahrain before Russia’s foreign ministry issued the statement.
Amid swirling questions over Mr. al-Assad’s whereabouts, Syria’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, said that he had not spoken with him since Saturday. Mr. Ghazi said that he would stay in the country and was ready to work with whomever Syrians choose as their leader.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham said it would work with Mr. Ghazi and called on Syrian military forces in Damascus to stay away from public institutions, which it said would remain under Mr. Ghazi’s supervision until they are formally handed over.
Who are the rebels?: The head of the Islamist group leading the main rebel coalition said in an interview with The New York Times this week that the fighters aim to depose Mr. al-Assad. First, the rebels seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, then days later blazed through Hama and the strategic city of Homs, en route to the capital. His group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, broke ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 but is still designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
New York Times, Rebels Assert Control in Damascus as Questions Loom Over Their Plans, Christina Goldbaum and Vivian Yee, Dec. 9, 2024. The fighters who forced Bashar al-Assad into exile began the complex task of governing the Syrian capital.
New York Times, Relics of Fallen Government Are Everywhere, Times Reporters Find, Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 9, 2024. The New York Times saw remnants of Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive rule after entering Syria on Monday.
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South Korean Crisis
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Impeached Over Martial Law Crisis, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, Victoria Kim and Qasim Nauman, Dec. 14, 2024. Celebrations broke out in Seoul after lawmakers voted to oust President Yoon Suk Yeol. He vowed to fight removal in the country’s Constitutional Court.
South Korea’s National Assembly voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday, suspending him from office after his stunning declaration of martial law earlier this month caused widespread outrage and plunged the country into a constitutional crisis.
With the impeachment vote, Mr. Yoon has been suspended from office. Under South Korea’s Constitution, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo will step in as interim leader.
“This is a victory for the South Korean people and for democracy,” Park Chan-dae, the opposition floor leader said at a news conference.
Mr. Yoon repeated his intention to fight the impeachment in the Constitutional Court, which will now decide whether to reinstate or formally remove him, a process that could take up to six months. “I will never give up,” he said in a televised address shortly after the vote.
Inside the National Assembly, there were loud cheers and gasps from lawmakers when the speaker announced that the votes in favor of impeachment had crossed the 200 needed to pass. The result indicated that 12 lawmakers from Yoon’s party had joined the opposition to impeach him.
The thousands of protesters gathered outside the Assembly in frigid weather jumped up and down, and hugged or shook hands.
“I’m over the moon, but this cannot happen again,” said An Jung-hyun, 26, who as a high school student joined protests against President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached in 2017.
The opposition leader, Lee Jae-myung, addressing the crowd, noted that their fight was not over. “We’ve only just overcome a small mountain,” Mr. Lee said. “There is a larger, steeper mountain ahead.”
Mr. Yoon declared martial law on Dec. 3, accusing the opposition of paralyzing his government, and soldiers were sent to the National Assembly. Lawmakers managed to vote down the declaration, however, prompting Mr. Yoon to rescind his order within hours.
It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
The impeachment was the latest twist in a turbulent term that began in 2022, when Mr. Yoon narrowly won the election on a conservative, business-friendly platform. His tenure has been marked by near-constant protests and political deadlock.
Mr. Han, the prime minister who will step in to perform presidential duties, was appointed by Mr. Yoon in 2022. On Saturday, Mr. Han said in brief comments that his heart was heavy. “I will focus all my strength and effort on stably running the affairs of the state,” he said.
New York Times, How the President Alienated South Korea, One Group at a Time, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles, Dec. 14, 2024. Ever since Yoon Suk Yeol took office, the public had been infuriated with near-constant scandals and unpopular decisions. Angry rice farmers. Striking doctors. A $2,200 Dior bag.
South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, may have sealed his political fate on Dec. 3, when he declared martial law, triggering public outrage. And on Saturday, the National Assembly voted to impeach Mr. Yoon, who was then suspended from office.
But even before Mr. Yoon's brief imposition of military rule, voters were furious with a series of scandals and unpopular decisions since he took office. Amid growing inequality, rising prices and escalating threats from North Korea, his controversial leadership had left him with some of the lowest approval ratings in South Korea's history.
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 10, 2024. Lee Jae-myung, the main opposition leader, is leading efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his declaration of martial law.
Shortly after his political nemesis, President Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law last Tuesday, Lee Jae-myung began livestreaming from his cellphone. While driving to the National Assembly, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party appealed to Koreans to rush to the Assembly and hold back soldiers trying to seize the parliament.
“You must protect the Assembly, the last line of defense for our democracy,” Mr. Lee said repeatedly — in a watershed moment for South Korean democracy and for his own political career. Mr. Lee’s exhortation, relayed by YouTubers, helped attract crowds who slowed down the advance of troops and bought time for lawmakers to vote down Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree, forcing the president to withdraw it after just six hours.
Mr. Lee, who has been fighting legal charges that he says are politically motivated, now finds himself in a stronger political position than ever. His party holds the majority in the Assembly and he represents what most South Koreans want: Mr. Yoon removed from office. Polls show he is most favored to win if a presidential election is held now.
New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Victoria Kim and Thomas Fuller, Dec. 4, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to break a political deadlock by imposing military rule collapsed within hours, leaving him with few defenders.
Emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, members of South Korea’s political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.
Several opposition parties, buoyed by thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the president, jointly submitted the impeachment motion, which could be put to a vote as early as Friday. While the parties represent an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, it remains unclear whether they will have the two-thirds vote needed to impeach.
Mr. Yoon’s surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America’s closest allies and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s.
Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder, historian, Dec. 4, 2024. South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, invoked martial law, tried to install a military dictatorship -- and failed completely. In his actions there are some likely similarities with the coming Trump regime, and some clear lessons for Americans to learn right now.
Yoon won a very narrow election, as did Trump. Like Trump, he refers constantly to "fake news" and calls his political opponents enemies of the state (as Trump says, "the enemy within"). Yoon used this language to justify the imposition of martial law, as will Trump if he decides to invoke the Insurrection Act in the United States.
Like Trump, Yoon telegraphed his move in advance, and not only with such language. He surrounded himself with military men and intelligence officers who were characterized by personal loyalty. Trump is trying to do the same, now, with his proposals for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Kash Patel as director of the FBI, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. He also wants to purge the top ranks of the armed forces.
Yoon's main political opponent, Lee Jae-myung, had correctly predicted that Yoon would try to implement martial law. Trump makes this prediction rather easy. Trump has spoken openly of being "dictator for a day," and of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military inside the United States.The Insurrection Act is not quite the same thing as martial law. Under martial law, the military assumes the basic responsibilities associated with a civilian government. The Insurrection Act, in principle, only allows the American president to use the armed forces to assist civilian authorities to enforce some law in the presence of an insurrection. But the language of the law is quite vague. Trump makes it clear that he has in mind invoking the Insurrection Act to very broad purposes, essentially to change the regime.
In both South Korea and the United States, the legal basis for asserting greater presidential authority is antiquated. Martial law was declared in South Korea for the last time in 1979. Since the late 1980s, South Korea has moved quite decisively in the direction of meaningful elections and civil rights, thanks to the forceful activity of civil society, especially trade unions. In the United States, the Insurrection Act is an assemblage of laws passed between 1792 and 1871. It was last invoked during racial violence in Los Angeles in 1992.
Yoon's actions, although rooted of course in his own personality and South Korean career, and enabled by South Korean law, were very trumpy. Indeed, it seems likely to me that the very presence of Trump on the international scene will make such attempts more likely, among America's democratic allies (such as South Korea) and generally.
But Yoon failed, and very badly. His dictatorship for a day lasted only about six hours. What can Americans learn from his less-than-a-day dictatorship?First of all, we have to take in a very basic reality: that attempts to establish military dictatorships have been made in democracies, and will be made in other democracies --including, very possibly, in the American one.
The most worrying moment of Yoon's invocation of martial law was that, in the beginning, the military acted as he wished that it would. Military leaders initially joined in his coup attempt, with General Park An-su claiming to ban political actions, political parties, political gatherings, and "propaganda," which can mean anything anyone says. He also claimed to take all media outlets under the control of the military.
The pertinent question for Americans would be: will Trump be able to surround himself with loyalists who will do the same thing? He is trying to do so. And so the Senate, in confirmation hearings, has an obvious question to ask all of Trump's appointees with any responsibility for national security or intelligence: if Trump attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act to stifle domestic political life, just as Yoon attempted to do in South Korea, would you take part?
For legislators, the lessons are also very clear. The moment Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Kim, told people to rally at the parliament. Legislators themselves entered its chambers, despite the wishes of the military leadership, and then voted unanimously for the revocation of martial law. Members of Yoon's own right-wing party, in other words, joined with the opposition in a dramatic demonstration of unity in the face of the threat of a military dictatorship.
Are American legislators capable of defending their roles and their republic? The evidence thus far is very mixed; it remains to be seen.
New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon and Jin Yu Young, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol made the decree, the first of its kind in more than four decades, amid a bitter feud with the political opposition. Lawmakers demanded the declaration be canceled, setting up a showdown. Earlier, a general said news outlets were under “martial law command.”
President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, right, declared emergency martial law on Tuesday, banning “all political activities,” in an extraordinary reaction to the political deadlock that has hobbled his tenure.
The full extent of what martial law entails was not immediately clear, but the announcement enabled the president to take command of the news media. His declaration set off protesters clashing with the police outside the National Assembly, and an immediate effort by opposition lawmakers to halt the decree. It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since the military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
Mr. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply unpopular and divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
In a late-night meeting, the National Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the president must lift it “without delay.”
Here’s what else to know.
- Protesters in Seoul: Some demonstrators appeared to be trying to enter the National Assembly as police officers tried to block them, as seen in images broadcast by local networks. “End martial law! End martial law!” protesters chanted.
- Political paralysis: Elected president in 2022, Mr. Yoon has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls the National Assembly. In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday night, he denounced the opposition for repeatedly using its majority in the National Assembly to impeach members of his cabinet and block the passage of his government’s budget plans. This has “paralyzed the administration,” Mr. Yoon said. “The National Assembly, which should have been the foundation of free democracy, has become a monster that destroys it.”
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Warning from Seoul: Democracy at Risk in an Age of Authoritarian Power, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 4, 2024. How Yoon’s State of Emergency and Trump’s Strategies Are Eroding Global Freedoms.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.
In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.
Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.
Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.
The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.
Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 4, 2024.For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, John Yoon and Ephrat Livni, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol has been locked in a bitter fight with the opposition, which controls Parliament.
It was the first martial law declaration in more than four decades in South Korea, which saw the end of a military dictatorship in the late 1980s. Mr. Yoon, who was elected president in 2022, has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, and his government has faced plunging public approval ratings.
In his speech declaring martial law late Tuesday, Mr. Yoon said he was making the move to “defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order. Through this emergency martial law, I will rebuild and defend the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into ruin.”
New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law, Dec. 3, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol made the extraordinary declaration in an unannounced speech to the nation on Tuesday night.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid
- Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Opinion: Can Martial Law Happen in America? David French
- New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law
- New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea
- New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law
More Global News
New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader, above, has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel Macron.
The one-on-one duel that has shaped French political life for nearly a decade ratcheted up a notch last week, with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen claiming one big scalp, and giving notice of going after a bigger one, President Emmanuel Macron.
No one doubted that she was calling the shots. Yet by Monday, Mr. Macron, right, had relegated Ms. Le Pen and her party, the anti-immigrant National Rally, to “pariah” — her word — status. He did not deign to meet with her in his search for a new prime minister to replace the one she had largely ousted last week.
Leaders of other parties had tête-à-têtes with Mr. Macron at the presidential palace; but not Ms. Le Pen, who was excluded because she is part of the “anti-Republican front” — his words.
That could turn out to be a big mistake. Last week, Ms. Le Pen announced the demise of the hapless prime minister, Michel Barnier, in Parliament; sure enough he was overthrown in a no-confidence vote soon after.
Mr. Barnier had tried to force through a budget proposal without a vote, and above all he had barely consulted with Ms. Le Pen, who has the largest bloc of parliamentarians and cannot be ignored.
She has suggested successive Macron governments could fall, until he steps down — making clear she is after a more consequential trophy: the president himself.
Mr. Macron was barely off the plane from Saudi Arabia as she spoke last Wednesday night. As the bemused parliamentarians listened, she promised “deliverance” for France from its woes, “maybe, very soon.”
That seemed as much promise as threat.
It all rested on one man’s decision, she said, avoiding Mr. Macron’s name while suggesting she was pushing him toward the exit. Her target was clear.
“It’s up to the person concerned, by himself, to decide whether he should stay,” she said. “It’s on his conscience, to determine whether he should sacrifice public policy, and France’s fate, for the sake of his own pride.”
New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial, Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 10, 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a trial that began four years ago. He has denied the charges.
Outside the courthouse, he is one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, overseeing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, its occupation of southern Lebanon and recent strikes in Syria.
As he stepped into a cramped and sweltering underground courtroom in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel morphed into the defendant in Case 67104-01-20 — charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Eight years after the police started investigating him and four years after his trial began, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was taking the stand for the first time to respond to accusations of corruption that have defined and disrupted Israeli public life for nearly a decade.
“Like everyone who is brought to the witness stand, you are charged with speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” said Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of three judges hearing the case.
An audience of roughly 100 journalists, lawmakers, government ministers and lawyers craned their necks to catch his response.
“I have waited eight years for this moment — to tell the truth, the truth as I remember it,” replied Mr. Netanyahu, gripping the sides of a wooden lectern as he stood to the left of the judges.
It was a humbling moment — a sitting prime minister, forced to answer accusations of graft, before a courtroom filled with his peers. It was also a moment Mr. Netanyahu seemed determined to transcend.
“I am shocked by the magnitude of this absurdity,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
“I am the prime minister, I am running a country, I am running a war,” he continued. “I am not occupying myself with my future, but rather with that of the state of Israel.”
For nearly a decade, the corruption charges against Mr. Netanyahu have divided Israel, leading to years of political turmoil. The electorate has been roughly evenly split on the question of whether Mr. Netanyahu should remain in office while he stands trial — a dynamic that has created an electoral stalemate, leading to five elections in less than four years.
Apart from a brief court appearance to plead not guilty in 2021, Mr. Netanyahu had rarely been affected by the day-to-day proceedings of the trial.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers spent years interviewing witnesses instead of the defendant himself. The hearing on Tuesday — 1,661 days since the trial began — was set to be Mr. Netanyahu’s first full day in court.
Mr. Netanyahu had sought to delay his testimony by several months, arguing that his management of the war campaign had disrupted his preparations. But the court agreed to a postponement of only a few days.
While his appearance on Tuesday provided a crescendo in the judicial process, it was also, to many Israelis, anti-climactic. The charges against Mr. Netanyahu have been a part of Israeli discourse for so long that the spectacle of a prime minister on trial no longer seems as shocking as it once did.
“The public has completely accepted the idea that we have a sitting prime minister who has been investigated, indicted and is now on trial — even in the middle of a war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst who attended the hearing on Tuesday.
“What would have been unimaginable 10 years ago has been completely normalized,” she added.
Mr. Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The charges center on claims that he gave regulatory favors and diplomatic support to prominent businessmen in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage.
The trial is expected to continue for years, and Mr. Netanyahu will likely take the stand several times a week for several months.
New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions, Jeffrey Gettleman, Dec. 10, 2024. The former Soviet Republic has been rocked by demonstrations over the same issues that hurtled Ukraine into war: its relationship with Europe and Russia.
On the streets of Georgia, it’s starting to look a little like the Ukraine of 10 years ago, before the war, when tensions with Russia started brewing.
- An increasingly authoritarian government in a former Soviet republic cools to the European Union and drifts closer to Moscow.
- Enormous protests erupt, calling for the government’s ouster.
- Riot police respond.
- Young demonstrators are beaten up and dragged away.
- Each side digs in, raising the specter of a major crisis in a country that has long struggled to break away from Russian dominance.
On the continent’s far eastern edge, embracing the European Union can be a risky move, threatening vested interests, especially those of Russia, which is wary to lose any of its regional influence.
These tensions have been playing out to different degrees in recent years in Georgia, Moldova and, in the most extreme example, Ukraine. All three are former Soviet republics and Russian troops occupy different slices of each.
In Georgia, what concerns people here and beyond are the unmistakable echoes of Ukraine’s popular revolution in 2014 that succeeded in pulling the country away from Moscow but ultimately resulted in a devastating war.
“The government is trying to turn the country back to the Russian sphere of influence against the will of the people, who were moving toward the West,which felt almost inevitable,” said Cristina Florea, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Eastern Europe.
“It is creepily similar to what happened in Ukraine,” she said, and “so, so worrying.”
Ever since the ruling party announced in late November it was postponing its effort to join the European Union, thousands of outraged, pro-Europe Georgians have poured into the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, provoking a brutal response.
Lazare Maglakelidze, a 20-year-old computer science student, said men in unmarked black uniforms snatched him from a recent protest, dragged him into a van, pummeled his face, broke his nose and threatened to rape him. He shared medical records and video footage corroborating much of his account.
Still, in an interview, speaking through a mask of medical tape, he said he wasn’t discouraged and found the Ukraine parallel inspiring.
“Ukraine is where we see people fighting for their dignity, dedicating their lives to the highest of high concepts that anybody can imagine,” he said.
“Yes, there’s a risk to standing up to Russia,” he went on. “But it’s better to die fighting, to die with dignity, than to live a miserable, unworthy, unholy life.”
New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades, David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien, Dec. 10, 2024. Taiwan is on high alert in response to China’s unannounced deployment of naval and Coast Guard ships, as tensions rise over U.S. support for the island.
Taiwan said on Tuesday that China was conducting its largest maritime operations in nearly three decades, sending nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels into waters stretching from the southern Japanese islands to the South China Sea.
Taiwanese defense officials said the scope of the deployment suggested that China was not only trying to show that it could choke the self-governed island, but also that it could block American allies in the region like Japan and the Philippines from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
China has “extended their military strength outward,” Gen. Hsieh Jih-sheng, a senior official in Taiwan’s ministry of defense told reporters. “The numbers are indeed astonishing,” he said, referring to the surge of Chinese vessels in the waters. Sun Li-fang, a spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, said the maritime operations were the largest that Taiwan has seen since 1996.
The officials said that Taiwan was on high alert in response to the Chinese ships, many of which were in waters off Taiwan’s southwest, east and northwest coasts.
China’s intentions were not immediately clear. There were no official announcements from Beijing that its forces were holding exercises. A foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked on Tuesday if China was conducting drills near Taiwan, deflected the question.
Speculation had been growing for days that China would launch war games in retaliation for visits made by Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam last week while on his way to the Pacific islands.
Trump Cases, Convictions, Reprisals, Allies
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Politico, Trump promised Jan. 6 pardons. His post-election silence is making loyalists nervous, Kyle Cheney, Nov. 30, 2024. His die-hard supporters — as well as some federal judges — are left to speculate about his clemency plans.
Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to pardon a vast swath of supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his silence on the matter since winning the election has begun unsettling some fervent allies awaiting even the slightest signal from Trump about how he intends to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.
Federal judges overseeing Jan. 6 cases have been left to guess at Trump’s plans. As a result, they have allowed nearly all cases to proceed, saying Trump’s clemency plans are merely “speculative.” Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have brought a handful of new Jan. 6 felony cases since Election Day, and they’ve argued repeatedly against efforts by defendants to delay their cases to await Trump’s inauguration.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people for their roles in the riot. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would pardon many of them. But he left the specifics unclear, and never said whether he might leave in place some prosecutions, particularly against people who assaulted police.
Now that he’s president-elect, his failure to say more has begun nagging at some of his die-hard supporters, who have engaged in a public guessing game on X about Trump’s intentions.
“[H]onestly people have suffered for 4 years and many are still in flux and terrified. A word of reassurance from the top would go a long way for people,” wrote Brandon Straka, a prominent Trump ally who spent three months in home detention after pleading guilty to Jan. 6 misdemeanors. “The silence on the issue just exacerbates the victims’ anxiety. Hopefully some kind of messaging comes soon.”
Adding to the anxiety expressed by some Jan. 6 defendants is a statement from Trump’s transition team that hinted at a far more limited approach than the sweeping pardons that many in Trump’s base have demanded.
“President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis,” incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in the statement.
The meaning of “case-by-case” has morphed into a raging debate among Jan. 6 defendants and their allies.
“It is just a phrase. ‘Case by case,’ It isn’t a policy, or a strategy, or anything,” wrote Suzzanne Monk, a longtime advocate for Jan. 6 defendants. “It is a catch phrase the media is using to push the ‘only some will be pardoned’ narrative.”
Politico, Trump picks Kash Patel to lead FBI, Megan Messerly, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). The position will require Senate confirmation.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Pate, shown above,l as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.
If confirmed, Patel will replace current FBI Director Chris Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017 after firing James Comey, cutting his 10-year term short. Wray’s term is not set to expire until 2027, so Trump will have to fire Wray to install Patel, if Wray doesn’t resign first.
Trump, in a post to Truth Social, called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”
“He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” the president-elect added, referring to the role Patel played as a staffer in crafting House Republican responses to the investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At the time, Patel was an aide to Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, a position that helped raise his profile in Trump’s inner circle.
Patel was also angling to be deputy director of the CIA, a position that would not have required Senate confirmation, unlike the FBI director post, which does. It’s unclear whether Patel, who is a divisive figure even among Trump loyalists, will have the votes needed in the Senate to be confirmed.
When Trump floated naming Patel deputy director of the FBI during his first administration, then-Attorney General Bill Barr responded “over my dead body,” according to reporting at the time. CIA Director Gina Haspel also threatened to quit over the move.
Patel is a former federal public defender and former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s national security division. A staunch Trump defender, Patel has been assisting the president-elect in compiling a list of candidates to join the Justice Department.
Patel has also promised to investigate and potentially prosecute journalists.
“We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” Patel said last year.
The president-elect also announced Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Chronister, a 32-year veteran of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, joins a long line of Floridians Trump has picked to join his administration.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said Chronister would work with Pam Bondi, his appointee for attorney general, to “secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES.”
Chronister was first appointed to the post by then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Donald J. Trump, left, then as a former president defending himself in New York earlier this year, appears with his attorney Todd Blanche in a court-designated media availability site at the courthouse
Washington Post, Trump picked his lawyer for a top Justice Dept. job. Does it matter? Mark Berman, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). If confirmed as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche should recuse from Justice Department matters related to cases where he represented Donald Trump, experts say.
Soon after winning the presidential election, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to install Todd Blanche, one of his criminal defense attorneys, as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department.
Blanche would fix “a broken System of Justice,” Trump declared in a statement.
Days later, Blanche was hard at work in his current role, signing a court filing that derided one of the cases against Trump as “politically-motivated and fatally flawed” and argued that it should be dismissed.
Blanche — Trump’s pick to be the deputy attorney general — faces an uneasy balancing act, particularly given the president-elect’s stated desire to seek retribution against his investigators and political foes.
If Blanche is confirmed, his previous work representing Trump in multiple criminal cases would raise ethical concerns unless he recuses himself from anything at the Justice Department that might touch on those matters, according to interviews with several legal experts.
Recusal is “an obvious call,” said Eli Wald, a law professor at the University of Denver who specializes in legal ethics. He said Blanche overseeing anything that touches on his previous defense of Trump in either state or federal court would create a clear “appearance of impropriety.”
The Justice Department has “lots of excellent lawyers,” Wald said. “Why would we want one person that Americans can correctly identify with being President Trump’s lawyer to be … making decisions about the same matters in which he represented the president? That would defy common sense.”
Washington Post, Analysis: Trump’s plans for disruption, retribution explained through Cabinet picks, Amber Phillips, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). On some choices, his strategy is clear: Disruption and retribution.
President-elect Donald Trump has quickly put together his Cabinet picks. Loyalty to him has been a major factor.
But Trump is also sending a mixed message with his choices: Will his administration be more of a traditional Republican one, or one that shakes up the system as much as it can?
And despite saying during the presidential campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, the policy blueprint coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Trump picked one of its architects to a top government job.
“On a lot of this, we just don’t know what to make of it,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said of Trump’s Cabinet announcements.
Here are some broad trends behind the Cabinet picks so far.On some, Trump is clear: He wants disruption and retribution.
MSNBC Alex Wagner Tonight, Commentary: DOJ braces for corruption of department as Trump prioritizes revenge, Nov. 27, 2024. David Rohde, national security editor for NBC News, discusses how prosecutors at the Justice Department are preparing to be the subject of weaponized investigations at the hands of Pam Bondi to appease Donald Trump's desire for revenge for efforts to hold him accountable.
Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him, Sonam Sheth, Nov. 26, 2024. Schiff Reminds His GOP Colleagues The Outcome Of Trump Hush Money Trial.
California U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, shown above in a file photo, questioned on Tuesday whether President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general will go after the grand jurors who voted to indict Trump. "Is she also going to go after the grand jurors who found there was probable cause to believe he was engaged in multiple crimes?" Schiff said on MSNBC, referring to Trump'sattorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, shown below.
Special counsel Jack Smith's office secured two grand jury indictments against Trump: one in Washington, D.C., in connection to his activities surrounding efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and in the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol; and another in Florida, related to Trump's handling of classified documents.
Smith's office this week moved to dismiss the January 6 case, and prosecutors also dropped an appeal to the dismissal of the classified documents case.A jury in New York also returned an indictment charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was convicted of all 34 charges earlier this year, but his sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.
And the president-elect and several of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering charges, but that case has been placed on hold amid a legal challenge to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' role in the case.
During his MSNBC interview on Tuesday, Schiff, who recently won his Senate race in California, mentioned special counsel John Durham, left, who was tapped to investigate the Justice Department's inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Durham did not secure convictions in any of the cases.
"You can very well see a lot of prosecutors, like Durham, who spend millions of taxpayer dollars to come up with nothing," Schiff told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace. "Pam Bondi [shown in a 2016 file photo below] follows through with what she's pledged to do, which is to investigate nonexistent voter fraud, for example, or to go after the prosecutors."
[MSNBC Host Nicolle Wallace, shown below in a file photo, responded: "It’s clear that Trump wants a whole bunch of John Durhams in the Justice Department.”]
A 1798 political cartoon's depiction of the XYZ Affair with America as a female being plundered by Frenchmen
The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann, right, Nov. 28, 2024. From Jefferson’s era to today, history proves democracy’s defenders can still win…
It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?
Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.
In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?
My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.
In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.
New York Times, Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities, Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang, Nov. 28, 2024 (interactive). A Times analysis shows where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joe Biden and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift.
New York Times, Analysis: Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles, David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk as co-leader, has advantages that past budget-cutters did not, but changes could still be slow.
New York Times, What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now? Theodore Schleifer, Nov. 27, 2024. The party’s donor class is still wrestling with Donald Trump’s victory, worried about retribution and sluggish liberal energy. (Shown at right, Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- Washington Post, Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted'
- Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him
- Washington Post, Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election, Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein
- Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu
- The Hartmann Report, Political Opinion: Is Democratic Leadership Missing in Action as Trump Tightens His Grip? Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump Evaded Jack Smith and the Rule of Law, Jesse Wegman
- New York Times, They Attended Trump’s Trial. Now He’s Offering Them High-Profile Jobs
- New York Times, Trump’s Sentencing in New York Is Officially on Hold
- New York Times, Pam Bondi, Former Florida Prosecutor, Is Trump’s New Attorney General Pick
- New York Times, Pam Bondi Is Trump’s New Choice for Attorney General. Here’s What to Know About Her
- Washington Post, Matt Gaetz withdraws bid to be attorney general in Trump administration
- The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann
More On Hunter Biden Pardon
Emptywheel, Analysis: You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 6, 2024. The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.
Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.
With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.
And it won’t work.
Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden
Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.
Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted. But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.
While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media. The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.
Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.
Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.
More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.
Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.
That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.
There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole
Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.
Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.
Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.
Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.
There are legal privileges to protect
One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking opening of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.
To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.
Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”
Plus, the opinion via which Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.
The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.
If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.
It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law
There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.
Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.
Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.
Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.
Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.
Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.
Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.
Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.John Bolton would beg to differ with you.
Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.
Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.
But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.
Hunter Biden, shown above in a file photo. The Biden sentencing judges, U.S. District Court Judges Maryellen Noreika (left) of Delaware and Mark Scarsi of California, both nominated by Donald Trump, are shown side by side.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 4, 2024. I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.
ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.
Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.
According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.
In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.
This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.
Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.
First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.
But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.
Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1
[snip]
The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.
Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.
Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.
New York Times, Editorial: The Dangerous Precedent of Biden’s Pardon, Editorial Board, Dec. 4, 2024. President Biden has issued pardons to just 26 people during his term, and granted the commutation of 132 prison sentences. Though he has been criticized for his reluctance to extend clemency, his choices mostly represented the best form of it, wiping away the criminal stains of everyday people who had been unjustly convicted or reducing prison time for those whose sentences were excessive. And his modest record spoke to Mr. Biden’s attempt to project an admirable restraint in using his absolute, easily abused power to overrule the judgment of the justice system.
Then on Sunday, in direct violation of his own pledges not to do so, Mr. Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter. Though he claimed the decision was made out of fatherly love, his explanation also attacked the investigation of his son and, implicitly, his own Justice Department.
New York Times, Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun.
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”
He said he did so because the charges against his son were politically motivated and designed to hurt the president politically.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
After Mr. Biden announced the pardon, Hunter Biden issued a statement of his own. “I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” he said. “I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though he and his spokeswoman had denied for months that he had any intention of doing so. NBC News first reported on Sunday evening that Mr. Biden had in fact decided to pardon his son.
But the move quickly drew expressions of scorn from Mr. Biden’s political adversaries and others and called into question the president’s honesty, given the many public statements that he made saying he would not pardon his son.
President Biden used the power of his office to wave aside years of his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, including a guilty plea for illegally buying a gun. Republicans, including the president’s successor, President-elect Trump, have spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues. Read Joe Biden’s Statement About Pardoning Hunter
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced — precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter of lying on the firearms form. The tax charges were due to be tried in Los Angeles in September 2024, but Hunter suddenly decided to “plead to the sheet,” i.e., admit guilt to all charges.
Both cases were awaiting sentencing until last night’s presidential pardon, which brought them both to a swift end.
The pardon is generating controversy, even among Democrats and my former prosecutor peers. I understand their ambivalence, but I think it rests on considerations that don’t undermine the essential fairness and propriety of the pardon. In the few hours since the pardon was announced, these are the main objections I’ve heard, along with my responses:
New York Times, Opinion: Biden’s Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office, Jeffrey Toobin, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Toobin, right, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
Pardons are the consummate discretionary acts; presidents are never required to issue even a single one, nor are they limited in the number they issue or to whom. In this way, they reveal their roots in the royal prerogative of mercy. There is only one reason presidents, or kings, issue pardons: because they want to.
On Sunday night as he boarded a plane to Cape Verde, en route to Angola, President Biden revealed himself as an anguished, and furious, father when he pardoned his son Hunter. Mr. Biden said, as recently as June, that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter or commute his sentence, and his press secretary reiterated that he had no plans to pardon Hunter after last month’s election. In June, a jury had found the younger Mr. Biden guilty of three felony counts relating to lies about his drug use on a federal form to apply to own a firearm. Then, in September, he pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California.
Hunter was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month, which undoubtedly served to precipitate his father’s action. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, he was probably facing at least a couple of years in prison. But the pardon from his father wiped out that possibility and gifted the son a clean record, as if he had never been charged in the first place. The pardon goes further. It is “not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted” and encompasses the period when the younger Mr. Biden joined the board of Burisma.
Reader Comment: I would agree with Mr. Toobin here, except that there are a few unique circumstances that move this out of the realm of typical Federal sentencing situations.
The Secret Service is responsible for Mr. Biden until July 19, 2025, which means there is a six-month period during which they must protect him in prison. His time in prison would very likely have exceeded that period. Between the time of the sentencing report following his tax-related guilty plea (September 5, 2024) and yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Secret Service, the DOJ, and his lawyers have been trying to construct an incarceration plan that would have guaranteed his safety, at least until July 19, 2025.
The overriding concern is that an incoming administration consisting of some of the announced nominees would be easily capable of, and, in fact, looking forward to, relocating Mr. Biden from a low-security facility to a Federal hell-hole with a shiv-carrying general population.Even solitary confinement is not a safe escape from that population.
Hunter Biden deserves to serve time, but does not deserve to be murdered in prison. Does President Biden need to sacrifice yet another child to prove his character?
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon
New York Times, President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night.
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.
From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given noncriminal resolutions.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
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It is clear that Hunter was treated differently. The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.
There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.
Washington Post, Hunter Biden’s team issues a fiery defense ahead of sentencing, possible pardon, Matt Viser, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Judges are scheduled to sentence the president’s son for gun and tax offenses in December.
Hunter Biden’s legal team is launching an assertive public defense of the president’s son just weeks before federal judges in Delaware and California prepare to sentence him this month, and as his father faces a diminishing window to pardon him if he chooses to do so despite previously ruling it out.Get the latest election news and results
In a 52-page paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” released Saturday, Hunter Biden’s lawyers criticize the foundation of the investigations into their client, arguing that he was prosecuted for crimes that an ordinary citizen would not have been. Hunter Biden is likely to face further unfair threats when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the lawyers contend.
The document at times seems aimed directly at President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said that he will not pardon or commute the sentences of his son. Hunter has been with his father over the past several days in Nantucket, where the Biden family for decades has gathered for Thanksgiving.
“With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real,” the report asserts. It cites comments that Trump has made about targeting his opponents, along with remarks from congressional Republicans who for years have investigated Hunter and other Biden family members.
“There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter,” the report says. “The prospect that Trump will turn his vengeance on the Special Counsel prosecutors if they fail to take a harder line against Hunter no doubt exerts considerable pressure on them not to let up on Hunter.”
Both cases against Hunter Biden, for gun and tax offenses, were brought by special counsel David Weiss, left (nominated by Donald Trump to be U.S. attorney), whose office was staffed by attorneys from the Justice Department. That department will now be overseen by Trump and his attorney general.
Taken as a whole, the document largely rehashes past arguments made by Hunter Biden and his legal team, at times unsuccessfully in court. It includes a lengthy timeline of events since 2017 that the attorneys say demonstrate that federal prosecutors unfairly targeted the son of a prominent politician.
“Here, in one place, is the complete and reprehensible history of the political persecution of Hunter Biden,” Abbe Lowell, one of Hunter’s top attorneys, said in a statement. “This is a seven-year saga propelled by an unrelenting political desire to use a son to hurt his father.”
He added, “It is a wild and terrifying story that serves as a stark warning of what is to come as some of the same Republicans who targeted Hunter prepare to resume power and have stated their intention to use the government’s vast power to pursue their perceived enemies.”
New York Times, Analysis: In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints, Peter Baker, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden and President-elect Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.
The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Mr. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much the way Mr. Biden has now said his son was.
Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Mr. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Mr. Biden did not explicitly accuse the Justice Department of being biased against his family, but suggested that it was influenced by Republican politicians who have waged a long public campaign assailing Hunter Biden.
As it happens, the Justice Department has rejected both accusations. The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics, and senior department officials have denied that politics entered the equation against either man. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases.
But Mr. Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the F.B.I. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Mr. Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.
“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.
Representative Greg Stanton, Democrat of Arizona, disputed the president’s argument that politics was behind his son’s prosecution. “I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said online. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
The Bulwark, Opinion: The Father, the Son, and Kash Patel, William Kristol, Dec. 2, 2024. One thing can be bad and another thing can be much worse.
In The Bulwark’s house there are many rooms. In one of them resides the estimable Mona Charen, who a couple of weeks ago urged President Biden not to pardon his son, Hunter. In another dwells the laudable Kim Wehle, who this morning defends Biden’s pardon as judiciously as one can. For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in Mona’s wing of our (virtual) Bulwark mansion.
The president ought not to have pardoned Hunter Biden. It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.
In any case, The Bulwark will survive some disagreement over the act of a man who let his love as a father overwhelm his judgment as a president. So will the nation. The question we face is how well the nation will survive the next four years of a Trump presidency, where neither love nor judgment are present, only the will to arbitrary power and the desire for personal retribution.
President Biden made a mistake. But the problem with Donald Trump and his appointees isn’t that they’ll make mistakes. It is that the whole Trump presidency is animated by a plan to create centralized, personalized, unconstrained, and unaccountable power in the president and his agents.
Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Kash Patel director of the FBI is one piece of the puzzle, but a particularly dangerous piece at that. It is emblematic of an attempt to seize full control over the power ministries of the government—including the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Whether these agencies are run by true believers like Patel or Tulsi Gabbard, or weak opportunists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, is less important than that they be run fully and unequivocally in accord with the wishes of Trump and his key apparatchiks in the White House—Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and OMB Director Russell Vought.
If Trump can get Patel confirmed as FBI director, he’s obviously off to the authoritarian races. But even if Patel isn’t confirmed, or isn’t confirmed quickly, we’re on a very dangerous path. Trump will govern and seek to enable his agents to govern in what one might call the spirit of Kash Patel—a lawless and authoritarian spirit.
One way Trump will advance this plan is by appointing loyalists to serve in an “acting” capacity in key positions where the Senate hasn’t confirmed his nominees. Trump experimented with this in his first term. Indeed, he commented in January, 2019: “I like acting [appointments]. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.” Now his lawyers and operatives have had years to plan on how to systematically place loyalists as acting officials in key positions, from secretary and director on down.
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced—precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.Gerald Ford (left) speaks as Richard Nixon looks on.
Gerald Ford (left) speaks as President Richard Nixon looks on in October 1973. Eleven months later, after Nixon resigned and Ford became president, he pardoned Nixon. | STR/AFP via Getty Images
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon.
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U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
Washington Post, Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses, Jacob Bogage, Jacqueline Alemany and Jeff Stein, Trump feuded with the mail agency in his first term. Privatizing it could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains.
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.
Trump has discussed his desire to overhaul the Postal Service at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition, the people said. Earlier this month, Trump also convened a group of transition officials to ask for their views on privatizing the agency, one of the people said.
Told of the mail agency’s annual financial losses, Trump said the government should not subsidize the organization, the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations.
Trump’s specific plans for overhauling the Postal Service were not immediately clear. But he feuded with the nation’s mail carrier as president in 2019, trying to force it to hand over key functions — including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients — to the Treasury Department.
“The government is slow, slow, slow — decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things, and there’s a lot of [other] carrier services that became legal in the ’70s that are doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs,” said Casey Mulligan, who served as a top economist in the first Trump administration. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.”
The postal system is older than the nation itself, founded in 1775 with Benjamin Franklin as its chief, revitalized with free rural delivery at the start of the 20th century, then transformed into a financially self-sustaining agency in 1970 designed to “bind the nation together” through the mail. Even through financial challenges wrought by the rise of the internet, the Postal Service has remained one of Americans’ most beloved federal agencies, second only the National Park Service in a 2024 Pew Research Center study.
But as congressional Republicans and others in Trump’s orbit have clamored in recent weeks for federal cost-cutting, the Postal Service has emerged as a prominent target. People who will work on the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a nongovernmental panel led by tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have also held preliminary conversations about major changes to the Postal Service, said two other people familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks.
The Postal Service lost $9.5 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, stung by continued declines in mail volume and a slower-than-anticipated parcel shipping business, even as it made major new investments in modernized facilities and equipment. The agency faces nearly $80 billion in liabilities, according to its annual financial report.
Cuts to the Postal Service could upend the trillion-dollar e-commerce industry, hitting small businesses and rural consumers whose businesses and budgets make the agency the shipper of choice. Amazon, the Postal Service’s largest customer, uses the agency for “last-mile” delivery between its hulking product fulfillment centers and consumers’ homes and businesses. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And the agency’s “universal service obligation” — which requires it to deliver mail or parcels regardless of distance or profitability concerns — means it is often the only carrier that will deliver to far-flung reaches of the country.
Attempts to privatize one of the most prominent parts of the federal government could spark a political backlash, especially for Republicans representing rural districts that the agency disproportionately serves. Federal officials from Alaska, for example, often invite postal executives to the Last Frontier to see how crucial the Postal Service is to the state’s economy.
Responding to inquiries about privatizing the agency, a Postal Service spokesperson said the agency’s 10-year modernization plan has led it to cut 45 million work hours in the past three years and reduce spending on transportation by $2 billion. The agency is also seeking regulatory approval to alter its mail processing and delivery timetables to better align with private-sector practices, the spokesperson said in a statement.
“The United States Postal Service is already engaged in an initiative to ensure that we can provide our customers with a high level of service to every delivery address in the nation at least 6-days-a-week in an efficient and financially sustainable fashion as required by law,” the agency’s statement said.
Trump has long had a tense relationship with the mail agency. He once derided it from the Oval Office as “a joke” and in a social media post as Amazon’s “Delivery Boy.” In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump threatened to withhold emergency assistance from the Postal Service unless it quadrupled package prices, and his treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, authorized a loan for the mail agency only in exchange for access to its confidential contracts with top customers.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump said the Postal Service was incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because the agency could not access the emergency funding he was blocking. The Postal Service ultimately delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days.
When he returns to office, Trump could have several options to exert control over the mail agency — though he may not have the authority to unilaterally privatize it.
The Postal Service has three vacancies on its nine-member governing board. Among sitting members, three are Republicans, and two of those are Trump appointees. Biden has three pending nominees, but the Senate does not appear poised to confirm them before Trump’s inauguration.
Significantly narrowing the universal service obligation — which had been recommended by officials during Trump’s first term — would probably require an act of Congress. If approved, the Postal Service would almost immediately be required to scale back delivery service to unprofitable areas and downsize its staff of roughly 650,000 employees.
The agency was also under fire earlier this week, when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy faced sharp questioning from Republicans in a hearing Tuesday. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Kentucky) warned DeJoy that next year’s Congress could seek to overhaul the mail service.
New York Times, Nancy Pelosi Has Hip Replacement Surgery After Fall, Karoun Demirjian, Dec. 14, 2024. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, had hip replacement surgery on Saturday after falling while on an official trip to Luxembourg, her office said in a statement.
“Earlier this morning, Speaker Emerita Pelosi underwent a successful hip replacement and is well on the mend,” Ian Krager, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, said in a statement.
Ms. Pelosi traveled to Luxembourg as part of a congressional delegation attending a ceremony to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, a pivotal fight during World War II. On Friday, she tripped and fell while going down marble stairs at the Grand Ducal Palace, according to a person familiar with the incident who was not authorized to comment and spoke on condition of anonymity.
People close to Ms. Pelosi said at the time that she had fractured her hip in the accident, though it was not immediately clear if she would be treated in Europe or the United States. Her spokesman’s statement indicated that her surgery ultimately had taken place at a U.S. military base in Germany.
The former speaker “is well on the mend,” her spokesman said. She fell in Luxembourg on a trip to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.
New York Times, What We Know About Drone Sightings in New Jersey and New York, Alyce McFadden, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). Reports of flying objects continue to occur throughout the region. State and local officials say they do not pose a threat but have provided few answers.
Bright lights floating or flying in the night sky above New Jersey have captivated residents for nearly a month. Now the sightings, which many observers believe to be drones, have spread throughout the region.
Federal authorities investigating the sightings have provided few answers about what the objects are or their origin, leaving residents unsettled and local leaders frustrated.
U.S. officials on Thursday said that they had been unable to corroborate the reported drone sightings, and suggested that many of the objects might in fact be manned aircraft, such as airplanes or helicopters.
But assurances from state and federal officials that the sightings do not indicate a threat to residents have done little to allay public concerns. Lawmakers have expressed frustration with the lack of information, and are urging the federal government to share more about its investigation.
New York Times, Agriculture Department to Require Testing of U.S. Milk Supply for Bird Flu Virus, Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The new rules call for testing unpasteurized milk from dairies across the country and for farm owners to provide details that would help officials identify and track cases more easily.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new rules on Friday requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus known as H5N1, nearly a year after the virus began circulating through dairy cattle.
Under the new testing strategy, the department will begin testing bulk samples of unpasteurized milk from dairy processing facilities across the country.
Farmers and dairy processors will be required to provide samples of raw milk on request from the government. The rules also require farm owners with infected herds to provide details that would help officials identify more cases and contacts.
The rules are a departure from the voluntary guidance that the department has issued during the outbreak. Many dairy farms have not complied with voluntary testing of milk or of dairy workers, leaving federal officials in the dark about how widely the virus might have spread.
Many experts in the United States and elsewhere, including with the World Health Organization, have sharply criticized the lack of testing of cattle and of people who may be infected with the virus. The virus does not yet spread easily among people, but every untreated infection is an opportunity for it to gain the ability to do so, experts have said.
Politico, Federal judge preserves Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions, Bianca Quilantan, Dec. 6, 2024. A federal judge argues that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.An entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Maryland, is seen.
A federal judge on Friday upheld the U.S. Naval Academy’s consideration of race in admissions arguing that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.
The ruling is an early blow to Students for Fair Admissions’ latest attempt to extend the scope of its Supreme Court win against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that gutted the use of race in college admissions. The ruling also comes while the Naval Academy’s admissions process is underway for its next class.
Judge Richard Bennett emphasized in his ruling that the academy is “distinct from a civilian university” because its mission is to prepare its students to become officers in the military. He also said that while race is considered in admissions, the academy does not have racial quotas or engage in racial balancing, and race is not a determinative factor in its process.
Bennett added that the academy proved its national security interest is measurable and its admissions program is narrowly tailored. He also said the court defers to the executive branch on military personnel decisions.
“The program survives strict scrutiny because the Naval Academy has established a compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Bennett wrote. “Specifically, the Academy has tied its use of race to the realization of an officer corps that represents the country it protects and the people it leads.”
SFFA, an anti-affirmative action group, argued that the Naval Academy has “no justification for using race-based admissions” when using race in admissions is unconstitutional for all other colleges across the country. But the Biden administration has argued the case is nothing like the one against Harvard or UNC because the admissions process and applicant pool are different. The administration also argued SFFA was overreading the ruling in the case against Harvard because the Supreme Court explicitly did not address military academies’ admissions policies.
The high court, in siding with SFFA against Harvard, had said it could not address admissions at the schools because of “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
SFFA President Edward Blum said the group was “disappointed” in the ruling and will appeal the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Politico, Eric Adams doesn’t rule out switch to the GOP: ‘Cancel me,’ Joe Anuta, Dec. 6, 2024. The New York City mayor has been at odds with national Democrats over immigration.Eric Adams walks in a parade.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has taken a soft touch with President-elect Donald Trump, left open the possibility of switching to the Republican Party in a pair of Friday morning interviews.
Adams was a member of the GOP from 1995 through 2002, and was asked during an appearance on NY1 whether he would return to the party. He did not rule out the possibility.
“I’m a part of the American party,” he said in response. “I love this country.”'Cancel me': Adams says he's open to working with Trump border czar
Asked to clarify his comments in a subsequent interview on PIX11, the big-city mayor again left open the question about his future political affiliation.
“No matter what party I’m on or vote on, I’m going to push for American values,” he said, arguing that officials need to move beyond parties altogether and work in concert to solve voters’ problems.
Adams’ comments come on the heels of a presidential race in which the mayor — unlike most of his fellow Democrats — took pains to avoid criticizing Trump. And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Adams has spoken glowingly about Elon Musk, a confidant of Trump tasked with making government more efficient.
The mayor is set to sit down with Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, next week to talk about plans to deport undocumented immigrants. Adams has said he would support any federal plan that focuses on those undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes.
The mayor’s openness to Trump has outraged local Democrats because of the power the incoming president will have over the five-count criminal case Adams faces in federal court.
Trump has already settled on a nominee to replace the U.S. Attorney prosecuting Adams. And as POLITICO has reported, Trump could assist Adams with the case, including offering him a pardon.
Each has cast criminal charges against themselves as the result of a politicized Justice Department — a notion President Joe Biden bolstered by criticizing the justice system in pardoning his son Hunter Biden. And Trump has expressed empathy toward Adams’ predicament.
When asked Friday if he would run for reelection next year as a Democrat, Adams gave a perfunctory answer.
“That is what I’m proposing to do,” he said. “I’ve been a Democrat for many years and I’m going to run for my reelection as a Democrat.”
And he had a final message for any naysayers.
“Those who don’t like it, they will cancel me,” he said. “I say: Cancel me. I’m for America.”
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Middle East Wars, Reactions
Travis Timmerman, shown in an AFP photo via Getty Images.
New York Times, Man Found in Syria Appears to Be a Missing American, Ben Hubbard and Amelia Nierenberg, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). The man told reporters that his name was Travis Timmerman and that he had entered Syria on a religious pilgrimage. He said that he had been detained for months.
The Syrian authorities said on Thursday that a foreign man who had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital.
In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year. In a video aired on Thursday by the news channel Al Arabiya, someone is heard asking the man if his name is Travis Timmerman. The man says, “That’s right.”
Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said that the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.
The man told reporters that he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Storm Another Major City, Ben Hubbard, Dec. 5, 2024. Opposition forces advanced on the city of Hama as their startling offensive moved quickly in the direction of the capital, Damascus.
Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad.
The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.
In a video circulated by the rebel group leading the offensive, their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, jubilantly calls for the rebels to push on toward other Syrian cities, including the capital.
“The people of Homs, prepare yourselves,” he said in the video, which his group said was filmed on Wednesday. “The people of Damascus, the people of Dara’a, the people of Deir al Zour. Victory for all, God willing.” The New York Times could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video or when it was filmed.
The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country, opened voids exploited by jihadist groups, drawn in world powers including Russia and the United States and created a long-term refugee crisis for neighboring countries.
Hama is one of the few major Syrian cities where rebels had yet to seize significant control during the civil war, which began with a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. al-Assad in 2011.
The city’s name is synonymous with one of the most notorious massacres in the Middle East. In 1982, security forces serving the president’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, massacred thousands of people there during an anti-government uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
New York Times, Fighting Rages in Syria as Rebels Advance, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Vivian Yee, Dec. 1, 2024. Forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad control the Aleppo airport and are attacking Hama, local officials and a U.K.-based war monitor say.
New York Times, A Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs, Amanda Taub, Dec. 1, 2024. Hamas's weakened position could leave the territory without any governing institutions, our columnist writes.
New York Times, Police and Protesters Clash in Georgian Capital, Cassandra Vinograd, Dec. 1, 2024. The government’s decision to suspend its bid for European Union membership has driven thousands of protesters onto the streets.
Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia’s capital late Saturday during the third consecutive night of demonstrations over the government’s suspension of its bid to join the European Union.
Thousands of people have rallied in the capital, Tbilisi, since Thursday night after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the country was putting the process of E.U. accession on hold until 2028 and would decline all grants from the bloc. The police have responded with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.
Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday morning that protests overnight had “evolved into violence.” It claimed that protesters “threw pyrotechnics” and “ignited objects” toward police officers and at Parliament, causing a fire to break out. Windows were smashed by “stones and various objects,” the ministry added in a statement, saying that protesters also had damaged protective iron barriers around the building.
More than 100 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, according to the ministry, which also said that several police officers were wounded and that 42 of its employees had been injured since the protests began.
The Associated Press reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters; it was not immediately clear how many protesters suffered injuries.
Georgia has been gripped by political crisis since the disputed victory of the Georgian Dream party in October’s parliamentary elections. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China. Georgia’s opposition, which says the election was rigged and has boycotted the new sitting of Parliament, seeks closer ties with the West.
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Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: {December 11 [Human Rights Day History, Implications] Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian, author, Dec. 11, 2024. Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans.
In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”They included the right to participate in art and science.They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.”
Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.—
New York Times, China Bans Rare Mineral Exports to the U.S., David Pierson, Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.
China said on Tuesday that it would begin banning the export of several rare minerals to the United States, an escalation of the tech war between the world’s two biggest powers. The move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology.
The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products, like weaponry and semiconductors.
Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony and so-called superhard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds that they have dual military and civilian uses, China’s Ministry of Commerce said. The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.
China is central to many global supply chains, but it generally refrained from clamping down on its own exports during the first Trump administration, preferring instead to take more limited actions like buying soybeans from Brazil instead of the United States. But senior Chinese officials are worried that President-elect Donald J. Trump plans more stringent policies during his coming term in office.
Mr. Trump has promised to put hefty tariffs on goods from China and further sever the trading relationship between the countries. The move on Tuesday — one of the most aggressive steps China has taken to counter increasingly restrictive policies from the U.S. government — could foreshadow more economic conflict as Mr. Trump enters the White House.
China produces nearly all the world’s supply of critical minerals needed to make advanced technologies such as semiconductors. Beijing has been tightening its grip on the materials to retaliate for clampdowns on American technology exports to China over the past two years.
John Leung at a meeting in 2019 of the Texas Council for the Promotion of China’s Peaceful Reunification. Mr. Leung had embraced Beijing’s causes, including unifying the mainland with Taiwan, the island democracy (David Tang photo).
New York Times, From Chinese Patriot to American Spy: The Unusual Life of John Leung, Mara Hvistendahl, Joy Dong and Adam Goldman, Dec. 3, 2024. He had been hailed by Chinese state media as a model for his efforts to promote Beijing’s interests in the United States. He was in fact an F.B.I. informant.
John Leung was an unlikely spy. In the small Oklahoma town where he lived, people knew him as a former restaurant owner and a father. In Houston, where he often traveled, they knew him as a political organizer in the city’s vibrant Chinese community.
And in China, they knew him as a benevolent patriot, a man who arranged musical performances and embraced official causes like unifying the mainland with Taiwan.
In fact, Mr. Leung was an informant for the F.B.I., gathering intelligence on China, according to two senior United States officials. That work landed him in Chinese custody in 2021, after he traveled to the mainland at the age of 75. He was later sentenced to life in prison, a first in decades for an American accused of espionage.
Mr. Leung was freed last Wednesday in a rare prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing. Six months shy of his 80th birthday, he was put on a plane to the United States with two other Americans who had been detained in China, along with three Uyghurs, members of an ethnic group that faces repression by the Chinese government.
In return, Washington released Xu Yanjun, a convicted Chinese spy who had been serving a 20-year sentence and Ji Chaoqun, 31, who had reported to Mr. Xu and was serving an eight-year sentence. A clemency order for a third Chinese national, Jin Shanlin, who had been in prison for possessing child pornography, was signed on the same day as an order for Mr. Xu. China said Washington also handed over a fugitive.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
Politico, Trump threatens BRICS nations with 100 percent tariff, Ari Hawkins, Nov. 30, 2024. Trump also said: “There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday demanded a group of developing countries commitment to the use of the U.S. dollar as their reserve currency and threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff if they attempt to abandon it.
“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, referring to the acronym for the original group of countries in the bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The geopolitical alliance has since expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
“We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy."
New York Times, Trudeau Flies to Mar-a-Lago to See Trump Amid Tariff Concerns, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Nov. 29, 2024. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is the first G-7 leader to visit since the election. He is under pressure to persuade President-elect Trump to back down from his tariff threat.
The visit makes Mr. Trudeau the first foreign head of government from the Group of 7, a key forum of global coordination consisting of the world’s wealthiest democracies, to visit the president-elect.
Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump were to dine together on Friday evening, one official said, along with a delegation of senior Trump allies poised for top trade and security positions in his new administration.
Mr. Trudeau was accompanied on his visit by Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister of public safety. The Canadian prime minister was expected to stay in the area overnight, but not at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.
The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment, and there was no information released about Mr. Trump’s schedule on Friday.
Mr. Trudeau has been scrambling to formulate a plan to respond to the threat made this week by Mr. Trump to impose a 25 percent tariff unless Mexico and Canada take action to curb the arrival of undocumented migrants and drugs across their borders into the United States.Scott Gottlieb said he’s worried that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS will follow through on past antivaccine rhetoric.
New York Times, Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years, Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate, Nov. 29, 2024. Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him. The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.
“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.
She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.
In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.”
Questions about Mr. Hegseth’s treatment of women have emerged in the weeks since Mr. Trump chose him, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to lead the Pentagon. The issue is expected to be a subject of scrutiny during Senate confirmation hearings.
Washington Post, Trump, Mexican president talk border, migrant caravans amid tariff threats, Mary Beth Sheridan and Niha Masih, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke to President-elect Donald Trump after he threatened to impose tariffs and she hinted at retaliation in a letter.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, left, assured President-elect Donald Trump in a phone call Wednesday that migrant caravans are no longer reaching the U.S.-Mexican border, after Trump’s threat earlier this week to impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from her country if it could not halt irregular migrants and fentanyl from crossing the U.S. border.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
“We discussed the Mexican strategy for the phenomenon of migration, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at our northern border, because we deal with them in Mexico,” Sheinbaum wrote on X after the call.
She described the conversation as “excellent.” Trump, posting about the call on Truth Social, his social media platform, said the conversation was “very productive.”
The conciliatory tone on both sides followed a tense exchange Tuesday: In a letter, Sheinbaum responded angrily to Trump’s tariff warning, threatening tariffs of her own. But they diverged in how they described the conversation.
Trump said Sheinbaum had agreed to “stop Migration through Mexico,” which would mean “effectively closing our Southern Border.” In a second post he said this would be come into effect immediately, prompting another tweet from Sheinbaum in which she said: “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders but to build bridges,” adding that her country would offer assistance to migrants, including caravans, before they could reach the northern border.
New York Times, Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy, Michael Crowley, Nov. 29, 2024. The world is braced for disruption from President-elect Trump, but he may find more common ground with President Biden than many assume.
President-elect Donald J. Trump comes to office with a view of America’s place in the world that is dramatically different from his predecessor’s.
Branding President Biden’s foreign policy as “historically horrible,” Mr. Trump is vowing to reinstate an America First approach that in his first term swept away years of policy consensus and shook U.S. alliances around the world.
He wants friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, may slash U.S. support for Ukraine and has threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He admires foreign autocrats and shows little interest in Mr. Biden’s goal of championing democracy abroad. He is hostile to international organizations and treaties including the United Nations and the Paris climate accord.
But amid the many areas of potential disruption, Mr. Trump will also find plenty of things to like in Mr. Biden’s policies. Beyond the glaring exceptions of Europe and his plans for Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s initial approach could bear a surprising resemblance to the Biden status quo.
One reason is that abrupt foreign policy swerves are rare and difficult to execute, analysts say. America’s military, economic and political power tends to provide a fairly fixed amount of leverage over other countries. Pressure from allies, Congress and the federal bureaucracy push commanders-in-chief toward consensus views.
New York Times, How China Became the World’s Largest Car Exporter, Agnes Chang and Keith Bradsher, Nov. 29, 2024. President-elect Trump has promised to impose new tariffs, but they are unlikely to undercut China’s dominance given its advantages in automaking.
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Trump Legal Cases, Strategies, Allies
Washington Post, Proud Boys’ Tarrio could testify at leak trial of D.C. police officer, Spencer S. Hsu, Peter Hermann and Tom Jackman, Dec. 1, 2024. Lt. Shane Lamond’s contacts with Henry Tarrio fed Proud Boys’ anger at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. His trial spotlights police dealings with the extremist group.
A former D.C. police lieutenant will face a federal trial Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied to investigators about their interactions.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Prosecutors say advance word from Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, deepened anger among the far-right Proud Boys and fueled their instigation of the mob two days later at the Capitol. But Lamond, then head of the force’s intelligence unit, says he may call Tarrio as a defense witness, seeking to convince the judge their talks were within the normal bounds of how a police investigator handles a source.
Such a move would put Lamond in the awkward position of seeking exoneration through a man serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy after being found guilty of plotting violence to stop Congress’s certification of the 2020 election, according to court filings.
Either way, Lamond’s bench trial before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will spotlight D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021. That tumultuous summer and fall, episodes of street violence in Washington marred both racial justice demonstrations prompted by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May and marches by Donald Trump supporters following the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Capitol riot that led to at least five deaths, $3 million in damage and assaults on about 140 officers.
The inner workings of police intelligence gathering stirred controversy, with liberal groups accusing police of favoring right-leaning organizations and crossing the line between eliciting information and appearing to take sides. They pointed to officers who posed for photos with supporters of Trump and who stood back as counterdemonstrators vandalized Black Lives Matter signs or pressed arguments to physical conflict.
Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, left, and former President Donald Trump, shown in a collage via CNN.
Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). The special counsel filed a motion to dismiss Donald Trump’s election-obstruction case without prejudice, which means the case could be revived in the future.
Special counsel Jack Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Monday to dismiss the federal election interference charges against President-elect Donald Trump, putting an end to a lengthy investigation that never made it to trial.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Smith’s motion seeks to dismiss the case without prejudice, acknowledging that Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president. If she does that, it leaves open the possibility that prosecutors could again bring charges once Trump leaves office after his second White House term.
But legal experts said it’s possible that once Trump is in office, he could try to do something that has never been tested before: pardon himself to foreclose the possibility of legal jeopardy in the future.
Trump faces four counts related to conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results. Smith’s filing acknowledges that the Justice Department has longed believed a sitting president cannot stand trial, and says prosecutors conferred with Trump’s attorneys and that they did not oppose the request to dismiss the case.
Russian War Against Ukraine
New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, Dec. 9, 2024. The messaging app’s popularity has soared during the war with Russia, leading Ukrainian officials to weigh Telegram’s upsides against its security risks.
In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support.
But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed.
Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings.
“We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.”
New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 370,000 wounded since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago. It was the first time in months that he had disclosed military casualty figures, a highly sensitive topic in Ukraine, particularly as Kyiv’s forces lose more ground to Russian troops.
The Ukrainian leader’s tally could not be verified independently, and it differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials and military analysts, who have put the number of dead much higher. U.S. officials said in August 2023 that close to 70,000 soldiers had been killed, a figure that has probably increased significantly since then.
Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian journalist with close ties to the army, shared a similar figure last week, adding that 35,000 soldiers were also missing in action.
Mr. Zelensky also noted that about half of the wounded soldiers return to the battlefield after treatment. This suggests that Ukraine has suffered a total of about 230,000 irreplaceable losses, comprising those killed and those permanently incapacitated by injuries.
It was not immediately clear why Mr. Zelensky chose to release casualty figures now, but his statement came just a few hours after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that Ukraine had lost 400,000 soldiers, without specifying the number of dead or wounded. Mr. Trump, who also said that Russia’s casualties were close to 600,000 soldiers, said the high toll of the war underscored the need for an immediate cease-fire and the start of peace negotiations.
Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid, Michael Birnbaum, Missy Ryan and Siobhán O'Grady, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president’s Ukraine directive has stirred debate, as some officials worry it will cut too deeply into American stockpiles and jeopardize military needs elsewhere.
The Biden administration is engaged in an 11th-hour scramble to provide Ukraine with billions of dollars in additional weaponry, a massive effort that is generating concerns internally about its potential to erode U.S. stockpiles and sap resources from other flash points, officials said.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The lame-duck initiative was spurred in part by Russia’s battlefield momentum and a fear among Ukraine’s fiercest advocates that once President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20, there will be an abrupt shift in U.S. policy toward the war.
Yet some in the administration have taken the view that no matter what Washington does, Kyiv’s military will remain outmatched without far more soldiers to sustain its fight. And even as they accelerate arms shipments, there is growing frustration with Ukraine’s leaders, who have resisted U.S. calls to lower the country’s draft age from 25 to 18.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have captured Ukrainian territory at the fastest pace since 2022, causing alarm in Washington. Administration officials say their end-of-term weapons push — accompanied by President Joe Biden’s decision to green-light missile strikes deep into Russian territory and the deployment of antipersonnel land mines long criticized by human rights groups — can give Kyiv some breathing room. But they are urging Ukrainian leaders to use the moment to expand their military beyond the 160,000 recruits Kyiv says it needs
“We’re absolutely going to keep sending Ukraine weapons and equipment. We know that’s vital. But so, too, is manpower at this point,” White House spokesman John Kirby said last week. “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.”
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Ukraine Matters, HORROR Spreads in Russian Force: Ukraine War Map Update, Georgi, Dec. 2, 2024. Crises in Russian conscripts, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine military as impacting Russian war against Ukraine.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
New York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants, Constant Méheut, Nov. 29, 2024. Moscow has increasingly hit critical substations linked to nuclear power plants in an effort to disconnect them. The assaults risk a disaster, experts said.
New York Times, Russia Launches Record Number of Drones in Overnight Attack, Ukraine Says, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). The assault, which the Ukrainian Air Force said involved 188 drones, came as both sides intensify air bombardments.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that it had shot down 76 of the drones in the “massive attack” but that nearly all the rest had disappeared from radar. It was unclear how many of those drones had been intercepted by other means, such as electronic interference, and how many had struck targets.
Some critical infrastructure was hit and residential buildings were damaged in several regions, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Damage to the power grid in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, caused electricity and water outages, the local authorities said.
New York Times, The Global Profile: As Russia Advances in Ukraine, a Cop Has to Flee City After City, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). For Volodymyr Nikulin, being a wartime police officer means aiding evacuees, surviving a shrapnel wound and tackling looters. It also means quickly switching cities when one falls to the invaders.
The belongings of Volodymyr Nikulin, a Ukrainian police officer stationed near the country’s eastern front line, boil down to this: a shrapnel-riddled car, a small sack stuffed with sweaters and pants, and two plastic bags filled with basic food and medicine.
Keeping it simple is essential for Mr. Nikulin, who has had to leave three cities to escape the advance of Russian forces in the country’s eastern Donbas region, losing his home each time. So he has learned to live with little, and to be ready to pack up on short notice.
He has barely bothered to settle into the friend’s apartment he currently occupies in Sloviansk, a city 15 miles from the combat zone, leaving the bedroom untouched and sleeping instead in a small office. The distant rumble of Russian bombing regularly echoes through the walls, a reminder he may soon have to leave everything behind, again.
“Who knows where I’ll be in a few months?” Mr. Nikulin said on a recent morning last month in Sloviansk, acknowledging that Russian forces in the area were creeping closer. He joked that he could at least count on his damaged car, recalling how it had helped him escape several Russian attacks.
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Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
New York Times, Brazilian Police Arrest Close Ally of Ex-President Bolsonaro, Official Says, Ana Ionova, Dec. 14, 2024. Gen. Walter Braga Netto was Jair Bolsonaro’s running mate. The arrest was for meddling in an investigation into a plot to stage a coup, the police said.
Brazilian police on Saturday arrested Gen. Walter Braga Netto, a close ally of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his running mate in 2022, according to a police official, accusing him of meddling in their investigation into a plot to stage a coup after Mr. Bolsonaro lost the election.
The federal police said in a statement that they had carried out an arrest and two search warrants against people for “hindering the free production of evidence during the criminal proceedings.”
The police official confirmed that General Braga Netto was the target of the arrest, which the police said in the statement was “to prevent the repetition of illegal actions.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the matter. The targets of the search warrants were not identified.
Washington Post, Opinion: Macron names François Bayrou as French prime minister after government collapse, Ellen Francisand Anthony Faiola, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). The new prime minister, a Macron ally, must try to assemble a government, regain control of France’s deficit and satisfy warring political factions.
French President Emmanuel Macron named François Bayrou, a centrist ally, as prime minister on Friday, in a bid to restore stability after a no-confidence vote toppled the shortest-serving government in the modern French republicGet concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
The new prime minister must now try to cobble together a government and get a handle on France’s spiraling deficit and debt burden — in a way that satisfies enough of the warring political factions to keep everything from crashing down again.
European allies are looking for France and neighboring Germany, also in political and financial turmoil, to get their affairs in order at a time when President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to launch a trade war and to pivot the U.S. position on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The appointment of 73-year-old Bayrou — a well-known name in French politics and a longtime Macron ally — came after a nearly two-hour meeting with the president at the Élysée Palace on Friday morning.
“No one knows the difficulty of the situation better than I do,” Bayrou said during a red-carpet ceremony for the transition of power at the prime minister’s official residence. He acknowledged the extent of the challenges that lie ahead, called for reconciliation of acrimonious divisions and described curbing debt as not only a financial priority but a “moral” issue.
Facing backlash over the political turmoil, Macron has called on the country’s fractious parties to make compromises in the national interest. He held consultations with the leaders of different blocs in the lead-up to Friday’s announcement. The far-right and far-left parties that pushed for the no-confidence vote have not been included in the talks.
France has alternated through periods of political chaos and paralysis since June, when Macron announced early legislative elections. Strategic coordination between a left-wing alliance and centrist parties blocked a far-right win, but the election resulted in a bitterly divided legislature. And the government that took office in September was threatened with collapse at any moment — its fate ultimately resting in the hands of far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Last week, Le Pen decided to wield her sword. Her party added its votes to those of the left-wing New Popular Front in an unusual combination to overthrow the government.
Whether she will maintain as much power over the next administration will depend on whether Bayrou can garner a broader base of support — and his odds of lasting longer than his predecessor were not immediately clear.
Le Pen said Friday that the new prime minister would have to “listen to the opposition to build a reasonable and thoughtful budget.” Otherwise, she said, he risked “impasse and failure.”
Le Pen, who has long sought the presidency, is among the Macron critics on the far right and far left who have called on him to resign. He has pledged to serve out his term, which ends in 2027. But if his opponents manage to bring down successive governments, that would pile further pressure on the president.
Le Pen, meanwhile, is awaiting a verdict in a trial accusing her of misusing European funds, and if found guilty, she could be banned from running for president.
To secure wider support and strip Le Pen of some influence, the new prime minister is expected to try to win over some on the left and will probably have to offer concessions on the budget. “Much will depend on the success or failure of his overtures,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group consultancy.On the left, Friday’s announcement brought mixed reactions. The hard-left France Unbowed, a key force in the broad left-wing alliance and a fierce opponent of Macron, rejected Bayrou as “a continuation” of the president’s policies.
The Socalists criticized Macron for picking from his own camp, while suggesting that the new government could avoid collapse if it doesn’t force through changes without a vote or “place itself under the dependence” of the anti-immigrant National Rally.
New York Times, India’s Luxury Property Market Is a Boon to Donald Trump’s Business, Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj, Dec. 9, 2024. The Trump Organization has found a warm welcome in the country, where status-hungry home buyers clamor for a famous American brand.
New York Times, How a Criminal With Close Ties to China Became a New York Power Broker, Michael Forsythe, Bianca Pallaro, Jay Root and Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 9, 2024. John Chan was a Chinatown gangster before remaking himself into a powerful force in New York politics — one closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. On a Monday in March, in the heart of China’s capital, more than 2,000 delegates of a rubber-stamp advisory body to the authoritarian government of President Xi Jinping gathered for their annual meeting.
One mission of the men and women in attendance was to spread the global influence of China’s Communist Party. Of the throngs of party officials, generals and business executives who watched as Mr. Xi took the stage, just 20 people had been invited to represent the country’s vast diaspora, including a single person from the United States: a 69-year-old man from Brooklyn named John Chan.
Mr. Chan’s participation reflected a remarkable proximity to the highest levels of power in China, experts said, and marked him as a person on whom the country’s leaders might call for favors. But it was remarkable, too, because of his position at home: He has operated as a power broker in America’s largest city, with immense sway over an important subset of New York politics.
Mr. Chan, now 70, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the investigations. But against the backdrop of recent events, he has stood out nonetheless, both for his overt connections to the Chinese government and for his ability to influence American elections up and down the ballot.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
New York Times, South Korea Bars President From Traveling Abroad, Victoria Kim and Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 9, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol cannot leave as an investigation unfolds into whether he led an insurrection last week when he briefly imposed martial law.
New York Times, France’s First Big #MeToo Case Goes to Trial, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Dec. 9, 2024. The actress Adèle Haenel has accused the director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She accused him of isolating her during rehearsals and filming. Of grooming her for three years, when on Saturday afternoons he would touch her sexually. When it began, he was 36. She was 12.
Five years ago, the French actress Adèle Haenel shocked the country’s film world when she spoke out about the director Christophe Ruggia, who had cast her as the lead actor in a 2002 film about an incestuous relationship.
On Monday, the case went to court, marking the first major #MeToo accusations in France to proceed to trial. Mr. Ruggia, 59, is charged with aggravated sexual assault against a minor. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison as well as a fine of up to 150,000 euros, about $190,000.
Mr. Ruggia has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying that his relationship with Ms. Haenel was strictly platonic and that he never sexually harassed or touched her inappropriately. His lawyer Fanny Colin had refused to speak publicly before the trial, but had said that Mr. Ruggia intended to plead not guilty.
After Ms. Haenel first told her story to the French investigative outlet Mediapart in 2019, it inspired heated conversations about the country’s film industry and sex with minors, and how the French justice system treats sexual abuse complaints.
At the time, Ms. Haenel was a rising star, praised for fierce yet sensitive performances that had earned her two Césars — the French equivalent of the Oscars. In the United States she rose to fame with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” her final role before she announced her decision to boycott the industry.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Loses No-Confidence Vote and Is Expected to Resign, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 4, 2024. Prime Minister Michel Barnier, above, is likely to remain as a caretaker until a replacement is named. But the vote could create a wider opening for the far right.
French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.
France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.
It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.
President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Is on the Block, and Marine Le Pen Holds the Blade, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 1, 2024. The end of Michel Barnier’s government looks inevitable, even imminent, and would add to the country’s political malaise. How long can he last?
The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, (shown above in an AP photo), known for composure on previous scaffolds.
His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.
The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.
Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, left, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.
She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.
Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.
Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.
“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”
But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”
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U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
Politico, Anti-slavery movement charts its path forward, Emily Schultheis, An unlikely setback in progressive California has activists working to remove slavery exceptions from state constitutions grappling with the best way to draft future ballot measures.A California prison inmate with the Prison Industry Authority cleans one of the newly installed headstones.
The national movement to close a so-called slavery loophole in state constitutions was riding a wave of momentum after voters in eight states — including deep-red Alabama and Tennessee — removed exceptions to post-Civil War bans on slavery and involuntary servitude.
But the movement was handed an unexpected defeat this year in progressive California, where the failure of a ballot measure explicitly packaged as a ban on forced prison labor has left activists nationwide grappling with how best to draft such constitutional amendments in the up to 14 states where they could appear on ballots in 2026.
The movement’s lawyers want detailed language delineating what constitutes involuntary servitude so courts can be compelled to defend prisoners’ rights against forced labor. At the same time, campaigners confronting voters breaking right on questions of criminal justice want to see simply worded anti-slavery provisions free of specifics about what they mean for the incarcerated people who stand to benefit.
“That’s been a big part of our fight, making sure the language is correct,” said Dennis Febo, the New Jersey-based lead organizer for the Abolish Slavery National Network. “The more we’ve done on this question, the more we understand how complicated it is.”
New York Times, President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 1,500 Americans, a Record for One Day, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Mark Landler, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). Many of those being granted clemency had been placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic.
President Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest grant of clemency by an American president in a single day, the White House announced in a statement on Thursday.
The commutations affect mostly those who had been released from prison and placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic. The people who received pardons were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including possession of marijuana.
A pardon wipes out a conviction, while a commutation leaves the guilty verdict intact but reduces some or all of the punishment.
The announcement came two weeks after Mr. Biden issued a pardon for his son, Hunter, who had been convicted of gun possession and income tax evasion. That decision was harshly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats because Mr. Biden had long ruled out clemency for his son.
Politico, Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences, promises ‘more steps in the weeks ahead,’ Andrew Howard, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330.
President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of almost 1,500 people and pardoned another 39, the most ever in a single day, the White House announced on Thursday.
The White House said in its announcement that those receiving clemency “have shown successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” The 39 pardon recipients had all committed non-violent crimes, and the commutations were for people who were placed in home confinement during the pandemic.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As President, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
Following Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, he faced pressure from some Democrats, as well as outside advocacy groups, to use his clemency powers more widely before his term ends in January. Biden indicated in his statement that he “will take more steps in the weeks ahead.” “My Administration will continue reviewing clemency petitions to advance equal justice under the law, promote public safety, support rehabilitation and reentry, and provide meaningful second chances.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who was one of the Democrats pressuring Biden to issue pardons, praised the president’s decision, calling it a “meaningful and historic action.”
“Thanks to President Biden, today a near 1,500 families will have their lives changed forever and I congratulate each and every family on this new beginning,” she said in a statement.
Still, Pressley is pushing for more clemency actions before Biden’s term ends.
“With 39 days remaining in his presidency, President Biden has the power to continue to use his clemency authority to change and save the lives of many, many other Americans behind the wall,” she said. “It is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, and it is a matter of legacy.”
The progressive group Popular Democracy in Action struck a similar tone, praising Biden’s decision but also telling the president “do not stop now.”
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.).. During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Horowitz’s report, which does not identify the lawmakers by name, did not turn up indications that the two outspoken Trump critics were targeted because of their political views or affiliation.
“We did not find any evidence of retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors who issued the compulsory process we reviewed,” the report said.
The Justice Department during the Trump administration also faced scrutiny for efforts to access the email account of then-House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel. Patel, who is now Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has long decried the intrusion by Justice Department officials, which he claimed was retaliation for his effort to undermine the investigation of Trump’s 2016 ties to Russia.
Last year, Patel sued top Justice Department officials over the grand jury subpoena, and his suit was dismissed in September by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Patel was one of the 43 congressional staffers whose phone or email logs were pursued by investigators — a number higher than previously known. The review found that 21 of them were affiliated with Democrats, 20 with Republicans and two were in nonpartisan positions. The Justice Department did not seek or obtain the content of their communications, but only details such as which phone numbers or email accounts they were in contact with and when, Horowitz found.
Around the same time the existence of subpoenas aimed at lawmakers was reported, it emerged that prosecutors also sought phone or email records for journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN as part of the same leak investigations.
Barr did approve the subpoenas aimed at reporters, but the department never convened an internal panel that a policy in place at the time said should examine all such requests, the watchdog report found.
“This deviation from the Department’s own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role,” Horowitz wrote.
Biden called the tactic aimed at reporters “simply wrong” and vowed it would not continue under his administration. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo banning the practice and he later formalized that policy in DOJ regulations.
Horowitz was particularly critical of the Justice Department’s handling of gag orders it obtained on companies like Apple and Google. Those orders prevented the firms from telling targets about the demands.
Last year, the Justice Department issued a policy on subpoenas aimed at lawmakers, requiring high-level approvals at DOJ. Horowitz’s report reveals that DOJ quietly updated that policy again in September after getting a draft of the review. Among the latest requirements: Prosecutors must inform the judge or magistrate that the requests target a member of Congress or congressional staff.
The incoming Trump administration is expected to roll back the protections Garland adopted for journalists and perhaps even to eliminate earlier limits Democratic and Republican administrations had put on such demands. Legislation pending in Congress could block those moves, but last month Trump urged Republican lawmakers to “kill” the measure, known as the PRESS Act.
Horowitz said the past and current policies encourage prosecutors to seek lawmakers’ records because getting subpoenas for journalists’ emails or phone records required high-level approval, which has been basically impossible to get since 2021. He noted that even the latest Justice Department policy doesn’t require prosecutors to exhaust other avenues before demanding email and phone providers turn over lawmakers’ records.
Most of the leaks did not result in criminal charges, but one staffer swept up in one round of phone and email records searches — Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe — pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his dealings with journalists. A judge sentenced Wolfe to two months in prison.
Another long-awaited report is expected from Horowitz’s office in the coming days: a review of the Justice Department’s actions in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. That review has been pending for nearly four years. Horowitz recently acknowledged that work on it was frozen for about two years while prosecutors pursued some of the most serious criminal cases stemming from the attack.
Horowitz’s release of the long-awaited investigations comes as Horowitz and other inspectors general across the government face the possibility of being removed or even fired by the incoming Trump administration. Some Trump allies have urged him to install his own appointees in the independent watchdog roles at federal agencies, although traditionally most inspectors general have not resigned during a change of administration or of partisan control of the White House.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have vowed to oppose any attempt by Trump to oust the experienced watchdogs.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews Dec 10, 2024. 70% of Americans favor ending lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices.
Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices. The move is aimed at restoring confidence in the Court, as the approval rating for SCOTUS is at its lowest point in history, with only 16% of Americans reporting "a great deal of confidence" in the highest Court.
The Manchin-Welch amendment would impose single 18-year, non-renewable terms for Supreme Court justices. Each 18-year term would be staggered every two years. Current justices will not be held to term limits, but blocks of 18-year terms will begin to cycle every two years once the amendment is ratified. When a current justice retires, their replacement will be assigned the remainder of the current 18-year block, until every justice on the Court is term limited.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas Dec 10, 2024. Prosecutors are pressing forward with the case even with Trump becoming President again.
This afternoon, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has filed an opposition to Donald Trump's request to immediately vacate the guilty verdicts against him and to dismiss the criminal case given the results of the November 5th election. Prosecutors had been considering whether to make this move for several weeks, and have officially decided to oppose any dismissal on several grounds.
First, prosecutors argue that the Manhattan court should reject Trump's motion to immediately dismiss the case given the fact that he has not yet been sworn in and does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution while President-elect.
The opposition goes on to highlight how even after he is sworn into office, the case should not be dismissed because the temporary immunity Trump will enjoy over the next four years does not justify wiping out the jury's verdict, especially as Trump's team does not dispute that the 34 felonies he was convicted of deal with purely unofficial conduct.
Prosecutors note that "at most, [Trump] should receive temporary accommodations during his presidency to prevent this criminal case form meaningfully interfering with his official decision-making."
Prosecutors listed several alternative remedies to a complete dismissal including a stay of proceedings during his term in office if judgment is not entered before January 20th. The decision will now ultimately be up to Justice Merchan who will decide whether or not to dismiss the criminal charges against Trump.
New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024. A New York jury acquitted Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely. Republican politicians hailed the verdict. But some New Yorkers found it deeply disturbing.
Outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Monday, a scuffle broke out among demonstrators, their chants amplified over bullhorns.
On one side were supporters of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was charged with fatally choking a fellow subway rider, Jordan Neely, on an uptown F train last year. They held signs, including one that said, “Daniel Penny deserves a prize not a prison.” On the other side were people protesting on behalf of Mr. Neely. Upset, they grabbed a sign and ripped it up.
As the sides exchanged barbs and police officers erected a barrier to separate them, inside the courthouse 12 New Yorkers were coming to a unanimous decision. Mr. Penny, they concluded, was not guilty.
If the death of Mr. Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who had struggled with mental health problems, had left New Yorkers unnerved and divided, the verdict quickly became yet another flashpoint in the nation’s debate over how best to address issues of crime and justice, homelessness and mental illness.
Republican political figures including Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani praised the jury and criticized the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for pursuing the case.
“Thank God justice was done in this case,” Mr. Vance said on social media. “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Penny a hero who deserved a medal.
But in New York, some found the verdict deeply troubling. “This decision highlights a deep-seated societal discomfort with unhoused individuals in need of support, and effectively green-lights ‘vigilante justice’ against the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” leaders of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus said in a statement.
Washington Post, Appeals court upholds nationwide TikTok ban-or-sale law, Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-Strong, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.
TikTok had argued to the three-judge panel, unsuccessfully, that the ban must be struck down for infringement on the free speech rights of the app’s users and owners under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” the court wrote in its opinion.
TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to take up the case before the sale deadline ends Jan. 19, or to first request that all the judges on the appeals court review the panel’s decision.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. He criticized the ban-or-sale law as being based on “inaccurate” information and said it was “resulting in the outright censorship of the American people.”
The appeals court on Friday said years-long bipartisan investigations into the app, and the government’s willingness to consider TikTok’s alternatives, weighed in favor of the law.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for a three-judge panel. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”
However, the judges said they rejected the government’s “ambitious argument” that the law did not “implicate the First Amendment at all,” saying that it would impose a “disproportionate burden on TikTok, an entity engaged in expressive activity.” The government had suggested that TikTok’s ownership by a foreign company left it without First Amendment rights, despite it having roughly 170 million U.S. accounts.
The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.By Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-StrongUpdated 45 minutes ag
The decision sets up a potential showdown with President-elect Donald Trump. Having backed a ban during his first term in the White House, he is expected to try to halt it, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Jose Ibarra listens through an interpreter during his trial at Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, Nov. 20, 2024, in Athens, Ga. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution pool photo by Hyosub Shin via Associated Press).
Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
Crystal Mangum in 2011 (Photo by Chuck Liddy of the Raleigh News & Observer / Tribune News Service via Getty Images).
New York Times, Crystal Mangum, who accused Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, says she lied, Jenna West, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). / Crystal Mangum, a woman who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, publicly said for the first time that she lied about the allegations.
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” Mangum said on an episode of the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat” released this week. “And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me.”
The episode was recorded in November at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where Mangum is serving time after being convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing her boyfriend in April 2011.
“I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” Mangum told podcast host Kat DePasquale about the Duke case, “and that was wrong when God already loved me for who I was regardless.”
The Duke case made national headlines after Mangum, a Black woman, accused lacrosse players David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann of raping her at a party where she was hired to perform as a stripper. It caused the cancellation of the lacrosse team’s 2006 season, and Duke forced coach Mike Pressler to resign.
The North Carolina attorney general’s office reviewed the case and declared Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann innocent in 2007. The attorney general’s office said the charges should not have been brought against the three players and there was no DNA or evidence to corroborate the allegations.
District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred for ethics violations, including making false statements and lying about withholding evidence. Prosecutors declined to press charges against Mangum for making false allegations.
Also in 2007, Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann reached an undisclosed settlement with Duke for the school’s handling of the allegations.
“I want them to know that I love them, and they didn’t deserve that, and I hope that they can forgive me,” Mangum said of the players.
New York Times, Texas Attorney General Sues New York Doctor for Mailing Abortion Pills, J. David Goodman and Pam Belluck, Dec. 14, 2024 (print ed.). The lawsuit appeared to be among the first attempts to stop doctors from mailing the medication to states that ban abortions.
The Texas attorney general, right, opened a new front in the contentious battle over access to abortion this week by suing a New York doctor for sending abortion pills into Texas. It appeared to be among the first attempts to stop the mailing of such medication into states that ban abortion.
The lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton — filed on Thursday in state court in Collin County, north of Dallas — pits the laws of Texas, which has a near-total ban on abortion, against those of New York, where lawmakers have taken steps to shield doctors from out-of-state prosecution.
Under shield laws, states like New York will refuse to cooperate with attempts by other states to prosecute or sue abortion providers who prescribe and send pills across state lines. Such laws exist in eight states and have allowed doctors there to send more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to women in states with bans.
But legal experts say they expect Texas to try to pursue its case even if it is rebuffed by New York’s law. Such an effort could wind up in federal court, potentially imperiling the ability of women in other states with bans to receive abortion pills by mail, and becoming a major test of whether states can enforce contradictory laws across state lines.
“It’s a huge deal,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Shield doctors mailing pills into ban states was always going to be, I think, both the most consequential in terms of access to abortion and the highest risk.”
In a statement on Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said that she was “committed to maintaining New York’s status as a safe harbor for all who seek abortion care.”
“Make no mistake,” she added. “I will do everything in my power to enforce the laws of New York State.”
Ms. Ziegler said that the case could play out in several ways. She said that New York’s shield law had a provision that allows the doctor being sued, or possibly the state, to countersue against Texas, so the case could end up with dueling lawsuits.
If, as expected, the case ends up in federal court, she said, Texas might argue that shield laws cannot be enforced because the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution requires states to respect other states’ laws. But, Ms. Ziegler said, some legal experts who support shield laws say the laws constitute a “public policy exception” to that clause.
The use of abortion medication has grown since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. One study found that medication is now used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions.More in U.S.
Already, abortion providers have become concerned that a 151-year-old federal anti-vice law known as the Comstock Act could be revived by the incoming Trump administration. The law, which has been rarely enforced, prohibits the mailing of “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials, like pornography, or any item “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.”
In 2022, the Justice Department concluded that abortion medication could be sent by mail if the sender did not intend for the recipient to use them unlawfully. Abortion opponents have been pushing for the incoming administration to rescind that interpretation and say that the act bans all mailing of abortion pills.
In the Texas suit, Mr. Paxton said that Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., provided two medications to a 20-year-old woman in Texas that “resulted in a medical abortion” over the summer. The two medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, are widely used together to end pregnancies up to 12 weeks.
In July, the woman asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room because of “severe bleeding,” and it was there that he first learned that she was nine weeks pregnant, according to the lawsuit.
The man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage,” the suit said, and he went back to their home in Collin County, where he “discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter.”ImagePiles of white pills on a table. Two hands wearing medical gloves are on the table, and one is hovering over a pile.Misoprostol, which is used to end pregnancies.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Dr. Carpenter specializes in reproductive health and is a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization that assists doctors in states where abortion is legal with interstate telemedicine in order to “close the abortion accessibility gap,” according to the group’s website.
She is not licensed to practice medicine in Texas, according to the suit. A colleague of Dr. Carpenter’s said on Friday that Dr. Carpenter would not be commenting on the case.
But the colleague, Dr. Linda Prine, who has been open about prescribing abortion pills under New York’s shield law, said: “Maggie has been providing legally protected abortion care, protected by the State of New York, to people who are greatly in need. Texas has no jurisdiction over us in New York State. Abortion is a human right.”
Mr. Paxton said he was seeking to have the court stop Dr. Carpenter from continuing to provide abortion medication to patients in Texas, and to apply Texas’ ban on abortion to her. The ban carries a penalty of at least $100,000 for each violation.
It was not clear how Mr. Paxton would seek to enforce the state law against a New York doctor. His office did not respond to a request to discuss the suit.
David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who has helped draft and lobby for shield laws, including New York’s, said the suit was precisely what the shield laws were meant to cover.
“Texas has no jurisdiction over Maggie Carpenter,” Mr. Cohen said. “She is not physically present there. The courts cannot order her to do anything, and they cannot get the assistance of the New York courts to order her to do anything because of the shield law.”
But anti-abortion groups were already celebrating the legal challenge.
“If Texas wins, this case could open the door for the state to take further legal action against one of the largest organizations in the illegal abortion cartel: Aid Access,” said Kimberlyn Schwartz, director of media and communication for Texas Right to Life, referring to the Europe-based organization that has been at the forefront of telemedicine abortion and has shield-law providers in several states.
Katie Daniel, the director of legal affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, applauded Mr. Paxton for “leading the charge to hold out-of-state abortion businesses accountable for preying on Texas’ unborn children and their mothers.”
It is not the first time that Mr. Paxton has tried to stretch Texas’ ban beyond state borders. He fought in court this year to reverse a rule by the Biden administration that prevents investigators from inspecting the medical records of women who travel out of state for abortions. It was not clear if Mr. Paxton had been seeking such records.
Ms. Ziegler says the new lawsuit also sets up an interstate battle that is “kind of giving the lie to the whole idea that each state is going to be left to do its own thing,” she said. “That was the winning recipe for the G.O.P. — every state can make its own policy.”
But with abortion pills being mailed across state lines, she said, the conflicts between conservative and liberal states don’t go away. Instead, they become heightened.
“The whole ‘each state is going to leave each other state alone’ thing is not an accurate depiction of what any of the states are doing or want to do,” she said.
New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case, Michael Levenson, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., right, who claimed to have more than 20 “wives” including 10 “brides” under 18, pleaded guilty in April to two felony conspiracy charges.
The self-proclaimed leader of a polygamist sect in Arizona who amassed more than 20 “wives,” including 10 “brides” under 18, was sentenced on Monday to 50 years in prison in connection with what prosecutors described as an interstate child sexual abuse ring, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.
Federal prosecutors said that the man, Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., led a group that victimized girls as young as 9.
Using his status as a self-declared prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mr. Bateman forced his child “brides” to participate in sexual activities with him and with other adult men and women, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Penny choked Mr. Neely in a minutes-long struggle on the floor of a New York subway car. The case reflected the pathologies of post-pandemic New York.
Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked a fellow subway rider on an uptown F train last year, was acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide on Monday, ending a case that had come to exemplify New York City’s post-pandemic struggles.
The jurors decided that Mr. Penny’s actions were not criminal when he held the rider, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold as the two men struggled on the floor of a subway car on May 1, 2023. Mr. Neely, who was homeless and had a history of mental illness, had strode through the subway car that afternoon, yelling at passengers and frightening them, according to witnesses.
After the forewoman announced the verdict, the courtroom erupted, with some people cheering the outcome and others responding with anger.
Upon hearing the words “not guilty,” Mr. Penny’s lawyer, Thomas A. Kenniff, slapped his palm on the defense table and turned to hug Mr. Penny, who had a large grin on his face. Another of his lawyers, Steven Raiser, stood and kissed his client on the cheek.
Mr. Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, lashed out at supporters of Mr. Penny, and the judge asked him to leave the room.
The jurors had spent more than three days trying to come to a unanimous decision on whether Mr. Penny, 26, was guilty of manslaughter — a higher charge — in the death of Mr. Neely, 30. On Friday, the jurors sent two notes to the judge overseeing the trial saying that they had deadlocked.
After the jurors — seven women and five men — sent the first note that morning, the judge, Maxwell T. Wiley, instructed them to resume their deliberations. When the jurors sent the second note in the afternoon, telling Justice Wiley that they were still unable to reach an agreement, he granted the prosecution’s request to dismiss the charge. He sent the jurors home for the weekend, telling them to prepare to begin deliberating on the lesser charge, criminally negligent homicide, on Monday. Ultimately, they decided to acquit Mr. Penny.
The decision was a defeat for the office of Alvin L. Bragg, left, Manhattan’s district attorney. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bragg said that the jury “has now spoken.”
“We deeply respect the jury process and we respect their verdict,” he said.
In his statement, Mr. Bragg also noted that prosecutors and their families had been “besieged with hate and threats — on social media, by phone and over email” throughout the trial. “Simply put, this is unacceptable, and everyone, no matter your opinion on this case, should condemn it,” he said.
New York Times, Youth Pastor Is Charged With Nearly 200 Sex Crimes Going Back Decades, Billy Witz, Nov. 27, 2024. Many of the victims were the West Virginia pastor’s relatives, the police said, including five nieces who filed a complaint against him in 2004.
The state police in West Virginia are continuing to investigate a longtime youth pastor who has now been charged with nearly 200 counts of sexual abuse crimes involving children, many of them his relatives, dating back more than three decades.
The pastor, John W. Radcliff II, was arrested a second time last week after officers investigating a complaint filed against him in September revisited a case from 2004, when five of Mr. Radcliff’s nieces told the police that he had abused them.
“I have no idea what happened, but we never saw charges pressed,” said one niece, Carla Rinehart, whose mother is Mr. Radcliff’s sister.
Ms. Rinehart, 38, said that growing up, she did not know that her relatives had endured the same type of abuse that she says her uncle had committed against her. But when Ms. Rinehart was hospitalized at 17 after a mental breakdown, she began to share her story with family members. Her sister recounted a similar experience at the time, and then their cousins did the same.
A local TV station, citing court documents in Lewis County, W.Va., on the 2004 case, reported that Mr. Radcliff had forced the girls to perform sexual acts on him from 1987 to 1996, and sexually assaulted them in other ways until they were about 12. The victims are all now adults, the news outlet reported.
Lewis is one of four counties where Mr. Radcliff has been charged with abuse.
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U.S. Immigration
Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramirez, Dec. 8, 2024. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported.
And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of the 1.4 million people in the U.S. immigration system who have pending deportation orders cannot be sent back to their home countries, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, posing one of several looming obstacles to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge for a mass removal campaign.
Some orders can’t be carried out because the would-be deportee’s home country won’t take them or limits cooperation with ICE. Others identified for deportation are serving prison terms, or have received a reprieve or deferral from an immigration judge, due to a medical condition, a credible persecution threat or another extenuating factor.
An array of other logistical and legal impediments also could constrain mass deportations, according to current and former ICE officials.
Trump promises to brush aside hurdles and mount a campaign modeled after the harsh roundups of the Eisenhower administration, when the U.S. government expelled hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to Mexico.
“We will begin — and we have no choice — the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said on the campaign trail.
Trump’s aides describe the anticipated campaign as an enforcement blitz that will leverage the power and resources of the U.S. military to roll back the effect of record numbers of illegal border crossings under President Joe Biden. Criminals and those with outstanding deportation orders will be the administration’s priority as of Trump’s inauguration, Jan. 20, aides say.
Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery, Laura Vozzella and Salvador Rizzo, Dec. 8, 2024. Virginia’s governor, shown above in a file photo, has used the arrest of two undocumented men who misunderstood directions to stop at a check-in station to inflame fears over illegal immigration.
There are two versions of a May 3 incident at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia involving two Jordanian men, both undocumented immigrants, who pulled up to the entrance in a box truck.
There’s the mundane account given by federal prosecutors about some confusion over where to check in during an Amazon delivery stop. And there’s the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has been telling for the past six months that makes it sound like two foreigners stormed the gates at the fortified military installation.
“We have folks that have crashed the — illegal immigrants — that have crashed the front gate at Quantico in a box truck, trying to gain access to Quantico,” Youngkin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Oct. 14 in one of multiple national television appearances — plus speeches at the National Republican Convention and a rally in Virginia with then-Republican nominee Donald Trump — where he has invoked the episode to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies.
Federal prosecutors — who initially charged the pair with misdemeanor trespassing, but later dropped those charges — say that, while the Jordanians were in the country illegally and are in the process of being deported, they did not crash the gate or intend to do any harm at Quantico.
Mohammad Dabous, working for an Amazon subcontractor, was trying to make a delivery to the post office in the town of Quantico, which can only be accessed through the gates of the military base, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Amico, who handled the case, said in a court filing. Hasan Hamdan was a passenger in the truck.
“Marine Corps … agents spoke with Mr. Dabous’s supervisor at the subcontractor delivery company, who confirmed Mr. Dabous’s employment and verified the scheduled authorized delivery to the Northern Virginia town of Quantico on May 3, 2024,” Amico wrote in a motion filed Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The same filing noted that neither man had any known terrorist links. “The FBI has not identified any national security concerns regarding either defendant,” wrote Amico, who also said he consulted the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Neither defendant is on the watch list.”
Quantico officials issued Dabous and Hamdan citations for trespassing, a petty offense punishable by a maximum six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. They then turned the pair over to ICE because of their immigration status. The men were later released on bond from ICE custody.
The U.S. attorney’s office dropped the charges Oct. 3, but the deportation proceedings continue.
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U.S. Jobs, Investment, Economy, Pensions
Washington Post, Skyrocketing car-insurance premiums are pushing inflation higher, Andrew Ackerman and Federica Cocco, Dec. 14, 2024. Auto insurance costs in particular are making the Federal Reserve’s job more difficult.
Soaring insurance premiums, particularly for autos, are fueling rising consumer prices and complicating policymakers’ attempts to beat back inflation.
Inflation cooled for much of the year before picking up this fall, with insurance prices for autos, homes and medical care contributing to a 15 percent of the increase in overall consumer prices, economists say. A double-digit spike in auto-insurance prices drove the vast majority of that rise.Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
Indeed, November’s hotter annual inflation gain of 2.73 percent would have been much lower, closer to a 2.37 percent inflation rate, without the outsize increase to auto insurance.
“It is punching well above its weight for that contribution,” said Josh Hirt, a senior economist at Vanguard.
Insurance premiums are among a handful of stubborn costs that have yet to yield much relief for consumers, in addition to shelter costs and other services like medical care.
Car insurance has remained elevated, and it has a bigger influence on overall inflation than other types of insurance because it’s required to drive in most states. And that cost can multiply with more than half of households owning two or more cars, according to census data.
Since just before the pandemic in December 2019, consumers have seen a roughly 51 percent jump in auto-insurance prices, Hirt said.
Car insurance prices revolve around the supply of cars available for purchase, which has been trending far more expensive as manufacturers funnel resources into souped-up versions of pricey models and cut back on cheaper options. New technologies have made vehicles safer, but the costs are higher to replace these more expensive parts. Labor costs to repair cars have also skyrocketed.
Rising accident frequency and severity is another factor, said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, fueled by distracted and reckless driving. “As a result, we are seeing more fatalities and injuries, leading to increased attorney involvement in claims,” she said.
Kyle Morrison, 52, of Seattle, was taken aback by the sharp rise in insurance premiums on his 2017 Kia Forte, which jumped to about $200 per month in December from roughly $130, he said.
Initially, Morrison, a transportation contractor with a clean driving record, thought the price hike by his insurer, Safeco, stemmed from a recent move to a new neighborhood, he said. But his insurance representative told him it largely had to do with price increases “across the board and from all insurance carriers,” Morrison said.
New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting, Jeanna Smialek, Dec. 11, 2024. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent in the year through November. The Federal Reserve is considering whether to cut interest rates next week.
The Hill, Powell calls for ‘change’ in ‘unsustainable’ fiscal path, Taylor Giorno, Dec. 4, 2024. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday that the U.S. is on an “unsustainable” fiscal path and called for a course correction days after the national debt topped $36 trillion for the first time ever.
New York Times, Trump Tax Cuts Won’t Help the Economy Grow, Budget Office Finds, Andrew Duehren, Dec. 4, 2024. A larger debt and higher interest rates would cancel out the boost from keeping individual taxes lower, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found.
New York Times, Opinion: Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America, Paul Krugman, right, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). It’s late 2025, and Donald Trump has done what he said he would do: impose high tariffs — taxes on imports — on goods coming from abroad, with extremely high tariffs on imports from China. These tariffs have had exactly the effect many economists predicted, although Trump insisted otherwise: higher prices for American buyers.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
Well, U.S. trade law gives the executive branch broad discretion in tariff-setting, including the ability to grant exemptions in special cases. So you apply for one of those exemptions. Will your request be granted?
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
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Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, E.P.A. Bans Cancer-Causing Chemicals Used in Dry Cleaning, Hiroko Tabuchi, Dec. 9, 2024. The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday banned two solvents found in everyday products that can cause cancer and other serious diseases. It was a move long sought by environmental and health advocates, even as they braced for what could be a wave of deregulation by the incoming Trump administration.
For decades, communities close to factories, airports, dry cleaners and other sites have lived with the consequences of exposure to trichloroethylene, or TCE, a toxic chemical used in cleaners, spot removers, lubricants and glue.
TCE is known to cause liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and to damage the nervous and immune systems. It has been found in drinking water nationwide and was the subject of a 1995 book that became a movie, “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. The E.P.A. is banning all uses of the chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was overhauled in 2016 to give the agency greater authority to regulate harmful chemicals.
The E.P.A. also banned all consumer uses of perchloroethylene, used in dry-cleaning and in automotive-care products. Though it is less harmful than TCE, the solvent, also called Perc, can cause liver, kidney, brain and testicular cancer, and can damage kidneys, the liver and the immune system.
The E.P.A.’s ban of Perc still allows for a range of industrial uses, including in aviation and defense, with the provision that strict rules must be in place to protect workers. Both bans were initially proposed in 2023.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 9, 2024. Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
Many of these places are major food producers, such as Argentina, Spain and the Black Sea region, said Narcisa Pricope, one of the report’s authors and a land systems scientist at Mississippi State University. Others, like South Sudan, are vulnerable to conflict and political instability.
The aridity crisis is unfolding “in our lifetime,” Dr. Pricope said. “This is affecting our children.”
Worldwide in recent years, nearly 400,000 square miles of the planet’s healthy and productive land has become degraded annually. Under the 30-year-old U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, countries committed themselves to halting the devastation.
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
The Mercury News, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment, Staff Report, Dec. 14, 2024. Suchir Balaji, 26, claimed the company broke copyright law.
A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week.
Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said.
The medical examiner’s office determined the manner of death to be suicide and police officials this week said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”
Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.
Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.
Its public release in late 2022 spurred a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI from authors, computer programmers and journalists, who say the company illegally stole their copyrighted material to train its program and elevate its value past $150 billion.
The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including the New York Times, to sue OpenAI in the past year.
In an interview with the New York Times published Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
Balaji grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley to study computer science. It was then he became a believer in the potential benefits that artificial intelligence could offer society, including its ability to cure diseases and stop aging, the Times reported. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the newspaper.
But his outlook began to sour in 2022, two years after joining OpenAI as a researcher. He grew particularly concerned about his assignment of gathering data from the internet for the company’s GPT-4 program, which analyzed text from nearly the entire internet to train its artificial intelligence program, the news outlet reported.
The practice, he told the Times, ran afoul of the country’s “fair use” laws governing how people can use previously published work. In late October, he posted an analysis on his personal website arguing that point.
No known factors “seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” Balaji wrote. “That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.”
Reached by this news agency, Balaji’s mother requested privacy while grieving the death of her son.
In a Nov. 18 letter filed in federal court, attorneys for The New York Times named Balaji as someone who had “unique and relevant documents” that would support their case against OpenAI. He was among at least 12 people — many of them past or present OpenAI employees — the newspaper had named in court filings as having material helpful to their case, ahead of depositions.
Generative artificial intelligence programs work by analyzing an immense amount of data from the internet and using it to answer prompts submitted by users, or to create text, images or videos.
When OpenAI released its ChatGPT program in late 2022, it turbocharged an industry of companies seeking to write essays, make art and create computer code. Many of the most valuable companies in the world now work in the field of artificial intelligence, or manufacture the computer chips needed to run those programs. OpenAI’s own value nearly doubled in the past year.
News outlets have argued that OpenAI and Microsoft — which is in business with OpenAI and also has been sued by The Mercury News — have plagiarized and stole its articles, undermining their business models.
“Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely,” the newspapers’ lawsuit said.
OpenAI has staunchly refuted those claims, stressing that all of its work remains legal under “fair use” laws.
“We see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience,” the company said when the lawsuit was filed.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, married for the fifth time in August 20124, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday. Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp. The couple announced their engagement in March.
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Murdoch wanted to change the terms of his family’s trust to ensure that his son Lachlan would be his successor upon his death.
Rupert Murdoch, right, has faced a setback in his bid to cement his son Lachlan’s future control of his media empire, after a Nevada probate commissioner rejected his bid to change his family’s trust, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
Murdoch, 93, initiated the effort to change the terms of the trust last year to preserve the conservative orientation of his sprawling media empire, which includes U.S. businesses Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. As first reported by the New York Times this summer, the elder Murdoch was concerned that a “lack of consensus” among his three other older children would have financial consequences for the company.
But probate commissioner Edmund “Joe” Gorman Jr. ruled against the effort, deeming it a “carefully crafted charade,” the New York Times reported on Monday afternoon. The case will now move to a district judge who could choose to affirm the recommendation, deny it or send it back for additional inquiry.
“We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members,” a spokesperson representing Prudence, Elisabeth and James Murdoch told The Washington Post in a statement.
The three siblings strongly objected to their father’s effort, which set off the current legal battle. The trust had been set up as part of divorce proceedings between Murdoch and his second wife, the former Anna Murdoch Mann.
Lachlan is ideologically aligned with his father and would be expected to continue the editorial positioning that has made the company successful. There was concern that his three siblings could choose to reorient the company in a more moderate direction after their father’s passing. James, in particular, has become a vocal supporter of liberal causes since he formally exited his father’s media company in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” But the three other siblings have not publicly expressed any desire to replace Lachlan or to change the company’s editorial direction.
Lachlan, 53, who has flitted in and out of the Murdoch media fold, became his father’s most likely successor after he was named chairman and CEO of the Fox Corporation in 2019. His grasp on that position only tightened after his father announced last fall that he would step down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., which includes the company’s newspaper and publishing portfolio.
Lachlan was the only one of the patriarch’s four older children who attended their father’s fifth wedding in June to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, a sign of the deep-seated family tensions at play.
The drama in Nevada was almost entirely hidden from the public and the media by dint of the commissioner, who determined that the trust battle was a private matter, rejecting efforts by a coalition of media companies — including The Post — to open up the case. Sealed hearings in the case were held in September. While no decisions in the case have been made public, the online docket now shows the status of the case to be “pending inactive.”
The elder Murdoch has been backed in his legal efforts by William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Previous attempts at a settlement that would have resolved the dispute without a court case were unsuccessful, though they could continue.
Murdoch’s company is still facing a host of legal challenges, including a defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic and shareholder lawsuits alleging that Fox executives were deficient in preventing defamatory content from airing on the network.
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Top Headlines
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Trump Transition News, Commentary
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
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President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
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Russian War Against Ukraine
- New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent
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Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
- New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial
- New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel
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U.S. Defense, Foreign Policy, Security
More U.S. Legal News
- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
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- New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case
- New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway
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U.S. Immigration
- Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramire
- Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows
- Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery
Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
U.S. Economy, Jobs, Pensions
Energy, Environment, Transportation, Climate Change, Disasters
Media, High-Tech, Culture, Education
Top Stories
New York Times, President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 1,500 Americans, a Record for One Day, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Mark Landler, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). Many of those being granted clemency had been placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic.
President Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest grant of clemency by an American president in a single day, the White House announced in a statement on Thursday.
The commutations affect mostly those who had been released from prison and placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic. The people who received pardons were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including possession of marijuana.
A pardon wipes out a conviction, while a commutation leaves the guilty verdict intact but reduces some or all of the punishment.
The announcement came two weeks after Mr. Biden issued a pardon for his son, Hunter, who had been convicted of gun possession and income tax evasion. That decision was harshly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats because Mr. Biden had long ruled out clemency for his son.
Politico, Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences, promises ‘more steps in the weeks ahead,’ Andrew Howard, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330.
President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of almost 1,500 people and pardoned another 39, the most ever in a single day, the White House announced on Thursday.
The White House said in its announcement that those receiving clemency “have shown successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” The 39 pardon recipients had all committed non-violent crimes, and the commutations were for people who were placed in home confinement during the pandemic.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As President, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
Following Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, he faced pressure from some Democrats, as well as outside advocacy groups, to use his clemency powers more widely before his term ends in January. Biden indicated in his statement that he “will take more steps in the weeks ahead.” “My Administration will continue reviewing clemency petitions to advance equal justice under the law, promote public safety, support rehabilitation and reentry, and provide meaningful second chances.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who was one of the Democrats pressuring Biden to issue pardons, praised the president’s decision, calling it a “meaningful and historic action.”
“Thanks to President Biden, today a near 1,500 families will have their lives changed forever and I congratulate each and every family on this new beginning,” she said in a statement.
Still, Pressley is pushing for more clemency actions before Biden’s term ends.
“With 39 days remaining in his presidency, President Biden has the power to continue to use his clemency authority to change and save the lives of many, many other Americans behind the wall,” she said. “It is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, and it is a matter of legacy.”
The progressive group Popular Democracy in Action struck a similar tone, praising Biden’s decision but also telling the president “do not stop now.”
New York Times, News Analysis: Why Wray’s Resignation May Signal a Shift in F.B.I. Tradition, Devlin Barrett, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director changes with the administration.
Christopher A. Wray, right, had considered resigning as F.B.I. director before. More than once, confronted with angry demands from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, he contemplated calling it quits.
When Mr. Wray on Wednesday announced his intent to do so, it was because he believed staying on the job into a second Trump term risked significant disruptions to the work force and its mission.
Mr. Trump had already declared his plan to replace him with Kash Patel, a tough-talking loyalist who has vowed to force out bureau leaders and empty its Washington headquarters.
In conceding to the reality of raw power, Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director is more of a political post that changes with the administration.
For decades, F.B.I. directors have been appointed to 10-year terms to insulate them from the shifting winds of politics. Few F.B.I. directors stay a full decade, and the circumstances of Mr. Wray’s departure after seven years suggest that insulation has worn thin.
New York Times, Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Dec. 13, 2024. Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.
That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.
Much of Mr. Siri’s work — including the polio petition filed in 2022 — has been on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit whose founder is a close ally of Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Siri also represented Mr. Kennedy during his presidential campaign.
New York Times, Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Pete Hegseth, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 13, 2024 (print ed.). After President-elect Trump was persuaded to stick with his embattled choice to lead the Pentagon, a swarm of supporters mobilized to pressure senators.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon was battered by damaging headlines: Drinking. Extramarital affairs. An allegation of sexual assault, which he denied.
Republican senators — emboldened after tanking Mr. Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the scandal-ridden Matt Gaetz — were going public with their concerns. Mr. Trump was getting sick of hearing about it all, and he told confidants he was serious about picking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to replace him.
But within 48 hours, Mr. Trump had changed his mind. He was going to see if Mr. Hegseth could survive.
People close to the president-elect had been telling him that this was a moment that would test his power as he prepared to return to Washington. It would be catastrophic, they argued, if he allowed Republican senators, like Joni Ernst of Iowa, to obstruct his mandate.
Kaja Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.(AFP photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images).
Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns , Elena Giordano, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.).The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, says Russia has learned how to influence elections through new technologies.
“I see the examples from Romania, but also other parts, that [the] Russians have really cracked the code on how to influence elections,” Kallas said at POLITICO’s P28 event Tuesday evening.
Responding to a question about the influence of new technologies on democracy, Kallas said she is “really worried.”
“Democracy is based on trust, and if you can’t trust elections anymore then how can you trust the outcome?” she asked.
Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair are outdated and don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.
“I think we should take them very seriously,” she said.
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
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Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.)A handful of Silicon Valley executives could help transform the country’s largest bureaucracy — and benefit themselves while trying.
A culture clash is headed for Washington that will pit the risk-embracing, fast-first nature of Silicon Valley against the lumbering bureaucracy of the country’s largest federal agency.
Donald Trump has already tapped billionaire finance executives to be Navy secretary and the Pentagon’s No. 2, and startup world successes are in the running for other Pentagon posts. If they all make it, the long-frustrated kings of the Valley who bristle at the doddering pace of Pentagon decision-making could force real change in the building — and benefit themselves while trying.
They’ll be tasked with building weapons faster, fixing a broken shipbuilding system and matching China’s tech prowess. And while every new administration tries to clean up the Pentagon, this crew of outsiders has animated the tech sector.
“A lot of us are hoping there’s a revolution coming,” Joe Lonsdale, founder of software company Palantir and startup investor said at a recent defense forum, “where we hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy.”
The Trump team has worked to fill the Pentagon with picks such as Stephen Feinberg, a wealthy investor with no experience inside the building, as deputy secretary of Defense. Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, is being considered for the Pentagon’s top research and engineering job, as POLITICO first reported. Trae Stephens, co-founder and chair of Anduril Industries, is also in the mix for a high-ranking job at the Pentagon.
The executives all have investments and stakes in multiple companies working with the Pentagon and will need to determine how they detangle a web of potential conflicts of interest — such as Anduril’s drone development or Palantir’s software platforms the Pentagon is helping fund.
New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History, David Leonhardt, Graphics by Albert Sun, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered the country, government data shows.
The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.
That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing, Ashley Southall and Maria Cramer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The man who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two officials.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare at a company investors’ day, was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said.
The shooting occurred early Dec. 4 as Mr. Thompson arrived early at a Hilton hotel on West 54th Street to prepare for the UnitedHealthcare investors’ meeting.
The Bulwark, Political Commentary: By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President, Andrew Egger, Dec. 11, 2024. An unsettling number of House Republicans are open to Trump’s threats against the House January 6th committee.
How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”
A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct. January 6th Committee Democrats were quick yesterday to deny that they had done anything untoward: “There’s nothing we did as a January 6th Select Committee that violates the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the committee, told NBC News.
For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the January 6th Committee criminally destroyed records in an attempt to bury facts that would exonerate him. (As fact checks have repeatedly shown, Trump’s claim is a totally baseless—a funhouse-mirror distortion of claims made back in 2023 by House Republicans who were then already investigating the work of the January 6th Committee and who were crabby that, for instance, they were only being provided with transcripts of depositions rather than video footage.)
For the most part, House Republicans who spoke to The Bulwark were careful not to actually say that they believed, like Trump, that the committee had destroyed evidence. But they were comfortable entertaining the possibility it had (despite those fact checks) and content with the idea of prosecuting lawmakers if they did. “I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”
Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee. (Raskin’s office did not return a request for comment.) It’s the committee which Comer chairs and on which Boebert and Burchett serve. That those three lawmakers showed comfort with Trump targeting the January 6th Committee members underscores the degree to which partisan affiliations now overwhelm institutional prerogatives.
The Oversight Committee exists specifically to provide congressional accountability and scrutiny to the actions of the executive branch. But none of these Oversight Republicans had an issue with Trump vowing open retribution against House members who performed that sort of accountability work during the last Congress.
When I asked Comer whether he was worried about the chilling effect of the president accusing an entire House committee of collective crimes, he dodged: “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Boebert wasn’t worried either: “I don’t lack confidence” in the House’s ability to do oversight, she said as she hopped into her car.
Not every House Republican The Bulwark spoke to endorsed Trump’s modest proposal of jail for the J6 committee. But none were willing to publicly criticize it either. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), considered one of the more bipartisan remaining members of the House, declined all questions about Trump’s interview in a sequence of terse monosyllables. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—typically as good for a soundbite as any human in Washington—smirked and ignored The Bulwark’s question as she walked to the House floor.
Remarkably, while some GOP lawmakers were practically licking their chops over the prospect of some of their colleagues facing legal retribution, others incorrectly argued Trump had never called for such retribution at all.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.). “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”
Over on the other side of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins was doing her part to avoid the controversy by focusing on the less openly bloodthirsty elements of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. “It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” she told reporters yesterday, alluding to Trump’s insistence that he would find “retribution” in office not by looking backwards but by being a successful president. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country, Jonathan Weisman, Dec. 10, 2024. When Donald Trump said Robert Kennedy Jr. could “go wild” on health, he might not have expected him to go to battle against the president-elect’s own voters.
The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.
To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.
To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”
Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies. Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.
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New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
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Trump Transition News, Commentary
New York Times, Trump Transition: F.B.I. Director to Step Down, Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Wray told F.B.I. employees he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, right, told bureau employees on Wednesday that he intended in January, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.
Mr. Wray made the disclosure while addressing employees Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Wray added that he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.
Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.
Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.
But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.
His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by searching the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.
“He invaded Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump told NBC News in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.
In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.
His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”
“If Kash gets in, he’ll be taking somebody’s place, and that somebody is the man you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with NBC News, referring to Mr. Wray.
Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.
At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.
Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.
The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.
Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.
After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.
“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel, right (and author of the book Government Gangsters, shown at left, is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.
Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sought to weigh in on F.B.I. operations and at times expressed frustration that presidents typically stayed out of the bureau’s business.
“I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in 2017. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 11, 2024. The terrifying implications of pardoning insurrectionists who killed and maimed…
This past weekend, in his Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker (shown above), Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to pardon the people who attacked our Capitol, killing five civilians and three police officers and sending more than 140 cops to the hospital.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said of pardoning Jan. 6 killers. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Most media and political observers and commentators appear to be of the opinion that this is simply Trump’s way of thanking the people who made what he considers a heroic effort to keep him in office through violence. That would be bad enough, but experts at The Critical Internet Studies Institute are worried that there may be a much more sinister explanation.
If they’re right, it would also go a long way toward explaining his picks for Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and FBI director.
This theory, increasingly shared among counterterrorism experts and people who monitor violent rightwing extremist groups, suggests that the real reason Trump would do the pardons (and is unafraid of discussing them) is because he’s recruiting. And you don’t need to go back to 1930s Europe to find examples of how that could work.
Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, for example, has often used non-state actors to intimidate and even kill his political enemies. The most well-known is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club, aka “Putin’s Angels,” run by a man who calls himself “the Surgeon.”
They helped Putin invade Crimea and Ukraine, but most of their activity is against protestors, “communists” (anybody opposing Putin), and the queer community in Russia.
Similarly, five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing Hungarian “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”
Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”
Language strikingly similar, if not milder, to Trump‘s way of describing Black people, immigrants, and liberals.
Orbán refused to condemn Bayer or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white, Orbán-supporting Hungarian militias.
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Armed rightwing militia groups in the United States have been on a recruiting jag of their own in anticipation of Trump’s presidency, according to press reports and terrorism experts. For example, Reuters notes:
“The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.”
Similarly, Wired magazine reports that Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), is preparing for something like war:
“’This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,’ says Seddon. ‘Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.’”
El Pais tells the story of armed militia groups who are looking forward to action on America’s southern border when Trump allows it. Referencing them, Tom Homan, who Trump has appointed as his “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:
“There are thousands of retired agents, border patrols, retired military personnel who want to come and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do deportation operations.”
They also cite a Wired article that quotes Tim Foley, head of Arizona Border Recon, a white “civilian patrol group,” as saying they’re doing outreach:
“We’re in talks with a few different people. We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”
It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.
Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:
“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
More recently, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth, left, asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”
Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”
Our timid national media refuse to even consider such a savage scenario, but America should brace itself as Trump has not let up on his violent rhetoric and neither have his followers. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
“You know, when you listen to these comments and watch these videos, what you are forced to consider is the message that Donald Trump is sending, because it is not just to the January 6th defendants.
“It is to the people he hopes will support him in this next term, and the message is: ‘Support me at all costs, use violence, commit crimes, I will take care of you.’
“I find that to be deeply frightening.”
January 6th taught us that Trump and some of the people following him are deadly serious and willing to use violence and even murder to achieve their goals.
America needs to get ready. President Biden should be preparing (or reassuring) us. And, if the latter, explaining why.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, in a red dress, addressing the Republican National Convention.Kimberly Guilfoyle has been engaged to Donald Trump Jr. since late 2020 (Associated Press photo by J. Scott Applewhite).
New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley, Dec. 11, 2024. The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr., Ms. Guilfoyle’s fiancé, has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida.
It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly — the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece.
The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson.
The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as “incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on” with a “stunning ‘it girl.’”
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, 46, did not return a request for comment on his relationship with Ms. Anderson, or on his engagement with Ms. Guilfoyle, to whom he has been betrothed since late 2020. Ms. Anderson, 38, also did not return requests for comment.
In his announcement of her posting to Greece, the president-elect called Ms. Guilfoyle “a close friend and ally,” but made no mention of her relationship with his son.
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States,” the elder Mr. Trump wrote, in a post on Truth Social.ImageBettina Anderson, wearing a white dress with a green floral pattern, sits on a bench in front of a pink and green artworkBettina Anderson was recently seen with Donald Trump Jr. in Palm Beach celebrating her birthday.Credit...Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images for FIGUE
The suggestions of a love triangle have been swirling for several months, including in July, at the Republican National Convention, where Ms. Anderson was spotted sitting behind Mr. Trump — and Ms. Guilfoyle — in a red dress. Ms. Guilfoyle spoke at the convention, saying, “Donald Trump will never stop fighting for you” about his father.
But speculation about Ms. Anderson’s closeness with the president-elect’s son intensified in September, with reports that the pair were seen kissing during a brunch not long before. (Adding a layer of intrigue were various reports that Ms. Anderson was a friend of his ex-wife, Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children.)
Suspicions about the durability of Mr. Trump and Ms. Guilfoyle’s engagement were given more fodder when Ms. Guilfoyle did not appear in a post-election family portrait, which did feature Vanessa Trump and their children. (Melania Trump — the once and future first lady — was also absent, though the photo did feature Elon Musk.)
New York Times, Musk’s Foundation Gave Away Less Money Than Required in 2023, David A. Fahrenthold and Theodore Schleifer, Dec. 12, 2024. Private foundations must donate 5 percent of their assets every year. Elon Musk’s enormous charity missed that standard for three consecutive years.
For the third year in a row, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation did not give away enough of its money.
And it did not miss the mark by a small amount.
New tax filings show that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the amount it was required to give away in 2023. Now, Mr. Musk has until the end of the year to distribute that money, or he will be required to pay a sizable penalty to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk, in his new role as a leader of what President-elect Donald J. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, is promising to downsize and rearrange the entire federal government — including the I.R.S. But the tax records show he has struggled to meet a basic I.R.S. rule that is required of all charity leaders, no matter how small or big their foundations.
Mr. Musk's is one of the biggest. His foundation has more than $9 billion in assets, including millions of shares in Tesla, his electric vehicle company. By law, all private foundations must give away 5 percent of those assets every year. The aim is to ensure that wealthy donors like Mr. Musk use these organizations to help the public instead of simply benefiting from the tax deductions they are afforded.
New York Times, Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous, Lisa Friedman, Dec. 12, 2024. Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.
Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels.
His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
The argument offered by Mr. Wright, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to run the Energy Department, ignores the fact that wind, solar and other renewable energy are cleaner and increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency says clean energy is coming online globally at an “unprecedented rate” and will play a significant role in the future. In some places, renewable energy has been able to displace fossil fuels.
New York Times, Health Insurance Workers Fearful Amid Public Anger After Slaying of C.E.O., Reed Abelson, Mitch Smith, Katie Benner and Amy Julia Harris, Dec. 12, 2024. The fatal shooting last week of an executive on the streets of New York City plunged his family members and colleagues into grief. For rank-and-file employees across the health insurance industry, the killing has left them with an additional emotion: fear, with many frightened for their own safety and feeling under attack for their work.
Health insurance companies have increased security measures since the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, and as an outpouring of online rage toward the industry has followed. Health care leaders have spoken with frustration about feeling vilified, and in the Minneapolis suburbs where United is headquartered, police officers stepped up protection of the company’s offices.
“Clearly the employees have been shaken,” said Mayor Brad Wiersum of Minnetonka, who said the city was working “just to provide that reassurance and that security, to let people know that we are going to do everything we can to keep them safe.”
One UnitedHealthcare worker who processes claims described being cleareyed about the American health care system’s shortcomings, but also believes that she and her colleagues did their best to help patients within the limits of that system. Like most workers interviewed, she did not want to be named because, given the reaction after Mr. Thompson’s killing, she feared for her own safety.
The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo, Dec. 10, 2024. There is confidence in the outcome: ‘They’re all going to get confirmed.’
It didn’t take long for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to realize she had stepped in it. Shortly after Ernst offered a chilly reception to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head the department of defense, she recognized she was in trouble politically, with grassroots Republicans calling for her head.
“How do I make this go away?” a flabbergasted Ernst said to an intermediary, according to a top Donald Trump adviser who received the message.
The answer was obvious to everyone involved. All Ernst had to do was back away from her tacit opposition to Hegseth and the MAGA dogs would stop baying.
Sure enough, on Monday, Ernst changed her tune—not explicitly saying she’d vote for Hegseth’s confirmation but saying she supported him in the process.
By then, the Trump team was feeling good, not just about her vote but about the slate of confirmations to come.
“It sent a message,” according to a top Trump adviser involved in the discussions with Ernst who relayed them to The Bulwark. “Nobody wants to be Joni.”
The desire not to get in MAGA’s crosshairs has spread throughout much of the Senate Republican conference in recent days. It’s the result of both a remarkable swelling of grassroots energy to demand party loyalty from GOP officials and the belief—among some members themselves—that it would send a bad message to see a second Trump nominee go down after Matt Gaetz’s failed bid for attorney general.
Leading that charge has been Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP conference chair, who’s tasked with charting the course for his party’s messaging in the chamber (a post for which he beat Ernst last month). Cotton, a vet like Ernst and Hegseth, was increasingly annoyed with political chatter that the Senate was essentially duty-bound to vote down one of Trump’s picks because of tradition (Gaetz never made it to a vote).
So Cotton directed staff to research the history of Senate confirmations and he quickly concluded that the GOP conference needed to support not just Hegseth, but all of Trump’s controversial nominees
.“I expect our Republican Senate is going to confirm all of President Trump's nominees,” he said Monday morning. In a separate post, he added: “Of the 72 cabinet secretary nominees since the Clinton transition, only 2 nominees have ever received NO votes from the president-elect’s party. No one should be surprised that the Republican Senate will confirm President Trump’s nominees.”
Cotton’s bravado and Ernst’s buckling underscored the choice facing 53 Republican senators in the weeks ahead: board the Trump train or get tied to the tracks.
As of early this week, an emboldened Trump team and top supporters believe that 50-plus members will get on board not just for Hegseth’s confirmation but for Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (secretary of health and human services), and Kash Patel (FBI director) as well.
“They’re all going to get confirmed,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl.) told The Bulwark. “We’re going to respect the fact that he [Trump] got 77 million votes, respect the fact that he won in a landslide, respect that he’s the president.”
Donald Trump on NBC's Meet the Press on December 8, 2024.
Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail, Staff Report, Dec. 8-9, 2024. In his first sit-down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he still plans to pardon those convicted for their role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while he said that the members of committee tasked with investigating it “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
“So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded, adding that he thinks “everybody” on the January 6th Committee should go to jail. Cheney served as vice chair of the January 6th Committee, which concluded in 2022 with a criminal referral to the Justice Department over Trump’s role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump said that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, but “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
In the wide ranging interview, Trump said that he plans to issue pardons to the January 6th rioters on his first day in office, adding that many of those convicted have been in prison “for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump also vowed action on the first day in office to end birthright citizenship, and he reiterated plans for mass deportations.
Welker challenged him on his ability to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants, given the tremendous resources needed to carry out such a plan.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump did say that he wanted to “work something out” to come up with a plan in how to handle “dreamers,” who were children when they were brought to the United States illegally.
Welker asked Trump about his previous pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden.
“Where did I say that?” Trump said.
Welker noted that he posted on Truth Social on June 12, 2023.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to go after Joe Biden?” Welker asked him.
Trump told her that he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
Pressed again on whether he would go after Biden, Trump said, “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump defended his plans for mass tariffs, saying that he doesn’t believe economists who predict costs will be passed on to consumers. But he told Welker that he cannot guarantee that Americans won’t end up paying more.
He said, “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation.”
Then-U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) helping preside as members of the House Jan. 6 Investigative Committee.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative, said President-elect Donald J. Trump “lied about” the bipartisan House committee that investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Former Representative Liz Cheney on Sunday called President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to imprison her and other members of a congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Responding to comments Mr. Trump made in an interview aired on Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Ms. Cheney said the incoming president “lied about the Jan. 6 select committee” and that there would be “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” to prosecute its members.
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” she said in a statement. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”
She continued: “This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Her statement came after Mr. Trump repeated his unfounded allegation that the committee destroyed evidence during its investigation.
“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” he said, referring to Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman. “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”
He went on: “And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”
In fact, the committee did not destroy all evidence. It released an 800-page report as well as 140 transcripts of testimony and various memos, emails and voice mail messages. The evidence remains online. Mr. Thompson explained in a letter last year that the committee had asked the executive branch to go through some material first to protect “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.”
Ms. Cheney pointed to that letter in her statement on Sunday. “Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson,” she said. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people targeted by Mr. Trump like Ms. Cheney as part of the president-elect’s promised “retribution” against his foes. Ms. Cheney did not say in her statement whether she would accept such a pardon to protect herself from a politically motivated prosecution by the next administration.
But she said that the evidence that should be made public was the material gathered by the special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. “The Justice Department should ensure that all that material is preserved and cannot be destroyed. As much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report.”
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 11, 2024. Should Fox Kennedy be selected for the role, she would have a major hill to climb in the confirmation process.
In new reporting from Axios, Donald Trump's selection to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now pushing to have his daughter in law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, to serve as deputy director of the CIA. Fox Kennedy has a long history of working for the Agency and served as an undercover spy for nearly a decade.
But, we are now learning that the reason Kennedy is pushing for his daughter in law to join the Agency in a top role stems from his belief that she could help uncover secrets regarding the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
RFK Jr. has long spread conspiracy theories related to his uncle's assasination, claiming that the federal government and the CIA may have been involved in the assassination plot. There has been no evidence released to support Kennedy's claims.
According to Axios, Fox Kennedy would have a steep uphill climb to be confirmed should she be selected as the deputy director of the Agency. When she first left the Agency, Fox Kennedy published a memoir without getting prior approval from the Agency's vetting team.
In addition, Fox Kennedy has made concerning comments about ISIS. During a 2016 interview, Fox Kennedy stated that "The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them." The enemy she was referring to was ISIS.
Whether Trump listens to RFK Jr. and nominates her, however, remains to be seen.
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm, Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout, Dec. 11, 2024. Gaetz is a longtime friend to John Morgan, a prominent trial lawyer.Matt Gaetz raises his fist in the air.
Matt Gaetz may be taking on a second job.
Prominent Florida megadonor John Morgan is actively in talks with the former Republican lawmaker about joining his firm, Morgan & Morgan, he told POLITICO in an extensive interview. The job would be in addition to the role Gaetz announced on Tuesday that he’s joining the conservative One America News Network as a prime-time host beginning in January.
Morgan praised Gaetz, who recently withdrew from consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, for his positions on marijuana legalization, property insurance and processed foods.
“A lot of the things that my politics are, Matt Gaetz’s are,” said Morgan, who has given heavily to Democratic candidates but is registered in Florida as a no-party affiliated voter.
Morgan said that he could see Gaetz being helpful in a recent lawsuit his firm filed that alleges major food companies specifically engineered their products to be addictive and then marketed them to kids, contributing to chronic illness.
In a text exchange, Gaetz acknowledged that he and Morgan had “talked about collaborating professionally” and said he was grateful for their friendship.
“I’ve known John Morgan for more than a decade,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot of advice from him on matters of law, policy and politics. I have great respect for how he stands to the powerful for his clients — and he wins.”
The job at Morgan & Morgan would be a high-profile landing for Gaetz, who resigned from the House after he dropped out of the process to be Trump’s attorney general, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz has denied the allegations, and a Department of Justice investigation into him resulted in no charges. Yet the accusations quickly dogged his confirmation process, and Gaetz left public service altogether.
The former member of Congress has also been seen as a potential Republican candidate for governor in 2026, a contest that has been increasingly fluid as Trump tapped numerous Floridians to hold jobs in his administration. Gaetz has already tapped into a potential campaign theme by siding with critics — like Morgan — that the GOP-controlled Legislature kowtowed to the property insurance industry when it passed a measure DeSantis signed into law that makes it much harder to sue insurers.
Morgan said the details of the potential job are still under discussion and that he was waiting until the news about Gaetz’s new TV spot settled down. He said that his firm hired “finders, minders and grinders” and that he saw Gaetz as a potential “finder-minder” who he saw at the “36,000-foot” level versus “in the trenches.”
“I know he’s controversial,” Morgan said of Gaetz, “but I’m fucking controversial.”
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 11, 2024. Trump’s association with Mel Gibson highlights troubling endorsement.
During a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, actor Mel Gibson implied that California wildfires might be deliberately set by political opponents of Donald Trump. Gibson stated:
"…4 years of thinly veiled Marxism, and, you know, now I think what we have is a four-year grace period. But we have to work hard for all of it. And I don’t know. The president’s got a big job on his hands to turn this place around. A lot of damage was done, and they continue to start fires, like around my house..."Mel Gibson at Mar-a-Lago
Mel Gibson: “they continue to start fires, like around my house...”
Gibson also praised former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and referred to Trump’s potential second term as a "four-year grace period" from what he described as Marxist policies. Flynn associates himself with fringe MAGA personalities who push conspiracies. Trump HitlerTrump Echoes Hitler: Migrants "Poisoning the Blood of Our Country"Read More
The comments come against a backdrop of devastating wildfires in Malibu, California, which have scorched thousands of acres and destroyed homes. Gibson’s claims mirror baseless conspiracy theories and detract from the real causes of these disasters.Mel Gibson, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Flynn, and Kid Rock at Mar-a-Lago
Gibson’s presence at Mar-a-Lago and his endorsement of Trump raise serious questions about the former president’s associations. Gibson’s history is riddled with controversy. He was infamously caught on tape berating his ex-girlfriend with vile, racist language, suggesting she would be sexually assaulted by “[n-words]” for her clothing choices.
Additionally, Gibson has a long-documented history of anti-Semitic remarks, including a drunken tirade in 2006 which he claimed that Jews are responsible for “all the wars in the world.”Mel Gibson, Trump, and Roger Stone in 2023
Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 11, 2024. Oligarchs have been getting slighted for far too long.
During her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris laid out an economic vision for America that was designed to help people at the bottom get ahead.
Well, here comes the Convict-Elect of the United States — and he’s all ‘fuck that noise. you know who really needs our help?’
‘Billionaires.’
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Finally, America’s beleaguered billionaires are getting the fast track to the help they so desperately need.
Are you an oligarch? well then step right to the head of the line, bro. all you have to do is grease Dear Leader’s palm to the tune of a bil, and every door will open for you.
What do you need, some permits? here you go, pal. is some annoying judge hassling you about regulations? put your mind at rest, ace. we’re going to make those regulations go fuckity-bye.
did you notice how Donny goes out of his way to mention that his little pay-for-play scheme includes ‘environmental approvals’? that’s pretty specific, isn’t it?
Hey, you know who’s a billionaire in bad need of a free pass to despoil the environment?
New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office, Sharon Otterman, Dec. 11, 2024. Harvard, Penn and U.S.C. were among the universities and colleges that issued advisories in anticipation of possible travel bans.
With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are advising their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
During his last administration, Mr. Trump imposed restrictions on entry to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, a policy that stranded thousands of students who were abroad at the time. Later in his term, Mr. Trump added more countries to the restricted travel list. And he has spoken of wanting to reimpose those restrictions once he is back in the White House.
“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell’s Office of Global Learning warned students on its website late last month, advising them to be back in the United States before the start of spring-semester classes on Jan. 21. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added to this list, particularly China and India.”
Colleges are also warning all students to prepare for possible delays at the border and in the processing of paperwork.
“Budget time ahead of the semester start, prior to the January Martin Luther King holiday,” Harvard advised on its website for international students who have concerns.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University have issued comparable advisories and guidance. The advice is precautionary in nature, since the policies of the new administration remain uncertain.
Mr. Trump has said that he wanted to bring back or strengthen some of the travel restrictions he imposed in his first term.
New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power, Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina, Dec. 11, 2024. After cloaking a bill that strips key powers from Democrats as hurricane aid, the state’s legislature overrode a veto from Gov. Roy Cooper to pass it into law.
Republicans in North Carolina muscled through a sweeping expansion of their own power on Wednesday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that will give the G.O.P. increased control over elections, judicial appointments and whether its laws stand up in the courts.
Perhaps most striking was how Republicans did it: They titled the legislation “Disaster Relief” but filled it with measures that had nothing to do with aid for areas devastated by Hurricane Helene and instead eroded the power of top state Democrats. Just 13 of the bill’s 131 pages dealt directly with the storm.
Republicans moved swiftly to pass the bill last month, only for Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to veto the legislation. Republicans then moved to overcome his veto in the final weeks of their single-vote supermajority in the House, where they lost key seats in November. Even as Donald J. Trump carried the state, Republicans fell short in several other top races, including for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
The override vote, which passed by 72 to 46 along party lines, follows four years of efforts by Republicans nationwide to gain greater control over the mechanics of elections, a push initially fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential contest.
State Representative Tim Moore, the departing Republican speaker of the House, said openly before the vote that the bill was meant to help his party win future elections.
“This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket and move this country in the right direction,” Mr. Moore told the Trump ally and conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday.
Lawmakers in North Carolina have a tradition of trying to lock in their political power after election losses. Democrats wielded such tactics in the 1990s, but more recently Republicans have led the way. After Mr. Cooper beat the Republican incumbent in 2016, the legislature stripped the governor’s office of key powers and reduced the number of staff members he could appoint by more than 1,000 positions.
New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan, Alan Feuer, Dec. 11, 2024. The incoming administration said it would not rely on outside groups to carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants, but militias have a long record of inserting themselves into patrolling the border.
A few days after the election, William Teer, who runs the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump with an offer: His organization could help Mr. Trump carry out his plan to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally.
“In support of our nation’s commitments to lawful immigration practices, I wanted to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs, to promote the safety and security of our state,” Mr. Teer wrote. “I am available for further discussion.”
He said Mr. Trump had yet to respond. A spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s transition team said the mass deportation plan would use state and federal resources, not private ones. But Mr. Teer’s offer was one of several recent efforts by far-right organizations, including some that have a history of taking it on themselves to patrol the border with Mexico, to insert themselves into the deportation plan.
Richard Mack, the founder of a group of hard-right sheriffs, said on television last week that if members of his organization assisted with the initiative, it would make it “a lot easier and a lot cheaper and a lot more effective.” And last month, members of other militia-style groups also volunteered their services, with some discussing in private group chats their desire to get involved.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews, Dec. 11, 2024. The outgoing Senate Democratic majority isn't going out without a fight.
Ben Meiselas discusses the early swearing-in of Democrats Adam Schiff and Andy Kim as U.S. Senators, surprising and infuriating MAGA Republicans.
Both Schiff and Kim won their elections, and were given gubernatorial approval to be sworn-in early due special circumstances, allowing them to gain seniority and participate in key Senate hearings.
Kim is replacing disgraced Senator Bob Menendez in New Jersey, and Schiff is filling the seat once held by Dianne Feinstein, who passed away in September of 2023.
Schiff, known for his prosecutorial background, has been a favorite target from MAGA for his role in leading the impeachments of Donald Trump. His early swearing-in has the MAGA trolls making fools of themselves; crying foul while not understanding this process is completely legal.
Andy Kim, a friend of MeidasTouch, delivered a heartfelt statement to his constituents pledging to serve with integrity, and a focus on healing the country; a poignant and powerful statement from a man who will be replacing the crook Bob Menendez.
The U.S. Senate, as well as the American People benefit having Andy Kim step into that office early to gain seniority.Meiselas also played a touching video you’ll only see on MeidasTouch, with Kamala Harris meeting Kim’s family during his swearing-in ceremony, and telling his kids that she knows her dad is a good man and up to the challenge and hard work of being a U.S. Senator.
Meiselas also highlights Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s efforts to secure Democratic control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by advancing the nominations of Lauren McFerrin and Joshua Didleberg; a move to shield the Board from figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Trump allies, who want to weaken the NLRB's power to protect American workers.
Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats, Greta Reich, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). “I’m not worried about it at all in the least,” the former Jan. 6 committee member said.Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger delivers remarks.t worried about President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to throw members of the committee in jail.
“No, I have absolutely no worries about this,” Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN’s “Inside Politics” host Manu Raju on Sunday.
Trump made the threat in an interview with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on NBC. He said that members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail.”
“First off, the executive branch can’t go after the legislative branch because we embarrassed him. That’s not a sin. That’s not against the law. Ultimately, when we talked about him throwing his ketchup and hamburger against the wall, there’s nothing illegal about that,” Kinzinger continued, referring to an alleged incident from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in which Trump once became so angry that he threw his plate of food at the wall and smeared it with ketchup.
He added that “most of the people that testified were actually his Republicans, you know, fellow Republicans that went up and spoke [against] him.”
Some Republicans who testified during the hearings included former Attorney General William Barr; former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue; Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; and Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s daughter.
“So look, he’s all butt hurt, right now because he was embarrassed,” Kinzinger added. “He’s not going to come after us and I’m not worried about it at all in the least.”
New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Applicants for government posts, including inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, say they have been asked about their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election.
At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, conducted in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful.
The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
Excerpt continued below.
Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). She and her firm have clients that have been doing legal battle with the U.S. government.
Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.
Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.
Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.
Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.
Bondi, who has yet to resign from Ballard, where she serves as a D.C.-based partner and chairs the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice focusing on Fortune 500 companies. Since 2019, she has lobbied the federal government for a host of major businesses, including Amazon, General Motors, Fidelity National Financial, Uber and Carnival North America. She serves as a key adviser to the firm’s president, Brian Ballard.
Bondi has also lobbied for the GEO Group, a major private prison company that is paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year by the federal government, according to federal records. The Justice Department is a major customer.
Currently, Bondi is only registered to lobby for the Major County Sheriffs of America, which pays her firm $50,000 a quarter, the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter, and the Florida Sheriffs Association, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter. Bondi, a former personal attorney to Trump, has also worked on corporate and regulatory issues and litigation at the Florida-based law firm Panza Maurer.
“It is essentially impossible to organize a Justice Department ethically in light of the breadth of Bondi’s connections,” said Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive Revolving Door Project. “I think it’s just going to be off-the-charts bad.”
He added that even if Bondi were not to involve herself in issues involving certain companies, she could still influence her department in their favor. For example, Hauser argued, her direction for the antitrust division would have broad implications for her onetime client Amazon.
Bondi did not respond to an email seeking comment, and a spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment.
Some business leaders had feared that, under Trump, they would lose their allies in the GOP, as the party veered in a more populist direction. But big business is hopeful that with Bondi, they’ll get a reprieve from the Biden administration’s corporate crackdowns and avoid follow-through on the Trump campaign’s anti-corporate rhetoric.
“Pam may reinforce that idea that we’re going back to normalcy on deal flow,” said one Republican lobbyist, referring to corporate mergers. The person was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone believes that she’s approachable. … She understands that companies need to have an opportunity to be heard.”
The tech industry, for one, is relatively optimistic about Bondi’s nomination, especially compared to former lawmaker and antitrust crusader Matt Gaetz, whose earlier nomination for attorney general imploded. Major companies have spent the last four years fighting anti-monopoly champions at the Department of Justice, led by Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. With Bondi’s selection, Big Tech sees a movement away from the economic populism that made them major targets, said one lobbyist representing major technology companies.
New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The enormous spending from the world’s richest man quietly fueled allied groups and was revealed only now, as Mr. Musk plays a key role in the presidential transition.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.
The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.
One of Mr. Musk’s most brazen moves — which emerged only on Thursday — was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.
Mr. Musk put the lion’s share of the money he donated toward his main super PAC, America PAC, cutting three checks for $25 million each in the final weeks of the race, according to the new filings with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Musk also spent $40.5 million on legally controversial checks to voters in swing states who signed a petition in support of the Constitution.
Over the course of the race, he gave America PAC a staggering $239 million in both cash and in-kind contributions.
Excerpt continued below.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution’
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, Trump Organization Plans an Ethics Policy Without Banning Foreign Deals
- New York Times, Pam Bondi’s Journey From Traditional Republican to Warrior for Trump, Patricia Mazzei
- New York Times, Investigation: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes Jesse Drucker
- Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases; Investigations, Hearings, Trials
- Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge
- The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld
- Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: Elderly golfer is an incoherent mess on Meet the Press, Jeff Tiedrich
- New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, He Promised Huge Tax Refunds. Now Donald Trump Wants Him to Lead the I.R.S.
- New York Times, Trump Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China
- Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks
More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise, Corey Kilgannon, Mike Baker, Luke Broadwater and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione, above, charged in the death of an executive in New York, was an Ivy League graduate who had recently suffered physical and psychological pain.
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.
Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say, Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione faces gun charges and other counts. He was denied bail after his arraignment in Altoona, Pa.
Authorities said Monday that they had taken a 26-year-old man into custody in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, a health insurance executive who was gunned down last week on a Manhattan sidewalk.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The shooting sparked a sprawling five-day manhunt that ended in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where police said Luigi Mangione, a Maryland native, was spotted eating at a local McDonald’s. He was arrested and charged with five counts, including possessing an instrument of a crime, providing false identification to law enforcement and carrying a firearm without a license. Police said Mangione had a ghost gun, along with a lengthy handwritten document indicating anger toward “corporate America.”
“He is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, said at a news briefing.
Thompson, 50, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed Wednesday outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a stunning act of early-morning violence in one of New York’s busiest areas.
Police said it appeared that the suspect they were seeking escaped the city shortly after the shooting. Law enforcement officials said they were scouring reams of video footage and tips, but they pleaded with the public for more help, sharing several images of a person they said was wanted in connection with the killing.
ABC News, What we know about Luigi Mangione, Ivy League grad and suspect in CEO's murder, Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele, Josh Margolin, and Meredith Deliso, Dec. 9, 2024. Mangione, above, was located in Pennsylvania nearly a week after Brian Thompson's death.
Salon, Alleged UnitedHealthcare assassin praised Elon Musk for battle against “woke mind virus," Russell Payne, Dec, 9, 2024. Not so fast, what kind of "anti-capitalist" is praising Elon Musk and retweeting Peter Thiel?
On Monday afternoon, police announced that they had arrested a person of interest in the investigation into the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who was shot outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan last week.
According to police, Luigi Mangione was arrested around 9:15 a.m. in Altoona, Pennsylvania with a ghost gun and suppressor that New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with the weapon used in the murder.”
While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber's comments on “the decay of traditional values.”
Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives.
While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”
One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
He reposted another tweet, which was a link to an article calling TikTok “The Smiling Tiger” and making the argument that the short-form video app is an “accelerant” in a Chinese plot to get Western liberal capitalism to destroy itself.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different
- New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
- Letters from an American, Commentary: December 5, 2024 [Health Care CEO's Murder], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say
Public Health, Scandal, #MeToo, Trafficking, Abortion.
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, Dec. 5, 2024. Save your healthcare and dump Medicare Advantage before it’s too late. Here’s why you should return to real Medicare if you still can...
You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.
The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.
If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.
Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.
So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?
When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.
Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.
With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.
With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.
These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.
Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.
You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.
This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.
And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.
If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.
But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.
The FTC news release laid it out:
“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”
And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.
Washington Post, Opinion: What is going on with Cheryl Hines? Monica Hesse, Dec. 5, 2024. It’s time to accept that the actress and RFK Jr. are a package deal.
I’m as baffled by this as the rest of you, but I’m going to have to subject us all to a close analysis of Cheryl Hines’s recent Instagram story featuring her naked husband, RFK Jr.
The video takes place in the Hines/Kennedy bathroom. Cheryl is in the foreground, holding a linen spray and some kind of cream that she would like you to buy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking a shower. His bottom half is covered by his wife’s strategically located head, and, as he stands under the water, she giggles uproariously and says: “No, you can’t take a shower, I’m doing a video!” He continues showering; she continues giggling. “No, no. No. You’ve got to give me a second, I’m doing a video for Hines and Young!”
Some logistical questions:
If Hines was already in the bathroom filming when her husband entered, why did she wait until he came in, took off all his clothes, turned on the shower and started hosing himself down before she decided to tell him that she was filming?
And if he was in the shower to begin with, why didn’t she notice that before she started advertising a holiday sale? Why did the couple not, at that point, sort out who needed to be naked and who needed to hawk merchandise, and agree to do those things in different rooms? Why leave the camera running? Why post the results?
Hines was advertising products from the wellness company she runs with her daughter, but she was also advertising her marriage. Which is to say, she would like you to know that the couple is fine. They are flirty. He wants to remove fluoride from public drinking water, but she will still caption videos with, “Oh Bobby!”
The number of times in the past two years that I have thought, Well, now she’ll divorce him has been … many. The couple has been married for more than a decade, but she is, after all, a successful actress with 12 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” under her belt. Not A-list, maybe, but running in circles with Larry David and J.B. Smoove would seem to provide enough glamour and financial independence that she shouldn’t need to put up with any crap.
Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert, Dec. 2, 2024. Mehmet Oz has extolled Ozempic’s promise for weight loss. Now Medicare may cover it.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- New York Times, Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Unfounded Health Claims
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- Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert
- New York Times, Trump Transition: Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life
- New York Times, How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy, Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie
- Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID, Sam Stein and Andrew Egger
- Politico, Kennedy's 'MAHA transition team' includes anti-vax activists
- New York Times, Five Ways R.F.K. Jr. Could Undermine Lifesaving Childhood Vaccines, Emily Anthes and Emily Baumgaertner
- Washington Post, The New Administration: Millions may not have health coverage if subsidies return to pre-Biden level
- New York Times, Dr. Martin Makary, a Frequent Fox News Commentator, Is Chosen to Head F.D.A.
- Politico, Health Care: Trump transition closes in on picks for top health posts
- The Hill, Medicare Advantage gets ally in Dr. Oz
- Politico, Kennedy's 'MAHA transition team' includes anti-vax activists
- Politico, Progressive groups share many of RFK Jr.’s goals. They’re opposing him anyway
- Politico, Transition of Power: Project 2025 author rejected for top health position
- Washington Post, Trump selects Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, as health secretary
Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
Politico, Has Syrian rebel leader al-Golani really shaken off his al Qaeda past? Jamie Dettmer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The leopard claims he has changed his spots, but will he bring stability to the devastated nation
In the not so distant past, Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, shown at right in a U.S. State Department photo, sported a long unkempt beard, wore a style of turban favored by jihadis and looked like he was auditioning for the role of a young Osama bin Laden.
But the man who toppled the regime of Bashar Assad on Sunday cuts a very different figure today. Like a political chameleon, he wears green fatigues in the style of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or preppy blazers and chinos, and his beard is neatly trimmed. He even recently dropped his nom de guerre and reverted to using his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a.
But how convincing is the makeover? Should Syrians be worried that a man who once made the pledge of allegiance — or bay’ah — to al Qaeda, and fought Western forces in Iraq, is now the most powerful man in their country, and is poised to play a major role in the transition from the 54-year-long autocracy of the Assad dynasty?
He could even lead the country.
Is this a case where the apparel really does proclaim the man? Has the Damascus medical school dropout genuinely transitioned from being a jihadi, or is his embrace of toleration a ruse?
Those are the questions Western leaders and officials are also grappling with as they plot their next steps. France and Germany have promptly agreed to work with the Syrian opposition groups that took power in Damascus, while the U.S. and Britain are deliberating whether to delist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main insurgent Islamist faction led by al-Golani that swept into Damascus, as a terrorist organization.
For now, everyone is watching and waiting, piecing together clues about who al-Golani really is and what future HTS has planned for Syria — an inclusive, democratic one embracing the country’s diversity, its religious sects and ethnic minorities, including Christian, Alawite, Druze and Kurds; or an Islamist state that oppresses, restricts and elevates the Sunni majority? Or somewhere in-between?
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Israel Says Its Troops Will Stay in Seized Territory for Now, Aaron Boxerman and Michael Crowley, Dec. 12, 2024. Here are the latest developments.
As countries in the Middle East and beyond work out how to respond to the sudden fall of the Assad government, Israel said on Thursday that its military would stay in Syrian territory it seized until “a new force” was established that met its security demands.
“The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in a statement. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities.”
Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli soldiers would deploy in Syrian territory only “temporarily,” but did not give any clear timeline for their departure.
The Biden administration has been rushing to respond to the upheaval in Syria. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan on Thursday and was heading to Turkey, where he will meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
After a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Mr. Blinken called it “a time of promise but also peril for Syria and its neighbors.” He said that it was essential that Syria’s new government respect basic principles of human rights, including the protection of minorities, and ensure that Syria “is not used as a base for terrorism by groups like the Islamic State.”
Here are other developments:
- Seeking justice: The fall of Syria’s government has reinvigorated a long push for justice over crimes committed by the Assad regime, allowing human rights groups the long-awaited opportunity to inspect prison sites, freely interview witnesses and build legal cases. But there is also frustration because the ultimate goal of the effort would be to see Mr. al-Assad stand trial, and he appears out of reach, having taken exile in Russia.
- Mood in Aleppo: In the northern Syrian city that rebels seized last week before taking Damascus, there was celebration as exiled residents returned home and assessed what remained after more than a decade of civil war. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.
- Russia in Syria: Satellite imagery and ship tracking data reviewed by The New York Times show that Russian naval and commercial activity in the key Syrian port of Tartus — which has played a critical role in Moscow’s projection of military power in the region — has ceased since the Assad government fell on Sunday.
Consortium News, Analysis: The End of Pluralism in the Middle East, Craig Murray, Dec. 11, 2024. What this potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism: An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.
A truly seismic change in the Middle East has occurred. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.
This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities. Witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women when the jihadists — who overthrew the government of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday — first took Aleppo a mere two weeks ago.
The speed of the collapse of Syria took everybody by surprise. Next, a renewed Israeli attack on Southern Lebanon to coincide with a Salafist invasion of the Bekaa Valley seems inevitable, as the Israelis would obviously wish their border with their new Taliban-style Greater Syrian neighbour to be as far North as possible.
It could be a race for Beirut, unless the Americans have already organised who gets it.
It is no coincidence that the attack on Syria started the day of the Lebanon/Israel ceasefire. The jihadist forces do not want to be seen to be fighting alongside Israel, even though they are fighting forces which have been relentlessly bombed by Israel, and in the case of Hezbollah are exhausted from fighting Israel.
The Times of Israel has no compunction about saying the quiet part out loud, unlike the British media:
In fact Israeli media is giving a lot more truth about the Syrian rebel forces than British and American media. This is another article from The Times of Israel:
“While HTS officially seceded from Al Qaeda in 2016, it remains a Salafi jihadi organization designated as a terror organization in the US, the EU and other countries, with tens of thousands of fighters.
Its sudden surge raises concerns that a potential takeover of Syria could transform it into an Islamist, Taliban-like regime – with repercussions for Israel at its south-western border. Others, however, see the offensive as a positive development for Israel and a further blow to the Iranian axis in the region.”
Contrast this to the U.K. media, which from the Telegraph and Express to The Guardian has promoted the official narrative that not just the same organisations, but the same people responsible for mass torture and executions of non-Sunnis, including Western journalists, are now cuddly liberals.
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, left, commander-in-chief of Tahrir al-Sham; he was emir of its predecessor al-Nusra Front, Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. (U.S. State Dept.)
Nowhere is this more obvious than the case of Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, sometimes spelt Al-Julani or Al-Golani, who, now nominally in charge in Damascus, is being boosted throughout western media as a moderate leader. He was the deputy leader of ISIS, and the C.I.A. actually has a $10 million bounty on his head! Yes, that is the same C.I.A. which is funding and equipping him and giving him air support.
Supporters of the Syrian rebels still attempt to deny that they have Israeli and U.S. support – despite the fact that almost a decade ago there was open Congressional testimony in the U.S.A. that, to that point, over half a billion dollars had been spent on assistance to Syrian rebel forces, and the Israelis have openly been providing medical and other services to the jihadists and effective air support.
Violates UK Terrorism Act
One interesting consequence of this joint NATO/Israel support for the jihadist groups in Syria is a further perversion of domestic rule of law. To take the U.K. as an example, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act it is illegal to state an opinion that supports, or may lead somebody else to support, a proscribed organisation.
The abuse of this provision by British police to persecute Palestinian supporters for allegedly encouraging support for proscribed organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is notorious, with even tangential alleged references leading to arrest. Sarah Wilkinson, Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Richard Barnard and myself are all notable victims, and the persecution has been greatly intensified by Keir Starmer [UK prime minister, right].
Yet Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) is also a proscribed group in the U.K. But both British mainstream media and British Muslim outlets have been openly promoting and praising HTS – frankly much more openly than I have ever witnessed anyone in the U.K. support Hamas and Hezbollah – and not a single person has been arrested or even warned by U.K. police.
That in itself is the strongest of indications that western security services are fully behind the overthrow of the government in Syria.
For the record, I think it is an appalling law, and nobody should be prosecuted for expressing an opinion either way. But the politically biased application of the law is undeniable.
When the entire corporate and state media in the West puts out a unified narrative that Syrians are overjoyed to be released by HTS from the tyranny of the Assad regime – and says nothing whatsoever of the accompanying torture and execution of Shias, and destruction of Christmas decorations and icons – it ought to be obvious to everybody where this is coming from.
Yet – and this is another U.K. domestic repercussion – a very substantial number of Muslims in the U.K. support HTS and the Syrian rebels, because of the funding pumped into U.K. mosques from Saudi and Emirate Salafist sources.
This is allied to the U.K. security service influence also wielded through the mosques, both by sponsorship programmes and “think tanks” benefiting approved religious leaders, and by the execrable coercive Prevent programme.
U.K. Muslim outlets that have been ostensibly pro-Palestinian – like Middle East Eye and 5 Pillars – enthusiastically back Israel’s Syrian allies in ensuring the destruction of resistance to the genocide of the Palestinians. Al Jazeera alternates between items detailing dreadful massacre in Palestine, and items extolling the Syrian rebels bringing Israel-allied rule to Syria.
Among the mechanisms they employ to reconcile this is a refusal to acknowledge the vital role of Syria in enabling the supply of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Which supply the jihadists have now cut off, to the absolute delight of Israel, and in conjunction with both Israeli and U.S. air strikes.
In the final analysis, for many Sunni Muslims both in the Middle East and in the West, the pull seems to be a stronger sectarian hatred of the Shia and the imposition of Salafism, than preventing the ultimate destruction of the Palestinian nation.
“Many Sunni Muslims have been brainwashed into hating Shia Muslims more than they hate the power committing genocide of mostly Sunnis in Gaza.”
I am not a Muslim. My Muslim friends happen to be almost entirely Sunni. I personally regard the continuing division over the leadership of the religion over a millennium ago as deeply unhelpful and a source of unnecessary continued hate.
Classic Divide and Rule
But as a historian I do know that the western colonial powers have consciously and explicitly used the Sunni/Shia split for centuries to divide and rule. In the 1830’s, Alexander Burnes was writing reports on how to use the division in Sind between Shia rulers and Sunni populations to aid British colonial expansion.
Unlike many readers, I have never been a fan of the Assad regime or blind to its human rights violations. But what it did undeniably do was maintain a pluralist state where the most amazing historical religious and community traditions – including Sunni (and many Sunni do support Assad), Shia, Alaouites, descendants of the first Christians, and speakers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus – were all able to co-exist. The same is true of Lebanon.
New York Times, Syria’s Civil War: Syria’s New Leaders Balance Huge Struggles Amid Disorder, Aryn Baker, Cassandra Vinograd, Euan Ward and Michael Levenson, Dec. 11, 2024. The rebels who seized control called for foreign help in prosecuting atrocities, while trying to restore order in a fractured country.
The rebels who seized control of Syria confronted the challenge on Wednesday of striking a balance between obtaining justice for the victims of atrocities committed under the ousted Assad regime and preventing the newly liberated country from descending into unchecked vengeance.
While Syria’s new leaders have promised amnesty for conscripted soldiers who served under the former president, Bashar al-Assad, the leader of the rebel force that toppled him made clear on Wednesday that those who helped Mr. al-Assad brutalize or slaughter would be held accountable.
“We won’t pardon those complicit in the torture and murder of detainees, and we will go after them in our country,” the leader of the rebel offensive, Ahmed al-Shara, said on the Telegram messaging app. “We call on nations to hand over to us whoever of those criminals has escaped to them to subject them to justice.”
Mr. al-Shara did not name any countries in particular, but Mr. al-Assad arrived in Russia over the weekend as the rebels swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Mr. al-Shara’s comments came as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, warned that armed groups had carried out retaliatory attacks on civilians in areas that were once considered loyal to the Assad government. But it was not clear who was carrying out the violence, or directing it.
Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows fighters inside the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian president and the father of Bashar al-Assad, in the northwestern town of al-Qardaha.
As one of the fighters steps on the tomb, another can be heard thanking God. “This is avenging my cousins and their sons, who were killed by this criminal, Hafez al-Assad, in the 1980s,” he says. “This is our revenge.” In another clip, the rebels can be seen setting fire to parts of the tomb.
The Observatory reported that groups of gunmen were preparing to hunt down former commanders of Mr. al-Assad’s military and that armed groups dressed in military uniforms were looting property and intimidating residents of Latakia Province, the heartland of the Alawite minority to which the Assad family belongs, prompting fears of sectarian strife.
While Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, it has significant communities of Christians and Druse, as well as others who adhere to different sects of Islam. Many of the ousted regime’s top figures came from the Alawite sect.
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus, Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad, Farnaz Fassihi and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Syrian Leader Resigns and Leaves Country, Russia Says. The foreign ministry of Russia, a longtime ally, did not provide details on where President Bashar al-Assad had gone; Rebels stormed the Syrian capital on Sunday without encountering any significant resistance from government forces.
President Bashar al-Assad, shown above, has resigned and left Syria, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Sunday, a stunning fall for the longtime dictator that ushered in hope and uncertainty after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive.
Mr. al-Assad’s departure was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat Mr. al-Assad for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.
For many in Syria, Mr. Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that has used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been riven with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.
“Our hearts are dancing with joy,” Walaa Salameh, 35, a resident of the Damascus area, said in a phone interview. “We can’t predict the future and anything is possible, but the most important thing is we got rid of this oppressive regime.”
The foreign ministry’s statement did not offer details on Mr. al-Assad’s exact whereabouts, saying only that he had held talks with “several parties of the armed conflict.” There was no immediate comment from the Syrian presidency about Mr. al-Assad.
Earlier on Sunday, the main rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, had announced on its Telegram channel that it had taken the capital, Damascus, and that Syrian forces were withdrawing. It later said that Mr. al-Assad had fallen and that Damascus was “free of the tyrant.”
The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.
As reports spread of Syrian government troops fleeing their posts and peeling off uniforms, the sounds of gunfire erupted in Damascus before dawn on Sunday, witnesses said. By late morning, the streets were largely empty but the sound of gunfire still echoed.
“No one should shed any tears over the end of the Assad regime,” Daniel B. Shapiro, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said in Bahrain before Russia’s foreign ministry issued the statement.
Amid swirling questions over Mr. al-Assad’s whereabouts, Syria’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, said that he had not spoken with him since Saturday. Mr. Ghazi said that he would stay in the country and was ready to work with whomever Syrians choose as their leader.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham said it would work with Mr. Ghazi and called on Syrian military forces in Damascus to stay away from public institutions, which it said would remain under Mr. Ghazi’s supervision until they are formally handed over.
Who are the rebels?: The head of the Islamist group leading the main rebel coalition said in an interview with The New York Times this week that the fighters aim to depose Mr. al-Assad. First, the rebels seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, then days later blazed through Hama and the strategic city of Homs, en route to the capital. His group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, broke ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 but is still designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
New York Times, Rebels Assert Control in Damascus as Questions Loom Over Their Plans, Christina Goldbaum and Vivian Yee, Dec. 9, 2024. The fighters who forced Bashar al-Assad into exile began the complex task of governing the Syrian capital.
New York Times, Relics of Fallen Government Are Everywhere, Times Reporters Find, Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 9, 2024. The New York Times saw remnants of Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive rule after entering Syria on Monday.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- New York Times, Iran Makes ‘Dramatic’ Leap to Produce Near-Bomb-Grade Fuel, but to What End?
- New York Times, Opinion: Conversations and insights about the moment, Thomas L. Friedman
- New York Times, Opinion: The Winners and Losers Following the Fall of Assad, Nicholas Kristof
- New York Times, Syria Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule
- Update from Ukraine, Commentary: Assad is over; Damascus fallen; Russians are running away from Syria, Denys Davydov
- Times Radio, Commentary: Collapse of Assad is 'humiliation' for Putin and will weaken him on Ukraine, Bill Browder
- New York Times, In the Syrian Regime’s Hour of Need, Its Patron Iran Makes an Exit
- New York Times, As Syrian Rebel Advance Accelerates, Nervous Neighbors Close Their Borders
- New York Times, Leader of Syria’s Resurgent Rebels Lays Out Strategy to Oust Assad, Raja Abdulrahim
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South Korean Crisis
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 10, 2024. Lee Jae-myung, the main opposition leader, is leading efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his declaration of martial law.
Shortly after his political nemesis, President Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law last Tuesday, Lee Jae-myung began livestreaming from his cellphone. While driving to the National Assembly, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party appealed to Koreans to rush to the Assembly and hold back soldiers trying to seize the parliament.
“You must protect the Assembly, the last line of defense for our democracy,” Mr. Lee said repeatedly — in a watershed moment for South Korean democracy and for his own political career. Mr. Lee’s exhortation, relayed by YouTubers, helped attract crowds who slowed down the advance of troops and bought time for lawmakers to vote down Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree, forcing the president to withdraw it after just six hours.
Mr. Lee, who has been fighting legal charges that he says are politically motivated, now finds himself in a stronger political position than ever. His party holds the majority in the Assembly and he represents what most South Koreans want: Mr. Yoon removed from office. Polls show he is most favored to win if a presidential election is held now.
New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Victoria Kim and Thomas Fuller, Dec. 4, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to break a political deadlock by imposing military rule collapsed within hours, leaving him with few defenders.
Emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, members of South Korea’s political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.
Several opposition parties, buoyed by thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the president, jointly submitted the impeachment motion, which could be put to a vote as early as Friday. While the parties represent an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, it remains unclear whether they will have the two-thirds vote needed to impeach.
Mr. Yoon’s surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America’s closest allies and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s.
Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder, historian, Dec. 4, 2024. South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, invoked martial law, tried to install a military dictatorship -- and failed completely. In his actions there are some likely similarities with the coming Trump regime, and some clear lessons for Americans to learn right now.
Yoon won a very narrow election, as did Trump. Like Trump, he refers constantly to "fake news" and calls his political opponents enemies of the state (as Trump says, "the enemy within"). Yoon used this language to justify the imposition of martial law, as will Trump if he decides to invoke the Insurrection Act in the United States.
Like Trump, Yoon telegraphed his move in advance, and not only with such language. He surrounded himself with military men and intelligence officers who were characterized by personal loyalty. Trump is trying to do the same, now, with his proposals for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Kash Patel as director of the FBI, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. He also wants to purge the top ranks of the armed forces.
Yoon's main political opponent, Lee Jae-myung, had correctly predicted that Yoon would try to implement martial law. Trump makes this prediction rather easy. Trump has spoken openly of being "dictator for a day," and of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military inside the United States.The Insurrection Act is not quite the same thing as martial law. Under martial law, the military assumes the basic responsibilities associated with a civilian government. The Insurrection Act, in principle, only allows the American president to use the armed forces to assist civilian authorities to enforce some law in the presence of an insurrection. But the language of the law is quite vague. Trump makes it clear that he has in mind invoking the Insurrection Act to very broad purposes, essentially to change the regime.
In both South Korea and the United States, the legal basis for asserting greater presidential authority is antiquated. Martial law was declared in South Korea for the last time in 1979. Since the late 1980s, South Korea has moved quite decisively in the direction of meaningful elections and civil rights, thanks to the forceful activity of civil society, especially trade unions. In the United States, the Insurrection Act is an assemblage of laws passed between 1792 and 1871. It was last invoked during racial violence in Los Angeles in 1992.
Yoon's actions, although rooted of course in his own personality and South Korean career, and enabled by South Korean law, were very trumpy. Indeed, it seems likely to me that the very presence of Trump on the international scene will make such attempts more likely, among America's democratic allies (such as South Korea) and generally.
But Yoon failed, and very badly. His dictatorship for a day lasted only about six hours. What can Americans learn from his less-than-a-day dictatorship?First of all, we have to take in a very basic reality: that attempts to establish military dictatorships have been made in democracies, and will be made in other democracies --including, very possibly, in the American one.
The most worrying moment of Yoon's invocation of martial law was that, in the beginning, the military acted as he wished that it would. Military leaders initially joined in his coup attempt, with General Park An-su claiming to ban political actions, political parties, political gatherings, and "propaganda," which can mean anything anyone says. He also claimed to take all media outlets under the control of the military.
The pertinent question for Americans would be: will Trump be able to surround himself with loyalists who will do the same thing? He is trying to do so. And so the Senate, in confirmation hearings, has an obvious question to ask all of Trump's appointees with any responsibility for national security or intelligence: if Trump attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act to stifle domestic political life, just as Yoon attempted to do in South Korea, would you take part?
For legislators, the lessons are also very clear. The moment Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Kim, told people to rally at the parliament. Legislators themselves entered its chambers, despite the wishes of the military leadership, and then voted unanimously for the revocation of martial law. Members of Yoon's own right-wing party, in other words, joined with the opposition in a dramatic demonstration of unity in the face of the threat of a military dictatorship.
Are American legislators capable of defending their roles and their republic? The evidence thus far is very mixed; it remains to be seen.
New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon and Jin Yu Young, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol made the decree, the first of its kind in more than four decades, amid a bitter feud with the political opposition. Lawmakers demanded the declaration be canceled, setting up a showdown. Earlier, a general said news outlets were under “martial law command.”
President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, right, declared emergency martial law on Tuesday, banning “all political activities,” in an extraordinary reaction to the political deadlock that has hobbled his tenure.
The full extent of what martial law entails was not immediately clear, but the announcement enabled the president to take command of the news media. His declaration set off protesters clashing with the police outside the National Assembly, and an immediate effort by opposition lawmakers to halt the decree. It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since the military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
Mr. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply unpopular and divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
In a late-night meeting, the National Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the president must lift it “without delay.”
Here’s what else to know.
- Protesters in Seoul: Some demonstrators appeared to be trying to enter the National Assembly as police officers tried to block them, as seen in images broadcast by local networks. “End martial law! End martial law!” protesters chanted.
- Political paralysis: Elected president in 2022, Mr. Yoon has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls the National Assembly. In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday night, he denounced the opposition for repeatedly using its majority in the National Assembly to impeach members of his cabinet and block the passage of his government’s budget plans. This has “paralyzed the administration,” Mr. Yoon said. “The National Assembly, which should have been the foundation of free democracy, has become a monster that destroys it.”
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Warning from Seoul: Democracy at Risk in an Age of Authoritarian Power, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 4, 2024. How Yoon’s State of Emergency and Trump’s Strategies Are Eroding Global Freedoms.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.
In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.
Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.
Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.
The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.
Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 4, 2024.For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, John Yoon and Ephrat Livni, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol has been locked in a bitter fight with the opposition, which controls Parliament.
It was the first martial law declaration in more than four decades in South Korea, which saw the end of a military dictatorship in the late 1980s. Mr. Yoon, who was elected president in 2022, has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, and his government has faced plunging public approval ratings.
In his speech declaring martial law late Tuesday, Mr. Yoon said he was making the move to “defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order. Through this emergency martial law, I will rebuild and defend the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into ruin.”
New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law, Dec. 3, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol made the extraordinary declaration in an unannounced speech to the nation on Tuesday night.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid
- Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Opinion: Can Martial Law Happen in America? David French
- New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law
- New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea
- New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law
Global News
New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader, above, has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel Macron.
The one-on-one duel that has shaped French political life for nearly a decade ratcheted up a notch last week, with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen claiming one big scalp, and giving notice of going after a bigger one, President Emmanuel Macron.
No one doubted that she was calling the shots. Yet by Monday, Mr. Macron, right, had relegated Ms. Le Pen and her party, the anti-immigrant National Rally, to “pariah” — her word — status. He did not deign to meet with her in his search for a new prime minister to replace the one she had largely ousted last week.
Leaders of other parties had tête-à-têtes with Mr. Macron at the presidential palace; but not Ms. Le Pen, who was excluded because she is part of the “anti-Republican front” — his words.
That could turn out to be a big mistake. Last week, Ms. Le Pen announced the demise of the hapless prime minister, Michel Barnier, in Parliament; sure enough he was overthrown in a no-confidence vote soon after.
Mr. Barnier had tried to force through a budget proposal without a vote, and above all he had barely consulted with Ms. Le Pen, who has the largest bloc of parliamentarians and cannot be ignored.
She has suggested successive Macron governments could fall, until he steps down — making clear she is after a more consequential trophy: the president himself.
Mr. Macron was barely off the plane from Saudi Arabia as she spoke last Wednesday night. As the bemused parliamentarians listened, she promised “deliverance” for France from its woes, “maybe, very soon.”
That seemed as much promise as threat.
It all rested on one man’s decision, she said, avoiding Mr. Macron’s name while suggesting she was pushing him toward the exit. Her target was clear.
“It’s up to the person concerned, by himself, to decide whether he should stay,” she said. “It’s on his conscience, to determine whether he should sacrifice public policy, and France’s fate, for the sake of his own pride.”
New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial, Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 10, 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a trial that began four years ago. He has denied the charges.
Outside the courthouse, he is one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, overseeing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, its occupation of southern Lebanon and recent strikes in Syria.
As he stepped into a cramped and sweltering underground courtroom in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel morphed into the defendant in Case 67104-01-20 — charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Eight years after the police started investigating him and four years after his trial began, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was taking the stand for the first time to respond to accusations of corruption that have defined and disrupted Israeli public life for nearly a decade.
“Like everyone who is brought to the witness stand, you are charged with speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” said Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of three judges hearing the case.
An audience of roughly 100 journalists, lawmakers, government ministers and lawyers craned their necks to catch his response.
“I have waited eight years for this moment — to tell the truth, the truth as I remember it,” replied Mr. Netanyahu, gripping the sides of a wooden lectern as he stood to the left of the judges.
It was a humbling moment — a sitting prime minister, forced to answer accusations of graft, before a courtroom filled with his peers. It was also a moment Mr. Netanyahu seemed determined to transcend.
“I am shocked by the magnitude of this absurdity,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
“I am the prime minister, I am running a country, I am running a war,” he continued. “I am not occupying myself with my future, but rather with that of the state of Israel.”
For nearly a decade, the corruption charges against Mr. Netanyahu have divided Israel, leading to years of political turmoil. The electorate has been roughly evenly split on the question of whether Mr. Netanyahu should remain in office while he stands trial — a dynamic that has created an electoral stalemate, leading to five elections in less than four years.
Apart from a brief court appearance to plead not guilty in 2021, Mr. Netanyahu had rarely been affected by the day-to-day proceedings of the trial.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers spent years interviewing witnesses instead of the defendant himself. The hearing on Tuesday — 1,661 days since the trial began — was set to be Mr. Netanyahu’s first full day in court.
Mr. Netanyahu had sought to delay his testimony by several months, arguing that his management of the war campaign had disrupted his preparations. But the court agreed to a postponement of only a few days.
While his appearance on Tuesday provided a crescendo in the judicial process, it was also, to many Israelis, anti-climactic. The charges against Mr. Netanyahu have been a part of Israeli discourse for so long that the spectacle of a prime minister on trial no longer seems as shocking as it once did.
“The public has completely accepted the idea that we have a sitting prime minister who has been investigated, indicted and is now on trial — even in the middle of a war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst who attended the hearing on Tuesday.
“What would have been unimaginable 10 years ago has been completely normalized,” she added.
Mr. Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The charges center on claims that he gave regulatory favors and diplomatic support to prominent businessmen in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage.
The trial is expected to continue for years, and Mr. Netanyahu will likely take the stand several times a week for several months.
New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions, Jeffrey Gettleman, Dec. 10, 2024. The former Soviet Republic has been rocked by demonstrations over the same issues that hurtled Ukraine into war: its relationship with Europe and Russia.
On the streets of Georgia, it’s starting to look a little like the Ukraine of 10 years ago, before the war, when tensions with Russia started brewing.
- An increasingly authoritarian government in a former Soviet republic cools to the European Union and drifts closer to Moscow.
- Enormous protests erupt, calling for the government’s ouster.
- Riot police respond.
- Young demonstrators are beaten up and dragged away.
- Each side digs in, raising the specter of a major crisis in a country that has long struggled to break away from Russian dominance.
On the continent’s far eastern edge, embracing the European Union can be a risky move, threatening vested interests, especially those of Russia, which is wary to lose any of its regional influence.
These tensions have been playing out to different degrees in recent years in Georgia, Moldova and, in the most extreme example, Ukraine. All three are former Soviet republics and Russian troops occupy different slices of each.
In Georgia, what concerns people here and beyond are the unmistakable echoes of Ukraine’s popular revolution in 2014 that succeeded in pulling the country away from Moscow but ultimately resulted in a devastating war.
“The government is trying to turn the country back to the Russian sphere of influence against the will of the people, who were moving toward the West,which felt almost inevitable,” said Cristina Florea, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Eastern Europe.
“It is creepily similar to what happened in Ukraine,” she said, and “so, so worrying.”
Ever since the ruling party announced in late November it was postponing its effort to join the European Union, thousands of outraged, pro-Europe Georgians have poured into the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, provoking a brutal response.
Lazare Maglakelidze, a 20-year-old computer science student, said men in unmarked black uniforms snatched him from a recent protest, dragged him into a van, pummeled his face, broke his nose and threatened to rape him. He shared medical records and video footage corroborating much of his account.
Still, in an interview, speaking through a mask of medical tape, he said he wasn’t discouraged and found the Ukraine parallel inspiring.
“Ukraine is where we see people fighting for their dignity, dedicating their lives to the highest of high concepts that anybody can imagine,” he said.
“Yes, there’s a risk to standing up to Russia,” he went on. “But it’s better to die fighting, to die with dignity, than to live a miserable, unworthy, unholy life.”
New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades, David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien, Dec. 10, 2024. Taiwan is on high alert in response to China’s unannounced deployment of naval and Coast Guard ships, as tensions rise over U.S. support for the island.
Taiwan said on Tuesday that China was conducting its largest maritime operations in nearly three decades, sending nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels into waters stretching from the southern Japanese islands to the South China Sea.
Taiwanese defense officials said the scope of the deployment suggested that China was not only trying to show that it could choke the self-governed island, but also that it could block American allies in the region like Japan and the Philippines from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
China has “extended their military strength outward,” Gen. Hsieh Jih-sheng, a senior official in Taiwan’s ministry of defense told reporters. “The numbers are indeed astonishing,” he said, referring to the surge of Chinese vessels in the waters. Sun Li-fang, a spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, said the maritime operations were the largest that Taiwan has seen since 1996.
The officials said that Taiwan was on high alert in response to the Chinese ships, many of which were in waters off Taiwan’s southwest, east and northwest coasts.
China’s intentions were not immediately clear. There were no official announcements from Beijing that its forces were holding exercises. A foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked on Tuesday if China was conducting drills near Taiwan, deflected the question.
Speculation had been growing for days that China would launch war games in retaliation for visits made by Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam last week while on his way to the Pacific islands.
Trump Cases, Convictions, Reprisals, Allies
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Politico, Trump promised Jan. 6 pardons. His post-election silence is making loyalists nervous, Kyle Cheney, Nov. 30, 2024. His die-hard supporters — as well as some federal judges — are left to speculate about his clemency plans.
Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to pardon a vast swath of supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his silence on the matter since winning the election has begun unsettling some fervent allies awaiting even the slightest signal from Trump about how he intends to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.
Federal judges overseeing Jan. 6 cases have been left to guess at Trump’s plans. As a result, they have allowed nearly all cases to proceed, saying Trump’s clemency plans are merely “speculative.” Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have brought a handful of new Jan. 6 felony cases since Election Day, and they’ve argued repeatedly against efforts by defendants to delay their cases to await Trump’s inauguration.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people for their roles in the riot. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would pardon many of them. But he left the specifics unclear, and never said whether he might leave in place some prosecutions, particularly against people who assaulted police.
Now that he’s president-elect, his failure to say more has begun nagging at some of his die-hard supporters, who have engaged in a public guessing game on X about Trump’s intentions.
“[H]onestly people have suffered for 4 years and many are still in flux and terrified. A word of reassurance from the top would go a long way for people,” wrote Brandon Straka, a prominent Trump ally who spent three months in home detention after pleading guilty to Jan. 6 misdemeanors. “The silence on the issue just exacerbates the victims’ anxiety. Hopefully some kind of messaging comes soon.”
Adding to the anxiety expressed by some Jan. 6 defendants is a statement from Trump’s transition team that hinted at a far more limited approach than the sweeping pardons that many in Trump’s base have demanded.
“President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis,” incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in the statement.
The meaning of “case-by-case” has morphed into a raging debate among Jan. 6 defendants and their allies.
“It is just a phrase. ‘Case by case,’ It isn’t a policy, or a strategy, or anything,” wrote Suzzanne Monk, a longtime advocate for Jan. 6 defendants. “It is a catch phrase the media is using to push the ‘only some will be pardoned’ narrative.”
Politico, Trump picks Kash Patel to lead FBI, Megan Messerly, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). The position will require Senate confirmation.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Pate, shown above,l as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.
If confirmed, Patel will replace current FBI Director Chris Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017 after firing James Comey, cutting his 10-year term short. Wray’s term is not set to expire until 2027, so Trump will have to fire Wray to install Patel, if Wray doesn’t resign first.
Trump, in a post to Truth Social, called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”
“He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” the president-elect added, referring to the role Patel played as a staffer in crafting House Republican responses to the investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At the time, Patel was an aide to Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, a position that helped raise his profile in Trump’s inner circle.
Patel was also angling to be deputy director of the CIA, a position that would not have required Senate confirmation, unlike the FBI director post, which does. It’s unclear whether Patel, who is a divisive figure even among Trump loyalists, will have the votes needed in the Senate to be confirmed.
When Trump floated naming Patel deputy director of the FBI during his first administration, then-Attorney General Bill Barr responded “over my dead body,” according to reporting at the time. CIA Director Gina Haspel also threatened to quit over the move.
Patel is a former federal public defender and former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s national security division. A staunch Trump defender, Patel has been assisting the president-elect in compiling a list of candidates to join the Justice Department.
Patel has also promised to investigate and potentially prosecute journalists.
“We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” Patel said last year.
The president-elect also announced Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Chronister, a 32-year veteran of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, joins a long line of Floridians Trump has picked to join his administration.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said Chronister would work with Pam Bondi, his appointee for attorney general, to “secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES.”
Chronister was first appointed to the post by then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Donald J. Trump, left, then as a former president defending himself in New York earlier this year, appears with his attorney Todd Blanche in a court-designated media availability site at the courthouse
Washington Post, Trump picked his lawyer for a top Justice Dept. job. Does it matter? Mark Berman, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). If confirmed as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche should recuse from Justice Department matters related to cases where he represented Donald Trump, experts say.
Soon after winning the presidential election, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to install Todd Blanche, one of his criminal defense attorneys, as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department.
Blanche would fix “a broken System of Justice,” Trump declared in a statement.
Days later, Blanche was hard at work in his current role, signing a court filing that derided one of the cases against Trump as “politically-motivated and fatally flawed” and argued that it should be dismissed.
Blanche — Trump’s pick to be the deputy attorney general — faces an uneasy balancing act, particularly given the president-elect’s stated desire to seek retribution against his investigators and political foes.
If Blanche is confirmed, his previous work representing Trump in multiple criminal cases would raise ethical concerns unless he recuses himself from anything at the Justice Department that might touch on those matters, according to interviews with several legal experts.
Recusal is “an obvious call,” said Eli Wald, a law professor at the University of Denver who specializes in legal ethics. He said Blanche overseeing anything that touches on his previous defense of Trump in either state or federal court would create a clear “appearance of impropriety.”
The Justice Department has “lots of excellent lawyers,” Wald said. “Why would we want one person that Americans can correctly identify with being President Trump’s lawyer to be … making decisions about the same matters in which he represented the president? That would defy common sense.”
Washington Post, Analysis: Trump’s plans for disruption, retribution explained through Cabinet picks, Amber Phillips, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). On some choices, his strategy is clear: Disruption and retribution.
President-elect Donald Trump has quickly put together his Cabinet picks. Loyalty to him has been a major factor.
But Trump is also sending a mixed message with his choices: Will his administration be more of a traditional Republican one, or one that shakes up the system as much as it can?
And despite saying during the presidential campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, the policy blueprint coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Trump picked one of its architects to a top government job.
“On a lot of this, we just don’t know what to make of it,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said of Trump’s Cabinet announcements.
Here are some broad trends behind the Cabinet picks so far.On some, Trump is clear: He wants disruption and retribution.
MSNBC Alex Wagner Tonight, Commentary: DOJ braces for corruption of department as Trump prioritizes revenge, Nov. 27, 2024. David Rohde, national security editor for NBC News, discusses how prosecutors at the Justice Department are preparing to be the subject of weaponized investigations at the hands of Pam Bondi to appease Donald Trump's desire for revenge for efforts to hold him accountable.
Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him, Sonam Sheth, Nov. 26, 2024. Schiff Reminds His GOP Colleagues The Outcome Of Trump Hush Money Trial.
California U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, shown above in a file photo, questioned on Tuesday whether President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general will go after the grand jurors who voted to indict Trump. "Is she also going to go after the grand jurors who found there was probable cause to believe he was engaged in multiple crimes?" Schiff said on MSNBC, referring to Trump'sattorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, shown below.
Special counsel Jack Smith's office secured two grand jury indictments against Trump: one in Washington, D.C., in connection to his activities surrounding efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and in the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol; and another in Florida, related to Trump's handling of classified documents.
Smith's office this week moved to dismiss the January 6 case, and prosecutors also dropped an appeal to the dismissal of the classified documents case.A jury in New York also returned an indictment charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was convicted of all 34 charges earlier this year, but his sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.
And the president-elect and several of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering charges, but that case has been placed on hold amid a legal challenge to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' role in the case.
During his MSNBC interview on Tuesday, Schiff, who recently won his Senate race in California, mentioned special counsel John Durham, left, who was tapped to investigate the Justice Department's inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Durham did not secure convictions in any of the cases.
"You can very well see a lot of prosecutors, like Durham, who spend millions of taxpayer dollars to come up with nothing," Schiff told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace. "Pam Bondi [shown in a 2016 file photo below] follows through with what she's pledged to do, which is to investigate nonexistent voter fraud, for example, or to go after the prosecutors."
[MSNBC Host Nicolle Wallace, shown below in a file photo, responded: "It’s clear that Trump wants a whole bunch of John Durhams in the Justice Department.”]
A 1798 political cartoon's depiction of the XYZ Affair with America as a female being plundered by Frenchmen
The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann, right, Nov. 28, 2024. From Jefferson’s era to today, history proves democracy’s defenders can still win…
It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?
Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.
In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?
My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.
In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.
New York Times, Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities, Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang, Nov. 28, 2024 (interactive). A Times analysis shows where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joe Biden and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift.
New York Times, Analysis: Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles, David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk as co-leader, has advantages that past budget-cutters did not, but changes could still be slow.
New York Times, What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now? Theodore Schleifer, Nov. 27, 2024. The party’s donor class is still wrestling with Donald Trump’s victory, worried about retribution and sluggish liberal energy. (Shown at right, Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- Washington Post, Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted'
- Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him
- Washington Post, Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election, Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein
- Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu
- The Hartmann Report, Political Opinion: Is Democratic Leadership Missing in Action as Trump Tightens His Grip? Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump Evaded Jack Smith and the Rule of Law, Jesse Wegman
- New York Times, They Attended Trump’s Trial. Now He’s Offering Them High-Profile Jobs
- New York Times, Trump’s Sentencing in New York Is Officially on Hold
- New York Times, Pam Bondi, Former Florida Prosecutor, Is Trump’s New Attorney General Pick
- New York Times, Pam Bondi Is Trump’s New Choice for Attorney General. Here’s What to Know About Her
- Washington Post, Matt Gaetz withdraws bid to be attorney general in Trump administration
- The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann
More On Hunter Biden Pardon
Emptywheel, Analysis: You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 6, 2024. The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.
Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.
With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.
And it won’t work.
Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden
Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.
Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted. But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.
While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media. The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.
Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.
Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.
More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.
Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.
That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.
There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole
Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.
Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.
Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.
Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.
There are legal privileges to protect
One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking opening of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.
To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.
Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”
Plus, the opinion via which Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.
The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.
If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.
It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law
There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.
Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.
Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.
Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.
Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.
Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.
Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.
Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.John Bolton would beg to differ with you.
Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.
Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.
But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.
Hunter Biden, shown above in a file photo. The Biden sentencing judges, U.S. District Court Judges Maryellen Noreika (left) of Delaware and Mark Scarsi of California, both nominated by Donald Trump, are shown side by side.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 4, 2024. I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.
ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.
Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.
According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.
In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.
This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.
Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.
First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.
But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.
Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1
[snip]
The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.
Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.
Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.
New York Times, Editorial: The Dangerous Precedent of Biden’s Pardon, Editorial Board, Dec. 4, 2024. President Biden has issued pardons to just 26 people during his term, and granted the commutation of 132 prison sentences. Though he has been criticized for his reluctance to extend clemency, his choices mostly represented the best form of it, wiping away the criminal stains of everyday people who had been unjustly convicted or reducing prison time for those whose sentences were excessive. And his modest record spoke to Mr. Biden’s attempt to project an admirable restraint in using his absolute, easily abused power to overrule the judgment of the justice system.
Then on Sunday, in direct violation of his own pledges not to do so, Mr. Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter. Though he claimed the decision was made out of fatherly love, his explanation also attacked the investigation of his son and, implicitly, his own Justice Department.
New York Times, Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun.
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”
He said he did so because the charges against his son were politically motivated and designed to hurt the president politically.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
After Mr. Biden announced the pardon, Hunter Biden issued a statement of his own. “I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” he said. “I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though he and his spokeswoman had denied for months that he had any intention of doing so. NBC News first reported on Sunday evening that Mr. Biden had in fact decided to pardon his son.
But the move quickly drew expressions of scorn from Mr. Biden’s political adversaries and others and called into question the president’s honesty, given the many public statements that he made saying he would not pardon his son.
President Biden used the power of his office to wave aside years of his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, including a guilty plea for illegally buying a gun. Republicans, including the president’s successor, President-elect Trump, have spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues. Read Joe Biden’s Statement About Pardoning Hunter
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced — precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter of lying on the firearms form. The tax charges were due to be tried in Los Angeles in September 2024, but Hunter suddenly decided to “plead to the sheet,” i.e., admit guilt to all charges.
Both cases were awaiting sentencing until last night’s presidential pardon, which brought them both to a swift end.
The pardon is generating controversy, even among Democrats and my former prosecutor peers. I understand their ambivalence, but I think it rests on considerations that don’t undermine the essential fairness and propriety of the pardon. In the few hours since the pardon was announced, these are the main objections I’ve heard, along with my responses:
New York Times, Opinion: Biden’s Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office, Jeffrey Toobin, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Toobin, right, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
Pardons are the consummate discretionary acts; presidents are never required to issue even a single one, nor are they limited in the number they issue or to whom. In this way, they reveal their roots in the royal prerogative of mercy. There is only one reason presidents, or kings, issue pardons: because they want to.
On Sunday night as he boarded a plane to Cape Verde, en route to Angola, President Biden revealed himself as an anguished, and furious, father when he pardoned his son Hunter. Mr. Biden said, as recently as June, that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter or commute his sentence, and his press secretary reiterated that he had no plans to pardon Hunter after last month’s election. In June, a jury had found the younger Mr. Biden guilty of three felony counts relating to lies about his drug use on a federal form to apply to own a firearm. Then, in September, he pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California.
Hunter was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month, which undoubtedly served to precipitate his father’s action. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, he was probably facing at least a couple of years in prison. But the pardon from his father wiped out that possibility and gifted the son a clean record, as if he had never been charged in the first place. The pardon goes further. It is “not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted” and encompasses the period when the younger Mr. Biden joined the board of Burisma.
Reader Comment: I would agree with Mr. Toobin here, except that there are a few unique circumstances that move this out of the realm of typical Federal sentencing situations.
The Secret Service is responsible for Mr. Biden until July 19, 2025, which means there is a six-month period during which they must protect him in prison. His time in prison would very likely have exceeded that period. Between the time of the sentencing report following his tax-related guilty plea (September 5, 2024) and yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Secret Service, the DOJ, and his lawyers have been trying to construct an incarceration plan that would have guaranteed his safety, at least until July 19, 2025.
The overriding concern is that an incoming administration consisting of some of the announced nominees would be easily capable of, and, in fact, looking forward to, relocating Mr. Biden from a low-security facility to a Federal hell-hole with a shiv-carrying general population.Even solitary confinement is not a safe escape from that population.
Hunter Biden deserves to serve time, but does not deserve to be murdered in prison. Does President Biden need to sacrifice yet another child to prove his character?
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon
New York Times, President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night.
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.
From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given noncriminal resolutions.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
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It is clear that Hunter was treated differently. The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.
There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.
Washington Post, Hunter Biden’s team issues a fiery defense ahead of sentencing, possible pardon, Matt Viser, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Judges are scheduled to sentence the president’s son for gun and tax offenses in December.
Hunter Biden’s legal team is launching an assertive public defense of the president’s son just weeks before federal judges in Delaware and California prepare to sentence him this month, and as his father faces a diminishing window to pardon him if he chooses to do so despite previously ruling it out.Get the latest election news and results
In a 52-page paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” released Saturday, Hunter Biden’s lawyers criticize the foundation of the investigations into their client, arguing that he was prosecuted for crimes that an ordinary citizen would not have been. Hunter Biden is likely to face further unfair threats when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the lawyers contend.
The document at times seems aimed directly at President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said that he will not pardon or commute the sentences of his son. Hunter has been with his father over the past several days in Nantucket, where the Biden family for decades has gathered for Thanksgiving.
“With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real,” the report asserts. It cites comments that Trump has made about targeting his opponents, along with remarks from congressional Republicans who for years have investigated Hunter and other Biden family members.
“There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter,” the report says. “The prospect that Trump will turn his vengeance on the Special Counsel prosecutors if they fail to take a harder line against Hunter no doubt exerts considerable pressure on them not to let up on Hunter.”
Both cases against Hunter Biden, for gun and tax offenses, were brought by special counsel David Weiss, left (nominated by Donald Trump to be U.S. attorney), whose office was staffed by attorneys from the Justice Department. That department will now be overseen by Trump and his attorney general.
Taken as a whole, the document largely rehashes past arguments made by Hunter Biden and his legal team, at times unsuccessfully in court. It includes a lengthy timeline of events since 2017 that the attorneys say demonstrate that federal prosecutors unfairly targeted the son of a prominent politician.
“Here, in one place, is the complete and reprehensible history of the political persecution of Hunter Biden,” Abbe Lowell, one of Hunter’s top attorneys, said in a statement. “This is a seven-year saga propelled by an unrelenting political desire to use a son to hurt his father.”
He added, “It is a wild and terrifying story that serves as a stark warning of what is to come as some of the same Republicans who targeted Hunter prepare to resume power and have stated their intention to use the government’s vast power to pursue their perceived enemies.”
New York Times, Analysis: In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints, Peter Baker, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden and President-elect Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.
The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Mr. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much the way Mr. Biden has now said his son was.
Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Mr. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Mr. Biden did not explicitly accuse the Justice Department of being biased against his family, but suggested that it was influenced by Republican politicians who have waged a long public campaign assailing Hunter Biden.
As it happens, the Justice Department has rejected both accusations. The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics, and senior department officials have denied that politics entered the equation against either man. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases.
But Mr. Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the F.B.I. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Mr. Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.
“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.
Representative Greg Stanton, Democrat of Arizona, disputed the president’s argument that politics was behind his son’s prosecution. “I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said online. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
The Bulwark, Opinion: The Father, the Son, and Kash Patel, William Kristol, Dec. 2, 2024. One thing can be bad and another thing can be much worse.
In The Bulwark’s house there are many rooms. In one of them resides the estimable Mona Charen, who a couple of weeks ago urged President Biden not to pardon his son, Hunter. In another dwells the laudable Kim Wehle, who this morning defends Biden’s pardon as judiciously as one can. For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in Mona’s wing of our (virtual) Bulwark mansion.
The president ought not to have pardoned Hunter Biden. It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.
In any case, The Bulwark will survive some disagreement over the act of a man who let his love as a father overwhelm his judgment as a president. So will the nation. The question we face is how well the nation will survive the next four years of a Trump presidency, where neither love nor judgment are present, only the will to arbitrary power and the desire for personal retribution.
President Biden made a mistake. But the problem with Donald Trump and his appointees isn’t that they’ll make mistakes. It is that the whole Trump presidency is animated by a plan to create centralized, personalized, unconstrained, and unaccountable power in the president and his agents.
Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Kash Patel director of the FBI is one piece of the puzzle, but a particularly dangerous piece at that. It is emblematic of an attempt to seize full control over the power ministries of the government—including the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Whether these agencies are run by true believers like Patel or Tulsi Gabbard, or weak opportunists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, is less important than that they be run fully and unequivocally in accord with the wishes of Trump and his key apparatchiks in the White House—Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and OMB Director Russell Vought.
If Trump can get Patel confirmed as FBI director, he’s obviously off to the authoritarian races. But even if Patel isn’t confirmed, or isn’t confirmed quickly, we’re on a very dangerous path. Trump will govern and seek to enable his agents to govern in what one might call the spirit of Kash Patel—a lawless and authoritarian spirit.
One way Trump will advance this plan is by appointing loyalists to serve in an “acting” capacity in key positions where the Senate hasn’t confirmed his nominees. Trump experimented with this in his first term. Indeed, he commented in January, 2019: “I like acting [appointments]. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.” Now his lawyers and operatives have had years to plan on how to systematically place loyalists as acting officials in key positions, from secretary and director on down.
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced—precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.Gerald Ford (left) speaks as Richard Nixon looks on.
Gerald Ford (left) speaks as President Richard Nixon looks on in October 1973. Eleven months later, after Nixon resigned and Ford became president, he pardoned Nixon. | STR/AFP via Getty Images
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon.
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U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
New York Times, Agriculture Department to Require Testing of U.S. Milk Supply for Bird Flu Virus, Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The new rules call for testing unpasteurized milk from dairies across the country and for farm owners to provide details that would help officials identify and track cases more easily.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new rules on Friday requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus known as H5N1, nearly a year after the virus began circulating through dairy cattle.
Under the new testing strategy, the department will begin testing bulk samples of unpasteurized milk from dairy processing facilities across the country.
Farmers and dairy processors will be required to provide samples of raw milk on request from the government. The rules also require farm owners with infected herds to provide details that would help officials identify more cases and contacts.
The rules are a departure from the voluntary guidance that the department has issued during the outbreak. Many dairy farms have not complied with voluntary testing of milk or of dairy workers, leaving federal officials in the dark about how widely the virus might have spread.
Many experts in the United States and elsewhere, including with the World Health Organization, have sharply criticized the lack of testing of cattle and of people who may be infected with the virus. The virus does not yet spread easily among people, but every untreated infection is an opportunity for it to gain the ability to do so, experts have said.
Politico, Federal judge preserves Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions, Bianca Quilantan, Dec. 6, 2024. A federal judge argues that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.An entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Maryland, is seen.
A federal judge on Friday upheld the U.S. Naval Academy’s consideration of race in admissions arguing that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.
The ruling is an early blow to Students for Fair Admissions’ latest attempt to extend the scope of its Supreme Court win against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that gutted the use of race in college admissions. The ruling also comes while the Naval Academy’s admissions process is underway for its next class.
Judge Richard Bennett emphasized in his ruling that the academy is “distinct from a civilian university” because its mission is to prepare its students to become officers in the military. He also said that while race is considered in admissions, the academy does not have racial quotas or engage in racial balancing, and race is not a determinative factor in its process.
Bennett added that the academy proved its national security interest is measurable and its admissions program is narrowly tailored. He also said the court defers to the executive branch on military personnel decisions.
“The program survives strict scrutiny because the Naval Academy has established a compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Bennett wrote. “Specifically, the Academy has tied its use of race to the realization of an officer corps that represents the country it protects and the people it leads.”
SFFA, an anti-affirmative action group, argued that the Naval Academy has “no justification for using race-based admissions” when using race in admissions is unconstitutional for all other colleges across the country. But the Biden administration has argued the case is nothing like the one against Harvard or UNC because the admissions process and applicant pool are different. The administration also argued SFFA was overreading the ruling in the case against Harvard because the Supreme Court explicitly did not address military academies’ admissions policies.
The high court, in siding with SFFA against Harvard, had said it could not address admissions at the schools because of “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
SFFA President Edward Blum said the group was “disappointed” in the ruling and will appeal the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Politico, Eric Adams doesn’t rule out switch to the GOP: ‘Cancel me,’ Joe Anuta, Dec. 6, 2024. The New York City mayor has been at odds with national Democrats over immigration.Eric Adams walks in a parade.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has taken a soft touch with President-elect Donald Trump, left open the possibility of switching to the Republican Party in a pair of Friday morning interviews.
Adams was a member of the GOP from 1995 through 2002, and was asked during an appearance on NY1 whether he would return to the party. He did not rule out the possibility.
“I’m a part of the American party,” he said in response. “I love this country.”'Cancel me': Adams says he's open to working with Trump border czar
Asked to clarify his comments in a subsequent interview on PIX11, the big-city mayor again left open the question about his future political affiliation.
“No matter what party I’m on or vote on, I’m going to push for American values,” he said, arguing that officials need to move beyond parties altogether and work in concert to solve voters’ problems.
Adams’ comments come on the heels of a presidential race in which the mayor — unlike most of his fellow Democrats — took pains to avoid criticizing Trump. And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Adams has spoken glowingly about Elon Musk, a confidant of Trump tasked with making government more efficient.
The mayor is set to sit down with Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, next week to talk about plans to deport undocumented immigrants. Adams has said he would support any federal plan that focuses on those undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes.
The mayor’s openness to Trump has outraged local Democrats because of the power the incoming president will have over the five-count criminal case Adams faces in federal court.
Trump has already settled on a nominee to replace the U.S. Attorney prosecuting Adams. And as POLITICO has reported, Trump could assist Adams with the case, including offering him a pardon.
Each has cast criminal charges against themselves as the result of a politicized Justice Department — a notion President Joe Biden bolstered by criticizing the justice system in pardoning his son Hunter Biden. And Trump has expressed empathy toward Adams’ predicament.
When asked Friday if he would run for reelection next year as a Democrat, Adams gave a perfunctory answer.
“That is what I’m proposing to do,” he said. “I’ve been a Democrat for many years and I’m going to run for my reelection as a Democrat.”
And he had a final message for any naysayers.
“Those who don’t like it, they will cancel me,” he said. “I say: Cancel me. I’m for America.”
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Middle East Wars, Reactions
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Storm Another Major City, Ben Hubbard, Dec. 5, 2024. Opposition forces advanced on the city of Hama as their startling offensive moved quickly in the direction of the capital, Damascus.
Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad.
The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.
In a video circulated by the rebel group leading the offensive, their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, jubilantly calls for the rebels to push on toward other Syrian cities, including the capital.
“The people of Homs, prepare yourselves,” he said in the video, which his group said was filmed on Wednesday. “The people of Damascus, the people of Dara’a, the people of Deir al Zour. Victory for all, God willing.” The New York Times could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video or when it was filmed.
The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country, opened voids exploited by jihadist groups, drawn in world powers including Russia and the United States and created a long-term refugee crisis for neighboring countries.
Hama is one of the few major Syrian cities where rebels had yet to seize significant control during the civil war, which began with a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. al-Assad in 2011.
The city’s name is synonymous with one of the most notorious massacres in the Middle East. In 1982, security forces serving the president’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, massacred thousands of people there during an anti-government uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
New York Times, Fighting Rages in Syria as Rebels Advance, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Vivian Yee, Dec. 1, 2024. Forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad control the Aleppo airport and are attacking Hama, local officials and a U.K.-based war monitor say.
New York Times, A Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs, Amanda Taub, Dec. 1, 2024. Hamas's weakened position could leave the territory without any governing institutions, our columnist writes.
New York Times, Police and Protesters Clash in Georgian Capital, Cassandra Vinograd, Dec. 1, 2024. The government’s decision to suspend its bid for European Union membership has driven thousands of protesters onto the streets.
Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia’s capital late Saturday during the third consecutive night of demonstrations over the government’s suspension of its bid to join the European Union.
Thousands of people have rallied in the capital, Tbilisi, since Thursday night after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the country was putting the process of E.U. accession on hold until 2028 and would decline all grants from the bloc. The police have responded with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.
Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday morning that protests overnight had “evolved into violence.” It claimed that protesters “threw pyrotechnics” and “ignited objects” toward police officers and at Parliament, causing a fire to break out. Windows were smashed by “stones and various objects,” the ministry added in a statement, saying that protesters also had damaged protective iron barriers around the building.
More than 100 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, according to the ministry, which also said that several police officers were wounded and that 42 of its employees had been injured since the protests began.
The Associated Press reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters; it was not immediately clear how many protesters suffered injuries.
Georgia has been gripped by political crisis since the disputed victory of the Georgian Dream party in October’s parliamentary elections. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China. Georgia’s opposition, which says the election was rigged and has boycotted the new sitting of Parliament, seeks closer ties with the West.
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Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: {December 11 [Human Rights Day History, Implications] Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian, author, Dec. 11, 2024. Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans.
In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”They included the right to participate in art and science.They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.”
Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.—
New York Times, China Bans Rare Mineral Exports to the U.S., David Pierson, Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.
China said on Tuesday that it would begin banning the export of several rare minerals to the United States, an escalation of the tech war between the world’s two biggest powers. The move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology.
The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products, like weaponry and semiconductors.
Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony and so-called superhard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds that they have dual military and civilian uses, China’s Ministry of Commerce said. The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.
China is central to many global supply chains, but it generally refrained from clamping down on its own exports during the first Trump administration, preferring instead to take more limited actions like buying soybeans from Brazil instead of the United States. But senior Chinese officials are worried that President-elect Donald J. Trump plans more stringent policies during his coming term in office.
Mr. Trump has promised to put hefty tariffs on goods from China and further sever the trading relationship between the countries. The move on Tuesday — one of the most aggressive steps China has taken to counter increasingly restrictive policies from the U.S. government — could foreshadow more economic conflict as Mr. Trump enters the White House.
China produces nearly all the world’s supply of critical minerals needed to make advanced technologies such as semiconductors. Beijing has been tightening its grip on the materials to retaliate for clampdowns on American technology exports to China over the past two years.
John Leung at a meeting in 2019 of the Texas Council for the Promotion of China’s Peaceful Reunification. Mr. Leung had embraced Beijing’s causes, including unifying the mainland with Taiwan, the island democracy (David Tang photo).
New York Times, From Chinese Patriot to American Spy: The Unusual Life of John Leung, Mara Hvistendahl, Joy Dong and Adam Goldman, Dec. 3, 2024. He had been hailed by Chinese state media as a model for his efforts to promote Beijing’s interests in the United States. He was in fact an F.B.I. informant.
John Leung was an unlikely spy. In the small Oklahoma town where he lived, people knew him as a former restaurant owner and a father. In Houston, where he often traveled, they knew him as a political organizer in the city’s vibrant Chinese community.
And in China, they knew him as a benevolent patriot, a man who arranged musical performances and embraced official causes like unifying the mainland with Taiwan.
In fact, Mr. Leung was an informant for the F.B.I., gathering intelligence on China, according to two senior United States officials. That work landed him in Chinese custody in 2021, after he traveled to the mainland at the age of 75. He was later sentenced to life in prison, a first in decades for an American accused of espionage.
Mr. Leung was freed last Wednesday in a rare prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing. Six months shy of his 80th birthday, he was put on a plane to the United States with two other Americans who had been detained in China, along with three Uyghurs, members of an ethnic group that faces repression by the Chinese government.
In return, Washington released Xu Yanjun, a convicted Chinese spy who had been serving a 20-year sentence and Ji Chaoqun, 31, who had reported to Mr. Xu and was serving an eight-year sentence. A clemency order for a third Chinese national, Jin Shanlin, who had been in prison for possessing child pornography, was signed on the same day as an order for Mr. Xu. China said Washington also handed over a fugitive.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
Politico, Trump threatens BRICS nations with 100 percent tariff, Ari Hawkins, Nov. 30, 2024. Trump also said: “There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday demanded a group of developing countries commitment to the use of the U.S. dollar as their reserve currency and threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff if they attempt to abandon it.
“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, referring to the acronym for the original group of countries in the bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The geopolitical alliance has since expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
“We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy."
New York Times, Trudeau Flies to Mar-a-Lago to See Trump Amid Tariff Concerns, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Nov. 29, 2024. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is the first G-7 leader to visit since the election. He is under pressure to persuade President-elect Trump to back down from his tariff threat.
The visit makes Mr. Trudeau the first foreign head of government from the Group of 7, a key forum of global coordination consisting of the world’s wealthiest democracies, to visit the president-elect.
Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump were to dine together on Friday evening, one official said, along with a delegation of senior Trump allies poised for top trade and security positions in his new administration.
Mr. Trudeau was accompanied on his visit by Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister of public safety. The Canadian prime minister was expected to stay in the area overnight, but not at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.
The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment, and there was no information released about Mr. Trump’s schedule on Friday.
Mr. Trudeau has been scrambling to formulate a plan to respond to the threat made this week by Mr. Trump to impose a 25 percent tariff unless Mexico and Canada take action to curb the arrival of undocumented migrants and drugs across their borders into the United States.Scott Gottlieb said he’s worried that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS will follow through on past antivaccine rhetoric.
New York Times, Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years, Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate, Nov. 29, 2024. Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him. The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.
“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.
She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.
In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.”
Questions about Mr. Hegseth’s treatment of women have emerged in the weeks since Mr. Trump chose him, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to lead the Pentagon. The issue is expected to be a subject of scrutiny during Senate confirmation hearings.
Washington Post, Trump, Mexican president talk border, migrant caravans amid tariff threats, Mary Beth Sheridan and Niha Masih, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke to President-elect Donald Trump after he threatened to impose tariffs and she hinted at retaliation in a letter.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, left, assured President-elect Donald Trump in a phone call Wednesday that migrant caravans are no longer reaching the U.S.-Mexican border, after Trump’s threat earlier this week to impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from her country if it could not halt irregular migrants and fentanyl from crossing the U.S. border.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
“We discussed the Mexican strategy for the phenomenon of migration, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at our northern border, because we deal with them in Mexico,” Sheinbaum wrote on X after the call.
She described the conversation as “excellent.” Trump, posting about the call on Truth Social, his social media platform, said the conversation was “very productive.”
The conciliatory tone on both sides followed a tense exchange Tuesday: In a letter, Sheinbaum responded angrily to Trump’s tariff warning, threatening tariffs of her own. But they diverged in how they described the conversation.
Trump said Sheinbaum had agreed to “stop Migration through Mexico,” which would mean “effectively closing our Southern Border.” In a second post he said this would be come into effect immediately, prompting another tweet from Sheinbaum in which she said: “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders but to build bridges,” adding that her country would offer assistance to migrants, including caravans, before they could reach the northern border.
New York Times, Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy, Michael Crowley, Nov. 29, 2024. The world is braced for disruption from President-elect Trump, but he may find more common ground with President Biden than many assume.
President-elect Donald J. Trump comes to office with a view of America’s place in the world that is dramatically different from his predecessor’s.
Branding President Biden’s foreign policy as “historically horrible,” Mr. Trump is vowing to reinstate an America First approach that in his first term swept away years of policy consensus and shook U.S. alliances around the world.
He wants friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, may slash U.S. support for Ukraine and has threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He admires foreign autocrats and shows little interest in Mr. Biden’s goal of championing democracy abroad. He is hostile to international organizations and treaties including the United Nations and the Paris climate accord.
But amid the many areas of potential disruption, Mr. Trump will also find plenty of things to like in Mr. Biden’s policies. Beyond the glaring exceptions of Europe and his plans for Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s initial approach could bear a surprising resemblance to the Biden status quo.
One reason is that abrupt foreign policy swerves are rare and difficult to execute, analysts say. America’s military, economic and political power tends to provide a fairly fixed amount of leverage over other countries. Pressure from allies, Congress and the federal bureaucracy push commanders-in-chief toward consensus views.
New York Times, How China Became the World’s Largest Car Exporter, Agnes Chang and Keith Bradsher, Nov. 29, 2024. President-elect Trump has promised to impose new tariffs, but they are unlikely to undercut China’s dominance given its advantages in automaking.
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- The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trade Wars Are Good, And Easy to Win, Andrew Egger
- New York Times, Trump’s Tariff Threat Pits Canada Against Mexico
- New York Times, After Tariff Threat, Is a China Currency War Next?
- Politico, Grassley: Trump’s new tariff threats are just ‘negotiating tool’ — for now
- New York Times, After Tariff Threat, Is a China Currency War Next? Keith Bradsher
- Politico, Grassley: Trump’s new tariff threats are just ‘negotiating tool’ — for now, Meredith Lee Hill
Trump Legal Cases, Strategies, Allies
Washington Post, Proud Boys’ Tarrio could testify at leak trial of D.C. police officer, Spencer S. Hsu, Peter Hermann and Tom Jackman, Dec. 1, 2024. Lt. Shane Lamond’s contacts with Henry Tarrio fed Proud Boys’ anger at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. His trial spotlights police dealings with the extremist group.
A former D.C. police lieutenant will face a federal trial Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied to investigators about their interactions.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Prosecutors say advance word from Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, deepened anger among the far-right Proud Boys and fueled their instigation of the mob two days later at the Capitol. But Lamond, then head of the force’s intelligence unit, says he may call Tarrio as a defense witness, seeking to convince the judge their talks were within the normal bounds of how a police investigator handles a source.
Such a move would put Lamond in the awkward position of seeking exoneration through a man serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy after being found guilty of plotting violence to stop Congress’s certification of the 2020 election, according to court filings.
Either way, Lamond’s bench trial before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will spotlight D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021. That tumultuous summer and fall, episodes of street violence in Washington marred both racial justice demonstrations prompted by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May and marches by Donald Trump supporters following the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Capitol riot that led to at least five deaths, $3 million in damage and assaults on about 140 officers.
The inner workings of police intelligence gathering stirred controversy, with liberal groups accusing police of favoring right-leaning organizations and crossing the line between eliciting information and appearing to take sides. They pointed to officers who posed for photos with supporters of Trump and who stood back as counterdemonstrators vandalized Black Lives Matter signs or pressed arguments to physical conflict.
Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, left, and former President Donald Trump, shown in a collage via CNN.
Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). The special counsel filed a motion to dismiss Donald Trump’s election-obstruction case without prejudice, which means the case could be revived in the future.
Special counsel Jack Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Monday to dismiss the federal election interference charges against President-elect Donald Trump, putting an end to a lengthy investigation that never made it to trial.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Smith’s motion seeks to dismiss the case without prejudice, acknowledging that Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president. If she does that, it leaves open the possibility that prosecutors could again bring charges once Trump leaves office after his second White House term.
But legal experts said it’s possible that once Trump is in office, he could try to do something that has never been tested before: pardon himself to foreclose the possibility of legal jeopardy in the future.
Trump faces four counts related to conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results. Smith’s filing acknowledges that the Justice Department has longed believed a sitting president cannot stand trial, and says prosecutors conferred with Trump’s attorneys and that they did not oppose the request to dismiss the case.
Russian War Against Ukraine
New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, Dec. 9, 2024. The messaging app’s popularity has soared during the war with Russia, leading Ukrainian officials to weigh Telegram’s upsides against its security risks.
In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support.
But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed.
Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings.
“We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.”
New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 370,000 wounded since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago. It was the first time in months that he had disclosed military casualty figures, a highly sensitive topic in Ukraine, particularly as Kyiv’s forces lose more ground to Russian troops.
The Ukrainian leader’s tally could not be verified independently, and it differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials and military analysts, who have put the number of dead much higher. U.S. officials said in August 2023 that close to 70,000 soldiers had been killed, a figure that has probably increased significantly since then.
Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian journalist with close ties to the army, shared a similar figure last week, adding that 35,000 soldiers were also missing in action.
Mr. Zelensky also noted that about half of the wounded soldiers return to the battlefield after treatment. This suggests that Ukraine has suffered a total of about 230,000 irreplaceable losses, comprising those killed and those permanently incapacitated by injuries.
It was not immediately clear why Mr. Zelensky chose to release casualty figures now, but his statement came just a few hours after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that Ukraine had lost 400,000 soldiers, without specifying the number of dead or wounded. Mr. Trump, who also said that Russia’s casualties were close to 600,000 soldiers, said the high toll of the war underscored the need for an immediate cease-fire and the start of peace negotiations.
Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid, Michael Birnbaum, Missy Ryan and Siobhán O'Grady, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president’s Ukraine directive has stirred debate, as some officials worry it will cut too deeply into American stockpiles and jeopardize military needs elsewhere.
The Biden administration is engaged in an 11th-hour scramble to provide Ukraine with billions of dollars in additional weaponry, a massive effort that is generating concerns internally about its potential to erode U.S. stockpiles and sap resources from other flash points, officials said.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The lame-duck initiative was spurred in part by Russia’s battlefield momentum and a fear among Ukraine’s fiercest advocates that once President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20, there will be an abrupt shift in U.S. policy toward the war.
Yet some in the administration have taken the view that no matter what Washington does, Kyiv’s military will remain outmatched without far more soldiers to sustain its fight. And even as they accelerate arms shipments, there is growing frustration with Ukraine’s leaders, who have resisted U.S. calls to lower the country’s draft age from 25 to 18.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have captured Ukrainian territory at the fastest pace since 2022, causing alarm in Washington. Administration officials say their end-of-term weapons push — accompanied by President Joe Biden’s decision to green-light missile strikes deep into Russian territory and the deployment of antipersonnel land mines long criticized by human rights groups — can give Kyiv some breathing room. But they are urging Ukrainian leaders to use the moment to expand their military beyond the 160,000 recruits Kyiv says it needs
“We’re absolutely going to keep sending Ukraine weapons and equipment. We know that’s vital. But so, too, is manpower at this point,” White House spokesman John Kirby said last week. “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.”
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Ukraine Matters, HORROR Spreads in Russian Force: Ukraine War Map Update, Georgi, Dec. 2, 2024. Crises in Russian conscripts, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine military as impacting Russian war against Ukraine.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
New York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants, Constant Méheut, Nov. 29, 2024. Moscow has increasingly hit critical substations linked to nuclear power plants in an effort to disconnect them. The assaults risk a disaster, experts said.
New York Times, Russia Launches Record Number of Drones in Overnight Attack, Ukraine Says, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). The assault, which the Ukrainian Air Force said involved 188 drones, came as both sides intensify air bombardments.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that it had shot down 76 of the drones in the “massive attack” but that nearly all the rest had disappeared from radar. It was unclear how many of those drones had been intercepted by other means, such as electronic interference, and how many had struck targets.
Some critical infrastructure was hit and residential buildings were damaged in several regions, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Damage to the power grid in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, caused electricity and water outages, the local authorities said.
New York Times, The Global Profile: As Russia Advances in Ukraine, a Cop Has to Flee City After City, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). For Volodymyr Nikulin, being a wartime police officer means aiding evacuees, surviving a shrapnel wound and tackling looters. It also means quickly switching cities when one falls to the invaders.
The belongings of Volodymyr Nikulin, a Ukrainian police officer stationed near the country’s eastern front line, boil down to this: a shrapnel-riddled car, a small sack stuffed with sweaters and pants, and two plastic bags filled with basic food and medicine.
Keeping it simple is essential for Mr. Nikulin, who has had to leave three cities to escape the advance of Russian forces in the country’s eastern Donbas region, losing his home each time. So he has learned to live with little, and to be ready to pack up on short notice.
He has barely bothered to settle into the friend’s apartment he currently occupies in Sloviansk, a city 15 miles from the combat zone, leaving the bedroom untouched and sleeping instead in a small office. The distant rumble of Russian bombing regularly echoes through the walls, a reminder he may soon have to leave everything behind, again.
“Who knows where I’ll be in a few months?” Mr. Nikulin said on a recent morning last month in Sloviansk, acknowledging that Russian forces in the area were creeping closer. He joked that he could at least count on his damaged car, recalling how it had helped him escape several Russian attacks.
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Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
New York Times, India’s Luxury Property Market Is a Boon to Donald Trump’s Business, Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj, Dec. 9, 2024. The Trump Organization has found a warm welcome in the country, where status-hungry home buyers clamor for a famous American brand.
When Donald J. Trump started his first campaign for the presidency, two Trump-branded buildings were going up in India, one in the financial capital of Mumbai and the other nearby in Pune. Before he won in 2016, the Trump Organization expanded its business in India, signing deals in two more big cities.
The day after Mr. Trump’s victory in November, a developer in India told local media about half a dozen new deals. Like the others, Indian companies buy the land, build the high-rises, sell the units and pay a fee to use the Trump name.
These deals are putting India even more squarely in the Trump Organization’s sights. And with Mr. Trump on his way back to the White House, the country is emerging as center stage for potential conflicts of interest.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, it was uncharted territory for a sitting U.S. president to have extensive business interests in foreign countries. During his second term, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
New York Times, How a Criminal With Close Ties to China Became a New York Power Broker, Michael ForsytheBianca PallaroJay Root and Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 9, 2024. John Chan was a Chinatown gangster before remaking himself into a powerful force in New York politics — one closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. On a Monday in March, in the heart of China’s capital, more than 2,000 delegates of a rubber-stamp advisory body to the authoritarian government of President Xi Jinping gathered for their annual meeting.
One mission of the men and women in attendance was to spread the global influence of China’s Communist Party. Of the throngs of party officials, generals and business executives who watched as Mr. Xi took the stage, just 20 people had been invited to represent the country’s vast diaspora, including a single person from the United States: a 69-year-old man from Brooklyn named John Chan.
Mr. Chan’s participation reflected a remarkable proximity to the highest levels of power in China, experts said, and marked him as a person on whom the country’s leaders might call for favors. But it was remarkable, too, because of his position at home: He has operated as a power broker in America’s largest city, with immense sway over an important subset of New York politics.
For years, Mr. Chan has exerted influence over the city’s ethnic Chinese communities — reaching into back rooms and political clubhouses from Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Chinatown to Flushing in Queens — to help sway elections, all without drawing much attention.
But lately, federal investigations into foreign influence efforts have swirled around city and state government in New York. Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with conspiring to accept illegal foreign campaign contributions from Turkey. He has pleaded not guilty. One of his top aides, an Asian affairs director with ties to China, had her homes searched in an investigation by Brooklyn federal prosecutors who have separately brought cases against people they suspect of being Chinese agents.
The same prosecutors recently accused an aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of serving the Chinese government by blocking Taiwanese officials from the governor’s office.
Mr. Chan, now 70, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the investigations. But against the backdrop of recent events, he has stood out nonetheless, both for his overt connections to the Chinese government and for his ability to influence American elections up and down the ballot.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by the Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
More than 180 people were killed in a massacre over the weekend in one of the poorest neighborhood’s of Haiti’s capital, the United Nation’s human rights chief said on Monday.
A leading Haitian human rights group described the killings as the personal vendetta of a gang boss who had been told that witchcraft caused his son’s fatal illness.
The slaughter began on Friday in the Wharf Jeremie section of Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a civil rights group based in the capital.
Older people who practiced voodoo appeared to have been targeted, according to the group. That assessment was backed by another rights organization and a Cité Soleil resident.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told reporters in Geneva that at least 184 people had been killed.
Nearly 130 of those who were killed were over 60 years old, according to the U.N., adding that gang members burned bodies and flung them into the sea.
The brutality of the killings reflect a country enduring an “accelerating spiral into the abyss,” said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert for Haiti.
New York Times, South Korea Bars President From Traveling Abroad, Victoria Kim and Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 9, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol cannot leave as an investigation unfolds into whether he led an insurrection last week when he briefly imposed martial law.
South Korea’s political dysfunction deepened Monday as its Ministry of Justice barred President Yoon Suk Yeol from leaving the country while officials investigate whether his brief declaration of martial law last week amounted to leading an insurrection.
Oh Dong-woon, the chief prosecutor who heads the office for investigating high-ranking officials, told lawmakers that he had sought the travel ban as the office carries out search-and-seizure operations targeting officials who were involved in the martial law order.
No sitting president has ever been arrested in South Korea, and the order adds to the spiraling fallout of Mr. Yoon’s extraordinary move last Tuesday. Since his short-lived martial law declaration, the country has been thrust into a leadership vacuum, and widespread protests have called for his removal.
New York Times, France’s First Big #MeToo Case Goes to Trial, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Dec. 9, 2024. The actress Adèle Haenel has accused the director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She accused him of isolating her during rehearsals and filming. Of grooming her for three years, when on Saturday afternoons he would touch her sexually. When it began, he was 36. She was 12.
Five years ago, the French actress Adèle Haenel shocked the country’s film world when she spoke out about the director Christophe Ruggia, who had cast her as the lead actor in a 2002 film about an incestuous relationship.
On Monday, the case went to court, marking the first major #MeToo accusations in France to proceed to trial. Mr. Ruggia, 59, is charged with aggravated sexual assault against a minor. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison as well as a fine of up to 150,000 euros, about $190,000.
Mr. Ruggia has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying that his relationship with Ms. Haenel was strictly platonic and that he never sexually harassed or touched her inappropriately. His lawyer Fanny Colin had refused to speak publicly before the trial, but had said that Mr. Ruggia intended to plead not guilty.
After Ms. Haenel first told her story to the French investigative outlet Mediapart in 2019, it inspired heated conversations about the country’s film industry and sex with minors, and how the French justice system treats sexual abuse complaints.
At the time, Ms. Haenel was a rising star, praised for fierce yet sensitive performances that had earned her two Césars — the French equivalent of the Oscars. In the United States she rose to fame with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” her final role before she announced her decision to boycott the industry.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024. Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by the Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
Rose-Mieline Florvil, 24, who lived in the Dominican Republic for less than a year, said immigration agents recently raided her house in Santiago, in the northern part of the country, one day before dawn and said something along the lines of “Black woman, come here.”
“I couldn’t run, because I’m pregnant,” she said.
The extraordinary wave of deportations — Dominican officials say the goal is 10,000 per week — reflects a stringent new immigration policy by a country with a complicated and racially charged history with Haiti.
The two nations share the island of Hispaniola, and the Dominican Republic, the far more prosperous of the two, has sounded increasingly loud alarms about shouldering the burden of what experts say is a failing state next door.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
More than 180 people were killed in a massacre over the weekend in one of the poorest neighborhood’s of Haiti’s capital, the United Nation’s human rights chief said on Monday.
A leading Haitian human rights group described the killings as the personal vendetta of a gang boss who had been told that witchcraft caused his son’s fatal illness.
The slaughter began on Friday in the Wharf Jeremie section of Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a civil rights group based in the capital.
Older people who practiced voodoo appeared to have been targeted, according to the group. That assessment was backed by another rights organization and a Cité Soleil resident.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told reporters in Geneva that at least 184 people had been killed.
Nearly 130 of those who were killed were over 60 years old, according to the U.N., adding that gang members burned bodies and flung them into the sea.
The brutality of the killings reflect a country enduring an “accelerating spiral into the abyss,” said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert for Haiti.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Loses No-Confidence Vote and Is Expected to Resign, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 4, 2024. Prime Minister Michel Barnier, above, is likely to remain as a caretaker until a replacement is named. But the vote could create a wider opening for the far right.
French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.
France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.
It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.
President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Is on the Block, and Marine Le Pen Holds the Blade, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 1, 2024. The end of Michel Barnier’s government looks inevitable, even imminent, and would add to the country’s political malaise. How long can he last?
The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, (shown above in an AP photo), known for composure on previous scaffolds.
His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.
The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.
Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, left, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.
She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.
Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.
Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.
“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”
But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”
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U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.).. During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Horowitz’s report, which does not identify the lawmakers by name, did not turn up indications that the two outspoken Trump critics were targeted because of their political views or affiliation.
“We did not find any evidence of retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors who issued the compulsory process we reviewed,” the report said.
The Justice Department during the Trump administration also faced scrutiny for efforts to access the email account of then-House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel. Patel, who is now Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has long decried the intrusion by Justice Department officials, which he claimed was retaliation for his effort to undermine the investigation of Trump’s 2016 ties to Russia.
Last year, Patel sued top Justice Department officials over the grand jury subpoena, and his suit was dismissed in September by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Patel was one of the 43 congressional staffers whose phone or email logs were pursued by investigators — a number higher than previously known. The review found that 21 of them were affiliated with Democrats, 20 with Republicans and two were in nonpartisan positions. The Justice Department did not seek or obtain the content of their communications, but only details such as which phone numbers or email accounts they were in contact with and when, Horowitz found.
Around the same time the existence of subpoenas aimed at lawmakers was reported, it emerged that prosecutors also sought phone or email records for journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN as part of the same leak investigations.
Barr did approve the subpoenas aimed at reporters, but the department never convened an internal panel that a policy in place at the time said should examine all such requests, the watchdog report found.
“This deviation from the Department’s own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role,” Horowitz wrote.
Biden called the tactic aimed at reporters “simply wrong” and vowed it would not continue under his administration. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo banning the practice and he later formalized that policy in DOJ regulations.
Horowitz was particularly critical of the Justice Department’s handling of gag orders it obtained on companies like Apple and Google. Those orders prevented the firms from telling targets about the demands.
Last year, the Justice Department issued a policy on subpoenas aimed at lawmakers, requiring high-level approvals at DOJ. Horowitz’s report reveals that DOJ quietly updated that policy again in September after getting a draft of the review. Among the latest requirements: Prosecutors must inform the judge or magistrate that the requests target a member of Congress or congressional staff.
The incoming Trump administration is expected to roll back the protections Garland adopted for journalists and perhaps even to eliminate earlier limits Democratic and Republican administrations had put on such demands. Legislation pending in Congress could block those moves, but last month Trump urged Republican lawmakers to “kill” the measure, known as the PRESS Act.
Horowitz said the past and current policies encourage prosecutors to seek lawmakers’ records because getting subpoenas for journalists’ emails or phone records required high-level approval, which has been basically impossible to get since 2021. He noted that even the latest Justice Department policy doesn’t require prosecutors to exhaust other avenues before demanding email and phone providers turn over lawmakers’ records.
Most of the leaks did not result in criminal charges, but one staffer swept up in one round of phone and email records searches — Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe — pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his dealings with journalists. A judge sentenced Wolfe to two months in prison.
Another long-awaited report is expected from Horowitz’s office in the coming days: a review of the Justice Department’s actions in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. That review has been pending for nearly four years. Horowitz recently acknowledged that work on it was frozen for about two years while prosecutors pursued some of the most serious criminal cases stemming from the attack.
Horowitz’s release of the long-awaited investigations comes as Horowitz and other inspectors general across the government face the possibility of being removed or even fired by the incoming Trump administration. Some Trump allies have urged him to install his own appointees in the independent watchdog roles at federal agencies, although traditionally most inspectors general have not resigned during a change of administration or of partisan control of the White House.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have vowed to oppose any attempt by Trump to oust the experienced watchdogs.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews Dec 10, 2024. 70% of Americans favor ending lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices.
Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices. The move is aimed at restoring confidence in the Court, as the approval rating for SCOTUS is at its lowest point in history, with only 16% of Americans reporting "a great deal of confidence" in the highest Court.
The Manchin-Welch amendment would impose single 18-year, non-renewable terms for Supreme Court justices. Each 18-year term would be staggered every two years. Current justices will not be held to term limits, but blocks of 18-year terms will begin to cycle every two years once the amendment is ratified. When a current justice retires, their replacement will be assigned the remainder of the current 18-year block, until every justice on the Court is term limited.
Eventually, every two years there will be a new Supreme Court vacancy to be filled by the current President.
"I’m proud to introduce this legislation with Senator Welch that would establish 18-year term limits for justices of the United States Supreme Court. The current lifetime appointment structure is broken and fuels polarizing confirmation battles and political posturing that has eroded public confidence in the highest court in our land," Manchin, the outgoing senator from West Virginia said.
"Our amendment maintains that there shall never be more than nine justices and would gradually create regular vacancies on the Court, allowing the president to appoint a new justice every two years with the advice and consent of the United States Senate. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join our legislation to help restore faith in our judicial system."
"Taking action to restore public trust in our nation’s most powerful Court is as urgent as it is necessary. Setting term limits for Supreme Court justices will cut down on political gamesmanship, and is commonsense reform supported by a majority of Americans," said Welch. "I’m proud to lead this effort with Senator Manchin that will restore Americans’ faith in our judicial system."
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas Dec 10, 2024. Prosecutors are pressing forward with the case even with Trump becoming President again.
This afternoon, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has filed an opposition to Donald Trump's request to immediately vacate the guilty verdicts against him and to dismiss the criminal case given the results of the November 5th election. Prosecutors had been considering whether to make this move for several weeks, and have officially decided to oppose any dismissal on several grounds.
First, prosecutors argue that the Manhattan court should reject Trump's motion to immediately dismiss the case given the fact that he has not yet been sworn in and does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution while President-elect.
The opposition goes on to highlight how even after he is sworn into office, the case should not be dismissed because the temporary immunity Trump will enjoy over the next four years does not justify wiping out the jury's verdict, especially as Trump's team does not dispute that the 34 felonies he was convicted of deal with purely unofficial conduct.
Prosecutors note that "at most, [Trump] should receive temporary accommodations during his presidency to prevent this criminal case form meaningfully interfering with his official decision-making."
Prosecutors listed several alternative remedies to a complete dismissal including a stay of proceedings during his term in office if judgment is not entered before January 20th. The decision will now ultimately be up to Justice Merchan who will decide whether or not to dismiss the criminal charges against Trump.
New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024. A New York jury acquitted Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely. Republican politicians hailed the verdict. But some New Yorkers found it deeply disturbing.
Outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Monday, a scuffle broke out among demonstrators, their chants amplified over bullhorns.
On one side were supporters of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was charged with fatally choking a fellow subway rider, Jordan Neely, on an uptown F train last year. They held signs, including one that said, “Daniel Penny deserves a prize not a prison.” On the other side were people protesting on behalf of Mr. Neely. Upset, they grabbed a sign and ripped it up.
As the sides exchanged barbs and police officers erected a barrier to separate them, inside the courthouse 12 New Yorkers were coming to a unanimous decision. Mr. Penny, they concluded, was not guilty.
If the death of Mr. Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who had struggled with mental health problems, had left New Yorkers unnerved and divided, the verdict quickly became yet another flashpoint in the nation’s debate over how best to address issues of crime and justice, homelessness and mental illness.
Republican political figures including Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani praised the jury and criticized the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for pursuing the case.
“Thank God justice was done in this case,” Mr. Vance said on social media. “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Penny a hero who deserved a medal.
But in New York, some found the verdict deeply troubling. “This decision highlights a deep-seated societal discomfort with unhoused individuals in need of support, and effectively green-lights ‘vigilante justice’ against the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” leaders of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus said in a statement.
Washington Post, Appeals court upholds nationwide TikTok ban-or-sale law, Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-Strong, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.
TikTok had argued to the three-judge panel, unsuccessfully, that the ban must be struck down for infringement on the free speech rights of the app’s users and owners under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” the court wrote in its opinion.
TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to take up the case before the sale deadline ends Jan. 19, or to first request that all the judges on the appeals court review the panel’s decision.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. He criticized the ban-or-sale law as being based on “inaccurate” information and said it was “resulting in the outright censorship of the American people.”
The appeals court on Friday said years-long bipartisan investigations into the app, and the government’s willingness to consider TikTok’s alternatives, weighed in favor of the law.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for a three-judge panel. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”
However, the judges said they rejected the government’s “ambitious argument” that the law did not “implicate the First Amendment at all,” saying that it would impose a “disproportionate burden on TikTok, an entity engaged in expressive activity.” The government had suggested that TikTok’s ownership by a foreign company left it without First Amendment rights, despite it having roughly 170 million U.S. accounts.
The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.By Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-StrongUpdated 45 minutes ag
The decision sets up a potential showdown with President-elect Donald Trump. Having backed a ban during his first term in the White House, he is expected to try to halt it, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
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Jose Ibarra listens through an interpreter during his trial at Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, Nov. 20, 2024, in Athens, Ga. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution pool photo by Hyosub Shin via Associated Press).
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Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case, Michael Levenson, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., right, who claimed to have more than 20 “wives” including 10 “brides” under 18, pleaded guilty in April to two felony conspiracy charges.
The self-proclaimed leader of a polygamist sect in Arizona who amassed more than 20 “wives,” including 10 “brides” under 18, was sentenced on Monday to 50 years in prison in connection with what prosecutors described as an interstate child sexual abuse ring, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.
Federal prosecutors said that the man, Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., led a group that victimized girls as young as 9.
Using his status as a self-declared prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mr. Bateman forced his child “brides” to participate in sexual activities with him and with other adult men and women, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Penny choked Mr. Neely in a minutes-long struggle on the floor of a New York subway car. The case reflected the pathologies of post-pandemic New York.
Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked a fellow subway rider on an uptown F train last year, was acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide on Monday, ending a case that had come to exemplify New York City’s post-pandemic struggles.
The jurors decided that Mr. Penny’s actions were not criminal when he held the rider, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold as the two men struggled on the floor of a subway car on May 1, 2023. Mr. Neely, who was homeless and had a history of mental illness, had strode through the subway car that afternoon, yelling at passengers and frightening them, according to witnesses.
After the forewoman announced the verdict, the courtroom erupted, with some people cheering the outcome and others responding with anger.
Upon hearing the words “not guilty,” Mr. Penny’s lawyer, Thomas A. Kenniff, slapped his palm on the defense table and turned to hug Mr. Penny, who had a large grin on his face. Another of his lawyers, Steven Raiser, stood and kissed his client on the cheek.
Mr. Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, lashed out at supporters of Mr. Penny, and the judge asked him to leave the room.
The jurors had spent more than three days trying to come to a unanimous decision on whether Mr. Penny, 26, was guilty of manslaughter — a higher charge — in the death of Mr. Neely, 30. On Friday, the jurors sent two notes to the judge overseeing the trial saying that they had deadlocked.
After the jurors — seven women and five men — sent the first note that morning, the judge, Maxwell T. Wiley, instructed them to resume their deliberations. When the jurors sent the second note in the afternoon, telling Justice Wiley that they were still unable to reach an agreement, he granted the prosecution’s request to dismiss the charge. He sent the jurors home for the weekend, telling them to prepare to begin deliberating on the lesser charge, criminally negligent homicide, on Monday. Ultimately, they decided to acquit Mr. Penny.
The decision was a defeat for the office of Alvin L. Bragg, left, Manhattan’s district attorney. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bragg said that the jury “has now spoken.”
“We deeply respect the jury process and we respect their verdict,” he said.
In his statement, Mr. Bragg also noted that prosecutors and their families had been “besieged with hate and threats — on social media, by phone and over email” throughout the trial. “Simply put, this is unacceptable, and everyone, no matter your opinion on this case, should condemn it,” he said.
New York Times, Youth Pastor Is Charged With Nearly 200 Sex Crimes Going Back Decades, Billy Witz, Nov. 27, 2024. Many of the victims were the West Virginia pastor’s relatives, the police said, including five nieces who filed a complaint against him in 2004.
The state police in West Virginia are continuing to investigate a longtime youth pastor who has now been charged with nearly 200 counts of sexual abuse crimes involving children, many of them his relatives, dating back more than three decades.
The pastor, John W. Radcliff II, was arrested a second time last week after officers investigating a complaint filed against him in September revisited a case from 2004, when five of Mr. Radcliff’s nieces told the police that he had abused them.
“I have no idea what happened, but we never saw charges pressed,” said one niece, Carla Rinehart, whose mother is Mr. Radcliff’s sister.
Ms. Rinehart, 38, said that growing up, she did not know that her relatives had endured the same type of abuse that she says her uncle had committed against her. But when Ms. Rinehart was hospitalized at 17 after a mental breakdown, she began to share her story with family members. Her sister recounted a similar experience at the time, and then their cousins did the same.
A local TV station, citing court documents in Lewis County, W.Va., on the 2004 case, reported that Mr. Radcliff had forced the girls to perform sexual acts on him from 1987 to 1996, and sexually assaulted them in other ways until they were about 12. The victims are all now adults, the news outlet reported.
Lewis is one of four counties where Mr. Radcliff has been charged with abuse.
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U.S. Immigration
Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramirez, Dec. 8, 2024. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported.
And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of the 1.4 million people in the U.S. immigration system who have pending deportation orders cannot be sent back to their home countries, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, posing one of several looming obstacles to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge for a mass removal campaign.
Some orders can’t be carried out because the would-be deportee’s home country won’t take them or limits cooperation with ICE. Others identified for deportation are serving prison terms, or have received a reprieve or deferral from an immigration judge, due to a medical condition, a credible persecution threat or another extenuating factor.
An array of other logistical and legal impediments also could constrain mass deportations, according to current and former ICE officials.
Trump promises to brush aside hurdles and mount a campaign modeled after the harsh roundups of the Eisenhower administration, when the U.S. government expelled hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to Mexico.
“We will begin — and we have no choice — the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said on the campaign trail.
Trump’s aides describe the anticipated campaign as an enforcement blitz that will leverage the power and resources of the U.S. military to roll back the effect of record numbers of illegal border crossings under President Joe Biden. Criminals and those with outstanding deportation orders will be the administration’s priority as of Trump’s inauguration, Jan. 20, aides say.
Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery, Laura Vozzella and Salvador Rizzo, Dec. 8, 2024. Virginia’s governor, shown above in a file photo, has used the arrest of two undocumented men who misunderstood directions to stop at a check-in station to inflame fears over illegal immigration.
There are two versions of a May 3 incident at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia involving two Jordanian men, both undocumented immigrants, who pulled up to the entrance in a box truck.
There’s the mundane account given by federal prosecutors about some confusion over where to check in during an Amazon delivery stop. And there’s the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has been telling for the past six months that makes it sound like two foreigners stormed the gates at the fortified military installation.
“We have folks that have crashed the — illegal immigrants — that have crashed the front gate at Quantico in a box truck, trying to gain access to Quantico,” Youngkin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Oct. 14 in one of multiple national television appearances — plus speeches at the National Republican Convention and a rally in Virginia with then-Republican nominee Donald Trump — where he has invoked the episode to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies.
Federal prosecutors — who initially charged the pair with misdemeanor trespassing, but later dropped those charges — say that, while the Jordanians were in the country illegally and are in the process of being deported, they did not crash the gate or intend to do any harm at Quantico.
Mohammad Dabous, working for an Amazon subcontractor, was trying to make a delivery to the post office in the town of Quantico, which can only be accessed through the gates of the military base, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Amico, who handled the case, said in a court filing. Hasan Hamdan was a passenger in the truck.
“Marine Corps … agents spoke with Mr. Dabous’s supervisor at the subcontractor delivery company, who confirmed Mr. Dabous’s employment and verified the scheduled authorized delivery to the Northern Virginia town of Quantico on May 3, 2024,” Amico wrote in a motion filed Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The same filing noted that neither man had any known terrorist links. “The FBI has not identified any national security concerns regarding either defendant,” wrote Amico, who also said he consulted the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Neither defendant is on the watch list.”
Quantico officials issued Dabous and Hamdan citations for trespassing, a petty offense punishable by a maximum six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. They then turned the pair over to ICE because of their immigration status. The men were later released on bond from ICE custody.
The U.S. attorney’s office dropped the charges Oct. 3, but the deportation proceedings continue.
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U.S. Jobs, Investment, Economy, Pensions
New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting, Jeanna Smialek, Dec. 11, 2024. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent in the year through November. The Federal Reserve is considering whether to cut interest rates next week.
What to know about the report.
Fresh inflation data released on Wednesday gave Federal Reserve officials one last glimpse at how their battle against rapid price increases is progressing as they prepare for their final interest rate decision of 2024.
Consumer Price Index inflation ticked up in November, with the index climbing 2.7 percent from a year earlier. That was up from 2.6 percent previously, and in line with economists’ expectations.
The Hill, Powell calls for ‘change’ in ‘unsustainable’ fiscal path, Taylor Giorno, Dec. 4, 2024. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday that the U.S. is on an “unsustainable” fiscal path and called for a course correction days after the national debt topped $36 trillion for the first time ever.
New York Times, Trump Tax Cuts Won’t Help the Economy Grow, Budget Office Finds, Andrew Duehren, Dec. 4, 2024. A larger debt and higher interest rates would cancel out the boost from keeping individual taxes lower, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found.
New York Times, Opinion: Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America, Paul Krugman, right, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). It’s late 2025, and Donald Trump has done what he said he would do: impose high tariffs — taxes on imports — on goods coming from abroad, with extremely high tariffs on imports from China. These tariffs have had exactly the effect many economists predicted, although Trump insisted otherwise: higher prices for American buyers.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
Well, U.S. trade law gives the executive branch broad discretion in tariff-setting, including the ability to grant exemptions in special cases. So you apply for one of those exemptions. Will your request be granted?
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
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Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, E.P.A. Bans Cancer-Causing Chemicals Used in Dry Cleaning, Hiroko Tabuchi, Dec. 9, 2024. The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday banned two solvents found in everyday products that can cause cancer and other serious diseases. It was a move long sought by environmental and health advocates, even as they braced for what could be a wave of deregulation by the incoming Trump administration.
For decades, communities close to factories, airports, dry cleaners and other sites have lived with the consequences of exposure to trichloroethylene, or TCE, a toxic chemical used in cleaners, spot removers, lubricants and glue.
TCE is known to cause liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and to damage the nervous and immune systems. It has been found in drinking water nationwide and was the subject of a 1995 book that became a movie, “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. The E.P.A. is banning all uses of the chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was overhauled in 2016 to give the agency greater authority to regulate harmful chemicals.
The E.P.A. also banned all consumer uses of perchloroethylene, used in dry-cleaning and in automotive-care products. Though it is less harmful than TCE, the solvent, also called Perc, can cause liver, kidney, brain and testicular cancer, and can damage kidneys, the liver and the immune system.
The E.P.A.’s ban of Perc still allows for a range of industrial uses, including in aviation and defense, with the provision that strict rules must be in place to protect workers. Both bans were initially proposed in 2023.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 9, 2024. Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
Many of these places are major food producers, such as Argentina, Spain and the Black Sea region, said Narcisa Pricope, one of the report’s authors and a land systems scientist at Mississippi State University. Others, like South Sudan, are vulnerable to conflict and political instability.
The aridity crisis is unfolding “in our lifetime,” Dr. Pricope said. “This is affecting our children.”
Worldwide in recent years, nearly 400,000 square miles of the planet’s healthy and productive land has become degraded annually. Under the 30-year-old U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, countries committed themselves to halting the devastation.
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, married for the fifth time in August 20124, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday. Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp. The couple announced their engagement in March.
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Murdoch wanted to change the terms of his family’s trust to ensure that his son Lachlan would be his successor upon his death.
Rupert Murdoch, right, has faced a setback in his bid to cement his son Lachlan’s future control of his media empire, after a Nevada probate commissioner rejected his bid to change his family’s trust, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
Murdoch, 93, initiated the effort to change the terms of the trust last year to preserve the conservative orientation of his sprawling media empire, which includes U.S. businesses Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. As first reported by the New York Times this summer, the elder Murdoch was concerned that a “lack of consensus” among his three other older children would have financial consequences for the company.
But probate commissioner Edmund “Joe” Gorman Jr. ruled against the effort, deeming it a “carefully crafted charade,” the New York Times reported on Monday afternoon. The case will now move to a district judge who could choose to affirm the recommendation, deny it or send it back for additional inquiry.
“We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members,” a spokesperson representing Prudence, Elisabeth and James Murdoch told The Washington Post in a statement.
The three siblings strongly objected to their father’s effort, which set off the current legal battle. The trust had been set up as part of divorce proceedings between Murdoch and his second wife, the former Anna Murdoch Mann.
Lachlan is ideologically aligned with his father and would be expected to continue the editorial positioning that has made the company successful. There was concern that his three siblings could choose to reorient the company in a more moderate direction after their father’s passing. James, in particular, has become a vocal supporter of liberal causes since he formally exited his father’s media company in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” But the three other siblings have not publicly expressed any desire to replace Lachlan or to change the company’s editorial direction.
Lachlan, 53, who has flitted in and out of the Murdoch media fold, became his father’s most likely successor after he was named chairman and CEO of the Fox Corporation in 2019. His grasp on that position only tightened after his father announced last fall that he would step down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., which includes the company’s newspaper and publishing portfolio.
Lachlan was the only one of the patriarch’s four older children who attended their father’s fifth wedding in June to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, a sign of the deep-seated family tensions at play.
The drama in Nevada was almost entirely hidden from the public and the media by dint of the commissioner, who determined that the trust battle was a private matter, rejecting efforts by a coalition of media companies — including The Post — to open up the case. Sealed hearings in the case were held in September. While no decisions in the case have been made public, the online docket now shows the status of the case to be “pending inactive.”
The elder Murdoch has been backed in his legal efforts by William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Previous attempts at a settlement that would have resolved the dispute without a court case were unsuccessful, though they could continue.
Murdoch’s company is still facing a host of legal challenges, including a defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic and shareholder lawsuits alleging that Fox executives were deficient in preventing defamatory content from airing on the network.
Washington Post, Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion, Kim Bellware and Niha Masih, Dec. 11, 2024. Alex Jones (shown above in a 2020 file photo) was forced to sell the platform to help pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which he called a “hoax.”
A federal bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale of Alex Jones’s Infowars platform to satirical news website the Onion, ruling Tuesday that the November court-ordered auction of Jones’s website lacked transparency.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
The decision capped a two-day hearing that stretched late into the night in U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s Houston courtroom.
“I don’t think anyone acted in bad faith here. I think everyone was trying to buy an asset and put their best foot forward and play by the rules,” Lopez said as he delivered his decision. The judge took issue with the lack of transparency from the sealed bidding process selected by the court-appointed trustee Christopher Murray, who was overseeing the sale of Jones’s assets. The judge added that he was troubled that the process, however well intended, “did not maximize value in any way, based on the record before me.”
“I don’t think it was enough money,” Lopez said of the winning bid, adding that he did not think the backup bid was high enough, either.
Lopez said he does not want another complex auction, but he deferred to Murray on how to proceed with fetching top dollar for Jones’s assets.
Global Tetrahedron, the Onion’s parent company, was named the winning bidder of a Nov. 13 auction to acquire Infowars. The platform was among the assets Jones was forced to sell to help pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting who sued for defamation after Jones claimed the massacre was a “hoax.”
Minutes after the verdict, Jones appeared live on X, telling more than 440,000 viewers: “A judge followed the law.”
In a statement, the Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, expressed disappointment that the ruling did not clear a path forward for any bidder, but he indicated it would continue its efforts toward acquiring Infowars. “It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome,” the statement said.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut families, said in a statement they were disappointed with Lopez’s ruling but would not abandon their fight to hold Jones accountable.
“This decision doesn’t change the fact that, soon, Alex Jones will begin to pay his debt to these families and he will continue doing so for as long as it takes,” Mattei said.
Lopez paused the Onion’s acquisition of Infowars a day after the auction. Jones, on air and in court filings, had decried the process as “rigged.”Skip to end of carouselThe Style sectionStyle is where The Washington Post explains what’s happening on the front lines of culture — including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion — with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, click here.End of carousel
First United American Companies (FUAC), a group affiliated with Jones’s supplements business that was the runner-up bidder, quickly challenged the validity of the Onion’s bid, drawing concerns from Lopez about the transparency of the bidding process.
FUAC’s $3.5 million bid was about double the Onion’s bid of $1.75 million cash, plus credit from some of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs, according to court documents. Plaintiffs from the Connecticut-based defamation suit against Jones agreed to forgo a portion of their award to boost the Onion’s bid, which would raise the overall payout to Sandy Hook families who were plaintiffs in a Texas-based suit against Jones.
FUAC argued that its higher cash bid should have won the auction and said the auction’s court-appointed trustee improperly selected the Onion’s bid.
National Public Radio (NPR), Top 'Washington Post' editor kills article on deputy's departure, David Folkenflik, Dec. 9, 2024. Washington Post Managing Editor Matea Gold, a veteran newsroom leader, is headed to the rival New York Times. Acting Post Executive Editor Matt Murray blocked the publication of a story about her decision to leave, questioning why the paper should cover itself. Her departure has shaken colleagues and caps a year of crises for the Post 
involving its leadership and its finances.
As the Washington Post newsroom awaits the appointment of a new top editor, its acting news chief intervened to block an article about the departure of its second-highest-ranking editor, a contender for the position, according to several people with knowledge of events.
Managing Editor Matea Gold, a veteran of 11-and-a-half years at the Post who has built up deep loyalty among staffers, had been herself considered a top internal candidate to run the newsroom. According to associates, it became clear that Post Publisher and Chief Executive Will Lewis was poised to pass over her.
She is instead headed to be second-highest ranking leader of the New York Times Washington bureau, as the Times announced today.
The internal tensions over the selection of the Post's new executive editor are capping a series of crises for Lewis, including tensions over the paper's reporting on its own issues.The Washington Post's new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, announced a newsroom leadership shakeup during a staff meeting on Monday.The 'Washington Post' in crisis'Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first timeActing editor says Post should not report on itself
On Saturday, Acting Executive Editor Matt Murray told editors that the paper should not cover itself, according to four people with knowledge.
This is not how the Post has handled past developments about itself or its leaders. Last year, it covered the retirement of Senior Managing Editor Cameron Barr and in 2015, it published an article about Managing Editor Kevin Merida's decision to leave for ESPN.
Murray did not respond to NPR's request for comment and Gold declined comment.
NPR spoke to nine people with ties to the Post for this article. They requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive internal matters at the paper.
A Washington Post Co. spokesperson declined to answer questions for this story, but said, "The Washington Post newsroom is editorially independent and operates in service of our community and national interest."
Murray previously worked under Lewis at the Wall Street Journal, where Lewis served as publisher and chief executive from 2014 to 2020.Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Rupert Murdoch's U.K. tabloids hacked into his voicemails and documents to learn private information about him and his family. A 2011 police memo shows Washington Post CEO Will Lewis, then working for Murdoch, cited a security threat involving Brown as a reason to delete company emails.The 'Washington Post' in crisisFormer U.K. Prime Minister says Bezos should reconsider 'Washington Post' publisher
Gold is highly regarded inside the Post newsroom, especially as a stabilizing figure. In a social media post, Associate Editor and columnist Karen Tumulty called Gold "deeply respected and deeply beloved" there. Six colleagues tell NPR they believe Lewis's decision not to choose Gold helped push her into the arms of its leading competitor, compounding a sense of frustration internally.
Owner Jeff Bezos blocked 'The Washington Post' from endorsing a presidential candidate less than two weeks before Election Day. The editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris.
Gold was not granted an interview with Bezos for the top position, according to colleagues. Beyond Murray, Clifford Levy, deputy publisher of the New York Times Co., Wirecutter and Athletic sites is believed to be in contention for the editor's job.
Politico, Matt Gaetz gets his own TV show on OAN, Kimberly Leonard, Dec. 10, 2024. Gaetz, who was President-elect Donald Trump's original pick to be attorney general, has been teasing his next move for weeks.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has a found an outlet for his sharp tongue and yearning for the limelight: far-right broadcaster One America News Network.
The former lawmaker from Florida's Panhandle and MAGA provocateur will soon host his own hourlong political talk show on OAN, which heavily supports President-elect Donald Trump. OAN promoted the show in a series of graphics on Tuesday and called Gaetz a "powerhouse" in a release, describing the hire as a "mega MAGA investment" that will air weeknights at 9 p.m.
It is yet another high-profile, public platform for Gaetz, a firebrand Republican who made no shortage of enemies in the House before President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate him to be attorney general. Gaetz immediately resigned from the House after Trump's announcement, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). This is my final column for The New York Times, where I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. I’m retiring from The Times, not the world, so I’ll still be expressing my views in other places. But this does seem like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed over these past 25 years.
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.
In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration — toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren’t widely shared.
Of course, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. There was, for example, already a fair bit of proto-QAnon-type conspiracy theorizing and even instances of domestic terrorism in America during the Clinton years. There were financial crises in Asia, which some of us saw as a potential harbinger of things to come; I published a 1999 book titled “The Return of Depression Economics,” arguing that similar things could happen here; I put out a revised edition a decade later, when they did.
Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper.
Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.
New York Times, Opinion: Paul Krugman retires as Times columnist, Kathleen Kingsbury (New York Times opinion editor), Dec. 6, 2024. After nearly 25 years as an Opinion columnist, Paul is signing off.
I want to take you back to Jan. 2, 2000, a day when Y2K was in the rearview mirror and the dot-com bubble burst was just around the corner, when the Dow stood at a mighty 11,500 and a New York Times Opinion columnist debuted on the scene with the first of many prescient arguments and ideas about economics and government.
“Beginnings are always difficult: Even the most tough-minded writer finds it hard to avoid portentousness,” Paul Krugman wrote in his inaugural column nearly 25 years ago. “And since this is a quadruple beginning (new year, new century, new millennium and, for me, new column), I won’t even try. What follows are some broad opening-night thoughts about the world economy.”
That lede and the column were signature Krugman: The authoritative voice. The lively writing. The direct style. The clear hand guiding readers through a thicket of policy, data and trade-offs. The big ideas — in that column, they were about the First Global Economy and the Second Global Economy and how the interplay of political and economic questions would shape life worldwide in the 21st century. In little time, Paul became an essential read in Opinion, helping countless readers become more fluent in and mindful of how trade, taxes, technology, the markets, labor and capital intersected with political leadership, ideology and partisanship to shape the lives of people across America and the world.
Beginnings are always difficult, as Paul said, and so are endings. I’m writing to let you know that he has decided to retire from The Times at the end of the year. He plans to write a final column soon — though he will forever be a friend of Opinion.
Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on the big fights, grappled with policy deeply and seriously, held the powerful to account and spoke hard truths — sometimes as a lonely voice arguing unfashionable positions. He was a strong, clear, early opponent of the American invasion of Iraq and spent years shining a light on the lies and consequences involved with that war. He was a principled critic of George W. Bush’s leadership and many of his policy priorities and, with lucid prose, helped readers understand the implications of the Bush tax cuts and his proposed privatization of Social Security. And Paul was plenty tough on Bush’s successor, too: Barack Obama hadn’t even taken office in 2009 when Paul memorably took apart the president-elect’s prescription for the Great Recession: “The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat,” Paul wrote. “In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed.”
And through the Trump era and the Biden presidency, Paul was ever-sharp about the critical stakes facing the country, not least the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump and how his plans could radically harm the economy. A few weeks before this year’s election, Paul took a deep dive into Trump’s tariff plans, laying out for readers in clear and urgent writing why his economic policy ideas could do enormous damage to American society. He ended the essay with a classic Krugman kicker, where he summarized the cons of Trump’s tariffs in one graf and then wrote in the final graf, “Pros: I can’t think of any.”
Nick Fox, one of Paul’s editors over the years, said: “Twenty-five years ago, who could have imagined that a column by an expert in economics (yawn!) would become addictive for millions of Americans? Paul made the complex clear, cut through double talk and obfuscation and wrote in the voice of a tough but beloved teacher. It was remarkable that he could write so enjoyably and insightfully as many as four times a week.”
Ezra Klein, who has had his fellow Opinion columnist on his podcast over the years, said: “I don’t know that there’s anyone alive I have read more words from than Paul Krugman. A beacon of clear, moral and inventive analysis for decades now. What a gift his work has been.”
Among the many things we appreciate about Paul is that he’s always been game to engage with readers. Liriel Higa, Opinion’s Audience director, put it this way: “Despite being a Nobel winner, Paul was incredibly accessible. He responded to readers in comments on his articles; he touted the benefits of air fryers in an Opinion TikTok; he loved his cats.”
And on that Nobel: It really has been an honor and a privilege to work with someone of Paul’s stature but also an inspiration to see the deep care and strong work ethic that he devotes to his journalism.
Please join me in congratulating our colleague for so many great columns and a ride at The Times worthy of the best bull market. We wish you all the best, Paul.
Washington Post, Colleges scramble to shield programs amid growing hostility from GOP, Susan Svrluga, Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, Dec. 9, 2024. Endowments, research funding and DEI initiatives are expected to be among many possible targets of the incoming Trump administration.
For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.
Now that rift has become a rupture.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, many colleges are preparing for threats to research funding, endowments, diversity efforts, student financial aid, visas for foreign students and more.
“I think it’s an extremely worrisome time for universities, extremely so,” said L. Rafael Reif, the president emeritus of MIT.
It’s a dizzying and upsetting place for universities which had become accustomed to reverence for their contributions to society and now find themselves tarred as “the enemy.” The shift is not just political, but cultural, with a hardening skepticism of expertise and academia, rather than faith in research, science and scholarship.
New York Times, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion, Ben Sisario, Dec. 9, 2024. Over 21 months, the pop superstar’s culture-dominating stage show doubled the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures.
For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.
Now we know exactly how big.
Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.
Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.
The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.
The Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin? Thom Hartmann, right, The Best of the Rest of the News.
Russian media is bragging that Tucker Carlson could be shuttling secret messages between Trump and Putin.
This is the role that was apparently played during the last Trump administration by Senator Rand Paul. Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort. Senator Paul then often took Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Paul responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. Most concerning, ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent.”
Now it’s apparently Carlson’s turn. “While the former Fox host is positioning himself as a dove of peace, toiling to prevent a nuclear war, Putin’s acolytes say he is also acting as a carrier pigeon for the Russian president and privately delivering his messages to Trump,” wrote Russian media expert Julia Davis for The Daily Beast.
Davis reports that a Russian expert on American politics, Malek Dudakov, was blunt in an appearance on Russian TV. “What is important here is that the man [Tucker Carlson] who came to talk to [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov spent the last six months shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump. Obviously, he didn’t just come to conduct an interview. He has something to say. Apparently, he has a message that he is bringing.”
It gets worse, and appears to be an echo of the message from Russia right after Trump’s election was declared in November when the Kremlin released nudie pictures of Trump’s wife Melania by way of threatening Trump and then, a day later, issued a statement that, “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
On the Russian TV show this week, Dudakov bragged, “Yes, we currently see quite a few similar emissaries [to Tucker]. It seems Viktor Orbán is again planning to meet with Trump, and after that, he may come to Russia once again. There are people who are willing to pass messages back and forth, indirectly. Trump will understand what his plan is only after he personally meets with Putin.”
Where is America’s mainstream media on reporting this stuff that’s right out there in public to see?!? And if the Kremlin is openly boasting that Trump must dance to Putin’s tune, America’s intelligence agencies must be freaking out. Which makes Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who’s been taking Putin’s side on various issues for years, a lot easier to understand. Trump must live in terror of Putin…and apparently our media does, too…
— Will Joe pardon “the enemy within”? Andy Borowitz joked yesterday in his Substack newsletter that President Biden has issued a blanket pardon for all 70+ million Democratic voters except for “Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, adding, ‘They’re on their own now.’”
The humor references a very real discussion that’s going on in the Biden White House right now, according to some press reports. Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon for Vietnam War resisters, similar to Lincoln’s blanket pardon of former Confederate soldiers; could Biden be considering a large pardon or amnesty (like for the hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers”) or specific pardons for a few dozen or even a few hundred people who may be in Trump’s revenge cross-hairs? Presumably that would include members of the January 6th Congressional panel, Jack Smith and the attorneys and FBI agents who worked with him, and some of the others who testified at his various impeachment hearings and trials. One hopes Biden has the guts to do it.
Steady, Commentary: 'Blue Velvet': A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather, right, former CBS News anchor and managing editor, shown in a 2017 photo, and Team Steady, Dec. 8, 2024. right, My mind is awash in memories these days … so much 
to reflect on. Jean and I shared everything over the 67 years of our marriage. She was a wonderful woman and partner, and I miss her dearly. Someoneasked me the other day if I remembered our first date.
Of course, like it was yesterday. The year was 1956. Jean Goebel was working as a secretary at KTRH, the radio station in Houston where I was a young reporter. It took me a few weeks, but I finally summoned the courage to ask her out. When she said yes, you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
We decided to go dancing. I’ve tried to remember the name of the place. No doubt it’s long gone now. But I will never forget our first dance, and the song playing on the jukebox. It was Tony Bennett’s top 20 hit, “Blue Velvet.”
Though finding joy is challenging for me right now, this song does give me a reason to smile. I hope it gives you one too. Even though it’s from a lifetime ago, a good love song is timeless.
Listening to the song now brings back everything about the night that changed my life. We couldn’t find a video of Mr. Bennett from the 1950s. But he re-recorded the song with k.d. lang in 2011 as part of his Duets II album. It is a beautiful rendition.
New York Times, Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens, Ellen Barry, Photographs by Graham Dickie, Dec. 9, 2024. New technology alerts schools when students type words related to suicide. But do the timely interventions balance out the false alarms?Dawn was still hours away when Angel Cholka was awakened by the beams of a police flashlight through the window. At the door was an officer, who asked if someone named Madi lived there. He said he needed to check on her. Ms. Cholka ran to her 16-year-old’s bedroom, confused and, suddenly, terrified.
Ms. Cholka did not know that A.I.-powered software operated by the local school district in Neosho, Mo., had been tracking what Madi was typing on her school-issued Chromebook.
While her family slept, Madi had texted a friend that she planned to overdose on her anxiety medication. That information shot to the school’s head counselor, who sent it to the police. When Ms. Cholka and the officer reached Madi, she had already taken about 15 pills. They pulled her out of bed and rushed her to the hospital.
Thousands of miles away, at around midnight, a mother and father in Fairfield County, Conn., received a call on their landline and were unable to reach it in time to answer. Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Three officers were on the stoop asking to see their 17-year-old daughter, who had been flagged by monitoring software as at urgent risk for self-harm.
The girl’s parents woke her and brought her downstairs so the police could quiz her on something she had typed on her school laptop. It took only a few minutes to conclude that it was a false alarm — the language was from a poem she wrote years earlier — but the visit left the girl profoundly shaken.
“It was one of the worst experiences of her life,” said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to discuss an experience “traumatizing” to her daughter.
In the array of artificial intelligence technologies entering American classrooms, few carry higher stakes than software that tries to detect self-harm and suicidal ideation. These systems spread quickly during Covid shutdowns as more schools began sending laptops home with students.
A law required that these devices be fitted with filters to ensure safe internet use, but educational technology companies — GoGuardian, Gaggle, Lightspeed, Bark and Securly are the big ones — also saw a way to address rising rates of suicidal behavior and self-harm. They began offering tools that scanned what students type, alerting school staff members if they appeared to be contemplating hurting themselves.
New York Times, Jay-Z, Accused in Suit of Raping Minor With Sean Combs, Calls It Blackmail, Julia Jacobs, Dec. 9, 2024. The entertainer said the suit, which accuses him of assaulting an unnamed 13-year-old girl in 2000, was an effort to gain settlement money.
Jay-Z was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl with Sean Combs in a lawsuit filed Sunday by an unnamed plaintiff. He vehemently denied the allegation and accused the lawyer who brought the suit of trying to blackmail him with false claims.
The allegations against the billionaire rapper and hip-hop mogul came as part of the flurry of litigation against Mr. Combs, who is facing federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges and at least 30 lawsuits accusing him of sexual misconduct. One of those lawsuits, filed in October, accused Mr. Combs and an anonymous celebrity of raping the teen at an after-party following the MTV Video Music Awards in New York in 2000.
On Sunday, the plaintiff amended the lawsuit to name Jay-Z as the other celebrity, asserting in court papers that he and Mr. Combs took turns raping her after she arrived at the party and drank part of a drink that made her feel “woozy and lightheaded.” Jay-Z called the claims “idiotic” and said that he came from a world where “we protect children.” Mr. Combs has denied all allegations of sexual assault and misconduct and has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges.
The lawsuit was filed by Tony Buzbee, a personal injury lawyer in Houston, who has filed at least 20 sex assault lawsuits against Mr. Combs and used a phone hotline, Instagram and a news conference to find clients.
In an extensive response, Jay-Z, 55, said he had received a demand letter from Mr. Buzbee appearing to seek a settlement but that the letter had the opposite effect: “It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!” the statement read.
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- Steady, Commentary: 'Blue Velvet': A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather
Dec. 12
Top Headlines
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
- New York Times, Trump Transition: F.B.I. Director to Step Down
- New York Times, President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 1,500 Americans, a Record for One Day
- Politico, Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences, promises ‘more steps in the weeks ahead’
- New York Times, Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Pete Hegseth
- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
- Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns
- Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon
- New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America
- New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: The Prominent Maryland Family of the Suspect in the C.E.O. Killing
- New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting
- New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says
Trump Transition News, Commentary
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley
- New York Times, Musk’s Foundation Gave Away Less Money Than Required in 2023
- New York Times, Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous
- New York Times, Health Insurance Workers Fearful Amid Public Anger After Slaying of C.E.O.
- The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo
- Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail
- New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law'
- Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats
- New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman
- Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews
- Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm
- Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf
- Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich
- New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office
- New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power
- New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan
More On Health Care CEO's Murder
More On U.S. Public Health, Transition, Fears
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
More On South Korean Crisis
More U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
More On Tariffs, Budget Threats, U.S. Foreign Policy, Defense
More On Presidential Pardons, Cases
Russian War Against Ukraine
- New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent
- New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says
- Washington Post, Spies are secretly at war with Russian drones. But Moscow is fighting back — with lots of lousy weapons, Joby Warrick and Serhiy Morgunov
- Washington Post, Faltering Russian drones point to modest successes in Western sanctions to block Moscow’s access to technology
- Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid
Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
- New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial
- New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel
- New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions
- New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades
- New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages
U.S. Defense, Foreign Policy, Security
More U.S. Legal News
- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas
- New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case
- New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway
- New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness
- Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say
U.S. Immigration
- Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramire
- Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows
- Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery
Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
U.S. Economy, Jobs, Pensions
Energy, Environment, Transportation, Climate Change, Disasters
Media, High-Tech, Culture, Education
- New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America
- Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust
- Washington Post, Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion
- New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman
- National Public Radio (NPR), Top 'Washington Post' editor kills article on deputy's departure, David Folkenflik
- Politico, Matt Gaetz gets his own TV show on OAN
- Washington Post, Colleges scramble to shield programs amid growing hostility from GOP
- New York Times, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion
- New York Times, Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens
- New York Times, Jay-Z, Accused in Suit of Raping Minor With Sean Combs, Calls It Blackmail
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin? Thom Hartmann
- Steady, Commentary: 'Blue Velvet': A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather
Top Stories
New York Times, Trump Transition: F.B.I. Director to Step Down, Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). Wray told F.B.I. employees he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, right, told bureau employees on Wednesday that he intended in January, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.
Mr. Wray made the disclosure while addressing employees Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Wray added that he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.
Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.
Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.
But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.
His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by searching the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.
“He invaded Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump told NBC News in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.
In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.
His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”
“If Kash gets in, he’ll be taking somebody’s place, and that somebody is the man you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with NBC News, referring to Mr. Wray.
Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.
At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.
Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.
The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.
Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.
After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.
“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel, right (and author of the book Government Gangsters, shown at left, is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.
Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sought to weigh in on F.B.I. operations and at times expressed frustration that presidents typically stayed out of the bureau’s business.
“I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in 2017. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
New York Times, President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 1,500 Americans, a Record for One Day, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Mark Landler, Dec. 12, 2024. Many of those being granted clemency had been placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic.
President Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest grant of clemency by an American president in a single day, the White House announced in a statement on Thursday.
The commutations affect mostly those who had been released from prison and placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic. The people who received pardons were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including possession of marijuana.
A pardon wipes out a conviction, while a commutation leaves the guilty verdict intact but reduces some or all of the punishment.
The announcement came two weeks after Mr. Biden issued a pardon for his son, Hunter, who had been convicted of gun possession and income tax evasion. That decision was harshly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats because Mr. Biden had long ruled out clemency for his son.
Politico, Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences, promises ‘more steps in the weeks ahead,’ Andrew Howard, Dec. 12, 2024. The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330.
President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of almost 1,500 people and pardoned another 39, the most ever in a single day, the White House announced on Thursday.
The White House said in its announcement that those receiving clemency “have shown successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” The 39 pardon recipients had all committed non-violent crimes, and the commutations were for people who were placed in home confinement during the pandemic.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As President, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
Following Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, he faced pressure from some Democrats, as well as outside advocacy groups, to use his clemency powers more widely before his term ends in January. Biden indicated in his statement that he “will take more steps in the weeks ahead.” “My Administration will continue reviewing clemency petitions to advance equal justice under the law, promote public safety, support rehabilitation and reentry, and provide meaningful second chances.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who was one of the Democrats pressuring Biden to issue pardons, praised the president’s decision, calling it a “meaningful and historic action.”
“Thanks to President Biden, today a near 1,500 families will have their lives changed forever and I congratulate each and every family on this new beginning,” she said in a statement.
Still, Pressley is pushing for more clemency actions before Biden’s term ends.
“With 39 days remaining in his presidency, President Biden has the power to continue to use his clemency authority to change and save the lives of many, many other Americans behind the wall,” she said. “It is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, and it is a matter of legacy.”
The progressive group Popular Democracy in Action struck a similar tone, praising Biden’s decision but also telling the president “do not stop now.”
New York Times, Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Pete Hegseth, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 12, 2024. After President-elect Trump was persuaded to stick with his embattled choice to lead the Pentagon, a swarm of supporters mobilized to pressure senators.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon was battered by damaging headlines: Drinking. Extramarital affairs. An allegation of sexual assault, which he denied.
Republican senators — emboldened after tanking Mr. Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the scandal-ridden Matt Gaetz — were going public with their concerns. Mr. Trump was getting sick of hearing about it all, and he told confidants he was serious about picking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to replace him.
But within 48 hours, Mr. Trump had changed his mind. He was going to see if Mr. Hegseth could survive.
People close to the president-elect had been telling him that this was a moment that would test his power as he prepared to return to Washington. It would be catastrophic, they argued, if he allowed Republican senators, like Joni Ernst of Iowa, to obstruct his mandate.
Kaja Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.(AFP photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images).
Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns , Elena Giordano, Dec. 11, 2024. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, says Russia has learned how to influence elections through new technologies.
“I see the examples from Romania, but also other parts, that [the] Russians have really cracked the code on how to influence elections,” Kallas said at POLITICO’s P28 event Tuesday evening.
Responding to a question about the influence of new technologies on democracy, Kallas said she is “really worried.”
“Democracy is based on trust, and if you can’t trust elections anymore then how can you trust the outcome?” she asked.
Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair are outdated and don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.
“I think we should take them very seriously,” she said.
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Excerpt Continued Below.
Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Dec. 11, 2024. A handful of Silicon Valley executives could help transform the country’s largest bureaucracy — and benefit themselves while trying.
A culture clash is headed for Washington that will pit the risk-embracing, fast-first nature of Silicon Valley against the lumbering bureaucracy of the country’s largest federal agency.
Donald Trump has already tapped billionaire finance executives to be Navy secretary and the Pentagon’s No. 2, and startup world successes are in the running for other Pentagon posts. If they all make it, the long-frustrated kings of the Valley who bristle at the doddering pace of Pentagon decision-making could force real change in the building — and benefit themselves while trying.
They’ll be tasked with building weapons faster, fixing a broken shipbuilding system and matching China’s tech prowess. And while every new administration tries to clean up the Pentagon, this crew of outsiders has animated the tech sector.
“A lot of us are hoping there’s a revolution coming,” Joe Lonsdale, founder of software company Palantir and startup investor said at a recent defense forum, “where we hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy.”
The Trump team has worked to fill the Pentagon with picks such as Stephen Feinberg, a wealthy investor with no experience inside the building, as deputy secretary of Defense. Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, is being considered for the Pentagon’s top research and engineering job, as POLITICO first reported. Trae Stephens, co-founder and chair of Anduril Industries, is also in the mix for a high-ranking job at the Pentagon.
The executives all have investments and stakes in multiple companies working with the Pentagon and will need to determine how they detangle a web of potential conflicts of interest — such as Anduril’s drone development or Palantir’s software platforms the Pentagon is helping fund.
New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History, David Leonhardt, Graphics by Albert Sun, Dec. 11, 2024. Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered the country, government data shows.
The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.
That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing, Ashley Southall and Maria Cramer, Dec. 11, 2024. The man who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two officials.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare at a company investors’ day, was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said.
The shooting occurred early Dec. 4 as Mr. Thompson arrived early at a Hilton hotel on West 54th Street to prepare for the UnitedHealthcare investors’ meeting.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: The Prominent Maryland Family of the Suspect in the C.E.O. Killing, Amy Qin, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). Until the arrest this week of Luigi Mangione, the family was best known for building a business that made them a force in local politics and charity.
Long before the shooting, before the manhunt and before the arrest of Luigi Mangione in connection with the killing of a health care executive, the Mangione name was well-known around Baltimore.
The Mangiones, fueled by the competitive, combative spirit of their immigrant patriarch, built a formidable family business that made them a force in local politics and charity.
When Nick Mangione Sr., Luigi’s paternal grandfather, thought that he was being discriminated against at country clubs in the early 1970s because he was Italian, he bought his own golf resort. When he got tired of waiting for permission to build a second golf course at one of his clubs, he sent in bulldozers to begin clearing the land. And when one of his sons was cut from a local soccer team, Mr. Mangione barred the team’s coach from his country club.
“Nick Mangione is foremost identified as a family man,” Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, the former Baltimore mayor and late brother of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told The Baltimore Sun in 1995. “He is maybe a little rough around the edges and maybe with an aggressive personality, but a man with a big heart.”
When he died in 2008, the elder Mr. Mangione left behind 10 children, more than 35 grandchildren and a collection of business holdings, which now include two country clubs, a chain of nursing homes and a local conservative radio station. The Mangiones are longtime supporters of numerous local causes and institutions, including Loyola University Maryland and the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where the high-risk obstetrics unit bears the Mangione name.
Until this week, those commercial and philanthropic pursuits were the principal sources of the family’s prominence. Then, on Monday, Luigi, 26, was arrested in Altoona, Pa., and charged with second-degree murder and other offenses in connection with the killing last week of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare.
New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting, Jeanna Smialek, Dec. 11, 2024. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent in the year through November. The Federal Reserve is considering whether to cut interest rates next week.
What to know about the report.
Fresh inflation data released on Wednesday gave Federal Reserve officials one last glimpse at how their battle against rapid price increases is progressing as they prepare for their final interest rate decision of 2024.
Consumer Price Index inflation ticked up in November, with the index climbing 2.7 percent from a year earlier. That was up from 2.6 percent previously, and in line with economists’ expectations.
The Bulwark, Political Commentary: By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President, Andrew Egger, Dec. 11, 2024. An unsettling number of House Republicans are open to Trump’s threats against the House January 6th committee.
How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”
A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct. January 6th Committee Democrats were quick yesterday to deny that they had done anything untoward: “There’s nothing we did as a January 6th Select Committee that violates the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the committee, told NBC News.
For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the January 6th Committee criminally destroyed records in an attempt to bury facts that would exonerate him. (As fact checks have repeatedly shown, Trump’s claim is a totally baseless—a funhouse-mirror distortion of claims made back in 2023 by House Republicans who were then already investigating the work of the January 6th Committee and who were crabby that, for instance, they were only being provided with transcripts of depositions rather than video footage.)
For the most part, House Republicans who spoke to The Bulwark were careful not to actually say that they believed, like Trump, that the committee had destroyed evidence. But they were comfortable entertaining the possibility it had (despite those fact checks) and content with the idea of prosecuting lawmakers if they did. “I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”
Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee. (Raskin’s office did not return a request for comment.) It’s the committee which Comer chairs and on which Boebert and Burchett serve. That those three lawmakers showed comfort with Trump targeting the January 6th Committee members underscores the degree to which partisan affiliations now overwhelm institutional prerogatives.
The Oversight Committee exists specifically to provide congressional accountability and scrutiny to the actions of the executive branch. But none of these Oversight Republicans had an issue with Trump vowing open retribution against House members who performed that sort of accountability work during the last Congress.
When I asked Comer whether he was worried about the chilling effect of the president accusing an entire House committee of collective crimes, he dodged: “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Boebert wasn’t worried either: “I don’t lack confidence” in the House’s ability to do oversight, she said as she hopped into her car.
Not every House Republican The Bulwark spoke to endorsed Trump’s modest proposal of jail for the J6 committee. But none were willing to publicly criticize it either. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), considered one of the more bipartisan remaining members of the House, declined all questions about Trump’s interview in a sequence of terse monosyllables. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—typically as good for a soundbite as any human in Washington—smirked and ignored The Bulwark’s question as she walked to the House floor.
Remarkably, while some GOP lawmakers were practically licking their chops over the prospect of some of their colleagues facing legal retribution, others incorrectly argued Trump had never called for such retribution at all.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.). “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”
Over on the other side of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins was doing her part to avoid the controversy by focusing on the less openly bloodthirsty elements of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. “It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” she told reporters yesterday, alluding to Trump’s insistence that he would find “retribution” in office not by looking backwards but by being a successful president. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country, Jonathan Weisman, Dec. 10, 2024. When Donald Trump said Robert Kennedy Jr. could “go wild” on health, he might not have expected him to go to battle against the president-elect’s own voters.
The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.
To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.
To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”
Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies. Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.
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New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
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Trump Transition News, Commentary
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 11, 2024. The terrifying implications of pardoning insurrectionists who killed and maimed…
This past weekend, in his Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker (shown above), Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to pardon the people who attacked our Capitol, killing five civilians and three police officers and sending more than 140 cops to the hospital.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said of pardoning Jan. 6 killers. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Most media and political observers and commentators appear to be of the opinion that this is simply Trump’s way of thanking the people who made what he considers a heroic effort to keep him in office through violence. That would be bad enough, but experts at The Critical Internet Studies Institute are worried that there may be a much more sinister explanation.
If they’re right, it would also go a long way toward explaining his picks for Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and FBI director.
This theory, increasingly shared among counterterrorism experts and people who monitor violent rightwing extremist groups, suggests that the real reason Trump would do the pardons (and is unafraid of discussing them) is because he’s recruiting. And you don’t need to go back to 1930s Europe to find examples of how that could work.
Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, for example, has often used non-state actors to intimidate and even kill his political enemies. The most well-known is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club, aka “Putin’s Angels,” run by a man who calls himself “the Surgeon.”
They helped Putin invade Crimea and Ukraine, but most of their activity is against protestors, “communists” (anybody opposing Putin), and the queer community in Russia.
Similarly, five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing Hungarian “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”
Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”
Language strikingly similar, if not milder, to Trump‘s way of describing Black people, immigrants, and liberals.
Orbán refused to condemn Bayer or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white, Orbán-supporting Hungarian militias.
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Armed rightwing militia groups in the United States have been on a recruiting jag of their own in anticipation of Trump’s presidency, according to press reports and terrorism experts. For example, Reuters notes:
“The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.”
Similarly, Wired magazine reports that Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), is preparing for something like war:
“’This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,’ says Seddon. ‘Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.’”
El Pais tells the story of armed militia groups who are looking forward to action on America’s southern border when Trump allows it. Referencing them, Tom Homan, who Trump has appointed as his “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:
“There are thousands of retired agents, border patrols, retired military personnel who want to come and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do deportation operations.”
They also cite a Wired article that quotes Tim Foley, head of Arizona Border Recon, a white “civilian patrol group,” as saying they’re doing outreach:
“We’re in talks with a few different people. We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”
It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.
Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:
“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
More recently, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth, left, asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”
Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”
Our timid national media refuse to even consider such a savage scenario, but America should brace itself as Trump has not let up on his violent rhetoric and neither have his followers. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
“You know, when you listen to these comments and watch these videos, what you are forced to consider is the message that Donald Trump is sending, because it is not just to the January 6th defendants.
“It is to the people he hopes will support him in this next term, and the message is: ‘Support me at all costs, use violence, commit crimes, I will take care of you.’
“I find that to be deeply frightening.”
January 6th taught us that Trump and some of the people following him are deadly serious and willing to use violence and even murder to achieve their goals.
America needs to get ready. President Biden should be preparing (or reassuring) us. And, if the latter, explaining why.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, in a red dress, addressing the Republican National Convention.Kimberly Guilfoyle has been engaged to Donald Trump Jr. since late 2020 (Associated Press photo by J. Scott Applewhite).
New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley, Dec. 11, 2024. The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr., Ms. Guilfoyle’s fiancé, has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida.
It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly — the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece.
The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson.
The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as “incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on” with a “stunning ‘it girl.’”
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, 46, did not return a request for comment on his relationship with Ms. Anderson, or on his engagement with Ms. Guilfoyle, to whom he has been betrothed since late 2020. Ms. Anderson, 38, also did not return requests for comment.
In his announcement of her posting to Greece, the president-elect called Ms. Guilfoyle “a close friend and ally,” but made no mention of her relationship with his son.
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States,” the elder Mr. Trump wrote, in a post on Truth Social.ImageBettina Anderson, wearing a white dress with a green floral pattern, sits on a bench in front of a pink and green artworkBettina Anderson was recently seen with Donald Trump Jr. in Palm Beach celebrating her birthday.Credit...Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images for FIGUE
The suggestions of a love triangle have been swirling for several months, including in July, at the Republican National Convention, where Ms. Anderson was spotted sitting behind Mr. Trump — and Ms. Guilfoyle — in a red dress. Ms. Guilfoyle spoke at the convention, saying, “Donald Trump will never stop fighting for you” about his father.
But speculation about Ms. Anderson’s closeness with the president-elect’s son intensified in September, with reports that the pair were seen kissing during a brunch not long before. (Adding a layer of intrigue were various reports that Ms. Anderson was a friend of his ex-wife, Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children.)
Suspicions about the durability of Mr. Trump and Ms. Guilfoyle’s engagement were given more fodder when Ms. Guilfoyle did not appear in a post-election family portrait, which did feature Vanessa Trump and their children. (Melania Trump — the once and future first lady — was also absent, though the photo did feature Elon Musk.)
New York Times, Musk’s Foundation Gave Away Less Money Than Required in 2023, David A. Fahrenthold and Theodore Schleifer, Dec. 12, 2024. Private foundations must donate 5 percent of their assets every year. Elon Musk’s enormous charity missed that standard for three consecutive years.
For the third year in a row, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation did not give away enough of its money.
And it did not miss the mark by a small amount.
New tax filings show that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the amount it was required to give away in 2023. Now, Mr. Musk has until the end of the year to distribute that money, or he will be required to pay a sizable penalty to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk, in his new role as a leader of what President-elect Donald J. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, is promising to downsize and rearrange the entire federal government — including the I.R.S. But the tax records show he has struggled to meet a basic I.R.S. rule that is required of all charity leaders, no matter how small or big their foundations.
Mr. Musk's is one of the biggest. His foundation has more than $9 billion in assets, including millions of shares in Tesla, his electric vehicle company. By law, all private foundations must give away 5 percent of those assets every year. The aim is to ensure that wealthy donors like Mr. Musk use these organizations to help the public instead of simply benefiting from the tax deductions they are afforded.
New York Times, Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous, Lisa Friedman, Dec. 12, 2024. Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.
Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels.
His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
The argument offered by Mr. Wright, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to run the Energy Department, ignores the fact that wind, solar and other renewable energy are cleaner and increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency says clean energy is coming online globally at an “unprecedented rate” and will play a significant role in the future. In some places, renewable energy has been able to displace fossil fuels.
New York Times, Health Insurance Workers Fearful Amid Public Anger After Slaying of C.E.O., Reed Abelson, Mitch Smith, Katie Benner and Amy Julia Harris, Dec. 12, 2024. The fatal shooting last week of an executive on the streets of New York City plunged his family members and colleagues into grief. For rank-and-file employees across the health insurance industry, the killing has left them with an additional emotion: fear, with many frightened for their own safety and feeling under attack for their work.
Health insurance companies have increased security measures since the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, and as an outpouring of online rage toward the industry has followed. Health care leaders have spoken with frustration about feeling vilified, and in the Minneapolis suburbs where United is headquartered, police officers stepped up protection of the company’s offices.
“Clearly the employees have been shaken,” said Mayor Brad Wiersum of Minnetonka, who said the city was working “just to provide that reassurance and that security, to let people know that we are going to do everything we can to keep them safe.”
One UnitedHealthcare worker who processes claims described being cleareyed about the American health care system’s shortcomings, but also believes that she and her colleagues did their best to help patients within the limits of that system. Like most workers interviewed, she did not want to be named because, given the reaction after Mr. Thompson’s killing, she feared for her own safety.
The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo, Dec. 10, 2024. There is confidence in the outcome: ‘They’re all going to get confirmed.’
It didn’t take long for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to realize she had stepped in it. Shortly after Ernst offered a chilly reception to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head the department of defense, she recognized she was in trouble politically, with grassroots Republicans calling for her head.
“How do I make this go away?” a flabbergasted Ernst said to an intermediary, according to a top Donald Trump adviser who received the message.
The answer was obvious to everyone involved. All Ernst had to do was back away from her tacit opposition to Hegseth and the MAGA dogs would stop baying.
Sure enough, on Monday, Ernst changed her tune—not explicitly saying she’d vote for Hegseth’s confirmation but saying she supported him in the process.
By then, the Trump team was feeling good, not just about her vote but about the slate of confirmations to come.
“It sent a message,” according to a top Trump adviser involved in the discussions with Ernst who relayed them to The Bulwark. “Nobody wants to be Joni.”
The desire not to get in MAGA’s crosshairs has spread throughout much of the Senate Republican conference in recent days. It’s the result of both a remarkable swelling of grassroots energy to demand party loyalty from GOP officials and the belief—among some members themselves—that it would send a bad message to see a second Trump nominee go down after Matt Gaetz’s failed bid for attorney general.
Leading that charge has been Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP conference chair, who’s tasked with charting the course for his party’s messaging in the chamber (a post for which he beat Ernst last month). Cotton, a vet like Ernst and Hegseth, was increasingly annoyed with political chatter that the Senate was essentially duty-bound to vote down one of Trump’s picks because of tradition (Gaetz never made it to a vote).
So Cotton directed staff to research the history of Senate confirmations and he quickly concluded that the GOP conference needed to support not just Hegseth, but all of Trump’s controversial nominees
.“I expect our Republican Senate is going to confirm all of President Trump's nominees,” he said Monday morning. In a separate post, he added: “Of the 72 cabinet secretary nominees since the Clinton transition, only 2 nominees have ever received NO votes from the president-elect’s party. No one should be surprised that the Republican Senate will confirm President Trump’s nominees.”
Cotton’s bravado and Ernst’s buckling underscored the choice facing 53 Republican senators in the weeks ahead: board the Trump train or get tied to the tracks.
As of early this week, an emboldened Trump team and top supporters believe that 50-plus members will get on board not just for Hegseth’s confirmation but for Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (secretary of health and human services), and Kash Patel (FBI director) as well.
“They’re all going to get confirmed,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl.) told The Bulwark. “We’re going to respect the fact that he [Trump] got 77 million votes, respect the fact that he won in a landslide, respect that he’s the president.”
Donald Trump on NBC's Meet the Press on December 8, 2024.
Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail, Staff Report, Dec. 8-9, 2024. In his first sit-down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he still plans to pardon those convicted for their role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while he said that the members of committee tasked with investigating it “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
“So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded, adding that he thinks “everybody” on the January 6th Committee should go to jail. Cheney served as vice chair of the January 6th Committee, which concluded in 2022 with a criminal referral to the Justice Department over Trump’s role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump said that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, but “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
In the wide ranging interview, Trump said that he plans to issue pardons to the January 6th rioters on his first day in office, adding that many of those convicted have been in prison “for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump also vowed action on the first day in office to end birthright citizenship, and he reiterated plans for mass deportations.
Welker challenged him on his ability to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants, given the tremendous resources needed to carry out such a plan.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump did say that he wanted to “work something out” to come up with a plan in how to handle “dreamers,” who were children when they were brought to the United States illegally.
Welker asked Trump about his previous pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden.
“Where did I say that?” Trump said.
Welker noted that he posted on Truth Social on June 12, 2023.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to go after Joe Biden?” Welker asked him.
Trump told her that he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
Pressed again on whether he would go after Biden, Trump said, “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump defended his plans for mass tariffs, saying that he doesn’t believe economists who predict costs will be passed on to consumers. But he told Welker that he cannot guarantee that Americans won’t end up paying more.
He said, “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation.”
Then-U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) helping preside as members of the House Jan. 6 Investigative Committee.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative, said President-elect Donald J. Trump “lied about” the bipartisan House committee that investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Former Representative Liz Cheney on Sunday called President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to imprison her and other members of a congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Responding to comments Mr. Trump made in an interview aired on Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Ms. Cheney said the incoming president “lied about the Jan. 6 select committee” and that there would be “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” to prosecute its members.
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” she said in a statement. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”
She continued: “This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Her statement came after Mr. Trump repeated his unfounded allegation that the committee destroyed evidence during its investigation.
“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” he said, referring to Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman. “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”
He went on: “And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”
In fact, the committee did not destroy all evidence. It released an 800-page report as well as 140 transcripts of testimony and various memos, emails and voice mail messages. The evidence remains online. Mr. Thompson explained in a letter last year that the committee had asked the executive branch to go through some material first to protect “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.”
Ms. Cheney pointed to that letter in her statement on Sunday. “Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson,” she said. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people targeted by Mr. Trump like Ms. Cheney as part of the president-elect’s promised “retribution” against his foes. Ms. Cheney did not say in her statement whether she would accept such a pardon to protect herself from a politically motivated prosecution by the next administration.
But she said that the evidence that should be made public was the material gathered by the special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. “The Justice Department should ensure that all that material is preserved and cannot be destroyed. As much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report.”
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 11, 2024. Should Fox Kennedy be selected for the role, she would have a major hill to climb in the confirmation process.
In new reporting from Axios, Donald Trump's selection to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now pushing to have his daughter in law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, to serve as deputy director of the CIA. Fox Kennedy has a long history of working for the Agency and served as an undercover spy for nearly a decade.
But, we are now learning that the reason Kennedy is pushing for his daughter in law to join the Agency in a top role stems from his belief that she could help uncover secrets regarding the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
RFK Jr. has long spread conspiracy theories related to his uncle's assasination, claiming that the federal government and the CIA may have been involved in the assassination plot. There has been no evidence released to support Kennedy's claims.
According to Axios, Fox Kennedy would have a steep uphill climb to be confirmed should she be selected as the deputy director of the Agency. When she first left the Agency, Fox Kennedy published a memoir without getting prior approval from the Agency's vetting team.
In addition, Fox Kennedy has made concerning comments about ISIS. During a 2016 interview, Fox Kennedy stated that "The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them." The enemy she was referring to was ISIS.
Whether Trump listens to RFK Jr. and nominates her, however, remains to be seen.
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm, Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout, Dec. 11, 2024. Gaetz is a longtime friend to John Morgan, a prominent trial lawyer.Matt Gaetz raises his fist in the air.
Matt Gaetz may be taking on a second job.
Prominent Florida megadonor John Morgan is actively in talks with the former Republican lawmaker about joining his firm, Morgan & Morgan, he told POLITICO in an extensive interview. The job would be in addition to the role Gaetz announced on Tuesday that he’s joining the conservative One America News Network as a prime-time host beginning in January.
Morgan praised Gaetz, who recently withdrew from consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, for his positions on marijuana legalization, property insurance and processed foods.
“A lot of the things that my politics are, Matt Gaetz’s are,” said Morgan, who has given heavily to Democratic candidates but is registered in Florida as a no-party affiliated voter.
Morgan said that he could see Gaetz being helpful in a recent lawsuit his firm filed that alleges major food companies specifically engineered their products to be addictive and then marketed them to kids, contributing to chronic illness.
In a text exchange, Gaetz acknowledged that he and Morgan had “talked about collaborating professionally” and said he was grateful for their friendship.
“I’ve known John Morgan for more than a decade,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot of advice from him on matters of law, policy and politics. I have great respect for how he stands to the powerful for his clients — and he wins.”
The job at Morgan & Morgan would be a high-profile landing for Gaetz, who resigned from the House after he dropped out of the process to be Trump’s attorney general, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz has denied the allegations, and a Department of Justice investigation into him resulted in no charges. Yet the accusations quickly dogged his confirmation process, and Gaetz left public service altogether.
The former member of Congress has also been seen as a potential Republican candidate for governor in 2026, a contest that has been increasingly fluid as Trump tapped numerous Floridians to hold jobs in his administration. Gaetz has already tapped into a potential campaign theme by siding with critics — like Morgan — that the GOP-controlled Legislature kowtowed to the property insurance industry when it passed a measure DeSantis signed into law that makes it much harder to sue insurers.
Morgan said the details of the potential job are still under discussion and that he was waiting until the news about Gaetz’s new TV spot settled down. He said that his firm hired “finders, minders and grinders” and that he saw Gaetz as a potential “finder-minder” who he saw at the “36,000-foot” level versus “in the trenches.”
“I know he’s controversial,” Morgan said of Gaetz, “but I’m fucking controversial.”
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 11, 2024. Trump’s association with Mel Gibson highlights troubling endorsement.
During a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, actor Mel Gibson implied that California wildfires might be deliberately set by political opponents of Donald Trump. Gibson stated:
"…4 years of thinly veiled Marxism, and, you know, now I think what we have is a four-year grace period. But we have to work hard for all of it. And I don’t know. The president’s got a big job on his hands to turn this place around. A lot of damage was done, and they continue to start fires, like around my house..."Mel Gibson at Mar-a-Lago
Mel Gibson: “they continue to start fires, like around my house...”
Gibson also praised former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and referred to Trump’s potential second term as a "four-year grace period" from what he described as Marxist policies. Flynn associates himself with fringe MAGA personalities who push conspiracies. Trump HitlerTrump Echoes Hitler: Migrants "Poisoning the Blood of Our Country"Read More
The comments come against a backdrop of devastating wildfires in Malibu, California, which have scorched thousands of acres and destroyed homes. Gibson’s claims mirror baseless conspiracy theories and detract from the real causes of these disasters.Mel Gibson, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Flynn, and Kid Rock at Mar-a-Lago
Gibson’s presence at Mar-a-Lago and his endorsement of Trump raise serious questions about the former president’s associations. Gibson’s history is riddled with controversy. He was infamously caught on tape berating his ex-girlfriend with vile, racist language, suggesting she would be sexually assaulted by “[n-words]” for her clothing choices.
Additionally, Gibson has a long-documented history of anti-Semitic remarks, including a drunken tirade in 2006 which he claimed that Jews are responsible for “all the wars in the world.”Mel Gibson, Trump, and Roger Stone in 2023
Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 11, 2024. Oligarchs have been getting slighted for far too long.
During her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris laid out an economic vision for America that was designed to help people at the bottom get ahead.
Well, here comes the Convict-Elect of the United States — and he’s all ‘fuck that noise. you know who really needs our help?’
‘Billionaires.’
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Finally, America’s beleaguered billionaires are getting the fast track to the help they so desperately need.
Are you an oligarch? well then step right to the head of the line, bro. all you have to do is grease Dear Leader’s palm to the tune of a bil, and every door will open for you.
What do you need, some permits? here you go, pal. is some annoying judge hassling you about regulations? put your mind at rest, ace. we’re going to make those regulations go fuckity-bye.
did you notice how Donny goes out of his way to mention that his little pay-for-play scheme includes ‘environmental approvals’? that’s pretty specific, isn’t it?
Hey, you know who’s a billionaire in bad need of a free pass to despoil the environment?
New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office, Sharon Otterman, Dec. 11, 2024. Harvard, Penn and U.S.C. were among the universities and colleges that issued advisories in anticipation of possible travel bans.
With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are advising their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
During his last administration, Mr. Trump imposed restrictions on entry to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, a policy that stranded thousands of students who were abroad at the time. Later in his term, Mr. Trump added more countries to the restricted travel list. And he has spoken of wanting to reimpose those restrictions once he is back in the White House.
“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell’s Office of Global Learning warned students on its website late last month, advising them to be back in the United States before the start of spring-semester classes on Jan. 21. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added to this list, particularly China and India.”
Colleges are also warning all students to prepare for possible delays at the border and in the processing of paperwork.
“Budget time ahead of the semester start, prior to the January Martin Luther King holiday,” Harvard advised on its website for international students who have concerns.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University have issued comparable advisories and guidance. The advice is precautionary in nature, since the policies of the new administration remain uncertain.
Mr. Trump has said that he wanted to bring back or strengthen some of the travel restrictions he imposed in his first term.
New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power, Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina, Dec. 11, 2024. After cloaking a bill that strips key powers from Democrats as hurricane aid, the state’s legislature overrode a veto from Gov. Roy Cooper to pass it into law.
Republicans in North Carolina muscled through a sweeping expansion of their own power on Wednesday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that will give the G.O.P. increased control over elections, judicial appointments and whether its laws stand up in the courts.
Perhaps most striking was how Republicans did it: They titled the legislation “Disaster Relief” but filled it with measures that had nothing to do with aid for areas devastated by Hurricane Helene and instead eroded the power of top state Democrats. Just 13 of the bill’s 131 pages dealt directly with the storm.
Republicans moved swiftly to pass the bill last month, only for Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to veto the legislation. Republicans then moved to overcome his veto in the final weeks of their single-vote supermajority in the House, where they lost key seats in November. Even as Donald J. Trump carried the state, Republicans fell short in several other top races, including for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
The override vote, which passed by 72 to 46 along party lines, follows four years of efforts by Republicans nationwide to gain greater control over the mechanics of elections, a push initially fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential contest.
State Representative Tim Moore, the departing Republican speaker of the House, said openly before the vote that the bill was meant to help his party win future elections.
“This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket and move this country in the right direction,” Mr. Moore told the Trump ally and conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday.
Lawmakers in North Carolina have a tradition of trying to lock in their political power after election losses. Democrats wielded such tactics in the 1990s, but more recently Republicans have led the way. After Mr. Cooper beat the Republican incumbent in 2016, the legislature stripped the governor’s office of key powers and reduced the number of staff members he could appoint by more than 1,000 positions.
New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan, Alan Feuer, Dec. 11, 2024. The incoming administration said it would not rely on outside groups to carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants, but militias have a long record of inserting themselves into patrolling the border.
A few days after the election, William Teer, who runs the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump with an offer: His organization could help Mr. Trump carry out his plan to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally.
“In support of our nation’s commitments to lawful immigration practices, I wanted to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs, to promote the safety and security of our state,” Mr. Teer wrote. “I am available for further discussion.”
He said Mr. Trump had yet to respond. A spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s transition team said the mass deportation plan would use state and federal resources, not private ones. But Mr. Teer’s offer was one of several recent efforts by far-right organizations, including some that have a history of taking it on themselves to patrol the border with Mexico, to insert themselves into the deportation plan.
Richard Mack, the founder of a group of hard-right sheriffs, said on television last week that if members of his organization assisted with the initiative, it would make it “a lot easier and a lot cheaper and a lot more effective.” And last month, members of other militia-style groups also volunteered their services, with some discussing in private group chats their desire to get involved.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews, Dec. 11, 2024. The outgoing Senate Democratic majority isn't going out without a fight.
Ben Meiselas discusses the early swearing-in of Democrats Adam Schiff and Andy Kim as U.S. Senators, surprising and infuriating MAGA Republicans.
Both Schiff and Kim won their elections, and were given gubernatorial approval to be sworn-in early due special circumstances, allowing them to gain seniority and participate in key Senate hearings.
Kim is replacing disgraced Senator Bob Menendez in New Jersey, and Schiff is filling the seat once held by Dianne Feinstein, who passed away in September of 2023.
Schiff, known for his prosecutorial background, has been a favorite target from MAGA for his role in leading the impeachments of Donald Trump. His early swearing-in has the MAGA trolls making fools of themselves; crying foul while not understanding this process is completely legal.
Andy Kim, a friend of MeidasTouch, delivered a heartfelt statement to his constituents pledging to serve with integrity, and a focus on healing the country; a poignant and powerful statement from a man who will be replacing the crook Bob Menendez.
The U.S. Senate, as well as the American People benefit having Andy Kim step into that office early to gain seniority.Meiselas also played a touching video you’ll only see on MeidasTouch, with Kamala Harris meeting Kim’s family during his swearing-in ceremony, and telling his kids that she knows her dad is a good man and up to the challenge and hard work of being a U.S. Senator.
Meiselas also highlights Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s efforts to secure Democratic control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by advancing the nominations of Lauren McFerrin and Joshua Didleberg; a move to shield the Board from figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Trump allies, who want to weaken the NLRB's power to protect American workers.
Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats, Greta Reich, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). “I’m not worried about it at all in the least,” the former Jan. 6 committee member said.Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger delivers remarks.t worried about President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to throw members of the committee in jail.
“No, I have absolutely no worries about this,” Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN’s “Inside Politics” host Manu Raju on Sunday.
Trump made the threat in an interview with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on NBC. He said that members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail.”
“First off, the executive branch can’t go after the legislative branch because we embarrassed him. That’s not a sin. That’s not against the law. Ultimately, when we talked about him throwing his ketchup and hamburger against the wall, there’s nothing illegal about that,” Kinzinger continued, referring to an alleged incident from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in which Trump once became so angry that he threw his plate of food at the wall and smeared it with ketchup.
He added that “most of the people that testified were actually his Republicans, you know, fellow Republicans that went up and spoke [against] him.”
Some Republicans who testified during the hearings included former Attorney General William Barr; former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue; Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; and Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s daughter.
“So look, he’s all butt hurt, right now because he was embarrassed,” Kinzinger added. “He’s not going to come after us and I’m not worried about it at all in the least.”
New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Applicants for government posts, including inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, say they have been asked about their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election.
At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, conducted in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful.
The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
Excerpt continued below.
Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). She and her firm have clients that have been doing legal battle with the U.S. government.
Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.
Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.
Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.
Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.
Bondi, who has yet to resign from Ballard, where she serves as a D.C.-based partner and chairs the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice focusing on Fortune 500 companies. Since 2019, she has lobbied the federal government for a host of major businesses, including Amazon, General Motors, Fidelity National Financial, Uber and Carnival North America. She serves as a key adviser to the firm’s president, Brian Ballard.
Bondi has also lobbied for the GEO Group, a major private prison company that is paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year by the federal government, according to federal records. The Justice Department is a major customer.
Currently, Bondi is only registered to lobby for the Major County Sheriffs of America, which pays her firm $50,000 a quarter, the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter, and the Florida Sheriffs Association, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter. Bondi, a former personal attorney to Trump, has also worked on corporate and regulatory issues and litigation at the Florida-based law firm Panza Maurer.
“It is essentially impossible to organize a Justice Department ethically in light of the breadth of Bondi’s connections,” said Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive Revolving Door Project. “I think it’s just going to be off-the-charts bad.”
He added that even if Bondi were not to involve herself in issues involving certain companies, she could still influence her department in their favor. For example, Hauser argued, her direction for the antitrust division would have broad implications for her onetime client Amazon.
Bondi did not respond to an email seeking comment, and a spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment.
Some business leaders had feared that, under Trump, they would lose their allies in the GOP, as the party veered in a more populist direction. But big business is hopeful that with Bondi, they’ll get a reprieve from the Biden administration’s corporate crackdowns and avoid follow-through on the Trump campaign’s anti-corporate rhetoric.
“Pam may reinforce that idea that we’re going back to normalcy on deal flow,” said one Republican lobbyist, referring to corporate mergers. The person was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone believes that she’s approachable. … She understands that companies need to have an opportunity to be heard.”
The tech industry, for one, is relatively optimistic about Bondi’s nomination, especially compared to former lawmaker and antitrust crusader Matt Gaetz, whose earlier nomination for attorney general imploded. Major companies have spent the last four years fighting anti-monopoly champions at the Department of Justice, led by Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. With Bondi’s selection, Big Tech sees a movement away from the economic populism that made them major targets, said one lobbyist representing major technology companies.
New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The enormous spending from the world’s richest man quietly fueled allied groups and was revealed only now, as Mr. Musk plays a key role in the presidential transition.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.
The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.
One of Mr. Musk’s most brazen moves — which emerged only on Thursday — was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.
Mr. Musk put the lion’s share of the money he donated toward his main super PAC, America PAC, cutting three checks for $25 million each in the final weeks of the race, according to the new filings with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Musk also spent $40.5 million on legally controversial checks to voters in swing states who signed a petition in support of the Constitution.
Over the course of the race, he gave America PAC a staggering $239 million in both cash and in-kind contributions.
Excerpt continued below.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution’
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, Trump Organization Plans an Ethics Policy Without Banning Foreign Deals
- New York Times, Pam Bondi’s Journey From Traditional Republican to Warrior for Trump, Patricia Mazzei
- New York Times, Investigation: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes Jesse Drucker
- Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases; Investigations, Hearings, Trials
- Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge
- The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld
- Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: Elderly golfer is an incoherent mess on Meet the Press, Jeff Tiedrich
- New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, He Promised Huge Tax Refunds. Now Donald Trump Wants Him to Lead the I.R.S.
- New York Times, Trump Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China
- Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks
More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise, Corey Kilgannon, Mike Baker, Luke Broadwater and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione, above, charged in the death of an executive in New York, was an Ivy League graduate who had recently suffered physical and psychological pain.
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.
Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say, Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione faces gun charges and other counts. He was denied bail after his arraignment in Altoona, Pa.
Authorities said Monday that they had taken a 26-year-old man into custody in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, a health insurance executive who was gunned down last week on a Manhattan sidewalk.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The shooting sparked a sprawling five-day manhunt that ended in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where police said Luigi Mangione, a Maryland native, was spotted eating at a local McDonald’s. He was arrested and charged with five counts, including possessing an instrument of a crime, providing false identification to law enforcement and carrying a firearm without a license. Police said Mangione had a ghost gun, along with a lengthy handwritten document indicating anger toward “corporate America.”
“He is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, said at a news briefing.
Thompson, 50, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed Wednesday outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a stunning act of early-morning violence in one of New York’s busiest areas.
Police said it appeared that the suspect they were seeking escaped the city shortly after the shooting. Law enforcement officials said they were scouring reams of video footage and tips, but they pleaded with the public for more help, sharing several images of a person they said was wanted in connection with the killing.
ABC News, What we know about Luigi Mangione, Ivy League grad and suspect in CEO's murder, Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele, Josh Margolin, and Meredith Deliso, Dec. 9, 2024. Mangione, above, was located in Pennsylvania nearly a week after Brian Thompson's death.
Salon, Alleged UnitedHealthcare assassin praised Elon Musk for battle against “woke mind virus," Russell Payne, Dec, 9, 2024. Not so fast, what kind of "anti-capitalist" is praising Elon Musk and retweeting Peter Thiel?
On Monday afternoon, police announced that they had arrested a person of interest in the investigation into the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who was shot outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan last week.
According to police, Luigi Mangione was arrested around 9:15 a.m. in Altoona, Pennsylvania with a ghost gun and suppressor that New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with the weapon used in the murder.”
While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber's comments on “the decay of traditional values.”
Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives.
While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”
One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
He reposted another tweet, which was a link to an article calling TikTok “The Smiling Tiger” and making the argument that the short-form video app is an “accelerant” in a Chinese plot to get Western liberal capitalism to destroy itself.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different
- New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
- Letters from an American, Commentary: December 5, 2024 [Health Care CEO's Murder], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say
Public Health, Scandal, #MeToo, Trafficking, Abortion.
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, Dec. 5, 2024. Save your healthcare and dump Medicare Advantage before it’s too late. Here’s why you should return to real Medicare if you still can...
You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.
The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.
If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.
Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.
So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?
When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.
Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.
With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.
With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.
These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.
Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.
You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.
This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.
And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.
If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.
But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.
The FTC news release laid it out:
“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”
And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.
Washington Post, Opinion: What is going on with Cheryl Hines? Monica Hesse, Dec. 5, 2024. It’s time to accept that the actress and RFK Jr. are a package deal.
I’m as baffled by this as the rest of you, but I’m going to have to subject us all to a close analysis of Cheryl Hines’s recent Instagram story featuring her naked husband, RFK Jr.
The video takes place in the Hines/Kennedy bathroom. Cheryl is in the foreground, holding a linen spray and some kind of cream that she would like you to buy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking a shower. His bottom half is covered by his wife’s strategically located head, and, as he stands under the water, she giggles uproariously and says: “No, you can’t take a shower, I’m doing a video!” He continues showering; she continues giggling. “No, no. No. You’ve got to give me a second, I’m doing a video for Hines and Young!”
Some logistical questions:
If Hines was already in the bathroom filming when her husband entered, why did she wait until he came in, took off all his clothes, turned on the shower and started hosing himself down before she decided to tell him that she was filming?
And if he was in the shower to begin with, why didn’t she notice that before she started advertising a holiday sale? Why did the couple not, at that point, sort out who needed to be naked and who needed to hawk merchandise, and agree to do those things in different rooms? Why leave the camera running? Why post the results?
Hines was advertising products from the wellness company she runs with her daughter, but she was also advertising her marriage. Which is to say, she would like you to know that the couple is fine. They are flirty. He wants to remove fluoride from public drinking water, but she will still caption videos with, “Oh Bobby!”
The number of times in the past two years that I have thought, Well, now she’ll divorce him has been … many. The couple has been married for more than a decade, but she is, after all, a successful actress with 12 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” under her belt. Not A-list, maybe, but running in circles with Larry David and J.B. Smoove would seem to provide enough glamour and financial independence that she shouldn’t need to put up with any crap.
Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert, Dec. 2, 2024. Mehmet Oz has extolled Ozempic’s promise for weight loss. Now Medicare may cover it.
Recent Relevant Headlines
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Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
Politico, Has Syrian rebel leader al-Golani really shaken off his al Qaeda past? Jamie Dettmer, Dec. 12, 2024 (print ed.). The leopard claims he has changed his spots, but will he bring stability to the devastated nation
In the not so distant past, Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, shown at right in a U.S. State Department photo, sported a long unkempt beard, wore a style of turban favored by jihadis and looked like he was auditioning for the role of a young Osama bin Laden.
But the man who toppled the regime of Bashar Assad on Sunday cuts a very different figure today. Like a political chameleon, he wears green fatigues in the style of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or preppy blazers and chinos, and his beard is neatly trimmed. He even recently dropped his nom de guerre and reverted to using his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a.
But how convincing is the makeover? Should Syrians be worried that a man who once made the pledge of allegiance — or bay’ah — to al Qaeda, and fought Western forces in Iraq, is now the most powerful man in their country, and is poised to play a major role in the transition from the 54-year-long autocracy of the Assad dynasty?
He could even lead the country.
Is this a case where the apparel really does proclaim the man? Has the Damascus medical school dropout genuinely transitioned from being a jihadi, or is his embrace of toleration a ruse?
Those are the questions Western leaders and officials are also grappling with as they plot their next steps. France and Germany have promptly agreed to work with the Syrian opposition groups that took power in Damascus, while the U.S. and Britain are deliberating whether to delist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main insurgent Islamist faction led by al-Golani that swept into Damascus, as a terrorist organization.
For now, everyone is watching and waiting, piecing together clues about who al-Golani really is and what future HTS has planned for Syria — an inclusive, democratic one embracing the country’s diversity, its religious sects and ethnic minorities, including Christian, Alawite, Druze and Kurds; or an Islamist state that oppresses, restricts and elevates the Sunni majority? Or somewhere in-between?
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Israel Says Its Troops Will Stay in Seized Territory for Now, Aaron Boxerman and Michael Crowley, Dec. 12, 2024. Here are the latest developments.
As countries in the Middle East and beyond work out how to respond to the sudden fall of the Assad government, Israel said on Thursday that its military would stay in Syrian territory it seized until “a new force” was established that met its security demands.
“The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in a statement. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities.”
Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli soldiers would deploy in Syrian territory only “temporarily,” but did not give any clear timeline for their departure.
The Biden administration has been rushing to respond to the upheaval in Syria. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Jordan on Thursday and was heading to Turkey, where he will meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
After a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Mr. Blinken called it “a time of promise but also peril for Syria and its neighbors.” He said that it was essential that Syria’s new government respect basic principles of human rights, including the protection of minorities, and ensure that Syria “is not used as a base for terrorism by groups like the Islamic State.”
Here are other developments:
- Seeking justice: The fall of Syria’s government has reinvigorated a long push for justice over crimes committed by the Assad regime, allowing human rights groups the long-awaited opportunity to inspect prison sites, freely interview witnesses and build legal cases. But there is also frustration because the ultimate goal of the effort would be to see Mr. al-Assad stand trial, and he appears out of reach, having taken exile in Russia.
- Mood in Aleppo: In the northern Syrian city that rebels seized last week before taking Damascus, there was celebration as exiled residents returned home and assessed what remained after more than a decade of civil war. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.
- Russia in Syria: Satellite imagery and ship tracking data reviewed by The New York Times show that Russian naval and commercial activity in the key Syrian port of Tartus — which has played a critical role in Moscow’s projection of military power in the region — has ceased since the Assad government fell on Sunday.
Consortium News, Analysis: The End of Pluralism in the Middle East, Craig Murray, Dec. 11, 2024. What this potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism: An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.
A truly seismic change in the Middle East has occurred. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.
This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities. Witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women when the jihadists — who overthrew the government of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday — first took Aleppo a mere two weeks ago.
The speed of the collapse of Syria took everybody by surprise. Next, a renewed Israeli attack on Southern Lebanon to coincide with a Salafist invasion of the Bekaa Valley seems inevitable, as the Israelis would obviously wish their border with their new Taliban-style Greater Syrian neighbour to be as far North as possible.
It could be a race for Beirut, unless the Americans have already organised who gets it.
It is no coincidence that the attack on Syria started the day of the Lebanon/Israel ceasefire. The jihadist forces do not want to be seen to be fighting alongside Israel, even though they are fighting forces which have been relentlessly bombed by Israel, and in the case of Hezbollah are exhausted from fighting Israel.
The Times of Israel has no compunction about saying the quiet part out loud, unlike the British media:
In fact Israeli media is giving a lot more truth about the Syrian rebel forces than British and American media. This is another article from The Times of Israel:
“While HTS officially seceded from Al Qaeda in 2016, it remains a Salafi jihadi organization designated as a terror organization in the US, the EU and other countries, with tens of thousands of fighters.
Its sudden surge raises concerns that a potential takeover of Syria could transform it into an Islamist, Taliban-like regime – with repercussions for Israel at its south-western border. Others, however, see the offensive as a positive development for Israel and a further blow to the Iranian axis in the region.”
Contrast this to the U.K. media, which from the Telegraph and Express to The Guardian has promoted the official narrative that not just the same organisations, but the same people responsible for mass torture and executions of non-Sunnis, including Western journalists, are now cuddly liberals.
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, left, commander-in-chief of Tahrir al-Sham; he was emir of its predecessor al-Nusra Front, Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. (U.S. State Dept.)
Nowhere is this more obvious than the case of Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, sometimes spelt Al-Julani or Al-Golani, who, now nominally in charge in Damascus, is being boosted throughout western media as a moderate leader. He was the deputy leader of ISIS, and the C.I.A. actually has a $10 million bounty on his head! Yes, that is the same C.I.A. which is funding and equipping him and giving him air support.
Supporters of the Syrian rebels still attempt to deny that they have Israeli and U.S. support – despite the fact that almost a decade ago there was open Congressional testimony in the U.S.A. that, to that point, over half a billion dollars had been spent on assistance to Syrian rebel forces, and the Israelis have openly been providing medical and other services to the jihadists and effective air support.
Violates UK Terrorism Act
One interesting consequence of this joint NATO/Israel support for the jihadist groups in Syria is a further perversion of domestic rule of law. To take the U.K. as an example, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act it is illegal to state an opinion that supports, or may lead somebody else to support, a proscribed organisation.
The abuse of this provision by British police to persecute Palestinian supporters for allegedly encouraging support for proscribed organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is notorious, with even tangential alleged references leading to arrest. Sarah Wilkinson, Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Richard Barnard and myself are all notable victims, and the persecution has been greatly intensified by Keir Starmer [UK prime minister, right].
Yet Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) is also a proscribed group in the U.K. But both British mainstream media and British Muslim outlets have been openly promoting and praising HTS – frankly much more openly than I have ever witnessed anyone in the U.K. support Hamas and Hezbollah – and not a single person has been arrested or even warned by U.K. police.
That in itself is the strongest of indications that western security services are fully behind the overthrow of the government in Syria.
For the record, I think it is an appalling law, and nobody should be prosecuted for expressing an opinion either way. But the politically biased application of the law is undeniable.
When the entire corporate and state media in the West puts out a unified narrative that Syrians are overjoyed to be released by HTS from the tyranny of the Assad regime – and says nothing whatsoever of the accompanying torture and execution of Shias, and destruction of Christmas decorations and icons – it ought to be obvious to everybody where this is coming from.
Yet – and this is another U.K. domestic repercussion – a very substantial number of Muslims in the U.K. support HTS and the Syrian rebels, because of the funding pumped into U.K. mosques from Saudi and Emirate Salafist sources.
This is allied to the U.K. security service influence also wielded through the mosques, both by sponsorship programmes and “think tanks” benefiting approved religious leaders, and by the execrable coercive Prevent programme.
U.K. Muslim outlets that have been ostensibly pro-Palestinian – like Middle East Eye and 5 Pillars – enthusiastically back Israel’s Syrian allies in ensuring the destruction of resistance to the genocide of the Palestinians. Al Jazeera alternates between items detailing dreadful massacre in Palestine, and items extolling the Syrian rebels bringing Israel-allied rule to Syria.
Among the mechanisms they employ to reconcile this is a refusal to acknowledge the vital role of Syria in enabling the supply of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Which supply the jihadists have now cut off, to the absolute delight of Israel, and in conjunction with both Israeli and U.S. air strikes.
In the final analysis, for many Sunni Muslims both in the Middle East and in the West, the pull seems to be a stronger sectarian hatred of the Shia and the imposition of Salafism, than preventing the ultimate destruction of the Palestinian nation.
“Many Sunni Muslims have been brainwashed into hating Shia Muslims more than they hate the power committing genocide of mostly Sunnis in Gaza.”
I am not a Muslim. My Muslim friends happen to be almost entirely Sunni. I personally regard the continuing division over the leadership of the religion over a millennium ago as deeply unhelpful and a source of unnecessary continued hate.
Classic Divide and Rule
But as a historian I do know that the western colonial powers have consciously and explicitly used the Sunni/Shia split for centuries to divide and rule. In the 1830’s, Alexander Burnes was writing reports on how to use the division in Sind between Shia rulers and Sunni populations to aid British colonial expansion.
Unlike many readers, I have never been a fan of the Assad regime or blind to its human rights violations. But what it did undeniably do was maintain a pluralist state where the most amazing historical religious and community traditions – including Sunni (and many Sunni do support Assad), Shia, Alaouites, descendants of the first Christians, and speakers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus – were all able to co-exist. The same is true of Lebanon.
New York Times, Syria’s Civil War: Syria’s New Leaders Balance Huge Struggles Amid Disorder, Aryn Baker, Cassandra Vinograd, Euan Ward and Michael Levenson, Dec. 11, 2024. The rebels who seized control called for foreign help in prosecuting atrocities, while trying to restore order in a fractured country.
The rebels who seized control of Syria confronted the challenge on Wednesday of striking a balance between obtaining justice for the victims of atrocities committed under the ousted Assad regime and preventing the newly liberated country from descending into unchecked vengeance.
While Syria’s new leaders have promised amnesty for conscripted soldiers who served under the former president, Bashar al-Assad, the leader of the rebel force that toppled him made clear on Wednesday that those who helped Mr. al-Assad brutalize or slaughter would be held accountable.
“We won’t pardon those complicit in the torture and murder of detainees, and we will go after them in our country,” the leader of the rebel offensive, Ahmed al-Shara, said on the Telegram messaging app. “We call on nations to hand over to us whoever of those criminals has escaped to them to subject them to justice.”
Mr. al-Shara did not name any countries in particular, but Mr. al-Assad arrived in Russia over the weekend as the rebels swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Mr. al-Shara’s comments came as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, warned that armed groups had carried out retaliatory attacks on civilians in areas that were once considered loyal to the Assad government. But it was not clear who was carrying out the violence, or directing it.
Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows fighters inside the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian president and the father of Bashar al-Assad, in the northwestern town of al-Qardaha.
As one of the fighters steps on the tomb, another can be heard thanking God. “This is avenging my cousins and their sons, who were killed by this criminal, Hafez al-Assad, in the 1980s,” he says. “This is our revenge.” In another clip, the rebels can be seen setting fire to parts of the tomb.
The Observatory reported that groups of gunmen were preparing to hunt down former commanders of Mr. al-Assad’s military and that armed groups dressed in military uniforms were looting property and intimidating residents of Latakia Province, the heartland of the Alawite minority to which the Assad family belongs, prompting fears of sectarian strife.
While Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, it has significant communities of Christians and Druse, as well as others who adhere to different sects of Islam. Many of the ousted regime’s top figures came from the Alawite sect.
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus, Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad, Farnaz Fassihi and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Syrian Leader Resigns and Leaves Country, Russia Says. The foreign ministry of Russia, a longtime ally, did not provide details on where President Bashar al-Assad had gone; Rebels stormed the Syrian capital on Sunday without encountering any significant resistance from government forces.
President Bashar al-Assad, shown above, has resigned and left Syria, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Sunday, a stunning fall for the longtime dictator that ushered in hope and uncertainty after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive.
Mr. al-Assad’s departure was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat Mr. al-Assad for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.
For many in Syria, Mr. Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that has used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been riven with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.
“Our hearts are dancing with joy,” Walaa Salameh, 35, a resident of the Damascus area, said in a phone interview. “We can’t predict the future and anything is possible, but the most important thing is we got rid of this oppressive regime.”
The foreign ministry’s statement did not offer details on Mr. al-Assad’s exact whereabouts, saying only that he had held talks with “several parties of the armed conflict.” There was no immediate comment from the Syrian presidency about Mr. al-Assad.
Earlier on Sunday, the main rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, had announced on its Telegram channel that it had taken the capital, Damascus, and that Syrian forces were withdrawing. It later said that Mr. al-Assad had fallen and that Damascus was “free of the tyrant.”
The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.
As reports spread of Syrian government troops fleeing their posts and peeling off uniforms, the sounds of gunfire erupted in Damascus before dawn on Sunday, witnesses said. By late morning, the streets were largely empty but the sound of gunfire still echoed.
“No one should shed any tears over the end of the Assad regime,” Daniel B. Shapiro, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said in Bahrain before Russia’s foreign ministry issued the statement.
Amid swirling questions over Mr. al-Assad’s whereabouts, Syria’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, said that he had not spoken with him since Saturday. Mr. Ghazi said that he would stay in the country and was ready to work with whomever Syrians choose as their leader.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham said it would work with Mr. Ghazi and called on Syrian military forces in Damascus to stay away from public institutions, which it said would remain under Mr. Ghazi’s supervision until they are formally handed over.
Who are the rebels?: The head of the Islamist group leading the main rebel coalition said in an interview with The New York Times this week that the fighters aim to depose Mr. al-Assad. First, the rebels seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, then days later blazed through Hama and the strategic city of Homs, en route to the capital. His group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, broke ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 but is still designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
New York Times, Rebels Assert Control in Damascus as Questions Loom Over Their Plans, Christina Goldbaum and Vivian Yee, Dec. 9, 2024. The fighters who forced Bashar al-Assad into exile began the complex task of governing the Syrian capital.
New York Times, Relics of Fallen Government Are Everywhere, Times Reporters Find, Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 9, 2024. The New York Times saw remnants of Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive rule after entering Syria on Monday.
Recent Relevant Headlines
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- New York Times, Syria Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule
- Update from Ukraine, Commentary: Assad is over; Damascus fallen; Russians are running away from Syria, Denys Davydov
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South Korean Crisis
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 10, 2024. Lee Jae-myung, the main opposition leader, is leading efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his declaration of martial law.
Shortly after his political nemesis, President Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law last Tuesday, Lee Jae-myung began livestreaming from his cellphone. While driving to the National Assembly, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party appealed to Koreans to rush to the Assembly and hold back soldiers trying to seize the parliament.
“You must protect the Assembly, the last line of defense for our democracy,” Mr. Lee said repeatedly — in a watershed moment for South Korean democracy and for his own political career. Mr. Lee’s exhortation, relayed by YouTubers, helped attract crowds who slowed down the advance of troops and bought time for lawmakers to vote down Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree, forcing the president to withdraw it after just six hours.
Mr. Lee, who has been fighting legal charges that he says are politically motivated, now finds himself in a stronger political position than ever. His party holds the majority in the Assembly and he represents what most South Koreans want: Mr. Yoon removed from office. Polls show he is most favored to win if a presidential election is held now.
New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Victoria Kim and Thomas Fuller, Dec. 4, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to break a political deadlock by imposing military rule collapsed within hours, leaving him with few defenders.
Emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, members of South Korea’s political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.
Several opposition parties, buoyed by thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the president, jointly submitted the impeachment motion, which could be put to a vote as early as Friday. While the parties represent an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, it remains unclear whether they will have the two-thirds vote needed to impeach.
Mr. Yoon’s surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America’s closest allies and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s.
Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder, historian, Dec. 4, 2024. South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, invoked martial law, tried to install a military dictatorship -- and failed completely. In his actions there are some likely similarities with the coming Trump regime, and some clear lessons for Americans to learn right now.
Yoon won a very narrow election, as did Trump. Like Trump, he refers constantly to "fake news" and calls his political opponents enemies of the state (as Trump says, "the enemy within"). Yoon used this language to justify the imposition of martial law, as will Trump if he decides to invoke the Insurrection Act in the United States.
Like Trump, Yoon telegraphed his move in advance, and not only with such language. He surrounded himself with military men and intelligence officers who were characterized by personal loyalty. Trump is trying to do the same, now, with his proposals for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Kash Patel as director of the FBI, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. He also wants to purge the top ranks of the armed forces.
Yoon's main political opponent, Lee Jae-myung, had correctly predicted that Yoon would try to implement martial law. Trump makes this prediction rather easy. Trump has spoken openly of being "dictator for a day," and of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military inside the United States.The Insurrection Act is not quite the same thing as martial law. Under martial law, the military assumes the basic responsibilities associated with a civilian government. The Insurrection Act, in principle, only allows the American president to use the armed forces to assist civilian authorities to enforce some law in the presence of an insurrection. But the language of the law is quite vague. Trump makes it clear that he has in mind invoking the Insurrection Act to very broad purposes, essentially to change the regime.
In both South Korea and the United States, the legal basis for asserting greater presidential authority is antiquated. Martial law was declared in South Korea for the last time in 1979. Since the late 1980s, South Korea has moved quite decisively in the direction of meaningful elections and civil rights, thanks to the forceful activity of civil society, especially trade unions. In the United States, the Insurrection Act is an assemblage of laws passed between 1792 and 1871. It was last invoked during racial violence in Los Angeles in 1992.
Yoon's actions, although rooted of course in his own personality and South Korean career, and enabled by South Korean law, were very trumpy. Indeed, it seems likely to me that the very presence of Trump on the international scene will make such attempts more likely, among America's democratic allies (such as South Korea) and generally.
But Yoon failed, and very badly. His dictatorship for a day lasted only about six hours. What can Americans learn from his less-than-a-day dictatorship?First of all, we have to take in a very basic reality: that attempts to establish military dictatorships have been made in democracies, and will be made in other democracies --including, very possibly, in the American one.
The most worrying moment of Yoon's invocation of martial law was that, in the beginning, the military acted as he wished that it would. Military leaders initially joined in his coup attempt, with General Park An-su claiming to ban political actions, political parties, political gatherings, and "propaganda," which can mean anything anyone says. He also claimed to take all media outlets under the control of the military.
The pertinent question for Americans would be: will Trump be able to surround himself with loyalists who will do the same thing? He is trying to do so. And so the Senate, in confirmation hearings, has an obvious question to ask all of Trump's appointees with any responsibility for national security or intelligence: if Trump attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act to stifle domestic political life, just as Yoon attempted to do in South Korea, would you take part?
For legislators, the lessons are also very clear. The moment Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Kim, told people to rally at the parliament. Legislators themselves entered its chambers, despite the wishes of the military leadership, and then voted unanimously for the revocation of martial law. Members of Yoon's own right-wing party, in other words, joined with the opposition in a dramatic demonstration of unity in the face of the threat of a military dictatorship.
Are American legislators capable of defending their roles and their republic? The evidence thus far is very mixed; it remains to be seen.
New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon and Jin Yu Young, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol made the decree, the first of its kind in more than four decades, amid a bitter feud with the political opposition. Lawmakers demanded the declaration be canceled, setting up a showdown. Earlier, a general said news outlets were under “martial law command.”
President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, right, declared emergency martial law on Tuesday, banning “all political activities,” in an extraordinary reaction to the political deadlock that has hobbled his tenure.
The full extent of what martial law entails was not immediately clear, but the announcement enabled the president to take command of the news media. His declaration set off protesters clashing with the police outside the National Assembly, and an immediate effort by opposition lawmakers to halt the decree. It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since the military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
Mr. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply unpopular and divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
In a late-night meeting, the National Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the president must lift it “without delay.”
Here’s what else to know.
- Protesters in Seoul: Some demonstrators appeared to be trying to enter the National Assembly as police officers tried to block them, as seen in images broadcast by local networks. “End martial law! End martial law!” protesters chanted.
- Political paralysis: Elected president in 2022, Mr. Yoon has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls the National Assembly. In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday night, he denounced the opposition for repeatedly using its majority in the National Assembly to impeach members of his cabinet and block the passage of his government’s budget plans. This has “paralyzed the administration,” Mr. Yoon said. “The National Assembly, which should have been the foundation of free democracy, has become a monster that destroys it.”
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Warning from Seoul: Democracy at Risk in an Age of Authoritarian Power, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 4, 2024. How Yoon’s State of Emergency and Trump’s Strategies Are Eroding Global Freedoms.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.
In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.
Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.
Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.
The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.
Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 4, 2024.For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, John Yoon and Ephrat Livni, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol has been locked in a bitter fight with the opposition, which controls Parliament.
It was the first martial law declaration in more than four decades in South Korea, which saw the end of a military dictatorship in the late 1980s. Mr. Yoon, who was elected president in 2022, has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, and his government has faced plunging public approval ratings.
In his speech declaring martial law late Tuesday, Mr. Yoon said he was making the move to “defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order. Through this emergency martial law, I will rebuild and defend the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into ruin.”
New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law, Dec. 3, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol made the extraordinary declaration in an unannounced speech to the nation on Tuesday night.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid
- Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Opinion: Can Martial Law Happen in America? David French
- New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law
- New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea
- New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law
Global News
New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader, above, has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel Macron.
The one-on-one duel that has shaped French political life for nearly a decade ratcheted up a notch last week, with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen claiming one big scalp, and giving notice of going after a bigger one, President Emmanuel Macron.
No one doubted that she was calling the shots. Yet by Monday, Mr. Macron, right, had relegated Ms. Le Pen and her party, the anti-immigrant National Rally, to “pariah” — her word — status. He did not deign to meet with her in his search for a new prime minister to replace the one she had largely ousted last week.
Leaders of other parties had tête-à-têtes with Mr. Macron at the presidential palace; but not Ms. Le Pen, who was excluded because she is part of the “anti-Republican front” — his words.
That could turn out to be a big mistake. Last week, Ms. Le Pen announced the demise of the hapless prime minister, Michel Barnier, in Parliament; sure enough he was overthrown in a no-confidence vote soon after.
Mr. Barnier had tried to force through a budget proposal without a vote, and above all he had barely consulted with Ms. Le Pen, who has the largest bloc of parliamentarians and cannot be ignored.
She has suggested successive Macron governments could fall, until he steps down — making clear she is after a more consequential trophy: the president himself.
Mr. Macron was barely off the plane from Saudi Arabia as she spoke last Wednesday night. As the bemused parliamentarians listened, she promised “deliverance” for France from its woes, “maybe, very soon.”
That seemed as much promise as threat.
It all rested on one man’s decision, she said, avoiding Mr. Macron’s name while suggesting she was pushing him toward the exit. Her target was clear.
“It’s up to the person concerned, by himself, to decide whether he should stay,” she said. “It’s on his conscience, to determine whether he should sacrifice public policy, and France’s fate, for the sake of his own pride.”
New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial, Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 10, 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a trial that began four years ago. He has denied the charges.
Outside the courthouse, he is one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, overseeing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, its occupation of southern Lebanon and recent strikes in Syria.
As he stepped into a cramped and sweltering underground courtroom in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel morphed into the defendant in Case 67104-01-20 — charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Eight years after the police started investigating him and four years after his trial began, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was taking the stand for the first time to respond to accusations of corruption that have defined and disrupted Israeli public life for nearly a decade.
“Like everyone who is brought to the witness stand, you are charged with speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” said Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of three judges hearing the case.
An audience of roughly 100 journalists, lawmakers, government ministers and lawyers craned their necks to catch his response.
“I have waited eight years for this moment — to tell the truth, the truth as I remember it,” replied Mr. Netanyahu, gripping the sides of a wooden lectern as he stood to the left of the judges.
It was a humbling moment — a sitting prime minister, forced to answer accusations of graft, before a courtroom filled with his peers. It was also a moment Mr. Netanyahu seemed determined to transcend.
“I am shocked by the magnitude of this absurdity,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
“I am the prime minister, I am running a country, I am running a war,” he continued. “I am not occupying myself with my future, but rather with that of the state of Israel.”
For nearly a decade, the corruption charges against Mr. Netanyahu have divided Israel, leading to years of political turmoil. The electorate has been roughly evenly split on the question of whether Mr. Netanyahu should remain in office while he stands trial — a dynamic that has created an electoral stalemate, leading to five elections in less than four years.
Apart from a brief court appearance to plead not guilty in 2021, Mr. Netanyahu had rarely been affected by the day-to-day proceedings of the trial.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers spent years interviewing witnesses instead of the defendant himself. The hearing on Tuesday — 1,661 days since the trial began — was set to be Mr. Netanyahu’s first full day in court.
Mr. Netanyahu had sought to delay his testimony by several months, arguing that his management of the war campaign had disrupted his preparations. But the court agreed to a postponement of only a few days.
While his appearance on Tuesday provided a crescendo in the judicial process, it was also, to many Israelis, anti-climactic. The charges against Mr. Netanyahu have been a part of Israeli discourse for so long that the spectacle of a prime minister on trial no longer seems as shocking as it once did.
“The public has completely accepted the idea that we have a sitting prime minister who has been investigated, indicted and is now on trial — even in the middle of a war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst who attended the hearing on Tuesday.
“What would have been unimaginable 10 years ago has been completely normalized,” she added.
Mr. Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The charges center on claims that he gave regulatory favors and diplomatic support to prominent businessmen in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage.
The trial is expected to continue for years, and Mr. Netanyahu will likely take the stand several times a week for several months.
New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions, Jeffrey Gettleman, Dec. 10, 2024. The former Soviet Republic has been rocked by demonstrations over the same issues that hurtled Ukraine into war: its relationship with Europe and Russia.
On the streets of Georgia, it’s starting to look a little like the Ukraine of 10 years ago, before the war, when tensions with Russia started brewing.
- An increasingly authoritarian government in a former Soviet republic cools to the European Union and drifts closer to Moscow.
- Enormous protests erupt, calling for the government’s ouster.
- Riot police respond.
- Young demonstrators are beaten up and dragged away.
- Each side digs in, raising the specter of a major crisis in a country that has long struggled to break away from Russian dominance.
On the continent’s far eastern edge, embracing the European Union can be a risky move, threatening vested interests, especially those of Russia, which is wary to lose any of its regional influence.
These tensions have been playing out to different degrees in recent years in Georgia, Moldova and, in the most extreme example, Ukraine. All three are former Soviet republics and Russian troops occupy different slices of each.
In Georgia, what concerns people here and beyond are the unmistakable echoes of Ukraine’s popular revolution in 2014 that succeeded in pulling the country away from Moscow but ultimately resulted in a devastating war.
“The government is trying to turn the country back to the Russian sphere of influence against the will of the people, who were moving toward the West,which felt almost inevitable,” said Cristina Florea, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Eastern Europe.
“It is creepily similar to what happened in Ukraine,” she said, and “so, so worrying.”
Ever since the ruling party announced in late November it was postponing its effort to join the European Union, thousands of outraged, pro-Europe Georgians have poured into the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, provoking a brutal response.
Lazare Maglakelidze, a 20-year-old computer science student, said men in unmarked black uniforms snatched him from a recent protest, dragged him into a van, pummeled his face, broke his nose and threatened to rape him. He shared medical records and video footage corroborating much of his account.
Still, in an interview, speaking through a mask of medical tape, he said he wasn’t discouraged and found the Ukraine parallel inspiring.
“Ukraine is where we see people fighting for their dignity, dedicating their lives to the highest of high concepts that anybody can imagine,” he said.
“Yes, there’s a risk to standing up to Russia,” he went on. “But it’s better to die fighting, to die with dignity, than to live a miserable, unworthy, unholy life.”
New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades, David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien, Dec. 10, 2024. Taiwan is on high alert in response to China’s unannounced deployment of naval and Coast Guard ships, as tensions rise over U.S. support for the island.
Taiwan said on Tuesday that China was conducting its largest maritime operations in nearly three decades, sending nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels into waters stretching from the southern Japanese islands to the South China Sea.
Taiwanese defense officials said the scope of the deployment suggested that China was not only trying to show that it could choke the self-governed island, but also that it could block American allies in the region like Japan and the Philippines from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
China has “extended their military strength outward,” Gen. Hsieh Jih-sheng, a senior official in Taiwan’s ministry of defense told reporters. “The numbers are indeed astonishing,” he said, referring to the surge of Chinese vessels in the waters. Sun Li-fang, a spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, said the maritime operations were the largest that Taiwan has seen since 1996.
The officials said that Taiwan was on high alert in response to the Chinese ships, many of which were in waters off Taiwan’s southwest, east and northwest coasts.
China’s intentions were not immediately clear. There were no official announcements from Beijing that its forces were holding exercises. A foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked on Tuesday if China was conducting drills near Taiwan, deflected the question.
Speculation had been growing for days that China would launch war games in retaliation for visits made by Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam last week while on his way to the Pacific islands.
Trump Cases, Convictions, Reprisals, Allies
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Politico, Trump promised Jan. 6 pardons. His post-election silence is making loyalists nervous, Kyle Cheney, Nov. 30, 2024. His die-hard supporters — as well as some federal judges — are left to speculate about his clemency plans.
Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to pardon a vast swath of supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his silence on the matter since winning the election has begun unsettling some fervent allies awaiting even the slightest signal from Trump about how he intends to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.
Federal judges overseeing Jan. 6 cases have been left to guess at Trump’s plans. As a result, they have allowed nearly all cases to proceed, saying Trump’s clemency plans are merely “speculative.” Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have brought a handful of new Jan. 6 felony cases since Election Day, and they’ve argued repeatedly against efforts by defendants to delay their cases to await Trump’s inauguration.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people for their roles in the riot. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would pardon many of them. But he left the specifics unclear, and never said whether he might leave in place some prosecutions, particularly against people who assaulted police.
Now that he’s president-elect, his failure to say more has begun nagging at some of his die-hard supporters, who have engaged in a public guessing game on X about Trump’s intentions.
“[H]onestly people have suffered for 4 years and many are still in flux and terrified. A word of reassurance from the top would go a long way for people,” wrote Brandon Straka, a prominent Trump ally who spent three months in home detention after pleading guilty to Jan. 6 misdemeanors. “The silence on the issue just exacerbates the victims’ anxiety. Hopefully some kind of messaging comes soon.”
Adding to the anxiety expressed by some Jan. 6 defendants is a statement from Trump’s transition team that hinted at a far more limited approach than the sweeping pardons that many in Trump’s base have demanded.
“President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis,” incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in the statement.
The meaning of “case-by-case” has morphed into a raging debate among Jan. 6 defendants and their allies.
“It is just a phrase. ‘Case by case,’ It isn’t a policy, or a strategy, or anything,” wrote Suzzanne Monk, a longtime advocate for Jan. 6 defendants. “It is a catch phrase the media is using to push the ‘only some will be pardoned’ narrative.”
Politico, Trump picks Kash Patel to lead FBI, Megan Messerly, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). The position will require Senate confirmation.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Pate, shown above,l as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.
If confirmed, Patel will replace current FBI Director Chris Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017 after firing James Comey, cutting his 10-year term short. Wray’s term is not set to expire until 2027, so Trump will have to fire Wray to install Patel, if Wray doesn’t resign first.
Trump, in a post to Truth Social, called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”
“He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” the president-elect added, referring to the role Patel played as a staffer in crafting House Republican responses to the investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At the time, Patel was an aide to Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, a position that helped raise his profile in Trump’s inner circle.
Patel was also angling to be deputy director of the CIA, a position that would not have required Senate confirmation, unlike the FBI director post, which does. It’s unclear whether Patel, who is a divisive figure even among Trump loyalists, will have the votes needed in the Senate to be confirmed.
When Trump floated naming Patel deputy director of the FBI during his first administration, then-Attorney General Bill Barr responded “over my dead body,” according to reporting at the time. CIA Director Gina Haspel also threatened to quit over the move.
Patel is a former federal public defender and former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s national security division. A staunch Trump defender, Patel has been assisting the president-elect in compiling a list of candidates to join the Justice Department.
Patel has also promised to investigate and potentially prosecute journalists.
“We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” Patel said last year.
The president-elect also announced Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Chronister, a 32-year veteran of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, joins a long line of Floridians Trump has picked to join his administration.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said Chronister would work with Pam Bondi, his appointee for attorney general, to “secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES.”
Chronister was first appointed to the post by then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Donald J. Trump, left, then as a former president defending himself in New York earlier this year, appears with his attorney Todd Blanche in a court-designated media availability site at the courthouse
Washington Post, Trump picked his lawyer for a top Justice Dept. job. Does it matter? Mark Berman, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). If confirmed as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche should recuse from Justice Department matters related to cases where he represented Donald Trump, experts say.
Soon after winning the presidential election, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to install Todd Blanche, one of his criminal defense attorneys, as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department.
Blanche would fix “a broken System of Justice,” Trump declared in a statement.
Days later, Blanche was hard at work in his current role, signing a court filing that derided one of the cases against Trump as “politically-motivated and fatally flawed” and argued that it should be dismissed.
Blanche — Trump’s pick to be the deputy attorney general — faces an uneasy balancing act, particularly given the president-elect’s stated desire to seek retribution against his investigators and political foes.
If Blanche is confirmed, his previous work representing Trump in multiple criminal cases would raise ethical concerns unless he recuses himself from anything at the Justice Department that might touch on those matters, according to interviews with several legal experts.
Recusal is “an obvious call,” said Eli Wald, a law professor at the University of Denver who specializes in legal ethics. He said Blanche overseeing anything that touches on his previous defense of Trump in either state or federal court would create a clear “appearance of impropriety.”
The Justice Department has “lots of excellent lawyers,” Wald said. “Why would we want one person that Americans can correctly identify with being President Trump’s lawyer to be … making decisions about the same matters in which he represented the president? That would defy common sense.”
Washington Post, Analysis: Trump’s plans for disruption, retribution explained through Cabinet picks, Amber Phillips, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). On some choices, his strategy is clear: Disruption and retribution.
President-elect Donald Trump has quickly put together his Cabinet picks. Loyalty to him has been a major factor.
But Trump is also sending a mixed message with his choices: Will his administration be more of a traditional Republican one, or one that shakes up the system as much as it can?
And despite saying during the presidential campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, the policy blueprint coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Trump picked one of its architects to a top government job.
“On a lot of this, we just don’t know what to make of it,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said of Trump’s Cabinet announcements.
Here are some broad trends behind the Cabinet picks so far.On some, Trump is clear: He wants disruption and retribution.
MSNBC Alex Wagner Tonight, Commentary: DOJ braces for corruption of department as Trump prioritizes revenge, Nov. 27, 2024. David Rohde, national security editor for NBC News, discusses how prosecutors at the Justice Department are preparing to be the subject of weaponized investigations at the hands of Pam Bondi to appease Donald Trump's desire for revenge for efforts to hold him accountable.
Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him, Sonam Sheth, Nov. 26, 2024. Schiff Reminds His GOP Colleagues The Outcome Of Trump Hush Money Trial.
California U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, shown above in a file photo, questioned on Tuesday whether President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general will go after the grand jurors who voted to indict Trump. "Is she also going to go after the grand jurors who found there was probable cause to believe he was engaged in multiple crimes?" Schiff said on MSNBC, referring to Trump'sattorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, shown below.
Special counsel Jack Smith's office secured two grand jury indictments against Trump: one in Washington, D.C., in connection to his activities surrounding efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and in the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol; and another in Florida, related to Trump's handling of classified documents.
Smith's office this week moved to dismiss the January 6 case, and prosecutors also dropped an appeal to the dismissal of the classified documents case.A jury in New York also returned an indictment charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was convicted of all 34 charges earlier this year, but his sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.
And the president-elect and several of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering charges, but that case has been placed on hold amid a legal challenge to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' role in the case.
During his MSNBC interview on Tuesday, Schiff, who recently won his Senate race in California, mentioned special counsel John Durham, left, who was tapped to investigate the Justice Department's inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Durham did not secure convictions in any of the cases.
"You can very well see a lot of prosecutors, like Durham, who spend millions of taxpayer dollars to come up with nothing," Schiff told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace. "Pam Bondi [shown in a 2016 file photo below] follows through with what she's pledged to do, which is to investigate nonexistent voter fraud, for example, or to go after the prosecutors."
[MSNBC Host Nicolle Wallace, shown below in a file photo, responded: "It’s clear that Trump wants a whole bunch of John Durhams in the Justice Department.”]
A 1798 political cartoon's depiction of the XYZ Affair with America as a female being plundered by Frenchmen
The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann, right, Nov. 28, 2024. From Jefferson’s era to today, history proves democracy’s defenders can still win…
It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?
Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.
In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?
My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.
In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.
New York Times, Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities, Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang, Nov. 28, 2024 (interactive). A Times analysis shows where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joe Biden and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift.
New York Times, Analysis: Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles, David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk as co-leader, has advantages that past budget-cutters did not, but changes could still be slow.
New York Times, What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now? Theodore Schleifer, Nov. 27, 2024. The party’s donor class is still wrestling with Donald Trump’s victory, worried about retribution and sluggish liberal energy. (Shown at right, Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- Washington Post, Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted'
- Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him
- Washington Post, Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election, Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein
- Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu
- The Hartmann Report, Political Opinion: Is Democratic Leadership Missing in Action as Trump Tightens His Grip? Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump Evaded Jack Smith and the Rule of Law, Jesse Wegman
- New York Times, They Attended Trump’s Trial. Now He’s Offering Them High-Profile Jobs
- New York Times, Trump’s Sentencing in New York Is Officially on Hold
- New York Times, Pam Bondi, Former Florida Prosecutor, Is Trump’s New Attorney General Pick
- New York Times, Pam Bondi Is Trump’s New Choice for Attorney General. Here’s What to Know About Her
- Washington Post, Matt Gaetz withdraws bid to be attorney general in Trump administration
- The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann
More On Hunter Biden Pardon
Emptywheel, Analysis: You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 6, 2024. The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.
Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.
With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.
And it won’t work.
Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden
Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.
Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted. But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.
While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media. The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.
Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.
Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.
More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.
Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.
That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.
There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole
Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.
Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.
Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.
Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.
There are legal privileges to protect
One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking opening of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.
To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.
Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”
Plus, the opinion via which Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.
The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.
If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.
It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law
There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.
Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.
Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.
Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.
Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.
Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.
Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.
Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.John Bolton would beg to differ with you.
Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.
Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.
But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.
Hunter Biden, shown above in a file photo. The Biden sentencing judges, U.S. District Court Judges Maryellen Noreika (left) of Delaware and Mark Scarsi of California, both nominated by Donald Trump, are shown side by side.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 4, 2024. I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.
ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.
Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.
According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.
In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.
This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.
Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.
First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.
But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.
Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1
[snip]
The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.
Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.
Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.
New York Times, Editorial: The Dangerous Precedent of Biden’s Pardon, Editorial Board, Dec. 4, 2024. President Biden has issued pardons to just 26 people during his term, and granted the commutation of 132 prison sentences. Though he has been criticized for his reluctance to extend clemency, his choices mostly represented the best form of it, wiping away the criminal stains of everyday people who had been unjustly convicted or reducing prison time for those whose sentences were excessive. And his modest record spoke to Mr. Biden’s attempt to project an admirable restraint in using his absolute, easily abused power to overrule the judgment of the justice system.
Then on Sunday, in direct violation of his own pledges not to do so, Mr. Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter. Though he claimed the decision was made out of fatherly love, his explanation also attacked the investigation of his son and, implicitly, his own Justice Department.
New York Times, Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun.
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”
He said he did so because the charges against his son were politically motivated and designed to hurt the president politically.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
After Mr. Biden announced the pardon, Hunter Biden issued a statement of his own. “I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” he said. “I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though he and his spokeswoman had denied for months that he had any intention of doing so. NBC News first reported on Sunday evening that Mr. Biden had in fact decided to pardon his son.
But the move quickly drew expressions of scorn from Mr. Biden’s political adversaries and others and called into question the president’s honesty, given the many public statements that he made saying he would not pardon his son.
President Biden used the power of his office to wave aside years of his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, including a guilty plea for illegally buying a gun. Republicans, including the president’s successor, President-elect Trump, have spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues. Read Joe Biden’s Statement About Pardoning Hunter
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced — precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter of lying on the firearms form. The tax charges were due to be tried in Los Angeles in September 2024, but Hunter suddenly decided to “plead to the sheet,” i.e., admit guilt to all charges.
Both cases were awaiting sentencing until last night’s presidential pardon, which brought them both to a swift end.
The pardon is generating controversy, even among Democrats and my former prosecutor peers. I understand their ambivalence, but I think it rests on considerations that don’t undermine the essential fairness and propriety of the pardon. In the few hours since the pardon was announced, these are the main objections I’ve heard, along with my responses:
New York Times, Opinion: Biden’s Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office, Jeffrey Toobin, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Toobin, right, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
Pardons are the consummate discretionary acts; presidents are never required to issue even a single one, nor are they limited in the number they issue or to whom. In this way, they reveal their roots in the royal prerogative of mercy. There is only one reason presidents, or kings, issue pardons: because they want to.
On Sunday night as he boarded a plane to Cape Verde, en route to Angola, President Biden revealed himself as an anguished, and furious, father when he pardoned his son Hunter. Mr. Biden said, as recently as June, that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter or commute his sentence, and his press secretary reiterated that he had no plans to pardon Hunter after last month’s election. In June, a jury had found the younger Mr. Biden guilty of three felony counts relating to lies about his drug use on a federal form to apply to own a firearm. Then, in September, he pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California.
Hunter was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month, which undoubtedly served to precipitate his father’s action. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, he was probably facing at least a couple of years in prison. But the pardon from his father wiped out that possibility and gifted the son a clean record, as if he had never been charged in the first place. The pardon goes further. It is “not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted” and encompasses the period when the younger Mr. Biden joined the board of Burisma.
Reader Comment: I would agree with Mr. Toobin here, except that there are a few unique circumstances that move this out of the realm of typical Federal sentencing situations.
The Secret Service is responsible for Mr. Biden until July 19, 2025, which means there is a six-month period during which they must protect him in prison. His time in prison would very likely have exceeded that period. Between the time of the sentencing report following his tax-related guilty plea (September 5, 2024) and yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Secret Service, the DOJ, and his lawyers have been trying to construct an incarceration plan that would have guaranteed his safety, at least until July 19, 2025.
The overriding concern is that an incoming administration consisting of some of the announced nominees would be easily capable of, and, in fact, looking forward to, relocating Mr. Biden from a low-security facility to a Federal hell-hole with a shiv-carrying general population.Even solitary confinement is not a safe escape from that population.
Hunter Biden deserves to serve time, but does not deserve to be murdered in prison. Does President Biden need to sacrifice yet another child to prove his character?
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon
New York Times, President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night.
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.
From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given noncriminal resolutions.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
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It is clear that Hunter was treated differently. The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.
There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.
Washington Post, Hunter Biden’s team issues a fiery defense ahead of sentencing, possible pardon, Matt Viser, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Judges are scheduled to sentence the president’s son for gun and tax offenses in December.
Hunter Biden’s legal team is launching an assertive public defense of the president’s son just weeks before federal judges in Delaware and California prepare to sentence him this month, and as his father faces a diminishing window to pardon him if he chooses to do so despite previously ruling it out.Get the latest election news and results
In a 52-page paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” released Saturday, Hunter Biden’s lawyers criticize the foundation of the investigations into their client, arguing that he was prosecuted for crimes that an ordinary citizen would not have been. Hunter Biden is likely to face further unfair threats when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the lawyers contend.
The document at times seems aimed directly at President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said that he will not pardon or commute the sentences of his son. Hunter has been with his father over the past several days in Nantucket, where the Biden family for decades has gathered for Thanksgiving.
“With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real,” the report asserts. It cites comments that Trump has made about targeting his opponents, along with remarks from congressional Republicans who for years have investigated Hunter and other Biden family members.
“There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter,” the report says. “The prospect that Trump will turn his vengeance on the Special Counsel prosecutors if they fail to take a harder line against Hunter no doubt exerts considerable pressure on them not to let up on Hunter.”
Both cases against Hunter Biden, for gun and tax offenses, were brought by special counsel David Weiss, left (nominated by Donald Trump to be U.S. attorney), whose office was staffed by attorneys from the Justice Department. That department will now be overseen by Trump and his attorney general.
Taken as a whole, the document largely rehashes past arguments made by Hunter Biden and his legal team, at times unsuccessfully in court. It includes a lengthy timeline of events since 2017 that the attorneys say demonstrate that federal prosecutors unfairly targeted the son of a prominent politician.
“Here, in one place, is the complete and reprehensible history of the political persecution of Hunter Biden,” Abbe Lowell, one of Hunter’s top attorneys, said in a statement. “This is a seven-year saga propelled by an unrelenting political desire to use a son to hurt his father.”
He added, “It is a wild and terrifying story that serves as a stark warning of what is to come as some of the same Republicans who targeted Hunter prepare to resume power and have stated their intention to use the government’s vast power to pursue their perceived enemies.”
New York Times, Analysis: In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints, Peter Baker, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden and President-elect Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.
The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Mr. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much the way Mr. Biden has now said his son was.
Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Mr. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Mr. Biden did not explicitly accuse the Justice Department of being biased against his family, but suggested that it was influenced by Republican politicians who have waged a long public campaign assailing Hunter Biden.
As it happens, the Justice Department has rejected both accusations. The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics, and senior department officials have denied that politics entered the equation against either man. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases.
But Mr. Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the F.B.I. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Mr. Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.
“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.
Representative Greg Stanton, Democrat of Arizona, disputed the president’s argument that politics was behind his son’s prosecution. “I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said online. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
The Bulwark, Opinion: The Father, the Son, and Kash Patel, William Kristol, Dec. 2, 2024. One thing can be bad and another thing can be much worse.
In The Bulwark’s house there are many rooms. In one of them resides the estimable Mona Charen, who a couple of weeks ago urged President Biden not to pardon his son, Hunter. In another dwells the laudable Kim Wehle, who this morning defends Biden’s pardon as judiciously as one can. For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in Mona’s wing of our (virtual) Bulwark mansion.
The president ought not to have pardoned Hunter Biden. It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.
In any case, The Bulwark will survive some disagreement over the act of a man who let his love as a father overwhelm his judgment as a president. So will the nation. The question we face is how well the nation will survive the next four years of a Trump presidency, where neither love nor judgment are present, only the will to arbitrary power and the desire for personal retribution.
President Biden made a mistake. But the problem with Donald Trump and his appointees isn’t that they’ll make mistakes. It is that the whole Trump presidency is animated by a plan to create centralized, personalized, unconstrained, and unaccountable power in the president and his agents.
Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Kash Patel director of the FBI is one piece of the puzzle, but a particularly dangerous piece at that. It is emblematic of an attempt to seize full control over the power ministries of the government—including the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Whether these agencies are run by true believers like Patel or Tulsi Gabbard, or weak opportunists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, is less important than that they be run fully and unequivocally in accord with the wishes of Trump and his key apparatchiks in the White House—Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and OMB Director Russell Vought.
If Trump can get Patel confirmed as FBI director, he’s obviously off to the authoritarian races. But even if Patel isn’t confirmed, or isn’t confirmed quickly, we’re on a very dangerous path. Trump will govern and seek to enable his agents to govern in what one might call the spirit of Kash Patel—a lawless and authoritarian spirit.
One way Trump will advance this plan is by appointing loyalists to serve in an “acting” capacity in key positions where the Senate hasn’t confirmed his nominees. Trump experimented with this in his first term. Indeed, he commented in January, 2019: “I like acting [appointments]. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.” Now his lawyers and operatives have had years to plan on how to systematically place loyalists as acting officials in key positions, from secretary and director on down.
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced—precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.Gerald Ford (left) speaks as Richard Nixon looks on.
Gerald Ford (left) speaks as President Richard Nixon looks on in October 1973. Eleven months later, after Nixon resigned and Ford became president, he pardoned Nixon. | STR/AFP via Getty Images
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon.
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U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
New York Times, Agriculture Department to Require Testing of U.S. Milk Supply for Bird Flu Virus, Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The new rules call for testing unpasteurized milk from dairies across the country and for farm owners to provide details that would help officials identify and track cases more easily.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new rules on Friday requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus known as H5N1, nearly a year after the virus began circulating through dairy cattle.
Under the new testing strategy, the department will begin testing bulk samples of unpasteurized milk from dairy processing facilities across the country.
Farmers and dairy processors will be required to provide samples of raw milk on request from the government. The rules also require farm owners with infected herds to provide details that would help officials identify more cases and contacts.
The rules are a departure from the voluntary guidance that the department has issued during the outbreak. Many dairy farms have not complied with voluntary testing of milk or of dairy workers, leaving federal officials in the dark about how widely the virus might have spread.
Many experts in the United States and elsewhere, including with the World Health Organization, have sharply criticized the lack of testing of cattle and of people who may be infected with the virus. The virus does not yet spread easily among people, but every untreated infection is an opportunity for it to gain the ability to do so, experts have said.
Politico, Federal judge preserves Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions, Bianca Quilantan, Dec. 6, 2024. A federal judge argues that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.An entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Maryland, is seen.
A federal judge on Friday upheld the U.S. Naval Academy’s consideration of race in admissions arguing that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.
The ruling is an early blow to Students for Fair Admissions’ latest attempt to extend the scope of its Supreme Court win against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that gutted the use of race in college admissions. The ruling also comes while the Naval Academy’s admissions process is underway for its next class.
Judge Richard Bennett emphasized in his ruling that the academy is “distinct from a civilian university” because its mission is to prepare its students to become officers in the military. He also said that while race is considered in admissions, the academy does not have racial quotas or engage in racial balancing, and race is not a determinative factor in its process.
Bennett added that the academy proved its national security interest is measurable and its admissions program is narrowly tailored. He also said the court defers to the executive branch on military personnel decisions.
“The program survives strict scrutiny because the Naval Academy has established a compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Bennett wrote. “Specifically, the Academy has tied its use of race to the realization of an officer corps that represents the country it protects and the people it leads.”
SFFA, an anti-affirmative action group, argued that the Naval Academy has “no justification for using race-based admissions” when using race in admissions is unconstitutional for all other colleges across the country. But the Biden administration has argued the case is nothing like the one against Harvard or UNC because the admissions process and applicant pool are different. The administration also argued SFFA was overreading the ruling in the case against Harvard because the Supreme Court explicitly did not address military academies’ admissions policies.
The high court, in siding with SFFA against Harvard, had said it could not address admissions at the schools because of “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
SFFA President Edward Blum said the group was “disappointed” in the ruling and will appeal the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Politico, Eric Adams doesn’t rule out switch to the GOP: ‘Cancel me,’ Joe Anuta, Dec. 6, 2024. The New York City mayor has been at odds with national Democrats over immigration.Eric Adams walks in a parade.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has taken a soft touch with President-elect Donald Trump, left open the possibility of switching to the Republican Party in a pair of Friday morning interviews.
Adams was a member of the GOP from 1995 through 2002, and was asked during an appearance on NY1 whether he would return to the party. He did not rule out the possibility.
“I’m a part of the American party,” he said in response. “I love this country.”'Cancel me': Adams says he's open to working with Trump border czar
Asked to clarify his comments in a subsequent interview on PIX11, the big-city mayor again left open the question about his future political affiliation.
“No matter what party I’m on or vote on, I’m going to push for American values,” he said, arguing that officials need to move beyond parties altogether and work in concert to solve voters’ problems.
Adams’ comments come on the heels of a presidential race in which the mayor — unlike most of his fellow Democrats — took pains to avoid criticizing Trump. And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Adams has spoken glowingly about Elon Musk, a confidant of Trump tasked with making government more efficient.
The mayor is set to sit down with Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, next week to talk about plans to deport undocumented immigrants. Adams has said he would support any federal plan that focuses on those undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes.
The mayor’s openness to Trump has outraged local Democrats because of the power the incoming president will have over the five-count criminal case Adams faces in federal court.
Trump has already settled on a nominee to replace the U.S. Attorney prosecuting Adams. And as POLITICO has reported, Trump could assist Adams with the case, including offering him a pardon.
Each has cast criminal charges against themselves as the result of a politicized Justice Department — a notion President Joe Biden bolstered by criticizing the justice system in pardoning his son Hunter Biden. And Trump has expressed empathy toward Adams’ predicament.
When asked Friday if he would run for reelection next year as a Democrat, Adams gave a perfunctory answer.
“That is what I’m proposing to do,” he said. “I’ve been a Democrat for many years and I’m going to run for my reelection as a Democrat.”
And he had a final message for any naysayers.
“Those who don’t like it, they will cancel me,” he said. “I say: Cancel me. I’m for America.”
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Middle East Wars, Reactions
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Storm Another Major City, Ben Hubbard, Dec. 5, 2024. Opposition forces advanced on the city of Hama as their startling offensive moved quickly in the direction of the capital, Damascus.
Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad.
The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.
In a video circulated by the rebel group leading the offensive, their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, jubilantly calls for the rebels to push on toward other Syrian cities, including the capital.
“The people of Homs, prepare yourselves,” he said in the video, which his group said was filmed on Wednesday. “The people of Damascus, the people of Dara’a, the people of Deir al Zour. Victory for all, God willing.” The New York Times could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video or when it was filmed.
The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country, opened voids exploited by jihadist groups, drawn in world powers including Russia and the United States and created a long-term refugee crisis for neighboring countries.
Hama is one of the few major Syrian cities where rebels had yet to seize significant control during the civil war, which began with a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. al-Assad in 2011.
The city’s name is synonymous with one of the most notorious massacres in the Middle East. In 1982, security forces serving the president’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, massacred thousands of people there during an anti-government uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
New York Times, Fighting Rages in Syria as Rebels Advance, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Vivian Yee, Dec. 1, 2024. Forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad control the Aleppo airport and are attacking Hama, local officials and a U.K.-based war monitor say.
New York Times, A Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs, Amanda Taub, Dec. 1, 2024. Hamas's weakened position could leave the territory without any governing institutions, our columnist writes.
New York Times, Police and Protesters Clash in Georgian Capital, Cassandra Vinograd, Dec. 1, 2024. The government’s decision to suspend its bid for European Union membership has driven thousands of protesters onto the streets.
Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia’s capital late Saturday during the third consecutive night of demonstrations over the government’s suspension of its bid to join the European Union.
Thousands of people have rallied in the capital, Tbilisi, since Thursday night after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the country was putting the process of E.U. accession on hold until 2028 and would decline all grants from the bloc. The police have responded with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.
Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday morning that protests overnight had “evolved into violence.” It claimed that protesters “threw pyrotechnics” and “ignited objects” toward police officers and at Parliament, causing a fire to break out. Windows were smashed by “stones and various objects,” the ministry added in a statement, saying that protesters also had damaged protective iron barriers around the building.
More than 100 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, according to the ministry, which also said that several police officers were wounded and that 42 of its employees had been injured since the protests began.
The Associated Press reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters; it was not immediately clear how many protesters suffered injuries.
Georgia has been gripped by political crisis since the disputed victory of the Georgian Dream party in October’s parliamentary elections. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China. Georgia’s opposition, which says the election was rigged and has boycotted the new sitting of Parliament, seeks closer ties with the West.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Israeli Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant (File pool photo).
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Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: {December 11 [Human Rights Day History, Implications] Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian, author, Dec. 11, 2024. Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans.
In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”They included the right to participate in art and science.They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.”
Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.—
New York Times, China Bans Rare Mineral Exports to the U.S., David Pierson, Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.
China said on Tuesday that it would begin banning the export of several rare minerals to the United States, an escalation of the tech war between the world’s two biggest powers. The move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology.
The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products, like weaponry and semiconductors.
Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony and so-called superhard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds that they have dual military and civilian uses, China’s Ministry of Commerce said. The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.
China is central to many global supply chains, but it generally refrained from clamping down on its own exports during the first Trump administration, preferring instead to take more limited actions like buying soybeans from Brazil instead of the United States. But senior Chinese officials are worried that President-elect Donald J. Trump plans more stringent policies during his coming term in office.
Mr. Trump has promised to put hefty tariffs on goods from China and further sever the trading relationship between the countries. The move on Tuesday — one of the most aggressive steps China has taken to counter increasingly restrictive policies from the U.S. government — could foreshadow more economic conflict as Mr. Trump enters the White House.
China produces nearly all the world’s supply of critical minerals needed to make advanced technologies such as semiconductors. Beijing has been tightening its grip on the materials to retaliate for clampdowns on American technology exports to China over the past two years.
John Leung at a meeting in 2019 of the Texas Council for the Promotion of China’s Peaceful Reunification. Mr. Leung had embraced Beijing’s causes, including unifying the mainland with Taiwan, the island democracy (David Tang photo).
New York Times, From Chinese Patriot to American Spy: The Unusual Life of John Leung, Mara Hvistendahl, Joy Dong and Adam Goldman, Dec. 3, 2024. He had been hailed by Chinese state media as a model for his efforts to promote Beijing’s interests in the United States. He was in fact an F.B.I. informant.
John Leung was an unlikely spy. In the small Oklahoma town where he lived, people knew him as a former restaurant owner and a father. In Houston, where he often traveled, they knew him as a political organizer in the city’s vibrant Chinese community.
And in China, they knew him as a benevolent patriot, a man who arranged musical performances and embraced official causes like unifying the mainland with Taiwan.
In fact, Mr. Leung was an informant for the F.B.I., gathering intelligence on China, according to two senior United States officials. That work landed him in Chinese custody in 2021, after he traveled to the mainland at the age of 75. He was later sentenced to life in prison, a first in decades for an American accused of espionage.
Mr. Leung was freed last Wednesday in a rare prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing. Six months shy of his 80th birthday, he was put on a plane to the United States with two other Americans who had been detained in China, along with three Uyghurs, members of an ethnic group that faces repression by the Chinese government.
In return, Washington released Xu Yanjun, a convicted Chinese spy who had been serving a 20-year sentence and Ji Chaoqun, 31, who had reported to Mr. Xu and was serving an eight-year sentence. A clemency order for a third Chinese national, Jin Shanlin, who had been in prison for possessing child pornography, was signed on the same day as an order for Mr. Xu. China said Washington also handed over a fugitive.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
Politico, Trump threatens BRICS nations with 100 percent tariff, Ari Hawkins, Nov. 30, 2024. Trump also said: “There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday demanded a group of developing countries commitment to the use of the U.S. dollar as their reserve currency and threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff if they attempt to abandon it.
“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, referring to the acronym for the original group of countries in the bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The geopolitical alliance has since expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
“We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy."
New York Times, Trudeau Flies to Mar-a-Lago to See Trump Amid Tariff Concerns, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Nov. 29, 2024. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is the first G-7 leader to visit since the election. He is under pressure to persuade President-elect Trump to back down from his tariff threat.
The visit makes Mr. Trudeau the first foreign head of government from the Group of 7, a key forum of global coordination consisting of the world’s wealthiest democracies, to visit the president-elect.
Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump were to dine together on Friday evening, one official said, along with a delegation of senior Trump allies poised for top trade and security positions in his new administration.
Mr. Trudeau was accompanied on his visit by Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister of public safety. The Canadian prime minister was expected to stay in the area overnight, but not at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.
The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment, and there was no information released about Mr. Trump’s schedule on Friday.
Mr. Trudeau has been scrambling to formulate a plan to respond to the threat made this week by Mr. Trump to impose a 25 percent tariff unless Mexico and Canada take action to curb the arrival of undocumented migrants and drugs across their borders into the United States.Scott Gottlieb said he’s worried that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS will follow through on past antivaccine rhetoric.
New York Times, Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years, Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate, Nov. 29, 2024. Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him. The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.
“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.
She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.
In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.”
Questions about Mr. Hegseth’s treatment of women have emerged in the weeks since Mr. Trump chose him, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to lead the Pentagon. The issue is expected to be a subject of scrutiny during Senate confirmation hearings.
Washington Post, Trump, Mexican president talk border, migrant caravans amid tariff threats, Mary Beth Sheridan and Niha Masih, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke to President-elect Donald Trump after he threatened to impose tariffs and she hinted at retaliation in a letter.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, left, assured President-elect Donald Trump in a phone call Wednesday that migrant caravans are no longer reaching the U.S.-Mexican border, after Trump’s threat earlier this week to impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from her country if it could not halt irregular migrants and fentanyl from crossing the U.S. border.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
“We discussed the Mexican strategy for the phenomenon of migration, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at our northern border, because we deal with them in Mexico,” Sheinbaum wrote on X after the call.
She described the conversation as “excellent.” Trump, posting about the call on Truth Social, his social media platform, said the conversation was “very productive.”
The conciliatory tone on both sides followed a tense exchange Tuesday: In a letter, Sheinbaum responded angrily to Trump’s tariff warning, threatening tariffs of her own. But they diverged in how they described the conversation.
Trump said Sheinbaum had agreed to “stop Migration through Mexico,” which would mean “effectively closing our Southern Border.” In a second post he said this would be come into effect immediately, prompting another tweet from Sheinbaum in which she said: “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders but to build bridges,” adding that her country would offer assistance to migrants, including caravans, before they could reach the northern border.
New York Times, Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy, Michael Crowley, Nov. 29, 2024. The world is braced for disruption from President-elect Trump, but he may find more common ground with President Biden than many assume.
President-elect Donald J. Trump comes to office with a view of America’s place in the world that is dramatically different from his predecessor’s.
Branding President Biden’s foreign policy as “historically horrible,” Mr. Trump is vowing to reinstate an America First approach that in his first term swept away years of policy consensus and shook U.S. alliances around the world.
He wants friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, may slash U.S. support for Ukraine and has threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He admires foreign autocrats and shows little interest in Mr. Biden’s goal of championing democracy abroad. He is hostile to international organizations and treaties including the United Nations and the Paris climate accord.
But amid the many areas of potential disruption, Mr. Trump will also find plenty of things to like in Mr. Biden’s policies. Beyond the glaring exceptions of Europe and his plans for Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s initial approach could bear a surprising resemblance to the Biden status quo.
One reason is that abrupt foreign policy swerves are rare and difficult to execute, analysts say. America’s military, economic and political power tends to provide a fairly fixed amount of leverage over other countries. Pressure from allies, Congress and the federal bureaucracy push commanders-in-chief toward consensus views.
New York Times, How China Became the World’s Largest Car Exporter, Agnes Chang and Keith Bradsher, Nov. 29, 2024. President-elect Trump has promised to impose new tariffs, but they are unlikely to undercut China’s dominance given its advantages in automaking.
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Trump Legal Cases, Strategies, Allies
Washington Post, Proud Boys’ Tarrio could testify at leak trial of D.C. police officer, Spencer S. Hsu, Peter Hermann and Tom Jackman, Dec. 1, 2024. Lt. Shane Lamond’s contacts with Henry Tarrio fed Proud Boys’ anger at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. His trial spotlights police dealings with the extremist group.
A former D.C. police lieutenant will face a federal trial Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied to investigators about their interactions.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Prosecutors say advance word from Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, deepened anger among the far-right Proud Boys and fueled their instigation of the mob two days later at the Capitol. But Lamond, then head of the force’s intelligence unit, says he may call Tarrio as a defense witness, seeking to convince the judge their talks were within the normal bounds of how a police investigator handles a source.
Such a move would put Lamond in the awkward position of seeking exoneration through a man serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy after being found guilty of plotting violence to stop Congress’s certification of the 2020 election, according to court filings.
Either way, Lamond’s bench trial before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will spotlight D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021. That tumultuous summer and fall, episodes of street violence in Washington marred both racial justice demonstrations prompted by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May and marches by Donald Trump supporters following the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Capitol riot that led to at least five deaths, $3 million in damage and assaults on about 140 officers.
The inner workings of police intelligence gathering stirred controversy, with liberal groups accusing police of favoring right-leaning organizations and crossing the line between eliciting information and appearing to take sides. They pointed to officers who posed for photos with supporters of Trump and who stood back as counterdemonstrators vandalized Black Lives Matter signs or pressed arguments to physical conflict.
Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, left, and former President Donald Trump, shown in a collage via CNN.
Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). The special counsel filed a motion to dismiss Donald Trump’s election-obstruction case without prejudice, which means the case could be revived in the future.
Special counsel Jack Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Monday to dismiss the federal election interference charges against President-elect Donald Trump, putting an end to a lengthy investigation that never made it to trial.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Smith’s motion seeks to dismiss the case without prejudice, acknowledging that Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president. If she does that, it leaves open the possibility that prosecutors could again bring charges once Trump leaves office after his second White House term.
But legal experts said it’s possible that once Trump is in office, he could try to do something that has never been tested before: pardon himself to foreclose the possibility of legal jeopardy in the future.
Trump faces four counts related to conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results. Smith’s filing acknowledges that the Justice Department has longed believed a sitting president cannot stand trial, and says prosecutors conferred with Trump’s attorneys and that they did not oppose the request to dismiss the case.
Russian War Against Ukraine
New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, Dec. 9, 2024. The messaging app’s popularity has soared during the war with Russia, leading Ukrainian officials to weigh Telegram’s upsides against its security risks.
In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support.
But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed.
Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings.
“We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.”
New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 370,000 wounded since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago. It was the first time in months that he had disclosed military casualty figures, a highly sensitive topic in Ukraine, particularly as Kyiv’s forces lose more ground to Russian troops.
The Ukrainian leader’s tally could not be verified independently, and it differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials and military analysts, who have put the number of dead much higher. U.S. officials said in August 2023 that close to 70,000 soldiers had been killed, a figure that has probably increased significantly since then.
Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian journalist with close ties to the army, shared a similar figure last week, adding that 35,000 soldiers were also missing in action.
Mr. Zelensky also noted that about half of the wounded soldiers return to the battlefield after treatment. This suggests that Ukraine has suffered a total of about 230,000 irreplaceable losses, comprising those killed and those permanently incapacitated by injuries.
It was not immediately clear why Mr. Zelensky chose to release casualty figures now, but his statement came just a few hours after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that Ukraine had lost 400,000 soldiers, without specifying the number of dead or wounded. Mr. Trump, who also said that Russia’s casualties were close to 600,000 soldiers, said the high toll of the war underscored the need for an immediate cease-fire and the start of peace negotiations.
Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid, Michael Birnbaum, Missy Ryan and Siobhán O'Grady, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president’s Ukraine directive has stirred debate, as some officials worry it will cut too deeply into American stockpiles and jeopardize military needs elsewhere.
The Biden administration is engaged in an 11th-hour scramble to provide Ukraine with billions of dollars in additional weaponry, a massive effort that is generating concerns internally about its potential to erode U.S. stockpiles and sap resources from other flash points, officials said.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The lame-duck initiative was spurred in part by Russia’s battlefield momentum and a fear among Ukraine’s fiercest advocates that once President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20, there will be an abrupt shift in U.S. policy toward the war.
Yet some in the administration have taken the view that no matter what Washington does, Kyiv’s military will remain outmatched without far more soldiers to sustain its fight. And even as they accelerate arms shipments, there is growing frustration with Ukraine’s leaders, who have resisted U.S. calls to lower the country’s draft age from 25 to 18.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have captured Ukrainian territory at the fastest pace since 2022, causing alarm in Washington. Administration officials say their end-of-term weapons push — accompanied by President Joe Biden’s decision to green-light missile strikes deep into Russian territory and the deployment of antipersonnel land mines long criticized by human rights groups — can give Kyiv some breathing room. But they are urging Ukrainian leaders to use the moment to expand their military beyond the 160,000 recruits Kyiv says it needs
“We’re absolutely going to keep sending Ukraine weapons and equipment. We know that’s vital. But so, too, is manpower at this point,” White House spokesman John Kirby said last week. “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.”
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Ukraine Matters, HORROR Spreads in Russian Force: Ukraine War Map Update, Georgi, Dec. 2, 2024. Crises in Russian conscripts, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine military as impacting Russian war against Ukraine.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
New York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants, Constant Méheut, Nov. 29, 2024. Moscow has increasingly hit critical substations linked to nuclear power plants in an effort to disconnect them. The assaults risk a disaster, experts said.
New York Times, Russia Launches Record Number of Drones in Overnight Attack, Ukraine Says, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). The assault, which the Ukrainian Air Force said involved 188 drones, came as both sides intensify air bombardments.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that it had shot down 76 of the drones in the “massive attack” but that nearly all the rest had disappeared from radar. It was unclear how many of those drones had been intercepted by other means, such as electronic interference, and how many had struck targets.
Some critical infrastructure was hit and residential buildings were damaged in several regions, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Damage to the power grid in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, caused electricity and water outages, the local authorities said.
New York Times, The Global Profile: As Russia Advances in Ukraine, a Cop Has to Flee City After City, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). For Volodymyr Nikulin, being a wartime police officer means aiding evacuees, surviving a shrapnel wound and tackling looters. It also means quickly switching cities when one falls to the invaders.
The belongings of Volodymyr Nikulin, a Ukrainian police officer stationed near the country’s eastern front line, boil down to this: a shrapnel-riddled car, a small sack stuffed with sweaters and pants, and two plastic bags filled with basic food and medicine.
Keeping it simple is essential for Mr. Nikulin, who has had to leave three cities to escape the advance of Russian forces in the country’s eastern Donbas region, losing his home each time. So he has learned to live with little, and to be ready to pack up on short notice.
He has barely bothered to settle into the friend’s apartment he currently occupies in Sloviansk, a city 15 miles from the combat zone, leaving the bedroom untouched and sleeping instead in a small office. The distant rumble of Russian bombing regularly echoes through the walls, a reminder he may soon have to leave everything behind, again.
“Who knows where I’ll be in a few months?” Mr. Nikulin said on a recent morning last month in Sloviansk, acknowledging that Russian forces in the area were creeping closer. He joked that he could at least count on his damaged car, recalling how it had helped him escape several Russian attacks.
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Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
New York Times, India’s Luxury Property Market Is a Boon to Donald Trump’s Business, Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj, Dec. 9, 2024. The Trump Organization has found a warm welcome in the country, where status-hungry home buyers clamor for a famous American brand.
When Donald J. Trump started his first campaign for the presidency, two Trump-branded buildings were going up in India, one in the financial capital of Mumbai and the other nearby in Pune. Before he won in 2016, the Trump Organization expanded its business in India, signing deals in two more big cities.
The day after Mr. Trump’s victory in November, a developer in India told local media about half a dozen new deals. Like the others, Indian companies buy the land, build the high-rises, sell the units and pay a fee to use the Trump name.
These deals are putting India even more squarely in the Trump Organization’s sights. And with Mr. Trump on his way back to the White House, the country is emerging as center stage for potential conflicts of interest.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, it was uncharted territory for a sitting U.S. president to have extensive business interests in foreign countries. During his second term, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
New York Times, How a Criminal With Close Ties to China Became a New York Power Broker, Michael ForsytheBianca PallaroJay Root and Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 9, 2024. John Chan was a Chinatown gangster before remaking himself into a powerful force in New York politics — one closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. On a Monday in March, in the heart of China’s capital, more than 2,000 delegates of a rubber-stamp advisory body to the authoritarian government of President Xi Jinping gathered for their annual meeting.
One mission of the men and women in attendance was to spread the global influence of China’s Communist Party. Of the throngs of party officials, generals and business executives who watched as Mr. Xi took the stage, just 20 people had been invited to represent the country’s vast diaspora, including a single person from the United States: a 69-year-old man from Brooklyn named John Chan.
Mr. Chan’s participation reflected a remarkable proximity to the highest levels of power in China, experts said, and marked him as a person on whom the country’s leaders might call for favors. But it was remarkable, too, because of his position at home: He has operated as a power broker in America’s largest city, with immense sway over an important subset of New York politics.
For years, Mr. Chan has exerted influence over the city’s ethnic Chinese communities — reaching into back rooms and political clubhouses from Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Chinatown to Flushing in Queens — to help sway elections, all without drawing much attention.
But lately, federal investigations into foreign influence efforts have swirled around city and state government in New York. Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with conspiring to accept illegal foreign campaign contributions from Turkey. He has pleaded not guilty. One of his top aides, an Asian affairs director with ties to China, had her homes searched in an investigation by Brooklyn federal prosecutors who have separately brought cases against people they suspect of being Chinese agents.
The same prosecutors recently accused an aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of serving the Chinese government by blocking Taiwanese officials from the governor’s office.
Mr. Chan, now 70, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the investigations. But against the backdrop of recent events, he has stood out nonetheless, both for his overt connections to the Chinese government and for his ability to influence American elections up and down the ballot.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by the Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
More than 180 people were killed in a massacre over the weekend in one of the poorest neighborhood’s of Haiti’s capital, the United Nation’s human rights chief said on Monday.
A leading Haitian human rights group described the killings as the personal vendetta of a gang boss who had been told that witchcraft caused his son’s fatal illness.
The slaughter began on Friday in the Wharf Jeremie section of Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a civil rights group based in the capital.
Older people who practiced voodoo appeared to have been targeted, according to the group. That assessment was backed by another rights organization and a Cité Soleil resident.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told reporters in Geneva that at least 184 people had been killed.
Nearly 130 of those who were killed were over 60 years old, according to the U.N., adding that gang members burned bodies and flung them into the sea.
The brutality of the killings reflect a country enduring an “accelerating spiral into the abyss,” said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert for Haiti.
New York Times, South Korea Bars President From Traveling Abroad, Victoria Kim and Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 9, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol cannot leave as an investigation unfolds into whether he led an insurrection last week when he briefly imposed martial law.
South Korea’s political dysfunction deepened Monday as its Ministry of Justice barred President Yoon Suk Yeol from leaving the country while officials investigate whether his brief declaration of martial law last week amounted to leading an insurrection.
Oh Dong-woon, the chief prosecutor who heads the office for investigating high-ranking officials, told lawmakers that he had sought the travel ban as the office carries out search-and-seizure operations targeting officials who were involved in the martial law order.
No sitting president has ever been arrested in South Korea, and the order adds to the spiraling fallout of Mr. Yoon’s extraordinary move last Tuesday. Since his short-lived martial law declaration, the country has been thrust into a leadership vacuum, and widespread protests have called for his removal.
New York Times, France’s First Big #MeToo Case Goes to Trial, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Dec. 9, 2024. The actress Adèle Haenel has accused the director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She accused him of isolating her during rehearsals and filming. Of grooming her for three years, when on Saturday afternoons he would touch her sexually. When it began, he was 36. She was 12.
Five years ago, the French actress Adèle Haenel shocked the country’s film world when she spoke out about the director Christophe Ruggia, who had cast her as the lead actor in a 2002 film about an incestuous relationship.
On Monday, the case went to court, marking the first major #MeToo accusations in France to proceed to trial. Mr. Ruggia, 59, is charged with aggravated sexual assault against a minor. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison as well as a fine of up to 150,000 euros, about $190,000.
Mr. Ruggia has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying that his relationship with Ms. Haenel was strictly platonic and that he never sexually harassed or touched her inappropriately. His lawyer Fanny Colin had refused to speak publicly before the trial, but had said that Mr. Ruggia intended to plead not guilty.
After Ms. Haenel first told her story to the French investigative outlet Mediapart in 2019, it inspired heated conversations about the country’s film industry and sex with minors, and how the French justice system treats sexual abuse complaints.
At the time, Ms. Haenel was a rising star, praised for fierce yet sensitive performances that had earned her two Césars — the French equivalent of the Oscars. In the United States she rose to fame with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” her final role before she announced her decision to boycott the industry.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024. Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by the Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
Rose-Mieline Florvil, 24, who lived in the Dominican Republic for less than a year, said immigration agents recently raided her house in Santiago, in the northern part of the country, one day before dawn and said something along the lines of “Black woman, come here.”
“I couldn’t run, because I’m pregnant,” she said.
The extraordinary wave of deportations — Dominican officials say the goal is 10,000 per week — reflects a stringent new immigration policy by a country with a complicated and racially charged history with Haiti.
The two nations share the island of Hispaniola, and the Dominican Republic, the far more prosperous of the two, has sounded increasingly loud alarms about shouldering the burden of what experts say is a failing state next door.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
More than 180 people were killed in a massacre over the weekend in one of the poorest neighborhood’s of Haiti’s capital, the United Nation’s human rights chief said on Monday.
A leading Haitian human rights group described the killings as the personal vendetta of a gang boss who had been told that witchcraft caused his son’s fatal illness.
The slaughter began on Friday in the Wharf Jeremie section of Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a civil rights group based in the capital.
Older people who practiced voodoo appeared to have been targeted, according to the group. That assessment was backed by another rights organization and a Cité Soleil resident.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told reporters in Geneva that at least 184 people had been killed.
Nearly 130 of those who were killed were over 60 years old, according to the U.N., adding that gang members burned bodies and flung them into the sea.
The brutality of the killings reflect a country enduring an “accelerating spiral into the abyss,” said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert for Haiti.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Loses No-Confidence Vote and Is Expected to Resign, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 4, 2024. Prime Minister Michel Barnier, above, is likely to remain as a caretaker until a replacement is named. But the vote could create a wider opening for the far right.
French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.
France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.
It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.
President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Is on the Block, and Marine Le Pen Holds the Blade, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 1, 2024. The end of Michel Barnier’s government looks inevitable, even imminent, and would add to the country’s political malaise. How long can he last?
The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, (shown above in an AP photo), known for composure on previous scaffolds.
His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.
The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.
Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, left, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.
She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.
Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.
Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.
“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”
But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”
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U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.).. During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Horowitz’s report, which does not identify the lawmakers by name, did not turn up indications that the two outspoken Trump critics were targeted because of their political views or affiliation.
“We did not find any evidence of retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors who issued the compulsory process we reviewed,” the report said.
The Justice Department during the Trump administration also faced scrutiny for efforts to access the email account of then-House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel. Patel, who is now Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has long decried the intrusion by Justice Department officials, which he claimed was retaliation for his effort to undermine the investigation of Trump’s 2016 ties to Russia.
Last year, Patel sued top Justice Department officials over the grand jury subpoena, and his suit was dismissed in September by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Patel was one of the 43 congressional staffers whose phone or email logs were pursued by investigators — a number higher than previously known. The review found that 21 of them were affiliated with Democrats, 20 with Republicans and two were in nonpartisan positions. The Justice Department did not seek or obtain the content of their communications, but only details such as which phone numbers or email accounts they were in contact with and when, Horowitz found.
Around the same time the existence of subpoenas aimed at lawmakers was reported, it emerged that prosecutors also sought phone or email records for journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN as part of the same leak investigations.
Barr did approve the subpoenas aimed at reporters, but the department never convened an internal panel that a policy in place at the time said should examine all such requests, the watchdog report found.
“This deviation from the Department’s own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role,” Horowitz wrote.
Biden called the tactic aimed at reporters “simply wrong” and vowed it would not continue under his administration. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo banning the practice and he later formalized that policy in DOJ regulations.
Horowitz was particularly critical of the Justice Department’s handling of gag orders it obtained on companies like Apple and Google. Those orders prevented the firms from telling targets about the demands.
Last year, the Justice Department issued a policy on subpoenas aimed at lawmakers, requiring high-level approvals at DOJ. Horowitz’s report reveals that DOJ quietly updated that policy again in September after getting a draft of the review. Among the latest requirements: Prosecutors must inform the judge or magistrate that the requests target a member of Congress or congressional staff.
The incoming Trump administration is expected to roll back the protections Garland adopted for journalists and perhaps even to eliminate earlier limits Democratic and Republican administrations had put on such demands. Legislation pending in Congress could block those moves, but last month Trump urged Republican lawmakers to “kill” the measure, known as the PRESS Act.
Horowitz said the past and current policies encourage prosecutors to seek lawmakers’ records because getting subpoenas for journalists’ emails or phone records required high-level approval, which has been basically impossible to get since 2021. He noted that even the latest Justice Department policy doesn’t require prosecutors to exhaust other avenues before demanding email and phone providers turn over lawmakers’ records.
Most of the leaks did not result in criminal charges, but one staffer swept up in one round of phone and email records searches — Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe — pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his dealings with journalists. A judge sentenced Wolfe to two months in prison.
Another long-awaited report is expected from Horowitz’s office in the coming days: a review of the Justice Department’s actions in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. That review has been pending for nearly four years. Horowitz recently acknowledged that work on it was frozen for about two years while prosecutors pursued some of the most serious criminal cases stemming from the attack.
Horowitz’s release of the long-awaited investigations comes as Horowitz and other inspectors general across the government face the possibility of being removed or even fired by the incoming Trump administration. Some Trump allies have urged him to install his own appointees in the independent watchdog roles at federal agencies, although traditionally most inspectors general have not resigned during a change of administration or of partisan control of the White House.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have vowed to oppose any attempt by Trump to oust the experienced watchdogs.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews Dec 10, 2024. 70% of Americans favor ending lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices.
Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices. The move is aimed at restoring confidence in the Court, as the approval rating for SCOTUS is at its lowest point in history, with only 16% of Americans reporting "a great deal of confidence" in the highest Court.
The Manchin-Welch amendment would impose single 18-year, non-renewable terms for Supreme Court justices. Each 18-year term would be staggered every two years. Current justices will not be held to term limits, but blocks of 18-year terms will begin to cycle every two years once the amendment is ratified. When a current justice retires, their replacement will be assigned the remainder of the current 18-year block, until every justice on the Court is term limited.
Eventually, every two years there will be a new Supreme Court vacancy to be filled by the current President.
"I’m proud to introduce this legislation with Senator Welch that would establish 18-year term limits for justices of the United States Supreme Court. The current lifetime appointment structure is broken and fuels polarizing confirmation battles and political posturing that has eroded public confidence in the highest court in our land," Manchin, the outgoing senator from West Virginia said.
"Our amendment maintains that there shall never be more than nine justices and would gradually create regular vacancies on the Court, allowing the president to appoint a new justice every two years with the advice and consent of the United States Senate. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join our legislation to help restore faith in our judicial system."
"Taking action to restore public trust in our nation’s most powerful Court is as urgent as it is necessary. Setting term limits for Supreme Court justices will cut down on political gamesmanship, and is commonsense reform supported by a majority of Americans," said Welch. "I’m proud to lead this effort with Senator Manchin that will restore Americans’ faith in our judicial system."
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas Dec 10, 2024. Prosecutors are pressing forward with the case even with Trump becoming President again.
This afternoon, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has filed an opposition to Donald Trump's request to immediately vacate the guilty verdicts against him and to dismiss the criminal case given the results of the November 5th election. Prosecutors had been considering whether to make this move for several weeks, and have officially decided to oppose any dismissal on several grounds.
First, prosecutors argue that the Manhattan court should reject Trump's motion to immediately dismiss the case given the fact that he has not yet been sworn in and does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution while President-elect.
The opposition goes on to highlight how even after he is sworn into office, the case should not be dismissed because the temporary immunity Trump will enjoy over the next four years does not justify wiping out the jury's verdict, especially as Trump's team does not dispute that the 34 felonies he was convicted of deal with purely unofficial conduct.
Prosecutors note that "at most, [Trump] should receive temporary accommodations during his presidency to prevent this criminal case form meaningfully interfering with his official decision-making."
Prosecutors listed several alternative remedies to a complete dismissal including a stay of proceedings during his term in office if judgment is not entered before January 20th. The decision will now ultimately be up to Justice Merchan who will decide whether or not to dismiss the criminal charges against Trump.
New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024. A New York jury acquitted Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely. Republican politicians hailed the verdict. But some New Yorkers found it deeply disturbing.
Outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Monday, a scuffle broke out among demonstrators, their chants amplified over bullhorns.
On one side were supporters of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was charged with fatally choking a fellow subway rider, Jordan Neely, on an uptown F train last year. They held signs, including one that said, “Daniel Penny deserves a prize not a prison.” On the other side were people protesting on behalf of Mr. Neely. Upset, they grabbed a sign and ripped it up.
As the sides exchanged barbs and police officers erected a barrier to separate them, inside the courthouse 12 New Yorkers were coming to a unanimous decision. Mr. Penny, they concluded, was not guilty.
If the death of Mr. Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who had struggled with mental health problems, had left New Yorkers unnerved and divided, the verdict quickly became yet another flashpoint in the nation’s debate over how best to address issues of crime and justice, homelessness and mental illness.
Republican political figures including Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani praised the jury and criticized the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for pursuing the case.
“Thank God justice was done in this case,” Mr. Vance said on social media. “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Penny a hero who deserved a medal.
But in New York, some found the verdict deeply troubling. “This decision highlights a deep-seated societal discomfort with unhoused individuals in need of support, and effectively green-lights ‘vigilante justice’ against the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” leaders of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus said in a statement.
Washington Post, Appeals court upholds nationwide TikTok ban-or-sale law, Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-Strong, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.
TikTok had argued to the three-judge panel, unsuccessfully, that the ban must be struck down for infringement on the free speech rights of the app’s users and owners under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” the court wrote in its opinion.
TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to take up the case before the sale deadline ends Jan. 19, or to first request that all the judges on the appeals court review the panel’s decision.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. He criticized the ban-or-sale law as being based on “inaccurate” information and said it was “resulting in the outright censorship of the American people.”
The appeals court on Friday said years-long bipartisan investigations into the app, and the government’s willingness to consider TikTok’s alternatives, weighed in favor of the law.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for a three-judge panel. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”
However, the judges said they rejected the government’s “ambitious argument” that the law did not “implicate the First Amendment at all,” saying that it would impose a “disproportionate burden on TikTok, an entity engaged in expressive activity.” The government had suggested that TikTok’s ownership by a foreign company left it without First Amendment rights, despite it having roughly 170 million U.S. accounts.
The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.By Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-StrongUpdated 45 minutes ag
The decision sets up a potential showdown with President-elect Donald Trump. Having backed a ban during his first term in the White House, he is expected to try to halt it, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
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Jose Ibarra listens through an interpreter during his trial at Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, Nov. 20, 2024, in Athens, Ga. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution pool photo by Hyosub Shin via Associated Press).
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Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case, Michael Levenson, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., right, who claimed to have more than 20 “wives” including 10 “brides” under 18, pleaded guilty in April to two felony conspiracy charges.
The self-proclaimed leader of a polygamist sect in Arizona who amassed more than 20 “wives,” including 10 “brides” under 18, was sentenced on Monday to 50 years in prison in connection with what prosecutors described as an interstate child sexual abuse ring, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.
Federal prosecutors said that the man, Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., led a group that victimized girls as young as 9.
Using his status as a self-declared prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mr. Bateman forced his child “brides” to participate in sexual activities with him and with other adult men and women, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Penny choked Mr. Neely in a minutes-long struggle on the floor of a New York subway car. The case reflected the pathologies of post-pandemic New York.
Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked a fellow subway rider on an uptown F train last year, was acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide on Monday, ending a case that had come to exemplify New York City’s post-pandemic struggles.
The jurors decided that Mr. Penny’s actions were not criminal when he held the rider, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold as the two men struggled on the floor of a subway car on May 1, 2023. Mr. Neely, who was homeless and had a history of mental illness, had strode through the subway car that afternoon, yelling at passengers and frightening them, according to witnesses.
After the forewoman announced the verdict, the courtroom erupted, with some people cheering the outcome and others responding with anger.
Upon hearing the words “not guilty,” Mr. Penny’s lawyer, Thomas A. Kenniff, slapped his palm on the defense table and turned to hug Mr. Penny, who had a large grin on his face. Another of his lawyers, Steven Raiser, stood and kissed his client on the cheek.
Mr. Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, lashed out at supporters of Mr. Penny, and the judge asked him to leave the room.
The jurors had spent more than three days trying to come to a unanimous decision on whether Mr. Penny, 26, was guilty of manslaughter — a higher charge — in the death of Mr. Neely, 30. On Friday, the jurors sent two notes to the judge overseeing the trial saying that they had deadlocked.
After the jurors — seven women and five men — sent the first note that morning, the judge, Maxwell T. Wiley, instructed them to resume their deliberations. When the jurors sent the second note in the afternoon, telling Justice Wiley that they were still unable to reach an agreement, he granted the prosecution’s request to dismiss the charge. He sent the jurors home for the weekend, telling them to prepare to begin deliberating on the lesser charge, criminally negligent homicide, on Monday. Ultimately, they decided to acquit Mr. Penny.
The decision was a defeat for the office of Alvin L. Bragg, left, Manhattan’s district attorney. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bragg said that the jury “has now spoken.”
“We deeply respect the jury process and we respect their verdict,” he said.
In his statement, Mr. Bragg also noted that prosecutors and their families had been “besieged with hate and threats — on social media, by phone and over email” throughout the trial. “Simply put, this is unacceptable, and everyone, no matter your opinion on this case, should condemn it,” he said.
New York Times, Youth Pastor Is Charged With Nearly 200 Sex Crimes Going Back Decades, Billy Witz, Nov. 27, 2024. Many of the victims were the West Virginia pastor’s relatives, the police said, including five nieces who filed a complaint against him in 2004.
The state police in West Virginia are continuing to investigate a longtime youth pastor who has now been charged with nearly 200 counts of sexual abuse crimes involving children, many of them his relatives, dating back more than three decades.
The pastor, John W. Radcliff II, was arrested a second time last week after officers investigating a complaint filed against him in September revisited a case from 2004, when five of Mr. Radcliff’s nieces told the police that he had abused them.
“I have no idea what happened, but we never saw charges pressed,” said one niece, Carla Rinehart, whose mother is Mr. Radcliff’s sister.
Ms. Rinehart, 38, said that growing up, she did not know that her relatives had endured the same type of abuse that she says her uncle had committed against her. But when Ms. Rinehart was hospitalized at 17 after a mental breakdown, she began to share her story with family members. Her sister recounted a similar experience at the time, and then their cousins did the same.
A local TV station, citing court documents in Lewis County, W.Va., on the 2004 case, reported that Mr. Radcliff had forced the girls to perform sexual acts on him from 1987 to 1996, and sexually assaulted them in other ways until they were about 12. The victims are all now adults, the news outlet reported.
Lewis is one of four counties where Mr. Radcliff has been charged with abuse.
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U.S. Immigration
Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramirez, Dec. 8, 2024. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported.
And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of the 1.4 million people in the U.S. immigration system who have pending deportation orders cannot be sent back to their home countries, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, posing one of several looming obstacles to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge for a mass removal campaign.
Some orders can’t be carried out because the would-be deportee’s home country won’t take them or limits cooperation with ICE. Others identified for deportation are serving prison terms, or have received a reprieve or deferral from an immigration judge, due to a medical condition, a credible persecution threat or another extenuating factor.
An array of other logistical and legal impediments also could constrain mass deportations, according to current and former ICE officials.
Trump promises to brush aside hurdles and mount a campaign modeled after the harsh roundups of the Eisenhower administration, when the U.S. government expelled hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to Mexico.
“We will begin — and we have no choice — the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said on the campaign trail.
Trump’s aides describe the anticipated campaign as an enforcement blitz that will leverage the power and resources of the U.S. military to roll back the effect of record numbers of illegal border crossings under President Joe Biden. Criminals and those with outstanding deportation orders will be the administration’s priority as of Trump’s inauguration, Jan. 20, aides say.
Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery, Laura Vozzella and Salvador Rizzo, Dec. 8, 2024. Virginia’s governor, shown above in a file photo, has used the arrest of two undocumented men who misunderstood directions to stop at a check-in station to inflame fears over illegal immigration.
There are two versions of a May 3 incident at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia involving two Jordanian men, both undocumented immigrants, who pulled up to the entrance in a box truck.
There’s the mundane account given by federal prosecutors about some confusion over where to check in during an Amazon delivery stop. And there’s the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has been telling for the past six months that makes it sound like two foreigners stormed the gates at the fortified military installation.
“We have folks that have crashed the — illegal immigrants — that have crashed the front gate at Quantico in a box truck, trying to gain access to Quantico,” Youngkin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Oct. 14 in one of multiple national television appearances — plus speeches at the National Republican Convention and a rally in Virginia with then-Republican nominee Donald Trump — where he has invoked the episode to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies.
Federal prosecutors — who initially charged the pair with misdemeanor trespassing, but later dropped those charges — say that, while the Jordanians were in the country illegally and are in the process of being deported, they did not crash the gate or intend to do any harm at Quantico.
Mohammad Dabous, working for an Amazon subcontractor, was trying to make a delivery to the post office in the town of Quantico, which can only be accessed through the gates of the military base, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Amico, who handled the case, said in a court filing. Hasan Hamdan was a passenger in the truck.
“Marine Corps … agents spoke with Mr. Dabous’s supervisor at the subcontractor delivery company, who confirmed Mr. Dabous’s employment and verified the scheduled authorized delivery to the Northern Virginia town of Quantico on May 3, 2024,” Amico wrote in a motion filed Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The same filing noted that neither man had any known terrorist links. “The FBI has not identified any national security concerns regarding either defendant,” wrote Amico, who also said he consulted the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Neither defendant is on the watch list.”
Quantico officials issued Dabous and Hamdan citations for trespassing, a petty offense punishable by a maximum six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. They then turned the pair over to ICE because of their immigration status. The men were later released on bond from ICE custody.
The U.S. attorney’s office dropped the charges Oct. 3, but the deportation proceedings continue.
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U.S. Jobs, Investment, Economy, Pensions
The Hill, Powell calls for ‘change’ in ‘unsustainable’ fiscal path, Taylor Giorno, Dec. 4, 2024. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday that the U.S. is on an “unsustainable” fiscal path and called for a course correction days after the national debt topped $36 trillion for the first time ever.
New York Times, Trump Tax Cuts Won’t Help the Economy Grow, Budget Office Finds, Andrew Duehren, Dec. 4, 2024. A larger debt and higher interest rates would cancel out the boost from keeping individual taxes lower, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found.
New York Times, Opinion: Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America, Paul Krugman, right, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). It’s late 2025, and Donald Trump has done what he said he would do: impose high tariffs — taxes on imports — on goods coming from abroad, with extremely high tariffs on imports from China. These tariffs have had exactly the effect many economists predicted, although Trump insisted otherwise: higher prices for American buyers.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
Well, U.S. trade law gives the executive branch broad discretion in tariff-setting, including the ability to grant exemptions in special cases. So you apply for one of those exemptions. Will your request be granted?
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
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Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, E.P.A. Bans Cancer-Causing Chemicals Used in Dry Cleaning, Hiroko Tabuchi, Dec. 9, 2024. The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday banned two solvents found in everyday products that can cause cancer and other serious diseases. It was a move long sought by environmental and health advocates, even as they braced for what could be a wave of deregulation by the incoming Trump administration.
For decades, communities close to factories, airports, dry cleaners and other sites have lived with the consequences of exposure to trichloroethylene, or TCE, a toxic chemical used in cleaners, spot removers, lubricants and glue.
TCE is known to cause liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and to damage the nervous and immune systems. It has been found in drinking water nationwide and was the subject of a 1995 book that became a movie, “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. The E.P.A. is banning all uses of the chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was overhauled in 2016 to give the agency greater authority to regulate harmful chemicals.
The E.P.A. also banned all consumer uses of perchloroethylene, used in dry-cleaning and in automotive-care products. Though it is less harmful than TCE, the solvent, also called Perc, can cause liver, kidney, brain and testicular cancer, and can damage kidneys, the liver and the immune system.
The E.P.A.’s ban of Perc still allows for a range of industrial uses, including in aviation and defense, with the provision that strict rules must be in place to protect workers. Both bans were initially proposed in 2023.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 9, 2024. Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
Many of these places are major food producers, such as Argentina, Spain and the Black Sea region, said Narcisa Pricope, one of the report’s authors and a land systems scientist at Mississippi State University. Others, like South Sudan, are vulnerable to conflict and political instability.
The aridity crisis is unfolding “in our lifetime,” Dr. Pricope said. “This is affecting our children.”
Worldwide in recent years, nearly 400,000 square miles of the planet’s healthy and productive land has become degraded annually. Under the 30-year-old U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, countries committed themselves to halting the devastation.
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, married for the fifth time in August 20124, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday. Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp. The couple announced their engagement in March.
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Murdoch wanted to change the terms of his family’s trust to ensure that his son Lachlan would be his successor upon his death.
Rupert Murdoch, right, has faced a setback in his bid to cement his son Lachlan’s future control of his media empire, after a Nevada probate commissioner rejected his bid to change his family’s trust, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
Murdoch, 93, initiated the effort to change the terms of the trust last year to preserve the conservative orientation of his sprawling media empire, which includes U.S. businesses Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. As first reported by the New York Times this summer, the elder Murdoch was concerned that a “lack of consensus” among his three other older children would have financial consequences for the company.
But probate commissioner Edmund “Joe” Gorman Jr. ruled against the effort, deeming it a “carefully crafted charade,” the New York Times reported on Monday afternoon. The case will now move to a district judge who could choose to affirm the recommendation, deny it or send it back for additional inquiry.
“We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members,” a spokesperson representing Prudence, Elisabeth and James Murdoch told The Washington Post in a statement.
The three siblings strongly objected to their father’s effort, which set off the current legal battle. The trust had been set up as part of divorce proceedings between Murdoch and his second wife, the former Anna Murdoch Mann.
Lachlan is ideologically aligned with his father and would be expected to continue the editorial positioning that has made the company successful. There was concern that his three siblings could choose to reorient the company in a more moderate direction after their father’s passing. James, in particular, has become a vocal supporter of liberal causes since he formally exited his father’s media company in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” But the three other siblings have not publicly expressed any desire to replace Lachlan or to change the company’s editorial direction.
Lachlan, 53, who has flitted in and out of the Murdoch media fold, became his father’s most likely successor after he was named chairman and CEO of the Fox Corporation in 2019. His grasp on that position only tightened after his father announced last fall that he would step down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., which includes the company’s newspaper and publishing portfolio.
Lachlan was the only one of the patriarch’s four older children who attended their father’s fifth wedding in June to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, a sign of the deep-seated family tensions at play.
The drama in Nevada was almost entirely hidden from the public and the media by dint of the commissioner, who determined that the trust battle was a private matter, rejecting efforts by a coalition of media companies — including The Post — to open up the case. Sealed hearings in the case were held in September. While no decisions in the case have been made public, the online docket now shows the status of the case to be “pending inactive.”
The elder Murdoch has been backed in his legal efforts by William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Previous attempts at a settlement that would have resolved the dispute without a court case were unsuccessful, though they could continue.
Murdoch’s company is still facing a host of legal challenges, including a defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic and shareholder lawsuits alleging that Fox executives were deficient in preventing defamatory content from airing on the network.
Washington Post, Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion, Kim Bellware and Niha Masih, Dec. 11, 2024. Alex Jones (shown above in a 2020 file photo) was forced to sell the platform to help pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which he called a “hoax.”
A federal bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale of Alex Jones’s Infowars platform to satirical news website the Onion, ruling Tuesday that the November court-ordered auction of Jones’s website lacked transparency.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
The decision capped a two-day hearing that stretched late into the night in U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s Houston courtroom.
“I don’t think anyone acted in bad faith here. I think everyone was trying to buy an asset and put their best foot forward and play by the rules,” Lopez said as he delivered his decision. The judge took issue with the lack of transparency from the sealed bidding process selected by the court-appointed trustee Christopher Murray, who was overseeing the sale of Jones’s assets. The judge added that he was troubled that the process, however well intended, “did not maximize value in any way, based on the record before me.”
“I don’t think it was enough money,” Lopez said of the winning bid, adding that he did not think the backup bid was high enough, either.
Lopez said he does not want another complex auction, but he deferred to Murray on how to proceed with fetching top dollar for Jones’s assets.
Global Tetrahedron, the Onion’s parent company, was named the winning bidder of a Nov. 13 auction to acquire Infowars. The platform was among the assets Jones was forced to sell to help pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting who sued for defamation after Jones claimed the massacre was a “hoax.”
Minutes after the verdict, Jones appeared live on X, telling more than 440,000 viewers: “A judge followed the law.”
In a statement, the Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, expressed disappointment that the ruling did not clear a path forward for any bidder, but he indicated it would continue its efforts toward acquiring Infowars. “It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome,” the statement said.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut families, said in a statement they were disappointed with Lopez’s ruling but would not abandon their fight to hold Jones accountable.
“This decision doesn’t change the fact that, soon, Alex Jones will begin to pay his debt to these families and he will continue doing so for as long as it takes,” Mattei said.
Lopez paused the Onion’s acquisition of Infowars a day after the auction. Jones, on air and in court filings, had decried the process as “rigged.”Skip to end of carouselThe Style sectionStyle is where The Washington Post explains what’s happening on the front lines of culture — including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion — with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, click here.End of carousel
First United American Companies (FUAC), a group affiliated with Jones’s supplements business that was the runner-up bidder, quickly challenged the validity of the Onion’s bid, drawing concerns from Lopez about the transparency of the bidding process.
FUAC’s $3.5 million bid was about double the Onion’s bid of $1.75 million cash, plus credit from some of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs, according to court documents. Plaintiffs from the Connecticut-based defamation suit against Jones agreed to forgo a portion of their award to boost the Onion’s bid, which would raise the overall payout to Sandy Hook families who were plaintiffs in a Texas-based suit against Jones.
FUAC argued that its higher cash bid should have won the auction and said the auction’s court-appointed trustee improperly selected the Onion’s bid.
National Public Radio (NPR), Top 'Washington Post' editor kills article on deputy's departure, David Folkenflik, Dec. 9, 2024. Washington Post Managing Editor Matea Gold, a veteran newsroom leader, is headed to the rival New York Times. Acting Post Executive Editor Matt Murray blocked the publication of a story about her decision to leave, questioning why the paper should cover itself. Her departure has shaken colleagues and caps a year of crises for the Post involving its leadership and its finances.
As the Washington Post newsroom awaits the appointment of a new top editor, its acting news chief intervened to block an article about the departure of its second-highest-ranking editor, a contender for the position, according to several people with knowledge of events.
Managing Editor Matea Gold, a veteran of 11-and-a-half years at the Post who has built up deep loyalty among staffers, had been herself considered a top internal candidate to run the newsroom. According to associates, it became clear that Post Publisher and Chief Executive Will Lewis was poised to pass over her.
She is instead headed to be second-highest ranking leader of the New York Times Washington bureau, as the Times announced today.
The internal tensions over the selection of the Post's new executive editor are capping a series of crises for Lewis, including tensions over the paper's reporting on its own issues.The Washington Post's new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, announced a newsroom leadership shakeup during a staff meeting on Monday.The 'Washington Post' in crisis'Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first timeActing editor says Post should not report on itself
On Saturday, Acting Executive Editor Matt Murray told editors that the paper should not cover itself, according to four people with knowledge.
This is not how the Post has handled past developments about itself or its leaders. Last year, it covered the retirement of Senior Managing Editor Cameron Barr and in 2015, it published an article about Managing Editor Kevin Merida's decision to leave for ESPN.
Murray did not respond to NPR's request for comment and Gold declined comment.
NPR spoke to nine people with ties to the Post for this article. They requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive internal matters at the paper.
A Washington Post Co. spokesperson declined to answer questions for this story, but said, "The Washington Post newsroom is editorially independent and operates in service of our community and national interest."
Murray previously worked under Lewis at the Wall Street Journal, where Lewis served as publisher and chief executive from 2014 to 2020.Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Rupert Murdoch's U.K. tabloids hacked into his voicemails and documents to learn private information about him and his family. A 2011 police memo shows Washington Post CEO Will Lewis, then working for Murdoch, cited a security threat involving Brown as a reason to delete company emails.The 'Washington Post' in crisisFormer U.K. Prime Minister says Bezos should reconsider 'Washington Post' publisher
Gold is highly regarded inside the Post newsroom, especially as a stabilizing figure. In a social media post, Associate Editor and columnist Karen Tumulty called Gold "deeply respected and deeply beloved" there. Six colleagues tell NPR they believe Lewis's decision not to choose Gold helped push her into the arms of its leading competitor, compounding a sense of frustration internally.
Owner Jeff Bezos blocked 'The Washington Post' from endorsing a presidential candidate less than two weeks before Election Day. The editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris.
Gold was not granted an interview with Bezos for the top position, according to colleagues. Beyond Murray, Clifford Levy, deputy publisher of the New York Times Co., Wirecutter and Athletic sites is believed to be in contention for the editor's job.
Politico, Matt Gaetz gets his own TV show on OAN, Kimberly Leonard, Dec. 10, 2024. Gaetz, who was President-elect Donald Trump's original pick to be attorney general, has been teasing his next move for weeks.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has a found an outlet for his sharp tongue and yearning for the limelight: far-right broadcaster One America News Network.
The former lawmaker from Florida's Panhandle and MAGA provocateur will soon host his own hourlong political talk show on OAN, which heavily supports President-elect Donald Trump. OAN promoted the show in a series of graphics on Tuesday and called Gaetz a "powerhouse" in a release, describing the hire as a "mega MAGA investment" that will air weeknights at 9 p.m.
It is yet another high-profile, public platform for Gaetz, a firebrand Republican who made no shortage of enemies in the House before President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate him to be attorney general. Gaetz immediately resigned from the House after Trump's announcement, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). This is my final column for The New York Times, where I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. I’m retiring from The Times, not the world, so I’ll still be expressing my views in other places. But this does seem like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed over these past 25 years.
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.
In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration — toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren’t widely shared.
Of course, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. There was, for example, already a fair bit of proto-QAnon-type conspiracy theorizing and even instances of domestic terrorism in America during the Clinton years. There were financial crises in Asia, which some of us saw as a potential harbinger of things to come; I published a 1999 book titled “The Return of Depression Economics,” arguing that similar things could happen here; I put out a revised edition a decade later, when they did.
Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper.
Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.
New York Times, Opinion: Paul Krugman retires as Times columnist, Kathleen Kingsbury (New York Times opinion editor), Dec. 6, 2024. After nearly 25 years as an Opinion columnist, Paul is signing off.
I want to take you back to Jan. 2, 2000, a day when Y2K was in the rearview mirror and the dot-com bubble burst was just around the corner, when the Dow stood at a mighty 11,500 and a New York Times Opinion columnist debuted on the scene with the first of many prescient arguments and ideas about economics and government.
“Beginnings are always difficult: Even the most tough-minded writer finds it hard to avoid portentousness,” Paul Krugman wrote in his inaugural column nearly 25 years ago. “And since this is a quadruple beginning (new year, new century, new millennium and, for me, new column), I won’t even try. What follows are some broad opening-night thoughts about the world economy.”
That lede and the column were signature Krugman: The authoritative voice. The lively writing. The direct style. The clear hand guiding readers through a thicket of policy, data and trade-offs. The big ideas — in that column, they were about the First Global Economy and the Second Global Economy and how the interplay of political and economic questions would shape life worldwide in the 21st century. In little time, Paul became an essential read in Opinion, helping countless readers become more fluent in and mindful of how trade, taxes, technology, the markets, labor and capital intersected with political leadership, ideology and partisanship to shape the lives of people across America and the world.
Beginnings are always difficult, as Paul said, and so are endings. I’m writing to let you know that he has decided to retire from The Times at the end of the year. He plans to write a final column soon — though he will forever be a friend of Opinion.
Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on the big fights, grappled with policy deeply and seriously, held the powerful to account and spoke hard truths — sometimes as a lonely voice arguing unfashionable positions. He was a strong, clear, early opponent of the American invasion of Iraq and spent years shining a light on the lies and consequences involved with that war. He was a principled critic of George W. Bush’s leadership and many of his policy priorities and, with lucid prose, helped readers understand the implications of the Bush tax cuts and his proposed privatization of Social Security. And Paul was plenty tough on Bush’s successor, too: Barack Obama hadn’t even taken office in 2009 when Paul memorably took apart the president-elect’s prescription for the Great Recession: “The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat,” Paul wrote. “In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed.”
And through the Trump era and the Biden presidency, Paul was ever-sharp about the critical stakes facing the country, not least the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump and how his plans could radically harm the economy. A few weeks before this year’s election, Paul took a deep dive into Trump’s tariff plans, laying out for readers in clear and urgent writing why his economic policy ideas could do enormous damage to American society. He ended the essay with a classic Krugman kicker, where he summarized the cons of Trump’s tariffs in one graf and then wrote in the final graf, “Pros: I can’t think of any.”
Nick Fox, one of Paul’s editors over the years, said: “Twenty-five years ago, who could have imagined that a column by an expert in economics (yawn!) would become addictive for millions of Americans? Paul made the complex clear, cut through double talk and obfuscation and wrote in the voice of a tough but beloved teacher. It was remarkable that he could write so enjoyably and insightfully as many as four times a week.”
Ezra Klein, who has had his fellow Opinion columnist on his podcast over the years, said: “I don’t know that there’s anyone alive I have read more words from than Paul Krugman. A beacon of clear, moral and inventive analysis for decades now. What a gift his work has been.”
Among the many things we appreciate about Paul is that he’s always been game to engage with readers. Liriel Higa, Opinion’s Audience director, put it this way: “Despite being a Nobel winner, Paul was incredibly accessible. He responded to readers in comments on his articles; he touted the benefits of air fryers in an Opinion TikTok; he loved his cats.”
And on that Nobel: It really has been an honor and a privilege to work with someone of Paul’s stature but also an inspiration to see the deep care and strong work ethic that he devotes to his journalism.
Please join me in congratulating our colleague for so many great columns and a ride at The Times worthy of the best bull market. We wish you all the best, Paul.
Washington Post, Colleges scramble to shield programs amid growing hostility from GOP, Susan Svrluga, Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, Dec. 9, 2024. Endowments, research funding and DEI initiatives are expected to be among many possible targets of the incoming Trump administration.
For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.
Now that rift has become a rupture.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, many colleges are preparing for threats to research funding, endowments, diversity efforts, student financial aid, visas for foreign students and more.
“I think it’s an extremely worrisome time for universities, extremely so,” said L. Rafael Reif, the president emeritus of MIT.
It’s a dizzying and upsetting place for universities which had become accustomed to reverence for their contributions to society and now find themselves tarred as “the enemy.” The shift is not just political, but cultural, with a hardening skepticism of expertise and academia, rather than faith in research, science and scholarship.
New York Times, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion, Ben Sisario, Dec. 9, 2024. Over 21 months, the pop superstar’s culture-dominating stage show doubled the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures.
For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.
Now we know exactly how big.
Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.
Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.
The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.
The Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin? Thom Hartmann, right, The Best of the Rest of the News.
Russian media is bragging that Tucker Carlson could be shuttling secret messages between Trump and Putin.
This is the role that was apparently played during the last Trump administration by Senator Rand Paul. Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort. Senator Paul then often took Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Paul responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. Most concerning, ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent.”
Now it’s apparently Carlson’s turn. “While the former Fox host is positioning himself as a dove of peace, toiling to prevent a nuclear war, Putin’s acolytes say he is also acting as a carrier pigeon for the Russian president and privately delivering his messages to Trump,” wrote Russian media expert Julia Davis for The Daily Beast.
Davis reports that a Russian expert on American politics, Malek Dudakov, was blunt in an appearance on Russian TV. “What is important here is that the man [Tucker Carlson] who came to talk to [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov spent the last six months shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump. Obviously, he didn’t just come to conduct an interview. He has something to say. Apparently, he has a message that he is bringing.”
It gets worse, and appears to be an echo of the message from Russia right after Trump’s election was declared in November when the Kremlin released nudie pictures of Trump’s wife Melania by way of threatening Trump and then, a day later, issued a statement that, “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
On the Russian TV show this week, Dudakov bragged, “Yes, we currently see quite a few similar emissaries [to Tucker]. It seems Viktor Orbán is again planning to meet with Trump, and after that, he may come to Russia once again. There are people who are willing to pass messages back and forth, indirectly. Trump will understand what his plan is only after he personally meets with Putin.”
Where is America’s mainstream media on reporting this stuff that’s right out there in public to see?!? And if the Kremlin is openly boasting that Trump must dance to Putin’s tune, America’s intelligence agencies must be freaking out. Which makes Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who’s been taking Putin’s side on various issues for years, a lot easier to understand. Trump must live in terror of Putin…and apparently our media does, too…
— Will Joe pardon “the enemy within”? Andy Borowitz joked yesterday in his Substack newsletter that President Biden has issued a blanket pardon for all 70+ million Democratic voters except for “Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, adding, ‘They’re on their own now.’”
The humor references a very real discussion that’s going on in the Biden White House right now, according to some press reports. Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon for Vietnam War resisters, similar to Lincoln’s blanket pardon of former Confederate soldiers; could Biden be considering a large pardon or amnesty (like for the hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers”) or specific pardons for a few dozen or even a few hundred people who may be in Trump’s revenge cross-hairs? Presumably that would include members of the January 6th Congressional panel, Jack Smith and the attorneys and FBI agents who worked with him, and some of the others who testified at his various impeachment hearings and trials. One hopes Biden has the guts to do it.
Steady, Commentary: 'Blue Velvet': A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather, right, former CBS News anchor and managing editor, shown in a 2017 photo, and Team Steady, Dec. 8, 2024. right, My mind is awash in memories these days … so much to reflect on. Jean and I shared everything over the 67 years of our marriage. She was a wonderful woman and partner, and I miss her dearly. Someoneasked me the other day if I remembered our first date.
Of course, like it was yesterday. The year was 1956. Jean Goebel was working as a secretary at KTRH, the radio station in Houston where I was a young reporter. It took me a few weeks, but I finally summoned the courage to ask her out. When she said yes, you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
We decided to go dancing. I’ve tried to remember the name of the place. No doubt it’s long gone now. But I will never forget our first dance, and the song playing on the jukebox. It was Tony Bennett’s top 20 hit, “Blue Velvet.”
Though finding joy is challenging for me right now, this song does give me a reason to smile. I hope it gives you one too. Even though it’s from a lifetime ago, a good love song is timeless.
Listening to the song now brings back everything about the night that changed my life. We couldn’t find a video of Mr. Bennett from the 1950s. But he re-recorded the song with k.d. lang in 2011 as part of his Duets II album. It is a beautiful rendition.
New York Times, Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens, Ellen Barry, Photographs by Graham Dickie, Dec. 9, 2024. New technology alerts schools when students type words related to suicide. But do the timely interventions balance out the false alarms?Dawn was still hours away when Angel Cholka was awakened by the beams of a police flashlight through the window. At the door was an officer, who asked if someone named Madi lived there. He said he needed to check on her. Ms. Cholka ran to her 16-year-old’s bedroom, confused and, suddenly, terrified.
Ms. Cholka did not know that A.I.-powered software operated by the local school district in Neosho, Mo., had been tracking what Madi was typing on her school-issued Chromebook.
While her family slept, Madi had texted a friend that she planned to overdose on her anxiety medication. That information shot to the school’s head counselor, who sent it to the police. When Ms. Cholka and the officer reached Madi, she had already taken about 15 pills. They pulled her out of bed and rushed her to the hospital.
Thousands of miles away, at around midnight, a mother and father in Fairfield County, Conn., received a call on their landline and were unable to reach it in time to answer. Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Three officers were on the stoop asking to see their 17-year-old daughter, who had been flagged by monitoring software as at urgent risk for self-harm.
The girl’s parents woke her and brought her downstairs so the police could quiz her on something she had typed on her school laptop. It took only a few minutes to conclude that it was a false alarm — the language was from a poem she wrote years earlier — but the visit left the girl profoundly shaken.
“It was one of the worst experiences of her life,” said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to discuss an experience “traumatizing” to her daughter.
In the array of artificial intelligence technologies entering American classrooms, few carry higher stakes than software that tries to detect self-harm and suicidal ideation. These systems spread quickly during Covid shutdowns as more schools began sending laptops home with students.
A law required that these devices be fitted with filters to ensure safe internet use, but educational technology companies — GoGuardian, Gaggle, Lightspeed, Bark and Securly are the big ones — also saw a way to address rising rates of suicidal behavior and self-harm. They began offering tools that scanned what students type, alerting school staff members if they appeared to be contemplating hurting themselves.
New York Times, Jay-Z, Accused in Suit of Raping Minor With Sean Combs, Calls It Blackmail, Julia Jacobs, Dec. 9, 2024. The entertainer said the suit, which accuses him of assaulting an unnamed 13-year-old girl in 2000, was an effort to gain settlement money.
Jay-Z was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl with Sean Combs in a lawsuit filed Sunday by an unnamed plaintiff. He vehemently denied the allegation and accused the lawyer who brought the suit of trying to blackmail him with false claims.
The allegations against the billionaire rapper and hip-hop mogul came as part of the flurry of litigation against Mr. Combs, who is facing federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges and at least 30 lawsuits accusing him of sexual misconduct. One of those lawsuits, filed in October, accused Mr. Combs and an anonymous celebrity of raping the teen at an after-party following the MTV Video Music Awards in New York in 2000.
On Sunday, the plaintiff amended the lawsuit to name Jay-Z as the other celebrity, asserting in court papers that he and Mr. Combs took turns raping her after she arrived at the party and drank part of a drink that made her feel “woozy and lightheaded.” Jay-Z called the claims “idiotic” and said that he came from a world where “we protect children.” Mr. Combs has denied all allegations of sexual assault and misconduct and has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges.
The lawsuit was filed by Tony Buzbee, a personal injury lawyer in Houston, who has filed at least 20 sex assault lawsuits against Mr. Combs and used a phone hotline, Instagram and a news conference to find clients.
In an extensive response, Jay-Z, 55, said he had received a demand letter from Mr. Buzbee appearing to seek a settlement but that the letter had the opposite effect: “It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!” the statement read.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Dec. 11
Top Headlines
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Trump Transition Live Updates: F.B.I. Director to Step Down
- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
- Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns
- Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon
- New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: The Prominent Maryland Family of the Suspect in the C.E.O. Killing
- New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting
- New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says
Trump Transition News, Commentary
- New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley
- The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo
- Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail
- New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law'
- Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats
- New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman
- Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews
- New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America
- Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm
- Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf
- Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich
- New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office
- New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power
- New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan
More On Health Care CEO's Murder
More On U.S. Public Health, Transition, Fears
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
More On South Korean Crisis
More U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
More On Tariffs, Budget Threats, U.S. Foreign Policy, Defense
More On Presidential Pardons, Cases
Russian War Against Ukraine
- New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent
- New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says
- Washington Post, Spies are secretly at war with Russian drones. But Moscow is fighting back — with lots of lousy weapons, Joby Warrick and Serhiy Morgunov
- Washington Post, Faltering Russian drones point to modest successes in Western sanctions to block Moscow’s access to technology
- Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid
Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
- New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial
- New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel
- New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions
- New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades
- New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages
U.S. Defense, Foreign Policy, Security
More U.S. Legal News
- Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews
- Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas
- New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case
- New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway
- New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness
- Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say
U.S. Immigration
- Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramire
- Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows
- Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery
Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
U.S. Economy, Jobs, Pensions
Energy, Environment, Transportation, Climate Change, Disasters
Media, High-Tech, Culture, Education
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, married for the fifth time in August 20124, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday. Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp.
- Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust
- Washington Post, Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion
- New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman
- National Public Radio (NPR), Top 'Washington Post' editor kills article on deputy's departure, David Folkenflik
- Politico, Matt Gaetz gets his own TV show on OAN
- Washington Post, Colleges scramble to shield programs amid growing hostility from GOP
- New York Times, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion
- New York Times, Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens
- New York Times, Jay-Z, Accused in Suit of Raping Minor With Sean Combs, Calls It Blackmail
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin? Thom Hartmann
- Steady, Commentary: 'Blue Velvet': A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather
Top Stories
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism, Thom Hartmann, right,Dec. 11, 2024. The terrifying implications of pardoning insurrectionists who killed and maimed…
This past weekend, in his Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker (shown above), Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to pardon the people who attacked our Capitol, killing five civilians and three police officers and sending more than 140 cops to the hospital.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said of pardoning Jan. 6 killers. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Most media and political observers and commentators appear to be of the opinion that this is simply Trump’s way of thanking the people who made what he considers a heroic effort to keep him in office through violence. That would be bad enough, but experts at The Critical Internet Studies Institute are worried that there may be a much more sinister explanation.
If they’re right, it would also go a long way toward explaining his picks for Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and FBI director.
This theory, increasingly shared among counterterrorism experts and people who monitor violent rightwing extremist groups, suggests that the real reason Trump would do the pardons (and is unafraid of discussing them) is because he’s recruiting. And you don’t need to go back to 1930s Europe to find examples of how that could work.
Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, for example, has often used non-state actors to intimidate and even kill his political enemies. The most well-known is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club, aka “Putin’s Angels,” run by a man who calls himself “the Surgeon.”
They helped Putin invade Crimea and Ukraine, but most of their activity is against protestors, “communists” (anybody opposing Putin), and the queer community in Russia.
Similarly, five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing Hungarian “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”
Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”
Language strikingly similar, if not milder, to Trump‘s way of describing Black people, immigrants, and liberals.
Orbán refused to condemn Bayer or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white, Orbán-supporting Hungarian militias.
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Armed rightwing militia groups in the United States have been on a recruiting jag of their own in anticipation of Trump’s presidency, according to press reports and terrorism experts. For example, Reuters notes:
“The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.”
Similarly, Wired magazine reports that Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), is preparing for something like war:
“’This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,’ says Seddon. ‘Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.’”
El Pais tells the story of armed militia groups who are looking forward to action on America’s southern border when Trump allows it. Referencing them, Tom Homan, who Trump has appointed as his “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:
“There are thousands of retired agents, border patrols, retired military personnel who want to come and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do deportation operations.”
They also cite a Wired article that quotes Tim Foley, head of Arizona Border Recon, a white “civilian patrol group,” as saying they’re doing outreach:
“We’re in talks with a few different people. We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”
It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.
Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:
“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
More recently, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth, left, asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”
Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”
Our timid national media refuse to even consider such a savage scenario, but America should brace itself as Trump has not let up on his violent rhetoric and neither have his followers. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
“You know, when you listen to these comments and watch these videos, what you are forced to consider is the message that Donald Trump is sending, because it is not just to the January 6th defendants.
“It is to the people he hopes will support him in this next term, and the message is: ‘Support me at all costs, use violence, commit crimes, I will take care of you.’
“I find that to be deeply frightening.”
January 6th taught us that Trump and some of the people following him are deadly serious and willing to use violence and even murder to achieve their goals.
America needs to get ready. President Biden should be preparing (or reassuring) us. And, if the latter, explaining why.
New York Times, Trump Transition Live Updates: F.B.I. Director to Step Down, Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett, Dec. 11, 2024. Wray told F.B.I. employees he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, right, told bureau employees on Wednesday that he intended in January, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.
Mr. Wray made the disclosure while addressing employees Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Wray added that he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.
The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.
Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.
Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.
But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.
His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by searching the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.
“He invaded Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump told NBC News in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.
In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.
His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”
“If Kash gets in, he’ll be taking somebody’s place, and that somebody is the man you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with NBC News, referring to Mr. Wray.
Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.
At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.
Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.
The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.
Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.
After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.
“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel, right (and author of the book Government Gangsters, shown at left, is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.
Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sought to weigh in on F.B.I. operations and at times expressed frustration that presidents typically stayed out of the bureau’s business.
“I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in 2017. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
Kaja Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.(AFP photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images).
Politico, Russia has learned how to influence elections, EU’s top diplomat warns , Elena Giordano, Dec. 11, 2024. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, says Russia has learned how to influence elections through new technologies.
“I see the examples from Romania, but also other parts, that [the] Russians have really cracked the code on how to influence elections,” Kallas said at POLITICO’s P28 event Tuesday evening.
Responding to a question about the influence of new technologies on democracy, Kallas said she is “really worried.”
“Democracy is based on trust, and if you can’t trust elections anymore then how can you trust the outcome?” she asked.
Kallas argued that today’s methods for deciding whether elections can be considered free and fair are outdated and don’t take into account new technologies used to influence elections.
“I think we should take them very seriously,” she said.
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Excerpt Continued Below.
Politico, Tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, Dec. 11, 2024. A handful of Silicon Valley executives could help transform the country’s largest bureaucracy — and benefit themselves while trying.
A culture clash is headed for Washington that will pit the risk-embracing, fast-first nature of Silicon Valley against the lumbering bureaucracy of the country’s largest federal agency.
Donald Trump has already tapped billionaire finance executives to be Navy secretary and the Pentagon’s No. 2, and startup world successes are in the running for other Pentagon posts. If they all make it, the long-frustrated kings of the Valley who bristle at the doddering pace of Pentagon decision-making could force real change in the building — and benefit themselves while trying.
They’ll be tasked with building weapons faster, fixing a broken shipbuilding system and matching China’s tech prowess. And while every new administration tries to clean up the Pentagon, this crew of outsiders has animated the tech sector.
“A lot of us are hoping there’s a revolution coming,” Joe Lonsdale, founder of software company Palantir and startup investor said at a recent defense forum, “where we hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy.”
The Trump team has worked to fill the Pentagon with picks such as Stephen Feinberg, a wealthy investor with no experience inside the building, as deputy secretary of Defense. Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, is being considered for the Pentagon’s top research and engineering job, as POLITICO first reported. Trae Stephens, co-founder and chair of Anduril Industries, is also in the mix for a high-ranking job at the Pentagon.
The executives all have investments and stakes in multiple companies working with the Pentagon and will need to determine how they detangle a web of potential conflicts of interest — such as Anduril’s drone development or Palantir’s software platforms the Pentagon is helping fund.
New York Times, Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History, David Leonhardt, Graphics by Albert Sun, Dec. 11, 2024. Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered the country, government data shows.
The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.
That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Police Have Suspect’s Notebook Describing Rationale for C.E.O. Killing, Ashley Southall and Maria Cramer, Dec. 11, 2024. The man who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two officials.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare at a company investors’ day, was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said.
The shooting occurred early Dec. 4 as Mr. Thompson arrived early at a Hilton hotel on West 54th Street to prepare for the UnitedHealthcare investors’ meeting.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: The Prominent Maryland Family of the Suspect in the C.E.O. Killing, Amy Qin, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.). Until the arrest this week of Luigi Mangione, the family was best known for building a business that made them a force in local politics and charity.
Long before the shooting, before the manhunt and before the arrest of Luigi Mangione in connection with the killing of a health care executive, the Mangione name was well-known around Baltimore.
The Mangiones, fueled by the competitive, combative spirit of their immigrant patriarch, built a formidable family business that made them a force in local politics and charity.
When Nick Mangione Sr., Luigi’s paternal grandfather, thought that he was being discriminated against at country clubs in the early 1970s because he was Italian, he bought his own golf resort. When he got tired of waiting for permission to build a second golf course at one of his clubs, he sent in bulldozers to begin clearing the land. And when one of his sons was cut from a local soccer team, Mr. Mangione barred the team’s coach from his country club.
“Nick Mangione is foremost identified as a family man,” Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, the former Baltimore mayor and late brother of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told The Baltimore Sun in 1995. “He is maybe a little rough around the edges and maybe with an aggressive personality, but a man with a big heart.”
When he died in 2008, the elder Mr. Mangione left behind 10 children, more than 35 grandchildren and a collection of business holdings, which now include two country clubs, a chain of nursing homes and a local conservative radio station. The Mangiones are longtime supporters of numerous local causes and institutions, including Loyola University Maryland and the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where the high-risk obstetrics unit bears the Mangione name.
Until this week, those commercial and philanthropic pursuits were the principal sources of the family’s prominence. Then, on Monday, Luigi, 26, was arrested in Altoona, Pa., and charged with second-degree murder and other offenses in connection with the killing last week of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare.
New York Times, U.S. Inflation Ticks Up Slightly Ahead of Fed Meeting, Jeanna Smialek, Dec. 11, 2024. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent in the year through November. The Federal Reserve is considering whether to cut interest rates next week.
What to know about the report.
Fresh inflation data released on Wednesday gave Federal Reserve officials one last glimpse at how their battle against rapid price increases is progressing as they prepare for their final interest rate decision of 2024.
Consumer Price Index inflation ticked up in November, with the index climbing 2.7 percent from a year earlier. That was up from 2.6 percent previously, and in line with economists’ expectations.
The Bulwark, Political Commentary: By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President, Andrew Egger, Dec. 11, 2024. An unsettling number of House Republicans are open to Trump’s threats against the House January 6th committee.
How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”
A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct. January 6th Committee Democrats were quick yesterday to deny that they had done anything untoward: “There’s nothing we did as a January 6th Select Committee that violates the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the committee, told NBC News.
For months, Trump has falsely claimed that the January 6th Committee criminally destroyed records in an attempt to bury facts that would exonerate him. (As fact checks have repeatedly shown, Trump’s claim is a totally baseless—a funhouse-mirror distortion of claims made back in 2023 by House Republicans who were then already investigating the work of the January 6th Committee and who were crabby that, for instance, they were only being provided with transcripts of depositions rather than video footage.)
For the most part, House Republicans who spoke to The Bulwark were careful not to actually say that they believed, like Trump, that the committee had destroyed evidence. But they were comfortable entertaining the possibility it had (despite those fact checks) and content with the idea of prosecuting lawmakers if they did. “I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”
Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee. (Raskin’s office did not return a request for comment.) It’s the committee which Comer chairs and on which Boebert and Burchett serve. That those three lawmakers showed comfort with Trump targeting the January 6th Committee members underscores the degree to which partisan affiliations now overwhelm institutional prerogatives.
The Oversight Committee exists specifically to provide congressional accountability and scrutiny to the actions of the executive branch. But none of these Oversight Republicans had an issue with Trump vowing open retribution against House members who performed that sort of accountability work during the last Congress.
When I asked Comer whether he was worried about the chilling effect of the president accusing an entire House committee of collective crimes, he dodged: “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Boebert wasn’t worried either: “I don’t lack confidence” in the House’s ability to do oversight, she said as she hopped into her car.
Not every House Republican The Bulwark spoke to endorsed Trump’s modest proposal of jail for the J6 committee. But none were willing to publicly criticize it either. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), considered one of the more bipartisan remaining members of the House, declined all questions about Trump’s interview in a sequence of terse monosyllables. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—typically as good for a soundbite as any human in Washington—smirked and ignored The Bulwark’s question as she walked to the House floor.
Remarkably, while some GOP lawmakers were practically licking their chops over the prospect of some of their colleagues facing legal retribution, others incorrectly argued Trump had never called for such retribution at all.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.). “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”
Over on the other side of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins was doing her part to avoid the controversy by focusing on the less openly bloodthirsty elements of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. “It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” she told reporters yesterday, alluding to Trump’s insistence that he would find “retribution” in office not by looking backwards but by being a successful president. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
New York Times, Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country, Jonathan Weisman, Dec. 10, 2024. When Donald Trump said Robert Kennedy Jr. could “go wild” on health, he might not have expected him to go to battle against the president-elect’s own voters.
The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.
To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.
To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”
Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies. Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.
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New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
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Trump Transition News, Commentary
Kimberly Guilfoyle, in a red dress, addressing the Republican National Convention.Kimberly Guilfoyle has been engaged to Donald Trump Jr. since late 2020 (Associated Press photo by J. Scott Applewhite).
New York Times, Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece, Jesse McKinley, Dec. 11, 2024. The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr., Ms. Guilfoyle’s fiancé, has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida.
It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly — the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece.
The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson.
The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as “incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on” with a “stunning ‘it girl.’”
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, 46, did not return a request for comment on his relationship with Ms. Anderson, or on his engagement with Ms. Guilfoyle, to whom he has been betrothed since late 2020. Ms. Anderson, 38, also did not return requests for comment.
In his announcement of her posting to Greece, the president-elect called Ms. Guilfoyle “a close friend and ally,” but made no mention of her relationship with his son.
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States,” the elder Mr. Trump wrote, in a post on Truth Social.ImageBettina Anderson, wearing a white dress with a green floral pattern, sits on a bench in front of a pink and green artworkBettina Anderson was recently seen with Donald Trump Jr. in Palm Beach celebrating her birthday.Credit...Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images for FIGUE
The suggestions of a love triangle have been swirling for several months, including in July, at the Republican National Convention, where Ms. Anderson was spotted sitting behind Mr. Trump — and Ms. Guilfoyle — in a red dress. Ms. Guilfoyle spoke at the convention, saying, “Donald Trump will never stop fighting for you” about his father.
But speculation about Ms. Anderson’s closeness with the president-elect’s son intensified in September, with reports that the pair were seen kissing during a brunch not long before. (Adding a layer of intrigue were various reports that Ms. Anderson was a friend of his ex-wife, Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children.)
Suspicions about the durability of Mr. Trump and Ms. Guilfoyle’s engagement were given more fodder when Ms. Guilfoyle did not appear in a post-election family portrait, which did feature Vanessa Trump and their children. (Melania Trump — the once and future first lady — was also absent, though the photo did feature Elon Musk.)
The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump World’s Confirmation Playbook: Speak Loudly and Unleash the MAGA Dogs, Marc A. Caputo, Dec. 10, 2024. There is confidence in the outcome: ‘They’re all going to get confirmed.’
It didn’t take long for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to realize she had stepped in it. Shortly after Ernst offered a chilly reception to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head the department of defense, she recognized she was in trouble politically, with grassroots Republicans calling for her head.
“How do I make this go away?” a flabbergasted Ernst said to an intermediary, according to a top Donald Trump adviser who received the message.
The answer was obvious to everyone involved. All Ernst had to do was back away from her tacit opposition to Hegseth and the MAGA dogs would stop baying.
Sure enough, on Monday, Ernst changed her tune—not explicitly saying she’d vote for Hegseth’s confirmation but saying she supported him in the process.
By then, the Trump team was feeling good, not just about her vote but about the slate of confirmations to come.
“It sent a message,” according to a top Trump adviser involved in the discussions with Ernst who relayed them to The Bulwark. “Nobody wants to be Joni.”
The desire not to get in MAGA’s crosshairs has spread throughout much of the Senate Republican conference in recent days. It’s the result of both a remarkable swelling of grassroots energy to demand party loyalty from GOP officials and the belief—among some members themselves—that it would send a bad message to see a second Trump nominee go down after Matt Gaetz’s failed bid for attorney general.
Leading that charge has been Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP conference chair, who’s tasked with charting the course for his party’s messaging in the chamber (a post for which he beat Ernst last month). Cotton, a vet like Ernst and Hegseth, was increasingly annoyed with political chatter that the Senate was essentially duty-bound to vote down one of Trump’s picks because of tradition (Gaetz never made it to a vote).
So Cotton directed staff to research the history of Senate confirmations and he quickly concluded that the GOP conference needed to support not just Hegseth, but all of Trump’s controversial nominees
.“I expect our Republican Senate is going to confirm all of President Trump's nominees,” he said Monday morning. In a separate post, he added: “Of the 72 cabinet secretary nominees since the Clinton transition, only 2 nominees have ever received NO votes from the president-elect’s party. No one should be surprised that the Republican Senate will confirm President Trump’s nominees.”
Cotton’s bravado and Ernst’s buckling underscored the choice facing 53 Republican senators in the weeks ahead: board the Trump train or get tied to the tracks.
As of early this week, an emboldened Trump team and top supporters believe that 50-plus members will get on board not just for Hegseth’s confirmation but for Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (secretary of health and human services), and Kash Patel (FBI director) as well.
“They’re all going to get confirmed,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fl.) told The Bulwark. “We’re going to respect the fact that he [Trump] got 77 million votes, respect the fact that he won in a landslide, respect that he’s the president.”
Donald Trump on NBC's Meet the Press on December 8, 2024.
Deadline, Donald Trump, On ‘Meet The Press,’ Again Pledges To Pardon January 6th Rioters, Says Liz Cheney And Other Committee Members “Should Go To Jail, Staff Report, Dec. 8-9, 2024. In his first sit-down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he still plans to pardon those convicted for their role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while he said that the members of committee tasked with investigating it “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
“So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded, adding that he thinks “everybody” on the January 6th Committee should go to jail. Cheney served as vice chair of the January 6th Committee, which concluded in 2022 with a criminal referral to the Justice Department over Trump’s role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump said that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, but “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
In the wide ranging interview, Trump said that he plans to issue pardons to the January 6th rioters on his first day in office, adding that many of those convicted have been in prison “for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump also vowed action on the first day in office to end birthright citizenship, and he reiterated plans for mass deportations.
Welker challenged him on his ability to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants, given the tremendous resources needed to carry out such a plan.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump did say that he wanted to “work something out” to come up with a plan in how to handle “dreamers,” who were children when they were brought to the United States illegally.
Welker asked Trump about his previous pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden.
“Where did I say that?” Trump said.
Welker noted that he posted on Truth Social on June 12, 2023.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to go after Joe Biden?” Welker asked him.
Trump told her that he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
Pressed again on whether he would go after Biden, Trump said, “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump defended his plans for mass tariffs, saying that he doesn’t believe economists who predict costs will be passed on to consumers. But he told Welker that he cannot guarantee that Americans won’t end up paying more.
He said, “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation.”
Then-U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) helping preside as members of the House Jan. 6 Investigative Committee.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative, said President-elect Donald J. Trump “lied about” the bipartisan House committee that investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Former Representative Liz Cheney on Sunday called President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to imprison her and other members of a congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Responding to comments Mr. Trump made in an interview aired on Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Ms. Cheney said the incoming president “lied about the Jan. 6 select committee” and that there would be “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” to prosecute its members.
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” she said in a statement. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”
She continued: “This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
Her statement came after Mr. Trump repeated his unfounded allegation that the committee destroyed evidence during its investigation.
“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” he said, referring to Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman. “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”
He went on: “And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”
In fact, the committee did not destroy all evidence. It released an 800-page report as well as 140 transcripts of testimony and various memos, emails and voice mail messages. The evidence remains online. Mr. Thompson explained in a letter last year that the committee had asked the executive branch to go through some material first to protect “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.”
Ms. Cheney pointed to that letter in her statement on Sunday. “Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson,” she said. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people targeted by Mr. Trump like Ms. Cheney as part of the president-elect’s promised “retribution” against his foes. Ms. Cheney did not say in her statement whether she would accept such a pardon to protect herself from a politically motivated prosecution by the next administration.
But she said that the evidence that should be made public was the material gathered by the special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. “The Justice Department should ensure that all that material is preserved and cannot be destroyed. As much of that information as possible should be disclosed in the special counsel’s upcoming report.”
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: RFK Jr. Pushes Daughter In Law For Top CIA Role Over JFK Conspiracies, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 11, 2024. Should Fox Kennedy be selected for the role, she would have a major hill to climb in the confirmation process.
In new reporting from Axios, Donald Trump's selection to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now pushing to have his daughter in law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, to serve as deputy director of the CIA. Fox Kennedy has a long history of working for the Agency and served as an undercover spy for nearly a decade.
But, we are now learning that the reason Kennedy is pushing for his daughter in law to join the Agency in a top role stems from his belief that she could help uncover secrets regarding the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
RFK Jr. has long spread conspiracy theories related to his uncle's assasination, claiming that the federal government and the CIA may have been involved in the assassination plot. There has been no evidence released to support Kennedy's claims.
According to Axios, Fox Kennedy would have a steep uphill climb to be confirmed should she be selected as the deputy director of the Agency. When she first left the Agency, Fox Kennedy published a memoir without getting prior approval from the Agency's vetting team.
In addition, Fox Kennedy has made concerning comments about ISIS. During a 2016 interview, Fox Kennedy stated that "The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them." The enemy she was referring to was ISIS.
Whether Trump listens to RFK Jr. and nominates her, however, remains to be seen.
New York Times, Kari Lake Is Trump’s Pick to Lead Voice of America, Minho Kim, Dec. 11, 2024. Donald J. Trump chose Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for senator and governor of Arizona, to lead Voice of America, a federally funded broadcaster that aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. The announcement came as Mr. Trump made a flurry of picks for administration positions on Wednesday night.
President-elect Trump chose the former TV news anchor turned election denier who lost political races in Arizona to lead the federally funded broadcaster.
Lake campaigned for governor on false claims that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and baselessly accused Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, of unspecified election crimes. After narrowly losing to Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede. This year, after Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin, she only hinted at a concession. “I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
Politico, Matt Gaetz in talks to join Democratic megadonor’s law firm, Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout, Dec. 11, 2024. Gaetz is a longtime friend to John Morgan, a prominent trial lawyer.Matt Gaetz raises his fist in the air.
Matt Gaetz may be taking on a second job.
Prominent Florida megadonor John Morgan is actively in talks with the former Republican lawmaker about joining his firm, Morgan & Morgan, he told POLITICO in an extensive interview. The job would be in addition to the role Gaetz announced on Tuesday that he’s joining the conservative One America News Network as a prime-time host beginning in January.
Morgan praised Gaetz, who recently withdrew from consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, for his positions on marijuana legalization, property insurance and processed foods.
“A lot of the things that my politics are, Matt Gaetz’s are,” said Morgan, who has given heavily to Democratic candidates but is registered in Florida as a no-party affiliated voter.
Morgan said that he could see Gaetz being helpful in a recent lawsuit his firm filed that alleges major food companies specifically engineered their products to be addictive and then marketed them to kids, contributing to chronic illness.
In a text exchange, Gaetz acknowledged that he and Morgan had “talked about collaborating professionally” and said he was grateful for their friendship.
“I’ve known John Morgan for more than a decade,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot of advice from him on matters of law, policy and politics. I have great respect for how he stands to the powerful for his clients — and he wins.”
The job at Morgan & Morgan would be a high-profile landing for Gaetz, who resigned from the House after he dropped out of the process to be Trump’s attorney general, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz has denied the allegations, and a Department of Justice investigation into him resulted in no charges. Yet the accusations quickly dogged his confirmation process, and Gaetz left public service altogether.
The former member of Congress has also been seen as a potential Republican candidate for governor in 2026, a contest that has been increasingly fluid as Trump tapped numerous Floridians to hold jobs in his administration. Gaetz has already tapped into a potential campaign theme by siding with critics — like Morgan — that the GOP-controlled Legislature kowtowed to the property insurance industry when it passed a measure DeSantis signed into law that makes it much harder to sue insurers.
Morgan said the details of the potential job are still under discussion and that he was waiting until the news about Gaetz’s new TV spot settled down. He said that his firm hired “finders, minders and grinders” and that he saw Gaetz as a potential “finder-minder” who he saw at the “36,000-foot” level versus “in the trenches.”
“I know he’s controversial,” Morgan said of Gaetz, “but I’m fucking controversial.”
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: At Mar-a-Lago, Mel Gibson Implies Trump’s Political Opponents Started California Fire, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 11, 2024. Trump’s association with Mel Gibson highlights troubling endorsement.
During a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, actor Mel Gibson implied that California wildfires might be deliberately set by political opponents of Donald Trump. Gibson stated:
"…4 years of thinly veiled Marxism, and, you know, now I think what we have is a four-year grace period. But we have to work hard for all of it. And I don’t know. The president’s got a big job on his hands to turn this place around. A lot of damage was done, and they continue to start fires, like around my house..."Mel Gibson at Mar-a-Lago
Mel Gibson: “they continue to start fires, like around my house...”
Gibson also praised former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and referred to Trump’s potential second term as a "four-year grace period" from what he described as Marxist policies. Flynn associates himself with fringe MAGA personalities who push conspiracies. Trump HitlerTrump Echoes Hitler: Migrants "Poisoning the Blood of Our Country"Read More
The comments come against a backdrop of devastating wildfires in Malibu, California, which have scorched thousands of acres and destroyed homes. Gibson’s claims mirror baseless conspiracy theories and detract from the real causes of these disasters.Mel Gibson, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Flynn, and Kid Rock at Mar-a-Lago
Gibson’s presence at Mar-a-Lago and his endorsement of Trump raise serious questions about the former president’s associations. Gibson’s history is riddled with controversy. He was infamously caught on tape berating his ex-girlfriend with vile, racist language, suggesting she would be sexually assaulted by “[n-words]” for her clothing choices.
Additionally, Gibson has a long-documented history of anti-Semitic remarks, including a drunken tirade in 2006 which he claimed that Jews are responsible for “all the wars in the world.”Mel Gibson, Trump, and Roger Stone in 2023
Everyone is entitled to my own opiniont, Political Commentary: Thank God, someone is finally helping the billionaires, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 11, 2024. Oligarchs have been getting slighted for far too long.
During her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris laid out an economic vision for America that was designed to help people at the bottom get ahead.
Well, here comes the Convict-Elect of the United States — and he’s all ‘fuck that noise. you know who really needs our help?’
‘Billionaires.’
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Finally, America’s beleaguered billionaires are getting the fast track to the help they so desperately need.
Are you an oligarch? well then step right to the head of the line, bro. all you have to do is grease Dear Leader’s palm to the tune of a bil, and every door will open for you.
What do you need, some permits? here you go, pal. is some annoying judge hassling you about regulations? put your mind at rest, ace. we’re going to make those regulations go fuckity-bye.
did you notice how Donny goes out of his way to mention that his little pay-for-play scheme includes ‘environmental approvals’? that’s pretty specific, isn’t it?
Hey, you know who’s a billionaire in bad need of a free pass to despoil the environment?
New York Times, Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office, Sharon Otterman, Dec. 11, 2024. Harvard, Penn and U.S.C. were among the universities and colleges that issued advisories in anticipation of possible travel bans.
With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are advising their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
During his last administration, Mr. Trump imposed restrictions on entry to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, a policy that stranded thousands of students who were abroad at the time. Later in his term, Mr. Trump added more countries to the restricted travel list. And he has spoken of wanting to reimpose those restrictions once he is back in the White House.
“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell’s Office of Global Learning warned students on its website late last month, advising them to be back in the United States before the start of spring-semester classes on Jan. 21. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added to this list, particularly China and India.”
Colleges are also warning all students to prepare for possible delays at the border and in the processing of paperwork.
“Budget time ahead of the semester start, prior to the January Martin Luther King holiday,” Harvard advised on its website for international students who have concerns.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University have issued comparable advisories and guidance. The advice is precautionary in nature, since the policies of the new administration remain uncertain.
Mr. Trump has said that he wanted to bring back or strengthen some of the travel restrictions he imposed in his first term.
New York Times, North Carolina G.O.P. Brushes Aside Democratic Governor to Expand Power, Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina, Dec. 11, 2024. After cloaking a bill that strips key powers from Democrats as hurricane aid, the state’s legislature overrode a veto from Gov. Roy Cooper to pass it into law.
Republicans in North Carolina muscled through a sweeping expansion of their own power on Wednesday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that will give the G.O.P. increased control over elections, judicial appointments and whether its laws stand up in the courts.
Perhaps most striking was how Republicans did it: They titled the legislation “Disaster Relief” but filled it with measures that had nothing to do with aid for areas devastated by Hurricane Helene and instead eroded the power of top state Democrats. Just 13 of the bill’s 131 pages dealt directly with the storm.
Republicans moved swiftly to pass the bill last month, only for Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to veto the legislation. Republicans then moved to overcome his veto in the final weeks of their single-vote supermajority in the House, where they lost key seats in November. Even as Donald J. Trump carried the state, Republicans fell short in several other top races, including for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
The override vote, which passed by 72 to 46 along party lines, follows four years of efforts by Republicans nationwide to gain greater control over the mechanics of elections, a push initially fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential contest.
State Representative Tim Moore, the departing Republican speaker of the House, said openly before the vote that the bill was meant to help his party win future elections.
“This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket and move this country in the right direction,” Mr. Moore told the Trump ally and conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday.
Lawmakers in North Carolina have a tradition of trying to lock in their political power after election losses. Democrats wielded such tactics in the 1990s, but more recently Republicans have led the way. After Mr. Cooper beat the Republican incumbent in 2016, the legislature stripped the governor’s office of key powers and reduced the number of staff members he could appoint by more than 1,000 positions.
New York Times, Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan, Alan Feuer, Dec. 11, 2024. The incoming administration said it would not rely on outside groups to carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants, but militias have a long record of inserting themselves into patrolling the border.
A few days after the election, William Teer, who runs the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump with an offer: His organization could help Mr. Trump carry out his plan to deport millions of people who are in the United States illegally.
“In support of our nation’s commitments to lawful immigration practices, I wanted to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs, to promote the safety and security of our state,” Mr. Teer wrote. “I am available for further discussion.”
He said Mr. Trump had yet to respond. A spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s transition team said the mass deportation plan would use state and federal resources, not private ones. But Mr. Teer’s offer was one of several recent efforts by far-right organizations, including some that have a history of taking it on themselves to patrol the border with Mexico, to insert themselves into the deportation plan.
Richard Mack, the founder of a group of hard-right sheriffs, said on television last week that if members of his organization assisted with the initiative, it would make it “a lot easier and a lot cheaper and a lot more effective.” And last month, members of other militia-style groups also volunteered their services, with some discussing in private group chats their desire to get involved.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Democrats Shock MAGA with Surprise Moves This Week, Ben Meiselas and Troy Matthews, Dec. 11, 2024. The outgoing Senate Democratic majority isn't going out without a fight.
Ben Meiselas discusses the early swearing-in of Democrats Adam Schiff and Andy Kim as U.S. Senators, surprising and infuriating MAGA Republicans.
Both Schiff and Kim won their elections, and were given gubernatorial approval to be sworn-in early due special circumstances, allowing them to gain seniority and participate in key Senate hearings.
Kim is replacing disgraced Senator Bob Menendez in New Jersey, and Schiff is filling the seat once held by Dianne Feinstein, who passed away in September of 2023.
Schiff, known for his prosecutorial background, has been a favorite target from MAGA for his role in leading the impeachments of Donald Trump. His early swearing-in has the MAGA trolls making fools of themselves; crying foul while not understanding this process is completely legal.
Andy Kim, a friend of MeidasTouch, delivered a heartfelt statement to his constituents pledging to serve with integrity, and a focus on healing the country; a poignant and powerful statement from a man who will be replacing the crook Bob Menendez.
The U.S. Senate, as well as the American People benefit having Andy Kim step into that office early to gain seniority.Meiselas also played a touching video you’ll only see on MeidasTouch, with Kamala Harris meeting Kim’s family during his swearing-in ceremony, and telling his kids that she knows her dad is a good man and up to the challenge and hard work of being a U.S. Senator.
Meiselas also highlights Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s efforts to secure Democratic control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by advancing the nominations of Lauren McFerrin and Joshua Didleberg; a move to shield the Board from figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Trump allies, who want to weaken the NLRB's power to protect American workers.
Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats, Greta Reich, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). “I’m not worried about it at all in the least,” the former Jan. 6 committee member said.Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger delivers remarks.t worried about President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to throw members of the committee in jail.
“No, I have absolutely no worries about this,” Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN’s “Inside Politics” host Manu Raju on Sunday.
Trump made the threat in an interview with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on NBC. He said that members of the Jan. 6 committee should “go to jail.”
“First off, the executive branch can’t go after the legislative branch because we embarrassed him. That’s not a sin. That’s not against the law. Ultimately, when we talked about him throwing his ketchup and hamburger against the wall, there’s nothing illegal about that,” Kinzinger continued, referring to an alleged incident from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in which Trump once became so angry that he threw his plate of food at the wall and smeared it with ketchup.
He added that “most of the people that testified were actually his Republicans, you know, fellow Republicans that went up and spoke [against] him.”
Some Republicans who testified during the hearings included former Attorney General William Barr; former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue; Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; and Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s daughter.
“So look, he’s all butt hurt, right now because he was embarrassed,” Kinzinger added. “He’s not going to come after us and I’m not worried about it at all in the least.”
New York Times, Prepare for the Loyalty Test for a Job in the Trump Administration, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Applicants for government posts, including inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, say they have been asked about their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election.
At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, conducted in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful.
The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
Excerpt continued below.
Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). She and her firm have clients that have been doing legal battle with the U.S. government.
Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.
Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.
Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.
Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.
Bondi, who has yet to resign from Ballard, where she serves as a D.C.-based partner and chairs the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice focusing on Fortune 500 companies. Since 2019, she has lobbied the federal government for a host of major businesses, including Amazon, General Motors, Fidelity National Financial, Uber and Carnival North America. She serves as a key adviser to the firm’s president, Brian Ballard.
Bondi has also lobbied for the GEO Group, a major private prison company that is paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year by the federal government, according to federal records. The Justice Department is a major customer.
Currently, Bondi is only registered to lobby for the Major County Sheriffs of America, which pays her firm $50,000 a quarter, the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter, and the Florida Sheriffs Association, which pays her firm $20,000 a quarter. Bondi, a former personal attorney to Trump, has also worked on corporate and regulatory issues and litigation at the Florida-based law firm Panza Maurer.
“It is essentially impossible to organize a Justice Department ethically in light of the breadth of Bondi’s connections,” said Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive Revolving Door Project. “I think it’s just going to be off-the-charts bad.”
He added that even if Bondi were not to involve herself in issues involving certain companies, she could still influence her department in their favor. For example, Hauser argued, her direction for the antitrust division would have broad implications for her onetime client Amazon.
Bondi did not respond to an email seeking comment, and a spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment.
Some business leaders had feared that, under Trump, they would lose their allies in the GOP, as the party veered in a more populist direction. But big business is hopeful that with Bondi, they’ll get a reprieve from the Biden administration’s corporate crackdowns and avoid follow-through on the Trump campaign’s anti-corporate rhetoric.
“Pam may reinforce that idea that we’re going back to normalcy on deal flow,” said one Republican lobbyist, referring to corporate mergers. The person was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone believes that she’s approachable. … She understands that companies need to have an opportunity to be heard.”
The tech industry, for one, is relatively optimistic about Bondi’s nomination, especially compared to former lawmaker and antitrust crusader Matt Gaetz, whose earlier nomination for attorney general imploded. Major companies have spent the last four years fighting anti-monopoly champions at the Department of Justice, led by Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. With Bondi’s selection, Big Tech sees a movement away from the economic populism that made them major targets, said one lobbyist representing major technology companies.
New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The enormous spending from the world’s richest man quietly fueled allied groups and was revealed only now, as Mr. Musk plays a key role in the presidential transition.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.
The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.
One of Mr. Musk’s most brazen moves — which emerged only on Thursday — was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.
Mr. Musk put the lion’s share of the money he donated toward his main super PAC, America PAC, cutting three checks for $25 million each in the final weeks of the race, according to the new filings with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Musk also spent $40.5 million on legally controversial checks to voters in swing states who signed a petition in support of the Constitution.
Over the course of the race, he gave America PAC a staggering $239 million in both cash and in-kind contributions.
Excerpt continued below.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution’
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, Trump Organization Plans an Ethics Policy Without Banning Foreign Deals
- New York Times, Pam Bondi’s Journey From Traditional Republican to Warrior for Trump, Patricia Mazzei
- New York Times, Investigation: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes Jesse Drucker
- Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases; Investigations, Hearings, Trials
- Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge
- The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld
- Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: Elderly golfer is an incoherent mess on Meet the Press, Jeff Tiedrich
- New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test
- New York Times, Elon Musk Spent Over $250 Million to Help Elect Donald Trump, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg
- New York Times, He Promised Huge Tax Refunds. Now Donald Trump Wants Him to Lead the I.R.S.
- New York Times, Trump Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China
- Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks
More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise, Corey Kilgannon, Mike Baker, Luke Broadwater and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione, above, charged in the death of an executive in New York, was an Ivy League graduate who had recently suffered physical and psychological pain.
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.
Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say, Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Luigi Mangione faces gun charges and other counts. He was denied bail after his arraignment in Altoona, Pa.
Authorities said Monday that they had taken a 26-year-old man into custody in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, a health insurance executive who was gunned down last week on a Manhattan sidewalk.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The shooting sparked a sprawling five-day manhunt that ended in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where police said Luigi Mangione, a Maryland native, was spotted eating at a local McDonald’s. He was arrested and charged with five counts, including possessing an instrument of a crime, providing false identification to law enforcement and carrying a firearm without a license. Police said Mangione had a ghost gun, along with a lengthy handwritten document indicating anger toward “corporate America.”
“He is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, said at a news briefing.
Thompson, 50, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed Wednesday outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a stunning act of early-morning violence in one of New York’s busiest areas.
Police said it appeared that the suspect they were seeking escaped the city shortly after the shooting. Law enforcement officials said they were scouring reams of video footage and tips, but they pleaded with the public for more help, sharing several images of a person they said was wanted in connection with the killing.
ABC News, What we know about Luigi Mangione, Ivy League grad and suspect in CEO's murder, Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele, Josh Margolin, and Meredith Deliso, Dec. 9, 2024. Mangione, above, was located in Pennsylvania nearly a week after Brian Thompson's death.
Salon, Alleged UnitedHealthcare assassin praised Elon Musk for battle against “woke mind virus," Russell Payne, Dec, 9, 2024. Not so fast, what kind of "anti-capitalist" is praising Elon Musk and retweeting Peter Thiel?
On Monday afternoon, police announced that they had arrested a person of interest in the investigation into the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who was shot outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan last week.
According to police, Luigi Mangione was arrested around 9:15 a.m. in Altoona, Pennsylvania with a ghost gun and suppressor that New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with the weapon used in the murder.”
While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber's comments on “the decay of traditional values.”
Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives.
While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”
One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
He reposted another tweet, which was a link to an article calling TikTok “The Smiling Tiger” and making the argument that the short-form video app is an “accelerant” in a Chinese plot to get Western liberal capitalism to destroy itself.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different
- New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge
- New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
- Letters from an American, Commentary: December 5, 2024 [Health Care CEO's Murder], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
- New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say
Public Health, Scandal, #MeToo, Trafficking, Abortion.
President-elect Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Photo via Getty Images)
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, Dec. 5, 2024. Save your healthcare and dump Medicare Advantage before it’s too late. Here’s why you should return to real Medicare if you still can...
You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.
The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.
If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.
Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.
So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?
When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.
Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.
With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.
With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.
These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.
Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.
You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.
This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.
And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.
If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.
But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.
The FTC news release laid it out:
“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”
And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.
Washington Post, Opinion: What is going on with Cheryl Hines? Monica Hesse, Dec. 5, 2024. It’s time to accept that the actress and RFK Jr. are a package deal.
I’m as baffled by this as the rest of you, but I’m going to have to subject us all to a close analysis of Cheryl Hines’s recent Instagram story featuring her naked husband, RFK Jr.
The video takes place in the Hines/Kennedy bathroom. Cheryl is in the foreground, holding a linen spray and some kind of cream that she would like you to buy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking a shower. His bottom half is covered by his wife’s strategically located head, and, as he stands under the water, she giggles uproariously and says: “No, you can’t take a shower, I’m doing a video!” He continues showering; she continues giggling. “No, no. No. You’ve got to give me a second, I’m doing a video for Hines and Young!”
Some logistical questions:
If Hines was already in the bathroom filming when her husband entered, why did she wait until he came in, took off all his clothes, turned on the shower and started hosing himself down before she decided to tell him that she was filming?
And if he was in the shower to begin with, why didn’t she notice that before she started advertising a holiday sale? Why did the couple not, at that point, sort out who needed to be naked and who needed to hawk merchandise, and agree to do those things in different rooms? Why leave the camera running? Why post the results?
Hines was advertising products from the wellness company she runs with her daughter, but she was also advertising her marriage. Which is to say, she would like you to know that the couple is fine. They are flirty. He wants to remove fluoride from public drinking water, but she will still caption videos with, “Oh Bobby!”
The number of times in the past two years that I have thought, Well, now she’ll divorce him has been … many. The couple has been married for more than a decade, but she is, after all, a successful actress with 12 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” under her belt. Not A-list, maybe, but running in circles with Larry David and J.B. Smoove would seem to provide enough glamour and financial independence that she shouldn’t need to put up with any crap.
Washington Post, Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid, Desmond Butler, Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert, Dec. 2, 2024. Mehmet Oz has extolled Ozempic’s promise for weight loss. Now Medicare may cover it.
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Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
Politico, Has Syrian rebel leader al-Golani really shaken off his al Qaeda past? Jamie Dettmer, Dec. 11, 2024. The leopard claims he has changed his spots, but will he bring stability to the devastated nation
In the not so distant past, Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, shown at right in a U.S. State Department photo, sported a long unkempt beard, wore a style of turban favored by jihadis and looked like he was auditioning for the role of a young Osama bin Laden.
But the man who toppled the regime of Bashar Assad on Sunday cuts a very different figure today. Like a political chameleon, he wears green fatigues in the style of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or preppy blazers and chinos, and his beard is neatly trimmed. He even recently dropped his nom de guerre and reverted to using his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a.
But how convincing is the makeover? Should Syrians be worried that a man who once made the pledge of allegiance — or bay’ah — to al Qaeda, and fought Western forces in Iraq, is now the most powerful man in their country, and is poised to play a major role in the transition from the 54-year-long autocracy of the Assad dynasty?
He could even lead the country.
Is this a case where the apparel really does proclaim the man? Has the Damascus medical school dropout genuinely transitioned from being a jihadi, or is his embrace of toleration a ruse?
Those are the questions Western leaders and officials are also grappling with as they plot their next steps. France and Germany have promptly agreed to work with the Syrian opposition groups that took power in Damascus, while the U.S. and Britain are deliberating whether to delist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main insurgent Islamist faction led by al-Golani that swept into Damascus, as a terrorist organization.
For now, everyone is watching and waiting, piecing together clues about who al-Golani really is and what future HTS has planned for Syria — an inclusive, democratic one embracing the country’s diversity, its religious sects and ethnic minorities, including Christian, Alawite, Druze and Kurds; or an Islamist state that oppresses, restricts and elevates the Sunni majority? Or somewhere in-between?
Consortium News, Analysis: The End of Pluralism in the Middle East, Craig Murray, Dec. 11, 2024. What this potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism: An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.
A truly seismic change in the Middle East has occurred. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.
This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities. Witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women when the jihadists — who overthrew the government of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday — first took Aleppo a mere two weeks ago.
The speed of the collapse of Syria took everybody by surprise. Next, a renewed Israeli attack on Southern Lebanon to coincide with a Salafist invasion of the Bekaa Valley seems inevitable, as the Israelis would obviously wish their border with their new Taliban-style Greater Syrian neighbour to be as far North as possible.
It could be a race for Beirut, unless the Americans have already organised who gets it.
It is no coincidence that the attack on Syria started the day of the Lebanon/Israel ceasefire. The jihadist forces do not want to be seen to be fighting alongside Israel, even though they are fighting forces which have been relentlessly bombed by Israel, and in the case of Hezbollah are exhausted from fighting Israel.
The Times of Israel has no compunction about saying the quiet part out loud, unlike the British media:
In fact Israeli media is giving a lot more truth about the Syrian rebel forces than British and American media. This is another article from The Times of Israel:
“While HTS officially seceded from Al Qaeda in 2016, it remains a Salafi jihadi organization designated as a terror organization in the US, the EU and other countries, with tens of thousands of fighters.
Its sudden surge raises concerns that a potential takeover of Syria could transform it into an Islamist, Taliban-like regime – with repercussions for Israel at its south-western border. Others, however, see the offensive as a positive development for Israel and a further blow to the Iranian axis in the region.”
Contrast this to the U.K. media, which from the Telegraph and Express to The Guardian has promoted the official narrative that not just the same organisations, but the same people responsible for mass torture and executions of non-Sunnis, including Western journalists, are now cuddly liberals.
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, left, commander-in-chief of Tahrir al-Sham; he was emir of its predecessor al-Nusra Front, Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. (U.S. State Dept.)
Nowhere is this more obvious than the case of Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, sometimes spelt Al-Julani or Al-Golani, who, now nominally in charge in Damascus, is being boosted throughout western media as a moderate leader. He was the deputy leader of ISIS, and the C.I.A. actually has a $10 million bounty on his head! Yes, that is the same C.I.A. which is funding and equipping him and giving him air support.
Supporters of the Syrian rebels still attempt to deny that they have Israeli and U.S. support – despite the fact that almost a decade ago there was open Congressional testimony in the U.S.A. that, to that point, over half a billion dollars had been spent on assistance to Syrian rebel forces, and the Israelis have openly been providing medical and other services to the jihadists and effective air support.
Violates UK Terrorism Act
One interesting consequence of this joint NATO/Israel support for the jihadist groups in Syria is a further perversion of domestic rule of law. To take the U.K. as an example, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act it is illegal to state an opinion that supports, or may lead somebody else to support, a proscribed organisation.
The abuse of this provision by British police to persecute Palestinian supporters for allegedly encouraging support for proscribed organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is notorious, with even tangential alleged references leading to arrest. Sarah Wilkinson, Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Richard Barnard and myself are all notable victims, and the persecution has been greatly intensified by Keir Starmer [UK prime minister, right].
Yet Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) is also a proscribed group in the U.K. But both British mainstream media and British Muslim outlets have been openly promoting and praising HTS – frankly much more openly than I have ever witnessed anyone in the U.K. support Hamas and Hezbollah – and not a single person has been arrested or even warned by U.K. police.
That in itself is the strongest of indications that western security services are fully behind the overthrow of the government in Syria.
For the record, I think it is an appalling law, and nobody should be prosecuted for expressing an opinion either way. But the politically biased application of the law is undeniable.
When the entire corporate and state media in the West puts out a unified narrative that Syrians are overjoyed to be released by HTS from the tyranny of the Assad regime – and says nothing whatsoever of the accompanying torture and execution of Shias, and destruction of Christmas decorations and icons – it ought to be obvious to everybody where this is coming from.
Yet – and this is another U.K. domestic repercussion – a very substantial number of Muslims in the U.K. support HTS and the Syrian rebels, because of the funding pumped into U.K. mosques from Saudi and Emirate Salafist sources.
This is allied to the U.K. security service influence also wielded through the mosques, both by sponsorship programmes and “think tanks” benefiting approved religious leaders, and by the execrable coercive Prevent programme.
U.K. Muslim outlets that have been ostensibly pro-Palestinian – like Middle East Eye and 5 Pillars – enthusiastically back Israel’s Syrian allies in ensuring the destruction of resistance to the genocide of the Palestinians. Al Jazeera alternates between items detailing dreadful massacre in Palestine, and items extolling the Syrian rebels bringing Israel-allied rule to Syria.
Among the mechanisms they employ to reconcile this is a refusal to acknowledge the vital role of Syria in enabling the supply of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Which supply the jihadists have now cut off, to the absolute delight of Israel, and in conjunction with both Israeli and U.S. air strikes.
In the final analysis, for many Sunni Muslims both in the Middle East and in the West, the pull seems to be a stronger sectarian hatred of the Shia and the imposition of Salafism, than preventing the ultimate destruction of the Palestinian nation.
“Many Sunni Muslims have been brainwashed into hating Shia Muslims more than they hate the power committing genocide of mostly Sunnis in Gaza.”
I am not a Muslim. My Muslim friends happen to be almost entirely Sunni. I personally regard the continuing division over the leadership of the religion over a millennium ago as deeply unhelpful and a source of unnecessary continued hate.
Classic Divide and Rule
But as a historian I do know that the western colonial powers have consciously and explicitly used the Sunni/Shia split for centuries to divide and rule. In the 1830’s, Alexander Burnes was writing reports on how to use the division in Sind between Shia rulers and Sunni populations to aid British colonial expansion.
Unlike many readers, I have never been a fan of the Assad regime or blind to its human rights violations. But what it did undeniably do was maintain a pluralist state where the most amazing historical religious and community traditions – including Sunni (and many Sunni do support Assad), Shia, Alaouites, descendants of the first Christians, and speakers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus – were all able to co-exist. The same is true of Lebanon.
New York Times, Syria’s Civil War: Syria’s New Leaders Balance Huge Struggles Amid Disorder, Aryn Baker, Cassandra Vinograd, Euan Ward and Michael Levenson, Dec. 11, 2024. The rebels who seized control called for foreign help in prosecuting atrocities, while trying to restore order in a fractured country.
The rebels who seized control of Syria confronted the challenge on Wednesday of striking a balance between obtaining justice for the victims of atrocities committed under the ousted Assad regime and preventing the newly liberated country from descending into unchecked vengeance.
While Syria’s new leaders have promised amnesty for conscripted soldiers who served under the former president, Bashar al-Assad, the leader of the rebel force that toppled him made clear on Wednesday that those who helped Mr. al-Assad brutalize or slaughter would be held accountable.
“We won’t pardon those complicit in the torture and murder of detainees, and we will go after them in our country,” the leader of the rebel offensive, Ahmed al-Shara, said on the Telegram messaging app. “We call on nations to hand over to us whoever of those criminals has escaped to them to subject them to justice.”
Mr. al-Shara did not name any countries in particular, but Mr. al-Assad arrived in Russia over the weekend as the rebels swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Mr. al-Shara’s comments came as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, warned that armed groups had carried out retaliatory attacks on civilians in areas that were once considered loyal to the Assad government. But it was not clear who was carrying out the violence, or directing it.
Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows fighters inside the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian president and the father of Bashar al-Assad, in the northwestern town of al-Qardaha.
As one of the fighters steps on the tomb, another can be heard thanking God. “This is avenging my cousins and their sons, who were killed by this criminal, Hafez al-Assad, in the 1980s,” he says. “This is our revenge.” In another clip, the rebels can be seen setting fire to parts of the tomb.
The Observatory reported that groups of gunmen were preparing to hunt down former commanders of Mr. al-Assad’s military and that armed groups dressed in military uniforms were looting property and intimidating residents of Latakia Province, the heartland of the Alawite minority to which the Assad family belongs, prompting fears of sectarian strife.
While Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, it has significant communities of Christians and Druse, as well as others who adhere to different sects of Islam. Many of the ousted regime’s top figures came from the Alawite sect.
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus, Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad, Farnaz Fassihi and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Syrian Leader Resigns and Leaves Country, Russia Says. The foreign ministry of Russia, a longtime ally, did not provide details on where President Bashar al-Assad had gone; Rebels stormed the Syrian capital on Sunday without encountering any significant resistance from government forces.
President Bashar al-Assad, shown above, has resigned and left Syria, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Sunday, a stunning fall for the longtime dictator that ushered in hope and uncertainty after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive.
Mr. al-Assad’s departure was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat Mr. al-Assad for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.
For many in Syria, Mr. Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that has used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been riven with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.
“Our hearts are dancing with joy,” Walaa Salameh, 35, a resident of the Damascus area, said in a phone interview. “We can’t predict the future and anything is possible, but the most important thing is we got rid of this oppressive regime.”
The foreign ministry’s statement did not offer details on Mr. al-Assad’s exact whereabouts, saying only that he had held talks with “several parties of the armed conflict.” There was no immediate comment from the Syrian presidency about Mr. al-Assad.
Earlier on Sunday, the main rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, had announced on its Telegram channel that it had taken the capital, Damascus, and that Syrian forces were withdrawing. It later said that Mr. al-Assad had fallen and that Damascus was “free of the tyrant.”
The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.
As reports spread of Syrian government troops fleeing their posts and peeling off uniforms, the sounds of gunfire erupted in Damascus before dawn on Sunday, witnesses said. By late morning, the streets were largely empty but the sound of gunfire still echoed.
“No one should shed any tears over the end of the Assad regime,” Daniel B. Shapiro, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said in Bahrain before Russia’s foreign ministry issued the statement.
Amid swirling questions over Mr. al-Assad’s whereabouts, Syria’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, said that he had not spoken with him since Saturday. Mr. Ghazi said that he would stay in the country and was ready to work with whomever Syrians choose as their leader.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham said it would work with Mr. Ghazi and called on Syrian military forces in Damascus to stay away from public institutions, which it said would remain under Mr. Ghazi’s supervision until they are formally handed over.
Who are the rebels?: The head of the Islamist group leading the main rebel coalition said in an interview with The New York Times this week that the fighters aim to depose Mr. al-Assad. First, the rebels seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, then days later blazed through Hama and the strategic city of Homs, en route to the capital. His group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, broke ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 but is still designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
New York Times, Rebels Assert Control in Damascus as Questions Loom Over Their Plans, Christina Goldbaum and Vivian Yee, Dec. 9, 2024. The fighters who forced Bashar al-Assad into exile began the complex task of governing the Syrian capital.
New York Times, Relics of Fallen Government Are Everywhere, Times Reporters Find, Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 9, 2024. The New York Times saw remnants of Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive rule after entering Syria on Monday.
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South Korean Crisis
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out, Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 10, 2024. Lee Jae-myung, the main opposition leader, is leading efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his declaration of martial law.
Shortly after his political nemesis, President Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law last Tuesday, Lee Jae-myung began livestreaming from his cellphone. While driving to the National Assembly, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party appealed to Koreans to rush to the Assembly and hold back soldiers trying to seize the parliament.
“You must protect the Assembly, the last line of defense for our democracy,” Mr. Lee said repeatedly — in a watershed moment for South Korean democracy and for his own political career. Mr. Lee’s exhortation, relayed by YouTubers, helped attract crowds who slowed down the advance of troops and bought time for lawmakers to vote down Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree, forcing the president to withdraw it after just six hours.
Mr. Lee, who has been fighting legal charges that he says are politically motivated, now finds himself in a stronger political position than ever. His party holds the majority in the Assembly and he represents what most South Koreans want: Mr. Yoon removed from office. Polls show he is most favored to win if a presidential election is held now.
New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Victoria Kim and Thomas Fuller, Dec. 4, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to break a political deadlock by imposing military rule collapsed within hours, leaving him with few defenders.
Emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, members of South Korea’s political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.
Several opposition parties, buoyed by thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the president, jointly submitted the impeachment motion, which could be put to a vote as early as Friday. While the parties represent an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, it remains unclear whether they will have the two-thirds vote needed to impeach.
Mr. Yoon’s surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America’s closest allies and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s.
Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder, historian, Dec. 4, 2024. South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, invoked martial law, tried to install a military dictatorship -- and failed completely. In his actions there are some likely similarities with the coming Trump regime, and some clear lessons for Americans to learn right now.
Yoon won a very narrow election, as did Trump. Like Trump, he refers constantly to "fake news" and calls his political opponents enemies of the state (as Trump says, "the enemy within"). Yoon used this language to justify the imposition of martial law, as will Trump if he decides to invoke the Insurrection Act in the United States.
Like Trump, Yoon telegraphed his move in advance, and not only with such language. He surrounded himself with military men and intelligence officers who were characterized by personal loyalty. Trump is trying to do the same, now, with his proposals for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Kash Patel as director of the FBI, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. He also wants to purge the top ranks of the armed forces.
Yoon's main political opponent, Lee Jae-myung, had correctly predicted that Yoon would try to implement martial law. Trump makes this prediction rather easy. Trump has spoken openly of being "dictator for a day," and of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military inside the United States.The Insurrection Act is not quite the same thing as martial law. Under martial law, the military assumes the basic responsibilities associated with a civilian government. The Insurrection Act, in principle, only allows the American president to use the armed forces to assist civilian authorities to enforce some law in the presence of an insurrection. But the language of the law is quite vague. Trump makes it clear that he has in mind invoking the Insurrection Act to very broad purposes, essentially to change the regime.
In both South Korea and the United States, the legal basis for asserting greater presidential authority is antiquated. Martial law was declared in South Korea for the last time in 1979. Since the late 1980s, South Korea has moved quite decisively in the direction of meaningful elections and civil rights, thanks to the forceful activity of civil society, especially trade unions. In the United States, the Insurrection Act is an assemblage of laws passed between 1792 and 1871. It was last invoked during racial violence in Los Angeles in 1992.
Yoon's actions, although rooted of course in his own personality and South Korean career, and enabled by South Korean law, were very trumpy. Indeed, it seems likely to me that the very presence of Trump on the international scene will make such attempts more likely, among America's democratic allies (such as South Korea) and generally.
But Yoon failed, and very badly. His dictatorship for a day lasted only about six hours. What can Americans learn from his less-than-a-day dictatorship?First of all, we have to take in a very basic reality: that attempts to establish military dictatorships have been made in democracies, and will be made in other democracies --including, very possibly, in the American one.
The most worrying moment of Yoon's invocation of martial law was that, in the beginning, the military acted as he wished that it would. Military leaders initially joined in his coup attempt, with General Park An-su claiming to ban political actions, political parties, political gatherings, and "propaganda," which can mean anything anyone says. He also claimed to take all media outlets under the control of the military.
The pertinent question for Americans would be: will Trump be able to surround himself with loyalists who will do the same thing? He is trying to do so. And so the Senate, in confirmation hearings, has an obvious question to ask all of Trump's appointees with any responsibility for national security or intelligence: if Trump attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act to stifle domestic political life, just as Yoon attempted to do in South Korea, would you take part?
For legislators, the lessons are also very clear. The moment Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Kim, told people to rally at the parliament. Legislators themselves entered its chambers, despite the wishes of the military leadership, and then voted unanimously for the revocation of martial law. Members of Yoon's own right-wing party, in other words, joined with the opposition in a dramatic demonstration of unity in the face of the threat of a military dictatorship.
Are American legislators capable of defending their roles and their republic? The evidence thus far is very mixed; it remains to be seen.
New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon and Jin Yu Young, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol made the decree, the first of its kind in more than four decades, amid a bitter feud with the political opposition. Lawmakers demanded the declaration be canceled, setting up a showdown. Earlier, a general said news outlets were under “martial law command.”
President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, right, declared emergency martial law on Tuesday, banning “all political activities,” in an extraordinary reaction to the political deadlock that has hobbled his tenure.
The full extent of what martial law entails was not immediately clear, but the announcement enabled the president to take command of the news media. His declaration set off protesters clashing with the police outside the National Assembly, and an immediate effort by opposition lawmakers to halt the decree. It was the first time a South Korean president had declared martial law since the military dictatorship ended in the country in the late 1980s.
Mr. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply unpopular and divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
In a late-night meeting, the National Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the president must lift it “without delay.”
Here’s what else to know.
- Protesters in Seoul: Some demonstrators appeared to be trying to enter the National Assembly as police officers tried to block them, as seen in images broadcast by local networks. “End martial law! End martial law!” protesters chanted.
- Political paralysis: Elected president in 2022, Mr. Yoon has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls the National Assembly. In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday night, he denounced the opposition for repeatedly using its majority in the National Assembly to impeach members of his cabinet and block the passage of his government’s budget plans. This has “paralyzed the administration,” Mr. Yoon said. “The National Assembly, which should have been the foundation of free democracy, has become a monster that destroys it.”
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Warning from Seoul: Democracy at Risk in an Age of Authoritarian Power, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 4, 2024. How Yoon’s State of Emergency and Trump’s Strategies Are Eroding Global Freedoms.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.
In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.
Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.
Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.
The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.
Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 4, 2024.For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea, Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young, John Yoon and Ephrat Livni, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President Yoon Suk Yeol has been locked in a bitter fight with the opposition, which controls Parliament.
It was the first martial law declaration in more than four decades in South Korea, which saw the end of a military dictatorship in the late 1980s. Mr. Yoon, who was elected president in 2022, has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, and his government has faced plunging public approval ratings.
In his speech declaring martial law late Tuesday, Mr. Yoon said he was making the move to “defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order. Through this emergency martial law, I will rebuild and defend the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into ruin.”
New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law, Dec. 3, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol made the extraordinary declaration in an unannounced speech to the nation on Tuesday night.
Relevant Recent Headlines
- New York Times, Lawmakers Move to Impeach South Korean Leader After Failed Martial Law Bid
- Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder
- Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson
- New York Times, Opinion: Can Martial Law Happen in America? David French
- New York Times, South Korean Lawmakers Vote to Defy President, Demanding End to Martial Law
- New York Times, What to Know About the Situation in South Korea
- New York Times, Read President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law
Global News
New York Times, France’s Marine Le Pen Takes Aim at the Top, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 10, 2024. After helping to oust the prime minister last week, the far-right leader, above, has made clear her next target is President Emmanuel Macron.
The one-on-one duel that has shaped French political life for nearly a decade ratcheted up a notch last week, with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen claiming one big scalp, and giving notice of going after a bigger one, President Emmanuel Macron.
No one doubted that she was calling the shots. Yet by Monday, Mr. Macron, right, had relegated Ms. Le Pen and her party, the anti-immigrant National Rally, to “pariah” — her word — status. He did not deign to meet with her in his search for a new prime minister to replace the one she had largely ousted last week.
Leaders of other parties had tête-à-têtes with Mr. Macron at the presidential palace; but not Ms. Le Pen, who was excluded because she is part of the “anti-Republican front” — his words.
That could turn out to be a big mistake. Last week, Ms. Le Pen announced the demise of the hapless prime minister, Michel Barnier, in Parliament; sure enough he was overthrown in a no-confidence vote soon after.
Mr. Barnier had tried to force through a budget proposal without a vote, and above all he had barely consulted with Ms. Le Pen, who has the largest bloc of parliamentarians and cannot be ignored.
She has suggested successive Macron governments could fall, until he steps down — making clear she is after a more consequential trophy: the president himself.
Mr. Macron was barely off the plane from Saudi Arabia as she spoke last Wednesday night. As the bemused parliamentarians listened, she promised “deliverance” for France from its woes, “maybe, very soon.”
That seemed as much promise as threat.
It all rested on one man’s decision, she said, avoiding Mr. Macron’s name while suggesting she was pushing him toward the exit. Her target was clear.
“It’s up to the person concerned, by himself, to decide whether he should stay,” she said. “It’s on his conscience, to determine whether he should sacrifice public policy, and France’s fate, for the sake of his own pride.”
New York Times, Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu Finally Takes the Stand in His Corruption Trial, Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 10, 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a trial that began four years ago. He has denied the charges.
Outside the courthouse, he is one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, overseeing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, its occupation of southern Lebanon and recent strikes in Syria.
As he stepped into a cramped and sweltering underground courtroom in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel morphed into the defendant in Case 67104-01-20 — charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Eight years after the police started investigating him and four years after his trial began, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was taking the stand for the first time to respond to accusations of corruption that have defined and disrupted Israeli public life for nearly a decade.
“Like everyone who is brought to the witness stand, you are charged with speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” said Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of three judges hearing the case.
An audience of roughly 100 journalists, lawmakers, government ministers and lawyers craned their necks to catch his response.
“I have waited eight years for this moment — to tell the truth, the truth as I remember it,” replied Mr. Netanyahu, gripping the sides of a wooden lectern as he stood to the left of the judges.
It was a humbling moment — a sitting prime minister, forced to answer accusations of graft, before a courtroom filled with his peers. It was also a moment Mr. Netanyahu seemed determined to transcend.
“I am shocked by the magnitude of this absurdity,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
“I am the prime minister, I am running a country, I am running a war,” he continued. “I am not occupying myself with my future, but rather with that of the state of Israel.”
For nearly a decade, the corruption charges against Mr. Netanyahu have divided Israel, leading to years of political turmoil. The electorate has been roughly evenly split on the question of whether Mr. Netanyahu should remain in office while he stands trial — a dynamic that has created an electoral stalemate, leading to five elections in less than four years.
Apart from a brief court appearance to plead not guilty in 2021, Mr. Netanyahu had rarely been affected by the day-to-day proceedings of the trial.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers spent years interviewing witnesses instead of the defendant himself. The hearing on Tuesday — 1,661 days since the trial began — was set to be Mr. Netanyahu’s first full day in court.
Mr. Netanyahu had sought to delay his testimony by several months, arguing that his management of the war campaign had disrupted his preparations. But the court agreed to a postponement of only a few days.
While his appearance on Tuesday provided a crescendo in the judicial process, it was also, to many Israelis, anti-climactic. The charges against Mr. Netanyahu have been a part of Israeli discourse for so long that the spectacle of a prime minister on trial no longer seems as shocking as it once did.
“The public has completely accepted the idea that we have a sitting prime minister who has been investigated, indicted and is now on trial — even in the middle of a war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst who attended the hearing on Tuesday.
“What would have been unimaginable 10 years ago has been completely normalized,” she added.
Mr. Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The charges center on claims that he gave regulatory favors and diplomatic support to prominent businessmen in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage.
The trial is expected to continue for years, and Mr. Netanyahu will likely take the stand several times a week for several months.
New York Times, In Georgia Protests, Echoes of Ukraine’s Past Revolutions, Jeffrey Gettleman, Dec. 10, 2024. The former Soviet Republic has been rocked by demonstrations over the same issues that hurtled Ukraine into war: its relationship with Europe and Russia.
On the streets of Georgia, it’s starting to look a little like the Ukraine of 10 years ago, before the war, when tensions with Russia started brewing.
- An increasingly authoritarian government in a former Soviet republic cools to the European Union and drifts closer to Moscow.
- Enormous protests erupt, calling for the government’s ouster.
- Riot police respond.
- Young demonstrators are beaten up and dragged away.
- Each side digs in, raising the specter of a major crisis in a country that has long struggled to break away from Russian dominance.
On the continent’s far eastern edge, embracing the European Union can be a risky move, threatening vested interests, especially those of Russia, which is wary to lose any of its regional influence.
These tensions have been playing out to different degrees in recent years in Georgia, Moldova and, in the most extreme example, Ukraine. All three are former Soviet republics and Russian troops occupy different slices of each.
In Georgia, what concerns people here and beyond are the unmistakable echoes of Ukraine’s popular revolution in 2014 that succeeded in pulling the country away from Moscow but ultimately resulted in a devastating war.
“The government is trying to turn the country back to the Russian sphere of influence against the will of the people, who were moving toward the West,which felt almost inevitable,” said Cristina Florea, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Eastern Europe.
“It is creepily similar to what happened in Ukraine,” she said, and “so, so worrying.”
Ever since the ruling party announced in late November it was postponing its effort to join the European Union, thousands of outraged, pro-Europe Georgians have poured into the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, provoking a brutal response.
Lazare Maglakelidze, a 20-year-old computer science student, said men in unmarked black uniforms snatched him from a recent protest, dragged him into a van, pummeled his face, broke his nose and threatened to rape him. He shared medical records and video footage corroborating much of his account.
Still, in an interview, speaking through a mask of medical tape, he said he wasn’t discouraged and found the Ukraine parallel inspiring.
“Ukraine is where we see people fighting for their dignity, dedicating their lives to the highest of high concepts that anybody can imagine,” he said.
“Yes, there’s a risk to standing up to Russia,” he went on. “But it’s better to die fighting, to die with dignity, than to live a miserable, unworthy, unholy life.”
New York Times, Taiwan Says China Has Deployed Largest Fleet of Ships in Decades, David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien, Dec. 10, 2024. Taiwan is on high alert in response to China’s unannounced deployment of naval and Coast Guard ships, as tensions rise over U.S. support for the island.
Taiwan said on Tuesday that China was conducting its largest maritime operations in nearly three decades, sending nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels into waters stretching from the southern Japanese islands to the South China Sea.
Taiwanese defense officials said the scope of the deployment suggested that China was not only trying to show that it could choke the self-governed island, but also that it could block American allies in the region like Japan and the Philippines from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
China has “extended their military strength outward,” Gen. Hsieh Jih-sheng, a senior official in Taiwan’s ministry of defense told reporters. “The numbers are indeed astonishing,” he said, referring to the surge of Chinese vessels in the waters. Sun Li-fang, a spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, said the maritime operations were the largest that Taiwan has seen since 1996.
The officials said that Taiwan was on high alert in response to the Chinese ships, many of which were in waters off Taiwan’s southwest, east and northwest coasts.
China’s intentions were not immediately clear. There were no official announcements from Beijing that its forces were holding exercises. A foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked on Tuesday if China was conducting drills near Taiwan, deflected the question.
Speculation had been growing for days that China would launch war games in retaliation for visits made by Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam last week while on his way to the Pacific islands.
Trump Cases, Convictions, Reprisals, Allies
A scene from the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 insurrection attacking the U.S. Capitol (Reuters photo).
Politico, Trump promised Jan. 6 pardons. His post-election silence is making loyalists nervous, Kyle Cheney, Nov. 30, 2024. His die-hard supporters — as well as some federal judges — are left to speculate about his clemency plans.
Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to pardon a vast swath of supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his silence on the matter since winning the election has begun unsettling some fervent allies awaiting even the slightest signal from Trump about how he intends to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.
Federal judges overseeing Jan. 6 cases have been left to guess at Trump’s plans. As a result, they have allowed nearly all cases to proceed, saying Trump’s clemency plans are merely “speculative.” Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have brought a handful of new Jan. 6 felony cases since Election Day, and they’ve argued repeatedly against efforts by defendants to delay their cases to await Trump’s inauguration.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people for their roles in the riot. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would pardon many of them. But he left the specifics unclear, and never said whether he might leave in place some prosecutions, particularly against people who assaulted police.
Now that he’s president-elect, his failure to say more has begun nagging at some of his die-hard supporters, who have engaged in a public guessing game on X about Trump’s intentions.
“[H]onestly people have suffered for 4 years and many are still in flux and terrified. A word of reassurance from the top would go a long way for people,” wrote Brandon Straka, a prominent Trump ally who spent three months in home detention after pleading guilty to Jan. 6 misdemeanors. “The silence on the issue just exacerbates the victims’ anxiety. Hopefully some kind of messaging comes soon.”
Adding to the anxiety expressed by some Jan. 6 defendants is a statement from Trump’s transition team that hinted at a far more limited approach than the sweeping pardons that many in Trump’s base have demanded.
“President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis,” incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in the statement.
The meaning of “case-by-case” has morphed into a raging debate among Jan. 6 defendants and their allies.
“It is just a phrase. ‘Case by case,’ It isn’t a policy, or a strategy, or anything,” wrote Suzzanne Monk, a longtime advocate for Jan. 6 defendants. “It is a catch phrase the media is using to push the ‘only some will be pardoned’ narrative.”
Politico, Trump picks Kash Patel to lead FBI, Megan Messerly, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). The position will require Senate confirmation.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Pate, shown above,l as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.
If confirmed, Patel will replace current FBI Director Chris Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017 after firing James Comey, cutting his 10-year term short. Wray’s term is not set to expire until 2027, so Trump will have to fire Wray to install Patel, if Wray doesn’t resign first.
Trump, in a post to Truth Social, called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”
“He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” the president-elect added, referring to the role Patel played as a staffer in crafting House Republican responses to the investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At the time, Patel was an aide to Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, a position that helped raise his profile in Trump’s inner circle.
Patel was also angling to be deputy director of the CIA, a position that would not have required Senate confirmation, unlike the FBI director post, which does. It’s unclear whether Patel, who is a divisive figure even among Trump loyalists, will have the votes needed in the Senate to be confirmed.
When Trump floated naming Patel deputy director of the FBI during his first administration, then-Attorney General Bill Barr responded “over my dead body,” according to reporting at the time. CIA Director Gina Haspel also threatened to quit over the move.
Patel is a former federal public defender and former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s national security division. A staunch Trump defender, Patel has been assisting the president-elect in compiling a list of candidates to join the Justice Department.
Patel has also promised to investigate and potentially prosecute journalists.
“We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” Patel said last year.
The president-elect also announced Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Chronister, a 32-year veteran of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, joins a long line of Floridians Trump has picked to join his administration.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said Chronister would work with Pam Bondi, his appointee for attorney general, to “secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES.”
Chronister was first appointed to the post by then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Donald J. Trump, left, then as a former president defending himself in New York earlier this year, appears with his attorney Todd Blanche in a court-designated media availability site at the courthouse
Washington Post, Trump picked his lawyer for a top Justice Dept. job. Does it matter? Mark Berman, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). If confirmed as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche should recuse from Justice Department matters related to cases where he represented Donald Trump, experts say.
Soon after winning the presidential election, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to install Todd Blanche, one of his criminal defense attorneys, as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department.
Blanche would fix “a broken System of Justice,” Trump declared in a statement.
Days later, Blanche was hard at work in his current role, signing a court filing that derided one of the cases against Trump as “politically-motivated and fatally flawed” and argued that it should be dismissed.
Blanche — Trump’s pick to be the deputy attorney general — faces an uneasy balancing act, particularly given the president-elect’s stated desire to seek retribution against his investigators and political foes.
If Blanche is confirmed, his previous work representing Trump in multiple criminal cases would raise ethical concerns unless he recuses himself from anything at the Justice Department that might touch on those matters, according to interviews with several legal experts.
Recusal is “an obvious call,” said Eli Wald, a law professor at the University of Denver who specializes in legal ethics. He said Blanche overseeing anything that touches on his previous defense of Trump in either state or federal court would create a clear “appearance of impropriety.”
The Justice Department has “lots of excellent lawyers,” Wald said. “Why would we want one person that Americans can correctly identify with being President Trump’s lawyer to be … making decisions about the same matters in which he represented the president? That would defy common sense.”
Washington Post, Analysis: Trump’s plans for disruption, retribution explained through Cabinet picks, Amber Phillips, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). On some choices, his strategy is clear: Disruption and retribution.
President-elect Donald Trump has quickly put together his Cabinet picks. Loyalty to him has been a major factor.
But Trump is also sending a mixed message with his choices: Will his administration be more of a traditional Republican one, or one that shakes up the system as much as it can?
And despite saying during the presidential campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, the policy blueprint coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Trump picked one of its architects to a top government job.
“On a lot of this, we just don’t know what to make of it,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said of Trump’s Cabinet announcements.
Here are some broad trends behind the Cabinet picks so far.On some, Trump is clear: He wants disruption and retribution.
MSNBC Alex Wagner Tonight, Commentary: DOJ braces for corruption of department as Trump prioritizes revenge, Nov. 27, 2024. David Rohde, national security editor for NBC News, discusses how prosecutors at the Justice Department are preparing to be the subject of weaponized investigations at the hands of Pam Bondi to appease Donald Trump's desire for revenge for efforts to hold him accountable.
Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him, Sonam Sheth, Nov. 26, 2024. Schiff Reminds His GOP Colleagues The Outcome Of Trump Hush Money Trial.
California U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, shown above in a file photo, questioned on Tuesday whether President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general will go after the grand jurors who voted to indict Trump. "Is she also going to go after the grand jurors who found there was probable cause to believe he was engaged in multiple crimes?" Schiff said on MSNBC, referring to Trump'sattorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, shown below.
Special counsel Jack Smith's office secured two grand jury indictments against Trump: one in Washington, D.C., in connection to his activities surrounding efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and in the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol; and another in Florida, related to Trump's handling of classified documents.
Smith's office this week moved to dismiss the January 6 case, and prosecutors also dropped an appeal to the dismissal of the classified documents case.A jury in New York also returned an indictment charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was convicted of all 34 charges earlier this year, but his sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.
And the president-elect and several of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering charges, but that case has been placed on hold amid a legal challenge to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' role in the case.
During his MSNBC interview on Tuesday, Schiff, who recently won his Senate race in California, mentioned special counsel John Durham, left, who was tapped to investigate the Justice Department's inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Durham did not secure convictions in any of the cases.
"You can very well see a lot of prosecutors, like Durham, who spend millions of taxpayer dollars to come up with nothing," Schiff told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace. "Pam Bondi [shown in a 2016 file photo below] follows through with what she's pledged to do, which is to investigate nonexistent voter fraud, for example, or to go after the prosecutors."
[MSNBC Host Nicolle Wallace, shown below in a file photo, responded: "It’s clear that Trump wants a whole bunch of John Durhams in the Justice Department.”]
A 1798 political cartoon's depiction of the XYZ Affair with America as a female being plundered by Frenchmen
The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann, right, Nov. 28, 2024. From Jefferson’s era to today, history proves democracy’s defenders can still win…
It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?
Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.
In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?
My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.
In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.
New York Times, Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities, Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang, Nov. 28, 2024 (interactive). A Times analysis shows where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joe Biden and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift.
New York Times, Analysis: Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles, David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk as co-leader, has advantages that past budget-cutters did not, but changes could still be slow.
New York Times, What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now? Theodore Schleifer, Nov. 27, 2024. The party’s donor class is still wrestling with Donald Trump’s victory, worried about retribution and sluggish liberal energy. (Shown at right, Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman.
Recent Relevant Headlines
- Washington Post, Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted'
- Newsweek, Adam Schiff Questions If Trump's AG Will Target Jurors Who Indicted Him
- Washington Post, Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election, Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein
- Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu
- The Hartmann Report, Political Opinion: Is Democratic Leadership Missing in Action as Trump Tightens His Grip? Thom Hartmann
- New York Times, Opinion: Trump Evaded Jack Smith and the Rule of Law, Jesse Wegman
- New York Times, They Attended Trump’s Trial. Now He’s Offering Them High-Profile Jobs
- New York Times, Trump’s Sentencing in New York Is Officially on Hold
- New York Times, Pam Bondi, Former Florida Prosecutor, Is Trump’s New Attorney General Pick
- New York Times, Pam Bondi Is Trump’s New Choice for Attorney General. Here’s What to Know About Her
- Washington Post, Matt Gaetz withdraws bid to be attorney general in Trump administration
- The Hartmann Report, Historical Commentary: Truth vs. Tyranny: How Americans Have Stood Against Lies Before, Thom Hartmann
More On Hunter Biden Pardon
Emptywheel, Analysis: You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 6, 2024. The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.
Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.
With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.
And it won’t work.
Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden
Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.
Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted. But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.
While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media. The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.
Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.
Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.
More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.
Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.
That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.
There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole
Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.
Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.
Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.
Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.
There are legal privileges to protect
One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking opening of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.
To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.
Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”
Plus, the opinion via which Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.
The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.
If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.
It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law
There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.
Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.
Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.
Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.
Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.
Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.
Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.
Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.John Bolton would beg to differ with you.
Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.
Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.
But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.
Hunter Biden, shown above in a file photo. The Biden sentencing judges, U.S. District Court Judges Maryellen Noreika (left) of Delaware and Mark Scarsi of California, both nominated by Donald Trump, are shown side by side.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 4, 2024. I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.
ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.
Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.
According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.
In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.
This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.
Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.
First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.
But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.
Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1
[snip]
The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.
Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.
Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.
New York Times, Editorial: The Dangerous Precedent of Biden’s Pardon, Editorial Board, Dec. 4, 2024. President Biden has issued pardons to just 26 people during his term, and granted the commutation of 132 prison sentences. Though he has been criticized for his reluctance to extend clemency, his choices mostly represented the best form of it, wiping away the criminal stains of everyday people who had been unjustly convicted or reducing prison time for those whose sentences were excessive. And his modest record spoke to Mr. Biden’s attempt to project an admirable restraint in using his absolute, easily abused power to overrule the judgment of the justice system.
Then on Sunday, in direct violation of his own pledges not to do so, Mr. Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter. Though he claimed the decision was made out of fatherly love, his explanation also attacked the investigation of his son and, implicitly, his own Justice Department.
New York Times, Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun.
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”
He said he did so because the charges against his son were politically motivated and designed to hurt the president politically.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
After Mr. Biden announced the pardon, Hunter Biden issued a statement of his own. “I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” he said. “I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though he and his spokeswoman had denied for months that he had any intention of doing so. NBC News first reported on Sunday evening that Mr. Biden had in fact decided to pardon his son.
But the move quickly drew expressions of scorn from Mr. Biden’s political adversaries and others and called into question the president’s honesty, given the many public statements that he made saying he would not pardon his son.
President Biden used the power of his office to wave aside years of his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, including a guilty plea for illegally buying a gun. Republicans, including the president’s successor, President-elect Trump, have spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues. Read Joe Biden’s Statement About Pardoning Hunter
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced — precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter of lying on the firearms form. The tax charges were due to be tried in Los Angeles in September 2024, but Hunter suddenly decided to “plead to the sheet,” i.e., admit guilt to all charges.
Both cases were awaiting sentencing until last night’s presidential pardon, which brought them both to a swift end.
The pardon is generating controversy, even among Democrats and my former prosecutor peers. I understand their ambivalence, but I think it rests on considerations that don’t undermine the essential fairness and propriety of the pardon. In the few hours since the pardon was announced, these are the main objections I’ve heard, along with my responses:
New York Times, Opinion: Biden’s Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office, Jeffrey Toobin, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Toobin, right, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
Pardons are the consummate discretionary acts; presidents are never required to issue even a single one, nor are they limited in the number they issue or to whom. In this way, they reveal their roots in the royal prerogative of mercy. There is only one reason presidents, or kings, issue pardons: because they want to.
On Sunday night as he boarded a plane to Cape Verde, en route to Angola, President Biden revealed himself as an anguished, and furious, father when he pardoned his son Hunter. Mr. Biden said, as recently as June, that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter or commute his sentence, and his press secretary reiterated that he had no plans to pardon Hunter after last month’s election. In June, a jury had found the younger Mr. Biden guilty of three felony counts relating to lies about his drug use on a federal form to apply to own a firearm. Then, in September, he pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California.
Hunter was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month, which undoubtedly served to precipitate his father’s action. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, he was probably facing at least a couple of years in prison. But the pardon from his father wiped out that possibility and gifted the son a clean record, as if he had never been charged in the first place. The pardon goes further. It is “not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted” and encompasses the period when the younger Mr. Biden joined the board of Burisma.
Reader Comment: I would agree with Mr. Toobin here, except that there are a few unique circumstances that move this out of the realm of typical Federal sentencing situations.
The Secret Service is responsible for Mr. Biden until July 19, 2025, which means there is a six-month period during which they must protect him in prison. His time in prison would very likely have exceeded that period. Between the time of the sentencing report following his tax-related guilty plea (September 5, 2024) and yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Secret Service, the DOJ, and his lawyers have been trying to construct an incarceration plan that would have guaranteed his safety, at least until July 19, 2025.
The overriding concern is that an incoming administration consisting of some of the announced nominees would be easily capable of, and, in fact, looking forward to, relocating Mr. Biden from a low-security facility to a Federal hell-hole with a shiv-carrying general population.Even solitary confinement is not a safe escape from that population.
Hunter Biden deserves to serve time, but does not deserve to be murdered in prison. Does President Biden need to sacrifice yet another child to prove his character?
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon
New York Times, President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden issued the following statement on Sunday night.
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.
From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given noncriminal resolutions.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
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It is clear that Hunter was treated differently. The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.
There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.
Washington Post, Hunter Biden’s team issues a fiery defense ahead of sentencing, possible pardon, Matt Viser, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Judges are scheduled to sentence the president’s son for gun and tax offenses in December.
Hunter Biden’s legal team is launching an assertive public defense of the president’s son just weeks before federal judges in Delaware and California prepare to sentence him this month, and as his father faces a diminishing window to pardon him if he chooses to do so despite previously ruling it out.Get the latest election news and results
In a 52-page paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” released Saturday, Hunter Biden’s lawyers criticize the foundation of the investigations into their client, arguing that he was prosecuted for crimes that an ordinary citizen would not have been. Hunter Biden is likely to face further unfair threats when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the lawyers contend.
The document at times seems aimed directly at President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said that he will not pardon or commute the sentences of his son. Hunter has been with his father over the past several days in Nantucket, where the Biden family for decades has gathered for Thanksgiving.
“With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real,” the report asserts. It cites comments that Trump has made about targeting his opponents, along with remarks from congressional Republicans who for years have investigated Hunter and other Biden family members.
“There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter,” the report says. “The prospect that Trump will turn his vengeance on the Special Counsel prosecutors if they fail to take a harder line against Hunter no doubt exerts considerable pressure on them not to let up on Hunter.”
Both cases against Hunter Biden, for gun and tax offenses, were brought by special counsel David Weiss, left (nominated by Donald Trump to be U.S. attorney), whose office was staffed by attorneys from the Justice Department. That department will now be overseen by Trump and his attorney general.
Taken as a whole, the document largely rehashes past arguments made by Hunter Biden and his legal team, at times unsuccessfully in court. It includes a lengthy timeline of events since 2017 that the attorneys say demonstrate that federal prosecutors unfairly targeted the son of a prominent politician.
“Here, in one place, is the complete and reprehensible history of the political persecution of Hunter Biden,” Abbe Lowell, one of Hunter’s top attorneys, said in a statement. “This is a seven-year saga propelled by an unrelenting political desire to use a son to hurt his father.”
He added, “It is a wild and terrifying story that serves as a stark warning of what is to come as some of the same Republicans who targeted Hunter prepare to resume power and have stated their intention to use the government’s vast power to pursue their perceived enemies.”
New York Times, Analysis: In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints, Peter Baker, Dec. 2, 2024 (print ed.). President Biden and President-elect Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.
In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.
The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Mr. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much the way Mr. Biden has now said his son was.
Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Mr. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Mr. Biden did not explicitly accuse the Justice Department of being biased against his family, but suggested that it was influenced by Republican politicians who have waged a long public campaign assailing Hunter Biden.
As it happens, the Justice Department has rejected both accusations. The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics, and senior department officials have denied that politics entered the equation against either man. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases.
But Mr. Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the F.B.I. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Mr. Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.
“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.
Representative Greg Stanton, Democrat of Arizona, disputed the president’s argument that politics was behind his son’s prosecution. “I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said online. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
The Bulwark, Opinion: The Father, the Son, and Kash Patel, William Kristol, Dec. 2, 2024. One thing can be bad and another thing can be much worse.
In The Bulwark’s house there are many rooms. In one of them resides the estimable Mona Charen, who a couple of weeks ago urged President Biden not to pardon his son, Hunter. In another dwells the laudable Kim Wehle, who this morning defends Biden’s pardon as judiciously as one can. For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in Mona’s wing of our (virtual) Bulwark mansion.
The president ought not to have pardoned Hunter Biden. It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.
In any case, The Bulwark will survive some disagreement over the act of a man who let his love as a father overwhelm his judgment as a president. So will the nation. The question we face is how well the nation will survive the next four years of a Trump presidency, where neither love nor judgment are present, only the will to arbitrary power and the desire for personal retribution.
President Biden made a mistake. But the problem with Donald Trump and his appointees isn’t that they’ll make mistakes. It is that the whole Trump presidency is animated by a plan to create centralized, personalized, unconstrained, and unaccountable power in the president and his agents.
Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Kash Patel director of the FBI is one piece of the puzzle, but a particularly dangerous piece at that. It is emblematic of an attempt to seize full control over the power ministries of the government—including the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Whether these agencies are run by true believers like Patel or Tulsi Gabbard, or weak opportunists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, is less important than that they be run fully and unequivocally in accord with the wishes of Trump and his key apparatchiks in the White House—Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and OMB Director Russell Vought.
If Trump can get Patel confirmed as FBI director, he’s obviously off to the authoritarian races. But even if Patel isn’t confirmed, or isn’t confirmed quickly, we’re on a very dangerous path. Trump will govern and seek to enable his agents to govern in what one might call the spirit of Kash Patel—a lawless and authoritarian spirit.
One way Trump will advance this plan is by appointing loyalists to serve in an “acting” capacity in key positions where the Senate hasn’t confirmed his nominees. Trump experimented with this in his first term. Indeed, he commented in January, 2019: “I like acting [appointments]. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.” Now his lawyers and operatives have had years to plan on how to systematically place loyalists as acting officials in key positions, from secretary and director on down.
Talking Feds Substack, Commentary: Night of the Hunter, Harry Litman, Dec. 2, 2024. You could almost hear the howls of protest begin on Capitol Hill the moment President Biden announced he was granting a pardon to his son, Hunter.
Through his spokesperson, Trump immediately condemned Biden’s act and sought to contrast it with his own prosecutions, proclaiming, “The system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer excoriated the president, saying, “Rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
The shrieks were entirely predictable, and they will only grow in the coming days. Biden’s move provides Trump and his allies with a tool to pound the DOJ and Democrats for years to come. It also offers an opportunity for “whataboutism” when it comes to the abuses of the pardon system we may see during Trump’s second term.
But in fact, President Biden’s pardon was justified and falls within the heartland of executive clemency cases. A clear-eyed analysis of the facts, the law, and, crucially, DOJ standard practice in Hunter Biden’s case establishes this.
It’s crucial to review the course of prosecutorial conduct that culminated in Hunter’s convictions.
Hunter was prosecuted by special counsel David Weiss, a holdover from the first Trump term whom Biden retained in office when almost all United States attorneys were replaced—precisely to avoid charges that he had interfered with Hunter’s investigation. Weiss proceeded to investigate the case for five years, after which, in June 2023, he reached a plea agreement with Hunter.
The drafted agreement provided that Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes, for which prosecutors would recommend a sentence of probation. For the gun charges, Weiss signed off on a pretrial diversion agreement that required Hunter to remain drug-free and not own any firearms for two years, at the end of which the charges would be dismissed.
Critically, both of these dispositions were consistent with normal DOJ policy for comparable crimes. The department doesn’t prosecute offenders for false statements on firearm purchase forms unless the offender uses the gun to commit another crime or there are other extraordinary circumstances, such as gang activity. I have confirmed this point with numerous experienced prosecutors since Hunter was charged; they all agree that this is standard DOJ policy, although some have suggested (but I have been unable to verify) very rare exceptions.
Similarly, the misdemeanor resolution for the tax charges is consistent with standard DOJ practice for offenders who neglect taxes while battling substance abuse and subsequently repay their debt.
Of course, that’s not how things wound up for Hunter. During a hearing in July 2023 to finalize the terms of the agreement, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concern that the agreement was written in a way that could be construed as giving her the final determination on whether the terms were satisfied. The judge understandably balked at this unorthodox provision, and the agreement unraveled in court.
The deal then became a political flashpoint. Republicans on Capitol Hill accused Hunter’s plea agreement of being a “sweetheart deal” while seeking to tie his misconduct to efforts to impeach the president. The plea agreement crumbled through no fault of Hunter, who through his counsel tried repeatedly, but without success, to revive it. The month after it fell apart, Attorney General Garland agreed to Weiss’s request to be appointed a special counsel, giving him free rein to continue investigating Biden. Weiss responded by throwing the book at Hunter, indicting him in Delaware for the firearms charges and in Los Angeles for the tax offenses.
Politico, We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Dec. 2, 2024. The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.Joe Biden (left) is accompanied by his son, Hunter Biden, and his grandson, Beau.
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.Gerald Ford (left) speaks as Richard Nixon looks on.
Gerald Ford (left) speaks as President Richard Nixon looks on in October 1973. Eleven months later, after Nixon resigned and Ford became president, he pardoned Nixon. | STR/AFP via Getty Images
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
Politico, Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon, Andrew Howard, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans blasted the Biden's move as hypocritical given the president's promise not to issue such a pardon.
At least one Democrat is responding to President Joe Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son Hunter with a reminder about President-elect Donald Trump: He’s a convicted criminal, too.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country…you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on X overnight.
Other Democrats have stayed mum or defended the president’s decision to give his son a “full and unconditional” pardon, though Rep. Greg Landsman toed a finer line. The Ohio Democrat wrote on X Monday that while "I get it" as a father, "as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback."
Republicans have blasted the decision as hypocritical, given Joe Biden’s promise not to issue such a pardon.
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U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
New York Times, Agriculture Department to Require Testing of U.S. Milk Supply for Bird Flu Virus, Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The new rules call for testing unpasteurized milk from dairies across the country and for farm owners to provide details that would help officials identify and track cases more easily.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new rules on Friday requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus known as H5N1, nearly a year after the virus began circulating through dairy cattle.
Under the new testing strategy, the department will begin testing bulk samples of unpasteurized milk from dairy processing facilities across the country.
Farmers and dairy processors will be required to provide samples of raw milk on request from the government. The rules also require farm owners with infected herds to provide details that would help officials identify more cases and contacts.
The rules are a departure from the voluntary guidance that the department has issued during the outbreak. Many dairy farms have not complied with voluntary testing of milk or of dairy workers, leaving federal officials in the dark about how widely the virus might have spread.
Many experts in the United States and elsewhere, including with the World Health Organization, have sharply criticized the lack of testing of cattle and of people who may be infected with the virus. The virus does not yet spread easily among people, but every untreated infection is an opportunity for it to gain the ability to do so, experts have said.
Politico, Federal judge preserves Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions, Bianca Quilantan, Dec. 6, 2024. A federal judge argues that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.An entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Maryland, is seen.
A federal judge on Friday upheld the U.S. Naval Academy’s consideration of race in admissions arguing that pursuing diversity in the military is a national security interest.
The ruling is an early blow to Students for Fair Admissions’ latest attempt to extend the scope of its Supreme Court win against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that gutted the use of race in college admissions. The ruling also comes while the Naval Academy’s admissions process is underway for its next class.
Judge Richard Bennett emphasized in his ruling that the academy is “distinct from a civilian university” because its mission is to prepare its students to become officers in the military. He also said that while race is considered in admissions, the academy does not have racial quotas or engage in racial balancing, and race is not a determinative factor in its process.
Bennett added that the academy proved its national security interest is measurable and its admissions program is narrowly tailored. He also said the court defers to the executive branch on military personnel decisions.
“The program survives strict scrutiny because the Naval Academy has established a compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Bennett wrote. “Specifically, the Academy has tied its use of race to the realization of an officer corps that represents the country it protects and the people it leads.”
SFFA, an anti-affirmative action group, argued that the Naval Academy has “no justification for using race-based admissions” when using race in admissions is unconstitutional for all other colleges across the country. But the Biden administration has argued the case is nothing like the one against Harvard or UNC because the admissions process and applicant pool are different. The administration also argued SFFA was overreading the ruling in the case against Harvard because the Supreme Court explicitly did not address military academies’ admissions policies.
The high court, in siding with SFFA against Harvard, had said it could not address admissions at the schools because of “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
SFFA President Edward Blum said the group was “disappointed” in the ruling and will appeal the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Politico, Eric Adams doesn’t rule out switch to the GOP: ‘Cancel me,’ Joe Anuta, Dec. 6, 2024. The New York City mayor has been at odds with national Democrats over immigration.Eric Adams walks in a parade.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has taken a soft touch with President-elect Donald Trump, left open the possibility of switching to the Republican Party in a pair of Friday morning interviews.
Adams was a member of the GOP from 1995 through 2002, and was asked during an appearance on NY1 whether he would return to the party. He did not rule out the possibility.
“I’m a part of the American party,” he said in response. “I love this country.”'Cancel me': Adams says he's open to working with Trump border czar
Asked to clarify his comments in a subsequent interview on PIX11, the big-city mayor again left open the question about his future political affiliation.
“No matter what party I’m on or vote on, I’m going to push for American values,” he said, arguing that officials need to move beyond parties altogether and work in concert to solve voters’ problems.
Adams’ comments come on the heels of a presidential race in which the mayor — unlike most of his fellow Democrats — took pains to avoid criticizing Trump. And since Trump’s ascension to the White House, Adams has spoken glowingly about Elon Musk, a confidant of Trump tasked with making government more efficient.
The mayor is set to sit down with Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, next week to talk about plans to deport undocumented immigrants. Adams has said he would support any federal plan that focuses on those undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes.
The mayor’s openness to Trump has outraged local Democrats because of the power the incoming president will have over the five-count criminal case Adams faces in federal court.
Trump has already settled on a nominee to replace the U.S. Attorney prosecuting Adams. And as POLITICO has reported, Trump could assist Adams with the case, including offering him a pardon.
Each has cast criminal charges against themselves as the result of a politicized Justice Department — a notion President Joe Biden bolstered by criticizing the justice system in pardoning his son Hunter Biden. And Trump has expressed empathy toward Adams’ predicament.
When asked Friday if he would run for reelection next year as a Democrat, Adams gave a perfunctory answer.
“That is what I’m proposing to do,” he said. “I’ve been a Democrat for many years and I’m going to run for my reelection as a Democrat.”
And he had a final message for any naysayers.
“Those who don’t like it, they will cancel me,” he said. “I say: Cancel me. I’m for America.”
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Middle East Wars, Reactions
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Storm Another Major City, Ben Hubbard, Dec. 5, 2024. Opposition forces advanced on the city of Hama as their startling offensive moved quickly in the direction of the capital, Damascus.
Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad.
The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.
In a video circulated by the rebel group leading the offensive, their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, jubilantly calls for the rebels to push on toward other Syrian cities, including the capital.
“The people of Homs, prepare yourselves,” he said in the video, which his group said was filmed on Wednesday. “The people of Damascus, the people of Dara’a, the people of Deir al Zour. Victory for all, God willing.” The New York Times could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video or when it was filmed.
The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country, opened voids exploited by jihadist groups, drawn in world powers including Russia and the United States and created a long-term refugee crisis for neighboring countries.
Hama is one of the few major Syrian cities where rebels had yet to seize significant control during the civil war, which began with a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. al-Assad in 2011.
The city’s name is synonymous with one of the most notorious massacres in the Middle East. In 1982, security forces serving the president’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, massacred thousands of people there during an anti-government uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
New York Times, Fighting Rages in Syria as Rebels Advance, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Vivian Yee, Dec. 1, 2024. Forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad control the Aleppo airport and are attacking Hama, local officials and a U.K.-based war monitor say.
New York Times, A Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs, Amanda Taub, Dec. 1, 2024. Hamas's weakened position could leave the territory without any governing institutions, our columnist writes.
New York Times, Police and Protesters Clash in Georgian Capital, Cassandra Vinograd, Dec. 1, 2024. The government’s decision to suspend its bid for European Union membership has driven thousands of protesters onto the streets.
Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia’s capital late Saturday during the third consecutive night of demonstrations over the government’s suspension of its bid to join the European Union.
Thousands of people have rallied in the capital, Tbilisi, since Thursday night after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the country was putting the process of E.U. accession on hold until 2028 and would decline all grants from the bloc. The police have responded with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.
Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday morning that protests overnight had “evolved into violence.” It claimed that protesters “threw pyrotechnics” and “ignited objects” toward police officers and at Parliament, causing a fire to break out. Windows were smashed by “stones and various objects,” the ministry added in a statement, saying that protesters also had damaged protective iron barriers around the building.
More than 100 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, according to the ministry, which also said that several police officers were wounded and that 42 of its employees had been injured since the protests began.
The Associated Press reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters; it was not immediately clear how many protesters suffered injuries.
Georgia has been gripped by political crisis since the disputed victory of the Georgian Dream party in October’s parliamentary elections. The governing party has been pivoting Georgia more toward Russia and China. Georgia’s opposition, which says the election was rigged and has boycotted the new sitting of Parliament, seeks closer ties with the West.
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Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: {December 11 [Human Rights Day History, Implications] Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian, author, Dec. 11, 2024. Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans.
In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”They included the right to participate in art and science.They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.”
Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.—
New York Times, China Bans Rare Mineral Exports to the U.S., David Pierson, Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.
China said on Tuesday that it would begin banning the export of several rare minerals to the United States, an escalation of the tech war between the world’s two biggest powers. The move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology.
The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products, like weaponry and semiconductors.
Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony and so-called superhard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds that they have dual military and civilian uses, China’s Ministry of Commerce said. The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.
China is central to many global supply chains, but it generally refrained from clamping down on its own exports during the first Trump administration, preferring instead to take more limited actions like buying soybeans from Brazil instead of the United States. But senior Chinese officials are worried that President-elect Donald J. Trump plans more stringent policies during his coming term in office.
Mr. Trump has promised to put hefty tariffs on goods from China and further sever the trading relationship between the countries. The move on Tuesday — one of the most aggressive steps China has taken to counter increasingly restrictive policies from the U.S. government — could foreshadow more economic conflict as Mr. Trump enters the White House.
China produces nearly all the world’s supply of critical minerals needed to make advanced technologies such as semiconductors. Beijing has been tightening its grip on the materials to retaliate for clampdowns on American technology exports to China over the past two years.
John Leung at a meeting in 2019 of the Texas Council for the Promotion of China’s Peaceful Reunification. Mr. Leung had embraced Beijing’s causes, including unifying the mainland with Taiwan, the island democracy (David Tang photo).
New York Times, From Chinese Patriot to American Spy: The Unusual Life of John Leung, Mara Hvistendahl, Joy Dong and Adam Goldman, Dec. 3, 2024. He had been hailed by Chinese state media as a model for his efforts to promote Beijing’s interests in the United States. He was in fact an F.B.I. informant.
John Leung was an unlikely spy. In the small Oklahoma town where he lived, people knew him as a former restaurant owner and a father. In Houston, where he often traveled, they knew him as a political organizer in the city’s vibrant Chinese community.
And in China, they knew him as a benevolent patriot, a man who arranged musical performances and embraced official causes like unifying the mainland with Taiwan.
In fact, Mr. Leung was an informant for the F.B.I., gathering intelligence on China, according to two senior United States officials. That work landed him in Chinese custody in 2021, after he traveled to the mainland at the age of 75. He was later sentenced to life in prison, a first in decades for an American accused of espionage.
Mr. Leung was freed last Wednesday in a rare prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing. Six months shy of his 80th birthday, he was put on a plane to the United States with two other Americans who had been detained in China, along with three Uyghurs, members of an ethnic group that faces repression by the Chinese government.
In return, Washington released Xu Yanjun, a convicted Chinese spy who had been serving a 20-year sentence and Ji Chaoqun, 31, who had reported to Mr. Xu and was serving an eight-year sentence. A clemency order for a third Chinese national, Jin Shanlin, who had been in prison for possessing child pornography, was signed on the same day as an order for Mr. Xu. China said Washington also handed over a fugitive.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
Politico, Trump threatens BRICS nations with 100 percent tariff, Ari Hawkins, Nov. 30, 2024. Trump also said: “There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday demanded a group of developing countries commitment to the use of the U.S. dollar as their reserve currency and threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff if they attempt to abandon it.
“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, referring to the acronym for the original group of countries in the bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The geopolitical alliance has since expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
“We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy."
New York Times, Trudeau Flies to Mar-a-Lago to See Trump Amid Tariff Concerns, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Nov. 29, 2024. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is the first G-7 leader to visit since the election. He is under pressure to persuade President-elect Trump to back down from his tariff threat.
The visit makes Mr. Trudeau the first foreign head of government from the Group of 7, a key forum of global coordination consisting of the world’s wealthiest democracies, to visit the president-elect.
Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump were to dine together on Friday evening, one official said, along with a delegation of senior Trump allies poised for top trade and security positions in his new administration.
Mr. Trudeau was accompanied on his visit by Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister of public safety. The Canadian prime minister was expected to stay in the area overnight, but not at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.
The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment, and there was no information released about Mr. Trump’s schedule on Friday.
Mr. Trudeau has been scrambling to formulate a plan to respond to the threat made this week by Mr. Trump to impose a 25 percent tariff unless Mexico and Canada take action to curb the arrival of undocumented migrants and drugs across their borders into the United States.Scott Gottlieb said he’s worried that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS will follow through on past antivaccine rhetoric.
New York Times, Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years, Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate, Nov. 29, 2024. Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him. The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.
“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.
She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.
In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.”
Questions about Mr. Hegseth’s treatment of women have emerged in the weeks since Mr. Trump chose him, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to lead the Pentagon. The issue is expected to be a subject of scrutiny during Senate confirmation hearings.
Washington Post, Trump, Mexican president talk border, migrant caravans amid tariff threats, Mary Beth Sheridan and Niha Masih, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke to President-elect Donald Trump after he threatened to impose tariffs and she hinted at retaliation in a letter.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, left, assured President-elect Donald Trump in a phone call Wednesday that migrant caravans are no longer reaching the U.S.-Mexican border, after Trump’s threat earlier this week to impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from her country if it could not halt irregular migrants and fentanyl from crossing the U.S. border.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
“We discussed the Mexican strategy for the phenomenon of migration, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at our northern border, because we deal with them in Mexico,” Sheinbaum wrote on X after the call.
She described the conversation as “excellent.” Trump, posting about the call on Truth Social, his social media platform, said the conversation was “very productive.”
The conciliatory tone on both sides followed a tense exchange Tuesday: In a letter, Sheinbaum responded angrily to Trump’s tariff warning, threatening tariffs of her own. But they diverged in how they described the conversation.
Trump said Sheinbaum had agreed to “stop Migration through Mexico,” which would mean “effectively closing our Southern Border.” In a second post he said this would be come into effect immediately, prompting another tweet from Sheinbaum in which she said: “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders but to build bridges,” adding that her country would offer assistance to migrants, including caravans, before they could reach the northern border.
New York Times, Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy, Michael Crowley, Nov. 29, 2024. The world is braced for disruption from President-elect Trump, but he may find more common ground with President Biden than many assume.
President-elect Donald J. Trump comes to office with a view of America’s place in the world that is dramatically different from his predecessor’s.
Branding President Biden’s foreign policy as “historically horrible,” Mr. Trump is vowing to reinstate an America First approach that in his first term swept away years of policy consensus and shook U.S. alliances around the world.
He wants friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, may slash U.S. support for Ukraine and has threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He admires foreign autocrats and shows little interest in Mr. Biden’s goal of championing democracy abroad. He is hostile to international organizations and treaties including the United Nations and the Paris climate accord.
But amid the many areas of potential disruption, Mr. Trump will also find plenty of things to like in Mr. Biden’s policies. Beyond the glaring exceptions of Europe and his plans for Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s initial approach could bear a surprising resemblance to the Biden status quo.
One reason is that abrupt foreign policy swerves are rare and difficult to execute, analysts say. America’s military, economic and political power tends to provide a fairly fixed amount of leverage over other countries. Pressure from allies, Congress and the federal bureaucracy push commanders-in-chief toward consensus views.
New York Times, How China Became the World’s Largest Car Exporter, Agnes Chang and Keith Bradsher, Nov. 29, 2024. President-elect Trump has promised to impose new tariffs, but they are unlikely to undercut China’s dominance given its advantages in automaking.
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Trump Legal Cases, Strategies, Allies
Washington Post, Proud Boys’ Tarrio could testify at leak trial of D.C. police officer, Spencer S. Hsu, Peter Hermann and Tom Jackman, Dec. 1, 2024. Lt. Shane Lamond’s contacts with Henry Tarrio fed Proud Boys’ anger at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. His trial spotlights police dealings with the extremist group.
A former D.C. police lieutenant will face a federal trial Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied to investigators about their interactions.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Prosecutors say advance word from Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, deepened anger among the far-right Proud Boys and fueled their instigation of the mob two days later at the Capitol. But Lamond, then head of the force’s intelligence unit, says he may call Tarrio as a defense witness, seeking to convince the judge their talks were within the normal bounds of how a police investigator handles a source.
Such a move would put Lamond in the awkward position of seeking exoneration through a man serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy after being found guilty of plotting violence to stop Congress’s certification of the 2020 election, according to court filings.
Either way, Lamond’s bench trial before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will spotlight D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021. That tumultuous summer and fall, episodes of street violence in Washington marred both racial justice demonstrations prompted by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May and marches by Donald Trump supporters following the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Capitol riot that led to at least five deaths, $3 million in damage and assaults on about 140 officers.
The inner workings of police intelligence gathering stirred controversy, with liberal groups accusing police of favoring right-leaning organizations and crossing the line between eliciting information and appearing to take sides. They pointed to officers who posed for photos with supporters of Trump and who stood back as counterdemonstrators vandalized Black Lives Matter signs or pressed arguments to physical conflict.
Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, left, and former President Donald Trump, shown in a collage via CNN.
Washington Post, Special counsel Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump’s D.C. prosecution, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). The special counsel filed a motion to dismiss Donald Trump’s election-obstruction case without prejudice, which means the case could be revived in the future.
Special counsel Jack Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Monday to dismiss the federal election interference charges against President-elect Donald Trump, putting an end to a lengthy investigation that never made it to trial.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Smith’s motion seeks to dismiss the case without prejudice, acknowledging that Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president. If she does that, it leaves open the possibility that prosecutors could again bring charges once Trump leaves office after his second White House term.
But legal experts said it’s possible that once Trump is in office, he could try to do something that has never been tested before: pardon himself to foreclose the possibility of legal jeopardy in the future.
Trump faces four counts related to conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results. Smith’s filing acknowledges that the Justice Department has longed believed a sitting president cannot stand trial, and says prosecutors conferred with Trump’s attorneys and that they did not oppose the request to dismiss the case.
Russian War Against Ukraine
New York Times, Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, Dec. 9, 2024. The messaging app’s popularity has soared during the war with Russia, leading Ukrainian officials to weigh Telegram’s upsides against its security risks.
In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support.
But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed.
Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings.
“We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.”
New York Times, 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Since Russia Invaded, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 370,000 wounded since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago. It was the first time in months that he had disclosed military casualty figures, a highly sensitive topic in Ukraine, particularly as Kyiv’s forces lose more ground to Russian troops.
The Ukrainian leader’s tally could not be verified independently, and it differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials and military analysts, who have put the number of dead much higher. U.S. officials said in August 2023 that close to 70,000 soldiers had been killed, a figure that has probably increased significantly since then.
Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian journalist with close ties to the army, shared a similar figure last week, adding that 35,000 soldiers were also missing in action.
Mr. Zelensky also noted that about half of the wounded soldiers return to the battlefield after treatment. This suggests that Ukraine has suffered a total of about 230,000 irreplaceable losses, comprising those killed and those permanently incapacitated by injuries.
It was not immediately clear why Mr. Zelensky chose to release casualty figures now, but his statement came just a few hours after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that Ukraine had lost 400,000 soldiers, without specifying the number of dead or wounded. Mr. Trump, who also said that Russia’s casualties were close to 600,000 soldiers, said the high toll of the war underscored the need for an immediate cease-fire and the start of peace negotiations.
Washington Post, Biden surges arms to Ukraine, fearing Trump will halt U.S. aid, Michael Birnbaum, Missy Ryan and Siobhán O'Grady, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president’s Ukraine directive has stirred debate, as some officials worry it will cut too deeply into American stockpiles and jeopardize military needs elsewhere.
The Biden administration is engaged in an 11th-hour scramble to provide Ukraine with billions of dollars in additional weaponry, a massive effort that is generating concerns internally about its potential to erode U.S. stockpiles and sap resources from other flash points, officials said.Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The lame-duck initiative was spurred in part by Russia’s battlefield momentum and a fear among Ukraine’s fiercest advocates that once President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20, there will be an abrupt shift in U.S. policy toward the war.
Yet some in the administration have taken the view that no matter what Washington does, Kyiv’s military will remain outmatched without far more soldiers to sustain its fight. And even as they accelerate arms shipments, there is growing frustration with Ukraine’s leaders, who have resisted U.S. calls to lower the country’s draft age from 25 to 18.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have captured Ukrainian territory at the fastest pace since 2022, causing alarm in Washington. Administration officials say their end-of-term weapons push — accompanied by President Joe Biden’s decision to green-light missile strikes deep into Russian territory and the deployment of antipersonnel land mines long criticized by human rights groups — can give Kyiv some breathing room. But they are urging Ukrainian leaders to use the moment to expand their military beyond the 160,000 recruits Kyiv says it needs
“We’re absolutely going to keep sending Ukraine weapons and equipment. We know that’s vital. But so, too, is manpower at this point,” White House spokesman John Kirby said last week. “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.”
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Ukraine Matters, HORROR Spreads in Russian Force: Ukraine War Map Update, Georgi, Dec. 2, 2024. Crises in Russian conscripts, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine military as impacting Russian war against Ukraine.
New York Times, Russian General Calls U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 4, 2024. In an unusual call, the two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a spokesman said.
Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, shown at left in a 2017 photo, the architect of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, called President Biden’s top military adviser last week and talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries, according to defense and military officials.
The rare phone call took place last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and just six days after Russia launched a new, nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine that Mr. Putin said was in response to Ukraine’s use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.
During the call, General Gerasimov told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia, officials said.
Though the Oreshnik missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chose. The missile struck a Ukraine weapons facility in Dnipro.
Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for General Brown, said in a statement after he was approached by a reporter about the call that “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call.”
The two men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Captain Dorsey said.
The call came at a tense time. Mr. Putin had escalated an already tense showdown with the West, asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
New York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants, Constant Méheut, Nov. 29, 2024. Moscow has increasingly hit critical substations linked to nuclear power plants in an effort to disconnect them. The assaults risk a disaster, experts said.
New York Times, Russia Launches Record Number of Drones in Overnight Attack, Ukraine Says, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). The assault, which the Ukrainian Air Force said involved 188 drones, came as both sides intensify air bombardments.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that it had shot down 76 of the drones in the “massive attack” but that nearly all the rest had disappeared from radar. It was unclear how many of those drones had been intercepted by other means, such as electronic interference, and how many had struck targets.
Some critical infrastructure was hit and residential buildings were damaged in several regions, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Damage to the power grid in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine, caused electricity and water outages, the local authorities said.
New York Times, The Global Profile: As Russia Advances in Ukraine, a Cop Has to Flee City After City, Constant Méheut, Nov. 27, 2024 (print ed.). For Volodymyr Nikulin, being a wartime police officer means aiding evacuees, surviving a shrapnel wound and tackling looters. It also means quickly switching cities when one falls to the invaders.
The belongings of Volodymyr Nikulin, a Ukrainian police officer stationed near the country’s eastern front line, boil down to this: a shrapnel-riddled car, a small sack stuffed with sweaters and pants, and two plastic bags filled with basic food and medicine.
Keeping it simple is essential for Mr. Nikulin, who has had to leave three cities to escape the advance of Russian forces in the country’s eastern Donbas region, losing his home each time. So he has learned to live with little, and to be ready to pack up on short notice.
He has barely bothered to settle into the friend’s apartment he currently occupies in Sloviansk, a city 15 miles from the combat zone, leaving the bedroom untouched and sleeping instead in a small office. The distant rumble of Russian bombing regularly echoes through the walls, a reminder he may soon have to leave everything behind, again.
“Who knows where I’ll be in a few months?” Mr. Nikulin said on a recent morning last month in Sloviansk, acknowledging that Russian forces in the area were creeping closer. He joked that he could at least count on his damaged car, recalling how it had helped him escape several Russian attacks.
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Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
New York Times, India’s Luxury Property Market Is a Boon to Donald Trump’s Business, Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj, Dec. 9, 2024. The Trump Organization has found a warm welcome in the country, where status-hungry home buyers clamor for a famous American brand.
When Donald J. Trump started his first campaign for the presidency, two Trump-branded buildings were going up in India, one in the financial capital of Mumbai and the other nearby in Pune. Before he won in 2016, the Trump Organization expanded its business in India, signing deals in two more big cities.
The day after Mr. Trump’s victory in November, a developer in India told local media about half a dozen new deals. Like the others, Indian companies buy the land, build the high-rises, sell the units and pay a fee to use the Trump name.
These deals are putting India even more squarely in the Trump Organization’s sights. And with Mr. Trump on his way back to the White House, the country is emerging as center stage for potential conflicts of interest.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, it was uncharted territory for a sitting U.S. president to have extensive business interests in foreign countries. During his second term, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
New York Times, How a Criminal With Close Ties to China Became a New York Power Broker, Michael ForsytheBianca PallaroJay Root and Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 9, 2024. John Chan was a Chinatown gangster before remaking himself into a powerful force in New York politics — one closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. On a Monday in March, in the heart of China’s capital, more than 2,000 delegates of a rubber-stamp advisory body to the authoritarian government of President Xi Jinping gathered for their annual meeting.
One mission of the men and women in attendance was to spread the global influence of China’s Communist Party. Of the throngs of party officials, generals and business executives who watched as Mr. Xi took the stage, just 20 people had been invited to represent the country’s vast diaspora, including a single person from the United States: a 69-year-old man from Brooklyn named John Chan.
Mr. Chan’s participation reflected a remarkable proximity to the highest levels of power in China, experts said, and marked him as a person on whom the country’s leaders might call for favors. But it was remarkable, too, because of his position at home: He has operated as a power broker in America’s largest city, with immense sway over an important subset of New York politics.
For years, Mr. Chan has exerted influence over the city’s ethnic Chinese communities — reaching into back rooms and political clubhouses from Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Chinatown to Flushing in Queens — to help sway elections, all without drawing much attention.
But lately, federal investigations into foreign influence efforts have swirled around city and state government in New York. Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with conspiring to accept illegal foreign campaign contributions from Turkey. He has pleaded not guilty. One of his top aides, an Asian affairs director with ties to China, had her homes searched in an investigation by Brooklyn federal prosecutors who have separately brought cases against people they suspect of being Chinese agents.
The same prosecutors recently accused an aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of serving the Chinese government by blocking Taiwanese officials from the governor’s office.
Mr. Chan, now 70, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the investigations. But against the backdrop of recent events, he has stood out nonetheless, both for his overt connections to the Chinese government and for his ability to influence American elections up and down the ballot.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by the Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
More than 180 people were killed in a massacre over the weekend in one of the poorest neighborhood’s of Haiti’s capital, the United Nation’s human rights chief said on Monday.
A leading Haitian human rights group described the killings as the personal vendetta of a gang boss who had been told that witchcraft caused his son’s fatal illness.
The slaughter began on Friday in the Wharf Jeremie section of Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a civil rights group based in the capital.
Older people who practiced voodoo appeared to have been targeted, according to the group. That assessment was backed by another rights organization and a Cité Soleil resident.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told reporters in Geneva that at least 184 people had been killed.
Nearly 130 of those who were killed were over 60 years old, according to the U.N., adding that gang members burned bodies and flung them into the sea.
The brutality of the killings reflect a country enduring an “accelerating spiral into the abyss,” said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert for Haiti.
New York Times, South Korea Bars President From Traveling Abroad, Victoria Kim and Choe Sang-Hun, Dec. 9, 2024. President Yoon Suk Yeol cannot leave as an investigation unfolds into whether he led an insurrection last week when he briefly imposed martial law.
South Korea’s political dysfunction deepened Monday as its Ministry of Justice barred President Yoon Suk Yeol from leaving the country while officials investigate whether his brief declaration of martial law last week amounted to leading an insurrection.
Oh Dong-woon, the chief prosecutor who heads the office for investigating high-ranking officials, told lawmakers that he had sought the travel ban as the office carries out search-and-seizure operations targeting officials who were involved in the martial law order.
No sitting president has ever been arrested in South Korea, and the order adds to the spiraling fallout of Mr. Yoon’s extraordinary move last Tuesday. Since his short-lived martial law declaration, the country has been thrust into a leadership vacuum, and widespread protests have called for his removal.
New York Times, France’s First Big #MeToo Case Goes to Trial, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Dec. 9, 2024. The actress Adèle Haenel has accused the director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She accused him of isolating her during rehearsals and filming. Of grooming her for three years, when on Saturday afternoons he would touch her sexually. When it began, he was 36. She was 12.
Five years ago, the French actress Adèle Haenel shocked the country’s film world when she spoke out about the director Christophe Ruggia, who had cast her as the lead actor in a 2002 film about an incestuous relationship.
On Monday, the case went to court, marking the first major #MeToo accusations in France to proceed to trial. Mr. Ruggia, 59, is charged with aggravated sexual assault against a minor. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison as well as a fine of up to 150,000 euros, about $190,000.
Mr. Ruggia has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying that his relationship with Ms. Haenel was strictly platonic and that he never sexually harassed or touched her inappropriately. His lawyer Fanny Colin had refused to speak publicly before the trial, but had said that Mr. Ruggia intended to plead not guilty.
After Ms. Haenel first told her story to the French investigative outlet Mediapart in 2019, it inspired heated conversations about the country’s film industry and sex with minors, and how the French justice system treats sexual abuse complaints.
At the time, Ms. Haenel was a rising star, praised for fierce yet sensitive performances that had earned her two Césars — the French equivalent of the Oscars. In the United States she rose to fame with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” her final role before she announced her decision to boycott the industry.
New York Times, Desperate Haitians Who Fled to the Dominican Republic Are Being Sent Back in Cages, Hogla Enecia Pérez and Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024. Relations between the neighboring countries have long been frosty. They are now complicated by up to 10,000 deportations a week.
Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars that appear designed to carry livestock line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The vehicles at the Elias Piña border crossing are not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported by the Dominican immigration authorities. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children and some people who have never lived in Haiti.
Since October, more than 71,000 people have been deported to Haiti.
Rose-Mieline Florvil, 24, who lived in the Dominican Republic for less than a year, said immigration agents recently raided her house in Santiago, in the northern part of the country, one day before dawn and said something along the lines of “Black woman, come here.”
“I couldn’t run, because I’m pregnant,” she said.
The extraordinary wave of deportations — Dominican officials say the goal is 10,000 per week — reflects a stringent new immigration policy by a country with a complicated and racially charged history with Haiti.
The two nations share the island of Hispaniola, and the Dominican Republic, the far more prosperous of the two, has sounded increasingly loud alarms about shouldering the burden of what experts say is a failing state next door.
New York Times, Massacre in Haiti’s Capital Leaves Nearly 200 Dead, U.N. Says, Frances Robles, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The killings, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo in a Port-au-Prince slum, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.
More than 180 people were killed in a massacre over the weekend in one of the poorest neighborhood’s of Haiti’s capital, the United Nation’s human rights chief said on Monday.
A leading Haitian human rights group described the killings as the personal vendetta of a gang boss who had been told that witchcraft caused his son’s fatal illness.
The slaughter began on Friday in the Wharf Jeremie section of Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a civil rights group based in the capital.
Older people who practiced voodoo appeared to have been targeted, according to the group. That assessment was backed by another rights organization and a Cité Soleil resident.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told reporters in Geneva that at least 184 people had been killed.
Nearly 130 of those who were killed were over 60 years old, according to the U.N., adding that gang members burned bodies and flung them into the sea.
The brutality of the killings reflect a country enduring an “accelerating spiral into the abyss,” said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert for Haiti.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Loses No-Confidence Vote and Is Expected to Resign, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 4, 2024. Prime Minister Michel Barnier, above, is likely to remain as a caretaker until a replacement is named. But the vote could create a wider opening for the far right.
French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.
France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.
It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.
President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
New York Times, France’s Prime Minister Is on the Block, and Marine Le Pen Holds the Blade, Adam Nossiter, Dec. 1, 2024. The end of Michel Barnier’s government looks inevitable, even imminent, and would add to the country’s political malaise. How long can he last?
The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, (shown above in an AP photo), known for composure on previous scaffolds.
His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.
The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.
Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, left, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.
She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.
Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.
Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.
“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”
But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”
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U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 11, 2024 (print ed.).. During leak investigations, Trump’s DOJ obtained phone and email records of two House Democrats and dozens of congressional staffers.
The Justice Department during Donald Trump’s first term failed to comply with its own procedures when it sought journalists’ phone and email records in leak investigations, according to a DOJ watchdog report released Tuesday.
And the department never conducted any high-level review as it swept up the records of 43 congressional staffers and two Democratic House members, the report found.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, said he also found no evidence that federal prosecutors got express approval from then-Attorney General Bill Barr or told federal courts that the subpoenas were for records of lawmakers and their aides, despite the potential for the probes to intrude on legitimate oversight efforts by Congress.
Obtaining the records of lawmakers and their staff during criminal investigations “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Horowitz wrote in his 91-page report.
Barr told POLITICO in 2021 that he did not know the Justice Department sought any lawmaker’s records in the leak probes, which involved disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page and ties between that campaign and Russia.
Barr declined to be interviewed by Horowitz’s team, but the report says investigators found no indication the issuance of subpoenas for lawmakers or their aides was raised to Barr’s level. Indeed, the report concludes that — at the time — there was no policy in place to require added review of subpoenas and similar demands for information about lawmakers and their staff.
The inspector general launched the review in June 2021 after President Joe Biden took office and press reports revealed that investigators probing leaks of classified information obtained court orders to access phone records of two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Horowitz said the Justice Department’s decision to include Schiff and Swalwell in the investigation was based on a claim from a Democratic staffer who suspected them of having a role in the leak of classified intelligence. The department later determined that the staffer’s contentions lacked any “evidentiary support” and were found to be “of uncertain credibility.”
Horowitz’s report, which does not identify the lawmakers by name, did not turn up indications that the two outspoken Trump critics were targeted because of their political views or affiliation.
“We did not find any evidence of retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors who issued the compulsory process we reviewed,” the report said.
The Justice Department during the Trump administration also faced scrutiny for efforts to access the email account of then-House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel. Patel, who is now Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has long decried the intrusion by Justice Department officials, which he claimed was retaliation for his effort to undermine the investigation of Trump’s 2016 ties to Russia.
Last year, Patel sued top Justice Department officials over the grand jury subpoena, and his suit was dismissed in September by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Patel was one of the 43 congressional staffers whose phone or email logs were pursued by investigators — a number higher than previously known. The review found that 21 of them were affiliated with Democrats, 20 with Republicans and two were in nonpartisan positions. The Justice Department did not seek or obtain the content of their communications, but only details such as which phone numbers or email accounts they were in contact with and when, Horowitz found.
Around the same time the existence of subpoenas aimed at lawmakers was reported, it emerged that prosecutors also sought phone or email records for journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN as part of the same leak investigations.
Barr did approve the subpoenas aimed at reporters, but the department never convened an internal panel that a policy in place at the time said should examine all such requests, the watchdog report found.
“This deviation from the Department’s own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role,” Horowitz wrote.
Biden called the tactic aimed at reporters “simply wrong” and vowed it would not continue under his administration. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo banning the practice and he later formalized that policy in DOJ regulations.
Horowitz was particularly critical of the Justice Department’s handling of gag orders it obtained on companies like Apple and Google. Those orders prevented the firms from telling targets about the demands.
Last year, the Justice Department issued a policy on subpoenas aimed at lawmakers, requiring high-level approvals at DOJ. Horowitz’s report reveals that DOJ quietly updated that policy again in September after getting a draft of the review. Among the latest requirements: Prosecutors must inform the judge or magistrate that the requests target a member of Congress or congressional staff.
The incoming Trump administration is expected to roll back the protections Garland adopted for journalists and perhaps even to eliminate earlier limits Democratic and Republican administrations had put on such demands. Legislation pending in Congress could block those moves, but last month Trump urged Republican lawmakers to “kill” the measure, known as the PRESS Act.
Horowitz said the past and current policies encourage prosecutors to seek lawmakers’ records because getting subpoenas for journalists’ emails or phone records required high-level approval, which has been basically impossible to get since 2021. He noted that even the latest Justice Department policy doesn’t require prosecutors to exhaust other avenues before demanding email and phone providers turn over lawmakers’ records.
Most of the leaks did not result in criminal charges, but one staffer swept up in one round of phone and email records searches — Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe — pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his dealings with journalists. A judge sentenced Wolfe to two months in prison.
Another long-awaited report is expected from Horowitz’s office in the coming days: a review of the Justice Department’s actions in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. That review has been pending for nearly four years. Horowitz recently acknowledged that work on it was frozen for about two years while prosecutors pursued some of the most serious criminal cases stemming from the attack.
Horowitz’s release of the long-awaited investigations comes as Horowitz and other inspectors general across the government face the possibility of being removed or even fired by the incoming Trump administration. Some Trump allies have urged him to install his own appointees in the independent watchdog roles at federal agencies, although traditionally most inspectors general have not resigned during a change of administration or of partisan control of the White House.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have vowed to oppose any attempt by Trump to oust the experienced watchdogs.
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manchin and Welch Introduce Amendment for SCOTUS Term Limits, Troy Matthews Dec 10, 2024. 70% of Americans favor ending lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices.
Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices. The move is aimed at restoring confidence in the Court, as the approval rating for SCOTUS is at its lowest point in history, with only 16% of Americans reporting "a great deal of confidence" in the highest Court.
The Manchin-Welch amendment would impose single 18-year, non-renewable terms for Supreme Court justices. Each 18-year term would be staggered every two years. Current justices will not be held to term limits, but blocks of 18-year terms will begin to cycle every two years once the amendment is ratified. When a current justice retires, their replacement will be assigned the remainder of the current 18-year block, until every justice on the Court is term limited.
Eventually, every two years there will be a new Supreme Court vacancy to be filled by the current President.
"I’m proud to introduce this legislation with Senator Welch that would establish 18-year term limits for justices of the United States Supreme Court. The current lifetime appointment structure is broken and fuels polarizing confirmation battles and political posturing that has eroded public confidence in the highest court in our land," Manchin, the outgoing senator from West Virginia said.
"Our amendment maintains that there shall never be more than nine justices and would gradually create regular vacancies on the Court, allowing the president to appoint a new justice every two years with the advice and consent of the United States Senate. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join our legislation to help restore faith in our judicial system."
"Taking action to restore public trust in our nation’s most powerful Court is as urgent as it is necessary. Setting term limits for Supreme Court justices will cut down on political gamesmanship, and is commonsense reform supported by a majority of Americans," said Welch. "I’m proud to lead this effort with Senator Manchin that will restore Americans’ faith in our judicial system."
Medias Touch Network, Commentary: Manhattan Prosecutors Oppose Dismissing Trump's Criminal Case, Aaron Parnas Dec 10, 2024. Prosecutors are pressing forward with the case even with Trump becoming President again.
This afternoon, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has filed an opposition to Donald Trump's request to immediately vacate the guilty verdicts against him and to dismiss the criminal case given the results of the November 5th election. Prosecutors had been considering whether to make this move for several weeks, and have officially decided to oppose any dismissal on several grounds.
First, prosecutors argue that the Manhattan court should reject Trump's motion to immediately dismiss the case given the fact that he has not yet been sworn in and does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution while President-elect.
The opposition goes on to highlight how even after he is sworn into office, the case should not be dismissed because the temporary immunity Trump will enjoy over the next four years does not justify wiping out the jury's verdict, especially as Trump's team does not dispute that the 34 felonies he was convicted of deal with purely unofficial conduct.
Prosecutors note that "at most, [Trump] should receive temporary accommodations during his presidency to prevent this criminal case form meaningfully interfering with his official decision-making."
Prosecutors listed several alternative remedies to a complete dismissal including a stay of proceedings during his term in office if judgment is not entered before January 20th. The decision will now ultimately be up to Justice Merchan who will decide whether or not to dismiss the criminal charges against Trump.
New York Times, In Penny Verdict, a Flashpoint in the Debate Over Crime and Mental Illness, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024. A New York jury acquitted Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely. Republican politicians hailed the verdict. But some New Yorkers found it deeply disturbing.
Outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Monday, a scuffle broke out among demonstrators, their chants amplified over bullhorns.
On one side were supporters of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was charged with fatally choking a fellow subway rider, Jordan Neely, on an uptown F train last year. They held signs, including one that said, “Daniel Penny deserves a prize not a prison.” On the other side were people protesting on behalf of Mr. Neely. Upset, they grabbed a sign and ripped it up.
As the sides exchanged barbs and police officers erected a barrier to separate them, inside the courthouse 12 New Yorkers were coming to a unanimous decision. Mr. Penny, they concluded, was not guilty.
If the death of Mr. Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who had struggled with mental health problems, had left New Yorkers unnerved and divided, the verdict quickly became yet another flashpoint in the nation’s debate over how best to address issues of crime and justice, homelessness and mental illness.
Republican political figures including Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani praised the jury and criticized the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for pursuing the case.
“Thank God justice was done in this case,” Mr. Vance said on social media. “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Penny a hero who deserved a medal.
But in New York, some found the verdict deeply troubling. “This decision highlights a deep-seated societal discomfort with unhoused individuals in need of support, and effectively green-lights ‘vigilante justice’ against the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” leaders of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus said in a statement.
Washington Post, Appeals court upholds nationwide TikTok ban-or-sale law, Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-Strong, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.
TikTok had argued to the three-judge panel, unsuccessfully, that the ban must be struck down for infringement on the free speech rights of the app’s users and owners under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” the court wrote in its opinion.
TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to take up the case before the sale deadline ends Jan. 19, or to first request that all the judges on the appeals court review the panel’s decision.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. He criticized the ban-or-sale law as being based on “inaccurate” information and said it was “resulting in the outright censorship of the American people.”
The appeals court on Friday said years-long bipartisan investigations into the app, and the government’s willingness to consider TikTok’s alternatives, weighed in favor of the law.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for a three-judge panel. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”
However, the judges said they rejected the government’s “ambitious argument” that the law did not “implicate the First Amendment at all,” saying that it would impose a “disproportionate burden on TikTok, an entity engaged in expressive activity.” The government had suggested that TikTok’s ownership by a foreign company left it without First Amendment rights, despite it having roughly 170 million U.S. accounts.
The D.C. Court of Appeals made the expedited decision ahead of the ban’s looming Jan. 19 deadline, in a high-profile case pitting national security concerns against free speech.By Eva Dou, Drew Harwell and Cristiano Lima-StrongUpdated 45 minutes ag
The decision sets up a potential showdown with President-elect Donald Trump. Having backed a ban during his first term in the White House, he is expected to try to halt it, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
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Jose Ibarra listens through an interpreter during his trial at Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, Nov. 20, 2024, in Athens, Ga. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution pool photo by Hyosub Shin via Associated Press).
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Sex Assault, Trafficking, #MeToo, Abortion, Women's Health
New York Times, Leader of Polygamist Sect in Arizona Gets 50 Years in Child Sex Ring Case, Michael Levenson, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., right, who claimed to have more than 20 “wives” including 10 “brides” under 18, pleaded guilty in April to two felony conspiracy charges.
The self-proclaimed leader of a polygamist sect in Arizona who amassed more than 20 “wives,” including 10 “brides” under 18, was sentenced on Monday to 50 years in prison in connection with what prosecutors described as an interstate child sexual abuse ring, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.
Federal prosecutors said that the man, Samuel R. Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, Ariz., led a group that victimized girls as young as 9.
Using his status as a self-declared prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mr. Bateman forced his child “brides” to participate in sexual activities with him and with other adult men and women, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Mr. Penny choked Mr. Neely in a minutes-long struggle on the floor of a New York subway car. The case reflected the pathologies of post-pandemic New York.
Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked a fellow subway rider on an uptown F train last year, was acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide on Monday, ending a case that had come to exemplify New York City’s post-pandemic struggles.
The jurors decided that Mr. Penny’s actions were not criminal when he held the rider, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold as the two men struggled on the floor of a subway car on May 1, 2023. Mr. Neely, who was homeless and had a history of mental illness, had strode through the subway car that afternoon, yelling at passengers and frightening them, according to witnesses.
After the forewoman announced the verdict, the courtroom erupted, with some people cheering the outcome and others responding with anger.
Upon hearing the words “not guilty,” Mr. Penny’s lawyer, Thomas A. Kenniff, slapped his palm on the defense table and turned to hug Mr. Penny, who had a large grin on his face. Another of his lawyers, Steven Raiser, stood and kissed his client on the cheek.
Mr. Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, lashed out at supporters of Mr. Penny, and the judge asked him to leave the room.
The jurors had spent more than three days trying to come to a unanimous decision on whether Mr. Penny, 26, was guilty of manslaughter — a higher charge — in the death of Mr. Neely, 30. On Friday, the jurors sent two notes to the judge overseeing the trial saying that they had deadlocked.
After the jurors — seven women and five men — sent the first note that morning, the judge, Maxwell T. Wiley, instructed them to resume their deliberations. When the jurors sent the second note in the afternoon, telling Justice Wiley that they were still unable to reach an agreement, he granted the prosecution’s request to dismiss the charge. He sent the jurors home for the weekend, telling them to prepare to begin deliberating on the lesser charge, criminally negligent homicide, on Monday. Ultimately, they decided to acquit Mr. Penny.
The decision was a defeat for the office of Alvin L. Bragg, left, Manhattan’s district attorney. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bragg said that the jury “has now spoken.”
“We deeply respect the jury process and we respect their verdict,” he said.
In his statement, Mr. Bragg also noted that prosecutors and their families had been “besieged with hate and threats — on social media, by phone and over email” throughout the trial. “Simply put, this is unacceptable, and everyone, no matter your opinion on this case, should condemn it,” he said.
New York Times, Youth Pastor Is Charged With Nearly 200 Sex Crimes Going Back Decades, Billy Witz, Nov. 27, 2024. Many of the victims were the West Virginia pastor’s relatives, the police said, including five nieces who filed a complaint against him in 2004.
The state police in West Virginia are continuing to investigate a longtime youth pastor who has now been charged with nearly 200 counts of sexual abuse crimes involving children, many of them his relatives, dating back more than three decades.
The pastor, John W. Radcliff II, was arrested a second time last week after officers investigating a complaint filed against him in September revisited a case from 2004, when five of Mr. Radcliff’s nieces told the police that he had abused them.
“I have no idea what happened, but we never saw charges pressed,” said one niece, Carla Rinehart, whose mother is Mr. Radcliff’s sister.
Ms. Rinehart, 38, said that growing up, she did not know that her relatives had endured the same type of abuse that she says her uncle had committed against her. But when Ms. Rinehart was hospitalized at 17 after a mental breakdown, she began to share her story with family members. Her sister recounted a similar experience at the time, and then their cousins did the same.
A local TV station, citing court documents in Lewis County, W.Va., on the 2004 case, reported that Mr. Radcliff had forced the girls to perform sexual acts on him from 1987 to 1996, and sexually assaulted them in other ways until they were about 12. The victims are all now adults, the news outlet reported.
Lewis is one of four counties where Mr. Radcliff has been charged with abuse.
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U.S. Immigration
Washington Post, Immigration: Hundreds more migrants have died in Rio Grande crossings than U.S., Mexico reported, Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramirez, Dec. 8, 2024. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported.
And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of the 1.4 million people in the U.S. immigration system who have pending deportation orders cannot be sent back to their home countries, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, posing one of several looming obstacles to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge for a mass removal campaign.
Some orders can’t be carried out because the would-be deportee’s home country won’t take them or limits cooperation with ICE. Others identified for deportation are serving prison terms, or have received a reprieve or deferral from an immigration judge, due to a medical condition, a credible persecution threat or another extenuating factor.
An array of other logistical and legal impediments also could constrain mass deportations, according to current and former ICE officials.
Trump promises to brush aside hurdles and mount a campaign modeled after the harsh roundups of the Eisenhower administration, when the U.S. government expelled hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to Mexico.
“We will begin — and we have no choice — the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said on the campaign trail.
Trump’s aides describe the anticipated campaign as an enforcement blitz that will leverage the power and resources of the U.S. military to roll back the effect of record numbers of illegal border crossings under President Joe Biden. Criminals and those with outstanding deportation orders will be the administration’s priority as of Trump’s inauguration, Jan. 20, aides say.
Washington Post, Youngkin: Jordanians ‘crashed’ Quantico. Feds: It was an Amazon delivery, Laura Vozzella and Salvador Rizzo, Dec. 8, 2024. Virginia’s governor, shown above in a file photo, has used the arrest of two undocumented men who misunderstood directions to stop at a check-in station to inflame fears over illegal immigration.
There are two versions of a May 3 incident at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia involving two Jordanian men, both undocumented immigrants, who pulled up to the entrance in a box truck.
There’s the mundane account given by federal prosecutors about some confusion over where to check in during an Amazon delivery stop. And there’s the one that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has been telling for the past six months that makes it sound like two foreigners stormed the gates at the fortified military installation.
“We have folks that have crashed the — illegal immigrants — that have crashed the front gate at Quantico in a box truck, trying to gain access to Quantico,” Youngkin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Oct. 14 in one of multiple national television appearances — plus speeches at the National Republican Convention and a rally in Virginia with then-Republican nominee Donald Trump — where he has invoked the episode to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies.
Federal prosecutors — who initially charged the pair with misdemeanor trespassing, but later dropped those charges — say that, while the Jordanians were in the country illegally and are in the process of being deported, they did not crash the gate or intend to do any harm at Quantico.
Mohammad Dabous, working for an Amazon subcontractor, was trying to make a delivery to the post office in the town of Quantico, which can only be accessed through the gates of the military base, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Amico, who handled the case, said in a court filing. Hasan Hamdan was a passenger in the truck.
“Marine Corps … agents spoke with Mr. Dabous’s supervisor at the subcontractor delivery company, who confirmed Mr. Dabous’s employment and verified the scheduled authorized delivery to the Northern Virginia town of Quantico on May 3, 2024,” Amico wrote in a motion filed Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The same filing noted that neither man had any known terrorist links. “The FBI has not identified any national security concerns regarding either defendant,” wrote Amico, who also said he consulted the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Neither defendant is on the watch list.”
Quantico officials issued Dabous and Hamdan citations for trespassing, a petty offense punishable by a maximum six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. They then turned the pair over to ICE because of their immigration status. The men were later released on bond from ICE custody.
The U.S. attorney’s office dropped the charges Oct. 3, but the deportation proceedings continue.
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U.S. Jobs, Investment, Economy, Pensions
The Hill, Powell calls for ‘change’ in ‘unsustainable’ fiscal path, Taylor Giorno, Dec. 4, 2024. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday that the U.S. is on an “unsustainable” fiscal path and called for a course correction days after the national debt topped $36 trillion for the first time ever.
New York Times, Trump Tax Cuts Won’t Help the Economy Grow, Budget Office Finds, Andrew Duehren, Dec. 4, 2024. A larger debt and higher interest rates would cancel out the boost from keeping individual taxes lower, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found.
New York Times, Opinion: Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America, Paul Krugman, right, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). It’s late 2025, and Donald Trump has done what he said he would do: impose high tariffs — taxes on imports — on goods coming from abroad, with extremely high tariffs on imports from China. These tariffs have had exactly the effect many economists predicted, although Trump insisted otherwise: higher prices for American buyers.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
Well, U.S. trade law gives the executive branch broad discretion in tariff-setting, including the ability to grant exemptions in special cases. So you apply for one of those exemptions. Will your request be granted?
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
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Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, E.P.A. Bans Cancer-Causing Chemicals Used in Dry Cleaning, Hiroko Tabuchi, Dec. 9, 2024. The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday banned two solvents found in everyday products that can cause cancer and other serious diseases. It was a move long sought by environmental and health advocates, even as they braced for what could be a wave of deregulation by the incoming Trump administration.
For decades, communities close to factories, airports, dry cleaners and other sites have lived with the consequences of exposure to trichloroethylene, or TCE, a toxic chemical used in cleaners, spot removers, lubricants and glue.
TCE is known to cause liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and to damage the nervous and immune systems. It has been found in drinking water nationwide and was the subject of a 1995 book that became a movie, “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. The E.P.A. is banning all uses of the chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was overhauled in 2016 to give the agency greater authority to regulate harmful chemicals.
The E.P.A. also banned all consumer uses of perchloroethylene, used in dry-cleaning and in automotive-care products. Though it is less harmful than TCE, the solvent, also called Perc, can cause liver, kidney, brain and testicular cancer, and can damage kidneys, the liver and the immune system.
The E.P.A.’s ban of Perc still allows for a range of industrial uses, including in aviation and defense, with the provision that strict rules must be in place to protect workers. Both bans were initially proposed in 2023.
New York Times, Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says, Raymond Zhong, Dec. 9, 2024. Global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.
From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”
Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.
The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.
Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.
Many of these places are major food producers, such as Argentina, Spain and the Black Sea region, said Narcisa Pricope, one of the report’s authors and a land systems scientist at Mississippi State University. Others, like South Sudan, are vulnerable to conflict and political instability.
The aridity crisis is unfolding “in our lifetime,” Dr. Pricope said. “This is affecting our children.”
Worldwide in recent years, nearly 400,000 square miles of the planet’s healthy and productive land has become degraded annually. Under the 30-year-old U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, countries committed themselves to halting the devastation.
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, married for the fifth time in August 20124, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday. Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp. The couple announced their engagement in March.
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Murdoch wanted to change the terms of his family’s trust to ensure that his son Lachlan would be his successor upon his death.
Rupert Murdoch, right, has faced a setback in his bid to cement his son Lachlan’s future control of his media empire, after a Nevada probate commissioner rejected his bid to change his family’s trust, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
Murdoch, 93, initiated the effort to change the terms of the trust last year to preserve the conservative orientation of his sprawling media empire, which includes U.S. businesses Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. As first reported by the New York Times this summer, the elder Murdoch was concerned that a “lack of consensus” among his three other older children would have financial consequences for the company.
But probate commissioner Edmund “Joe” Gorman Jr. ruled against the effort, deeming it a “carefully crafted charade,” the New York Times reported on Monday afternoon. The case will now move to a district judge who could choose to affirm the recommendation, deny it or send it back for additional inquiry.
“We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members,” a spokesperson representing Prudence, Elisabeth and James Murdoch told The Washington Post in a statement.
The three siblings strongly objected to their father’s effort, which set off the current legal battle. The trust had been set up as part of divorce proceedings between Murdoch and his second wife, the former Anna Murdoch Mann.
Lachlan is ideologically aligned with his father and would be expected to continue the editorial positioning that has made the company successful. There was concern that his three siblings could choose to reorient the company in a more moderate direction after their father’s passing. James, in particular, has become a vocal supporter of liberal causes since he formally exited his father’s media company in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” But the three other siblings have not publicly expressed any desire to replace Lachlan or to change the company’s editorial direction.
Lachlan, 53, who has flitted in and out of the Murdoch media fold, became his father’s most likely successor after he was named chairman and CEO of the Fox Corporation in 2019. His grasp on that position only tightened after his father announced last fall that he would step down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., which includes the company’s newspaper and publishing portfolio.
Lachlan was the only one of the patriarch’s four older children who attended their father’s fifth wedding in June to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, a sign of the deep-seated family tensions at play.
The drama in Nevada was almost entirely hidden from the public and the media by dint of the commissioner, who determined that the trust battle was a private matter, rejecting efforts by a coalition of media companies — including The Post — to open up the case. Sealed hearings in the case were held in September. While no decisions in the case have been made public, the online docket now shows the status of the case to be “pending inactive.”
The elder Murdoch has been backed in his legal efforts by William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Previous attempts at a settlement that would have resolved the dispute without a court case were unsuccessful, though they could continue.
Murdoch’s company is still facing a host of legal challenges, including a defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic and shareholder lawsuits alleging that Fox executives were deficient in preventing defamatory content from airing on the network.
Washington Post, Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion, Kim Bellware and Niha Masih, Dec. 11, 2024. Alex Jones (shown above in a 2020 file photo) was forced to sell the platform to help pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which he called a “hoax.”
A federal bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale of Alex Jones’s Infowars platform to satirical news website the Onion, ruling Tuesday that the November court-ordered auction of Jones’s website lacked transparency.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
The decision capped a two-day hearing that stretched late into the night in U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s Houston courtroom.
“I don’t think anyone acted in bad faith here. I think everyone was trying to buy an asset and put their best foot forward and play by the rules,” Lopez said as he delivered his decision. The judge took issue with the lack of transparency from the sealed bidding process selected by the court-appointed trustee Christopher Murray, who was overseeing the sale of Jones’s assets. The judge added that he was troubled that the process, however well intended, “did not maximize value in any way, based on the record before me.”
“I don’t think it was enough money,” Lopez said of the winning bid, adding that he did not think the backup bid was high enough, either.
Lopez said he does not want another complex auction, but he deferred to Murray on how to proceed with fetching top dollar for Jones’s assets.
Global Tetrahedron, the Onion’s parent company, was named the winning bidder of a Nov. 13 auction to acquire Infowars. The platform was among the assets Jones was forced to sell to help pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting who sued for defamation after Jones claimed the massacre was a “hoax.”
Minutes after the verdict, Jones appeared live on X, telling more than 440,000 viewers: “A judge followed the law.”
In a statement, the Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, expressed disappointment that the ruling did not clear a path forward for any bidder, but he indicated it would continue its efforts toward acquiring Infowars. “It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome,” the statement said.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut families, said in a statement they were disappointed with Lopez’s ruling but would not abandon their fight to hold Jones accountable.
“This decision doesn’t change the fact that, soon, Alex Jones will begin to pay his debt to these families and he will continue doing so for as long as it takes,” Mattei said.
Lopez paused the Onion’s acquisition of Infowars a day after the auction. Jones, on air and in court filings, had decried the process as “rigged.”Skip to end of carouselThe Style sectionStyle is where The Washington Post explains what’s happening on the front lines of culture — including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion — with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, click here.End of carousel
First United American Companies (FUAC), a group affiliated with Jones’s supplements business that was the runner-up bidder, quickly challenged the validity of the Onion’s bid, drawing concerns from Lopez about the transparency of the bidding process.
FUAC’s $3.5 million bid was about double the Onion’s bid of $1.75 million cash, plus credit from some of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs, according to court documents. Plaintiffs from the Connecticut-based defamation suit against Jones agreed to forgo a portion of their award to boost the Onion’s bid, which would raise the overall payout to Sandy Hook families who were plaintiffs in a Texas-based suit against Jones.
FUAC argued that its higher cash bid should have won the auction and said the auction’s court-appointed trustee improperly selected the Onion’s bid.
National Public Radio (NPR), Top 'Washington Post' editor kills article on deputy's departure, David Folkenflik, Dec. 9, 2024. Washington Post Managing Editor Matea Gold, a veteran newsroom leader, is headed to the rival New York Times. Acting Post Executive Editor Matt Murray blocked the publication of a story about her decision to leave, questioning why the paper should cover itself. Her departure has shaken colleagues and caps a year of crises for the Post involving its leadership and its finances.
As the Washington Post newsroom awaits the appointment of a new top editor, its acting news chief intervened to block an article about the departure of its second-highest-ranking editor, a contender for the position, according to several people with knowledge of events.
Managing Editor Matea Gold, a veteran of 11-and-a-half years at the Post who has built up deep loyalty among staffers, had been herself considered a top internal candidate to run the newsroom. According to associates, it became clear that Post Publisher and Chief Executive Will Lewis was poised to pass over her.
She is instead headed to be second-highest ranking leader of the New York Times Washington bureau, as the Times announced today.
The internal tensions over the selection of the Post's new executive editor are capping a series of crises for Lewis, including tensions over the paper's reporting on its own issues.The Washington Post's new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, announced a newsroom leadership shakeup during a staff meeting on Monday.The 'Washington Post' in crisis'Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first timeActing editor says Post should not report on itself
On Saturday, Acting Executive Editor Matt Murray told editors that the paper should not cover itself, according to four people with knowledge.
This is not how the Post has handled past developments about itself or its leaders. Last year, it covered the retirement of Senior Managing Editor Cameron Barr and in 2015, it published an article about Managing Editor Kevin Merida's decision to leave for ESPN.
Murray did not respond to NPR's request for comment and Gold declined comment.
NPR spoke to nine people with ties to the Post for this article. They requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive internal matters at the paper.
A Washington Post Co. spokesperson declined to answer questions for this story, but said, "The Washington Post newsroom is editorially independent and operates in service of our community and national interest."
Murray previously worked under Lewis at the Wall Street Journal, where Lewis served as publisher and chief executive from 2014 to 2020.Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Rupert Murdoch's U.K. tabloids hacked into his voicemails and documents to learn private information about him and his family. A 2011 police memo shows Washington Post CEO Will Lewis, then working for Murdoch, cited a security threat involving Brown as a reason to delete company emails.The 'Washington Post' in crisisFormer U.K. Prime Minister says Bezos should reconsider 'Washington Post' publisher
Gold is highly regarded inside the Post newsroom, especially as a stabilizing figure. In a social media post, Associate Editor and columnist Karen Tumulty called Gold "deeply respected and deeply beloved" there. Six colleagues tell NPR they believe Lewis's decision not to choose Gold helped push her into the arms of its leading competitor, compounding a sense of frustration internally.
Owner Jeff Bezos blocked 'The Washington Post' from endorsing a presidential candidate less than two weeks before Election Day. The editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris.
Gold was not granted an interview with Bezos for the top position, according to colleagues. Beyond Murray, Clifford Levy, deputy publisher of the New York Times Co., Wirecutter and Athletic sites is believed to be in contention for the editor's job.
Politico, Matt Gaetz gets his own TV show on OAN, Kimberly Leonard, Dec. 10, 2024. Gaetz, who was President-elect Donald Trump's original pick to be attorney general, has been teasing his next move for weeks.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has a found an outlet for his sharp tongue and yearning for the limelight: far-right broadcaster One America News Network.
The former lawmaker from Florida's Panhandle and MAGA provocateur will soon host his own hourlong political talk show on OAN, which heavily supports President-elect Donald Trump. OAN promoted the show in a series of graphics on Tuesday and called Gaetz a "powerhouse" in a release, describing the hire as a "mega MAGA investment" that will air weeknights at 9 p.m.
It is yet another high-profile, public platform for Gaetz, a firebrand Republican who made no shortage of enemies in the House before President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate him to be attorney general. Gaetz immediately resigned from the House after Trump's announcement, a move that also came just before the House Ethics Committee planned to meet regarding a probe into allegations against him regarding illegal drug use and sex with a 17-year-old.
New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 10, 2024 (print ed.). This is my final column for The New York Times, where I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. I’m retiring from The Times, not the world, so I’ll still be expressing my views in other places. But this does seem like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed over these past 25 years.
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.
In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration — toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren’t widely shared.
Of course, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. There was, for example, already a fair bit of proto-QAnon-type conspiracy theorizing and even instances of domestic terrorism in America during the Clinton years. There were financial crises in Asia, which some of us saw as a potential harbinger of things to come; I published a 1999 book titled “The Return of Depression Economics,” arguing that similar things could happen here; I put out a revised edition a decade later, when they did.
Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper.
Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.
New York Times, Opinion: Paul Krugman retires as Times columnist, Kathleen Kingsbury (New York Times opinion editor), Dec. 6, 2024. After nearly 25 years as an Opinion columnist, Paul is signing off.
I want to take you back to Jan. 2, 2000, a day when Y2K was in the rearview mirror and the dot-com bubble burst was just around the corner, when the Dow stood at a mighty 11,500 and a New York Times Opinion columnist debuted on the scene with the first of many prescient arguments and ideas about economics and government.
“Beginnings are always difficult: Even the most tough-minded writer finds it hard to avoid portentousness,” Paul Krugman wrote in his inaugural column nearly 25 years ago. “And since this is a quadruple beginning (new year, new century, new millennium and, for me, new column), I won’t even try. What follows are some broad opening-night thoughts about the world economy.”
That lede and the column were signature Krugman: The authoritative voice. The lively writing. The direct style. The clear hand guiding readers through a thicket of policy, data and trade-offs. The big ideas — in that column, they were about the First Global Economy and the Second Global Economy and how the interplay of political and economic questions would shape life worldwide in the 21st century. In little time, Paul became an essential read in Opinion, helping countless readers become more fluent in and mindful of how trade, taxes, technology, the markets, labor and capital intersected with political leadership, ideology and partisanship to shape the lives of people across America and the world.
Beginnings are always difficult, as Paul said, and so are endings. I’m writing to let you know that he has decided to retire from The Times at the end of the year. He plans to write a final column soon — though he will forever be a friend of Opinion.
Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on the big fights, grappled with policy deeply and seriously, held the powerful to account and spoke hard truths — sometimes as a lonely voice arguing unfashionable positions. He was a strong, clear, early opponent of the American invasion of Iraq and spent years shining a light on the lies and consequences involved with that war. He was a principled critic of George W. Bush’s leadership and many of his policy priorities and, with lucid prose, helped readers understand the implications of the Bush tax cuts and his proposed privatization of Social Security. And Paul was plenty tough on Bush’s successor, too: Barack Obama hadn’t even taken office in 2009 when Paul memorably took apart the president-elect’s prescription for the Great Recession: “The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat,” Paul wrote. “In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed.”
And through the Trump era and the Biden presidency, Paul was ever-sharp about the critical stakes facing the country, not least the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump and how his plans could radically harm the economy. A few weeks before this year’s election, Paul took a deep dive into Trump’s tariff plans, laying out for readers in clear and urgent writing why his economic policy ideas could do enormous damage to American society. He ended the essay with a classic Krugman kicker, where he summarized the cons of Trump’s tariffs in one graf and then wrote in the final graf, “Pros: I can’t think of any.”
Nick Fox, one of Paul’s editors over the years, said: “Twenty-five years ago, who could have imagined that a column by an expert in economics (yawn!) would become addictive for millions of Americans? Paul made the complex clear, cut through double talk and obfuscation and wrote in the voice of a tough but beloved teacher. It was remarkable that he could write so enjoyably and insightfully as many as four times a week.”
Ezra Klein, who has had his fellow Opinion columnist on his podcast over the years, said: “I don’t know that there’s anyone alive I have read more words from than Paul Krugman. A beacon of clear, moral and inventive analysis for decades now. What a gift his work has been.”
Among the many things we appreciate about Paul is that he’s always been game to engage with readers. Liriel Higa, Opinion’s Audience director, put it this way: “Despite being a Nobel winner, Paul was incredibly accessible. He responded to readers in comments on his articles; he touted the benefits of air fryers in an Opinion TikTok; he loved his cats.”
And on that Nobel: It really has been an honor and a privilege to work with someone of Paul’s stature but also an inspiration to see the deep care and strong work ethic that he devotes to his journalism.
Please join me in congratulating our colleague for so many great columns and a ride at The Times worthy of the best bull market. We wish you all the best, Paul.
Washington Post, Colleges scramble to shield programs amid growing hostility from GOP, Susan Svrluga, Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, Dec. 9, 2024. Endowments, research funding and DEI initiatives are expected to be among many possible targets of the incoming Trump administration.
For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.
Now that rift has become a rupture.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, many colleges are preparing for threats to research funding, endowments, diversity efforts, student financial aid, visas for foreign students and more.
“I think it’s an extremely worrisome time for universities, extremely so,” said L. Rafael Reif, the president emeritus of MIT.
It’s a dizzying and upsetting place for universities which had become accustomed to reverence for their contributions to society and now find themselves tarred as “the enemy.” The shift is not just political, but cultural, with a hardening skepticism of expertise and academia, rather than faith in research, science and scholarship.
New York Times, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion, Ben Sisario, Dec. 9, 2024. Over 21 months, the pop superstar’s culture-dominating stage show doubled the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures.
For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.
Now we know exactly how big.
Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.
Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.
The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.
The Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin? Thom Hartmann, right, The Best of the Rest of the News.
Russian media is bragging that Tucker Carlson could be shuttling secret messages between Trump and Putin.
This is the role that was apparently played during the last Trump administration by Senator Rand Paul. Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort. Senator Paul then often took Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Paul responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. Most concerning, ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent.”
Now it’s apparently Carlson’s turn. “While the former Fox host is positioning himself as a dove of peace, toiling to prevent a nuclear war, Putin’s acolytes say he is also acting as a carrier pigeon for the Russian president and privately delivering his messages to Trump,” wrote Russian media expert Julia Davis for The Daily Beast.
Davis reports that a Russian expert on American politics, Malek Dudakov, was blunt in an appearance on Russian TV. “What is important here is that the man [Tucker Carlson] who came to talk to [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov spent the last six months shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump. Obviously, he didn’t just come to conduct an interview. He has something to say. Apparently, he has a message that he is bringing.”
It gets worse, and appears to be an echo of the message from Russia right after Trump’s election was declared in November when the Kremlin released nudie pictures of Trump’s wife Melania by way of threatening Trump and then, a day later, issued a statement that, “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
On the Russian TV show this week, Dudakov bragged, “Yes, we currently see quite a few similar emissaries [to Tucker]. It seems Viktor Orbán is again planning to meet with Trump, and after that, he may come to Russia once again. There are people who are willing to pass messages back and forth, indirectly. Trump will understand what his plan is only after he personally meets with Putin.”
Where is America’s mainstream media on reporting this stuff that’s right out there in public to see?!? And if the Kremlin is openly boasting that Trump must dance to Putin’s tune, America’s intelligence agencies must be freaking out. Which makes Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who’s been taking Putin’s side on various issues for years, a lot easier to understand. Trump must live in terror of Putin…and apparently our media does, too…
— Will Joe pardon “the enemy within”? Andy Borowitz joked yesterday in his Substack newsletter that President Biden has issued a blanket pardon for all 70+ million Democratic voters except for “Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, adding, ‘They’re on their own now.’”
The humor references a very real discussion that’s going on in the Biden White House right now, according to some press reports. Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon for Vietnam War resisters, similar to Lincoln’s blanket pardon of former Confederate soldiers; could Biden be considering a large pardon or amnesty (like for the hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers”) or specific pardons for a few dozen or even a few hundred people who may be in Trump’s revenge cross-hairs? Presumably that would include members of the January 6th Congressional panel, Jack Smith and the attorneys and FBI agents who worked with him, and some of the others who testified at his various impeachment hearings and trials. One hopes Biden has the guts to do it.
Steady, Commentary: 'Blue Velvet': A Reason To Smile, Dan Rather, right, former CBS News anchor and managing editor, shown in a 2017 photo, and Team Steady, Dec. 8, 2024. right, My mind is awash in memories these days … so much to reflect on. Jean and I shared everything over the 67 years of our marriage. She was a wonderful woman and partner, and I miss her dearly. Someoneasked me the other day if I remembered our first date.
Of course, like it was yesterday. The year was 1956. Jean Goebel was working as a secretary at KTRH, the radio station in Houston where I was a young reporter. It took me a few weeks, but I finally summoned the courage to ask her out. When she said yes, you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
We decided to go dancing. I’ve tried to remember the name of the place. No doubt it’s long gone now. But I will never forget our first dance, and the song playing on the jukebox. It was Tony Bennett’s top 20 hit, “Blue Velvet.”
Though finding joy is challenging for me right now, this song does give me a reason to smile. I hope it gives you one too. Even though it’s from a lifetime ago, a good love song is timeless.
Listening to the song now brings back everything about the night that changed my life. We couldn’t find a video of Mr. Bennett from the 1950s. But he re-recorded the song with k.d. lang in 2011 as part of his Duets II album. It is a beautiful rendition.
New York Times, Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens, Ellen Barry, Photographs by Graham Dickie, Dec. 9, 2024. New technology alerts schools when students type words related to suicide. But do the timely interventions balance out the false alarms?Dawn was still hours away when Angel Cholka was awakened by the beams of a police flashlight through the window. At the door was an officer, who asked if someone named Madi lived there. He said he needed to check on her. Ms. Cholka ran to her 16-year-old’s bedroom, confused and, suddenly, terrified.
Ms. Cholka did not know that A.I.-powered software operated by the local school district in Neosho, Mo., had been tracking what Madi was typing on her school-issued Chromebook.
While her family slept, Madi had texted a friend that she planned to overdose on her anxiety medication. That information shot to the school’s head counselor, who sent it to the police. When Ms. Cholka and the officer reached Madi, she had already taken about 15 pills. They pulled her out of bed and rushed her to the hospital.
Thousands of miles away, at around midnight, a mother and father in Fairfield County, Conn., received a call on their landline and were unable to reach it in time to answer. Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Three officers were on the stoop asking to see their 17-year-old daughter, who had been flagged by monitoring software as at urgent risk for self-harm.
The girl’s parents woke her and brought her downstairs so the police could quiz her on something she had typed on her school laptop. It took only a few minutes to conclude that it was a false alarm — the language was from a poem she wrote years earlier — but the visit left the girl profoundly shaken.
“It was one of the worst experiences of her life,” said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to discuss an experience “traumatizing” to her daughter.
In the array of artificial intelligence technologies entering American classrooms, few carry higher stakes than software that tries to detect self-harm and suicidal ideation. These systems spread quickly during Covid shutdowns as more schools began sending laptops home with students.
A law required that these devices be fitted with filters to ensure safe internet use, but educational technology companies — GoGuardian, Gaggle, Lightspeed, Bark and Securly are the big ones — also saw a way to address rising rates of suicidal behavior and self-harm. They began offering tools that scanned what students type, alerting school staff members if they appeared to be contemplating hurting themselves.
New York Times, Jay-Z, Accused in Suit of Raping Minor With Sean Combs, Calls It Blackmail, Julia Jacobs, Dec. 9, 2024. The entertainer said the suit, which accuses him of assaulting an unnamed 13-year-old girl in 2000, was an effort to gain settlement money.
Jay-Z was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl with Sean Combs in a lawsuit filed Sunday by an unnamed plaintiff. He vehemently denied the allegation and accused the lawyer who brought the suit of trying to blackmail him with false claims.
The allegations against the billionaire rapper and hip-hop mogul came as part of the flurry of litigation against Mr. Combs, who is facing federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges and at least 30 lawsuits accusing him of sexual misconduct. One of those lawsuits, filed in October, accused Mr. Combs and an anonymous celebrity of raping the teen at an after-party following the MTV Video Music Awards in New York in 2000.
On Sunday, the plaintiff amended the lawsuit to name Jay-Z as the other celebrity, asserting in court papers that he and Mr. Combs took turns raping her after she arrived at the party and drank part of a drink that made her feel “woozy and lightheaded.” Jay-Z called the claims “idiotic” and said that he came from a world where “we protect children.” Mr. Combs has denied all allegations of sexual assault and misconduct and has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges.
The lawsuit was filed by Tony Buzbee, a personal injury lawyer in Houston, who has filed at least 20 sex assault lawsuits against Mr. Combs and used a phone hotline, Instagram and a news conference to find clients.
In an extensive response, Jay-Z, 55, said he had received a demand letter from Mr. Buzbee appearing to seek a settlement but that the letter had the opposite effect: “It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!” the statement read.
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